Book cover of Model City

Book description

Model City answers its own inaugural question 'What was it like?' in 288 different ways. The accumulation of these answers offers a form of sustained and refined negative capability, which by turns is wry, profound and abundant with an unspecified longing for the passing ghost of European idealism. In the…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Model City as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

The book is a haunting description of a model city, written in Berlin and other cities, that answers the question: “What was it like?” Each of the seventy pages of the book contains four long sentences in prose, each of which begins, “It was like.” 

Every time I read the book, which I teach in my classes, I am delighted by her prose style and awed by Stonecipher’s ability to depict both presence and absence. Stonecipher is exclusively a prose poet and has written a book about that poetic form. Her writing also displays proceduralism, which is the invention of…

From Paul's list on contemporary long poems.

If you love Model City...

Book cover of These Blue Mountains

These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…

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