About this Talk
Despite a love and fascination for Rome dating to his days as an architecture student, David Macaulay found the path to his book Rome Antics took some unusual (and frustrating) turns. Through failed pop-up designs, scribbled out title possibilities, surreal sketchbook pages (think “Piranesi meets Escher”), and rambling story lines, MacAulay details each step of his winding journey towards completion of his illustrated homage to the city.
About David Macaulay
David Macaulay gets under the skins of skyscrapers, mosques, pyramids, subways, and a host of other ancient and modern marvels. His lavish and micro-detailed renderings expose the world’s secret engineering to dazzled readers of all ages. Read full bio »
Athens- The exhibition «Art on the Front Page» at the Benaki museum features original works by 72 Greek and foreign artists who created the front pages of the Athens Voice newspaper throughout the first year of its publication. The exhibition features work by well-known artists such as Konstantin Kakanias, Guerilla Girls, Antonis Kyriakoulis and Dimitri Papaioannou. The exhibition, curated by Aggeliki Birbili, includes the special installation “Send a message to your town”. Athens Mayor Nikita Kaklamanis was invited to the opening, which also included music by prominent composer Stamatis Kraounakis. This is the third time the Benaki Museum hosts an exhibition with Athens Voice artwork. A book with the Athens Voice covers and original work by artists has also been published.
Athens Voice is one of the most popular free press newspapers available once a week throughout Athens. It features news and commentary presented with an edge and off-beat humor on a broad range of issues, often by prominent members of Greece’s arts and letters community. The newspaper has also established itself as a reliable guide to events, happenings and places to be in Athens. The exhibition at the Benaki Museum runs until February 10th, 2008.
The most beloved Iranian novel of the twentieth century. Written by Iraj Pezeshkzad first published in Iran in the 1970s and adapted into a hugely successful television series, this beloved novel is now “Suggested Reading” in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. My Uncle Napoleon is a timeless and universal satire of first love and family intrigue.
God forbid, I’ve fallen in love with Layli!” So begins the farce of our narrator’s life, one spent in a large extended Iranian family lorded over by the blustering, paranoid patriarch, Dear Uncle Napoleon. When Uncle Napoleon’s least-favorite nephew falls for his daughter, Layli, family fortunes are reversed, feuds fired up and resolved, and assignations attempted and thwarted. Random House / Papyros Publications
Hilary Mantel has done something extraordinary. She has taken that ethereal halfway house between heaven and hell, between the living and the dead, and nailed it on the page. She has taken those moments between sleep and waking, when we hardly know who we are, or why, and turned them into a novel that makes the unbelievable believable. She persuades, she convinces, she offers an alternative universe, she uses the extraordinary descriptive skills that are her trademark — Mantel does “seedy” as no one else, except possibly Graham Greene in his early novels, The Confidential Agent and Brighton Rock. She produces characters — some dead, some partly dead, some barely alive but pretending — that are as strong and vivid on the page as if they were living or dying next door — if only you cared to go there. Most don’t, next door being a rather nasty and disturbing place. She’s witty, ironic, intelligent and, I suspect, haunted. This is a book out of the unconscious, where the best novels come from.
“Funny and harrowing . . . A great comic novel. Hilary Mantel’s humor, like Flannery
O’Connor’s, is so far beyond black it becomes a kind of light.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Macillan Publishers / Papyros Publications
Novel, written by Ma Jian, Random House / Papyros Publications, 2007
From the award-winning author of Red Dust, comes a virtuoso piece of ‘red humour’ - a darkly funny novel about the absurdities and cruelties of life in modern China. Every week, a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood donor meet for dinner. They are unlikely friends - one of them tortured by his ‘art’, the other fat and wealthy from the earthy business of providing spare blood for the citizens of China. Over the course of one especially gastronomic evening, the writer starts to complain about his latest Party commission: the story of an ordinary soldier who sacrifices his life to the revolutionary cause. This is not the novel he wants to write, he tells his friend. Inside his head lives an unwritten book about the people he knows or sees everyday on the streets - people who lives are far more representative of the world in which he lives-
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