Books published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The definitive book on animation, from the Academy Award-winning animator behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit?Animation is one of the hottest areas of filmmaking today--and the master animator who bridges the old generation and the new is Richard Williams. During his fifty years in the business, Williams has been one of the true innovators, winning three Academy Awards and serving as the link between Disney''s golden age of animation by hand and the new computer animation exemplified by Toy Story. Perhaps even more important, though, has been his dedication in passing along his knowledge to a new generation of animators so that they in turn could push the medium in new directions. In this book, based on his sold-out master classes in the United States and across Europe, Williams provides the underlying principles of animation that every animator--from beginner to expert, classic animator to computer animation whiz --needs. Urging his readers to "invent but be believable," he illustrates his points with hundreds of drawings, distilling the secrets of the masters into a working system in order to create a book that will become the standard work on all forms of animation for professionals, students, and fans.

The Piano Player: British Classics presents 20 iconic pieces of British classical music, specially arranged for intermediate piano solo. The collection includes the theme from Enigma Variations by Edward Elgar and Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis alongside music by Rachel Portman, Benjamin Britten, Howard Goodall and more, as well as traditional classics from across the British Isles.All the books in The Piano Player series feature a collectible pull-out print of the stunning cover artwork by the 20th century British painter Edward Bawden, alongside some of the greatest classical music ever written, specially arranged for the intermediate pianist.

The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for GodIn the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "e;Christ-haunted"e; literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them-the School of the Holy Ghost-and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "e;predicament shared in common."e;A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own Paul Elie tells these writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change-to save-our lives.

I have sat and listened to too manywords of the collaborating muse,and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,not avoiding injury to others,not avoiding injury to myself-to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,an eelnet made by man for the eel fightingmy eyes have seen what my hand did.Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, The Dolphin was controversial from the beginning: many of the poems include the letters that Robert Lowell's wife, the celebrated writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, wrote to him after he left her for the English socialite and writer Caroline Blackwood. He was warned by many, among them Elizabeth Bishop, that "e;art just isn't worth that much."e; Nevertheless, these poems are a powerful document of an impulsive love, and a moving record of Lowell's change from one life and marriage in America to a new life on new terms with a new family in England, rendered with the stunning technical power and control for which he was so celebrated. This new edition, which follows the 1973 edition, includes scans of the pages of Lowell's original manuscript, giving us a look into the brilliant and complicated mind of one of our most beloved and distinguished poets.

An intimate new biography of Joni Mitchell, one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century

Be terrified. It's you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you'll go, betray me, strayfrom home.So better by far for me if you were stone.--from "Medusa"Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfris of famous -- and infamous -- male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.

The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. Most of us can recite without prompting the salient characteristics of the vampire: sleeping by day in its coffin, rising at dusk to feed on the blood of the living; the ability to shapeshift into a bat, wolf, or mist; a mortal vulnerability to a wooden stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commidity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all.

An unprecedented eyewitness account of the New York School, as seen between the lines of O'Hara's poetryJoe LeSueur lived with Frank O'Hara from 1955 until 1965, the years when O'Hara wrote his greatest poems, including "e;To the Film Industry in Crisis,"e; "e;In Memory of My Feelings,"e; "e;Having a Coke with You,"e; and the famous Lunch Poems-so called because O'Hara wrote them during his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator. (The artists he championed include Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg.) The flowering of O'Hara's talent, cut short by a fatal car accident in 1966, produced some of the most exuberant, truly celebratory lyrics of the twentieth century. And it produced America's greatest poet of city life since Whitman.Alternating between O'Hara's poems and LeSueur's memory of the circumstances that inspired them, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara is a literary commentary like no other-an affectionate, no-holds-barred memoir of O'Hara and the New York that animated his work: friends, lovers, movies, paintings, streets, apartments, music, parties, and pickups. This volume, which includes many of O'Hara's best-loved poems, is the most intimate, true-to-life portrait we will ever have of this quintessential American figure and his now legendary times.

Luminous new poems from one who "has long been a poet of gorgeous description" -William Logan, The New CriterionLandscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.Don't just do something, sit there.And so I have, so I have, the seasons curling around me like smoke,Gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound.-from "Body and Soul II"This is Charles Wright's first collection of verse since the gathering, in Negative Blue, of his "Appalachian Book of the Dead," a trilogy of trilogies hailed "among the great long poems of the century" (James Longenbach, Boston Review). In A Short History of the Shadow, Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.

The Virgin Mary had made an untoward appearance in Dublin. Is she real? Is she a hoax? Mary Breasted's gift for poking fun where it hurts the most has produced an irreverent, irrepressible, unforgettable book. Ireland will never be the same."e;Breasted's perfectly aimed dialogue and brisk action skewer the jumbled politics--sexual, religious and marital, in academia and the governing Dail--that shape life in modern Ireland."e; - Publishers Weekly

The acclaimed work that debunks our myths and false assumptions about race in AmericaMaurice Berger grew up hypersensitized to race in the charged environment of New York City in the sixties. His father was a Jewish liberal who worshiped Martin Luther King, Jr.; his mother a dark-skinned Sephardic Jew who hated black people. Berger himself was one of the few white kids in his Lower East Side housing project.Berger's unusual experience--and his determination to examine the subject of race for its multiple and intricate meanings--makes White Lies a fresh and startling book.Berger has become a passionate observer of race matters, searching out the subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of racial meaning in everyday life. In White Lies, he encourages us to reckon with our own complex and often troubling opinions about race. The result is an uncommonly honest and affecting look at race in America today--free of cant, surprisingly entertaining, unsettled and unsettling.

Nominated for the National Book Award--The eighth book by one of our greatest poets"Always, "These gigantic inconceivables."Always, "What will have been done to me?"And so we don our mental armor,flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk,though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?"--from "Risk"Repair is body work in C. K. Williams's sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life's easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, and the secrets that separate and join intimates. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French influences: "the poetry of the sentence."Repair is a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry and the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Heschel's classic work on Maimonides, originally published in Berlin during the thirties, is one of the few scholarly biographies available of the great medieval philosopher.