Books
Reader’s Diary: Cormac McCarthy's ‘Blood Meridian’
Thanks to Blood Meridian, I’ve learned, at least temporarily, the meanings of “quirt,” “pritchel,” and even the seemingly ultra-rare “malandered.”
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The Tender Proceduralism of Solmaz Sharif’s 'Look'
More than merely taking a side in a long-running coterie debate, Look’s selective disclosures of its method stand out because they represent a way of pointing to artistic process without fetishizing it.
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An Artist Who Cultivates Deadly Plants and Photographs Them
Matthew M. Kaelin takes pictures of carnivorous plants to highlight their beautiful and fatal details.
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Paintings of a Homegrown Black Superhero
A great deal of art leverages mystique by processing experience through varying layers of abstraction. The N-Word, a new collection of paintings by the artist Peter Williams — published by Rotland Press and with contributions by writers Lynn Crawford and Bill Harris — does the opposite: it lays out a response
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Nocturnal Photographs of the World's Oldest Trees
Photographer Beth Moon documents the world's oldest trees by the starry light of the night sky.
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Reader’s Diary: ‘Eva Hesse: Diaries’
An artist’s fame may continue, or even grow, as the actual works on which it is nominally based are lost from sight.
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Autumn Visionary: Alejandra Pizarnik’s Poems
A translator and critic as well as poet, Alejandra Pizarnik lived between Buenos Aries and Paris, befriending Octavio Paz and Julio Cortazar and identifying with, while not necessarily emulating, the so-called poètes maudites of 19th-century France.
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Etel Adnan: Philosophy at Night
Lebanese-American artist, philosopher, and poet Etel Adnan’s recent publication, Night, is in equal measure a series of meditations on intersubjectivity and spirituality, and a dialogue between prose poetry and short verse.
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Japan's Islands of Monsters
Every year around September, mud-covered figures run amok in the streets of the Shimajiri District in Japan's Okinawa Prefecture, smearing dirt on anyone they encounter.
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Inexplicable Found Photographs of Women in Trees
It all began at a flea market in Frankfurt, when photo collector Jochen Raiß came across a picture of a woman wearing a summer dress and high heels.
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Reader’s Diary: George Seferis's ‘Six Nights on the Acropolis’
George Seferis's mercurial tone can turn on a dime from lyricism to humor and back again, just as his characters shuttle between sensual abandon and neurotic self-flagellation.
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A Fictional Photographer Chronicles a Changing City
For several years, Ben Katchor explored in comics the vanishing (or long gone) rituals we associate with life in America's metropolitan centers.