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Criticism eBooks

If you like Criticism eBooks, then you'll love these top picks.
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  • Chromophobia

    The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse – a fear of corruption or contamination through colour – lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’ – the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological – or by ... Read more

    $22.99 USD

  • Pockets

    An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close

    “Who knew the humble pocket could hold so much history? In this enthralling and always surprising account, Hannah Carlson turns the pocket inside out and out tumble pocket watches, coins, pistols, and a riveting centuries-long social and political history.” ―**Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United StatesPockets "showcases the best features of cultural history: a lively ... Read more

    Was $16.99 USD Now $1.99 USD

  • W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits

    Visualizing Black America

    The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of "the color line." From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these prophetic infographics —beautiful in design and powerful in content ... Read more

    $17.29 USD

  • A Creative Compass

    An Empowering Guide to Living a Creative Life from the Bestselling Author

    by Emma Gannon ...
    'There is nothing Emma Gannon does not know about unlocking your creativity.'Farrah Storr, Head of Substack International'Another dose of genius from Emma Gannon. It's a bible for all of us.'Dawn O'PorterAn empowering guide for artists, makers, writers and anyone seeking to live more creatively, with confidence, calm and joy.We all possess creativity, whether it's in the clothes we ... ... Read more

    Was $9.99 USD Now $1.49 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • The History of Hentai Manga

    by Kimi Rito ...
    While manga is now a well known entity in the global publishing scene, the medium's international success has its roots in the realm of eros. Japanese media critic Kimi Rito dives into the history of manga's erotic world a genre known internationally simply as - hentai. What are the origins of hentai? How has it evolved from the days of ukiyo-e to today's modern comics and animation. Who are the ... Read more

    $8.69 USD

  • Man-Made

    How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out, and How We Can Make It Right

    A Next Big Idea Club Must-Read**"A powerful and urgent call to action—for the health and safety of half of our population, it’s time we rethink the male body ideal and build a world that includes us all.” —Dr. Elizabeth Comen, MD, medical oncologist, associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone, and bestselling author of All in Her Head“This book challenges us to ask new questions and, more ... Read more

    Was $14.99 USD Now $2.99 USD

  • Art That Changed the World

    Transformative Art Movements and the Paintings That Inspired Them

    by DK ...
    Series series DK Timelines
    Experience the uplifting power of art on this breathtaking visual tour of 2,500 paintings and sculptures created by more than 700 artists from Michelangelo to Damien Hirst.This beautiful book brings you the very best of world art from cave paintings to Neoexpressionism. Enjoy iconic must-see works, such as Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper and Monet's Waterlilies and discover less familiar artists ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

  • Fail Better

    Reckonings with Artists and Critics

    by Hal Foster ...
    From the distinguished art critic and historian, vital essays on key artists and critics, revealing how they redefined art and criticism over the last six decades.“Serious art anticipates the future as much as it reflects the present,” Hal Foster remarked in a 2015 interview. “By the same token serious art history is driven by the present as much as it is informed by the past.” In Fail Better, ... Read more

    $25.99 USD

  • Postmodernism

    A Very Short Introduction

    Series series Very Short Introductions
    Postmodernism has been a buzzword in contemporary society for the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler challenges and explores the key ideas of postmodernists, and their engagement with theory, literature, the visual arts, film, architecture, and music. He treats artists, intellectuals, critics, and social scientists 'as if they were all ... Read more

    $7.99 USD

  • Takedown

    Art and Power in the Digital Age

    by Farah Nayeri ...
    Farah Nayeri addresses the difficult questions plaguing the art world, from the bad habits of Old Masters, to the current grappling with identity politics.For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon--kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art.Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to ... Read more

    $16.99 USD

  • In Visible Archives

    Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s

    Analyzing how 1980s visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualitiesIn 1982, the protests of antiporn feminists sparked the censorship of the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, a radical and sexually evocative image-text volume whose silencing became a symbol for the irresolvable feminist sex wars. In Visible Archives documents the ... Read more

    $20.19 USD

  • The Creators

    A History of Heroes of the Imagination

    Series Book 1 - Knowledge Series
    By piecing the lives of selected individuals into a grand mosaic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin explores the development of artistic innovation over 3,000 years. A hugely ambitious chronicle of the arts that Boorstin delivers with the scope that made his Discoverers a national bestseller.Even as he tells the stories of such individual creators as Homer, Joyce, Giotto, Picasso ... Read more

