Eco-Gowanus: Urban Remediation by Design
by Richard Plunz & Patricia Culligan

Paperback $ 19.95

This richly illustrated volume documents two years of research into the Gowanus Canal region, presenting the area as a potential incubator of possible urban strategies, engaging issues of remediation, brownfields redevelopment, watershed restoration, and industrial recycling. It includes scholarly essays by the editors, Richard Plunz and Patricia Culligan, in addition to more than a dozen research projects and design proposals.

Last Last Chance: A Novel
by Fiona Maazel

Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

From Publishers Weekly
A sprawling debut with an alternately absurdist and sardonic tone, Maazel’s debut follows the tribulations of Lucy, a young drug addict who works at a New York City kosher chicken plant. Lucy’s father was a Centers for Disease Control bigwig who’s recently committed suicide, presumably due to fallout from his perceived role in an outbreak of plague that is spreading across America. Her mother, Isifrid, is a crack-addled gazillionaire, while grandmother Agneth talks incessantly of reincarnation, and younger half-sister Hannah harbors a huge obsession with disease. As the novel opens, Lucy sets off with her alcoholic, over-50 co-worker, Stanley, to attend the wedding of her best friend, Kam—who is marrying Eric, whom Lucy met first and fell in love with. After some hijinks, Lucy heads to a rehab facility in Texas. Over the course of Lucy’s wild road trip, Maazel, daughter of conductor Loren, delivers some electric writing: the novel is brimming with wit, ideas and delightfully screwball humor. But the whimsy undermines the story, especially on the abundant substance abuse material. The novel’s earnest, surprising conclusion feels out of sync with the zingy, existential banter of its core. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Haunted
by Philippe Dupuy

Hardcover $24.95 - 10%

Ten years after finishing the original French edition of Maybe Later—the book in which the French superstar cartooning duo Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian worked separately for the first time—Dupuy set out on his own again with Haunted. Gone are the tightly constructed narratives and urbane, elegant graphics of his projects with Berberian. In their place, roughed-in drawings give an urgent,
spontaneous feeling to a series of hallucinatory stories and dreamlike sequences that register the raw distress of solitude and self-doubt—the dark core of the material held in balance by Dupuy’s acid humor and lyrical sensibility.

A jogging Dupuy runs around and sometimes through the stories of the misfit characters that haunt him: a self-amputating dog, a Left Bank artist in search of emptiness, an art-collecting duck, Lucha Libre wrestlers, and a group of single guys at the watering hole imagined as the anthropomorphic “Forest Friends.” Heart pumping, gaze turned inward, the ground occasionally giving way beneath his feet, this alter ego concludes that sometimes you need to cross the line to figure out where it is.

The original French edition of Haunted was nominated for the 2006 award for Best Comic Book at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf

Hardcover $26.00 - 10%

From Publishers Weekly
Books on world elites tend to focus on the superwealthy, but political scholar Rothkopf (Running the World) has written a serious and eminently readable evaluation of the superpowerful. Until recent decades, great-power governments provided most of the superclass, accompanied by a few heads of international movements (i.e., the pope) and entrepreneurs (Rothschilds, Rockefellers). Today, economic clout—fueled by the explosive expansion of international trade, travel and communication—rules. The nation state’s power has diminished, according to Rothkopf, shrinking politicians to minority power broker status. Leaders in international business, finance and the defense industry not only dominate the superclass, they move freely into high positions in their nations’ governments and back to private life largely beyond the notice of elected legislatures (including the U.S. Congress), which remain abysmally ignorant of affairs beyond their borders. The superelites’ disproportionate influence over national policy is often constructive, but always self-interested. Across the world, the author contends, few object to corruption and oppressive governments provided they can do business in these countries. Neither hand-wringing nor worshipful, this book delivers an unsettling account of what the immense and growing power of this superclass bodes for the future.

