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"Corita Kent, formerly Sister Mary Corita, is known for her exuberant, colorful serigraphs and her teaching, as evidenced in her lively art classes. As a Catholic nun from 1936 until 1968, Corita lived and worked in the Immaculate Heart of Mary community in Los Angeles. She taught lettering and layout, image finding, and art structure for 20 years in Immaculate Heart College's art department. There, she screened multiple films simultaneously, hosted guest thinkers including Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller and John Cage, and guided the making of large-scale collaborative projects with students. Corita regularly took her students out for looking sessions at a used car lot or an art exhibition. While constantly looking and discovering visually, Corita shot thousands of 35 mm slides documenting references, the IHC milieu and the art department processes. For Corita, the vernacular environs of advertising, supermarkets and the city's media landscape were a source of inspiration and raw material. Her slide collection encompasses a wide range of subjects: cookies, coke bottles, toys, presents,experiments, projects, Mary's Day celebrations stemming from Corita's classroom, flowers, magazines, seeds, puppets, visits with Charles and Ray Eames, street signs, trade fairs, folk art, boxes, billboards and kites. Drawing from the Corita Art Center's vast slide collection, Ordinary Things Will Be Signs for Us embodies Corita's philosophy of looking"

Over the course of his 20-year career, Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) cast himself alternately as hard-drinking carouser and confrontational art-world jester, thrusting these personae to the forefront of his prodigious creativity. He was also very much a player in the international art world of the 1970s right up until his death in 1997, commissioning work from artists such as Jeff Koons and Mike Kelley, and acting as unofficial ringleader to a generation of German artists. Written by the artist's sister, Susanne Kippenberger, and now available in paperback, this first English-language biography draws both from personal memories of their shared childhood and exhaustive interviews with Kippenberger's extended family of friends and colleagues in the art world. Kippenberger gives insight into the psychology and drive behind this playful and provocative artist. Reviewing the hardcover edition in The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote: "Ms. Kippenberger provides wonderful thumbnail portraits of the many key figures in her brother's life, while using their reminiscences to create a finely diced composite oral history that makes palpable both his charming and his repellent sides."

The Weight Loss Secret that Nobody is Talking About Do you struggle with maintaining weight loss? Perhaps you stick to a Paleo, Gluten-Free, or Low-Carb diet for a while, but you just can't maintain it? This is not an uncommon situation. I have dealt with it myself, as have millions of other people. But millions of people have also successfully lost weight and kept it off on Paleo, Gluten-Free, or Low-Carb diets. After talking to and helping many of these people, I've found that they have at least one thing in common. And for some reason, nobody is talking about it. A Gluten-Free or Paleo Diet Plan Alone is Not Enough Everyone will tell you that all you need is to know what to eat. But that's not true. You already know that many foods are unhealthy, but you eat them anyway. What you really need is support and encouragement for sticking to a healthy diet and lifestyle. But very few people ever get this type of support. Paleo Weight Loss is NOT as Easy as Claimed Gluten-Free, Paleo, and Low-Carb diets are fantastic. They get junk out of your diet and have helped millions of people lose weight. However, it's tough to stick to any of these diets over the long-term. And that makes maintaining weight loss very tough. Everybody is tempted by bad food, and we all cheat at one time or another. I've been through this, and everybody I talk to goes through it at one time or another. You Must have Weight Loss Support from Your Family and Friends This might sound like a small thing, but if you don't have the support of your friends and family, then you will never be able to maintain your motivation to lose weight and keep it off. On the other hand, if you do have this support, then sticking to a Gluten-Free, Paleo, or Low-Carb diet is both easy and incredibly effective. And you can get greater results than you ever imagined. Get the Motivation to Lose Weight and Keep it Off After talking to thousands of people, I learned that getting your family on board is hard, but there's a system for doing it. And in this book, I'll show you that system. I'll walk you step-by-step through getting the support of your family and claiming your golden opportunity to take control of your health, as well as that of your family. Don't make the mistake of thinking that you don't need the help or support of the people around you. Buy the World's Greatest Weight Loss Secret Now I encourage you NOT to delay. Your health and your family aren't waiting for you.

