"The Terracotta Dog" opens with a mysterious tete-a-tete with aMafioso, some inexplicably abandoned loot from a supermarket heist,and some dying words that lead Inspector Montalbano gives to asecret grotto in a mountain cave where two young lovers dead fiftyyears ago and still embracing are watched over by a life-sizeterracotta dog. Montalbano's passion to solve this old crime takeshim, heedless of personal danger, on a journey through the island'spast and into a family's dark heart amid the horrors of World WarII.Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Salvo Montalbano has garneredmillions of fans worldwide with his sardonic, engaging take onSicilian small-town life and his genius for deciphering the mostenigmatic of crimes. 'The novels of Andrea Camilleri breath out thesense of place, the sense of humour, and the sense of despair thatfill the air of Sicily. To read him is to be taken to thatglorious, tortured island' - Donna Leon. 'Both farcical andendearing, Montalbano is a cross between Columbo and Chandler'sPhilip

Born in Hawaii and raised in Australia, Nicole Kidman blossomed from a gawky young-ster into an elegant beauty whose heart was set on becoming an actress. Relying on the grit and dedication passed on to her by her activist parents, Nicole quickly became an award-winning ingenue. Her American debut in the acclaimed thriller Dead Calm grabbed the attention of movie audiences--and of Tom Cruise, who asked that Nicole audition for his car-racing epic,Days of Thunder. Tom, not yet divorced from actress Mimi Rogers, was immediately taken with the gorgeous newcomer. Suddenly, Tom and Nicole were everywhere--and the paparazzi were never far behind. By the early 1990s, Tom and Nicole had married, and their private relationship was more intense than anything they portrayed on the screen. It also brought its share of problems. Although Nicole's performances garnered exceptional reviews, many continued to see her simply as Mrs. Tom Cruise. Then came the movie--Stanley Kubrick's controversial Eyes Wide Shut--that

Ranging from easy to intermediate level, these popular pieces display a wide variety of moods and musical ideas and are favorites with students and accomplished pianists alike. This affordable volume presents all 27 of the composer's bagatelles, including the well-loved "Für Elise," reprinted from authoritative editions.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was the most typical and the most individual Impressionist painter. His long life he dedicated to a pictorial exploration of the sensations which reality, and in particular landscape, offer the human eye. But while Monet the painter was faithful and persevering in the pursuit of his motifs, his personal life followed a more restless course. Parisian by birth, he discovered plein-air painting as a youth in the provinces, where one of his homes, Argenteuil, has come to represent the artistic flowering and official establishment of Impressionism as a movement, with Monet as its creative leader. In his endeavor to capture the ever-changing face of reality, Monet went beyond Impressionism and thereby beyond the confines of self-contained panel painting: in Giverny he painted the Poplars, Grain Stacks and Rouen Cathedral series in which he addressed one motif in constantly new variations. Here, too, Monet laid out the famous garden with its water-lily pond which he was to paint on huge canv

The timeless beauty of elegant floral designs has made them prime favorites among artists and craftspeople. This rich harvest of blos-soms, vines, and other floral decorations has an unlimited variety of applications, allowing them to serve equally well as individual motifs or as running borders. More than 300 delicately rendered motifs, all reproduced from a rare nineteenth-century catalog, feature a profusion of sprays,branches, and clusters. Commercial artists and designers will want them for projects calling for floral centerpieces, stripes, and allover patterns. Craftworkers will find the designs suitable for embroidery, textile patterns, woodworking, and other crafts.

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is considered the first significantAmerican painter in 20th-century art. After decades of patientwork, Hopper enjoyed a success and popularity that since the 1950shas continually grown. In canvas after canvas he painted theloneliness of big-city people. Many of Hopper's pictures representviews of streets and roads, rooftops, and abandoned houses,depicted in a brilliant light that strangely belies the melancholymood of the scenes. Hopper's paintings are marked by strikingjuxtapositions of colour, and by the clear contours with which thefigures are demarcated from their surroundings. His extremelyprecise focus on the theme of modern men and women in the naturaland man-made environment sometimes lends his pictures a mood ofeerie disquiet. On the other hand, Hopper's renderings of rockylandscapes in warm brown hues, or his depictions of the seacoast,exude an unusual tranquillity that reveals another, more optimisticside of his character.

Product De*ion Renowned among his contemporaries as one of the foremost painters of his era, Flemish baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) practically revolutionized northern European art. A shrewd businessman, international ambassador, passionate scholar, devout Catholic, and loving family man, Rubens--fluent in six languages, no less--cared about nothing more than painting, and thus devoted his life to it. Combining typical Flemish realism with classical themes influenced by the Renaissance, Rubens caught the attention of all of Europe and helped put his native Antwerp on the map. His very profitable workshop of accomplished artists, one of whom was Van Dyck, completed over 2000 works under his supervision. 作者简介： Gilles Neret (1933-2005) was an art historian, journalist, writer, and museum correspondent. He organized several art retrospectives in Japan and founded the SEIBU museum and the Wildenstein Gallery in Tokyo. He edited art reviews such as L'OEil and Connaissance

"Eminem proves himself a peerless rap poet with a profound understanding of the power of language." Details "His ryhmes sting like a lungful of crack."

