Leyendo

Título: Vesania
Autor: Luis Javier Alvarado
Número de páginas: 124
Editorial: Conarte / Mantis Editores
Fecha original de publicación: 2003
País: México
ISBN: 9687859539

Sinopsis: (Tomada de la www.mantiseditores.com) "Luis Javier Alvarado no puede dejar de creer en la inspiración, puesto que la padece. De allí que Vesania (a siete años de la publicación de un libro anterior) parta de la imagen observada y emprenda un viaje que va del lamento a la exaltación, en un rapto en el que sin duda se involucra al lector. La fascinación de Alvarado por el reverso del lenguaje lo distingue de otros enamorados del lenguaje, por lo que aunque encuentre el silencio, siempre grita."

Otros títulos notables del autor:

. Cielo Arlovka (1989)
. Miztoquio (1992)
. Tromba (1995)
. Postales (1996)
. Las estaciones de Marcia (1996)
. Déborah Galatea de las armas puestas (1996)
. Hotel Roosevelt (1997)

Novedad McSweeney's

Título: The Convalescent
Autor: Jessica Anthony
Número de páginas: 240
Editorial: McSweeney's
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-1934781104

Sinopsis: (Tomada de Publishers Weekly) "Anthony's compulsively readable debut novel stars Rovar Pfliegman, who sells meat out of a bus in Virginia. Rovar is a peculiar, troll-like man: he is short and hairy, has not spoken since childhood, keeps a pet beetle and lives in the same broken-down bus that houses his meat business. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Rovar is his precarious singularity. He is the last of the Pfliegmans and, by his own account, he is falling apart. Although he halfheartedly seeks treatment for his various ailments, he seems far more bent on fulfilling the destiny of self-destruction all Pfliegmans (according to Rovar) are subject to. Rovar's explanation of his family sprawls deep into the past, probing beyond his chaotic childhood all the way back to the origins of the Pfliegman clan in premedieval Hungary. Along the way, the narrative nods to all sorts of greats—Kafka, Rushdie, Darwin and Grass, to name a few. But Anthony's style—funny, immediate and unapologetically cerebral—carves out a space all its own."

Novedad Rizzoli

Título: Greg Lynn Form
Editores: Greg Lynn, Mark Rappolt
Número de páginas: 360
Editorial: Rizzoli
Fecha original de publicación: 2008
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-0847831029

Sinopsis: (Tomada de www.amazon.com) "Edited by Mark Rappolt with contributions by: J. G. Ballard, Chris Bangle, Rene Daalder, Sonia Eram, Imaginary Forces, Brian C. Goodwin, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sylvia Lavin, Ross Lovegrove, Ari Marcopoulos, Peter Schroder, and Bruce Sterling. One of the most provocative and exciting architects today, Greg Lynn has defined how designers and architects use computers as a medium, operating in an expanded field that fuses cutting-edge technology, contemporary art, and science fiction aesthetics with architectural form. At the epicenter of a debate about the role of digital design in architecture and design, his projects skillfully blend high technology and detailed craftsmanship, driven by modeling software from the film and aerospace industries. Included are contributions from theorists, architects, and artists, and futurists such as J. G. Ballard and Bruce Sterling. Greg Lynn Form offers a window into Lynn’s methods and techniques, theoretical positions, and career trajectory. Rather than a retrospective of Lynn’s career, it is thought-provoking and forward-looking."

Novedad Random House

Título: The Song is You
Autor: Arthur Phillips
Número de páginas: 272
Editorial: Random House
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-1400066469

Sinopsis: (Tomada de The New Yorker) "Phillips’s best writing achieves an elaborate, gratifying precision, combining a naturally flamboyant style with neat, observational wit. This quality is sharpest in some of the character portraits and delectable set pieces that animate this novel, his fourth, but the central plot is sometimes strained. A middle-aged advertising director, whose marriage has broken up following the death of his two-year-old son, plays an invisible and unlikely muse to a young Irish singer on the brink of stardom. As the two engage in an indirect seduction—they never meet—the narrative veers close to the 'adolescent fantasy' that its protagonist fears. But this curious bond provides an armature for Phillips’s beautiful evocation of music’s consoling power to blur the borders between art, artist, and consumer."

