Matisse And The Life Of Crime, a novel by Peter Josyph
An Ivesian Arts Publication
With Paris and the rest of the world on the eve of WWI, Henri Matisse is about to embark on one of his most memorable adventures, one that begins with the appearance of a Matisse impostor whose aptitude for larceny includes blackmail.
The prospect for Matisse to ever finish a painting is further compromised by a beautiful pickpocket who takes a bath in Matisse's home on quai St. Michel and who becomes both a savior and a source of further turmoil in a saga that continues in Pontoise after the war.
For the story to be told exactly as it happened, Matisse narrates the affair to two admiring biographers during a storm on the Ile St. Louis.
The Wrong Reader's Guide To Cormac McCarthy: All The Pretty Horses by Peter Josyph
An Ivesian Arts Publication
The Wrong Reader’s Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses is an impassioned tribute to one of the most popular and enduring novels by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy.
From his provocative reflection on the importance of McCarthy's dramatic prose-poetry in "How Cormac McCarthy Saved Civilization," to close readings of small moments that open up worlds of discovery, Josyph changes our perspective on this seminal work by one of our greatest living authors. In what he calls “a reader’s memoir,” Josyph invites noted McCarthy scholars such as Marty Priola and Wesley Morgan, as well as McCarthy's award-winning Portuguese translator Paolo Faria, to enrich his investigations with their expertise and insights.
How is the hero of the novel like Shakespeare's Hamlet? Is it possible he is more a Comanche than a cowboy? Can a sympathetic protagonist be equally heroic and self-destructive? Exactly what sort of town is he leaving? How do film and audio renderings of McCarthy contribute to understanding his text? In answering such questions, Josyph raises others as he—a native New Yorker—walks his great city and also travels to significant locations in the novel, such as San Angelo, Texas, where the story begins.
The Wrong Reader’s Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses includes 14 color illustrations by the author.
Peter Josyph’s books include Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy; Cormac McCarthy’s House: Reading McCarthy Without Walls; Liberty Street: Encounters at Ground Zero; The Way of the Trumpet; What One Man Said to Another: Talks With Richard Selzer; and The Wounded River, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. His films include the award-winning Liberty Street: Alive at Ground Zero; Shakespeare in New York; Hell; Bardtalk; A Few Things Basquiat Did in School; and Acting McCarthy: The Making of Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses.
First Edition. First Printing. A run of only 50 copies, 30 of which are numbered and signed by the author and available here. 267 pages, a fine paperback with an original cover painting by the author ink printed on Breathing Color Velvet, interior pages on Cougar with 14 color illustrations, also by the author. Ivesian Arts Publishing's premiere offering.
The critics on Cormac McCarthy’s House:
Reading McCarthy Without Walls
"...for experienced practitioners and well-read fans it unlocks dynamic, disparate terrain. An engaging addition to the ongoing McCarthy conversation, the book is surprising and unique in the best possible ways. Summing Up: Highly recommended.” - Erik Hage, Choice
"Josyph takes an aggressively unconventional approach to McCarthy's work, combining elements of travelogue, interview and memoir." - Michael Lindgren, Washington Post
"…the artist, playwright, director and actor Peter Josyph has produced an idiosyncratic and impressionistic text, a series of riffs, dialogues, anecdotes and prose poems…. Josyph shows himself capable of discriminating, and even irreverent, contemplation of his hero's corpus…. Forcefully, he makes his case for a canon within the McCarthy canon…. For Josyph, text brings you to object; this, he claims, is the point of literature, 'to touch something you never expected to find.’” - Pat Quinn, London Times Literary Supplement
“Peter Josyph has long been an unmistakable figure, a force of nature, in McCarthy circles.” – David Cremean, The Cormac McCarthy Journal
The critics on Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy:
"As with everything Peter Josyph produces, this is meticulously researched and beautifully written. The book reveals the fascinating engagement of one artist with another…. This is literary criticism of the old school: wonderfully well informed by culture broadly, grounded in reality, accessible, and a real pleasure to read." - Nicholas Monk, author of True and Living Prophet of Destruction: Cormac McCarthy and Modernity
Ivesian Arts Presents
Michele Brangwen Dance & Music Ensemble in concert 9/8/2023
Ivesian Arts is a production company that creates, curates and presents pioneering, genre-bending work in collaboration with its partners: live theatre, performance, spoken word, music, film, dance, painting, and sculpture.