New European Poets
Edited by Wayne Miller & Kevin Prufer

Paperback $18.00

Poems
by Hermann Hesse, translated by James Wright

Paperback $13.00

Few American readers seem to be aware that Hermann Hesse, author of the epic novels Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, among many others, also wrote poetry, the best of which the poet James Wright has translated and included in this book. This is a special volume—filled with short, direct poems about love, death, loneliness, the seasons—that is imbued with some of the imagery and feeling of Hesse’s novels but that has a clarity and resonance all its own, a sense of longing for love and for home that is both deceptively simple and deeply moving.

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Hardcover)
by Melody Petersen

Hardcover $26.00 - 10%

From Publishers Weekly
Drug companies have institutionalized deception, said a former pharmaceutical executive at a 1990 Senate hearing. And former New York Times reporter Petersen details these deceptions with information that will be startling even to those who closely follow the news on big pharma. Her subtitle, How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs, is most effectively illustrated in a chapter detailing Parke-Davis’s aggressive marketing of the epilepsy drug Neurontin for everything, in blatant disregard of regulations against promoting drugs for uses not approved by the FDA. Such reporting, rather than style or analysis, is Petersen’s strength. Much of what she recounts—such as the glut of copycat drugs like antacids, and marketers’ lavish wining and dining of doctors—has been covered in books by others, like Marcia Angell. But Petersen fleshes out these issues and names prominent doctors who, she says, are on the take. She is particularly strong on the ghostwriting of medical journal articles by advertising agencies. She also covers less familiar matters, like the environmental impact of drug residues in water. There are quibbles; for instance, Petersen accepts without examination the bromide that most people take prescription drugs as a quick fix. But she ends with tough, sound suggestions for reforms to make the pharmaceutical industry honest and to protect consumers. 

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
by David Hajdu

Hardcover $26.00 - 10%

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. After writing about the folk scene of the early 1960s in Positively 4th Street, Hajdu goes back a decade to examine the censorship debate over comic books, casting the controversy as a prelude to the cultural battle over rock music. Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, the centerpiece of the movement, has been reduced in public memory to a joke—particularly the attack on Batman for its homoeroticism—but Hajdu brings a more nuanced telling of Wertham’s background and shows how his arguments were preceded by others. Yet he comes down hard on the unsound research techniques and sweeping generalizations that led Wertham to conclude that nearly all comic books would inspire antisocial behavior in young readers. There are no real heroes here, only villains and victims; Hajdu turns to the writers and artists whose careers were ruined when censorship and other legal restrictions gutted the comics industry, and young kids who were coerced into participating in book burnings by overzealous parents and teachers. With such a meticulous setup, the history builds slowly but the main attraction—EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines’s attempt to explain in a Senate committee hearing how an illustration of a man holding a severed head could be in good taste—holds all the dramatic power it has acquired as it’s been told among fans over the past half-century.

Somebody Scream!: Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power
by Marcus Reeves

Hardcover $25.00

For many African Americans of a certain demographic the sixties and seventies were the golden age of political movements. The Civil Rights movement segued into the Black Power movement which begat the Black Arts movement. Fast forward to 1979 and the release of Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” With the onset of the Reagan years, we begin to see the unraveling of many of the advances fought for in the previous decades. Much of this occurred in the absence of credible, long-term leadership in the black community. Young blacks disillusioned with politics and feeling society no longer cared or looked out for their concerns started rapping with each other about their plight, becoming their own leaders on the battlefield of culture and birthing Hip-Hop in the process. In Somebody Scream, Marcus Reeves explores hip-hop music and its politics. Looking at ten artists that have impacted rap—from Run-DMC (Black Pop in a B-Boy Stance) to Eminem (Vanilla Nice)—and puts their music and celebrity in a larger socio-political context. In doing so, he tells the story of hip hop’s rise from New York-based musical form to commercial music revolution to unifying expression for a post-black power generation.