Otros títulos notables del autor:
. Prague (2002)
. The Egyptologist (2004)
. Angelica (2007)

Novedad Rizzoli

Título: Morphosis: Buildings and Projects Volume V
Autor: Thom Mayne
Número de páginas: 488
Editorial: Rizzoli
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-0847830725

Sinopsis: (Tomada de www.amazon.com) "One of the few truly visionary architects of large-scale commissions working today, Thom Mayne’s influential firm Morphosis, founded in the early 1970s, has maintained an avant-garde presence among contemporary architecture firms, even as it has garnered high-profile, big-budget commissions from around the world. Since Rizzoli published Volume I of the Morphosis series in 1989, the Los Angeles–based firm has continued to push its intricate modernism into new territories. In the tradition of its four visually groundbreaking predecessors, this fifth volume packs 500 illustrations into a comprehensive tour of Morphosis’s activity. New works covered in Volume V include Cal Trans Headquarters in Los Angeles (2004); the San Francisco Federal Office building (2006); the Wayne L. Morse United States Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon (2006); and the University of Cincinnati Student Recreation Center (2006). Projects in progress, such as the New Academic Building for the Cooper Union in New York (expected completion 2008) and the Phare Tower for La Defense, France (2012), will also be featured."

Leyendo

Título: Los príncipes nubios
Autor: Juan Bonilla
Número de páginas: 296
Editorial: Booket
Fecha original de publicación: 2003
País: España
ISBN: 8432216585

Sinopsis: (Tomada de la contraportada) "Moisés Froissard se dedica a salvar vidas. Trabaja de «cazador» para el Club Olimpo, una macroempresa con una intrincada red internacional que actúa en las zonas depauperadas del mundo. Él selecciona y rescata a los ejemplares más bellos de entre los supervivientes del infortunio y la inmigración y el Club se encarga de reeducarlos para convertirlos en máquinas sexuales, capaces de satisfacer los deseos de clientes ricos y caprichosos.
Audaz y corrosiva desde la idea inicial hasta su resolución, Los príncipes nubios sumerge al lector en un espectáculo sobrecogedor, una visión descarnada y cruel de cómo las formas de explotación se adaptan a los nuevos tiempos.
Juan Bonilla regresa a la novela dosificando humor negro y acción en una narración de inquietante actualidad galardonada con el Premio Biblioteca Breve 2003."

Otros títulos notables del autor:

. El que apaga la luz (1994)
. Nadie conoce a nadie (1996)
. Cansados de estar muertos (1998)
. La compañía de los solitarios (1998)
. Yo soy, yo eres, yo es... (1999)
. La noche del Skylab (2000)
. El estadio de mármol (2005)

Novedad Doubleday

Título: Johannes Cabal the Necromancer
Autor: Jonathan L. Howard
Número de páginas: 304
Editorial: Doubleday
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Reino Unido
ISBN: 978-0385528085

Sinopsis: (Tomada de Publishers Weekly) "When Johannes Cabal, a haughty sorcerer, finds that the absence of a soul is an impediment to his occult studies, he strikes a bargain with Satan in British author Howard's darkly funny debut: in one year's time he'll deliver the bartered souls of 100 unfortunates so that he might repossess his own. Cabal and his vampire brother, Horst, mount a traveling carnival to scour the countryside for men and women desperate enough to consign their souls to an infernal eternity for whatever will relieve their misery of the moment. Cabal proves marginally competent but maximally amusing in his dealings with a competing necromancer, an asylum of escaped lunatics and a staff of slowly decomposing carnies conjured from the dead. Howard capably synthesizes two classic themes of macabre fiction—the pact with the devil and the dark carnival—but the book's episodic structure and unconvincing ending betray it as a freshman effort. Still, Howard's ear for witty banter and his skill at rendering black comedy bode well for the future."

Novedad Fiction Collective 2

Título: The Illustrated Version of Things
Autora: Affinity Konar
Número de páginas: 248
Editorial: Fiction Collective 2
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-1573661478

Sinopsis: (Tomada de www.amazon.com): "Affinity Konar has invented a language. It's sonorous, brilliant, and at least half insane; its word substitutions and trickery are both charming and maddening, reminding us of the thoughts we almost but never quite had. Like Samuel Beckett this is literature for the superhuman: reading it makes us greater than we are.
In astonishingly brilliant prose that's been tweaked to the far limits of sorrow and isolation, Affinity Konar reveals a tragically splintered family, and the result is a literary debut of phenomenal innovation and power."

Leyendo

Título: Temporada de caza para el león negro
Autor: Tryno Maldonado
Número de páginas: 128
Editorial: Anagrama
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: México
ISBN: 978-8433971869

Sinopsis: (Tomada de www.anagrama-ed.es) "Golo, el impredecible protagonista de esta novela, podría sintetizar las cualidades de un perfecto anti enfant terrible del arte. Golo es hermoso y sucio como un dios desmañanado después de una orgía, un genio precoz y salvaje de la pintura, un vitalista imparable que reparte el día entre la pintura, las drogas y el sexo, pero sobre todo el sexo. En este libro hay dosis certeras de humor, pasión y vitalidad, goce por el arte y por la vida, así como una crítica feroz a un medio elitista que concibe el arte como una prenda de moda según los dictados de la temporada. Los episodios de la vida de Golo –contados por su amante gay de turno– se suceden a la velocidad del zapping televisivo, con la energía de una canción de rock o con la contundencia de un puñetazo en la cara. En esta su deslumbrante segunda novela, su joven autor deja claro que es un narrador de la mejor cepa de la reciente narrativa latinoamericana. En palabras de Sergio Pitol, atento lector del manuscrito, «Tryno Maldonado logra con extraordinaria maestría enlazar y fundir una literatura divertida y hasta delicada con un personaje irrespetuoso, subversivo, feroz y a la vez radiante. Un príncipe del sexo»."

