Postmodernism

The writer on creating a legend about her mother, breaking the fourth wall, and Elena Ferrante’s honesty.

A newly reconstructed “opera for television.”

The writer of the Poena Damni trilogy on analytic philosophy, polyphonous narrators, and alternate consciousness. 

A New York City public defender and author of a self-published bestseller returns with his third novel, Lost Empress. Sources range from quantum physics to the gospel.

Autofiction that explores the borderland between memoir and vision quest.

Tracing the lineage of feminism and social justice in postmodern dance.

Katie Peyton on the satisfying artifacts of truth in Kristopher Jansma’s The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Here is an attractively printed 500-plus-page anthology of “North American Postmodern Pastoral Poetry,” culled from work first published since 1995 and divided into four largely arbitrary piles.

“History has shown that universalism is a step away from totalitarianism—a deadly kind of erasure that I find horrifying. The fear of fascism undermines my sensuous relationship to those things. I often wonder, are there any other alternative aesthetics?”

I met Jimmie Durham the day after the opening of his retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in February of 2009. 

In paying homage to Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Sowon Kwon’s book project dongghab suggests a connection between nascent American postmodernism and violence.

Peter Eisenman prefers Milan to Istanbul. He is an architect and theorist whose work is firmly grounded in the European classical tradition from the Italian Renaissance to the present. 

Montana Wojczuk interviews Wendy and Lucy author Jon Raymond.

David Varno reflects on the Charles Olsen documentary Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place.

Based on a workshop and exhibition at the Banff Centre in 2007, Informal Architectures is more a compilation of documents (artist statements, interviews, and articles by workshop participants and exhibitors) than a typical work of architectural history or criticism.

“My dream was a synchronized sound of present, absent, and distant musicians choreographed across the audience via the elaborate placement and movements of the performers in the whole building.”

In his new collection of critical essays, writer Alan Gilbert leads a probing, borderless investigation into countless contemporary moments in aesthetics that recognize, inhabit, resist, essentially interact with the realm of the social. 

In his introduction to Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s new book Chinese Sun, Jacob Edmonds posits the book’s most pressing question: Can something be central if it is marginal and arbitrary?

Mauricio Kagel’s seminar in Aix-en-Provence, France, in the summer of 1981, sponsored by the organization Centre Acanthes, was a turning point in my life.

I’ve known Jeffrey Eugenides for several years and in several contexts—first as one of his readers, then as a student of his at Princeton, and now as a friend