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Criticism eBooks

If you like Criticism eBooks, then you'll love these top picks.
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  • Landscapes

    John Berger on Art

    by John Berger ...
    “Essential reading”—n+1Creative and political art criticism on landscape works from the Renaissance to the present from a “master” storyteller (Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things)In this brilliant collection of diverse pieces—essays, short stories, poems, translations—which spans a lifetime’s engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing. He ... Read more

    Was $9.99 USD Now $1.99 USD

  • Art, Annotated

    The World's 500 Greatest Paintings Explained

    by DK ...
    A stunning art gallery in a book, art, annotated spans more than 3,000 years of paintings, sculptures, and prints.Combining reproductions of each work of art with precise annotations and visual analysis, it is an expertly curated selection of the finest art ever created.Immerse yourself in this book and learn all about art - how Michelangelo painted nudes, what cubism is, and where abstraction ... Read more

    $19.99 USD

  • The Invention of Design

    A Twentieth-Century History

    by Maggie Gram ...
    **From a brilliant cultural historian, a fascinating history of the twentieth century told through the story of design and its utopian promises“Fascinating, rigorously researched.” ―AtlanticA New Yorker Best Book of the Year**Design has penetrated every dimension of contemporary society, from classrooms to statehouses to corporate boardrooms. It’s seen as a kind of mega-power, one that can solve ... Read more

    Was $18.99 USD Now $1.99 USD

  • The Art Spirit

    by Robert Henri ...
    A classic collection of writing from a great American painter and teacher on modern art theory, technique, and appreciation.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Robert Henri pioneered a more visceral approach to painting, finding his subjects in everyday urban experiences. From his studio in Philadelphia, he inspired fellow painters to capture the dismal aspects of city life, ... Read more

    $8.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • The Green Imperative

    Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture

    A fresh edition of the sustainable design pioneer Victor Papanek’s classic and ever-relevant book examining the important role of design in combating climate change.Whether it’s horror at the plastic littering the world’s beaches or despair at the melting polar ice caps, the world is gradually waking up to the impending climate disaster. In The Green Imperative, Papanek argues for design that ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • The Trust Experiments

    Rebuilding Connection in a World Designed to Divide Us

    **Against the social trust crisis of our era, an acclaimed urbanist shows how we can design healthy relationships back into our communities, online spaces, and nations. **Imagine you dropped your wallet and a stranger found it. Would you get it back? Your answer to this question says a lot about you: It predicts your happiness, the health of your community, and even the stability of your country. ... Read more

    $16.99 USD

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  • The Spaces That Make Us

    Why Design Is Broken and How We Can Create a Happier, Healthier World

    by Danish Kurani ...
    Create a better life by creating better design. Did you know that. . .. . . the arrangement of your living room could improve your relationship with your partner?. . . the layout of your child's classroom affects their grades and test scores?. . . the design of your hospital room influences how quickly you recover?We live in a symbiotic relationship with the spaces around us—first we make our ... Read more

    Was $13.49 USD Now $3.99 USD

  • The Geography of the Imagination

    Forty Essays

    by Guy Davenport ...
    Series Book 10 - Nonpareil Books
    “One of the most sinuous stylists and searching minds of the twentieth century.”—Washington PostForty essays on history, art, and literature to lift your mind and spirit. Guy Davenport serves as the reader’s guide through history and literature, providing links between music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present—pointing out the values and avenues of thought ... Read more

    $9.99 USD

  • Postmodernism

    A Very Short Introduction

    Series series Very Short Introductions
    Postmodernism has been a buzzword in contemporary society for the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler challenges and explores the key ideas of postmodernists, and their engagement with theory, literature, the visual arts, film, architecture, and music. He treats artists, intellectuals, critics, and social scientists 'as if they were all ... Read more

    $7.99 USD

  • Takedown

    Art and Power in the Digital Age

    by Farah Nayeri ...
    Farah Nayeri addresses the difficult questions plaguing the art world, from the bad habits of Old Masters, to the current grappling with identity politics.For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon--kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art.Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to ... Read more

    $16.99 USD

  • In Visible Archives

    Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s

    Analyzing how 1980s visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualitiesIn 1982, the protests of antiporn feminists sparked the censorship of the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, a radical and sexually evocative image-text volume whose silencing became a symbol for the irresolvable feminist sex wars. In Visible Archives documents the ... Read more