Otros títulos notables del autor:
. Temas y varaciones (2002)
. Viena roja (2005)

Novedad Princeton University Press

Título: The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess
Autor: Andrei Codrescu
Número de páginas: 248
Editorial: Princeton University Press
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-0691137780

Sinopsis: (Tomada de Publishers Weekly) "This Zagat-sized handbook, a Dadaist chop suey showcasing the astonishing intellectual range of English professor and NPR commentator Codrescu (New Orleans, Mon Amour), is arranged alphabetically and topically, which permits one to dip in or to read it all. The occasionally outrageous encyclopedic juxtapositions of entries give a firsthand experience similar to the effect of Dada cutups and collages. The human and so-called posthuman are concepts best understood via Codrescu's imagined 1916 game of chess in Zurich between Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dada (the art of the absurd), and Vladimir Ilych Lenin, avatar of the anti-Dada ethos of communism. Exactly how this fictitious game, played on the metaphoric chessboard of history—with the author rooting for Tzara —informs the rest of this book is murky. Yet, wending and blending their way through it all are dozens of people and subjects, among them Ben Franklin (who, like Lenin, bristles at the royalist aspects of chess) and a Belgian eccentric named Paul Otlet (who more or less envisioned the World Wide Web in the 1930s) and much else, japing and serious."

Novedad Candlewick

Título: Punkzilla
Autor: Adam Rapp
Número de páginas: 256
Editorial: Candlewick
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-0763630317

Sinopsis: (Tomada de Booklist) "The 61-word run-on sentence on the first page sets the stream-of-consciousness tone, and then two pages later there’s hand jobs and meth—yep, it’s a Rapp novel, all right. And the quality hits the high standards of 33 Snowfish (2003) and Under the Wolf, Under the Dog (2004). Fourteen-year-old Jamie (aka “Punkzilla”) has gone AWOL from his military school, is off his meds, and is making his way from Oregon to Memphis, where his older brother, Peter, is dying of cancer. Though he is thankful to leave behind his career as an iPod thief, life on the road doesn’t seem much better: his fellow Greyhound riders are frightening, he gets jumped in a roadside restroom, and his androgynous features land him in increasingly disturbing situations. You expect such bleakness from Rapp, but it’s the flashes of humor and optimism that exhilarate. Beneath a surface of disease, despair, and disfigurements, Rapp’s road trip is populated with good souls who, despite their circumstances, make significant sacrifices to help Punkzilla. Rapp constructs the book as a series of unsent letters to Peter and punctuates them with correspondence, some old enough to be heartbreakingly out of date, that Punkzilla has received from friends and family. This is devastating stuff, but breathtaking, too."

Otros títulos notables del autor:
. The Buffalo Tree (1993)
. Missing the Piano (1994)
. The Copper Elephant (1995)
. Little Chicago (1998)
. 33 Snowfish (2003)
. Under the Wolf, Under the Dog (2004)
. The Year of Endless Sorrows (2006)

Novedad Flood Editions

Título: The Sound Mirror
Autor: Andrew Joron
Número de páginas: 71
Editorial: Flood Editions
Fecha original de publicación: 2008
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-0978746780

Sinopsis: (Tomada de www.amazon.com) "Andrew Joron's The Sound Mirror offers poetry that is both cosmic and atomic, operating above and below the normative scale of human attention. As in chemical reactions, Joron's sonic friction breaks the bonds between letters and anagrammatically reforms a new lyric. As readers, we find ourselves in a symbolic space of paradox and impossibility 'where / X relaxes relation, where / X licks the elixir of / night's rhyme with light.'"

