John Stezaker: Love

By Jennie Waldow

JUNE 2019 | Art Books

The collages and silkscreens of John Stezaker contain stutters and elisions, gaps and coverings that pull viewers into “an act of empathetic engagement,” as the artist said in a 2011 interview included in the catalogue for his retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery.

The Once and Future Queen: Amber Sparks's Weird Realism

By Kurt Baumeister

FEB 2020 | Books

Amber Sparks’s third story collection And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges is, as the title suggests, teeming with tales of retribution, though reducing the book or even its concept to that of a glorified burn book would be way off the mark. Desire, anger, murder, madness, robots, gods, monsters, apocalypses, love, hate, violence, magic, fairy godmothers, women as heroes, and men behaving badly (badly-behaved men who often pay with their lives, or hearts, or souls for said bad behavior): all these things live within this book’s pages.

ADAM RENSCH with John Collins

MAR 2020 | Field Notes

The third book in the Field Notes series published by Reaktion Books in association with the Brooklyn Rail has just been published: No Home for You Here: A Memoir of Class and Culture, by Adam Theron-Lee Rensch. John Collins sat down with Rensch at his home in Chicago to discuss the book and its preoccupations.

Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and the Virtues of Impracticality

By NOEL IGNATIEV

DEC 19-JAN 20 | Field Notes

In a lengthy review in the New Yorker of David W. Blight’s recent book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,¹ Adam Gopnik calls Douglass “the progenitor of the ‘pragmatic-progressive’ strain in American thought that led to Martin Luther King and Barack Obama.”² Douglass is an attractive figure, and it is easy to understand why he fills the need of American mainstream thought for a Black political hero now that George Washington Carver (the one Black figure in the textbooks when I went to grade school) no longer serves. But the notion of “pragmatic progressive” suggests an alternative tradition, which we might call “impractical revolutionary.” Nat Turner, John Brown, and Malcolm X come to mind as exemplars.