Mark Bibbins’s book-length poem sequence brings the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s into new light—an account that approximates, with stunning lyricism, “what music sounds like / just before the record skips.” Addressed to a dead beloved, 13th Balloon troubles the cloud-like space of grief by piecing together the fragmented experiences of youth and loss, anguish and desire. Part elegy, part memoir in verse, this is a groundbreaking collection whose trajectory runs counter to the impulse toward nostalgia, unearthing what was thought to have burned in the fire.
Whether it's addressing the grotesque in daily scenes or upsetting the norms of professional culture, Joe Wenderoth's fifth collection, If I Don't Breathe How Do I Sleep, resonates with his signature intellect and disturbing humor. He is at once an aesthete and an iconoclast who brings inventive force to American poetry.
Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flâneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: "Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flâneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer." Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank.
Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: the tenth feature in six years by genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard is a stylish mash-up of anticonsumerist satire, au courant politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, “the last romantic couple.” With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard’s last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema.
Archive release from the late soul/funk icon. Recorded in 1983 at Prince's Kiowa Trail home studio in Chanhassen, MN and engineered by Don Batts, Piano & A Microphone 1983 is a nine track, 35-minute album features a previously unreleased home studio cassette recording of Prince at his piano. The private rehearsal provides a rare, intimate glimpse into Prince s creative process as he worked through songs which include '17 Days' and 'Purple Rain' (neither of which would be released until 1984), a cover of Joni Mitchell's 'A Case Of You', 'Strange Relationship' (not released until 1987 on his critically acclaimed Sign O' The Times album), and 'International Lover'. The album also includes a rare recording of the 19th Century spiritual 'Mary Don't You Weep', featured during the end credits of Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman. For fans of Prince s spontaneous live medleys, tracks 1-7 of the album are presented in that same format as they were originally recorded.
On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces.
At a fading vacation resort, 11-year-old Sophie treasures rare time together with her loving and idealistic father, Calum (Paul Mescal). As a world of adolescence creeps into view, beyond her eye Calum struggles under the weight of life outside of fatherhood. Twenty years later, Sophie's tender recollections of their last holiday become a powerful and heartrending portrait of their relationship, as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn't, in Charlotte Wells' superb and searingly emotional debut film.
Phil Klay's Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos.
A young video shop assistant exchanges the home comforts of one mother-figure for a fleeting sexual encounter with another; a brother and sister find themselves at the bottom of a coal mine with a Japanese tourist; a Welsh stag on a debauched weekend in Dublin confesses an unimaginable truth; and a twice-widowed pensioner tries to persuade the lovely Mrs Morgan to be his date at the town's summer festival. Set in Caerphilly, a diminished castle town in South Wales, Thomas Morris debut collection reveals its treasures in unexpected ways, offering vivid and moving glimpses of the lost, lonely and bemused. By turns poignant, witty, tender and bizarre these entertaining stories detail the lives of people who know where they are, but don't know what they're doing. This is the work of a young writer with a startlingly fresh voice, an uncanny ear for dialogue and a broad emotional range.
A powerful supernatural thriller about a young student who experiences extreme seizures while studying at a university in Oslo, Norway, who, upon falling in love for the first time, discovers that she has terrifying and inexplicable powers.
Guys Like Us considers how writers of the 1950s and ’60s struggled to craft literature that countered the politics of consensus and anticommunist hysteria in America, and how notions of masculinity figured in their effort. Michael Davidson examines a wide range of postwar literature, from the fiction of Jack Kerouac to the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. He also explores the connection between masculinity and sexuality in films such as Chinatown and The Lady from Shanghai, as well as television shows, plays, and magazines from the period. What results is a virtuoso work that looks at American poetic and artistic innovation through the revealing lenses of gender and history.
Arendt's classic work explores totalitarianism through an extended analysis of the Nazi and Soviet regimes. In a series of dazzling insights, she explores the role of propaganda, the use of terror and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination. A surprise bestseller in the wake of the US presidential election, Arendt's book offers chilling lessons about the threat of totalitarianism that we ignore at our peril.
The debut feature by the great Andrei Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood is a poetic journey through the shards and shadows of one boy’s war-ravaged youth. Moving back and forth between the traumatic realities of World War II and serene moments of family life before the conflict began, Tarkovsky’s film remains one of the most jarring and unforgettable depictions of the impact of war on children.
