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Becoming Shakespeare Jack Lynch Bloomsbury, 2009 $29.99pb
Becoming Shakespeare begins where most Shakespeare stories end - with his death in 1616 - and relates the fascinating story of his unlikely transformation from provincial playwright to universal Bard. Lynch vividly chronicles Shakespeare's afterlife - from the revival of his plays to the decades when his work was co-opted and 'improved' by politicians and other playwrights, and culminating with the 'Bardolatry' of the Stratford celebration of Shakespeare's 300th birthday in 1864. Becoming Shakespeare is not only essential reading for anyone intrigued by Shakespeare, but it also offers a consideration of the vagaries of fame. 320 pages |
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The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan Kevin Dettmar (ed) Cambridge University Press, 2009 $39.95pb
A towering figure in American culture and a global twentieth-century icon, Bob Dylan has been at the centre of American life for over forty years. The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan brings fresh insights into the imposing range of Dylan's creative output. The first Part approaches Dylan's output thematically, tracing the evolution of Dylan's writing and his engagement with American popular music, religion, politics, fame, and his work as a songwriter and performer. Essays in Part II analyse his landmark albums to examine the consummate artistry of Dylan's most accomplished studio releases. As a writer Dylan has courageously chronicled and interpreted many of the cultural upheavals in America since World War II. This book will be invaluable both as a guide for students of Dylan and twentieth-century culture, and for his fans, providing a set of new perspectives on a much-loved writer and composer. 204 pages |
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Diaghilev Sjeng Scheijen Profile, 2009 $65.00hb
Diaghilev (1872-1929) is a character on the scale of myth. Growing up in a minor noble family in remote Perm, as a very young man he became an influential art historian and publisher in St Petersburg. Moving soon onto a bigger stage, he became a central figure in the artistic worlds of Paris, London, Rome, Berlin and Madrid during the golden age of modern art. He lived through bankruptcy, war, revolution and exile. Furthermore he lived openly as a homosexual and his liaisons, most famously with Nijinsky, and his turbulent friendships with among others Stravinsky, Coco Chanel, Misia Sert, Prokoviev and Jean Cocteau give his life an exceptionally dramatic quality. The last biography was thirty years ago. Scheijen's biography is based on extensive research in little known archives, especially in Russia, is revelatory and brings a complex and powerful personality with boundless creative energy fully to life. 400 pages |
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Different Drummer: the Life of Kenneth MacMillan Jann Parry Faber, 2009 $75.00hb
Kenneth MacMillan's ballets are in constant demand by world-famous companies, particularly Romeo and Juliet, Manon and Mayerling. However, MacMillan was tormented by an acute sense of being an outsider, at odds with the institutions in which he worked and their conventional expectations of what ballet should be. A real-lifeBilly Elliot from a Scottish working class family, MacMillan demonstrated a prodigious talent for dancing from an early age. Following the premature death of his mother, the young MacMillan sought an escape route from home and, despite his father's disapproval, secured a place at Sadler's Wells. Paradoxically he found himself crippled by stage-fright during the height of his professional career, leaving him with only one option - choreography. He went on to produce ballets which defied convention and became renowned for challenging audiences. The criticism he received fanned his anxieties but, despite this, MacMillan achieved international acclaim, becoming artistic director of both the Berlin Ballet and the Royal Ballet. 688 pages |
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Everything is Connected: the power of music Daniel Barenboim Phoenix, 2010 $27.99pb
‘The power of music lies in is its ability to speak to all aspects of the human being-the animal, the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual. Music teaches us, in short, that everything is connected.' Daniel Barenboim's new book vividly describes his lifelong pursuit of knowledge and understanding, not only of music and of life, but of one through the other. 224 pages |
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George Balanchine: the ballet maker Robert Gottlieb Harper Perennial, 2010 $24.99pb
Gottlieb presents the life and achievement of the great choreographer who both summed up everything that proceeded him in ballet, and extended the art form into radical yet inevitable new paths. Leaving Russia in 1924, he joined Serge Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes, where he created his first enduring masterpiece, Apollo, cementing his lifelong collaboration with Stravinsky. In 1933 he arrived in America to found a school and a company, but the company as we know it - The New York City Ballet - didn't emerge until 1948. Meanwhile, he made ballets wherever opportunity allowed, while choreographing Broadway shows (four for Rodgers and Hart), movies ("The Goldwyn Follies"), even the circus - a ballet for elephants with a score by Stravinsky. By the time of his death, in 1983, he had been recognised as a member of the triad of the greatest modern masters, alongside Picasso and Stravinsky. 224 pages |