In the winter of 2007, photographer Michael Schmelling--known for his previous books Shut Up Truth and The Plan--photographed the USA National Memory Championships in New York City. Roughly 100 competitors gathered in a modest conference hall in the Con Edison building to compete in a series of mnemonic tests. Schmelling's photographs from that day are primarily of the competitors, all intensely engaged in recalling and reciting lists of information. Schmelling returned to the championships in 2008, photographing many of the same competitors as the year before. Building a book of short, interrelated stories, Schmelling has combined these images of mnemonists with a series of similar, overlapping narratives. Traveling through a North American landscape of neutral interiors, the viewer of Land Line encounters an array of subjects in the midst of thinking, forgetting, questioning and interpreting. Photographs of professional mnemonists, teenagers in an algorithmic code competition, entrepreneurs, a Hollywood actor, prisoners and English language students dressed up as historical figures coalesce into a larger narrative about cognition, memory and information.

French photographer Bertrand Fleuret (born 1969) has made some of the most poetical and beautifully produced photobooks of the past ten years--among them The Risk of an Early Spring and Landmasses and Railways, published by J&L Books, who brings us Fleuret's latest volume--a continuation of Landmasses and Railway's exploration of the moods and imagery of imaginary worlds. Several years ago, Fleuret had an unusually intense dream that began with him standing by a wall of dark cliffs. When he awoke, he found that the details of the dream remained oddly vivid, and he decided to reconstruct it in photographs. This volume reproduces the sequence of color photographs along with Fleuret's account of the dream.

In Festus, Canadian artist and illustrator Jason Logan depicts the classic figure of the frontiersman in various incarnations. Logan made these works while traveling to the Klondike Institute in the outer reaches of Yukon, by the Alaska border, and they reflect the rugged landscape of the Canadian northwest; traces of Basquiat, too, are visible in the faces, sometimes seemingly rendered in finger paint. Thirty-five variations on the frontiersman--as hustler, magician, logger--make up this slender gem of a book.

"I think that writing comes from a desire to complete some kind of emotional circuit; or making something gives you a sense of emotional completion," celebrated Canadian playwright Morwyn Brebner told Toronto Life in 2005. "You look around the world and you feel like you're not represented. You see things a certain way and you have a drive to be known-to hide and to be known at the same time. And I think writing fiction is about that, because you can be incredibly confessional and still make things up, and nobody knows which is which. You can reveal yourself while hiding behind the guise of fiction." Brebner's newest work of fiction fulfills this condition exactly. Hey 45 is a hybrid book that pairs her captivating novella with found photographs of high-school sports, taken from the Middletown Press, a Connecticut newspaper. These photos obliquely illustrate Brebner's funny and moving tale of family, adolescence and shame.

A tender, lighthearted homage to a father's "beautiful legs"Croatian-born photographer and architect Sara Perovic's mother once told her, "I fell in love with your father because of his beautiful legs." With this small paperback photobook, Perovic (born 1984) has created a tender, humorous study of her boyfriend's legs, as a stand-in for her father's, depicting them in color against various backdrops--aboard a boat, indoors, standing on a bed, or on the tennis court--isolated from the rest of his body. She laments that her father's love of tennis kept his attentions away from her when she was a child, and a short series of full-figure portraits of him delivering a backhand shot in flipbook style concludes the volume, along with a coda from the photographer: "And now my daughter's father has beautiful legs.

Artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner's (1933-2008) mobility was severely limited for the last five years of his life, when he rarely left the San Francisco home he shared with his wife, Jean. To aid in his physical navigation of its spaces, he worked with assistants to install a succession of solid brass handles in each and every room--surrounding the stove, down the boat-like stairwell, inside the recesses of the bedroom closet. At last count, the handles, a labyrinth of critical support, numbered 163. Still in situ after his death in 2008, the handles are arguably Conner's last great work--at once physical and metaphysical, fragmentary and elusive, elegant and anonymous. Together, they draft the ghost architecture of Conner's final years, transforming the pedestrian into something altogether different. Will Brown is a collaborative project founded by Lindsey White, Jordan Stein and David Kasprzak. Formerly based in a San Francisco storefront, Will Brown's main objective is to manipulate the structures of exhibition-making as a critical practice. Will Brown recently mounted a solo exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive.

While photographer Lisa Kereszi (born 1973) was researching for her previous book, Joe's Junk Yard, her father, Joe Jr., gave her a worn and tattered old photo album that he had compiled in the 1970s and 80s. Inside were 4 x 6-inch color photographs taken by Joe Jr. of biker babes in bars, at bike rallies and drag races, in various states of undress. As Kereszi says, "It's really a very odd group of images for a daughter to find--pics of biker babes showing off their tattoos, their boyfriends' bikes and hot rods, and, well, breasts." Kereszi appropriated the photographs, and re-cropped them for this volume. "The edit goes through various different types of pictures," she notes, "from the expected, posed shots, to the 'money shots, ' then on to some very interesting and beautiful images of women unawares."