The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.
Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea―that it is possible to construct a society based on justice, equality, and freedom―gaining the power to change history. Vico, Michelet, Bakunin, and especially Marx―along with scores of other anarchists, socialists, nihilists, utopians, and more―all come to life in these pages. And in Wilson's telling, their stories and their ideas remain as alive, as provocative, as relevant now as they were in their own time.
Already famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker Béla Tarr’s six-hour masterpiece, Satantango is proof, as the spellbinding, bleak, and hauntingly beautiful book has it, that “the devil has all the good times.” The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere. Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat. “At the center of Satantango,” George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.” “You know,” Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.”
Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television.
In her breathtaking and assured debut feature, Lynne Ramsay creates a haunting evocation of a troubled Glasgow childhood. Set during Scotland’s national garbage strike of the mid-1970s, RATCATCHER explores the experiences of a poor adolescent boy as he struggles to reconcile his dreams and his guilt with the abjection that surrounds him. Utilizing beautiful, elusive imagery, candid performances, and unexpected humor, Ramsay deftly contrasts urban decay with a rich interior landscape of hope and perseverance, resulting in a work at once raw and deeply poetic.
In the mid-1960s, inspired by William Burroughs's "cut-up" writing technique, Tom Phillips bought an obscure Victorian novel for three penceW. H. Mallock's 1892 novel, A Human Document. He began cutting and pasting the extant text, treating the pages with gouache and ink, isolating the words that interested him while scoring out unwanted words or painting over them. The result was A Humument, and the first version appeared in 1970. The artist writes, "I plundered, mined, and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents, and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds. It began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams, and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love's casualties." After its first publication in book form in 1980, A Humument rapidly became a cult classic. Phillips has continued to revisit Mallock's novel, and this new fourth edition follows its predecessors by incorporating revisions and reworkingsover a hundred pages are replaced by new versionsand celebrates an artistic enterprise that is itself some forty years old and still actively a work in progress.
Originally published in 1945, this book of poetic prose encapsulates former journalist Elizabeth Smart’s relationship with poet George Barker. Instantly, upon picking up a book of his poetry while browsing through a London bookshop, Smart fell in love with the poet. They would soon begin an indulgent love affair during which she gave birth to four of his children. He, however, remained legally married to his wife. This tale of passionate but fanatical love is a modern reflection of the Romantic poets.
Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir that charts her fraught relationship with her late father. Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
Raúl Zurita’s INRI is a visionary response to the atrocities committed under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In this deeply moving elegy for the dead, the whole of Chile, with its snow-covered cordilleras and fields of wildflowers, its empty spaces and the sparkling sea beyond, is simultaneously transformed into the grave of its lost children and their living and risen body. Zurita’s incantatory, unapologetically political work is one of the great prophetic poems of our new century.
To live in an Alaska of the mind is to map the imagined cartography of winter on all that is physical. To dwell perpetually in a symbolic cold, and to emerge, with grace, unscathed. This book questions what it means to live and love in such a buried season. This Alaska interrogates all that emotional and physical intimacy cannot salvage or keep warm. Death and dreams are at the very center of this book. But life — and all it entails and circles and loses and loves — is at its heart.
Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus opus is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present, and it is inarguably one of the most important cinematic works of all time.
Passion brews quietly between an artist and her subject, until together they create a space in which it can briefly flourish, in this sumptuous eighteenth-century romance from Céline Sciamma, one of contemporary French cinema’s most acclaimed auteurs. Summoned to an isolated seaside estate on a secret assignment, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) must find a way to paint a wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who is resisting chattel marriage, by furtively observing her. What unfolds in exquisite tension is an exchange of sustained gazes in which the two women come to know each other’s gestures, expressions, and bodies with rapturous intimacy, ultimately forging a subversive creative collaboration as well as a delirious romance. Charged with a yearning that almost transcends time and space, Portrait of a Lady on Fire mines the emotional and artistic possibilities that emerge when women can freely live together and see one another in a world without men.
