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What is the relation of art and history? What is art today? Why does art affect us? In Field Notes on the Visual Arts, seventy-five scholars, curators, and artists traverse chronology and geography to reveal the meanings and dilemmas of art. Organized under seven major headings--anthropomorphism, appropriation, contingency, detail, materiality, time, and tradition--the contributions are written by historians of art, literature, culture, and science, as well as archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, curators, and artists. By bringing together voices that are generally separated both inside and outside the academy, Field Notes on the Visual Arts makes clear that the work of art is both meaningful and resistant to meaning.

A prescient document of art-industry and museum critique from Black artists and writers, now in facsimile A collection of essays edited by artist and organizer Tom Lloyd and first published in 1971, Black Art Notes was a critical response to the Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition at the Whitney Museum, but grew into a "concrete affirmation of Black Art philosophy as interpreted by eight Black artists," as Lloyd notes in the introduction. This facsimile edition features writings by Lloyd, Amiri Baraka, Melvin Dixon, Jeff Donaldson, Ray Elkins, Babatunde Folayemi, and Francis & Val Gray Ward. These artists position the Black Arts Movement outside of white, Western frameworks and articulate the movement as one created by and existing for Black people. Their essays outline the racism of the art world, condemning the attempts of museums and other white cultural institutions to tokenize, whitewash and neutralize Black art, and offer solutions through self-determination and immediate political reform. While the publication was created to respond to a particular moment, the systemic problems that it addresses remain pervasive, making these critiques both timely and urgent.

A slim volume featuring Georges Perec's writings on the simple task of arranging books and what it can reveal about life One of the most singular and extravagant imaginations of the twentieth century, the novelist and essayist Georges Perec was a true original who delighted in wordplay, puzzles, taxonomies and seeing the extraordinary in the everyday. In these virtuoso writings about books and language, he discusses different ways of reading, a list of the things he really must do before he dies and the power of words to overcome the chaos of the world. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives--and upended them. Now Penguin brings you a new set of the acclaimed Great Ideas, a curated library of selections from the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Nineteen writers dig into the imaginative spaces between conventional genres—realistic and fantastical, scholarly and poetic, personal and political—and bring up gems of new fiction: interstitial fiction. This is the literary mode of the new century, a reflection of the complex, ambiguous, and challenging world that we live in. These nineteen stories, by some of the most interesting and innovative writers working today, will change your mind about what stories can and should do as they explore the imaginative space between conventional genres. The editors garnered stories from new and established authors in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and also fiction translated from Spanish, Hungarian, and French. The collection features stories from Christopher Barzak, Colin Greenland, Holly Phillips, Rachel Pollack, Vandana Singh, Anna Tambour, Catherynne Valente, Leslie What, and others. "A wildly varied cacophony of a book, by turns beautiful, funny, frightening, frustrating, and baffling, but never boring." —New Haven Review "Odd, Deep, Delightful" —Atlanta Journal-Constitution "This idea of playing with genre conventions is interstitiality's charm and what makes it a movement for the hypertext age. We want words to do more now and for our time not to have been spent with just one idea." —Adrienne Martini, Baltimore City Paper Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo and brought up in New York City. She earned a PhD in Renaissance studies at Brown University and taught at Boston and North-eastern universities. She is the author of the novels Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove (a Mythopoeic Award winner), and Changeling. Sherman co-founded the Interstitial Arts Foundation, dedicated to promoting art that crosses genre borders. Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent a peripatetic childhood in various European countries. She teaches at Boston University, is completing a PhD, and is introducing classes on the fantastic tradition in English literature. She is the author of a short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting.

Between 1868 and 1897 Henry James wrote a number of short essays and reviews of artists and art collections; these essays were published in magazines such as Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Weekly and in newspapers such as the New York Tribune. They included James's comments on Ruskin, Turner, Whistler, Sargent, and the Impressionists, among many others. Thirty of these essays were collected and first published in a modern edition in 1956, accompanied by John Sweeney's introduction, which sketches James's interest in the visual arts over a period of years, focusing on the ways in which painting and painters entered his work as subjects. Susan Griffin's new forward places James's observations in a contemporary context. Some of the novelist's judgements will seem wrong to today's readers: he was critical of the Impressionists, for example. But all of these essays bear the stamp of James's critical intelligence, and they tell us a great deal about his development as a writer during those years.