Music/Art/Literature
Explore a curated reading list blending music, art, and literature. Discover acclaimed biographies like Jan Swafford's *Johannes Brahms* alongside sci-fi classics by Philip K. Dick and Robert Silverberg.
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Maurice
by Edward Morgan Forster
Written during 1913 and 1914, Maurice deals with the then unmentionable subject of homosexuality. More unusual, it concerns a relationship that ends happily.
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Johannes Brahms
by Jan Swafford
A New York Times Notable Book "This brilliant and magisterial book is a very good bet to...become the definitive study of Johannes Brahms."--The Plain Dealer Judicious, compassionate, and full of insight into Brahms's human complexity as well as his music, Johannes Brahms is an indispensable biography. Proclaimed the new messiah of Romanticism by Robert Schumann when he was only twenty, Johannes Brahms dedicated himself to a long and extraordinarily productive career. In this book, Jan Swafford sets out to reveal the little-known Brahms, the boy who grew up in mercantile Hamburg and played piano in beer halls among prostitutes and drunken sailors, the fiercely self-protective man who thwarted future biographers by burning papers, scores and notebooks late in his life. Making unprecedented use of the remaining archival material, Swafford offers richly expanded perspectives on Brahms's youth, on his difficult romantic life--particularly his longstanding relationship with Clara Schumann--and on his professional rivalry with Lizst and Wagner. "[Johannes Brahms] will no doubt stand as the definitive work on Brahms, one of the monumental biographies in the entire musical library."--London Weekly Standard "It is a measure of the accomplishment of Jan Swafford's biography that Brahms's sadness becomes palpable.... [Swafford] manages to construct a full-bodied human being."--The New York Times Book Review
![Yves Tanguy; [exhibition and catalogue] Cover](https://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/0405015798.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
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Dying Inside
by Robert Silverberg
Science fiction. From birth David Selig was both blessed and cursed with the ability to look into the innermost thoughts and hearts of people around him. As he grew he learnt to protect himself from the things he did not want to hear and eavesdropped on all that he did, using his powers for the pursuit of pleasure. But now having reached middle-age, David's powers are fading, slowly stranding him in a world he does not know how to handle, leaving him living on the outside but dying inside. Universally acclaimed as Silverberg's masterpiece, this is the harrowing and chilling story of a man who squandered his remarkable powers and then had to learn what it was like to be human.
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A Scanner Darkly
by Philip K. Dick
A drug dealer of the future periodically moves away from his spaced-out world to become an informer for narcotics agents until he becomes unable to separate his two personalities.
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The Man Who Knew Infinity
by Robert Kanigel
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JEREMY IRONS AND DEV PATEL! A moving and enlightening look at the unbelievable true story of how gifted prodigy Ramanujan stunned the scholars of Cambridge University and revolutionized mathematics. In 1913, a young unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G H Hardy, begging the preeminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Realizing the letter was the work of a genius, Hardy arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England. Thus began one of the most improbable and productive collaborations ever chronicled. With a passion for rich and evocative detail, Robert Kanigel takes us from the temples and slums of Madras to the courts and chapels of Cambridge University, where the devout Hindu Ramanujan, "the Prince of Intuition," tested his brilliant theories alongside the sophisticated and eccentric Hardy, "the Apostle of Proof." In time, Ramanujan's creative intensity took its toll: he died at the age of thirty-two, but left behind a magical and inspired legacy that is still being plumbed for its secrets today.
