Books published by Alfred A. Knopf

Celebrate a century of children's book illustration!For families, art lovers, and history buffs alike, Leonard S. Marcus's visual history tour of 100 years of children's book illustration gathers in one glorious volume the posters of the annual Children's Book Week!Featuring work from early luminaries such as N. C. Wyeth and Marcia Brown to more contemporary illustrators like David Wiesner, Mary GrandPré, Christian Robinson, and Jillian Tamaki, this beautiful collection showcases the conceptual and iconic images that have defined children's books for generations of young readers. While the posters within these pages are linked in their resounding advocacy for young people's literacy, they are distinguished by the styles and mediums of their creators and by the historical, social, and cultural influences of their times. Renowned historian Leonard S. Marcus traces these developments in the children's book field with incisive descriptions to accompany each poster. Children's Book Week has grown over the past one hundred years from a modest grassroots effort to a full-throttle nationwide annual celebration of literacy and the pleasures of reading. The posters in this book beautifully emphasize Book Week's mission, with slogans such as "Build the Future with Books," "Get Lost in a Book," and "One World, Many Stories."

"Poetic musings on a life well-lived-one that is still moving forward, always creating, always luminous. This isn't your typical autobiography. Garfunkel's history is told in flowing prose, bounding from present to past, far from a linear rags-to-riches story." -Bookreporter "It's hard to imagine any single word that would accurately describe this book . . . an entertaining volume that's more fun to read than a conventional memoir might have been." -The Wall Street Journal "A charming book of prose and poetry printed in a digitalized version of his handwriting . . . witty, candid, and wildly imaginative . . . A highly intelligent man trying to make sense of his extraordinary life." -Associated Press From the golden-haired, curly-headed half of Simon & Garfunkel, a memoir (of sorts)-moving, lyrical impressions, interspersed throughout a narrative, punctuated by poetry, musings, lists of resonant books loved and admired, revealing a life and the making of a musician, that show us, as well, the evolution of a man, a portrait of a life-long friendship and of a collaboration that became the most successful singing duo in the roiling age that embraced, and was defined by, their pathfinding folk-rock music. In What Is It All but Luminous, Art Garfunkel writes about growing up in the 1940s and '50s (son of a traveling salesman, listening as his father played Enrico Caruso records), a middle-class Jewish boy, living in a redbrick semi-attached house on Jewel Avenue in Kew Gardens, Queens. He writes of meeting Paul Simon, the kid who made Art laugh (they met at their graduation play, Alice in Wonderland; Paul was the White Rabbit; Art, the Cheshire Cat). Of their being twelve at the birth of rock'n'roll ("it was rhythm and blues. It was black. I was captured and so was Paul"), of a demo of their song, Hey Schoolgirl for seven dollars and the actual record (with Paul's father on bass) going to #40 on the charts. He writes about their becoming Simon & Garfunkel, ruling the pop charts from the age of sixteen, about not being a natural performer but more a thinker, an underground man. He writes of the hit songs; touring; about being an actor working with directors Mike Nichols ("the greatest of them all"), about choosing music over a PhD in mathematics. And he writes about his long-unfolding split with Paul, and how and why it evolved, and after; learning to perform on his own . . . and about being a husband, a father and much more.

As a member of the renowned Flying Doctors Service, Dr. Anne Spoerry treated hundreds of thousands of people across rural Kenya over the span of fifty years, earning herself the cherished nickname "Mama Daktari"-"Mother Doctor." Yet few knew that what drove her from post-World War II Europe to Africa was a past marked by rebellion, submission, and personal decisions that earned her another nickname-this one sinister-while working as a "doctor" in a Nazi concentration camp. In Full Flight explores the question of whether it is possible to rewrite one's past by doing good in the present, and takes readers on an extraordinary journey into a dramatic life punctuated by both courage and weakness and driven by a powerful need to atone.

Now in paperback, the stunning lifework of this beloved prize-winning poet, gathered in one volume, covering sixty years of poetry, from 1956 to 2016.This celebratory volume covers nearly all of Marie Ponsot''s published work, from True Minds (published in 1956 as number five in the famous Pocket Poets series from City Lights press) through Easy (2009), her most recent collection; and it also includes some work written in the years since. Here is the lyrical joy, the full range of Ponsot''s gift for constructing the pleasures and pains of a riddle that the music and wit of her language solve just in the nick of time, in the "hand-span skill" that is the poem. Notable in this collection is the astonishing accomplishment of Ponsot''s sonnets: the traditional form in varieties we''ve never seen in one book before. Open these pages anywhere to experience "language as the primitive dialect of our human race," as she has described it--to gratefully enter a state that is "what poetry hopes of us and for us: enraptured attention."

**NAMED ONE OF THE BEST ART BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY ARTNEWS**The first and definitive biography of the celebrated collectors Dominique and John de Menil, who became one of the greatest cultural forces of the twentieth century through groundbreaking exhibits of art, artistic scholarship, the creation of innovative galleries and museums, and work with civil rights.Dominique and John de Menil created an oasis of culture in their Philip Johnson-designed house with everyone from Marlene Dietrich and René Magritte to Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. In Houston, they built the Menil Collection, the Rothko Chapel, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, the Cy Twombly Gallery, and underwrote the Contemporary Arts Museum. Now, with unprecedented access to family archives, William Middleton has written a sweeping biography of this unique couple. From their ancestors in Normandy and Alsace, to their own early years in France, and their travels in South America before settling in Houston. We see them introduced to the artists in Europe and America whose works they would collect, and we see how, by the 1960s, their collection had grown to include 17,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, rare books, and decorative objects. And here is, as well, a vivid behind-the-scenes look at the art world of the twentieth century and the enormous influence the de Menils wielded through what they collected and built and through the causes they believed in.