Otros títulos notables del autor:
. A measure of calm: A poem (1985)
. Force Fields (1987)
. Science Fiction (1992)
. The Removes (1999)
. The emergency of poetry (2002)
. Fathom (2003)
. Neo-surrealism: Or, The Sun At Night (2004)
. The Cry at Zero: Selected Prose (2007)

Leyendo

Título: The Girl on the Fridge
Autor: Etgar Keret
Traducido por: Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston
Número de páginas: 192
Editorial: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Fecha original de publicación: 2008
País: Israel
ISBN: 978-0374531056

Sinopsis: (Tomada de Publishers Weekly) "Advocates of flash fiction contend you can say a lot with a little. Unfortunately, you can also say a little with a little. Israeli writer Keret (The Nimrod Flipout) confirms both with this hodgepodge of 46 sketches, culled from his first collection. There are whimsical tales like Nothing, about a woman who loved a man who was made of nothing because this love would never betray her, and Freeze! about a guy who can stop the world and uses the power to score with hot girls. Despite an appealing, comic voice, many of these pieces feel insubstantial and leave the reader indifferent. Nevertheless, a haunting theme arises as stories featuring violence accumulate: Not Human Beings, in which an Israeli soldier is beaten by fellow officers when he objects to the cruel treatment of an old Arab man, screams in the face of bloodshed, whereas the irritation of the father in A Bet, when TV news reports on an Arab sentenced to death preempts an episode of Moonlighting, suggests how violence has been normalized. Keret demonstrates how the same short form that produces ineffective trifles can also create moments of startling power."

Otros títulos notables del autor:
. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories (2004)
. The Nimrod Flipout (2006)

Novedad Fiction Collective 2

Título: The Bruise
Autora: Magdalena Zurawski
Número de páginas: 152
Editorial: Fiction Collective 2
Fecha original de publicación: 2008
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-1573661447

Sinopsis: (Tomada de www.amazon.com): "The Bruise is a prize-winning novel of imperative voice and raw sensation. In the sterile dormitories and on the quiet winter greens of an American university, a young woman named M— deals with the repercussions of a strange encounter with an angel, one that has left a large bruise on her forehead. Was the event real or imagined? The bruise does not disappear, forcing M— to confront her own existential fears and her wavering desire to tell the story of her imagination. As a writer, M— is breathless, desperate, and obsessive, questioning the mutations and directions of her words while writing with fevered immediacy. Using rhythmic language, suffused with allusions to literature and art, Magdalena Zurawski recasts the bildungsroman as a vibrant and moving form."

Franz Kafka Preis 2009

Hace algunos días se anunció al ganador del premio literario Franz Kafka, uno de los galardones de mayor prestigio en Europa, sobre todo por haberle entregado el premio a Elfriede Jelinek y a Harold Pinter unos cuantos meses antes de habérseles concedido el Nobel de Literatura. Este año el ganador fue el austriaco Peter Handke, de quien aún no he leído nada, pero dos de sus libros ya aparecen en mi lista de lecturas para el 2010: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (en febrero) y The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (en julio).

Para Peter Handke (Austria, 1942)

Algunos títulos notables del autor:
. Offending the Audience/Self-accusation [Publikumsbeschimpfung und andere Sprechstücke] (1966)
. Kaspar and Other Plays [Kaspar] (1967)
. The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld, A Continuum Book [Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt] (1969)
. The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick [Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter] (1970)
. The Ride Across Lake Constance [Der Ritt über den Bodensee] (1971)
. Short Letter, Long Farewell [Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied] (1971)
. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams [Wunschloses Unglück] (1972)
. They Are Dying Out [Die Unvernünftigen sterben aus] (1973)
. A Moment of True Feeling [Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung] (1975)
. The Left-Handed Woman [Die linkshändige Frau] (1976)
. The Weight of the World [Das Gewicht der Welt] (1977)
. Walk About the Villages : A Dramatic Poem [Über die Dörfer] (1981)
. Across [Der Chinese des Schmerzes] (1983)
. Repetition [Die Wiederholung] (1986)
. The Afternoon of a Writer [Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers] (1987)
. Absence [Die Abwesenheit] (1987)
. Voyage to the Sonorous Land : Or the Art of Asking [Das Spiel vom Fragen oder Die Reise zum sonoren Land] (1989)
. The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling [Versuch über die Jukebox] (1990)
. Once Again for Thucydides [Noch einmal für Thukydides] (1990)
. My Year in the No-Man's-Bay [Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht] (1994)
. A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia [Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien] (1996)
. On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House [In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus] (1997)
. Crossing the Sierra de Gredos [Der Bildverlust oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos] (2002)

Novedad The MIT Press

Título: Robert Ryman: Used Paint
Autores: Suzanne P. Hudson
Número de páginas: 328
Editorial: The MIT Press
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-0262012805

