This month we’ve uncovered a handful of beautiful, collectible titles from contemporary art heavy hitters Elizabeth Peyton, Jack Pierson, Lisa Yuskavage and William Kentridge. Elizabeth Peyton, the 2006 Larry Aldrich Award winner, is most known for her portraits of close friends and pop icons. Her work has been presented in over 50 exhibitions including the 2004 Whitney Biennial and "Drawing Now" at the MOMA (curated by our own Laura Hoptman), and is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and The Walker Museum, Minneapolis among others. This limited edition title documents over 40 etchings, monotypes, lithographs and Ukiyo-e woodcuts from 1998-2006. Many of the works come from Peyton's own private inventory, and therefore have never been seen before. Desire/Despair, from Rizzoli, surveys the prolific career of artist Jack Pierson. This stunning 288 page publication, printed on fine paper, presents a variety of the reoccurent themes in Pierson's work: lost love, sexual longing, faded glamour, fleeting moments, and sentimental musings and includes never-before-published celebrity portraits . For those of you who missed painter Lisa Yuskavage's show this Fall, David Zwirner released a small catalog of her ethereal, unsettling and sexually charged paintings of women. Peter Schjeldahl, of the Village Voice, describes Yuskavage's work as,"..beautiful in the same way that it is dire: hanging fire, always incipient, deliberately never fulfilled." Touted as the "premier bad-girl artist" by the New York Times, Yuskavage has held solo shows internationally at David Zwirner, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Luhring Augustine, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva, among others. Videobrasil, Brazil's premiere video art organization, produced Certain Doubts, a new documentary about William Kentridge. Partially shot in grainy super-8 stock, a reference to Kentridge's signature charcoal drawings, this is certainly a must have for any William Kentridge fan or collector.

What's next? The New Art, from London-based publisher Rachmaninoff's, provides an insiteful overview of recent trends in contemporary art, such as the increasing importance of art fairs, the reinstatement of different forms of satire, visual and language intersections in artists' works, amongst other salient currents. Cartune Xprez will bring you up to date on the world of contemporary computer animation through loops and shorts by Takeshi Murata, Michael Bell -Smith, Paper Rad, Shana Moulton, and many others. The artists on this limited editioned DVD are receiving an increasing amount of attention. Videos by Michael Bell-Smith and Takeshi Murata were recently featured in They Heart A Computer, a night of video and performance at the Kitchen curated by Lauren Cornell for Rhizome's Tenth Anniversary Festival. Michael Bell-South also recently had a solo exhibition at Foxy Production gallery, and had an original gif animation in The Gif Show curated by Rhizome curator Marisa Olsen on Myspace and at Rx Gallery in San Francisco. Equally colorful and chaotic, Brian Chippendale's Ninja is an oversized comic book from Picturebox, Inc, who produced the popular Taylor Mckimens Drips comic. This is the first book by Chippendale, whose vibrant, detailed, and frenzied drawings have graced numerous comic books, posters and album covers for many years now.

The full list contains 20 must haves for your shelves.

Elizabeth Peyton: Prints 1998-2006

This is an exhibition catalog from a Fall 2006 show at East Hampton's Guild Hall Museum. The museum placed Peyton's portraits alongside those of Andy Warhol. Christine Straussfield, Guild Hall curator, explains the exhibition, "Both Peyton’s and Warhol’s portraits represent the most exhaustive visual inventory of our culture’s famous, infamous and anonymous faces, mapping and describing contemporary culture’s ever-shifting definitions of beauty and sexuality, fame and celebrity, and ultimately, death.

Limited Edition of 1500

Two Palms/Gavin Brown's Enterprise, November 2006, 63 pages, ISBN: 93379360X

$35.00

Jack Pierson: Desire/Despair

Like Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha before him, Jack Pierson expresses himself through a variety of media. Drawn to stardom, melodrama, loneliness, and emotional narrative as subjects for his art, Pierson infuses his work with literal and visual references to lost love, sexual longing, faded glamour, fleeting moments, and sentimental musings.This book will contain approximately 200 works organized into five sections that echo the prevalent themes in Pierson's oeuvre: Riches and Fame, Desire Despair, Rented Rooms, Another Time Another Place, and Ghosts. A subversive playfulness and an erotic undercurrent run throughout, especially in the photographs of men, including never-before-published celebrity portraits.Surveying more than twenty years of the artist's career, this beautifully designed volume marks a milestone for all fans of Pierson's art.

Rizzoli, November 2006, 288 pages, 13.1 x 9.9 x 1.2 inches, ISBN: 0847828964

$50.00

Lisa Yuskavage from David Zwirner

Catalog from the Fall 2006 exhibition New Work at David Zwirner. Known for paintings of women, Lisa Yuskavage’s images occupy the space between high and low; the sacred and the profane. Many of these new works explore a complex psychological direction – specifically, symbiotic relationships. Influenced in part by images that depict power struggles, including Baroque sculptures (specifically Gianlorenzo Bernini) and Giorgio de Chirico’s late “Gladiator” paintings, Yuskavage’s “figures” hover or climb upon one another – caught in embraces that appear to shift between tenderness and violence. Within these paradoxical relationships, it is often difficult to decipher what is real and what is imagined; what is weighted and what is weightless; what is made of paint and what transcends the medium entirely. Yuskavage’s subtle degrees of fiction and representation culminate in questionable, unsettling quasi-realities. The exhibition featured Yuskavage’s new, large canvases.

$45.00

William Kentridge Certain Doubts DVD

Partially shot in grainy super-8 stock, a reference to the author's charcoal drawings, this documentary follows Kentridge through Johannesburg and Brazil, where he speaks of the impact of the landscape and the social contradictions in his work, and comments on the life of characters such as Felix Teitlebaum, his alter ego.

Videobrasil, DVD 51 mins Portuguese/English

$38.00

The New Art

The New Art considers specific recent developments in Contemporary Art. Issues include: appropriation; melancholy; “spectres of the past”; contemporary elaboration or staging of exhibitions involving video and installation (with reference to painting); visual and language intersections in artists’ works; the value of art fairs; the separate significance of works which explicitly involve themselves with the circumstance of their production and consequence of their dissemination; the slight denigration of performance and the reinstatement of forms of satire; “futurology”, “lacunae”, “ellipses” and so on. Artists and projects discussed include: Tomas Saraceno, John Bock, Doug Fishbone, Tino Sehgal, Anne Bean, Man in the Holocene, pablo internacional magazine, Jonathan Monk, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Bonnie Camplin, Steven Claydon, John Bock, Los Super Elegantes.

$30.00

Cartune Xprez DVD

DVD compilation of up and coming animators. Loops by Takeshi Murata, Philippe Blanchard, Christopher Doulgeris, Michael Bell-Smith, Peter Burr Shorts by Peter Burr, Christopher Doulgeris, Cassandra C. Jones, Paper Rad, Luke Meeken and Andrew Negrey, Francine Spiegel, Drew Pavelchak, Gretchen Hogue, Hooliganship, Amy Lockhart, Philippe Blanchard, Shana Moulton

DVD/NTSC

$18.00

Brian Chippendale- Ninja

Ninja is the first book by Fort Thunder co-founder and Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale. It is both an epic 80 page graphic novel and a document of his vibrant drawings, collages, and posters. The graphic novel, a work 5 years in the making, takes readers through a fantastic landscape delineated in Chippendale's dense pen and ink linework and starring a Ninja hunted by the forces of evil. It functions as both a great fantasy story and a social allegory about an artist's struggle with money, gentrification, and city politics.

Picturebox Inc, November 2006, 114 pages, Hardcover, 11 x 17, mostly color

$34.95