Joan Snyder is known for the globs of paint that slide down her canvases; for her choice of materials, such as straw, flowers, gels, gauze, newspaper, and frills; for the slashes that puncture cloth; for the symbolic fields, sunflowers, ponds, bare trees, screaming faces, and nude women; and for the grids that hold order. Joan Snyder, the book, offers a glimpse into the creative process behind the lush, rough, and gooey surfaces of Snyder's iconographic canvases.

In the essay, which fills a quarter of the book, art historian Hayden Herrera examines the links between Snyder's life and work. The text is both personal and formal, refreshingly devoid of dreaded art-speak. (Herrera also wrote Mary Frank and the biography of Frida Kahlo that inspired the Oscar-nominated film.) One hundred and forty illustrations follow the text, from full-page reproductions of Snyder's most acclaimed works to candid photographs of Snyder at different stages of her life. The book is primarily filled with paintings.

Snyder knew early on that she was an autobiographical painter, although, as Herrera writes, "Because the message is conveyed through abstract language as well as through images or words, self-exploration never becomes trivial self-display." We travel with Snyder through her youth, emotional breakdowns, marriage to photographer Larry Fink, a miscarriage, a birth, divorce, new love, thoughts of politics and the lives of women, deaths of family and friends, and changing environments.

Through interviews and research, Herrera explores the context in which Snyder created her major series: the altar paintings, the flock/membrane paintings, the stroke paintings, the field paintings. In the 1970s, Snyder rebelled against color field paintings: "I'm a maximalist, not a minimalist," she says.

Herrera reveals Snyder's processes: from symbolism to the meaning of the triptych to the necessity of the grid to inspiration culled from external and internal worlds. Snyder completes 15 or fewer paintings per year, and though she never repeats a work, images and icons reappear and transform. The cherry tree—which sometimes bears fruit, sometimes stands bare, and sometimes sheds its blossoms—was spotted by Snyder in Brooklyn as she drove to visit her dying father in his nursing home. The cherry tree became a metaphor of life and death. The color pink, says Snyder, "is always flesh."

Environment also informs the work. In 1990, Snyder began spending summers in Woodstock, and oval shapes and dark vertical lines begin to appear. The shapes reflect the trees and ponds of the area, so different than the open fields of Long Island, where she also lived (and which inspired the field paintings). Around the time of her parents' deaths, her lover's parents' deaths, and the deaths of friends from AIDS, these pond symbols become black holes, which Herrera likens to open graves.

The very format of the work is significant. Snyder began to think of her paintings as stories, to be read horizontally, from left to right. The end of the story was in the lower right hand corner. And despite the apparently random splatters and drips, and her unexpected choice of materials, Snyder asserts nothing happens by chance. Each work is structured and preconceived in her notebooks and, she says, "There's not a mark or drip on that painting that isn't meant to be there."

The glimpse Herrera gives us into Snyder's life is an enriching addition to the visual experience that follows, in page after page of gorgeous reproductions, following Snyder's philosophy of "more" versus "less" in adding one more layer to her work.

The book was published to accompany the traveling exhibit "Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey, 1969-2004," which opened at The Jewish Museum in New York City in 2005. Snyder is represented in the Hudson Valley by the Elena Zang Gallery in Shady, where group shows featuring her paintings and monoprints will be on exhibit this spring, summer, and fall.

Radio is a medium that reaches its audience only through the portal of the ear. This lends it a special earnestness and intimacy, and cloaks its voices in near anonymity as well. This remove can be a refreshing option to the world of television, where visual distractions compete with content. (Wow, another earthquake in Pakistan. And what has Katie Couric done to her hair?)

Public radio listeners may be a sophisticated lot, but still we are human. Haven't you ever wondered if Terry Gross's physical appearance matches her mighty interview abilities? If Garrison Keillor really lives on the folksy shores of Lake Wobegon? If Michael Feldman looks as sarcastic as he sounds on "Wad'ya Know?"

Their voices, says Lisa Phillips, leave us hungry, and in Public Radio: Behind the Voices, she dishes up some satisfying sustenance. Phillips is a print journalist as well as a former public radio reporter who has worked in stations across the country, including a stint at our own WAMC in Albany. She's still local, a Woodstock resident currently teaching journalism at SUNY New Paltz.

The book is perfect fare for the "snobby arugula eaters" (as one host playfully dubs his audience), filled with information and insight. A compilation of 43 profiles and interviews of personalities from every sector of public radio, it's a tasty, well-prepared meal that's not without a generous assortment of spicy entrees.

Like the fact that "Prairie Home Companion" host Garrison Keillor isn't completely beloved in his much ballyhooed home state of Minnesota (his reaction to exuberant press coverage of his several divorces and marriages may have something to do with this), and that the octogenarian host of "Piano Jazz," Marian McPartland, traded a world of upper class British privilege for the vagabond life of jazz.

"Marketplace" host Kai Ryssdal left a clerking job at Borders to work in radio, and the first time Neil Conan of "Talk of the Nation" was on the air, he wet his pants (but just a little).

