Description
The master of horror was also the funniest writer in America — and this proves it. Before The Haunting of Hill House and “The Lottery” made her a legend of the macabre, Shirley Jackson wrote Life Among the Savages (1953): the bestselling comic memoir of raising four children in a rambling Vermont house — half autobiography, half tall tale, all hilarious.
Jackson’s “savages” are her own kids — Laurie, Jannie, Sally, and Barry — and the Vermont neighbors who never quite knew what to make of their eccentric mother. The chapters on household chaos, school encounters, and small-town life are drawn with the same razor-sharp observation she brought to horror, but here the knife is used for comedy: wry, warm, and wickedly funny.
A beloved American classic — in the spirit of the great domestic humorists, but unmistakably Jackson: the domestic chaos before the darkness. For fans of her fiction, this reveals the other Shirley Jackson: brilliant, mischievous, and laughing all the way.
He made his fortune from a miracle drug — then spent it on paintings the experts told him not to buy. Art and Argyrol, William Schack’s classic biography first published in 1960, tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951): the Philadelphia chemist whose antiseptic Argyrol made him rich, and whose obsession with modern art made him legendary.
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nBarnes used his wealth to amass one of the world’s greatest private collections — Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses, Picassos — buying masterpieces when the art establishment still dismissed them. Schack, who knew Barnes personally, captures the man’s volcanic personality: his contempt for critics, his battles with Philadelphia high society, and his founding of the Barnes Foundation, with its famously eccentric rules for how the art could be shown.
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nReissued as an ebook in 2019, this remains the essential first biography of a collector who trusted his own eye above everyone else’s. For art lovers and anyone fascinated by the wild early days of modern art in America, it is a rollicking, revelatory read.
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