When you search for “the best books about improv,” Stephen Nachmanovitch’s Free Play is always near the top of the list. With more than 200,000 copies sold, it’s in its 30th year of publication and still going strong. Nachmanovitch’s long-awaited second book is finally here! The Art of Is: Improvising as a Way of Life shows exactly how the passion and immediacy of improvisation can be cultivated and how, in fact, we all improvise all the time. It is not a special act of genius of which few are capable but is in fact the natural activity of all humans, whether we’re driving a car or holding a conversation. People who might claim they could never improvise negotiate these tasks with fluidity and ease every day. We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book.

New World Library is very excited to be publishing a brand-new book by the well-known and much-loved comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. His wife, Jean Erdman, was a leading figure in modern dance who worked with Martha Graham. The Ecstasy of Being brings together seven of Campbell’s previously uncollected articles on dance as well as the treatise he was working on when he died, “Mythology and Form in the Performing and Visual Arts.”

In many ways, this book is a love letter both to his wife and to art-making itself, celebrating dance and the performing arts through the unique mythological lens that only Joseph Campbell can provide. We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book’s foreword by editor Nancy Allison.

We are running a special  #FavoriteQuilt contest on Facebook. Enter to win one of three FREE copies of Making a World of Difference One Quilt at a Time by leaving a comment on the contest post on the Facebook post with a picture of one of your favorite quilts.  

We hope you'll enjoy this short video where Eric Maisel, PhD, author of The Van Gogh Blues and Rethinking Depression talks about artists and existential depression. We also invite you to subscribe to New World Library's YouTube Channel for immediate access to the latest author interviews, book trailers, and more.