The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even

This is a wonderful comic novel, about philosophy, the nature of art, the beauty of the ordinary, and about quirky, complete, night & day victims of obsessive–compulsive disorder. Two charming, over–anxious, germ–phobic friends, Isaac and Greg take a road trip from Boston to Philadelphia. They are both obsessed with Marcel Duchamp, his art and his ideas, and thus the destination has to be the largest collection of Duchamp in the world, The Philadelphia Art Museum, the actual place "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" was to be delivered when it was cracked and broken in shipment. The piece is sometimes known as The Large Glass, and today it sits in the middle of a large gallery proudly displayed in its broken state which Duchamp repaired and then certified had been his intention all along. The two men are driven in a rented disinfected Winnebago by Kelly, a beautiful art scholar who smells like a mixture of lemons and fresh sawdust. They intend to pick up an ancient chocolate grinder, an exact working sculptural copy of one used in a Duchamp painting. Isaac intends to grind his own pure chocolate, which will prevent the build–up or arterial plaque, because his mother died of a stroke. Every action has its own suitable reaction, and then some. Isaac hopes eventually to overcome his devotion to his many obsessions and to re–enter the world, evidently his version of the real world. He is not an unreliable narrator, he is a hyper–reliable narrator, consumed by his own attention and thrilled with the connections he sees everywhere all at once. Of course when he finally gets to the museum he must dress–up as a woman to visit the collection.

A woman disappears, leaving behind an incendiary diary chronicling a journey of sexual awakening. To all who knew her, she was the good wife: happy, devoted, content. But the diary reveals a secret self, one who's discovered that her new marriage contains mysteries of its own. She has discovered a forgotten Elizabethan manuscript that dares to speak of what women truly desire, and inspired by its revelations, she tastes for the first time the intoxicating power of knowing what she wants and how to get it. The question is: How long can she sustain a perilous double life?

Octavio Paz conveying “his awareness of Duchamp as a great cautionary figure in our culture, warning us with jest and quiet scandals of the menacing encroachment of criticism, science and even art.” —New York Times Book Review

Each volume in series discusses a famous painting or sculpture in detail, as both image and idea, in its context--whether stylistic, technical, literary, religious, social, or political.

"Transit, transitional, transition: Dalia Judovitz catches Marcel Duchamp on the run with his art in a suitcase and his thought all boxed and ready to go. . . . She demonstrates how the theme of transition, reappearing from work to work, makes each piece reproduce some other piece, while all continue to exemplify an original which can no longer be found and which has no creator."—Jean-François Lyotard

Between 1912 and 1918, Marcel Duchamp made hundreds of notes in preparation for the execution of his major work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), also known as the Large Glass. Considering these notes to be as important as the Glass itself, Duchamp published three sets during his lifetime - 178 notes in all. But since his death in 1968, more than 100 further notes about the work have been discovered and published.

An examination of the interwoven lives and works of Duchamp and four of America's most important postwar artists

“The most must-read of all must-reads.” —Marie Claire “A kickass debut from start to finish.” —Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad Lee Cuddy is seventeen years old and on the run. Betrayed by her family after taking the fall for a friend, Lee finds refuge in a cooperative of runaways holed up in an abandoned building they call the Crystal Castle. But the façade of the Castle conceals a far more sinister agenda, one hatched by a society of fanatical men set on decoding a series of powerful secrets hidden in plain sight. And they believe Lee holds the key to it all. Aided by Tomi, a young hacker and artist with whom she has struck a wary alliance, Lee escapes into the unmapped corners of the city—empty aquariums, deserted motels, patrolled museums, and even the homes of vacationing families. But the deeper she goes underground, the more tightly she finds herself bound in the strange web she’s trying to elude. Desperate and out of options, Lee steps from the shadows to face who is after her—and why. A novel of puzzles, conspiracies, secret societies, urban exploration, art history, and a singular, indomitable heroine, The Readymade Thief heralds the arrival of a spellbinding and original new talent in fiction.