Autoportrait

Nominated for the Chicago Review of Books Award A work of unflinching honesty, Autoportrait is a hypnotic memoir of reflection, loss, and everyday joy from one of America's best contemporary novelists Jesse Ball has produced fourteen acclaimed works of deeply empathetic absurdism in poetry and fiction. Now, he offers readers his first memoir, one that showcases his “humane curiosity” (James Wood) and invites the reader into a raw and personal account of love, grief, and memory. Inspired by the memoir Édouard Levé put to paper shortly before his death, Autoportrait is an extraordinarily frank and intimate work from one of America's most brilliant authors. The subtle power of Ball's voice conjures the richness of everyday life. On each page, half-remembered moments are woven together with the joys and triumphs—and the mistakes and humiliations, too—that somehow tell us who we are, why we are here. Held at the same height as tragic accounts of illness or death are moments of startling beauty, banality, or humor: "I wake in the morning, I sit, I walk long distances. If there is somewhere to swim, I may swim. If I have a bicycle, I will ride it, especially to meet someone. There is no more preparing for me to do, other than preparing for death, and I do that by laughing. Not laughing at death, of course. Laughing at myself." An extraordinary memoir that reminds us what is possible and builds to the kind of power one might feel reading Anne Carson's Glass Essay, or Joe Brainard's I Remember. Autoportrait will leave you feeling utterly invigorated, inspired, and a little afraid.

'NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people's life.' New York Times ' One of France's most exciting prose stylists.' The Guardian. Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia. Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning, Marie NDiaye's brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.

Recorded and transcribed throughout the 1960s, Carla Lonzi's Self-portrait ruptures the linear tradition of art-historical writing. Lonzi first abolishes the role of the critic, her own, seeking change over self-preservation by theorising against the act of theorising. This is the voice of feminist experimentalism in Italian art and literature, and here Lonzi speaks for herself in English. Self-portrait montages her verbatim conversations with fourteen prominent artists working at the time, all men except one. Lonzi's vital feeling that it was impossible to respond professionally to the political and existential problems embedded in the production and distribution of artworks drives the book's contingent structure. Artmaking struck Lonzi as the invitation to be together in a humanly satisfying way. This first English translation brings Lonzi's final work of criticism before her break with 'art' to an international audience. Her uncompromising enactment and pragmatic drop-out discontinues the narration of postwar modern art in Italy and beyond.

Showcases sixty-five self portraits, many previously unpublished and culled from his earliest works, that offer insight into the photographer's complex personality and self-explorations.

Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel—it is, in a sense, the author's own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend—perhaps real, perhaps fictional—more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him, in favor of oblivion. Gradually, through Levé's casually obsessive, pointillist, beautiful ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight psychological resemblance to Levé himself. But Suicide is more than just a compendium of memories of an old friend; it is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications and effects of the act of suicide, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life.

First published in 2000 this revised edition includes a large number of new images and shows the remarkable shift from analogue to digital photography that has taken place over the period. The book also features a playable labyrinth puzzle on the front cover.

The author argues that Indiana's strident visual language emerges from his tendency to recast his life in story and verse, a fact that unlocks complex and secret tissues of figurative meaning within the deceptively simple canvases. By illuminating the enigmas in Indiana's word and image combinations, she helps to explain the longevity of LOVE and its influence on a later generation of artists."--BOOK JACKET.

"I had a real romance with this book." —Miranda July A highly anticipated collection, from the writer Maggie Nelson has called, “bracingly good...refreshing and welcome,” that explores the myriad ways in which desire and commodification intersect. From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing. Starting with Hodson’s own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre—including modeling and working on a NASA Mars mission— Hodson expands outward, looking at the ways in which the human will submits, whether in the marketplace or in a relationship. Both tender and jarring, this collection is relevant to anyone who’s ever searched for what the self is worth. Hodson’s accumulation within each piece is purposeful, and her prose vivid, clear, and sometimes even shocking, as she explores the wonderful and strange forms of desire. Tonight I'm Someone Else is a fresh, poetic debut from an exciting emerging voice, in which Hodson asks, “How much can a body endure?” And the resounding answer: "Almost everything."