I’ve never felt that fiction was quite enough. Like a dream that someone tells you, it’s arbitrary and slightly meaningless to anyone but the dreamer. Nonfiction is nice, but because what is described did, in fact, actually happen, it can’t happen any other way. And where’s the fun (or art) in that? Autofiction, which tries to blur the line between the two, seems to draw attention to itself, making the author of the story more important than the actual story. So what’s the answer? There is no answer. But every now and then, a book seems not to care about the difference and, therefore, transcends it.
I wrote
The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts
Sometimes, I have so many ideas happening in my mind at the same time that it’s hard to keep up with myself. And I get lost. Here’s a book by a writer with a mind that’s bursting with ideas, about how we communicate with each other, about how the culture controls how we communicate. And about how culture works.
Ideas sprout in the author’s protean mind, twirling and spinning and evolving, pushing him toward a black comedy, forcing him to the edge of madness where his thoughts, heated, become something closer to emotion until, by the end of the book the abstract ideas come home, settling, becoming quiet, and personal, and the story connects us back to ourselves.
Written originally for a special issue of The New Yorker and reissued here with a new forward by the author, Within the Context of No Context is George W. S. Trow's brilliant exposition on the state of American culture and twentieth-century life. Published to widespread acclaim, Within the Context of No Context became an immediate classic and is, to this day, a favorite work of writers and critics alike. Both a chilling commentary on the times in which it was written and an eerie premonition of the future, Trow's work locates and traces, describes and analyzes the components of change…
Framed by a scholarly appraisal of an actual archaic text, this novel, in verse, proceeds to tell a story of love, from boyhood to death.
It’s the story, amazingly, of a monster, a mythic creature with wings and red skin, but you forget about the myth when you’re reading. And you forget about poetry. Or you wonder, what’s the difference between poetry and a beautiful narrative of longing, of heartbreak, of hope and friendship and family ties, and when you get to the end of the life of this kid, which, like all our lives, is a story of love, you feel you understand a little more clearly what it is.
In this extraordinary epic poem, Anne Carson bridges the gap between classicism and the modern, poetry and prose, with a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon.
There is a strong mixture of whimsy and sadness in Geryon's story. He is tormented as a boy by his brother, escapes to a parallel world of photography, and falls in love with Herakles - a golden young man who leaves Geryon at the peak of infatuation. Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, until that glass house is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by…
LeeAnn Pickrell’s love affair with punctuation began in a tenth-grade English class.
Punctuated is a playful book of punctuation poems inspired by her years as an editor. Frustrated by the misuse of the semicolon, she wrote a poem to illustrate its correct use. From there she realized the other marks…
A deceptively simple idea: tell the story of falling in love. But for this book what the author falls in love with is the color blue. How can you fall in love with a color? It’s not as simple as it first appears.
The various aspects of love become, if anything, more real when talking about the various aspects of this color, looked at from various angles, digested, and felt. Lust and fucking and sadness and longing all come into play. And, of course, the object of affection rarely acts the way you want it to.
But by allowing her anger, jealousy, and resentment to reveal themselves, the author allows her story of a love affair to reveal something human.
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color ...A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the…
A girl gets a job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Information Desk. The current show is an installation called Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt, and so begins the book that is housed inside a poem but is really the story of how the author negotiates her way around loss, love, lust, and memory.
Along the way, she dissects the paintings in the Met. Also, insects, and creepy co-workers, and she finds something in them that resonates with her. And the President’s son, John-John is also part of the life living in the ideas the author makes so visceral and tangible and felt.
Named a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick
“Among the year's highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.” —Washington Post
“An effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . It’s bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence.” —New York Review of Books
A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers “something few poets ever discover:…
LeeAnn Pickrell’s love affair with punctuation began in a tenth-grade English class.
Punctuated is a playful book of punctuation poems inspired by her years as an editor. Frustrated by the misuse of the semicolon, she wrote a poem to illustrate its correct use. From there she realized the other marks…
As weird and self-indulgent as an actual person, this “novel,” about a failed filmmaker who finds, in the failed life of Simone Weil, a worthy doppelganger, takes some getting used to. But the author’s honesty doesn’t let go, and pretty soon, I found myself wondering along with her, what is worthy? And who gets to decide what’s worthy? Who gets to decide anything in a world that seems to make no sense?
Weil, an ersatz saint who starved herself to death, is just one of the triggers raising the questions that are raised by a book that, appropriately, fails to answer them. But it does so with humor and an often exhilarating disrespect.
It's 1996, and Chris Kraus is in Berlin, seeking a distributor for her film Gravity & Grace, described alternately as 'an experimental 16mm film about hope, despair, religious feeling and conviction' and 'an amateur intellectual's home video expanded to bulimic lengths' ...
It's 1942 in Marseille, and Simone Weil is waiting for the US entry visa that will save her from the Holocaust, while writing work described alternately as a 'radical philosophy of sadness' and 'immoral, trite, irrelevant and paradoxical' ...
It's the late 90s, the millennium is approaching, and Chris Kraus is in Los Angeles, not eating, waiting for…
This book is an intricate pas de corps in which fiction, film noir, and the history of dance combine to describe life in pre-millennial Los Angeles. The stories of the great romantic ballets are both reflected and refracted in the journey of a once-innocent narrator whose desire (or is it destiny?) leads him into a Technicolor world of desperation, obsession, and possibly love.
The films of John Cassavetes, the dances of George Balanchine, and the lives of Nijinsky and Pavlova and Joseph Cornell are filtered through the mind of a person who, by erasing his old life, hopes to start a new one.