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George Gershwin: an intimate portrait Walter Rimler University of Illinois, 2009 $47.95hb
George Gershwin lived with purpose and gusto, but with melancholy as well, for he was unable to make a place for himself - no family of his own and no real home in music. In this book, Walter Rimler makes use of fresh sources, including newly discovered letters by Kay Swift as well as correspondence between and interviews with intimates of Ira and Leonore Gershwin. It is written with spirited prose and contains more than two dozen photographs. 240 pages |
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Hymns to the Silence: Inside the Words and Music of Van Morrison Peter Mills Continuum, 2010 $39.95pb
This is a groundbreaking study of every aspect of Van Morrison's artistic career - his influences, lyrical themes, vocal performances, his relationship with America, and more. In 1991 Van Morrison said, 'Music is spiritual, the music business isn't'. Peter Mills investigates the oppositions and harmonies within the work of Van Morrison, proceeding from this identified starting point. Hymns to the Silence is a detailed investigative study of Van Morrison's remarkable career. 448 pages |
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Journeying Boy: the Diaries of the young Benjamin Britten 1928-1938 John Evans (ed) Faber, 2010 $32.99 pb
Best remembered for his operas and his War Requiem, Benjamin Britten's radical politics and his sexuality have also ensured that he remains a controversial public figure. This is a revealing and intimate collection of diary entries from one of the greatest English composers of the twentieth century. 512 pages |
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Just Kids Patti Smith Bloomsbury, 2010 $39.99hb
“It was the summer that Coltrane died. The summer Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames and China exploded the H-bomb. There were riots in Newark and marches against the war in Vietnam. The world was on the brink of change. It was the summer of love. And the summer of a chance encounter that would change the course of my life. It was the summer I met Robert.” Just Kids is Patti Smith's evocative, honest and moving coming-of-age story of her extraordinary relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe. 304 pages |
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The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 Beckett, Samuel / Fehsenfeld, M. & Overbeck, L. (eds) Cambridge University Press, 2009 $115.00hb
The letters written by Samuel Beckett between 1929 -1940 provide a vivid and personal view of Western Europe in the 1930s, and mark the gradual emergence of Beckett's unique voice and sensibility. This edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett offers for the first time a comprehensive range of letters of one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. Selected for their bearing on his work from over 15,000 extant letters, the letters published in this four-volume edition encompass sixty years of Beckett's writing life (1929-1989), and include letters to friends, painters and musicians, as well as to students, publishers, translators, and colleagues in the world of literature and theatre. For anyone interested in twentieth-century literature and theatre this edition is essential reading, offering not only a record of Beckett's achievements but a powerful literary experience in itself. 882 pages |
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Michael Clark Cotter & Violette Thames & Hudson, Dec. 2009 $135.00hb
Notorious for his continually subversive takes on classical dance, Michael Clark is without doubt one of the most important dancers and choreographers of our time. He has created some of contemporary dance’s finest productions, often using leftfield rock music (most famously in his fantastic collaboration with The Fall, I Am Kurious, Oranj). Situated at the heart of the British post-punk art scene, Clark is much admired for his judicious choice of collaborators, such as designers Bodymap and Hussein Chalayan, artists Cerith Wyn Evans, Leigh Bowery, Charles Atlas and Sarah Lucas, film director Peter Greenaway (Clark played Caliban in Prospero’s Books) and bands The Fall, Laibach and Wire. This monograph, the first on this major artist, celebrates the whole of Michael Clark’s career to date, from the late 1970s to the present. Rich in visual and archival material, it contains new essays on Clark’s work, reprints of key texts and journalism, photography by Nick Knight, David LaChappelle and others, plus interviews with many of Clark’s collaborators from the worlds of dance, art, fashion and music. 272 pages |
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Nureyev Howard Brown Phaidon, 2008 $39.95pb
Presents the greatest images of Nureyev's legendary career in chronological order, including his partnership with Margot Fonteyn as well as striking portraits and early family photographs. Includes photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Snowdon, Anthony Crickmay, David Bailey, Martine Franck and Cecil Beaton. Augmented by a complete list of Nureyev's roles, productions and film appearances. 208 pages |
