Darkmans by NICOLA BARKER

New In Paperback $16.95

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Darkmans is an exhilarating, extraordinary examination of the ways in which history can play jokes on us all… If History is just a sick joke which keeps on repeating itself, then who exactly might be telling it, and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV’s infamous court jester, whose favorite pastime was to burn people alive - for a laugh? Or could it be Andrew Boarde, Henry VIII’s physician, who kindly wrote John Scogin’s biography? Or could it be a tiny Kurd called Gaffar whose days are blighted by an unspeakable terror of - uh - salad? Or a beautiful, bulimic harpy with ridiculously weak bones? Or a man who guards Beckley Woods with a Samurai sword and a pregnant terrier?

Darkmans is a very modern book, set in Ashford [a ridiculously modern town], about two very old-fashioned subjects: love and jealousy. It’s also a book about invasion, obsession, displacement and possession, about comedy, art, prescription drugs and chiropody. And the main character? The past, which creeps up on the present and whispers something quite dark - quite unspeakable - into its ear.

The third of Nicola Barker’s narratives of the Thames Gateway, Darkmans is an epic novel of startling originality.

The Disinherited: Exile and the Making of Spanish Culture, 1492-1975 by HENRY KAMEN

New In Hardcover $34.95 - 10%

Few would doubt that Spain has for several centuries made a huge contribution to Europe’s culture. We all carry in our heads a seductive picture of what Spain stands for: its music, painting, buildings, and history. But what we do not understand is how much of this was the achievement of a very specific group: the Spanish in exile.

Henry Kamen’s The Disinherited is the most significant and enjoyable book on Spain to appear for many years. He creates a picture of a dysfunctional, violent country that, since the destruction of the last Muslim territories in Granada in 1492, has expelled wave after wave of its citizens in a brutal attempt to create religious and social conformity. Muslims, Jews, Protestants, liberals, Socialists, and Communists were all driven abroad at different times, and consequently what we think of as Spanish culture was substantially their invention—a creative response both to having no home and to the shock of encountering new worlds.

With brilliant sympathy, Kamen describes these diverse exiles’ travails as they scattered across Europe and Africa, across North and South America, many of them debarred by religion or politics from ever returning to Spain.They engaged in an unending project of fantasy about their old homeland—from the Sephardic communities of Amsterdam to the exiled Granada Muslims in Morocco, from liberal historians inventing the Black Legend of the Inquisition to painters in Paris inventing turreted, sensual Orientalist fantasies about the Alhambra. The twentieth century saw fresh waves of exile—from Picasso to Miró, Dalí to Buñuel, from Casals to Falla to Rodrigo—converting Spain itself into a cultural wasteland but enriching other cultures enormously. The Disinherited is a landmark work of cultural recovery, showing how Spain’s history has created a “virtual” culture imagined by people often thousands of miles from home—but whose impact on the world has been incalculable.

On Eloquence by DENIS DONOGHUE

New In Hardcover $27.50 - 10%

Donoghue argues persuasively that eloquence matters, that we should indeed care about it. “Because we should care about any instances of freedom, independence, creative force, sprezzatura,” he says, “especially when we live—perhaps this is increasingly the case—in a culture of the same, featuring official attitudes, stereotypes of the officially enforced values, sedated language, a politics of pacification.” A noteworthy addition to Donoghue’s long-term project to reclaim a disinterested appreciation of literature as literature, this volume is a wise and pleasurable meditation on eloquence, its unique ability to move or give pleasure, and its intrinsic value.

Journey to the East by LE CORBUSIER, Translated & Edited by IVAN ZAKNIC

New In Paperback $19.95

Le Corbusier was one of the greatest architects of the 20th century, if not the greatest in terms of influence and fecundity. This is the first book he ever wrote, never before published in English and only partially published in French in 1966, long after it was written in 1911. The translation, by an authority on the architect, is marvelously direct and straightforward, conveying the strength and poeticism of the original. The book records the young architect’s vivid impressions on his first “Grand Tour”not of London, Paris, and Vienna, as one might expect, but of Dresden, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Brindisi, Pompeii, and, finally, Athens, where before the aura of the Parthenon he became enthralled as an architect. A thrilling visual and verbal document of early modern architecture.

The Art of Small Things by JOHN MACK

New In Hardcover $24.95 - 10%

There is a true fascination with all things miniature and with the skills involved in creating a miniature work of art. Speaking of such works, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss remarked that “all miniatures seem to have an intrinsic aesthetic quality.” And who could fail to be beguiled by an exquisite Elizabethan miniature painting, an intricately carved Japanese netsuke, the words of the Lord’s Prayer engraved on a minute jewelled clasp, or the gemlike perfection of an eighteenth-century Italian micro-mosaic?