Molly Brodak’s The Cipher is a deft and unsparing study of the limits of knowledge and belief, and of what solace can be found within those limits. “We stand on the rim of the void,” Brodak writes. “We hold our little lamps of knowing / on the rim, and look in.” Drawing vividly from mathematics, Christianity, European history, urban life, and the natural world, these poems reveal a vision of contemporary experience that is at once luminous and centered on an unshakable emptiness. Wise, sharp, and sometimes devastating, The Cipher leads us through a world in which little can be trusted, takes its measure, and does not look away.
Michael Dickman presents an uncompromising vision of joy and devastating loss in Flies, his second collection. Flies summons the wonder and alienation of childhood through a dreamy and exuberant surrealism, drawing on the paintings of Barnett Newman and the traditional Catholic Stations of the Cross as the poems grapple with the suicide of an older brother. Dickman’s work contemplates psychic, spiritual, and physical violence, unswervingly facing abandonment and transformation to arrive at regeneration and grace.
Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite—until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bing, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past two decades of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career.
Holiday collides poems-as-text and image-as-impression, lyricism and the tones you hear as your mind expands. The “legacies” of Miles Davis and MLK and Billie Holiday collide as well, harnessing taboos they upheld just as triumphantly. The coalescing of layers of a story in restricted space produces ghettos, or a mythological advertising omniverse wherein shadow and light integrate, complicating our fantasies.
Sixteen years after the groundbreaking film Rivers and Tides director Thomas Riedelsheimer returns to work with the artist. The film follows Andy Goldsworthy on his exploration of the layers of his world and the impact of the years on himself and his art. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/movies/leaning-into-the-wind-review-andy-goldsworthy.html
The Feel Trio is Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker. Or is it that The Feel Trio are Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker? See, that’s the amazing problem and chance, right there! In the wake and air and light of The Feel Trio, what it bears and what propels them, which is everything in particular, The Feel Trio tries to put some things together. Alabama runs through those things like nobody’s business. I kept trying to visit the uncounted space James Brown forms around the one. To celebrate the varieties of black devotion. But coalition can’t be too easy; it’s in our nature not to come naturally lyrically, beautifully violently. The organizing principles, in our extramusical tailor’s retrofit of fitting, sharp as a tack from the tone worlds of east by southeast of Sheffield, the Bronx’s compassionate project/s and fly, flaired, flared Corona: listen to everything, relax the shape, approach with love, be worthy of a lovely t!
As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe's enigmatic wife allow her to remain? A subversively brilliant study of love, Swimming Home reveals how the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves.
Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys’s return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.
For book collectors, bibliophiles and design nostalgics, Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth’s THE LOOK OF THE BOOK: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature (Ten Speed) tells an alternate history of the Western canon, in the physical editions they think have shaped it most. PURCHASE: https://www.powells.com/book/look-of-the-book-jackets-covers-art-at-the-edges-of-literature-9780399581021
Oscar winners Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson star in this two-part film directed by Mike Nichols and written by Tony Kushner, based on his Pulitzer-winning play. The play is a complex, often metaphorical, and at times symbolic examination of AIDS and homosexuality in America in the 1980s.
This remarkable debut book from Philip Gourevitch chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Gourevitch his title.
The Family of Pascual Duarte is a 1942 novel written by Spanish Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela. The first two editions created an uproar and in less than a year it was banned. This book reflects the crude reality of rural Spain in Franco's time. It is full of human power and rich in social insight. Cela writes with great detail, but still maintains simplicity.
Winner of the National Book Award, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney; his fourth wife, Babette; and four ultramodern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism.
When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life yet suggesting something ominous.
Parodying everyone from classic authors to his own contemporaries, the dazzling and exuberant stories of Rabelais expose human follies with mischievous and often obscene humor. Gargantua depicts a young giant who becomes a cultured Christian knight. Pantagruel portrays Gargantua’s bookish son who becomes a Renaissance Socrates, divinely guided by wisdom and by his idiotic, self-loving companion, Panurge.
Legacy of Brutality is a compilation album of early songs by the punk rock band Misfits, released in September 1985. It contains overdubbed mixes of previously unreleased songs, mainly from the January–February 1978 Static Age sessions.
Crow was Ted Hughes’s visceral and innovative fourth book of poems for adults and a pivotal moment in his writing career. In it, he found both a structure and a persona that gave his vision a new power and coherence. A deep engagement with history, mythology and the natural world combine to forge a work of impressive and unsettling force.