Sinopsis: (Tomada de www.amazon.com) "In this first book-length study of Robert Ryman, Suzanne Hudson traces the artist's production from his first paintings in the early 1950s, many of which have never been exhibited or reproduced, to his more recent gallery shows. Ryman's largely white-on-white paintings represent his careful working over of painting's conventions at their most radically reduced. Through close readings of the work, Hudson casts Ryman as a painter for whom painting was conducted as a continuous personal investigation. Ryman's method—an act of 'learning by doing'—as well as his conception of painting as 'used paint' set him apart from second-generation abstract expressionists, minimalists, or conceptualists.
Ryman (born in 1930) is a self-taught artist who began to paint in earnest while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1950s. Hudson argues that Ryman's approach to painting developed from quotidian contact with the story of modern painting as assembled by MoMA director and curator Alfred Barr and rendered widely accessible by director of the education department Victor D'Amico and colleagues. Ryman's introduction to artistic practice within the (white) walls of MoMA, Hudson contends, was shaped by an institutional ethos of experiential learning. (Others who worked at MoMA during these years include Lucy Lippard, who married Ryman in 1961; Dan Flavin, another guard; and Sol LeWitt, a desk assistant.)
Hudson's chapters—'Primer,' 'Paint,' 'Support,' 'Edge,' and 'Wall,' named after the most basic elements of the artist's work—eloquently explore Ryman's ongoing experiment in what makes a painting a painting. Ryman's work, Hudson argues, tests the medium's material and conceptual possibilities. It neither signals the end of painting nor guarantees its continued longevity but keeps the prospect of painting an open question, answerable only through the production of new paintings."

Novedad Graywolf Press

Título: The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards
Autor: Robert Boswell
Número de páginas: 288
Editorial: Graywolf Press
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-1555975241

Sinopsis: (Tomada de Publishers Weekly) "In this imaginative story collection, author Boswell (Century's Son) examines the limits and losses of ordinary souls with technical mastery and profound sympathy. In No River Wide, a widowed woman visiting a longtime friend in Florida discovers that their friendship is over; her story unfolds in overlapping narratives that form a startling, resonant meditation on the nature of time. Another story finds a 30-something returning to his North Dakota home to identify the body of his missing mother; what he finds instead frees him from the long shadow of his embittered father. In the title story, a gang spends the summer squatting in the home of a vacationing family, with dire consequences; in Supreme Beings, a priest's attempts to intervene in the lives of three troubled youths lead him to confront personal and professional failure. Boswell conveys the sordid but hopeful inner lives of average people with insight and care; his shorter stories (Miss Famous, Skin Deep) showcase his pleasure in language and invention, and his longer tales pack the emotional weight of a novel."

Otros títulos notables del autor:
. Dancing in the Movies (1986)
. The Geography of Desire (1989)
. Crooked Hearts (1990)
. Living to Be 100 (1994)
. Mystery Ride (1994)
. American Owned Love (1997)
. Century's Son (2003)
. The Half-Known World (2008)

Leyendo

Título: Traducción a lengua extraña
Autor: Luis Jorge Boone
Número de páginas: 120
Editorial: FETA
Fecha original de publicación: 2007
País: México
ISBN: 978-9703513328

Sinopsis: (Tomada de la contraportada): "Autobiográfico, pero de temple intelectual porque expresa sentimientos a partir del desarrollo de distintos conceptos, Traducción a lengua extraña se construye a la par de personajes y escenarios en los que la muerte tiene lugar y es presencia para los seres humanos como condición transitoria; objetos que son signos y actos que se convierten en símbolos: corbata a rayas azules y negras, difuntos, y una momia llevada de Egipto a Río de Janeiro como elementos irónicos. Compuesto de una confluencia de sensibilidades distantes en las que el plagio funciona como homenaje y la apropiación de la obra del otro es una manifestación de su influencia, visitando a Charles Wright, H. P. Lovecraft y John Ashbery, Traducción a lengua extraña va generando al pie de página las imágenes que contienen los asuntos de la vida, las ocupaciones y preocupaciones de este mundo."

Otros títulos notables del autor:
. Legión (2003)
. Galería de armas rotas (2004)
. La noche caníbal (2008)

Novedad Hatje Cantz

Título: Jeff Koons: Celebration
Autores: Anette Husch, Peter-Klaus Schuster, Jeff Koons
Número de páginas: 120
Editorial: Hatje Cantz
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-3775723114

Sinopsis: (Tomada de www.amazon.com) "Jeff Koons' spectacular October 2008 exhibition at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie presented the infamous series of sculptures and paintings known collectively as Celebration, a project whose fabrication has involved so much labor (both manual and computer-aided) that Koons seemed to almost vanish from the art world radar in the 1990s, when he first undertook the series. At present, Celebration's best-known work may be the 10-foot-tall, stainless-steel Balloon Dog, typical of the outsize scale and remarkably clean sheen of Koons' sculptures, in which the sensory joys of childhood object relations are revisited and espoused. Such works wear their playroom origins on their sleeves, but their gargantuan proportions, with their attendant sense of menace, establish them firmly in the adult world as infant objects retrieved and rebuilt with adult strength. 'The work tries to gain support from the confidence of the gesture,' Koons says, 'to be kind of in the moment, and to have confidence within the self.' Inasmuch as such observations could be true of much art, Koons is unusually open about what drives his work, all the while preserving its self-sufficiency as art. This monograph documents these mammoth installations in the Neue Nationalgalerie's Upper Hall, an exhibition that without doubt constitutes a milestone in the artist's career."

