BlogFlockYuki Tanaka
Copper Canyon Press ($17)
by John Bradley
Although Surrealism is among the most important artistic movements of the past hundred years, the adjective “surreal” has largely lost its connection to the unconscious and the marvelous. Merriam-Webster, for example, defines “surreal” as “marked by the intense irrational reality…
by Zack Kopp
Originally from England, John Tottenham has made Los Angeles his home for over two decades. A sharp critic of both writing and visual art, he has published reviews and essays in numerous publications, including a long-standing column in the art magazine Artillery.…
by Kit Robinson
The poet Deborah Meadows has made a career of collaging materials from a wide array of specialized disciplines to create conceptual works with lively, surprisingly personable surfaces. Her work demonstrates what happens when you put together words from disparate vocabularies to…
Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur
NBM ($29.99)
by Paul Buhle
It is perhaps not so surprising to learn that the real story of a hugely popular 20th-century comic art form has slipped into a seemingly distant past, even as a densely theoretical, university-based comics scholarship emerges. Even now, the medium’s…
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Patrick Lawler: Swallowed by a Hyperobject | Interviewed by John Bradley
Andrew Grace: If only, heaven…
Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Press ($30)
by Ben Sloan
A time machine swiveling us to an assortment of cultural markers from the 1930s—vaudeville, fascism, “chorus cuties trucking across at all angles shaking ostrich-feather fans,” U-boats, antisemitism, Al Capone, “a slowly rotating dance floor,” Hitler—Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel Shadow Ticket is a…
Robert D. Kaplan
Random House ($31)
by Poul Houe
In his 2012 book The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (Random House), noted foreign affairs observer Robert D. Kaplan explored the spatial dimension of the crisis…
André Breton
Translated by Austin Carder
City Lights Publishers ($18.95)
In 1946, some six years after fleeing Fascist France for New York City, André Breton returned to post-war Paris. He sought not only to resume surrealist activities with old and new comrades, but also…
Ethan Rutherford
Deep Vellum Publishing ($17.95)
Annie Dillard observed that under the influence of Herman Melville’s pen, a whale becomes “an aesthetic or epistemological probe by means of which the artist analyzes the universe.” The same might be said of…
Tessa Bolsover
Black Ocean ($18)
Tessa Bolsover’s Crane is an exercise in indexing and meshing. Though many poetry collections invest in the interconnectedness of words, concepts, and experiences, writers like Bolsover and her touchstones (including Nathaniel Mackey and Susan Howe, whose epigraph opens the book) strive…