In June, 2005, while traveling in Vietnam, artist Harrell Fletcher visited The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Deeply affected by the exhibit, Fletcher returned to photograph all of the images and text descriptions from the main museum with the intention of re-presenting the exhibition in the United States. Fletcher's exhibition The American War toured for two years, stopping at various U. S. venues including the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M. I. T. and White Columns in New York City. With this collection of images, Fletcher encourages his audience to reconsider opinions of the War in Vietnam and other American wars that have occurred since. Harrell Fletcher is a visual artist working in mixed media: video, installation, photography and web based works. His work was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Fletcher has an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and has taught and lectured in the US and Europe. In Spring 2004, he taught at New York's Cooper Union. A hallmark of his work is to devise strategies for transforming the everyday experiences and objects of community residents into curated exhibitions.

Edited by Jason Fulford, Leanne Shapton and Craig Taylor.

Edited by Jason Fulford, Leanne Shapton, Paul Maliszewski, Matt Singer.

A cultural history of the sublime first image of a black hole, in photographs and documents"Peering into Light's Graveyard: The First Image of the Black Hole," read the New York Times' April 11 cover story. The headline, like many others that day, was accompanied by an image of a glowing celestial ring framed by infinite blackness: the first image of a black hole. In his first book, New York photographer Matthew Beck (born 1986) focuses on the unveiling of this previously unseeable image by following it into the depths of the New York City subway. The book suggests the notion that the cosmos is not something to simply be observed from our vantage point as humans, but more a system that we are intrinsically a part of; and the true nature of the black hole seems to be as elusive as the answer to humanity's most pressing question of "why."

Found art in the form of record covers, lovingly and mischievously vandalized by anonymous music loversMarred for Life! presents over 250 record covers, lovingly and mischievously vandalized by anonymous music lovers. The LP covers were selected from the collection of Greg Wooten, a Los Angeles-based collector, musician and design purveyor. Wooten and his community of record-collector friends have discovered these in used record bins over the course of several years. Sometimes over-the-top and other times subtle--and often, really funny--the objects become a kind of found folk art. Bloodshot eyes, blackened teeth, moustaches, tattoos, reviews, love letters, collage and psychedelic and pornographic embellishings of record covers by Elvis, the Beatles, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Yoko Ono, Nina Simone, Led Zeppelin, Sparks, LL Cool J, David Bowie, The Velvet Underground, Mose Allison, Prince, Tim Buckley, Neil Young and more can be found here. The book is edited by Jason Fulford, in a way that highlights connections and humor between the covers.

San Francisco Oracle was a countercultural newspaper published in the city's bustling Haight Ashbury neighborhood from September 1966 to February 1968, bookending the iconic "Summer of Love." In 12 issues combining poetry, spirituality and speculation with revolutionary rainbow inking effects, the Oracle reached well beyond the Bay Area and spoke to a radical new American ethos.Where to Score presents not the candy-colored prophecies of various gurus, but a quieter, more revealing corner of the paper--its classified section. There, surrounded by advertisements for drummers, carpenters and head shops, are the desperate pleas of parents seeking wayward children. "Will you trust me enough to call collect and let me know you're alright?" Elsewhere, beat poet Michael McClure needs a harp and the Sexual Freedom League is hungry for recruits. The diminutive entries speak volumes to the times, showcasing an honest, immediate and lesser-known chapter in the era's history.

In the archives of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pittsburgh-based artist Lenka Clayton (born 1977) came across a letter written in 1978 by a member of the public to the curator of 20th-century art. The writer--a Mr. Brian H. Morgan--describes a white marble egg made by his Romanian great-grandfather Peter Finck. He notes a startling similarity between this egg and Brancusi's "Sculpture for the Blind," in the museum's collection. The letter poses this question: "What is it about Brancusi that makes his egg a work of art suitable for a museum, and not the egg by Finck?" At its heart is a timeless question: how does one object come to be understood as an important work of art, while another, so similar, is entirely forgotten? Clayton found the letter almost 40 years after it was written and discovered that it was never answered. She sent a copy of the letter to 1,000 curators, museum directors and other art professionals, inviting them to imagine that the letter was addressed to them and to respond to Mr. Morgan.

