Françoise Gilot

Carlton Lake

Lisa Alther

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

North Carolina

Françoise Gilot's candid memoir remains the most revealing portrait of Picasso written, and gives fascinating insight into the intense and creative life shared by two modern artists. Françoise Gilot was in her early twenties when she met the sixty-one-year-old Pablo Picasso in 1943. Brought up in a well-to-do upper-middle-class family, who had sent her to Cambridge and the Sorbonne and hoped that she would go into law, the young woman defied their wishes and set her sights on being an artist. Her introduction to Picasso led to a friendship, a love affair, and a relationship of ten years, during which Gilot gave birth to Picasso’s two children, Paloma and Claude. Gilot was one of Picasso’s muses; she was also very much her own woman, determined to make herself into the remarkable painter she did indeed become. Life with Picasso, written with Carlton Lake and published in 1961, is about Picasso the artist and Picasso the man. We hear him talking about painting and sculpture, his life, his career, as well as other artists, both contemporaries and old masters. We glimpse Picasso in his many and volatile moods, dismissing his work, exultant over his work, entertaining his various superstitions, being an anxious father. But Life with Picasso is not only a portrait of a great artist at the height of his fame; it is also a picture of a talented young woman of exacting intelligence at the outset of her own notable career.

Life with Picasso

1e534f57-ba9f-4873-aa43-0cbefffedf10-1

John Knowles

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Pennsylvania

Gene was a lonely, introverted intellectual.  Phineas was a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete.  What happened between them at school one summer  during the early years of World War II is the  subject of A Separate Peace. A  great bestseller for over thirty years--one of the  most starkly moving parables ever written of the  dark forces that brood over the tortured world of  adolescence.

A Separate Peace

2232a89a-6c05-43c8-b44e-b3468ecc2e5e-1

Glynnis MacNicol

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Texas

One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

When you’re a woman of a certain age, you are only promised that everything will get worse. But what if everything you’ve been told is a lie? Come to Paris, August 2021, when the City of Lights was still empty of tourists and a thirst for long-overdue pleasure gripped those who wandered its streets. After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, aged forty-six, unmarried with no children, spent sixteen months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. The isolation was punishing. A year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness no one can prepare you for. When the opportunity to sublet a friend’s apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it. Leaving felt less like a risk than a necessity. What follows is a decadent, joyful, unexpected journey into one woman’s pursuit of radical enjoyment. The weeks in Paris are filled with friendship and food and sex. There is dancing on the Seine; a plethora of gooey cheese; midnight bike rides through empty Paris; handsome men; afternoons wandering through the empty Louvre; nighttime swimming in the ocean off a French island. And yes, plenty of nudity. In the spirit of Nora Ephron and Deborah Levy (think Colette . . . if she’d had access to dating apps), I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is an intimate, insightful, powerful, and endlessly pleasurable memoir of an intensely lived experience whose meaning and insight expand far beyond the personal narrative. MacNicol is determined to document the beauty, excess, and triumph of a life that does not require permission. The pursuit of enjoyment is a political act, both a right and a responsibility. Enjoying yourself—as you are—is not something the world tells you is possible, but it is. Here’s the proof.

Shelves by The Toni Pages

The Toni Pages

Wishlist

Browse by categories

Shelves by The Toni Pages

The Toni Pages

Wishlist