Novedad Harper Perennial

Título: Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
Autor: Kevin Wilson
Número de páginas: 240
Editorial: Harper Perennial
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-0061579028

Sinopsis: (Tomada de Booklist): "Four mutually loathing brothers fold hundreds of paper cranes for a contest to determine who will own the family plantation house. A young man counts every step to and from a factory in which he winnows the Qs from heaps of new-minted Scrabble tiles. Three new BAs spend months after graduation tunneling beneath the hometown of one of them. A professional substitute grandmother gets queasy about her new family when she discovers they also retain a faux child. That last story, “Grand Stand-In,” is the creepiest in the book, though the bad-dream pulp-noir exercise, “The Shooting Man,” is a close, gritty runner-up. Two stories of teens and sex, “Mortal Kombat” and “Go, Fight, Win”—the only third-person narratives here—express great though measured sympathy. Wildly imaginative in the manner of new weirdness fiction (see Feeling Very Strange, 2006), Wilson’s work is also warmly compassionate in tenor. He creates an appealing voice for each first-person narrator he invents, and in third person, he is flat-out magisterial, with more than a hint of the magical. Watch him closely. --Ray Olson"

Novedad Thames & Hudson

Título: Francis Bacon: Incunabula
Autores: Rebecca Daniels, Martin Harrison
Número de páginas: 256
Editorial: Thames & Hudson
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Irlanda
ISBN: 978-0500093443

Sinopsis: (Tomada de www.amazon.com) "In 1949 Francis Bacon found his main subject, the human body, and from then on it remained his principal theme. But he did not paint from life. Instead, he took from images from the mass media - newspapers, magazines, books, photos - and drew on them for his paintings. This book presents over 200 of these documents, about which Bacon was secretive but which, it emerges, were integral to his creative process, along with some of the works that the material inspired."

Novedad Fiction Collective 2

Título: TOC: A New Media Novel
Autor: Steve Tomasula
Diseñador: Stephen Farrell
Número de páginas: DVD-ROM
Editorial: Fiction Collective 2
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-1573661522

Sinopsis: (Tomada de www.amazon.com): "You've never experienced a novel like this. TOC is a multimedia epic about time—the invention of the second, the beating of a heart, the story of humans connecting through time to each other and to the world. An evocative fairy tale with a steampunk heart, TOC is a breath-taking visual novel, an assemblage of text, film, music, photography, the spoken word, animation, and painting. It is the story of a man who digs a hole so deep he can hear the past, a woman who climbs a ladder so high she can see the future, as well as others trapped in the clockless, timeless time of a surgery waiting room: God's time. Theirs is an imagined history of people who are fixed in the past, those who have no word for the future, and those who live out their days oblivious to either.
A new media hybrid, TOC re-imagines what the book is, and can be. Produced as a DVD for playback on personal computers (both Macs and PCs), TOC retains the intimate, one-on-one experience that a reader can have with a book even as it draws on the power of other art forms to immerse readers in an altogether new multimedia story."

Otros títulos notables del autor:
. IN & OZ (2003)
. VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2003)
. The Book of Portraiture (2006)

Novedad Thames & Hudson

Título: Christian Lacroix On Fashion
Autores: Christian Lacroix, Patrick Mauries, Olivier Saillard
Número de páginas: 240
Editorial: Thames & Hudson
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Francia
ISBN: 978-0500287972

Sinopsis: (Tomada de www.amazon.com) "Published in conjunction with an exhibition at Paris's Musée des Arts Décoratifs, this handsome volume presents a selection of fashions by noted designer Lacroix together with dresses and gowns by great couturiers who have inspired him—Worth, Pasquier, Balmain, Lanvin, Schiaparelli, Dior and others. All the fashions have been chosen by Lacroix from the museum's collection and arranged by theme, such as colors, exotic styles, stripes, spots and sculpted shells. Lacroix introduces each motif with a few words about why it's important to him and discusses influences, such as his childhood in Provence, where he began drawing clothing at an early age, reveled in colors, and drew inspiration from the traditional costumes of Arles. Haute couture should cling tightly to its obsession with the unusual, he states, and that maxim is amply realized in the extraordinary fashions shown from the past and from the House of Lacroix. Saillard, curator at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and Mauriès (Cabinets of Curiosities) explore the designer's work. The appeal of this beautifully designed book is enhanced by the inclusion of some of Lacroix's colorful sketches."