Economically downtrodden New York City in the mid-to-late 1970s was like the end of the world, but only if you chose to see it that way. For young artists running amok in the collapsing capital, the possibilities seemed endless. For Manuel DeLanda (born 1952), a Mexican transplant enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, overcrowded sidewalks and decrepit subway stations were blank canvases for inspired mayhem.Widely recognized today as a philosopher, professor and author (of A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Assemblage Theory and The Rise of Realism, among other titles), DeLanda initially came to prominence as one of the premiere experimental filmmakers of his generation. Fueled by the gonzo humor and graphic audacity of Frank Zappa and Zap Comix, DeLanda's fevered productions were among the most deliriously innovative movies of the punk era. While films like Raw Nerves: A Lacanian Thriller and Incontinence: A Diarrhetic Flow of Mismatches are certified underground classics, DeLanda's visually striking, virtually unknown graffiti work (signed with the tag Ism Ism) has long remained more urban legend than legendary.ISM ISM presents a comprehensive overview of DeLanda's ephemeral street collages through a colorful frame-by-frame breakdown of a Super-8 short film made in 1979 to document his sweetly subversive activities. Extensive still images, an expansive interview and copious contextual materials combine to illustrate the story of DeLanda's aesthetic attack on 23rd St, including his friendly competition with fellow taggers Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In 2014, New York-based photographer Darin Mickey (born 1974) began documenting a handful of record shops in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania--independently run stores that opened primarily in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, many of which are now on their last legs, or have recently been shuttered. These stores are the alphabetized havens for the musical successes of a few and the forgotten failures of many. Shot from the perspective of a middle-aged man restlessly clinging to his youth and the hope of finding that elusive artifact to make anxiety subside and keep the reaper at bay, Death Takes a Holiday shows us a community of beautiful recluses brought together by obsession, compulsion and a pure, undying love of music.

"There are eight million stories in the naked city," says the narrator in Jules Dassin's 1948 noir classic Naked City. This sense of the bustling American metropolis as a vast reservoir of untapped stories has moved numerous photographers to surf the urban sprawl with an open-ended attention to chance encounters and unexpected visual serendipities. After watching the documentary film A Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert Frank in the early 1990s, Los Angeles-based photographer Chrissy Piper wrote a fan letter to Frank, and traveled to New York to meet him. Frank's work and their eventual friendship inspired Piper to continue shooting on the street. The pictures gathered in this book were taken mostly on the streets of New York City, but also in other locales across America, during various road trips with friends.

Filmmaker, painter, anthropologist, musicologist and occultist--Harry Smith (1923-1991) was an incomparable polymath and seminal figure in the realms of beat culture and avant-garde art. Smith's kaleidoscopic experimental films have influenced generations of artists and cinephiles, while his landmark three-volume compilation, the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), laid the foundation for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to his ecstatic artwork, Smith is renowned for his vast collections of curious objects. The Collections of Harry Smith, Catalogue Raisonné series spotlights and indexes his eclectic research obsessions. Volume one features richly detailed photographic documentation of 251 paper airplanes gathered by Smith from the streets of New York City over an approximately 20-year period. Whimsical and weird, the paper airplanes rank among Smith's most mysterious collecting pursuits. This extensive compendium presents the fruits of his extraordinary aeronautic pursuit and highlights the tangled history and myths that accompany them.

Elisabeth Tonnard's In This Dark Wood is a study of urban alienation in America. In a haunting, modern-gothic style, it pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations, collected by Tonnard, of the famous first lines of Dante's Inferno: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita." ("In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood / for the straight way was lost"). The images were selected from the Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers who worked in San Francisco from the 1940s to the 70s. This edition is a reprint of a work originally self-published in 2008.

Baltimore photographer Michael Northrup (born 1948) has been making gently humorous but decidedly jubilant color photographs of his daily life since the early 1970s. His 2004 J&L publication Beautiful Ecstasy depicted young families (Northrup's own and those of friends) partying and performing for the camera, often in each other's homes, bringing a beautifully understated formal elegance to moments of tender and chaotic everyday living. This sequel to Beautiful Ecstasy presents a further selection of previously unpublished photographs from the 1970s and 80s, all permeated with Northrup's characteristic joie de vivre. Period details in furniture and clothing vividly resurrect the textures of these bygone moments; here, we also see young couples bringing children into their chaotic worlds, freighting these scenes of small town America with a powerful atmosphere of fragility and wonder.