Pynchon's debut novel follows discharged Navy sailor Benny Profane as he reconnects with an eclectic collection of artists in New York known as the "Whole Sick Crew" along with his sidekick Pig Bodine, and the plot of Herbert Stencil, looking to find the woman he knows only as she is described in his father's diary: "V."
Brimming with madcap characters, the novel meanders from New York to Alexandria, Cairo, Paris, Florence, and Africa, and traverses generations. Time magazine raves, "Few books haunt the waking or the sleeping mind, but this is one."
Beach Bunny began as a bedroom-based solo project in Chicago in 2015 when Lili Trifilio recorded a song titled "6 Weeks". The same year, Trifilio released her first EP, titled Animalism. She released her second EP titled Pool Party in 2016. In 2017, she released her third EP titled Crybaby, and Beach Bunny expanded to a full four-piece lineup shortly after. In 2018, Beach Bunny released her fourth EP, titled Prom Queen. The group achieved widespread popularity after their song "Prom Queen" went viral on TikTok.
The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard was described by Frank Rich in The New York Times as ‘not only Mr. Stoppard’s most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love, honesty and marriage in years. First performed in 1982, the play focuses on the relationship between Henry and Annie, an actress and member of a group fighting to free Brodie, a Scottish soldier imprisoned for burning a memorial wreath during a protest.
The Maids is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. First performed in 1947, Solange and Claire are two housemaids who construct elaborate sadomasochistic rituals when their mistress (Madame) is away. The focus of their role-playing is the murder of Madame and they take turns portraying both sides of the power divide. Their deliberate pace and devotion to detail guarantees that they always fail to actualize their fantasies by ceremoniously "killing" Madame at the ritual's dénouement.
The Balcony is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet, first performed in English in 1957. It is set in an unnamed city that is experiencing a revolutionary uprising in the streets; most of the action takes place in an upmarket brothel that functions as a microcosm of the regime of the establishment under threat outside.
Genet's biographer Edmund White wrote that with The Balcony, along with The Blacks (1959), Genet re-invented modern theatre. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described the play as the rebirth of the spirit of the classical Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes, while the philosopher Lucien Goldmann argued that despite its "entirely different world view" it constitutes "the first great Brechtian play in French literature." Martin Esslin has called The Balcony "one of the masterpieces of our time."
The letters written by Samuel Beckett between 1929 and 1940 provide a vivid and personal view of Western Europe in the 1930s, and mark the gradual emergence of Beckett’s unique voice and sensibility. The Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett offers for the first time a comprehensive range of letters of one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. Selected for their bearing on his work from over 15,000 extant letters, the letters published in this four-volume edition encompass sixty years of Beckett's writing life (1929–1989), and include letters to friends, painters and musicians, as well as to students, publishers, translators, and colleagues in the world of literature and theater. For anyone interested in twentieth-century literature and theater this edition is essential reading, offering not only a record of Beckett's achievements but a powerful literary experience in itself.
Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites—supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums—that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background for narrative action and character development, David Alworth argues that sites figure in novels as social agents. Engaging a wide range of social and cultural theorists, especially Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman, Site Reading examines how the literary figuration of real, material environments reorients our sense of social relations. To read the sites of fiction, Alworth demonstrates, is to reveal literature as a profound sociological resource, one that simultaneously models and theorizes collective life.
A journalist by trade, who now suffers from an immune deficiency developed while researching this book, presents personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus after the nuclear reactor accident in 1986, and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they still live with. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."
First published in 1961, and reissued in this sixtieth anniversary edition with a powerful new introduction by Cornel West, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a masterfuland timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle, and a continuing influence on movements from Black Lives Matter to decolonization. A landmark text for revolutionaries and activists, The Wretched of the Earth is an eternal touchstone for civil rights, anti-colonialism, psychiatric studies, and Black consciousness movements around the world. Alongside Cornel West’s introduction, the book features critical essays by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. This sixtieth anniversary edition of Fanon’s most famous text stands proudly alongside such pillars of anti-colonialism and anti-racism as Edward Said’s Orientalism and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
In publishing Marx's Concept of Man in 1961, Erich Fromm presented to the English-speaking world for the first time Karl Marx's then recently discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Including the Manuscripts and many other philosophical writings by Marx as well as Fromm's own extended response, many of these writings have since become recognised as important works in their own right. Fromm stresses Marx's humanist philosophy and challenges both contemporary Western ignorance of Marx and Soviet corruptions of his work. Fromm's analysis of Marx's work and his dissemination of these neglected writings by Marx himself fundamentally altered the prevailing discourse about Marxism, revolutionizing contemporary thought and providing a formative influence for the development of the New Left.