    $6.99 USD

  • Swedish Design

    A History

    Swedish Design: A History provides a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to the development of design in Sweden from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first.Leading design historian Lasse Brunnström traces the move from artisanal crafts production to the mass production and consumption of designed objects, a process by which the role and profile of the designer became ... Read more

    $29.99 USD

  • The Last Days of Roger Federer

    And Other Endings

    by Geoff Dyer ...
    One of Esquire's best books of spring 2022An extended meditation on late style and last works from "one of our greatest living critics" (Kathryn Schulz, New York).When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating torment? As our bodies decay, how do we keep on? In this beguiling meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg

    by Emily Black ...
    A New York Times-bestselling author's personal examination of how the experiences, art, and disabilities of Frida Kahlo shaped her life as an amputee.At first sight of Frida Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas, Emily Rapp Black felt a connection with the artist. An amputee from childhood, Rapp Black grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs and learned that she had to hide her disability from the ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • See/Saw

    Looking at Photographs

    by Geoff Dyer ...
    A lavishly illustrated history of photography in essays by the author of Otherwise Known as the Human ConditionSee/Saw shows how photographs frame and change our perspective on the world. Taking in photographers from early in the last century to the present day—including artists such as Eugène Atget, Vivian Maier, Roy DeCarava, and Alex Webb—the celebrated writer Geoff Dyer offers a series of ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Design as Art

    by Bruno Munari ...
    Series series Penguin Modern Classics
    How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever.Bruno Munari was among the most inspirational designers of all time, described by Picasso as ‘the new Leonardo’. Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly ... Read more

    $11.39 USD

  • The synthetic proposition

    Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art

    by Nizan Shaked ...
    Series series Rethinking Art's Histories
    The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art ... Read more

    $20.19 USD

  • Erotic Comics

    A Graphic History, Vol 1 (PB)

    Crammed full of exquisite art from around the world, with fascinating background stories about the artists, editors and publishers, Erotic Comics: A Graphic History examines how this much maligned artform developed into a publishing phenomenon that spans the globe. Volume 1 delves deep into comic history, from the bawdy English cartoons of the 17th century, through the magazines impacted by the ... Read more

    $3.99 USD

  • Ordinary Notes

    A finalist for the National Book Award in NonfictionA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in NonfictionNamed a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, NPR, New York magazine, Kirkus, and Barnes and NobleThe critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, “Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangeme... ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • The Routledge International Handbook of Simmel Studies

    Edited by Gregor Fitzi ...
    Series series Routledge International Handbooks
    The Routledge International Handbook of Simmel Studies documents the richness, variety, and creativity of contemporary international research on Georg Simmel’s work. Starting with the established role of Simmel as a classical author of sociology, and including the growing interest in his work in the domain of philosophy, this volume explores the research on Simmel in several further disciplines ... Read more

    $68.99 USD

  • Shapely Bodies

    The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France

    Series series Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture
    Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France constructs the first cultural history of porcelain making in France. It takes its title from two types of “bodies” treated in this study: the craft of porcelain making shaped clods of earth into a clay body to produce high-end commodities and the French elite shaped human bodies into social subjects with the help of makeup, ... Read more

    $36.69 USD

  • A Dead White

    An Argument Against White Paint

    Longlisted for the National Book Award for NonfictionAn impassioned, boundary-pushing work of criticism traversing an array of subjects, from fine arts to design to architecture, taking aim at the ubiquity of white paint in our society and what its prevalence reveals about our values.It’s hard to identify a material that takes up more sensory space and has received less critical examination than ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

  • The Driving Machine

    A Design History of the Car

    **“[A] compact epic.… Brisk, lucid and enjoyable.” —Richard Snow, Wall Street JournalThe renowned design writer on the extraordinary history of car design.**In this lively and entertaining work, Witold Rybczynski—hailed as “one of the best writers on design working today” by Publishers Weekly—tells the story of the most distinctive cars in history and the artists, engineers, dreamers, and ... Read more

    $13.69 USD