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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 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 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"--
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.
Understanding Practice
Levine; 12.
Transforming Kafka
Patrick O'Neill approaches five of Kafka's novels and short stories by considering the many translations of each work as a single, multilingual “macrotext.”
Venus&document
Jared Marcel Pollen's debut novel, Venus&Document, gives lyric voice to philosophic insight and addresses itself directly to the cultural maelstrom in which we find ourselves. The novel is set in New York City after a natural disaster strikes and strange demonstrations begin to spring up all over the globe, with thousands of people occupying Central Park. Paul Kenning, journalist and writer, receives a special assignment by his editor to write about these mysterious Events. Paul comes to find himself with a monumental task - he believes he can write a great essay that will diagnose the ails of modern culture and explain the times in which he lives, certain that mass enlightenment, or perhaps his own death lies at the end of his effort. Paul Kenning is a comic figure for these strange times. As he navigates the affairs of his love life during a time of distress, he must explain it all - the rising tides, rising crime, refugee crises, political corruption, income inequality, racial injustice, and the overwhelming daily influx of information. Can he keep up with the relentless pace of events, as everything - including history itself - seems to be accelerating?
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.
The Country where No One Ever Dies
Victimized by dysfunctional family dynamics while struggling with the harsh realities of Albania's communist regime, a young girl endures everyday violence and the perpetual changing of her own identity, in an English translation of an award-winning first novel. Original.
