Bookshelf

NEW FROM NYU PRESS:

New York Stories: The Best of the
City Section of The New York Times

Edited by Constance Rosenblum.

Its been said that there are eight million stories in the naked city, and this new book from NYU Press tells just a few of them. Cultivating many of New York City’s greatest stories is the City section in Sunday’s New York Times. Distributed only in papers in the five boroughs, it captivates readers with tales of people and places that make the city unique.

Featuring a cast of stellar writers, New York Stories brings some of the best and liveliest essays from the City section to readers everywhere. Profiles include 16-year-old Barbara Ott, who surfs the waters off Rockaway beach in Queens, and Sonny Payne, the beloved panhandler of the F train. Other essays explore memorable places…from the Greenwich Village townhouse blown up by radical activists in the 1970s to a basketball court that serves as the heart of its Downtown neighborhood.

Rosenblum is editor of the City section.

For further information on this book and others published by NYU Press, log on to www.nyupress.org.

Building Interactive Worlds in 3D:
Virtual Sets and Pre-Visualization
for Games, Film, & the Web

By Jean-Marc Gauthier (Focal Press)

This is a book about the process of creating virtual spaces. The creative process and the production process are presented side by side through text, sketches of virtual worlds, and drawings created during the course of various projects. The emphasis given to the process of collaborative work helps the reader to understand that many different skills can be involved. Several interactive projects are documented in order to fully illustrate the connections among designing assets, programming digital art, and the viewer’s experience.

“I have found ways to express myself as a writer, moviemaker, photographer, and architect but still felt the need to communicate ideas that did not fit into any of these domains,” says Jean-Marc Gauthier, assistant arts professor in Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. “New possibilities for expression emerge in the design of virtual spaces. Designing virtual spaces helps me convey ideas in ways that cannot be expressed the same way in writing, movies, photographs, architecture, or other visual art.

“For similar reasons, topics covered in this book stretch beyond the strict domain of virtual spaces. They relate to larger concepts like the future of cinema, the place of virtual spaces in tangible public spaces, defining new experiences for the viewer of a virtual space, or developing new types of associations among several media that may involve both the virtual and real,” added Gauthier.

Pettoruti

By Edward J. Sullivan and Nelly Perazzo
(Asociacion Amigos del Museo National de Bella)

Pettoruti, co-authored by Edward J.Sullivan, FAS’s dean for the humanities, and Nelly Perazzo, presents the life and work of Argentinean Emilio Pettoruti, whose contributions to modern art in the 20th century have been understudied despite his participation in “many of the fundamental avant-garde movements in Europe,” Sullivan writes. “He and his fellow artists created in their work methods of understanding and acceptance of these new modes of vision in the American cities from which they had come.” Thanks in great part to Pettoruti’s efforts, Buenos Aires became a center for experimental art in the 1920s and beyond.

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