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* One of the Best Books of 2012 —Salon "Waclawiak's novel reinvents the immigration story. How to Get Into the Twin Palms movingly portrays a protagonist intent on both creating and destroying herself, on burning brightly even as she goes up in smoke." —New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice How To Get Into the Twin Palms is the story of Anya, a young woman living in a Russian neighborhood in Los Angeles, who struggles between retaining her parents' Polish culture and trying to assimilate into her adopted community. She lusts after Lev, a Russian man who frequents the Twin Palms nightclub down the block from Anya's apartment. It is Anya's wish to gain entrance to this seeminly exclusive club. How To Get Into the Twin Palms is a really funny and often moving book that provides a unique twist on the immigrant story, and provides a credible portrait of the city of Los Angeles, literally burning to the ground.
The reproductions and layout are superb, rich and textured, and the accompanying text is illuminating ...
Centered around the 2011 Libyan Revolution, Libyan Sugar is a road trip through a war zone, detailed through photographs, journal entries, and written communication with family and colleagues. A record of Michael Christopher Brown's life both inside and outside Libya during that year, the work is about a young man going to war for the first time and his experience of that age-old desire to get as close as possible to a conflict in order to discover something about war and something about himself, perhaps a certain definition of life and death.
In his second book, Luke Smalley revisits the themes and ideas that resonated throughout his 2002 monograph Gymnasium. Smalley returns to his native Pennsyvania to investigate the small-town interiors and landscapes which are the settings for his portraits of young atheletes. Color photographs, inspired by a more innocent era, depict exercises which combine whimsy with the inexplicable: Smalley has hired a local seamstress to construct a colassal medicine ball: he binds two boys together with a harness and leaves them in an empty room for a game of tug-of-war, while somewhere nearby two boys lead donkeys around the floor of a basketball court in an empty high school gym. Scale, time and content are altered to create the world Smalley inhabits: the lush colors of this new world belie the viewer's sense of dislocation.
Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment. In 1966 he changed from black and white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessors. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the "first color photographer, " and certainly the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of Eggleston. From 1966 to 1971, Eggleston would occasionally use a two and one quarter inch format for photographs. These are collected and published here for the first time, adding more classic Eggleston images to photography's color canon.
"Stivers (born 1953) takes us into alcoholic twilight. Shuddering exiles in watery purgatory, the human figures as well as forests, clouds, plants, works of art and even architecture seem never actually to have existed ... Each photograph visualizes the anguished lament of the current that runs through him ... All of this mirrors his dream books and journals, where the trials of actual experience and his mind's nocturnal dream machinery are indistinguishable. Stivers's pictures are figments of his material philosophy of escape." --Eugenia Parry
"In the interstices between film and photography, ad stereotypes and clichés of a Californian paradise, Jack Pierson (born 1960) produces pictures that are deliberately sensual and sentimental. Through a subtle hybridization of genres they raise the central question of autobiographical sincerity as the work's theme and site. By arresting intimate moments, they compose a familiar, private world, happy and nostalgic. By disclosing (or pretending to disclose) something of the artist, they acquire a natural quality that turns them into secret confessions. We are simultaneously in the artist's studio and in the middle of his life, and, I'd be tempted to add, in the idealizing and loving grace of his gaze." --Henry-Claude Cousseau
For the past thirteen years, young American artist Chris Verene has carefully documented the strange and yet oddly familiar world of his family and friends. Verene's lush color images reveal freakishly beautiful stories of simple daily joys and troubling family secrets. Curators, critics, and museums from Atlanta to New York and Europe are exhibiting and discussing his moving portrayal of family, love, youth, and aging. The geography of Chris Verene's color photography is primarily social, though the landscape is always a presence. Whether he is following his relatives around the dilapidated environs of Galesburg, Illinois, or locked in a suburban bedroom with five members of his "Camera Club" photographing a half-dressed woman draped over a bed, Chris Verene innerves us with a vision of daily life at once bizarre and banal. His high-key colors and composition occupy a terrain somewhere between William Eggleston and Nan Goldin. This is the artist's first book.
From Ancient philosophy to contemporary theories of fiction, it is a common practice to relegate illusory appearances to the realm of the non-existent, like shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. Contrary to this traditional mode of drawing a metaphysical distinction between reality and fiction, Markus Gabriel argues that the realm of the illusory, fictional, imaginary, and conceptually indeterminate is as real as it gets. Being in touch with reality need not and cannot require that we overcome appearances in order to grasp a meaningless reality which exists ‘out there,’ outside and maybe even beyond our minds. Human mindedness (Geist) exists in the mode of fictions through which we achi...