Ann Hamilton edited by Joan Simon Gregory R. Miller & Company ($60) by Mason Riddle Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects is the physical and aesthetic embodiment of its very subject matter. Alluring in both form and content, the book investigates, with a careful eye to detail, the nearly two decades of object-making by Hamilton, who […]
Christian Boltanski edited by Ralf Beil Hatje Cantz Publishers ($55) by Jan Estep After World War II, as thousands of children were displaced from their families, lost and homeless, the Red Cross publicly distributed posters in an attempt to find family members who might recognize their faces. Looking like a page from a school yearbook, […]
George Quasha and Carter Ratcliff North Atlantic Books ($30) by Deborah Karasov George Quasha’s extraordinary sculptures place natural stones in a state of breathtakingly improbable balance. This fitting follows strict rules: one rock must be balanced on another at a narrow point of contact; no adhesive is permissible, nor may either rock be modified in […]
Stephen Collis Talonbooks ($24.95) by Kate Eichhorn Poet, broadcaster, public intellectual, recluse, artist—Phyllis Webb has been appearing, and disappearing, from public life for more than half a century. In Phyllis Webb and the Common Good, Stephen Collis avoids any attempt to pin down this elusive poet. Sparing readers from trite autobiographical details and dry publishing histories, […]
Edie Kerouac-Parker City Lights ($14.95) by Mark Terrill Neither scholarly tome nor critical analysis, Edie Kerouac-Parker’s new memoir is a warm, intimate, and colorful portrait of the embryonic journey of Jack Kerouac, whose seminal novel On the Road celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. You’ll Be Okay is thus a timely contribution to the ongoing reassessment of Kerouac’s role […]
Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer Farrar Straus & Giroux ($18) by Stephen Burt I was never the Sassiest Boy in America; I hardly aspired to be one, much less to resemble Ian Svenonius, the first (and only culturally significant) young man to bear that putatively annual honor, bestowed by the teen mag Sassy at the apex—around 1990—of […]
Joshua Ferris Little, Brown and Company ($23.99) by Lucy Biederman Joshua Ferris’s debut novel, Then We Came to the End, is a uniquely concentrated expression of what it feels like to work in an office. The book abjures a protagonist, instead relying on a nebulous group of advertising agency employees that narrates the novel in first-person […]
Jana Martin Yeti / Verse Chorus Press ($15.95) by Spencer Dew “The taste of coke through a gold straw is different than the taste of coke through a hundred-dollar bill,” Jana Martin’s nameless makeshift dominatrix discovers, squeezed inside a keyhole dress that smells too much like bicycle tires. Her job for the night is making […]
Robert Lopez Calamari Press ($17) by Blake Butler Perhaps it was Samuel Beckett who first projected, or at least perfected, the art of the novel in which almost nothing ever happens. In each of the three parts of his trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable we are offered interior monologues of a mind so tripped and embedded by itself […]
Warren Ellis William Morrow ($21.95) by Spencer Dew Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis’s dark reworking of America, mixes absurd fantasies with real horrors, though his imagery falls short of the nightmarish. Sure, ostrich fetishists are mentioned, and there’s a film screening for enthusiasts of Godzilla bukkake; we hear on the news that a blind man […]