Of all art forms, filmmaking is the one most taken for granted: no sooner is an artistic or technical advance made than its salient features are employed in the harness of commerce. Yet, innovation is almost always the province of individual expression. Film at Wit's End presents eight artists who have electrified American independent cinema across four decades: James Broughton, Bruce Conner, Maya Deren, Jerome Hill, Ken Jacobs, Christopher MacLaine, Marie Menken, and Sidney Peterson. Each of these filmmakers' lives and work is brought into sharp focus as we enter the art scenes of New York and San Francisco during times of ferment and controversy. Film at Wit's End tells marvelous tales of serendipitous encounters, of life lived at the edge of social disapproval, and of the insistent development of an art form.

Film at wit's end: Eight avant-garde filmmakers

Brakhage, Stan

McPherson & Company

After twelve years a young woman returns home to settle accounts with her doformed twin sister Laura. But Laura is inexplicably absent, and the visiting daughter's parents are enmeshed in their own emotional warfare. With the deceptive simplicity that has become Molinaro's literary hallmark, the stage is set for an explosive confrontation as the parents and visiting daughter take their positions around the traditional family table, with its centerpiece, an elegant arrangement of white roses.

Positions with White Roses

Literature & Fiction

Ursule Molinaro

United States

Vladimir Klavdievich Arseniev (1872-1930) undertook twelve major scientific expeditions between 1902 and 1930 in the Siberian Far East, and authored some sixty works from the geographical, geological, botanical, and ethnographic data he amassed. Among these, Dersu the Trapper has earned a privileged place in Russian literature. In this Russian counterpart to The Journals of Lewis and Clark and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Arseniev combines the precise observations of a naturalist with an exciting narrative of real-life adventure. Arseniev describes three explorations in the Ussurian taiga along the Sea of Japan above Vladivostok, beginning with his first encounter of the solitary aboriginal hunter named Dersu, a member of the Gold tribe, who thereafter becomes his guide. Each expedition is beset with hardship and danger: through blizzard and flood and assorted deprivations, these two men forge an exceptional friendship in their mutual respect for the immense grandeur of the wilderness. But the bridges across language, race and culture also have limitations, and the incursion of civilization exacts its toll. Dersu the Trapper is at once a witnessing of Russia's last frontier and a poignant memoir of rare cross-cultural understanding. Originally published in 1941, this English translation is reprinted in its entirety now for the first time. The hardcover editions is jacketed in a mylar wrap.

Dersu the Trapper (Recovered Classics)

Arseniev, V. K.

History & Criticism

An Autograph Edition of 1500 numbered copies signed by the author. This weekend Liam's going away to college, and his mother, Cathleen Hogan Williams, is taking him there, driving south along the Hudson. For Liam, impatience to arrive at a new destination rubs against the anxiety of a future apart. For Cathleen, the trip has a second purpose: a long-suppressed love affair she had before conceiving him has resurfaced in a poem she is trying to write. Noah, her husband, endures the new separation at home...until an elderly Irish enchantress, a client of his law practice, leads him to recalculate what he himself may have left behind in his youth. For this couple, married and alone, Liam's going ripples outward across the surface of their marriage, the melange of their intertwining memories. Michael Joyce's new novel is an affecting song of the rites of passage--startlingly beautiful in its prose, even more so in its recognitions. In Liam's Going, Joyce--the foremost American author working in the new electronic artform of “hypertext”--has returned to his storytelling roots.

Liam's Going

Michael Joyce

Contemporary

In 1632, the Emperor of Hindustan, Shah Jahan, overwhelmed with grief over the death of his beloved wife, Mumatz Mahal, commissioned the building of a grand mausoleum to symbolize the greatness of their love. The story surrounding the construction of the Taj Mahal occurs, however, against a scrim of fratricidal war, murderous rebellion, unimaginable wealth, and, not least of all, religious fundamentalism ruthlessly opposing tolerance and coexistence between the disparate peoples in the empire. At that time, Hindustan comprised all of modern Pakistan and Kashmir, most of eastern Afghanistan, and two-thirds of the Indian subcontinent (roughly north of Bombay to the Himalayas). Beneath a Marble Sky, narrated by Princess Jahanara, eldest daughter of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, recounts their story, and her own as well, a parallel tale of forbidden love enduring censure and extreme deprivations. Beneath a Marble Sky brims with action and intrigue befitting an epic era when, alongside continuous war, architecture and its attendant arts reached a pinnacle of perfection. In a splendid debut, John Shors has crafted an immensely readable and well-researched historical novel of surprisingly contemporary relevance.

