Böcker av Marc Kristal

Pauline Boty (1938 -1966) was a founding member of the British Pop Art movement and one of its very few women. She attended London's Royal College of Art at a watershed moment when its students included David Hockney,Peter Blake, R.B. Kitaj and Allen Jones. Dying tragically young at the age of 28, she is now seen as central to British Pop Art and an icon of Sixties culture. As well as her work as an artist, she appeared on the stage, TV and in film (including alongside Michael Caine in Alfie) and was a regular contributor on BBC radio. She was photographed by David Bailey and other society photographers and became a key player in 1960s London's golden age.Outspoken, provocative and charismatic, she refused to accept the oppositions between sexual woman and serious artist, between celebration and critique, between high and low culture. Observer and participant, feminist and hedonist, subject and object, Boty's 'double vision' was decades ahead of its time, and prefigured a diversity of artists-everyone from Cindy Sherman to Madonna. Having been largely forgotten after her death, her reputation has been growing steadily since the rediscovery and exhibition of her works in the early 1990s. As well as cropping up regularly in various books, documentaries and newspaper articles since then, she features as a central character in Ali Smith's novel Autumn (2016) and one of her works sold for $1.4m at auction in June 2022. After seeing her work at an auction in 2013, author Marc Kristal has spent almost ten years researching her life, interviewing the people who knew her and delving into archives and libraries. This is the definitive biography of her life and work, appealing to both those interested in art but in this creative period of British culture.

How far would you be willing to go...for permission? Set in the crime-, riot-, and earthquake-racked Los Angeles of the 1990s, Permission tells the story of a screenwriter on the brink of success, derailed by a destructive marriage that drives him into a breakdown. Medicating his condition with a bottomless plunge into prostitutes and cocaine (his unlikely vehicles for self-analysis and personal revelation) he uses what he learns - and the new relationship he finds in this underworld - to come to terms with his nature, and to change his life. Comic and horrific, shockingly explicit yet tender and lyrical, Permission is more than a sex-and-drug-fueled fever dream -- more than a portrait of LA, the movies, and of a marriage. Rather, Marc Kristal's uncompromising, unforgettable first novel is about the ways in which we create identities that let us overcome and hide from our fears, what happens when those selves crash into their limits - and how the worst sort of chaos can lead, in the end, to the best outcome.