This collection of Brahms' enchanting Hungarian Dances will thrill intermediate and advanced pianists. Based on Hungarian themes, this lively and popular set of 21 dance arrangements contains some of the Romantic classicist's most popular piano pieces in one low-priced edition.

FRENCH-GERMAN PAINTER COUNT BALTHASAR KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA (1908-2001), KNOWN AS BALTHUS, SHOCKED THE PARISIAN ART WORLD IN 1934 WITH HIS DREAMY, SENSUAL, NEO-CLASSICAL PORTRAITS OF NYMPHETS AT A TIME WHEN SURREALISM AND ABSTRACTION WERE DE RIGUEUR. AS A PROVOCATEUR, BALTHUS WAS OFTEN SCORNED; AS AN ARTIST, HE WAS WIDELY EMBRACED AS A PRODIGY. IN RESPONSE TO CRITICS OF HIS REALIST STYLE, BALTHUS SAID: "THE REAL ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK YOU SEE. ONE CAN BE A REALIST OF THE UNREAL AND A FIGURATIVE PAINTER OF THE INVISIBLE." HIS EROTIC, POETIC PAINTINGS LIVE ON AS EXAMPLES OF THE BEST FIGURATIVE WORK OF THE MODERN ERA.

An influential early Romantic composer for piano, John Field (1782-1837) redefined the term "nocturne." Field's dreamy, poetic style exerted a lasting effect on such later composers as Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann. This new collection brings together the most popular and often performed of Field's nocturnes, along with a selection of his most important solo piano works.

By the time of his death from AIDS at the age of 31, Keith Haring (1958-1990) was already a wildly successful and popular artist. Haring's original and instantly recognizable style, full of thick black lines, bold colors, and graffiti-inspired cartoon-like figures, won him the appreciation of both the art world and the general public; his work appeared simultaneously on T-shirts, gallery walls, and public murals. In 1986, Haring founded Pop Shop, a boutique in New York's SoHo selling Haring-designed memorabilia, to benefit charities and help bring his work closer to the public and especially street kids, with whom he never lost contact.

Joan Miro (1893-1983) is one of the most significant Spanishpainters of the 20th century. His early work clearly shows theinfluence of Fauvism and Cubism. The Catalan landscape also shapesthe themes and treatment of these initial works. In his travels,Miro encountered the intellectual avant-garde of his time. Hisfriends included Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Andr Masson, JeanArp and Pablo Picasso. From the mid-twenties onward, Miro strove toleave direct objective references behind and developed thepictograms that typify his style. The pictures of this period,which include perhaps the most beautiful and significant ones ofhis whole oeuvre, dispense with spatiality and an unambiguousreference to objects. From now on, the surfaces are defined bynumerals, writing, abstract emblems, and playful figures andcreatures. Nineteen-forty-four saw the beginning of his extensivegraphic oeuvre, ceramics, monumental mural works, and sculptures.In these works, too, the Catalan artist sought the solid foundationof a f

The goats of Vigata once grazed on the trash-strewn site stillknown as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sortflourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour. Buttheir discreet trade is upset when two employees of the SplendourRefuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer SilvioLuparello, one of the local movers and shakers, apparently deceasedin flagrante at the Pasture. The coroner's verdict is death fromnatural causes - refreshingly unusual for Sicily. But InspectorSalvo Montalbano, as honest as he is streetwise and as scathing tofools and villains as he is compassionate to their victims, is notready to close the case - even though he's being pressured byVigata's police chief, judge, and bishop. Picking his way through alabyrinth of high-comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendettafirepower, and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can berelied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of thematter.

Swirling with gargoyles, devils, dragons, griffins, and other images that haunt both dreams and nightmares, this otherworldly assortment features illustrations from a rare 19th-century volume. Images include cartouches, frames, doors, trophies, cabinets, friezes for textiles and wallpaper, decorative scutcheons, stone balustrades, arabesques, roof cornices, and much more.

Egon Schiele (1890-1918) - along with Oskar Kokoschka - is the painter who had the most long-lasting influence on the Vienna art scene after the great era of Klimt came to a close. After a short flirtation with Klimt's style, Schiele soon questioned the aesthetic orientation to the beautiful surface of the Viennese Art Nouveau with his rough and not easily accessible paintings. Many contemporaries found his expressive nudes and self-portraits, with their strange movements and morbid colours, to be ugly and even morally objectionable - criticism which culminated in criminalizing the painter as "obscene" and resulted in 1912 in an indictment and short jail sentence. However, not even his harshest critics could dispute however the artist's extraordinary drawing talent.

Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) is now universallyacclaimed: museums pride themselves on his paintings, crowds flockto his retrospectives. His work shows art at its mostlight-hearted, sensual and luminous. Renoir never wanted anythingugly in his paintings, nor any dramatic action. "I like pictureswhich make me want to wander through them when it's a landscape,"he said, "or pass my hand over breast or back if it's a woman."Renoir's entire oeuvre is dominated by the depiction of women.Again and again he painted "these faunesses with their poutinglips" (Mallarme) and invented a new image of feminity.

Title, music, first verse and refrain of 34 traditional carols in handsome calligraphy; also subsequent verses and other information in type.