Marina Warner Books

Widely considered to be one of the most engaging and fascinating artists of our time, Kiki Smith has, over the past 25 years, developed into a major figure in the world of twenty-first-century art. Her subject matter is as wide-ranging as the materials her work has encompassed. In the 1980s, with her earliest figural sculptures in plaster, glass and wax, Smith developed an elaborate vocabulary around the forms and functions of the body and its metaphorical as well as physical relationship to society. By the early 1990s, she began to engage with themes of a more religious and mythological nature. Her re-imaginings of biblical women as inhabitants of physical bodies--rather than as abstract bearers of doctrine--led her to make series of sculptural works related to the figure of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lilith and others. The artist has more recently considered fairy tales and folk narratives as well as nurturing a growing menagerie of work concerned with animals and the natural world. Smith has now earned a considerable reputation as a virtuoso printmaker and draftsperson, and as a re-inventor of the startling sculptural possibilities present in materials ranging from paper and resin to bronze and porcelain. Organized by the Walker Art Center with the full collaboration of the artist, the exhibition Kiki Smith represents the artist's first full-scale monograph.

A fascinating study of the symbolism of Joan of Arc in her own time and ever since in literature, politics, on the stage, and on screen.

Fun activities for pre-school kids to keep them entertained whilst building key early years skills

This brilliant and timely study looks beyond the Freudian interpretation of fairy tales, to the tellers of the tales, and to the social and cutural contexts in which the tales are told and re-told through the centuries, from the ancient sibyls to the eighteenth-century SALONIERES, from Angela Carter to Disney. The value and enduring popularity of folk and fairy tales derives not only from their mythic significance but, crucially, from the fact that their concerns are rooted in the material world. Lively, provocative and ground-breaking, FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE is Marina Warner's first major work of non-fiction since the acclaimed MONUMENTS AND MAIDENS.

Published to accompany an exhibition held Feb. 7-May 27, 2013, at the National Portrait Gallery, London; June 22-Sept. 8, 2013, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; Oct. 28, 2013-January 19, 2014, at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

From 1861 to 1908 a woman, the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi, born the daughter of a minor mandarin, held the supreme power in China. Opportunistic, ruthless, malicious, she ruled over four hundred million people. This title presents her portrait.

The Cahiers Series continues its exploration of translation in all its aspects with this account by renowned writer and academic Marine Warner of what happened to time during the Coronavirus pandemic lockdowns. She recounts how strangely her days and weeks passed, in this highly personal account of a response to lockdown in which she delves into her experience of Catholic convent schools for some clues as to how each day might be marked as significant. She discusses missals, almanacs, Roman and Revolutionary calendars, developing her thoughts into what amounts almost to a manifesto for a new way of rendering each day different, memorable, human. Her text is accompanied by a further response to lockdown, by the Greek photographer Dimitris Kleanthis, whose haunting images somehow make visible the suspension and acceleration of time experienced by so many, while also hinting at how, to the eye that is acute enough, there may always be an event taking place.

"Esmond and Ilia follows Marina Warner's beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English colonel, is still away in the war in the East as she begins to learn how to be Mrs. Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman. With diamond rings on her fingers and brogues on her feet, Ilia steps fearlessly into the world of cricket and riding. But, without prospect of work in a bleak, war-ravaged England, Esmond remembers the glorious ease of Cairo during his periods of leave from the desert campaign. There, they start a bookshop, a branch of W. H. Smith's. But growing resistance to foreign interests, especially British, erupts in the 1952 uprising, and the Cairo Fire burns the city clean. Evocative and imaginative, at once historical and speculative, this memoir powerfully resurrects the fraught union and unrequited hopes of Warner's parents. Memory intertwines richly with myth, the river Lethe feeling as real as the Nile. Vivid recollections of Cairo swirl with ever-present dreams of a city where Warner's parents, friends, and associates are still restlessly wandering"-- Provided by publisher

Marina Warner's study of the products of fantasy deepens our understanding of the supernatural in relation to self and society. This surprising story explores the metaphors and media that have been the stock in trade of poets, scientists, magicians, and visionaries, including wax and cloud, smoke and mirrors, ether, ectoplasm, and celluloid.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD 2012WINNER OF THE TRUMAN CAPOTE AWARD 2013WINNER OF THE SHEIKH ZAYED BOOK AWARD 2013Magic is not simply a matter of the occult arts, but a whole way of thinking, of dreaming the impossible.