Since its initial publication in 1958, The Poetics of Space has been a muse to philosophers, architects, writers, psychologists, critics, and readers alike. The rare work of irresistibly inviting philosophy, Bachelard’s seminal work brims with quiet revelations and stirring, mysterious imagery. This lyrical journey takes as its premise the emergence of the poetic image and finds an ideal metaphor in the intimate spaces of our homes. Guiding us through a stream of meditations on poetry, art, and the blooming of consciousness itself, Bachelard examines the domestic places that shape and hold our dreams and memories. Houses and rooms; cellars and attics; drawers, chests, and wardrobes; nests and shells; nooks and corners: No space is too vast or too small to be filled by our thoughts and our reveries. In Bachelard’s enchanting spaces, “We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
Born into an aristocratic family in decline, Wei Ying-wu (737–791)—ranked alongside such Tang dynasty masters as Tu Fu, Li Pai, and Wang Wei—served in several government posts without distinction. He disdained the literary establishment of his day and fashioned a poetic style counter to the mainstream: one of profound simplicity centered in the natural world. Yet only a handful of his poems had ever been translated into English.
Poetry. Drama. This book contains a play about a woman who dies twice, a treatise on why there are no female absurdists, and several unfortunate references to goldfish. In fact, the book was almost called "The Fish" in the way that Gogol's story is called "The Nose," except that unlike the olfactory organ of the Gogol story, neither the woman nor the fish has yet developed a life of her own, and it is perhaps beyond the powers of the author to indicate whether this is a happy or sad undevelopment. Much of the text is simply unattributed lines from Pina Bausch, Virginia Woolf, Daniil Kharms, Albert Camus, Clarice Lispector, and others.
In this third collection, Catherine Wagner assumes a mantle of responsibility. Each opportunity for productivity is a personal call-out; she responds, “diligent and strict.” A repetitive stretching exercise produces sectional meditations on obedience to self, and to ambition, and the limitations of the body as container, while the obligation to include others in one’s apprehension of the room, or self, causes Wagner’s slangy, spoken, and singing world of representation to slide from syntactic unit to unit, making room for a galaxy of metonymy. “Things mean, and i can’t tell them not to.” What’s going on inside is a watchful self-regard that invites eros to play. Further exploration takes Wagner close into sexual fantasy—the desire for a debased object—and the politics thereof: “Well i expect you to go into the/fucking human tunnel/i’m going.” In each of the four series that make up this book we find a female body watching itself and marking that watching with a severe wit, charmed visuals, and the analytic prowess of a born human.
Ignatz takes the form of a cycle of love poems—in radical variations—based on Ignatz Mouse, the rodent anti-hero and love-object of George Herriman’s classic comic strip Krazy Kat. For decades, Krazy Kat rang the changes on a quirky theme of unrequited love: cat loves mouse; mouse hates cat; mouse hits cat with brick; cat mistakes brick for love; and so on, day after day. The backgrounds of the strip were in constant inexplicable flux: a desiccated specimen of Arizona flora morphs in the next panel into a crescent moon, then into a snowcapped butte, while the characters chatted obliviously on, caught up in their own obsessive round.
New European Poets presents the works of poets from across Europe. In compiling this landmark anthology, editors Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer enlisted twenty-four regional editors to select 270 poets, whose writing was first published after 1970. These poets represent every country in Europe, and many of them are published here for the first time in English or in the United States. The resulting anthology collects some of the very best work of a new generation of poets who have come of age since Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugenio Montale, and Czeslaw Milosz.
We Were Here is the first documentary to take a deep and reflective look back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco. It explores how the city's inhabitants were affected by, and how they responded to, the calamitous epidemic.
Amidst air strikes and bombings, a group of female doctors in Ghouta, Syria struggle with systemic sexism while trying to care for the injured using limited resources.
Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, Ulysses is one of the most important and enjoyable works of the twentieth century.
Sergeant Gauthier Bachmann is the perfect Nazi soldier. But after a horrifying defeat at Voroshenko, where most of his Eighth Hessian Infantry Regiment was slaughtered in a single instant, Bachmann was declared mentally unfit to serve. Incapable of accepting this judgment, and of returning to his girlfriend and a quiet life as a gold- and silversmith, Bachmann wanders the war-ravaged countryside, trying to find a way to rejoin his regiment, or any regiment, and return to the front.
While trying to find his regiment and come to terms with the horrors he has seen and committed, the increasingly unstable Bachmann is manipulated by a series of figures from the underbelly of war’s underbelly—deserters and collaborators, corrupt officers and sexual predators—who induce him to carry out their venal missions, which they’ve justified against the background of institutionalized murder going on all around them.
Laura Sims's third poetry collection engages the escarpment of the page itself: walled-off phrases set against spare lines on largely empty pages, a proto-graphical representation of thought itself. These poems replicate the psychic fragmentation that's necessary for evil-doing: relationship as crime scene, the folk ballad re-writ for our new cult of mass-shootings, "the quiet and unmeaning" of a natural world wrought horrific.
In a companion to her astonishing collection of prose, Cooling Time, C.D. Wright argues for poetry as a way of being and seeing and calls it “the one arena where I am not inclined to crank up the fog machine.” Wright’s passion for the genre is pure inspiration, and in her hands the answer to the question of poetry is poetry.
Dan Chiasson takes inspiration for his stunning new collection from the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder. The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.
The Dream Songs is widely seen as Berryman's masterpiece, an impressively vast and varied collection of poems that is in itself a single, sprawling, ever-shifting poem. The songs in this great work are thus offered in many different tones, moods, and guises, although their form, Berryman's idiosyncratic reworking of the sonnet, remains more or less constant.
With this volume The Library of America inaugurates a collected edition of the works of America’s preeminent living poet. Long associated with the New York School that came to the fore in the 1950s, John Ashbery has charted a profoundly original course that has opened up pathways for subsequent generations of poets. At once hermetic and exuberantly curious, meditative and unnervingly funny, dreamlike and steeped in everyday realities, alive to every nuance of American speech, these are poems that constantly discover new worlds within language and its unexpected permutations.
An eccentric classic of Zen poetry. When Zen master Ikkyū Sōjun (1394-1481) was appointed headmaster of the great temple at Kyoto, he lasted nine days before denouncing the rampant hypocrisy he saw among the monks there. He in turn invited them to look for him in the sake parlors of the Pleasure Quarters. A Zen monk-poet-calligrapher-musician, he dared to write about the joys of erotic love, along with more traditional Zen themes. He was a rebel genius who dared to defy authority and despised corruption. Although he lived during times plagued by war, famine, rioting, and religious upheaval, his writing and music prevailed, influencing Japanese culture to this day.
Luis Buñuel’s vision of the inherent absurdity of human social rituals reaches its taboo-annihilating extreme in what may be his most morally subversive and formally audacious work. Zigzagging across time and space, from the Napoleonic era to the present day, The Phantom of Liberty unfolds as a picaresque, its characters traveling between tableaux in a series of Dadaist non sequiturs. Unbound by the laws of narrative logic, Buñuel lets his surrealist’s id run riot in an exuberant revolt against bourgeois rationality that seems telegraphed directly from his unconscious to the screen.
Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation, the long-awaited second collection by Columbia University professor and poetry editor of Boston Review, is an absolute tour de force, fully investing itself in the possibilities of language and intelligence—by way of a traditional and abiding faith in poetry—to illuminate the ceaseless advances of personal, political and social contingency.
“This is a song of the massacred, the destroyed and disappeared during Chilean President Pinochet’s era of tyranny – how can this be if the dismembered, burned and slashed cannot speak? Zurita pulls it out of his body, his day by day, his furnace by furnace mouth, his barracks by barracks and bombs by bombs rebel notary ledger. It is a collection of planks, that is, jagged samples of bone shards, splinters of barrack and tangles of wire, low tremolos of shrieks lingering, blood streams, body-sticks, warehouse and camp whispered love journals before the crematorium and time-space shafts intersecting the death ship Chile-Nagasaki-Auschwitz still in the liminoid edge of our present storms. With the eye and timbre of Rodnoti, Neruda, Bombal and Wiesel, Zurita, through Borzutzky’s masterful translation, hurls himself at our comfort culture barricades. He wants “awakening” –– in spite of the multiple chambers of horrors suffered by innocent peoples, mountains and seas – “There were millions of planets being born there.” And Zurita is one – and this book is thousands. Plank by plank, line by line, this is an inspiring, major work in translation in our post 9-11 era of always-war and terror. Heal with it.”
