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For decades now, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a more fundamental matter, one he had often meditated on in The New Yorker: How do masters learn their miraculous skill, whether it was drawing a museum-ready nude or baking a perfect sourdough loaf? How could anyone become so good at anything? There seemed to be a fundamental mystery to mastery. Was it possible to unravel it?In The Real Work-the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick-Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others. Rejecting self-help bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods. For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking down and building up-of identifying and perfecting the small constituent parts of a skill and the combining them for an overall effect greater than the sum of those parts. For another, mastery almost always involves intentional imperfection-as in music, where vibrato, a way of not quite landing on the right note, carries maximum expressiveness. Gopnik's simplest and most invigorating lesson, however, is that we are surrounded by mastery. Far from rare, mastery is commonplace, if we only know where to look: from the parent who can whip up a professional strudel to the social worker who-in one of the most personally revealing passages Gopnik has ever written-helps him master his own demons.Spirited and profound, The Real Work will help you understand how mastery can happen in your own life-and, significantly, why each of us relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place.

Known to his contemporaries primarily as an art critic, but ambitious to secure a more lasting literary legacy, Charles Baudelaire, a Parisian bohemian, spent much of the 1840s composing gritty, often perverse, poems that expressed his disgust with the banality of modern city life.First published in 1857, the book that collected these poems together, Les Fleurs du mal, was an instant sensation-earning Baudelaire plaudits and, simultaneously, disrepute. Only a year after Gustave Flaubert had endured his own public trial for published indecency (for Madame Bovary), a French court declared Les Fleurs du mal an offense against public morals and six poems within it were immediately suppressed (a ruling that would not be reversed until 1949, nearly a century after Baudelaire's untimely death). Subsequent editions expanded on the original, including new poems that have since been recognized as Baudelaire's masterpieces, producing a body of work that stands as the most consequential, controversial and influential book of poetry from the nineteenth century.Acclaimed translator and poet Aaron Poochigian tackles this revolutionary text with an ear attuned to Baudelaire's lyrical innovations-rendering them in "an assertive blend of full and slant rhymes and fluent iambs" (A. E. Stallings)-and an intuitive feel for the work's dark and brooding mood. Poochigian's version captures the incantatory, almost magical, effect of the original-reanimating for today's reader Baudelaire's "unfailing vision" that "trumpeted the space and light of the future" (Patti Smith).An introduction by Dana Gioia offers a probing reassessment of the supreme artistry of Baudelaire's masterpiece, and an afterword by Daniel Handler explores its continued relevance and appeal. Featuring the poems in English and French, this deluxe dual-language edition allows readers to commune both with the original poems and with these electric, revelatory translations.

The digital era is beset by distraction, and it feels like things are only getting worse. At times like these, the distant past beckons as a golden age of attention. We fantasise about escaping our screens. We dream of recapturing the quiet of a world with less noise. We imagine retreating into solitude and singlemindedness, almost like latter-day monks.But although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them easily. As historian Jamie Kreiner demonstrates in The Wandering Mind, their attempts to stretch the mind out to God-to continuously contemplate the divine order and its ethical requirements-were all-consuming, and their battles against distraction were never-ending. Delving into the experiences of early Christian monks living in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, and throughout Europe from 300 to 900 CE, Kreiner shows that these men and women were obsessed with distraction in ways that seem remarkably modern. At the same time, she suggests that our own obsession is remarkably medieval. Ancient Greek and Roman intellectuals had sometimes complained about distraction, but it was early Christian monks who waged an all-out war against it. The stakes could not have been higher: they saw distraction as a matter of life and death.Even though the world today is vastly different from the world of the early Middle Ages, we can still learn something about our own distractedness by looking closely at monks' strenuous efforts to concentrate. Drawing on a trove of sources that the monks left behind, Kreiner reconstructs the techniques they devised in their lifelong quest to master their minds-from regimented work schedules and elaborative metacognitive exercises to physical regimens for hygiene, sleep, sex and diet. She captures the fleeting moments of pure attentiveness that some monks managed to grasp, and the many times when monks struggled and failed and went back to the drawing board. Blending history and psychology, The Wandering Mind is a witty, illuminating account of human fallibility and ingenuity that bridges a distant era and our own.

1964: Eyes of the Storm, Author: Paul McCartney, Publication Year: 2023-06-13, Publisher: Norton & Company, Language: eng

Finally in paperback and featuring seven new song commentaries, the #1 New York Times bestseller celebrates the creative life and unparalleled musical genius of Paul McCartney.Spanning sixty-four years-from his early days in Liverpool, through the historic decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo career-Paul McCartney's The Lyrics revolutionized the way artists write about music. An unprecedented "triumph" (Times UK), this handsomely designed volume pairs the definitive texts of over 160 songs with first-person commentaries on McCartney's life, revealing the diverse circumstances in which songs were written; how they ultimately came to be; and the remarkable, yet often delightfully ordinary, people and places that inspired them. The Lyrics also includes:· A personal foreword by McCartney· An unprecedented range of songs, from beloved standards like "Band on the Run" to new additions "Day Tripper" and "Magical Mystery Tour"· Over 160 images from McCartney's own archivesEdited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, The Lyrics is the definitive literary and visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.