Leyendo

Título: Image-Music-Text
Autor: Roland Barthes
Traducción de: Stephen Heath
Número de páginas: 220
Editorial: Hill and Wang
Fecha original de publicación: 1977
País: Francia
ISBN: 978-0374521363

Sinopsis: Roland Barthes, the French critic and semiotician, was one of the most important critics and essayists of this century. His work continues to influence contemporary literary theory and cultural studies. Image-Music-Text collects Barthes's best writings on photography and the cinema, as well as fascinating articles on the relationship between images and sound. Two of Barthes's most important essays, 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative' and 'The Death of the Author' are also included in this fine anthology, an excellent introduction to his thought.

Otros títulos notables del autor:
. Writing Degree Zero [Le Degré zéro de l'écriture suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques] (1953)
. Michelet [Michelet par lui-même] (1954)
. Mythologies (1957)
. On Racine [Sur Racine] (1963)
. Essais critiques (1964)
. The Eiffel Tower [La Tour Eiffel] (1964)
. Elements of Semiology [Eléments de sémiologie] (1965)
. Criticism and Truth [Critique et Vérité] (1966)
. The Fashion system [Système de la mode] (1967)
. S/Z: An Essay [S/Z essai sur Sarrasine d'Honoré de Balzac] (1970)
. Empire of Signs [L'Empire des signes] (1970)
. Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971)
. Nouveaux essais critiques (1972)
. The Pleasure of the Text [Le Plaisir du texte] (1973)
. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes [Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes] (1975)
. Alors la Chine? (1975)
. A Lover's Discourse : Fragments [Fragments d'un discours amoureux] (1977)
. Leçon, (1978)
. Writer Sollers [Sollers écrivain] (1979)
. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [La Chambre claire : Note sur la photographie] (1980)
. Sur la littérature (1980)
. The Grain of the Voice : interviews 1962-1980 [Le Grain de la Voix : Entretiens, 1962-1980] (1981)
. L'Obvie et l'Obtus : Essais critiques III (1982)
. The Rustle of Language [Le Bruissement de la langue : Essais critiques IV] (1984)
. The Semiotic Challenge [L'Aventure sémiologique] (1985)
. Incidents (1987)

Novedad Coffee House Press

Título: German for Travelers
Autora: Norah Labiner
Número de páginas: 270
Editorial: Coffee House Press
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-1566892230

Sinopsis: (Tomada de Publishers Weekly) "Labiner (Miniatures) delves into the life of Dr. Jozef Apfel, a renowned German psychoanalyst who never solved the mysterious case of his patient, Elsa Z, in the years leading up to WWII. A few generations later, the doctor's Jewish descendants are scattered across America: Hollywood starlet Lemon Leopold; her psychiatrist brother, Ben; their romance novelist cousin, Eliza. When Eliza is summoned to Berlin by a distant aunt to delve into the family's past, Lemon comes along and winds up finding meaning in her life. Elsa Z's traumas are mirrored by the sorrows of generations of Apfel women, most notably Eliza, whose own recent past is entangled with Berlin. Labiner toys with both psychoanalysis and its history: Elsa Z's hysteria is reminiscent of Freud's Dora (she even has her own Herr K), and Dr. Apfel's triangular seduction theory ends up causing problems in his own love life. But while this intricate family saga has definite potential, it's thrown off course by the novel's frustrating structure, where seemingly random chapters devolve into pseudo-existential travel advice and Labiner's heavy-handed poetic intentions."

Otros títulos notables de la autora:
. Our Sometime Sister (1998)
. Miniatures (2002)

Novedad Phaidon

Título: The Contemporary Garden
Autores: Editores de Phaidon
Número de páginas: 112
Editorial: Phaidon
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Estados Unidos
ISBN: 978-0714849584

