The Open The Open
Where even the shadow has light, there summer is spoken. Where darkness speaks you— a word— you still say light. Where the body is, you say convocation, absolute sun. (translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Mayhew)
Sep 26, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Andrés Sánchez Robyana
Shelf Life Shelf Life
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani’s The Freud Files; E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer, editors, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank
Sep 26, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Elias Altman
Empire and Revolution: On Joshua Freeman Empire and Revolution: On Joshua Freeman
In a new history of postwar America, Joshua Freeman argues that policy changes occur because of pressure from the bottom up.
Sep 26, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Thomas J. Sugrue
Brooklyn Book Festival, 2012 Brooklyn Book Festival, 2012
This Sunday's Brooklyn Book Festival is one of the country's most celebrated celebrations of books, reading and independent publishing.
Sep 19, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Peter Rothberg
The Unconquered Flame: On Robert Duncan The Unconquered Flame: On Robert Duncan
A new biography shows how the poet Robert Duncan fed a line backward into the labyrinthine history of human imagination.
Sep 18, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Ange Mlinko
Shelf Life Shelf Life
Maureen F. McHugh's After the Apocalypse; Joshua Cohen's Four New Messages
Sep 18, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Aaron Thier
Last Picture Shows: Film and Obsolescence Last Picture Shows: Film and Obsolescence
Until the final reel of celluloid is shot and projected, will every film’s primary subject be film itself?
Sep 18, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Akiva Gottlieb
Rat Bastard: On Bruce Conner Rat Bastard: On Bruce Conner
The shadows were the elective habitat of the artist Bruce Conner, who thought true knowledge was shrouded in secrecy.
Sep 18, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Barry Schwabsky
Superfund Superfund
If this was all the access you had to sky, looking down through boardwalk boards into a tributary glinting, if this was all the time your calling or had been all this time, and you found it, foundv yourself arrested above an opening, if purgatory were as real as bridges, where would your religion build, in the soft parabola of carriage and suds, or in the hip points your heaviness keeps in counsel with the planks. The mill of spiderlight and curtainwork in one run over the impress of cofferdam in the other. This river in the days left to live, in the leftover days reclamation balances, trains its instrument on a prospect, romantic and pushy plainly. The joinery of the boards is thoughtful, or the prison wish is a watchwork through and through: to guess at the rare punt of a single stick’s bark odyssey, or to separate from the rummage each drifted glyph of superscript and gloss the passage. Drawn through the bothway of the ribs: A breath, and then another. No prior experience knock wood. Not purgatory, but overage.
Sep 18, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Brian Blanchfield
The Generalist: On Charles de Gaulle The Generalist: On Charles de Gaulle
How Charles de Gaulle’s story became a collective fairy tale that the French have agreed to believe in.
Sep 12, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Thomas Meaney