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First, the Raven
Fiction. Sy Kirschbaum has spent almost twenty years in Prague translating legendary Czech dissident Jan Horak's samizdat masterpiece, Blue, Red, Gray. On the cusp of finishing, he is called back to his Maine hometown to see his troubled former lover, Ida Fields, now the wife of their childhood friend Gabe Slatky. But before he can see her, Sy must meet with Gabe for an evening at a local bar, an encounter that becomes a test of their old friendship and their dueling accounts of reality. In the conversation that follows, narratives of past and present--of art and life--interweave with perfect inevitability, yet with unpredictable, even shocking consequences, spiraling Sy and Gabe into confusion, doubt, and despair, without quite eroding, perhaps, the possibility of hope. FIRST, THE RAVEN: A PREFACE is a quietly yet profoundly radical work, as ingenious as a print by Escher or a Möbius strip: the Reader must glide along its whole immaculately ramified length before realizing how deeply life, despite its unceasing, nearly flawless appearance of normalcy, is upside down.
Thin Rising Vapors
Fiction. THIN RISING VAPORS by Seth Rogoff (author of FIRST, THE RAVEN: A PREFACE) is a richly psychological novel about enduring yet fragile friendship and the allure of nature and faith. Ezra Stern hasn't seen his best friend from childhood and college in the six years since Abel suddenly quit a successful career in New York to live alone in a cabin in the Maine woods. In late November, Ezra receives a letter from an estate lawyer telling him that Abel has died and that he has inherited the deceased's property in the lakeside town of Casco. That evening, as the first blizzard of the year approaches, Ezra leaves the city for Abel's house. Over the next seven days, Ezra searches to understand his friend's reclusive life and mysterious death by poring compulsively over Abel's voluminous posthumous papers, typed on an old Remington manual. As Ezra becomes increasingly immersed in Abel's writings, the coherence of the story of Abel's life builds and disintegrates in successive swells. Ezra discovers in the center of what had been familiar something irremediably alien, and in the heart of that total otherness--the unbearably intimate.
The Castle
"Seth Rogoff's The Castle is a novel that engages with Franz Kafka's novel of the same title, which famously ends mid-sentence. Built on a foundation of lost documents, erased texts, invented histories, boxed manuscripts, stolen sources, and translations with no originals, Rogoff writes an inverse reenactment of the original creative act-the bringing forth of chaos from form, in which the renowned translator Sy Kirschbaum travels out of the valley to the heart of the castle in a narrative that is at once a physical, psychological, literary, and metaphysical journey into Kafka's abandoned world"--
The Politics of the Dreamscape
This book traces the intersection of dreams and power in order to analyze the complex ways representations of dreams and paradigms of dream interpretation reinforce and challenge authoritarian, hierarchical structures. The book puts forward the concept of the dreamscape as a pre-representational space that contains anarchistic attributes, including its instability or chaotic nature and the lack of a stable or core selfhood and identity in its subjects. The book situates this concept of the dreamscape through an analysis of the Daoist notions of the “transformation of things” and hundun (chaos) and the biblical concept of tehom (the deep). Using this conceptual framework, this book analyzes paradigmatic moments of dream interpretation along a spectrum from radical, anarchist assertions of the primal dreamscape to authoritarian dream-texts that seek to reify identity, define and establish hierarchy, and support coercive relationships between unequal subjects. The book’s key figures include William Blake, Robert Frost, Jacob and Joseph from Genesis, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jean Rhys, Franz Kafka, and the neurobiologist J. Allan Hobson
The Kirschbaum Lectures
Sy Kirschbaum, renowned for his translations of major European writers like Jan Horak and Anton Grassfeld, has arrived at the college to teach a course called Introduction to Literature. He's come from the Czech countryside, where he'd been undergoing treatment by Dr. L. Hruska for a psychological breakdown connected to the seventeen-year-long process of finishing Horak's epic novel of Cold War dissent. Standing before a group of disoriented but enthralled students, facing down an increasingly tyrannical dean, Kirschbaum embarks on a twelve-week journey into his past and toward the heart of his literary life, 1990s Berlin, where art and dreams surged with the raw energy of utopian aspirations. Sy's lectures cross treacherous narrative terrain and spiral toward the shocking revelation of an unhealed wound, from which literature itself, in its infinity of interwoven forms, seems to pulsate.
Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines
This volume reflects on what legibility entails in today’s machinic world. It asks what makes cultural expressions, from literary texts, films, artworks and museum exhibits to archives, laws and algorithms, il/legible to whom or what, and with what consequences.
The Education of Kendrick Perkins
The Education of Kendrick Perkins is an intimate memoir about race, fatherhood, and basketball, from former NBA player and outspoken cultural critic, Kendrick "Perk" Perkins. At age eighteen, Kendrick Perkins left his grandparents' run-down yellow house in Beaumont, Texas for the last time. Sure, he'd traveled the country for camps and tournaments. He'd banged and bruised with the biggest and most skilled players the amateur basketball world had to offer. But he'd always come back home. In this powerful and intimate memoir, readers follow Perkins on his journey from small-town Texas athlete to the NBA. Both on and off the court, Perk gained a reputation for his candor and conviction--his unabiding sense of right and wrong. Now he tells all, offering the sports insights for which he has become a stellar ESPN commentator, and for the first time ever, sharing frank opinions about racial justice, political consciousness, and fatherhood. Years spent playing against and alongside giants like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James helped shape Perk's athleticism, but this is a story all his own, the story of an education.
Understanding Practice
Levine; 12.
Museum Culture
Museums display much more than artifacts; Museum Culture makes us on a tour through the complex of ideas, values and symbols that pervade and shape the practice of exhibiting today. Bringing together a broad range of perspectives from history, art history, critical theory and sociology, the contributors to this new collection argue that museums have become a central institution and metaphor in contemporary society. Discussing exhibition histories and practice in Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, Israel and the United States, the authors explore the ways in which museums assign meaning to art through various kinds of exhibitions and display strategies, examining the political implications of these strategies and the forms of knowledge they invoke and construct. The collection also discusses alternative exhibition forms, the involvement of some museums with the more spectacular practices of mass media culture, and looks at how museums construct their public.
The Atlantic Realists
In The Atlantic Realists, intellectual historian Matthew Specter offers a boldly revisionist interpretation of "realism," a prevalent stance in post-WWII US foreign policy and public discourse and the dominant international relations theory during the Cold War. Challenging the common view of realism as a set of universally binding truths about international affairs, Specter argues that its major features emerged from a century-long dialogue between American and German intellectuals beginning in the late nineteenth century. Specter uncovers an "Atlantic realist" tradition of reflection on the prerogatives of empire and the nature of power politics conditioned by fin de siècle imperial competition, two world wars, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Focusing on key figures in the evolution of realist thought, including Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, and Wilhelm Grewe, this book traces the development of the realist worldview over a century, dismantling myths about the national interest, Realpolitik, and the "art" of statesmanship.