Adam Penn Gilders was a virtuoso of the deadpan prose miniature. He published his stories in "Paris Review," "The Walrus" and "J&L Illustrated," before passing away in 2007, at the age of 36, of a brain tumor. "Another Ventriloquist" collects Gilders' charming vignettes, which fall somewhere between Aesop's fable and bitch session: "My friend Geoffrey, to my constant dismay, seems compelled to enjoy life's little pleasures, such as coffee or perfectly cooked eggs, all at once, without delay or hesitation. With coffee, for example, which he particularly loves, he drains his cup with almost demented eagerness, often before his companions have taken a single sip. It was as though the best experiences, like hot liquids, were liable to evaporate if measured out in teaspoons. He had what I considered a 'Now or Never' attitude which made me want to proclaim 'Never!'" With this posthumous collection, Gilders bequeaths a gem of concision and wit.

J & L Books' acclaimed J & L Illustrated series presents handsomely designed paperback volumes of fiction and art at an affordable price. Shout magazine wrote of the first volume, published in 2002: "This impressive collection of illustrations and fiction makes sense of the world like good liquor should." Edited by writer Paul Maliszewski (author of Prayer and Parable and Fakers), this third volume of J & L Illustrated is comprised of 13 short stories by authors Amie Barrodale, Scott Bradfield, Stephen Dixon, Steve Featherstone, William H. Gass, Michael Martone, Joseph McElroy, Elizabeth Miller, Robert Nedelkoff, Hasanthikia Sirisena, Steve Stern, Mike Topp and Xiaoda Xiao. The Paris-based artist Shoboshobo provides accompanying drawings.

This veritable visual encyclopedia collects 132 images of our most dexterous body part, gathered by Dutch-French artist Serge Onnen from across the annals of art history--from meticulous sixteenth-century renderings (Hendrick Goltzius) to contemporary punk-influenced depictions (Raymond Pettibon), from instructional handshake diagrams to political cartoons. Other contributors include Kinke Kooi, Robert Filliou, William Kentridge, Shakers, Michael Kirkham, Balthus, Daragh Reeves, Mrzyk & Moriceau, Serge Onnen, Marcel van Eden, Andrej Roiter and Olav Westphalen. "Drawings on Hands"'s packaging, with a folded cardboard cover and elastic cord, is as pleasing to the eye as to the hand.

"Drawings on Geology" is Dutch/French artist Serge Onnen's collection of black-and-white drawings based on the concept of the horizon. Onnen has drawn on works by artists from across history to the present, as well as on anonymous ephemera, to elaborate this theme. The artists included here are David Shrigley, Paul Noble, Mark Dion, MVRDV, Hans Broek, Sebastiaan Bremer, Matthew Monaham, Olav Westphalen, Robert Longo, Raymond Pettibon, Leonardo DaVinci, Satoru Eguchi, Le Corbusier, Daragh Reeves, Marla Bussmann, Ellen Harvey, Alice Smit, Ben Polsky, Mathilde ter Heijne, Seurat, Paul Nassenstein, Toba Kedoori, Hannes Kater, Serge Onnen, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Aam Solleveld, Carlos Roque, Caspar David Friederich, Albrecht Durer, Arnoud Holleman, Napoleon Bonaparte, William Wegman, Christine Rusch, Grandville, Pope sixtus, Roy McMakin, Marc Smeets, Geert Dekkers and others.

This funny, dry and absurd twist on conventional art criticism serves as a great reference book for 20th Century art criticism. In 2001, while residing at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, artist and curator Octavian Esanu read hundreds of interviews and essays by artists and art critics. He then formed a new text out of the questions about art which he had culled from his readings. Each question is duly footnoted. The results are hilarious, absurd and profound. Originally published in 2002 in Germany by Edition Solitude, JFL: What Does "Why" Mean? is now available in North America, re-typeset and printed by J&L.

Edited by Leanne Shapton and Jason Fulford.

Beautiful Ecstasy is a collection of snapshot portraits and still lifes by American photographer Michael Northrup (born 1948), shot in the 1970s and 80s. Young families--Northrup's own and those of friends--are depicted partying and performing for the camera, a jubilant and wild community in small-town America.