Superman - Kryptonite NevermoreDennis O'Neil, Curt Swan
DC Comics, 2009
The new DC COMICS CLASSICS LIBRARY makes its debut with this beautiful hardcover volume, SUPERMAN: KRYPTONITE NEVERMORE. Originally published in 1971, this story turned The Man of Steel's status quo on its head. When an explosion Superman's only true weakness, Kryptonite, Superman seems unstoppable. But Superman begins to lose his powers creature with the form of Superman but composed of sand is born. When the true nature of Sand Supermans it is discovered that any contact between the two super beigns would result in the destruction of Earth.
The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore CartographyKatharine Harmon
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009
Maps can be simple tools, comfortable in their familiar form. Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists' maps, that happy combination of information and illusion that flourishes in basement studios and downtown galleries alike. It is little surprise that, in an era of globalized politics, culture, and ecology, contemporary artists are drawn to maps to express their visions. Using paint, salt, souvenir tea towels, or their own bodies, map artists explore a world free of geographical constraints.
Katharine Harmon knows this territory. As the author of our best-selling book You Are Here, she has inspired legions of new devotees of imaginative maps. In The Map as Art, Harmon collects 360 colorful, map-related artistic visions by well-known artists such as Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, Olafur Eliasson, Maira Kalman, William Kentridge, and Vik Muniz and many more less-familiar artists for whom maps are the inspiration for creating art. Essays by Gayle Clemans bring an in-depth look into the artists' maps of Joyce Kozloff, Landon Mackenzie, Ingrid Calame, Guillermo Kuitca, and Maya Lin. Together, the beautiful reproductions and telling commentary make this an essential volume for anyone open to exploring new paths.
Car GirlsJacqueline Hassink, Tim Dant
Aperture, 2009
Dutch artist Jacqueline Hassink has received critical acclaim for her books and exhibitions that deal conceptually with issues of power and social relations. Car Girls is a body of work that Hassink has created over five years, photographing major car shows in seven different cities on three continents. As she describes it, she has used these sites to reflect on differing cultural values with regard to their ideal images of beauty and women. The series captures the moments during the womens performances when they become more like dolls or tools than individuals. In an issue of Aperture magazine, Francine Prose praised the work for its ability to make us rethink the association between auto and eros as if it had never occurred to us, and to see it newly in all its sheer outrageous strangeness. Car Girls takes a subversively fun yet conceptually astute approach to issues of gender, power, and commodification. This luxuriously produced publication is designed by the award-winning Irma Boom, and is limited to an edition of 1,500 copies.
Prison Pit: Book OneJohnny Ryan
Fantagraphics Books, 2009
A full-on fantasy adventure from Johnny Ryan, inspired by Manga and videogame culture. Prison Pit is an original graphic novel from the pen of Johnny Ryan, best known for his humor comic Angry Youth Comix. Prison Pit represents a marked departure from AYC or his Blecky Yuckerella weekly comic strip, combining his love for WWE wrestling, Gary Panter’s “Jimbo” comics, and Kentaro Miura’s “Berserk” manga into a brutal showcase of violence, survival and revenge. Imagine a blend of old-fashioned role playing fantasy games like Dungeons & Dragons crossed with contemporary adult video games like Grand Theft Auto, filtered through Ryan’s sense of humor.
The book begins with C.F. (his full-name would be too horrifying to reveal here) being thrown into the Prison Pit, a barren negative-zone populated by intergalactic, violent monster criminals. In this first volume, C.F. gets into a bloody slorge war (a slorge is a giant slug that excretes a steroid-like drug called “fecid” that all the monster men are addicted to) with ultraprisoner Rottweiler Herpes and his henchmen Rabies Bloodbath and Assrat. The ensuing bloodbath is an over-the-top, hyperviolent yet hilarious farce worthy of Ryan’s inspiration, Kentaro Miura. 120 b&w illustrations.
The Possible Life of Christian BoltanskiChristian Boltanski, Catherine Grenier, Luc Sante
MFA Publications, 2009
Christian Boltanski's votive installations, archives and objects, revolving around the fragile polarities of memory and amnesia, identity and anonymity, have made him one of the world's most renowned contemporary artists. And yet, despite the centrality of biography and testimony to his work, Boltanski's own story is little known and has never been fully told. Published on the occasion of the artist's sixty-fifth birthday, The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski, written in the form of a book-length interview (which the artist likens to a "psychoanalysis" or "confession") with the art historian Catherine Grenier, is Boltanski's oral autobiography. In it, he recounts his unusual wartime childhood ("my mother hid my father under the floorboards. He stayed there for a year and a half, between two floors in the house. He'd come out from time to time--I'm living proof of that!"), his career, friendships and marriage, successes and regrets, his approaches to art and teaching, how he created various installations, his relations with dealers and the public, and other matters that illuminate as never before his complex, enigmatic works. Boltanski is refreshingly phlegmatic about the realities of the world (art and otherwise), and he relates his remarkable stories--some enormously amusing, others tragic--with a matter-of-factness and self-deprecating humor that highlight his capacity for humane responsiveness. As both the self-portrait of a major contemporary artist and a frank, fascinating memoir, this is a document of capital importance.
Narratives of Queer Desire: Deserts of the HeartMargaret Sönser Breen
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
Narratives of Queer Desire: Deserts of the Heart is an interdisciplinary project that uses literary analysis, especially close reading, along with personal testimony and the applications of gender theory, as a means for identifying, looking at, and exploring LGBTQ stories. Taking its subtitle from Jane Rule's novel Desert of the Heart , Narratives of Queer Desire considers queer yearnings for stories other than those conventionally available, stories that, often located at the social margins ('deserts') and subject to violent regulation, engage and resist norms in literature as well as culture and politics. nbsp; Narratives of Queer Desire offers a story about the power of storytelling: within our personal, professional, and political lives and at the sites of our desire, including the classroom. This is a story about how literature encounters loss, staves off aggression, and answers erasure by offering itself as a site of care and empowerment and activism for LGBTQ people.