Sinopsis: (Tomada de www.amazon.com) "The Contemporary Garden is an illustrated survey of 100 iconic and innovative gardens in the world, spanning from the early 1920s to the present day. Accessible and easy-to-use like Phaidon's popular The Garden Book, this informative source book includes an unrivalled range of gardens by designers, makers, architects and land artists - from Garrett Eckbo's Alcoa Forecast Garden (1925) and Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1929) to Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta (1966) and horticultural installation artist Tony Heywood's Split (2003). Each garden has been selected for its unique design, marking a break from traditional gardens and presenting new and sometimes conceptual designs. The selection ranges from the public to the private and all types are featured - Modernist gardens, conceptual spaces, roof and water gardens, contemporary interpretations of traditional garden styles and urban parks and landscapes. Other examples include Gabriel Guevrekian's Villa Noailles (1927) in France, Fernando Caruncho's startlingly unusual Wheat Garden (1990) in Spain, Kathryn Gustafson's Diana Memorial Fountain (2004) in England and Tadao Ando's Zen-like Garden of Fine Arts (1994) in Japan. The Contemporary Garden presents projects by forward-looking garden designers from around the globe. Today's most arresting garden designs are often based on traditional principles but the interpretation - with the use of innovative materials, unusual plants and unexpected forms - offers a new approach to planting and alternative solutions to garden, backyard or outdoor space design. Featuring the use of artificial materials, such as Robert Mallet-Stevens' Garden with Concrete Trees (1925) and Dean Cardasis' Plastic Garden (1995), The Contemporary Garden also offers an examination of the impact of unique, iconic gardens designed by the likes of Isamu Noguchi, Roberto Burle Marx and Luis Barragan, among others. In addition, the selection includes gardens by famous artistic and architectural figures such as Henry Moore, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Joan Miro and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Organised chronologically, readers can trace the development of the non-traditional garden in all its variations from the early experimentations of the twentieth century to the visionary ideas of today's practitioners. Each entry consists of a full-page image with an accompanying text, placing the garden and its maker in stylistic and historical context. The book also features a glossary of terms and movements, a directory of gardens open to the public and an index. The Contemporary Garden is a practical resource and an easy-to-use guide, unique in its appeal to both the general reader and the practicing gardener."

Novedad Cambridge University Press

Título: The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940.
Autor: Samuel Beckett
Editores: Martha Dow Fehsendfeld, Lois More Overbeck, Dan Gunn, George Craig
Número de páginas: 882
Editorial: Cambridge University Press
Fecha original de publicación: 2009
País: Irlanda
ISBN: 978-0521867931

Sinopsis: (Tomada de Publishers Weekly) "Shuffled among publishers for too long, the selected letters of the great Irish novelist and playwright Beckett (1906-1989) are finally here, the first in a projected four-volume set. Beckett, known for his love of silence and texts that attenuated to nearly nothing, was a veritable letter-writing machine, though only his letters to director Alan Schneider have been previously collected; this project may well represent the last great corpus of typed and handwritten correspondence from a literary giant. Beginning with two letters from the then-unpublished 23-year-old to James Joyce (helping the master with some Greek translations), and ending with a short note describing a Bram Van Velde painting seen just before the Nazis took Paris, Beckett struggles valiantly, endlessly, to find himself (included is a 1936 request for admission to the Moscow State School of Cinematography). There's much to discover, including Beckett's relations with forgotten Irish poet Thomas McGreevy and some explicit shop talk, including a 1937 letter to Axel Kaun in which he outlines his ambition: 'to drill one hole after another into the English language until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through.' Accompanied by smart, exhaustive notes, chronologies and solid bios of all correspondents, this collection will no doubt deepen Beckett scholarship, as well as fans' appreciation."

Otros títulos notables del autor:
. Whoroscope (1930)
. Proust (1931)
. Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932)
. More Pricks Than Kicks (1934)
. Echo's Bones and other Precipitates (1935)
. Murphy (1938)
. Eleutheria (1940s)
. Watt (1945)
. First Love (1945)
. Mercier and Camier (1946)
. The Expelled (1946)
. The Calmative (1946)
. The End (1946)
. Three Dialogues (with Georges Duthuit and Jacques Putnam) (1949)
. Molloy (1951)
. Malone Dies (1951)
. Waiting for Godot (1952)
. The Unnamable (1953)
. Stories and Texts for Nothing (1954)
. Act Without Words I (1956)
. Act Without Words II (1956)
. All That Fall (1956)
. From an Abandoned Work (1957)
. Endgame (1957)
. Krapp's Last Tape (1958)
. Rough for Theatre I (late 1950s)
. Rough for Theatre II (late 1950s)
. Embers (1959)
. Happy Days (1960)
. Rough for Radio I (1961)
. Rough for Radio II (1961)
. Words and Music (1961)
. How It Is (1961)
. Cascando (1962)
. Play (1963)
. Come and Go (1965)
. Eh Joe (1965)
. Disjecta (1929 - 1967)
. Breath (1969)
. The Lost Ones (1971)
. Not I (1972)
. That Time (1975)
. Footfalls (1975)
. Ghost Trio (1975)
. ... but the clouds ... (1976)
. Fizzles (1976)
. A Piece of Monologue (1980)
. Company (1980)
. Ill Seen Ill Said (1981)
. Rockaby (1981)
. Ohio Impromptu (1981)
. Quad I + II (1981)
. Catastrophe (1982)
. Nacht und Träume (1982)
. What Where (1983)
. Worstward Ho (1983)
. Stirrings Still (1988)
. What is the Word (1989)