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Peter Sculthorpe: the making of an Australian composer Graeme Skinner UNSW Press, 2007 $59.95hb
Peter Sculthorpe is Australia’s best-known living composer and is widely held to be the most important composer the country has yet produced. This, the first biography of the composer, tells the fascinating story of his rise to prominence. Beautifully written and fastidiously researched, this authorised biography provides an insight into Sculthorpe’s formative years: his quest for a personal voice, and his arrival – through many creative friendships and collaborations – at a place in the collective heart of the nation. It is also a social history, charting the rise of modernism in Australian music through the eyes of its key player. 752 pages |
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A Raffish Experiment: the selected writings of Rex Cramphorn Ian Maxwell (ed.) Currency Press, 2009 $39.95pb
The late Nick Enright described Rex Cramphorn as "that rare and important figure, a philosopher and visionary of the arts." When Cramphorn died in 1991, at the age of 50, he left a legacy of theatre productions, research and ideas, that have influenced his own and subsequent generations of Australian theatre artists. This book collects a range of Cramphorn’s writings about theatre, reviews and reflections, framed by short essays contextualising the material biographically, historically, and culturally. Each selection will be annotated to provide background information. 96 pages |
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Robert Helpmann: a servant of art Anna Bemrose UQP, 2008 $49.95hb
During the 1930s, the 1940s and the 1950s Helpmann's name was prominent in the performing arts scene in London and New York. In ballet he danced with Alicia Markova then began a long partnership with Margot Fonteyn. He danced with Moira Shearer and choreographed the fifteen-minute ballet within The Red Shoes. He worked with such luminaries as Michael Benthall, Richard Burton, Noël Coward, Robert Donat, Tyrone Guthrie, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. The operas he directed included Madam Butterfly (1950) with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf at Covent Garden and Alcina (1983) with Joan Sutherland at the Sydney Opera House. 416 pages |
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Talking Theatre: interviews with theatre people Richard Eyre Nick Hern Books, 2009 $64.00hb
Richard Eyre, the celebrated director of stage and screen, wrote and directed Changing Stages for the BBC. The series included interviews with an astonishing range of artists who helped shape British and American theatre in the latter half of the last century. Now, forty-one of those interviews introduced by the author provide a unique insight into the working lives of some of the most successful and celebrated of today’s practitioners of theatre and the performing arts. 360 pages |
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Various Voices: Sixty Years of Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2008 Harold Pinter Faber, 2009 $39.99pb
Harold Pinter's plays are lauded the world over but, until now, little has been gathered together of his other writings. Various Voices presents a wealth of material and a multiplicity of form in which to enjoy the crystal clarity of language and style which marks out Pinter as a true original. Through Various Voices the reader can trace Pinter's development from a nascent writer exploring the boundaries of his craft to the assured maturity of his later work. |
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Wasted: the true story of Jim McNeil, violent criminal and brilliant playwright Ross Honeywell Viking, 2010 $32.95pb
At thirteen, Jim McNeil quit school for good. At fourteen, he started an affair with a brothel madam and was introduced to Melbourne's underworld. Despite his love of reading and philosophy, McNeil relished his life among thugs, thieves and whores, becoming one of the city's most violent criminals. When he wrote his first play in prison, McNeil had never set foot in a theatre. Just four years later he was a celebrity, freed ten years early thanks to a powerful group of Sydney's elite, who declared him one of the country's most important writers. McNeil soon married actress Robyn Nevin, won the Australian Writers' Guild's script award and was commissioned to write the screenplay for My Brilliant Career. Charismatic and charming, he seemed at the height of his powers. But McNeil never wrote again. Pursued by Sydney society and lost in a world that lacked the strict regimen of prison life, he fell back into alcoholism and violence. He returned to the streets and was dead within a decade. His four plays stand as a testament to a talent sadly wasted. |
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The Worst it Can Be is a Disaster Braham Murray Methuen, 2008 $47.95pb
The Worst It
Can Be is a Disaster is the autobiography of Braham Murray, founding director of the
Royal Exchange Manchester which in 2006 celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. |
