Thought Catalog

Like Provincetown and Carmel, Key West has long been known as an artists’ retreat, a spectacularly beautiful geography haunted by abiding spirits. Associated with writers like Hemingway, Bishop, Dillard, and Stone, Key West flourishes today, a vibrant, diverse community of writers, painters, and artists of all sorts. It is also home to Sand Paper Press, an independent publishing venture founded in 2003, part of a continuing tradition of small presses passionately focused on the verbal arts, particularly poetry.

The Eizo Nanao Group, a Japanese company in the sexy business of making medical imaging equipment, has released a pinup calendar as part of a new marketing effort crafted by the German ad firm Butter. It’s quite revealing, to say the least. When will the porn producers catch on?

Sam Brown was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and moved to Sydney, Australia to finish his early education at a Technology High School, then continued studying Multimedia Design at the Computer Graphics College Sydney and the Private SAE Institute before spending a year working at a boutique design house. Now, under the name Massive Blue, Brown runs an accomplished web design and development company from his hometown of Edinburgh, which serves clients from around the world.

In 2008, Nadia Moro, an Italian photographer, best known for her work in the fashion and advertising industries, spent five consecutive days shooting a group of synchro swimmers and dancers underwater. The result was this series – “Behind the Surface” – a footloose, gravity-free ballet, a sequence of images challenging the ways we traditionally look at the human body, clothing, and movement.

Sloane Crosley graduated from Connecticut College in 2000 with a degree in creative writing. She took the literary world by storm in 2008 with her debut collection of essays, I Was Told There Would Be Cake,which became a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Thurber Prize of American Humor. Her follow-up book, How Did You Get this Number (Riverhead Books), will be released June 15th.

There’s a lot more to Iceland than Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano which basically put a complete halt to air travel across western and northern Europe as of April. Sacha Heron, an emerging photographer living and working in Paris, captured another, less violent side of the country in his trip there in 2008. Heron cites the beauty of the landscapes as a crucial influence in his decision to quit his job…

For reasons known only to the author himself, Mark Twain ordained that his complete autobiography – all five thousand pages of it – should not be printed in its entirety until one hundred years after his demise. Since he died in 1910, that makes 2010 the year for which many have been waiting so impatiently and for so long.

Michelle Madonna (real name) was born in Long Island, NY and after a short stint in Los Angeles settled in Manhattan on the Upper East Side. She describes herself as “vampire, camera whore, and wannabe socialite with terrible insomnia.” She is currently finishing a degree in Visual merchandising at Laboratory Institute of Merchandising. She also makes pop and dance music.