Eternal Enemies: Poems
by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh

Hardcover $24.00 - 10%

One of the most gifted and readable poets of his time, Adam Zagajewski is proving to be a contemporary classic. Few writers in either poetry or prose can be said to have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that have become a matter of course with Zagajewski. It is these qualities, combined with his wry humor, gentle skepticism, and perpetual sense of history’s dark possibilities, that have earned him a devoted international following. This collection, gracefully translated by Clare Cavanagh, finds the poet reflecting on place, language, and history. Especially moving here are his tributes to writers, friends known in person or in books—people such as Milosz and Sebald, Brodsky and Blake—which intermingle naturally with portraits of family members and loved ones. Eternal Enemies is a luminous meeting of art and everyday life.

Bill Owens
by Bill Owens, intro by A.M. Homes

Hardcover $65.00 - 10%

A black-and-white photograph captures a woman, curlers in her hair and a baby in her arms, standing in a messy kitchen and saying, “How can I worry about the damned dishes when there are children dying in Vietnam?” California photographer Bill Owens is best known for his critically acclaimed series Suburbia, which was published as a monograph in 1972, and has long been considered one of the classic photo books of the era. For this influential and evocative project, Owens simply shot friends and acquaintances in his Livermore, California, neighborhood and allowed them to speak for themselves. Ordinary people had rarely been so riveting.
A comprehensive monograph, this volume consists of several sections of work from 1969 to the present, opening at the height of flower power, with images of the Beat generation, Woodstock and the protests against Vietnam. Owens has always remained intrigued by America as a subject: there follows a series of images focusing on urban America, its endless grids and homogeneous cities. In his most recent photos, many of which are in color and previously unpublished, Owens reveals how suburbia has evolved in the last 40 years–from the friendly place he captured in the 1970s to one characterized by sprawl and anonymity.

Easter Everywhere: A Memoir
by Darcey Steinke

Paperback $14.95

From Publishers Weekly
A scrappy kid with a violent stutter, novelist Steinke (Milk; Suicide Blonde) is the oldest child of an aloof Lutheran minister and a clinically depressed former Miss Albany. The household is steeped in the word of God; Steinke grows up brewing her own communion wine, baptizing the neighborhood cats and craving, even at age six, spiritual transcendence. It’s a wish that never leaves her, and she’s tireless in her pursuit of this elusive state of oneness, first seeking it in a sexually obsessive relationship with a man who turns out to be gay, and then in her doomed marriage. Her writing on these topics is blunt and powerful. When her husband confides that a teenage girl of their acquaintance has been e-mailing him, Steinke doesn’t pull her punches. “Michael believed that getting close to young girls and hearing about their love life was so exciting that anyone, even his own wife, would understand the Masonic pull.” When it comes to her personal relationship with God—the real meat of the book—Steinke is relatively brief, almost distant: “The idea of church still has a grip on my imagination, but I realize now that what I thought was held only inside those walls—grace and divinity—is actually located directly and authentically inside myself.” Steinke is a gifted writer, and this only leaves readers wanting more.

Color Chart
by Ann Temkin, Briony Fer, Melissa Ho, & Nora Lawrence

Hardcover $55.00 - 10%

Color Chart addresses the impact of standardized, mass-produced color on the art of the past 60 years. Taking the commercial color chart as its central metaphor, this volume chronicles an important artistic shift that took place during the middle of the twentieth century: a frank acknowledgment of color as a matter-of-fact element rather than a vehicle of spiritual or emotional content. Collected here are more than 40 artists who explore in their works the double meaning of “ready-made color”–color bought off the shelf, rather than mixed on a palette, as well as color assigned by chance or arbitrary system rather than composed with traditional chromatic harmonies in mind.
Published to accompany a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, this volume begins with Marcel Duchamp’s Tu m’, the artist’s final painting, made in 1918, with its long array of color samples looming across the canvas. This early recognition of color’s commercial nature was fully explored more than three decades later by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Alighiero Boetti, who in the 1950s to the 1970s, with a host of others, redefined the parameters of color from a matter of personal expression to one of arbitrary systems and random processes. The repercussions of this transformation continue to be felt into the twenty-first century, in work by artists including Sherrie Levine, Mike Kelley and Damien Hirst, as well as others who explore color in digital technology This volume traces the lineage of the questions provoked by color’s new status, and the variety of answers that have resulted.