Best Selling Books by John Waters

Lily van der Stokker is a Dutch artist based in Amsterdam and New York. Her bold works most often take the form of large-scale decorative wall drawings and deal, in a disarmingly unashamed and exuberant way, with ideas of beauty, love, relationships, family and the everyday. This book accompanies the largest exhibition of her work in the UK.

For nearly fifteen years John Waters has been a dissident voice writing in his weekly column for The Irish Times, invariably confronting the conventional wisdom on issues ranging from fatherhood and the official denial of the rights of parents and children, to the absurdity of Ireland's seemingly endless tribunals. He is known for an elegant representation of common sense in the face of ideology, received thinking, and self-serving cant. In these controversial and highly-charged pieces he revisits his principal themes and concerns of a most turbulent decade in Ireland and the world, providing an invigorating look at how Ireland and its place in the world have changed in that time.

In 1991, Ireland was in the midst of a devastating recession; thousands of young Irish men and women had emigrated over the previous decade, and divisive social and moral debates on abortion and divorce had rocked Irish society. The great pillars of society - politics and religion - were beginning to crumble, a process that continued in subsequent years as both institutions were hit by scandal. A questioning of the values on which Ireland had been built had begun, with an apparently unbridgeable divide opening between "traditionalists" and "modernizers". At the start of the decade, the modernizers appeared to have won, with the election as President of the iconic Mary Robinson. Irish Times columnist John Waters captured the zeitgeist of the time with the hugely successful Jiving at the Crossroads, which sold over 50,000 copies. A defining book of the era, its success was partly due to its remarkable blending of social/cultural commentary with personal memoir. At the emotional core of the book was the relationship between Waters and his father, and the story of Ireland was intricately woven into this powerful narrative. It was the first in a long line of books to question the very notion of modern Irish identity, and to examine the deep-rooted tensions at the heart of the Irish psyche. Twenty years later, much has changed in Ireland, and yet Jiving at the Crossroads remains a deeply resonant book, particularly in the light of the remarkable rise and precipitous fall of the Celtic Tiger, and the fresh questioning of how we got where we are now. This twentieth anniversary reissue of a landmark book, with a new Introduction, will be welcomed by those who remember it, and will be a fascinating insight for a new generation of Irish people. It is published in parallel with a brand new book by John Waters, When We Are Free, which takes up the story of Jiving twenty years on to reflect on Ireland and the Irish in 2011.

Defines the nature of the ideology which fuelled the drive to modernization, charts the progress of the policies which brought it to fruition, and reveals how Ireland recreated itself culturally, politically, spiritually and economically.

C'est en 1998, avec The Art of Pleasure, que TASCHEN a fait découvrir au monde l'art remarquable de Touko Laaksonen. Avant cela, Laaksonen, alias Tom of Finland, artiste culte de la communauté gay internationale, était pratiquement inconnu du grand public. En 2009, TASCHEN poursuit l'entreprise avec l'ouvrage ultime retraçant l'oeuvre de Tom, Tom of Finland XXL, une magnifique édition collector grand format réunissant plus de 1000 illustrations et couvrant soixante ans de carrière de l'artiste. Son oeuvre a été réuni avec l'aide de la Tom of Finland Foundation, à partir de collections conservées aux Etats-Unis et en Europe, et comporte de nombreux dessins, peintures et études préparatoires qui n'avaient encore jamais été publiés. D'autres n'avaient jusqu'alors été vus qu'isolément et sont montrés ici dans l'ordre séquentiel prévu par Tom, gagnant ainsi toute leur valeur artistique et leur charge érotique. Cet élégant volume grand format présente toute l'étendue du talent de Tom, de ses portraits sensibles à ses descriptions explicites du plaisir sexuel et à ses hommages pleins de tendresse rendus aux jeunes hommes emportés par le sida, et il inclut, en complément, huit essais écrits pour l'occasion par Camille Paglia, John Waters, Armistead Maupin, Todd Oldham, entre autres, qui reviennent sur l'influence sociale et personnelle de Tom, ainsi qu'une étude approfondie de ses dessins par l'historien d'art Edward Lucie-Smith. Jusqu'à maintenant, la seule chose qui manquait à Tom of Finland XXL était un prix accessible au plus grand nombre. Le nouveau Tom of Finland XXL est toujours aussi gros, fera autant travailler vos biceps et reprend tout du contenu original, mais ne coûte qu'une fraction du prix d'origine. Il vous souhaite la bienvenue.

A very John Waters traveling show, replete with freaks, robbery, murder, sex, blasphemy, and savage shellfish—a lurid, surreal celebration of camp and trash. The Cavalcade of Perversion is a traveling show run by Lady Divine and a crew of her fellow degenerates. They have to drag suburban housewives into each vile, tasteless performance—only to rob them at gunpoint at the end of each show. When Divine gets bored of the routine and graduates to murdering the attendees one day, it sets her off on a rampage, hunting down her cheating lover, Mr. David, and unleashing a chain of frenzy, a truly blasphemous sex act, and a surreal violation by a giant lobster. Multiple Maniacs is John Waters’ paean to the glories of trash. As Lady Divine chants as she marches proudly into downtown Baltimore at the end of the movie, “I’m a maniac! A maniac that cannot be cured! O Divine, I am Di-vine!”

Menteuse invétérée, voleuse pathologique, arnaqueuse de génie : Marsha Sprinkle ne compte plus ses ennemis. Certains sont bien déterminés à lui régler son compte et lui faire ravaler ses bobards. À commencer par sa mère et sa fille, son ex-complice lubrique Daryl et une sautillante bande d’hurluberlus, fétichistes du trampoline, tous lancés à ses trousses dans une rocambolesque et décadente course-poursuite à travers le Nord-Est des Etats-Unis. Mais Marsha est intelligente, incroyablement fourbe et celui qui l’attrapera n’est pas encore né ! Le légendaire John Waters signe un premier roman à son image : hilarant, outrancier, déjanté, pervers, choquant. Tout simplement culte.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition held at Gagosian Gallery, New York, Sept. 16-Oct. 22, 2011.

Known as a highly entertaining and controversial filmmaker, John Waters is also an artist and photographer. "John Waters: Change of Life" is a collection of his still photographic works made over the past decade. Includes essays by guest authors and an interview with Waters.