At 11 PM on Saturday September 19, 2009, my iPhone’s screen went black. Despite multiple attempts to recharge it, my iPhone was dead. In the middle of Connecticut, without a car but required to go to the Apple store, I existed sans iPhone for over a week.
“Zaha Hadid Complete Works” (edited by Gordana Fontana-Giusti and Patrik Schimacher) provides several explanations of Zaha Hadid’s most recent building, the Chanel Pavilion, through the display of the architect’s many drawings and paintings.
Although Louise Bourgeois’ oeuvre spans her entire adult life, it wasn’t until she reached her seventies that the artist and sculptor hit her creative peak. Since then, Bourgeois has produced an amalgam of sculptural pieces, assembled from a variety of materials, that reveal not only her family’s past but also her distinct and disturbing vision of sexuality.
When “All the Pretty Horses,” Cormac McCarthy’s sixth book and the first volume in his Border Trilogy, was first published in 1992, it won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Award for Fiction. McCarthy’s career had reached a seeming apex following nearly 30 years of writing with grant money. In the years preceding this book’s publication, McCarthy was thought of as a recluse, someone who would attain popularity among writers and no one else. With the commercial and critical success of “Horses,” his public image changed.
I’ll be honest — a big part of my reason for buying Rivka Galchen’s “Atmospheric Disturbances” was its cover. The British “sustainable reading” edition is a paperback with a slip sleeve. On the first layer, purple etchings of various locations and characters from the novel are thrown onto a white background. Underneath the sleeve is a red cover, outlined in white and littered with quotations from other authors and the press. The contrast between haunting visages and blank, bloody space was weird enough to evoke a wild, vivid world in my mind.
Andre Aciman, the author of “Out of Egypt” and a professor at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, published his first novel in 2007. “Call Me by Your Name” successfully mimics the tone of Aciman’s academic subject, Proust.
Anne Carson’s place in contemporary poetry remains uncertain. Although her books, which blend literary criticism, theory, poetry, prose and ancient Greek drama, have received praise, many find her intellectual eclecticism tiresomely precocious. Two of Carson’s more noted forays into the prose poem, “Autobiography of Red” and “The Beauty of the Husband,” demonstrate her ability to meditate upon lost love.
Dan Savage, editor of Seattle’s independent newspaper The Stranger and author of "Savage Love," a popular syndicated sex advice column, makes further spectacle of his personal life in his two memoirs, "The Kid" and "The Commitment." Although much of Savage’s material is explicit, he makes broad efforts to mock heteronormative American society and further the public image of gay men.
Paul West is an extremely stubborn writer. He has not deviated from his desired subject matter, rather attaining critical success through the mastery of his unique form. Unfortunately, West’s writing is better known for the awards it has won than for outstanding sales. His oeuvre is notable for its breadth, encompassing novels, short stories, personal essays, criticism, poetry, and autobiography.
Adrian Tomine’s latest effort, “Shortcomings,” reflects the continued rise of the graphic novel, a form initially received with skepticism. Currently, several authors, including Tomine, have garnered enough critical acclaim and demonstrated the literary prowess necessary to bring an amount of respect to their art.
Dave Eggers and a committee of high school students chose the articles for “The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007.” Eleven teens from the Bay Area searched through hundreds of periodicals and independent publications to find their favorite articles. After discussing these pieces with one another, they handed their selections to Eggers, who whittled the entries down to the volume in the reader’s hand.
Raymond Carver revivalism has become as tiresome as Ernest Hemingway idolatry. Sensitive high school and college creative writers thrive off of both authors’ simple prose style. Whereas Hemingway’s stories and novels have a hard-boiled journalistic integrity, Carver’s stories reveal the redemptive nature of human cruelty.
This Wespeak is directed to the campus at large as a cautionary tale in poor deductive logic. Federally sponsored sleep deprivation is nothing new. Spanning the time since the infamous Act of March 19, 1918 until the present day, the American congress has been depriving its citizens of their right, as one special woman said, "to save their own goddamn daytime hours."
"Loose Lips," a subversive exhibition by Melissa Stern ’80 on display in the South Zilkha Gallery, brought a unique creative experience to visitors during its opening this week. Stern compiled "Loose Lips" from a book of the same title by taking visual stories from the book and placing them onto the gallery wall.