Books
Picture This: Sunandini Banerjee and the Book Illustrator’s Art
How do adjacent drawings or photos affect our reading experience as readers? What happens in the mind as we process both words and images? How do both tell a story together?
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Words Doing as They Want to Do: Image+Text Work by Women
Siglio Press’s anthology of text-based art, It is Almost That, is a rare gem: a book of pivotal works that have received little critical attention. Because of its attention to the obscure, It is Almost That is essential for anyone interested in feminist art, performance studies, cross-genre writing
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Salman Rushdie Says, “Art Is Not Entertainment ... It’s a Revolution”
During last night's Arthur Miller Freedom to Write event, writer Salman Rushie talked about the fact that censorship exists to change the subject. When it is introduced in the realm of art, it becomes the subject; the attack onto the work becomes the work. As Rushdie said, “Assumptions of guilt repl
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A Street Photographer for the 21st Century
The content of Strauss’s individual photographs is not always disturbing, but paging through the entirety of 10 Years means talking a walk through neighborhoods and into situations that you might otherwise avoid.
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“Writing with Scissors”: Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World
Last month, the UK-based novelist Graham Rawle gave a lecture at Antenna Media Centre in Nottingham called “Writing with Scissors.” Writing with scissors — a synonymous phrase for textual collage — would seem to aptly describe the compositional process of Woman’s World, Rawle’s handsomely designed a
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Call and Response: Kathleen Fraser’s “movable TYYPE”
Although Kathleen Fraser has long divided her time between San Francisco and Rome, her most recent collection, movable TYYPE (Nightboat Books), reminds us of her poetry’s New York roots. She glosses the title of the volume’s first poem, “Orologic,” as proposing “a particular time frame for entering
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The Photographs of A Changed Landscape
Altered Landscape is a collection of over 900 photographs, spanning the last fifty years, by hundreds of contemporary photographers, all of whom have helped to redefine contemporary landscape photography.
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Tuning In: Devin Johnston’s Verse Seeks to Fill the Nothing with Song
The title of Devin Johnston’s fourth book of poems, Traveler, might suggest that the work will offer some series of narratives about moving from place to place. To be sure, the poems are generated by specific sites, from the Scottish Highlands to the American midlands. Yet, what characterizes these
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The Verse That Could Happen: National Poetry Month to the Rescue?
A couple of months back I was sitting in an East Village dive bar enjoying, oh, I don’t know, my third or fourth whiskey (it was Tuesday, after all), when I noticed a very attractive girl next to me committing what appeared to be lines of verse onto a yellow notepad. Hang on, I thought: a fetching y
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Comic Twist: The New Kramers Ergot Reveals a Turn toward Genre
In July 2004, The New York Times Magazine signaled the advent of the “literary” comic book and described how a significant group of cartoonists — including Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Seth and Marjane Satrapi — had popularized these “comics with a brain.”
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A Global Toy Story
Do children's toys breed a culture of violence and war? This was one of the many questions you're left to ponder when reading Miniscule Blue Helmets on a Massive Quest by Dutch artist Pierre Derks.
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Wheel Life: Paul Scheerbart's Quest to Build a Perpetual Motion Machine
My favorite shelf in the home library is where Raymond Roussel, the Comte de Lautréamont, E.T. A. Hoffmann, Leonora Carrington and other writers form a brilliant phalanx of eccentricity and marvel. I turn to it like a five-hour energy drink, sampling a few pages of, say, Raymond Queneau or Heinrich