Search results for ""Author Richard Ovenden""

An unforgettable 3,000-year-old journey - from Mesopotamian clay tablets trying to predict the future, to Tudor book-hunters and Nazi bonfires, and on into the dangers of our increasingly digital existence, Burning the Books shows how the preservation of knowledge is vital for the survival of civilization itself. 'A wonderful book, full of good stories and burning with passion' SUNDAY TIMES, BOOKS OF THE YEAR'Compelling, fascinating and rewarding' LITERARY REVIEW'When books burn, it is more than just words under attack . . . this extraordinary book should stir us to thinking and to action' FINANCIAL TIMES 'A tale of ingenuity and deep courage' GUARDIAN'A stark warning - the truth itself is under attack' THE TIMES, BOOKS OF THE YEAR

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Over more than four decades J.R.R. Tolkien’s son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, published some twenty-four volumes of his father’s work, much more than his father had succeeded in publishing during his own lifetime. Standing on the mountain of his son’s colossal publishing effort and extraordinary scholarship, readers today are therefore able to survey and understand the vastness of the landscape of Tolkien’s legendarium. This collection of essays by world-renowned scholars, together with family reminiscences, sheds new light on J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, his son Christopher’s unique gifts in communicating and interpreting that work and the debt owed to Christopher by the many Tolkien scholars who were privileged to work with him. What was Tolkien’s intended ending for 'The Lord of the Rings'? Did it leave echoes in the stripped-down version that was actually published? What was the audience’s response to the first ever adaptation of 'The Lord of the Rings' – a radio dramatization that has now been deleted forever from the BBC’s archives? What was the significance of the extraordinary array of doorways which confronted the hobbits as they journeyed through Middle-earth? The book is illustrated with colour reproductions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s manuscripts, maps, drawings and letters and, with the kind permission of his estate, photographs of Christopher Tolkien and extracts from his works, some of which have never been seen before, making this volume essential reading for Tolkien scholars, readers and fans.

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An introduction to the postmodern photographs of Allan Chasanoff, whose work interrogates and subverts the notion of photography as a truthful record of the real From the 1960s onward, Allan Chasanoff (1936–2020) maintained a daily photographic practice, producing tens of thousands of images that pushed the limits of the medium and questioned its reliability as a document of reality. Preferring to experiment away from the art world, Chasanoff rarely exhibited his photographs, his art remaining unknown to all but a select circle of friends and collaborators. This catalogue is the first to survey his beguiling work. Artist Mónika Sziládi, who worked as an archivist for Chasanoff, contributes an outline of Chasanoff’s life and practice, tracing the development of his art from his early experiments with light, shadow, and color in his lens-shot photographs to his late-career foray into 3D printing, which he viewed as the latest frontier of photography. Influenced by the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and Jacques Derrida, Chasanoff understood photographic images to be full of multivalent symbolism, and his art highlights the fluid nature of the medium. Using analog optical effects, such as blurring and other distortions, and on-screen tools to cut and layer digital images, Chasanoff created a wide range of pictures, some of which reference or appropriate the work of artists like Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, or Giorgio Morandi. With nearly 200 plates organized into 7 thematic sections, Seeing and Not Believing brings Chasanoff’s contribution to postmodern photography to a wider audience and underlines how the artist’s work challenges our assumptions about believing what we see. Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery

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