In her most powerful book yet, award-winning writer Idra Novey has conjured a novel of "astonishing and singular" honesty.
Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, Take What You Need traces the parallel lives of Jean and her beloved but estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who has sought a clean break from her rural childhood. In Leah’s urban life with her young family, she has revealed little about Jean, how much she misses her stepmother’s hard-won insights and joyful lack of inhibition.
But with Jean’s death, Leah must return to sort through what’s been left behind. What Leah discovers is staggering: Jean has filled her ramshackle house with giant sculptures she’s welded from scraps of the area’s industrial history. There’s also a young man now living in the house who played an unknown role in Jean’s last years and in her art.
With great verve and humor, Idra Novey zeros in on the joys and difficulties of family, the ease with which we let distance mute conflict, and the power we can draw from creative pursuits. Take What You Need explores the continuing mystery of the people we love most with passion and resonance, illuminating what can be built from what others have discarded—art, unexpected friendship, a new contentment of self. This is Idra Novey at her very best.
Moritaka and Akito's hard work is paying off, and they start challenging their rival Eiji's popularity in Shonen Jump. But just as they plan to take the next step, the team is hit with a surprising setback. Moritaka and Akito will need the help of their manga artist friends to overcome this hurdle!
Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo began work on a painting that became one of the most famous pieces of art in the world—the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Every year, millions of people come to see Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, which is the largest fresco painting on earth in the holiest of Christianity's chapels; yet there is not one single Christian image in this vast, magnificent artwork.
The Sistine Secrets tells the fascinating story of how Michelangelo embedded messages of brotherhood, tolerance, and freethinking in his painting to encourage "fellow travelers" to challenge the repressive Roman Catholic Church of his time.
Driven by the truths he had come to recognize during his years of study in private nontraditional schooling in Florence, truths rooted in his involvement with Judaic texts as well as Kabbalistic training that conflicted with approved Christian doctrine, Michelangelo needed to find a way to let viewers discern what he truly believed. He could not allow the Church to forever silence his soul. And what the Church would not permit him to communicate openly, he ingeniously found a way to convey to those diligent enough to learn his secret language.
Blech and Doliner reveal what Michelangelo meant in the angelic representations that brilliantly mocked his papal patron, how he managed to sneak unorthodox heresies into his ostensibly pious portrayals, and how he was able to fulfill his lifelong ambition to bridge the wisdom of science with the strictures of faith. The Sistine Secrets unearths secrets that have remained hidden in plain sight for centuries.