Product Description: This book explores how the creations of great authors result from the same operations as our everyday counterfactual and hypothetical imaginations, which cognitive scientists refer to as "simulations." Drawing on detailed literary analyses as well as recent research in neuroscience and related fields, Patrick Colm Hogan develops a rigorous theory of the principles governing simulation that goes beyond any existing framework...read more

Product Description: Whether you’re aiming for a New York Times bestseller or a short personal essay to share with family and friends, a popular blogger and memoirist shows you the way in this witty writing guide and disarmingly candid account of discovering her own voice...read more

An Absorbing Errand uses stories of artists’ lives, personal anecdotes, and insights from the author’s work as a psychotherapist to examine the psychological obstacles that prevent people from staying with, and relishing, the process of art-making. Each chapter is devoted to a problem intrinsic to the creative process and illustrates how these very obstacles, once understood, can become prime sources of the energy that actually fuels the mastery of art-making.Many people carry within their hearts an aching sense that they have something they want to express through art; or that they will not feel complete until they’ve brought out some hidden part of themselves. Yet they cannot begin to do the work of bringing their creative idea into the world. Or, maybe they’ve begun over and over, but they can’t stay with their labor long enough to finish it. Ultimately, An Absorbing Errand provides a philosophical, historical, and analytical look at the creative impulse and how certain artists from a wide field mastered their craft. From Julia Child to Charlie Chaplin, Lady Gaga to Michael Jackson, famous painters to established writers, Smith shows us how each overcame the obstacles they faced in the pursuit of their creative visions.

Literary Nonfiction. This is an inspiring book about writing and—more unusually—a book that honors ambition, that idiosyncratic drive that compels writers and other artists to action despite every kind of obstacle. Upton explores forces that threaten our ability to fulfill the most daring aspirations, and she examines ambition's adjuncts, including failure, boredom, and purity, offering a provocative antidote: obsession. Ultimately Upton argues for a new perception of literary art as "a good secret" for our time, when our interior lives and our imaginations are under threat.

Product Description: This book examines the life and art of those contemporary artists who by force or by choice find themselves on other shores. It argues that the exilic challenge enables the émigré artist to (re)establish new artistic devices, new laws and a new language of communication in both his everyday life and his artistic work...read more

Product Description: This book focuses on the numerous examples of creativity produced by POWs and civilian internees during their captivity, including: paintings, cartoons, craftwork, needlework, acting, musical compositions, magazine and newspaper articles, wood carving, and recycled Red Cross tins turned into plates, mugs and makeshift stoves, all which have previously received little attention...read more

Product Description: The Human Condition prompts our creative strivings beyond the natural round of life toward outstanding achievements. This book explains how the emergence of Human Condition lifts natural endowment of the individual to the level of excellence...read more

Explains how to draw on the content of one's dreams and imagination to cultivate the creativity inherent in each individual, furnishing exercises on Vision Shifting, Dream Excavation, the Dream Artist's Studio, and Dream Archaeology, to open up a whole new world of possibilities. Original.

Product Description: Deeper than Reason takes the insights of modern psychological and neuroscientific research on the emotions and brings them to bear on questions about our emotional involvement with the arts. Robinson begins by laying out a theory of emotion, one that is supported by the best evidence from current empirical work on emotions, and then in the light of this theory examines some of the ways in which the emotions function in the arts...read more

The author reveals the fine art of using creativity to 'connect' with the natural world, presenting a series of guided 'creative encounters' designed to stimulate this bond in each reader. Original. 15,000 first printing.

Product Description: "A magnificent book that analyzes prominent female writers (Plath, Nin, The Brontes, Dickinson, and Sitwell) from a psychoanalytic self/object relations point of view . . . a must read for all."

Product Description: The Creative Matrix shows how Freudian and Kleinian theories of creativity are giving way to an attachment model, owing to research on anxiety by John Bowlby and other psychobiologists. We are entering an era of rapproachment between psychoanalysis, neurobiology, and attachment theory...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The Jungian analyst and author of the The Wounded Woman and Meeting the Madwoman shows readers how to unlock their creative potential, using examples from wellknown artists to make her case. 20,000 first printing.

(view table of contents)

Describes the mental states associated with creativity and artistic expression

Product Description: Attempts to discern the role of personality in helping or hindering creative production. This book assesses the traits necessary to prepare someone for a creative career, as well the crucial developmental experiences that may result in a creative personality.

Product Description: In "The Compulsion to Create", Kavaler-Alder offers a theoretical understanding of the psychological forces at work in the female artist. Drawing on the work of the object relations school - especially Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, Margaret Mahler and D...read more

A collection of essays examining the nature of modern art includes discussions of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Smithson