    $20.99 USD

  • Swedish Design

    A History

    Swedish Design: A History provides a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to the development of design in Sweden from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first.Leading design historian Lasse Brunnström traces the move from artisanal crafts production to the mass production and consumption of designed objects, a process by which the role and profile of the designer became ... Read more

    $29.99 USD

  • Splinters

    Another Kind of Love Story

    From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes “a blazing, unputdownable memoir” (Mary Karr, author of Lit), the “piercing, intimate” story (TIME Magazine) of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

  • The 99% Invisible City

    A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design

    **A NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, USA TODAY, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER“[A] diverse and enlightening book . . . The 99% Invisible City is altogether fresh and imaginative when it comes to thinking about urban spaces.”—The New York Times Book Review**“Here is a field guide, a boon, a bible, for the urban curious. Your city’s secret anatomy laid bare—a hundred things you look at but don’t ... Read more

    $16.99 USD

  • About Looking

    One of the writer and art critic’s finest essay collections, which includes his influential essay on animal ethics, “Why Look at Animals?”; a critique of the “bourgeois sexual morality” of Rodin’s sculptures; and an unlikely work of criticism linking Francis Bacon and Walt Disney.John Berger was a thinker and writer of altogether extraordinary independence and range, an essayist, novelist, poet, ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg

    by Emily Black ...
    A New York Times-bestselling author's personal examination of how the experiences, art, and disabilities of Frida Kahlo shaped her life as an amputee.At first sight of Frida Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas, Emily Rapp Black felt a connection with the artist. An amputee from childhood, Rapp Black grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs and learned that she had to hide her disability from the ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • See/Saw

    Looking at Photographs

    by Geoff Dyer ...
    A lavishly illustrated history of photography in essays by the author of Otherwise Known as the Human ConditionSee/Saw shows how photographs frame and change our perspective on the world. Taking in photographers from early in the last century to the present day—including artists such as Eugène Atget, Vivian Maier, Roy DeCarava, and Alex Webb—the celebrated writer Geoff Dyer offers a series of ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • The synthetic proposition

    Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art

    by Nizan Shaked ...
    Series series Rethinking Art's Histories
    The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art ... Read more

    $20.99 USD

  • Thinking through Graphic Design History

    Challenging the canon

    by Aggie Toppins ...
    WINNER of the 2025 Design Incubation Communication Design Award for Published ScholarshipGraphic design has a paradoxical relationship to history. While it claims to promote originality and innovation - ideas that emphasize the new and unique - design practice is deeply embedded in previous ideals. Too often, design students encounter the past in brief visual impressions which seduce them to ... Read more

    $28.99 USD

  • The Design of Everyday Things

    by Don Norman ...
    **The essential guide to human-centered design“Even more relevant today than it was when first published.”—Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO**Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious—even liberating—book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores ... Read more

    $15.99 USD

  • Ordinary Notes

    A finalist for the National Book Award in NonfictionA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in NonfictionNamed a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, NPR, New York magazine, Kirkus, and Barnes and NobleThe critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, “Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangeme... ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • The Routledge International Handbook of Simmel Studies

    Edited by Gregor Fitzi ...
    Series series Routledge International Handbooks
    The Routledge International Handbook of Simmel Studies documents the richness, variety, and creativity of contemporary international research on Georg Simmel’s work. Starting with the established role of Simmel as a classical author of sociology, and including the growing interest in his work in the domain of philosophy, this volume explores the research on Simmel in several further disciplines ... Read more

    $68.99 USD

  • Shapely Bodies

    The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France

    Series series Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture
    Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France constructs the first cultural history of porcelain making in France. It takes its title from two types of “bodies” treated in this study: the craft of porcelain making shaped clods of earth into a clay body to produce high-end commodities and the French elite shaped human bodies into social subjects with the help of makeup, ... Read more

    $36.99 USD

  • Eyeliner

    A Cultural History

    by Zahra Hankir ...
    **A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick“Cosmetic, tool of rebellion, status signifier: Eyeliner has been all these and more. Moving through millenniums and across civilizations, Hankir gives the makeup its eye-opening due.” —The New York Times Book Review“An impressive, rigorously researched, winding path through centuries and over continents.” —NPR.org“I loved Eyeliner. Hankir ... Read more

    $7.99 USD