by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson

University of Chicago Press, Pub: June 2005, 312 pages , paper

Reviewed in the April/May issue of bookforum. The book is due out in June.

by John Ashbery

Ecco Press, Pub Date: March 2005, 96 pages , cloth

by Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun

Yale University Press, Pub Date: March 2005, 280 pages, paper

by Gregg Bordowitz,

Edited by James Meyer,

Foreword by Douglas Crimp

MIT Press, Pub: December 2004, 285 pages , cloth

One of the aspects of this book that sets it apart, according to reviewer (bookforum) Richard Meyer, is that, "rather than offer(ing) any conventional narrative of personal suffering and survival . . . Bordowitz threads his individual experience through broader questions of artmaking, activism, and social critique as responses to the epidemic."

by Emmanuel Carrere,

Translated by Linda Coverdale and Lanie Goodman

Picador USA, Pub Date: April 2003, 336 pages , paper

The third of three books by Carrere mentioned in the bookforum article. If you have a mustache and have ever considered shaving it off, reading the second of these two short novels may change your mind.

by Emmanuel Carrere,

Translated by Linda Coverdale

Picador USA, Pub Date: January 2001, 208 pages, paper

Another long bookforum article, this in the April/May issue is devoted to the work of Emmanuel Carrere. Taken together, the three books reviewed -- all represented on this page -- offer an interesting portrait of the writer. Reviewer Gary Indiana concludes his article by saying of Carrère, "His characters, both real and imaginary, are people who tumble down a rabbit hole to a place very few of us would characterize as Wonderland, but is seems a wonderfully well-observed place, where we meet up with ourselves in the dark and discover that the arrangements we've made with ourselves hae been cancelled."

by Emmanuel Carrere,

Translated by Timothy Bent

Picador USA, Pub: June 2005, 336 pages , paper

The paper edition; due out in June 2005

by Pascale Casanova,

Translated by M. B. DeBevoise

Harvard University Press, Pub Date: January 2005, 440 pages, cloth

by Meredith L. Clausen

MIT Press, Pub Date: December 2004, 416 pages , cloth

I must say I never gave the Pam Am building that much thought, until I read Tom Venderbilt's review and Meridith Clausen's book. It has quite a story.

by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman

Basic Books, Pub: December 2004, 423 pages , cloth

by James Elkins

Routledge, Pub Date: October 2004, 176 pages , paper

by Marilyn Fabe

University of California Press, Pub: August 2004, 302 pages , paper

by Mark Feeney

University of Chicago Press, Pub Date: November 2004, 436 pages , cloth

by Eli Friedlander

Harvard University Press, Pub: January 2005, 176 pages , cloth

Reviewer Daniel Morris writes, "In the vintage spirit of Stanley Cavell (Friedlander is one of his most accomplished students), our usual expectations of philosophy are frustrated because Friedlander takes seriously the ordinary dimensions of life and experience. More to the point, he refuses both wondrousness and disappointment as animating features of philosophical inquiry. It is a remarkable refusal, for it gives Friedlander ample analytic space to break down the relations between autobiography and philosophy as they take shape in Rousseau's late work of meaningful refraction.

by Thomas L. Friedman

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc., Pub Date: May 2005, 496 pages , cloth

by Amy Hempel

Scribner, Pub: March 2005, 160 pages , cloth

Darcy Cosper writes that this collection of stories, "is markedly if subtly different from her previous works, not in form or style, but in tone." "It's sterner, a little bleaker, plainer-spoken but more complex; the sweet, loopy pathos, the wry and stealthy wit have evolved, have been transfigured, into something harder and purer -- perhaps less likeable, but, as a consequence, even more admirable."

by Martin Jay

University of California Press, Pub Date: January 2005, 431 pages , cloth

An intellectual history of experience that reviewer Michael Roth calls "at once modest and extrordinarily ambitious." He goes on to write, "The erudition on display in this sweeping acount of a central concept in Western Philosophy over several hundred years is a wonder; the writing is clear, and the scholasrship is breathtaking. But it is modest in the sense that it does not announce its own point of view with any emphasis. Instead, the reader benefits from the author's openness to thinkers as unalike as Schleirmacher and Rorty, Oakeshott and Bataille. Jay makes sense of each thinker on his own terms--and that's because with his intellectual openess and his conceptual mediation, Jay indeed practices what he is so lightly preaching. An intellectual historian at the top of his game, he has shared his own experience of these ideas, texts, and writers. After reading his book, we can, too."

by Philip Jodidio

Taschen, Pub Date: November 2004, 528 pages, cloth

by Uwe Johnson,

Translated by Damion Searls

Northwestern University Press, Pub: January 2004, 128 pages , paper

Also reviewed in the spring issue of bookforum, this is Johnson's memorial to Ingeborg Bachmann, one that according to reviewer Thomas McGonigle, "can be taken as an invitation to read her work."

Edited by Pamela Kort

Prestel Publishing Co., Pub Date: December 2004, 208 pages , cloth

A catalogue from a recent exhibition at the Neue Galerie in New York that brings together nine essays from scholars of German art history and literature and traces the thread of a particularly German prewar fascination with oddly hybridized forms and representations. Examples come from sources as varied as Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, and Hannah Hö, as well as from the career of Karl Valentin, a man who apparently converted his own body into various kinds of musical instruments and furniture. OK.

by Robert Lowell,

Edited by Saskia Hamilton

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc., Pub: June 2005, 896 pages , cloth

Not due to be released until June! Lowell's letter to Pound as a 19 year-old freshman at Harvard is remarkable. Imagine someone writing the same letter today??

by Maestro Martino of Como,

Edited by Luigi Ballerini,

Translated by Jeremy Parzen With 50 Modernized Recipes by Stefania Barzini

University of California Press, Pub Date: January 2005, 272 pages , cloth

The 14th title in UCal Press Food and Culture Series. Yes, Martino of Como did know how to cook a peacock.

by Dwight McBride

New York University Press, Pub: February 2005, 240 pages , paper

by C. Jill O'Bryan

University of Minnesota Press, Pub Date: January 2005, 216 pages , paper

by Jacqueline Rose

Princeton University Press, Pub: April 2005, 208 pages , cloth

In a long excerpt in the Feb/Mar issue of bookforum, Rose discusses the differing voices at odds with each other during the formative stages of Zionism. Hans Kohn, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Ahad Ha'am, Herzl, and others. Offering much more than an historical project, Rose relates these different voices to the contemporary question of what the state of Israel has become . . . and what it could be.