Call & Response 2015: Lineage

Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art. Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning. Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.

Selected for the Call & Response Exhibit by Kelly Hendrickson

This book offers enthralling insights into the history, mythology legends of the peoples of Mesoamerica, lavishly illustrated throughout.

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Ben Bever.

A decade after the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, scientists are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category. In this provocative analysis, leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race. By searching for differences at the molecular level, a new race-based science is obscuring racism in society and legitimising state brutality against communities at a time when America claims to be post-racial.

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Sean Pears.

When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their Children's and Household Tales in 1812, followed by a second volume in 1815, they had no idea that such stories as "Rapunzel," "Hansel and Gretel," and "Cinderella" would become the most celebrated in the world. Yet few people today are familiar with the majority of tales from the two early volumes, since in the next four decades the Grimms would publish six other editions, each extensively revised in content and style. For the very first time, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm makes available in English all 156 stories from the 1812 and 1815 editions. These narrative gems, newly translated and brought together in one beautiful book, are accompanied by sumptuous new illustrations from award-winning artist Andrea Dezsö. From "The Frog King" to "The Golden Key," wondrous worlds unfold--heroes and heroines are rewarded, weaker animals triumph over the strong, and simple bumpkins prove themselves not so simple after all. Esteemed fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes offers accessible translations that retain the spare description and engaging storytelling style of the originals. Indeed, this is what makes the tales from the 1812 and 1815 editions unique--they reflect diverse voices, rooted in oral traditions, that are absent from the Grimms' later, more embellished collections of tales. Zipes's introduction gives important historical context, and the book includes the Grimms' prefaces and notes. A delight to read, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm presents these peerless stories to a whole new generation of readers.

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Ben Brezner

This book surveys the wide array of textiles made, worn, used, and displayed throughout the Islamic world, from the glorious fabrics of the past to those produced today. Hundreds of illustrations feature examples from around the globe, including embroidered Persian prayer cloths, Anatolian ikat coats, Ottoman beaded purses, Caucasian striped silk bags, Berber women's shawls, Arab tent decorations, Yemeni indigo robes, Indonesian batik sarongs, and West African strip-woven cloths.Region by region, the book provides details of local history, particular textile traditions, materials, dyes, special forms of decoration, and information on current practice. The variety is stunning, from cloths of cotton, hemp, linen, and wool to sumptuous velvets and silks; from techniques of quilting, felting, beading, and knitting to block-printing, tie-dyeing, and hand-weaving on a range of looms.Specially taken color photographs, portraits of weavers in action, and rare archival material complete a remarkable visual panorama. Together with a glossary and a guide to textile collections around the world, this comprehensive survey provides a wealth of information and will be invaluable to anyone interested in the rich art of textiles, costume, or craft.

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Noor Y. Hamidaddin.

The development of textiles as an art form between 1945 and 1970, and the extent of collaboration between artists and textile manufacturers at this time, is unrivalled in modern art history. Raoul Dufy was the first twentieth-century artist to become seriously and successfully involved in producing textile designs. His work influenced and encouraged many other artists and textile companies in Britain, on the Continent and in America. After the war this movement really flowered with the involvement of leading artists of the day: Picasso, Matisse, Moore, Nicholson, Warhol, Steinberg, to name a few. This book is an important and comprehensive survey of this art form in Britain and America. There are approximately 200 color images, many of which have never been seen before, alongside specially commissioned photography. Major artists featured: Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Saul Steinberg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Fernand Leger, Ben Nicholson, Andy Warhol."

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Ariel Harwick.

Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. “Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?” Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Sarah Zuckerman.

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." -- from Invisible Cities In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo -- Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear. "Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose . . . The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island." -- Jeanette Winterson

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Sarah Zuckerman.

"Before Night Fall is Reinaldo Arenas's stunning autobiography - a bold and unrestrained account of his life as a writer and a homosexual. Arenas, acknowledged as one of the great twentieth-century Cuban writers, was born in 1943 into a poor, rural Cuban family. At the age of fifteen he joined Castro's guerrillas against Batista's right-wing regime, only to discover that repression under Castro would be on a monumental scale. Reinaldo Arenas spent twenty years of his life trying to survive his "re-education," to safeguard his manuscripts, and to maintain his sanity when he was imprisoned in El Morro prison in Havana. But despite everything that happened to him, including betrayal by his aunt and some of his closest "friends," Arenas triumphed, finally leaving Cuba during the Mariel exodus in 1980." "But America could never replace his beloved Cuba, and his anti-Castro stance made him unsympathetic to many American intellectuals. The final irony was his battle with AIDS, which dominated the last years of his life until he committed suicide on December 7, 1990, at the age of forty-seven." "Before Night Falls was begun before Arenas left Cuba and was completed in the last stage of the disease. It is an extraordinary document - a compelling and moving account of the hell that Arenas experienced in Cuba and the purgatory he endured in the United States. It is a book both raw and fierce, tender and lyrical, particularly about the Cuban landscape. In it you will discover a man of enormous vitality, resilience, and courage. Arenas writes of his own book, "I tell my truth like a Jew who has suffered from racism, a Russian who has been in the Gulag, or any human being who has eyes to see things as they are: I cry out: therefore I am.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Marcos L. Martínez.

