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Eccola Press is pleased to announce that its book, Piazza: Italy’s Heart & Soul” by writer-photographer team, Marybeth Flower and Joe Bauwens, was selected as the winner of the Best Coffee Table Book category at the 11th Annual Independent Publisher Book Awards 2007 IPPY Award Winners.

The Independent Publishers Book Awards, also known as the IPPY Awards, were presented at BookExpo America 2007 in New York City.

This year’s titles were submitted by publishers from all 50 U.S. states, 8 Canadian provinces and 17 overseas countries.

“We are extremely honored that Piazza: Italy’s Heart & Soul’ was honored with this award,” said Bauwens & Flower. “From the inception of the book we felt it was important to show how the Italians live in their town squares. As far as we know this book is unique in that it focuses on the Italian people and not on their architecture and landscapes.” Continue reading »

Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviwer

Kittredge Cherry is a not only a well-trained student of the arts, art history, and journalism, but she is also an equally well schooled in religious studies. With such fine credentials it will be difficult for anyone to not pay attention to this provocative, beautifully designed and illustrated book Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ, and More, a thoughtful book written in a style that is not the usual dry reportage encountered in many art history books.

Kittredge, thankfully, writes as she probably preaches - with sincerity, warmth, and an unbiased and unfettered language style that is easy to read, making her thoughts and research far more credible. Her courage to approach so many ‘verboten’ regions of religious imagery and concepts is refreshing and well informed.

After an Introduction explaining her inspiration to share religion that she views as more inclusive for the world body than the present patriarchal stance that too often comes from the world’s pulpits, Kittredge presents the art of eleven artists who dare to paint and sculpt religious images of Jesus as a gay man, the Christ figure as a woman, and other ‘blasphemous’ stances of variations on the figures of Mary and Jesus as viewed in a more human light with all of the inherent possibilities of presentation that invokes. Continue reading »

Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure’ might be a apt conclusion after spending the significant amount of time required to digest Umberto Eco’s semiotic approach to ‘ugly’.

Eco’s brilliance as an author is well accepted, yet his informed academic investigation (upon which many of his own novels are based) is only now being appreciated. It is difficult to read On Ugliness as a treatise, so lush and provocative is his prose style.

Rizzoli International spared no expense on supplying Eco with images and design of this art treasure, and the result is a volume about art history and our manifold perceptions of the signs and symbols that through time have defined ‘ugly’ versus ‘beauty.’

Eco wisely uses the chronological approach to his discourse on the semiotics of ugliness. After a superb Introduction in which he suggests the response of an alien visiting our planet, trying to determine Continue reading »