“With natural elegance and untiring invention, Joshua Poteat writes some of the most remarkable poetry you are ever likely to encounter. In storylines that move beyond the virtues of narrative into a region of wonder, combining violence and tenderness in an intimate voice capable of revelations as swift and sudden as the sear of lightning, his poems work themselves into the cloudy fabric of your imagination and reside there as unforgettable experiences."-Blackbird. "Poteat tells me things as if I were an audience but invisible. Or as if I were the moon. Yet something real passes between us, which is to say that the book is very good, that it leaves its mark. For here we are the audience of what is clearly an inner voice, flowing forward, throwing out its lovely perceptions, its lyrical lines of praise, its wonderment, its pursuit of moments and places, past and present.
“This is a song of the massacred, the destroyed and disappeared during Chilean President Pinochet’s era of tyranny – how can this be if the dismembered, burned and slashed cannot speak? Zurita pulls it out of his body, his day by day, his furnace by furnace mouth, his barracks by barracks and bombs by bombs rebel notary ledger. It is a collection of planks, that is, jagged samples of bone shards, splinters of barrack and tangles of wire, low tremolos of shrieks lingering, blood streams, body-sticks, warehouse and camp whispered love journals before the crematorium and time-space shafts intersecting the death ship Chile-Nagasaki-Auschwitz still in the liminoid edge of our present storms. With the eye and timbre of Rodnoti, Neruda, Bombal and Wiesel, Zurita, through Borzutzky’s masterful translation, hurls himself at our comfort culture barricades. He wants “awakening” –– in spite of the multiple chambers of horrors suffered by innocent peoples, mountains and seas – “There were millions of planets being born there.” And Zurita is one – and this book is thousands. Plank by plank, line by line, this is an inspiring, major work in translation in our post 9-11 era of always-war and terror. Heal with it.”
Angela Veronica Wong's ELSA unfolds the story of a fictional 18th-century French demimondaine and mistress of Louis XV. Meditating on gender, identity, and the precarity of women's lives against the scrim of patriarchal power and capital, the foils of the sonnet form and storytelling shape Wong's critique. Both adhering to and breaking the strictures of rhyme and meter, much as Elsa wears and divests herself of corset and panniers, Wong's sonnets shift between the politics of the French court and the streets of New York, the poems navigating the shoals of female embodiment, as we slip between then and now, narrated and narrator. Her beauty a discipline alternately wielded by and against her, "Elsa is droll they say / Elsa is a doll. Elsa is a hole / inside you put your secrets." In the interstices of her childhood, affairs, and births, Elsa resists, interrogating each exchange, each lover as pieces in a game of strategy in which to endure is to win, the price of freedom, the silence she keeps.
Wolf Centos is comprised of a patchwork form that originated around the fourth century. Reconfiguring pre-existing poetic texts into new systems of imagery and ideas, the author places poets in conversation with one another across centuries and continents. Though the poems are explicitly sutured together by the motif of the wolf, they are also linked by elements of textuality, loss, desire, and transformation. Wolf Centos is ultimately elegiac while acknowledging that as we age and experience loss, we must retain our “wildness”—the wolf’s wilderness— inside us.
Shortlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. In January 2006, responding to pressure from the American press, the Department of Defense released three hundred and seventeen verbal trials from Guantanamo naval base, the prison camp used to house accused terrorists. From these documents comes GUANTANAMO by Frank Smith. Appropriating language from the interrogation minutes, Smith shapes these questions and answers into a literary world as faceless and recursive as the interrogations themselves, leading us away from the comfort of reason and the hope of resolution. In this bilingual edition, translated into English by Vanessa Place, GUANTANAMO unsettles the categories of law and poetry, innocence and guilt, translation and interpretation.