Beneath a Marble Sky: A Novel of the Taj Mahal

Shors, John

INCLUDES INDEX TO VOLUMES 1-4 This fourth and final installment of Paul West's collected literary essays begins with two paeans for departed friends, the novelist John Hawkes and the astronomer Carl Sagan, and a review of a book about famous literary suicides. Then West immediately launches into a cross-examination of Nobel Prize novelist J. M. Coetzee's curious employment of West himself as a character in the novel Elizabeth Costello. That alone is worth the ticket. But the sixteen essays which follow record the distances between mimetic projection of fictive personae and the "visionary plunge into what cannot be kept out of the mind" --dalliance, in other words, versus necessity. Here, predictably, West is at his best. Subjects range from an epic poem of the Titanic to the teaching of Samuel Beckett, and from a meeting with Borges to the complexities of Faulkner. West considers the future of the novel, conducts inquiries of the works of William Gass and Bradford Morrow, and offers asides about his own working methods and how he came to write certain of his books. Fittingly, Sheer Fiction IV includes an extensive index to all four volumes of Sheer Fiction published over the past eighteen years, making this volume indispensable to West's triumphant oeuvre.

Sheer Fiction, Volume Four

Paul West

Essays & Correspondence

Shame may be the most perdurably uncategorizable and daring book Robert Kelly has yet published during a career containing more than sixty sui generis volumes. It is a purloined correspondence, an investigatory improvisation, an apologia, a psychological expose, a desideratum, a profundity, and jazz. Yet, Shame is a collaboration. When Birgit Kempker -- a younger German writer living in Basel, Switzerland -- invited Kelly to create a work together, neither knew the other except by reputation. They proceeded to communicate by e-mail for two years through sixteen exchanges, and the subject was to be shame at its most personal, prosaic, intimate, and even sometimes fetching; and shame at its most generic, couched, poetic and hallucinatory. The barrier between them was not merely not knowing one another while risking the limits of naked trust, but of surmounting age, gender, nationality and language. Birgit Kempker wrote in German, and Robert Kelly in English. Shame is a love story. A story of two tongues. Shame is a book spoken between two lovers who will never be lovers, a book of the unabashed and prised apart secret intimacy that can be laid bare against all constraint by ghostly lovers -- virtual, exemplary, psychic guides to one another, and all of the rest of us.

Shame / Scham: A Collaboration (English and German Edition)

Robert Kelly

Birgit Kempker

The Man Who Walked to The Moon evokes the twin wildernesses of amorality -- the natural and the human. William Gasper is a lone walker, a man apart, who chooses the Steen mountains, and in particular one mountain named The Moon, as his forbidding refuge. As he relates with knife-edge precision what happens on The Moon, and what brought him to this place, menace and dread gradually take hold, creating an exacting portrait of a psyche as old as myth and as present as any politician's worst nightmare. Winner of the Dasher Award from the College English Association of Ohio

The Man Who Walked to The Moon: A Novella

Howard McCord

Italo Calvino once remarked that in Giorgio Manganelli, ''Italian literature has a writer who resembles no one else, unmistakable in each of his phrases, an inventor who is irresistible and inexhaustible in his games with language and ideas.'' Nowhere is this more true than in this Decameron of fictions, each composed on a single folio sheet of typing paper. Yet, what are they? Miniature psychodramas, prose poems, tall tales, sudden illuminations, malevolent sophistries, fabliaux, paranoiac excursions, existential oxymorons, or wondrous, baleful absurdities? Always provocative, insolent, sinister, and quite often funny, these 100 comic novels are populated by decidedly ordinary lovers, martyrs, killers, thieves, maniacs, emperors, bandits, sleepers, architects, hunters, prisoners, writers, hallucinations, ghosts, spheres, dragons, Doppelgängers, knights, fairies, angels, animal incarnations, and Dreamstuff. Each 'novel' construes itself into a kind of Möbius strip, in which, as one critic has noted, ''time turns in a circle and bites its tail'' like the Ouroborous. In any event, Centuria provides 100 uncategorizable reasons to experience and celebrate an immeasurably wonderful writer. Brilliantly translated from the Italian by Henry Martin.

Centuria : One Hundred Ouroboric Novels

Giorgio Manganelli

From roughly 1965 to 1980, Conceptual Art and Performance Art took center stage throughout the western world, introducing new and complex ideas to the practice of contemporary art which reverberate to this day. Thomas McEvilley's The Triumph of Anti-Art not only explains the origins of these controversial and compelling art forms, but also uncovers many relatively unrecognized yet indisputably important artists, American and European. He guides the reader through a thicket of seemingly arcane meanings of these nonrepresentational art form, and brings clarity to the intentions and agendas of these artists, as well as to their real world contexts. The long-term effects of anti-art and the development of the pluralistic situation known as post-Modernism, are described in vivid detail. From the Greek philosopher Diogenes, through the 19th-century German romantic tradition, to the modern art critic Clement Greenberg, McEvilley traces philosophical ideas and political impulses that temporarily led to a toppling of painting and sculpture in the decades right after World War II. Following an overview of Modernism and Marcel Duchamp's influence, a chapter on Yves Klein sets the state for surveys of Conceptual Art and its practitioners, including Bernar Venet, John Baldessari, and Francis Alys. McEvilley then gives equal focus to Performance Art with chapters on Andy Warhol, Brian O'Doherty, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay, among others. At the end of the volume the triumph of anti-art is explored in depth, as are the origins of the terms, practices, and politics of global art history.

The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism

Arts & Photography

Thomas McEvilley

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