This volume brings together three of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s major short stories and thirteen shorter pieces of fiction that he calls "texts for nothing.” Here, as in all his work, Beckett relentlessly strips away all but the essential to arrive at a core of truth. His prose reveals the same mastery that marks his work from Waiting for Godot and Endgame to Molloy and Malone Dies. In each of the three stories, old men displaced or expelled from the modest cornerswhere they have been living bestir themselves in search of new corners. Told, "You can’t stay here,” they somehow, doggedly, inevitably, go on. Includes: "The Expelled” "The Calmative” "The End” Texts for Nothing (1-10)

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Josh Whipkey.

In ten interlocking essays, the acclaimed author of Written on the Body and Art & Lies reveals art as an active force in the world--neither elitist nor remote, available to those who want it and affecting those who don't. Original, personal, and provocative, these essays are not so much a point of view as they are a way of life, revealing "a brilliant and deeply feeling artist at work" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Selected for the Call & Response Booklist by M. Mack and Marcos L. Martínez.

For this collection the Hawaii Award for Literature recipients were asked to write about people living in some way apart or outside of the mainstream: the plantation family, or the woman hostage, for example. Included in the notes are comments from writers responding to each other's work.

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Anne Smith.

With this volume, The Library of America inaugurates a collected edition of the works of America's preeminent living poet. Beginning with "Some Trees" in 1956, John Ashbery has charted a profoundly original and individual course that has opened up pathways for subsequent generations of poets. At once hermetic and exuberantly curious, meditative and unnervingly funny, dreamlike and steeped in everyday realities, and alive to every nuance of American speech, these are poems that constantly discover new worlds within language. This first volume of the collected Ashbery includes the complete texts of his first twelve books, including such groundbreaking collections as "Rivers and Mountains, Three Poems, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975), and "Houseboat Days." It also features an unprecedented gathering of more than sixty previously uncollected poems written over a period of four decades, a rare treasure trove for poetry lovers. This volume is a landmark portrait of a modern master.

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Ben Brezner.

These are poems of absence. Written in the wake of the loss of her mother, River House follows Sally Keith as she makes her way through the depths of grief, navigating a world newly transfigured. Incorporating her travels abroad, her experience studying the neutral mask technique developed by Jacques Lecoq, and her return to the river house she and her mother often visited, the poet assembles a guide to survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable pain. Even in the dark, Keith finds the ways we can be "filled with this unexpected feeling of living.

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Ben Brezner.

Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes--a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions--the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art. With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Lina Patton and Melody Cook.

"Brilliant....Each story is a fascinating vignette, and together they they weave the reader through a world where the Moon Lady can grant any wish, where a child, promised in marriage at two and delivered at 12, can, with cunning, free herself; where a rich man's concubine secures her daughter's future by killing herself, and where a woman can live on, knowing she has lost her entire life." WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD A stunning literary achievement, THE JOY LUCK CLUB explores the tender and tenacious bond between four daughters and their mothers. The daughters know one side of their mothers, but they don't know about their earlier never-spoken of lives in China. The mothers want love and obedience from their daughters, but they don't know the gifts that the daughters keep to themselves. Heartwarming and bittersweet, this is a novel for mother, daughters, and those that love them.

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Lina Patton and Melody Cook.

Poetry. Rigorously interrogating three hundred years of family history in Scotland and Maryland, TRAFFICKE tracks and remixes questions of race and identity, fact and legend into a mosaic of verse, lyric prose, historical narrative, and quotation. As it strips away the glamour—in the old Scottish sense of a spell, an illusion—TRAFFICKE takes shape not as a simple uncovering of truth, but as a dis-spelling, a building and tearing down of identity's various disguises, of power's relentless self- justification, of the poet's own bitterness and complicity. Stepping forward and backward in time, sampling texts that range from 16th- century Gaelic poetry to runaway slave advertisements, Tichy's narrative pulls readers through a many- layered critique of ownership and the timeless seduction of beauty. Violence and language, literacy and desire—these too are characters in the lyrical, fraught, and grief-charged text of TRAFFICKE.

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Ben Brezner.

Poetry. In LESSNESS everything is in ruins--machines, landscapes, buildings, bodies, histories, language. In terse elegies and effaced text, Lessness forces us to question the body, and through it the stability of the knowable. All builds toward a lengthy, strangely gentle "wreckage," where the surrender to inevitable infestations does not negate small triumphs.

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Marcos Martínez.

Recounts the history of pop-up books, provides detailed instructions and examples for creating each type of effect, and offers information on how movable books are produced.

Selected for the Call & Response booklist by Alice Quatrochi.