Suits

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Douglas Dunn

"Author of the New York Times bestseller White Girl Problems and Psychos, Babe Walker, faces her most daunting challenge yet--suburbia--in the third caustically witty White Girl Problems book. Babe Walker thought she had done it all. After all, she's survived the highly exclusive social hierarchies of Bel Air, traipsed around Europe in true white-girl fashion, and left her mark on several of the best rehab facilities in the United States. But now Babe is about to enter a terrifying new world: Middle America. After a freak accident that was definitely not Babe's fault, her estranged mother offers her the perfect escape from LA: an invite to her grandfather's eightieth birthday party in Maryland, of all places. Babe's journey throws her headlong into elementary school classrooms full of small, unfashionable people and pizza buffet restaurants that will haunt her nightmares and eventually back to Los Angeles, thank goodness. Tossed together with her cousins--basic preteen Cara and mature and preternaturally stylish Knox--Babe learns that connecting with someone on an intimate, familial level might be the most rewarding experience there is ... Besides being thin, of course. Hysterical, unapologetic, and as unfiltered as ever, Babe Walker proves again to be the "urban socialite you love to hate" (Time), and she can only hope the population is ready for American Babe"--

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(essay by Craig Owens

Since the late 1970s, Allan McCollum (b. 1944, Los Angeles, lives in New York) has addressed the production, distribution, acquisition, display, and reading of the artwork. His constant use of strategies of multiplication, his examination of the museum as a discursive agent, and his recurrent interest in notions of display, as well as his attempt to find a generic form for any purpose, were entirely reconfigured by this displacement of context. Working with regional museums, heterogeneous audiences, and references ranging from palaeontology to mineralogy, McCollum has built a very strong and intriguing body of works that has remained, in large part, unknown to (or at least unseen by) the art world.

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essays by Lynn M. Herbert ... [et al

The Art Guys (Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing) who met at the University of Houston in 1982, have carefully crafted a presence and wacky notoriety that places them at the heart of the Houston art scene and has captured the attention of a national audience. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, they employ a variety of media for the exploration of their ideas including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, performance and video. The Art Guys create diverse works designed to engage, amuse and challenge viewers by seducing them with a playful sense of humor. Described in the New York Times as "a cross between Dada, David Letterman, John Cage and the Smothers Brothers",[1] The Art Guys present a blend of performance, conceptual and visual art that explores the absurdities of contemporary life. All told, The Art Guys defy categorization, they represent a kink in the art historical continuum - a hiccup, a scratch that can't be itched. They have amused, irritated, enchanted and befuddled viewers with their deadpan humor and irreverent antics. Regardless of how they are remembered in the annals of American art, their audience will never be the same.

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A.S. Byatt

These three stories celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of A.S. Byatt's narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling--about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being. Beautifully written, intensely observed, The Matisse Stories is fiction of spellbinding authority."Full of delight and humor...The Matisse Stories is studded with brilliantly apt images and a fine sense for subtleties of conversation and emotion."--San Francisco ChronicleFrom the Trade Paperback edition.