Phillips has a gentle but probing touch with her subjects, but some of the book's best moments come when she lifts the veil on herself as well. She admits to being late for her appointment with Daniel Schorr, and to worrying throughout her interview with Michael Feldman that her napping infant would waken. When she couldn't find a quiet place to record her talk with Marian McPartland, she took her into a bathroom.

Collecting personal stories, says Phillips, was the main motivating force for this book, but the glimpses of the writer behind these profiles add an extra level of engagement. She has obvious heroes in the field; she's idolized Terri Gross from "Fresh Air" since college, and waxes especially enthusiastic about "This American Life" host Ira Glass (who's also, she says, the radio personality who looks most like he sounds).

She details her pursuit of some elusive subjects (like when she called in to "Car Talk" in an attempt to snare the Magliozzi brothers) and doesn't hide her substantial disappointment that Terry Gross refused repeated requests for an interview.

Phillips is an insider, a superior guide to this world, but she's also unabashedly a fan. "We have an intimate connection with public radio hosts, the people who bring this magic to us," she writes. "They are with us when we get up in the morning, when we drive to work, when we cook dinner, garden, sit in the bathtub. We know them mainly by their voices, not their faces.

This voice-to-ear relationship is a startlingly radical one in an era where image is everything, swaying its hips to seduce us, vivid and lifelike on giant screen digital television."

This book does make some concession to the power of image: It includes photos. But you may not want to look at them. Like radio, the words alone may be just enough.

Fresh out of Chapel Hill's J-school, 22-year-old cub reporter Emma Gant wears hand-monogrammed drip-dry shirts, uses words like "terpsichorean," and after nightlong drinking, crawls naked into bed to grab an hour of sleep before a day on the job at the Miami Star. Self-assured and precociously bright, the winsome protagonist of bestselling author Gail Godwin's enjoyable new novel, Queen of the Underworld, unsettles most men, her allure (reminiscent of Holly Golightly's in Breakfast at Tiffany's) owing more to calculated reserve than to gusto. As with many Godwin heroines, Emma takes her sartorial and sophisticated cues from older, wiser women, and is determined to secure a stronghold on life, despite thwarted romance and professional challenges.

The time is 1959, the place Miami Beach, where Emma boards at the Hotel Julia Tuttle among wealthy Cuban exiles who have fled Fidel Castro's revolution. Emma too is escaping—as much from her brutish stepfather as from provincial, rural North Carolina. Aiming to compete with top reporters at the Star and to avoid banishment among middle-aged women pouring over fashion layouts "segregated inside a glass cubicle," she assesses coworkers (male and female alike) as either potential allies or rivals. Her nemesis, assistant managing editor Lou Norbright (called "Lucifer" by staffers), has gained newsroom infamy and risen to power on the basis of his colorful series featuring a local madam, "Queen of the Underworld."

Emma owes her place of lodging to the elegant Tess, a former Miss Miami Beach and friend of her mother's who now works for a handsome Cuban dentist. At the hotel, Emma befriends literary, high-minded manager Alex de Costa, a recent Harvard graduate and grandson of the Cuban-American owner. With the political situation between the United States and Castro's island nation lurking in the background, no character is as he or she appears. Neither is Emma, who has a twice-her-age married lover stashed on the side. Complicating the intrigue, hinted-at subplots never fully unravel, leaving the heroine stranded on the novel's final page.

A fleet narrative and trenchant dialogue (enriched by Spanish and Yiddish) propels this autobiographic tale. Godwin's style embraces nonsequitur (indicative of life derailed), including "reprinted" newspaper items, dream sequences, mini history lessons, and excerpts from Emma Gant's journal.

Godwin's second new publication, The Making of a Writer: Journals 1961-1963--itself an inter-textual hodgepodge of personal reminiscences, travel précis, poems, short stories, expense accounts, and career aspirations—discloses how reporter Gant's ambitions and circumstances in Queen of the Underworld are derived from those of her creator.

Published at the urging of friend Joyce Carol Oates, The Making of a Writer chronicles (with somewhat mawkish editorial commentary by Rob Neufeld) its author's unyielding efforts to practice her craft while living abroad as an employee of the US Travel Service. Populated by a cast of Godwin's international lovers, friends, and adversaries in shifting settings (e.g., an ocean liner, Denmark, the Canary Islands, London), the journals provide a record of her intellectual and vocational awakenings as prompted by the writings of Thomas Wolfe, J. D. Salinger, Doris Lessing, Lawrence Durrell, Carl Jung, and Søren Kierkegaard (among others), as well as by exposure to classical music, live theater, and avant-garde film.

The journals depict a tireless Godwin, drafting and revising manuscripts (some no longer extant) that would result in stories and novels composed over the course of nearly half a century. In particular, in Queen of the Underworld, Emma Gant's personality, family history, and line of employment may be traced to a September 5, 1961, entry in Godwin's journal subtitled "GAIL ON GETTING FIRED" (from the Miami Herald). Above all, The Making of a Writer sheds light on how the younger Godwin managed to hold down jobs, engage in multiple love affairs, party until dawn, and faithfully write it all down.