This richly illustrated book celebrates the art of the miniature, but also looks beyond it at the many aspects of “small worlds”–in particular, their capacity to evoke responses that far exceed their physical dimensions. Author John Mack explores the talismanic, religious, or magical properties with which miniatures are often imbued. Considering a wide range of objects–from Mughal miniature paintings, ancient Egyptian amulets, Ashanti gold weights, and Aztec jade figures to Hindu temple carts, English prints and drawings, classical Greek jewelry, maps, mosaics, models, and magical gems–he examines the use of the miniature form in various cultural contexts. He also assesses the importance of scale and questions the definition of “miniature.” How large or small can a miniature be? Is a map a miniaturization of a larger world? What is the point of an object that is almost too small to be seen by the human eye? From Gulliver to King Kong, classical art to surrealism, Aristotle to the Yoruba, The Art of Small Things shows us, in fine detail, the exquisite and the esoteric, the wondrous and the weird.

The Moscow Jewish Avant-Garde Theatre by BENJAMIN HARSHAV

New In Hardcover $45.00

“At last, in their own words! The colorful voices and vibrant players of the Moscow Yiddish Theater come to life in this invaluable contribution to the study of modern Jewish culture. Combining rare first-hand accounts with original source material and meticulous scholarship, Harshav’’s work lays the foundation for a new appreciation of the Yiddish theater—born of the modernist moment in its Jewish incarnation, home to Marc Chagall and Sholem Aleichem, and the lesser-known figures of Sh. Mikhoels and Abram Efros. This is a welcome and engrossing collection, much of which appears here for the first time in English translation.”—Barbara Mann, author of A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space

Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 by CATRIONA KELLY

New In Hardcover $45.00 - 10%

Jasper Johns: Gray

New In Hardcover $65.00

As one of the most acclaimed and influential living artists, Jasper Johns has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, many of which have explored his signature use of flags, numbers, and other emblems. This exhibition emerges from broader studies of Johns’s approach to form, examining for the first time the artist’s use of gray in his paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings from 1955 to the present. Featuring more than 130 works and including major new works that have never been exhibited publicly, the exhibition tracks Johns’s application of gray for more than five decades—an investigation that provides a framework for understanding the development of the artist’s entire oeuvre.Every one of Johns’s major iconic, serialized forms has been, at one stage or another, articulated in gray. The intellectual and emotional significance of this color in his work has changed remarkably since 1955, when he used it initially as a statement of skepticism, quietude, or anticipation. Gray has since evolved in Johns’s work as an agent in a profound examination of the very meaning of color itself. The predominance of gray in his recent Catenary series, which self-consciously summarizes the artist’s career, takes on new meaning in the context of this exhibition’s thesis.Gray is further considered as a material condition. For Johns it seems the most appropriate hue or tone to present a “conceptual” art as it stimulates vision the least and therefore facilitates the presentation of ideas. Conversely, gray has been, for the artist, a vehicle for thinking about color through its absence. Indeed some of his most expressively rich statements are made in gray.

THE EXHIBITION

The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade by JOHN ROBERTS

New In Paperback $19.95

In this intellectually wide-ranging book John Roberts develops a labor theory of culture as a model for explaining the dynamics of avant-garde art and the expansion of artistic authority in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Duchamp to Warhol, conceptual art, and the “post-visual” practices of the moment, Roberts explores the relationship between artistic labor and productive labor, and the limits and possibilities of authorship. In doing so, he confronts a recurring theme of both conservative and radical detractors of modern art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: how is skill, and the seeming absence of skill in modern art, to be theorized and evaluated? Drawing on cognitive psychology, labor process theory, social anthropology, and debates in contemporary political philosophy, Roberts’ book establishes a new critical topography for examining the cultural form of art today.

I Was Cuba: Treasures from the Ramiro Fernandez Collection

New In Hardcover $24.95

While most think of Cuba as a mythical island of rum, rumba, and revolution, period photographs reveal a more complex place. I Was Cuba is an original look at Cuban history as seen through the Ramiro Fernandez Collection arguably the world’s leading archive of Cuban photos and ephemera. I Was Cuba showcases rare, vernacular images from the nineteenth century through the revolutionary period, exploring the everyday and the eccentric. With texts from famed Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (Before Night Falls), this captivating volume is an intimate view into a bygone era of glamour, political upheaval, and astounding visual culture.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website