A showcase of eighteen masterworks by one of the world’s greatest modern artists.

This important publication accompanies a major exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, of paintings by Edvard Munch (1863–1944). The catalog and accompanying exhibition showcase eighteen major works from the collection of KODE Art Museums in Bergen, one of the most important collections of Munch paintings in the world. The works span the most significant part of Munch’s artistic development and have never before been shown as a group outside of Scandinavia.

This book explores this group of remarkable works in detail and considers the important role of its collector, Rasmus Meyer. The exhibition and publication include seminal paintings from Munch’s early “realist” phase of the 1880s, such as Morning and Summer Night, pivotal works that show the artist’s move towards the expressive and psychologically charged work for which he became famous. These paintings launched Munch’s career and set the stage for his renowned, highly expressive paintings of the 1890s. Such works are a major feature of the exhibition that includes remarkable canvases from Munch’s famous Frieze of Life series, which address profound themes of human existence, from love to death. Munch’s powerful use of color and form marked him as one of the most radical painters at the turn of the twentieth century.

This fully illustrated publication includes a catalog of the works, with contributions by leading experts in their field from KODE and the Courtauld. 

Twenty years in the making, this collection presents 122 top-level Soviet, European and American records on the superpowers' role in the annus mirabilis of 1989. Consisting of Politburo minutes; diary entries from Gorbachev's senior aide, Anatoly Chernyaev; meeting notes and private communications of Gorbachev with George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand; and high-level CIA analyses, this volume offers a rare insider's look at the historic, world-transforming events that culminated in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. Most of these records have never been published before.

Tracing the origins of the modern short story, Michael Gorra provides the first fully realized picture of a century’s worth of great tales. 

The Storytellers offers a far-reaching account of the rich tradition of short narratives that flourished in nineteenth-century Europe and America, one that both prepared for and eventually gave way to the modern short story. Tracing unexpected resemblances across languages and decades, Michael Gorra restores a wide-angle view of the form in which works usually treated as stand-alone classics reveal themselves as parts of a single, lively conversation.

What unites these tales, Gorra argues, is their blend of novelty and unity. The book’s heart lies in a series of accessible readings of great tales by Herman Melville, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, and many more. Beyond its consideration of individual works, The Storytellers examines the formal and thematic concerns that bind the century together: the use of frame tales, accounts of social marginality, and an abundance of ghosts and uncanny coincidences. Over time, Gorra shows, these qualities yielded to a cooler realism, with Anton Chekhov as the key transitional figure. His compressed studies of ordinary lives inspired the modern short story and consigned the gothic flourishes of earlier tales to genre fiction.

What do we want from a story? What makes a tale worth telling? The nineteenth-century tale sought not the grand “meaning of life” promised by the novel, Gorra shows, but sudden revelations from singular events. The Storytellers gives readers an incomparable guide to a vast body of tales that still has the power to thrill and entertain.