James Joyce’s deeply personal and “most memorable novel” (H. G. Wells) detailing the spiritual and artistic awakening of Stephen Dedalus, now freshly repackaged for the Union Square & Co. Signature Classics line. James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical first novel explores the author’s own love-hate relationship with Ireland through Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s literary alter ego. Dedalus yearns to be an artist, but must first overcome the aspects of Irish society, like school and the church, that he feels restrains his creativity and stifles his soul. Joyce’s use of experimental literary techniques, including stream of consciousness, is on full display in his first novel, which he further develops in his later works, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake.

Young adults often struggle with confusion or guilt because they perceive themselves as different from others, especially their peers. For some of these individuals, the arts can help them cope with adolescent turmoil, allowing them to express their emotions in poems, stories, painting, songs, and other creative outlets. Sensitive teachers and parents know how important it is for young people to realize that they are not alone in their quest for self-knowledge and finding their way in the world. It can make a difference when readers find something in a book that helps them understand more about who they are and helps them understand others. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Adult: The Arts in Young Adult Literature, Lois Thomas Stover and Connie S. Zitlow examine books in which the coming-of-age for young adults is influenced by the arts. Stover and Zitlow consider the connection between the arts and a young person’s developing sense of self, the use of art to cope with loss and grief, and how young adults can use art to foster catharsis and healing. The young people in these books either identify as artists or use the arts in intentional ways to explore their identities. They often have artistic gifts that make them stand outside the norms of teenage life, yet those gifts also help them find a sense of community. Artists considered in this book include painters, photographers, sculptors, actors, directors, choreographers, dancers, composers, musicians, graffiti artists, and others. The books discussed also explore the ways adults can nurture the artist’s development and understand the way young people sometimes use the arts to form their unique identity. Included is an annotated bibliography organized by art discipline, as well as an appendix about using the arts pedagogically, making Portrait of the Artist as a Young Adult a valuable resource for educators, parents, librarians, and young adults.

The creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus explores the comics form ... and how it formed him! This book opens with Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, creating vignettes of the people, events, and comics that shaped Art Spiegelman. It traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son. The second part presents a facsimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s, the book that triggers these memories. Breakdowns established the mode of formally sophisticated comics that transformed the medium, and includes the prototype of Maus, cubist experiments, an essay on humor, and the definitive genre-twisting pulp story "Ace Hole-Midget Detective." Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks back at the sixties as the artist pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being. Poignant, funny, complex, and innovative, Breakdowns alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir.

Soon to be made into a major motion picture—Self Portrait—starring Zoë Kravitz and Thomasin McKenzie Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a "rich and thorny page turner" (Los Angeles Times) literary psychological horror about an ambitious young artist whose accidental photograph of a tragedy could jumpstart her career, but devastate her most intimate friendship. Lu Rile is a relentlessly focused young photographer struggling to make ends meet. Working three jobs, responsible for her aging father, and worrying that her crumbling loft apartment is being sold to developers, she is at a point of desperation. One day, in the background of a self-portrait, Lu accidentally captures an image of a boy falling to his death. The photograph turns out to be startlingly gorgeous, the best work of art she’s ever made. It’s an image that could change her life…if she lets it. But the decision to show the photograph is not easy. The boy is her neighbors’ son, and the tragedy brings all the building’s residents together. It especially unites Lu with the boy’s beautiful grieving mother, Kate. As the two forge an intense bond based on sympathy, loneliness, and budding attraction, Lu feels increasingly unsettled and guilty, torn between equally fierce desires: to advance her career, and to protect a woman she has come to love. Set in early 90s Brooklyn on the brink of gentrification, Self-Portrait with Boy is a “sparkling debut” (The New York Times Book Review) about the emotional dues that must be paid on the road to success and a powerful exploration of the complex terrain of female friendship. “The conflict is rich and thorny, raising questions about art and morality, love and betrayal, sacrifice and opportunism, and the chance moments that can define a life…It wrestles with the nature of art, but moves with the speed of a page-turner” (Los Angeles Times).

Winner of the Randolph Caldecott Medal and the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award Jean-Michel Basquiat and his unique, collage-style paintings rocketed to fame in the 1980s as a cultural phenomenon unlike anything the art world had ever seen. But before that, he was a little boy who saw art everywhere: in poetry books and museums, in games and in the words that we speak, and in the pulsing energy of New York City. Now, award-winning illustrator Javaka Steptoe's vivid text and bold artwork echoing Basquiat's own introduce young readers to the powerful message that art doesn't always have to be neat or clean--and definitely not inside the lines--to be beautiful.

With an essay by J. I. M. Stewart. 'Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears ... But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work' From a child grappling with the death of a fallen priest, to a young woman's dilemma over whether to elope to Argentina with her lover, to the dance party at which a man discovers just how little he really knows about his wife, these fifteen stories bring the gritty realism of existence in Joyce's native Dublin to life. With Dubliners, James Joyce reinvented the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.