In 2006 the Guardian's country diary column is 100 years old, and to commemorate the anniversary Martin Wainwright has compiled a collection of the best of a century's writing.
For more than 35 years, James Welling has explored the material and conceptual possibilities of photography. Diary/Landscape - the first mature body of work by this important contemporary artist - set the framework for his subsequent investigations of abstraction and his fascination with nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England. In July 1977, Welling began photographing a two-volume travel diary kept by his great-grandmother Elizabeth C. Dixon, as well as landscapes in southern Connecticut. A beautiful and moving meditation on family, history, memory, and place, the work reintroduced history and private emotion as subjects in high art, while also helping to usher in the centrality of photography and theoretical questions about originality that mark the epochal Pictures Generation.
* An October 2023 ABA "Indie Next List" Pick. * A Publishers Weekly's "Writers to Watch" (Fall 2023) An entrancing and prismatic debut novel by Christine Lai, set in a near future fraught with ecological collapse, Landscapes brilliantly explores memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal. In the English countryside—decimated by heat and drought—Penelope archives what remains of an estate’s once notable collection. As she catalogues the library’s contents, she keeps a diary of her final months in the dilapidated country house that has been her home for two decades and a refuge for those who have been displaced by disasters. Out of necessity, Penelope and her partner, Aidan, have sold the house and its scheduled demolition marks the pressing deadline for completing the archive. But with it also comes the impending return of Aidan’s brother, Julian, at whose hands Penelope suffered during a brief but violent relationship twenty-two years before. As Julian’s visit looms, Penelope finds herself unable to suppress the past, and she clings to art as a means of understanding, of survival, and of reckoning. Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an elegiac and spellbinding blend of narrative, essay, and diary that reinvents the country house novel for our age of catastrophe, and announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer. Additional reading: Necessary Fiction presents "Research Notes" by Landscapes author Christine Lai (September 15, 2023): The Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. Read an excerpt: Electric Literature presents "An Archivist for the End of the World," an excerpt from Landscapes by Christine Lai, recommended by Ayşegül Savaş. Interviews: Interview Magazine: Christine Lai | Sep 13, 2023 Amanda Paige Inman, for Interview Magazine, spoke with author Christine Lai about her debut novel, Landscapes, the challenges of writing certain characters, ruins, diaries, missed connections, the joys of collecting, Lai's enduring fascination with country houses, and so much more. Write or Die Magazine: Christine Lai | Sep 12, 2023 For Write or Die Magazine, Nirica Srinivasan spoke with author Christine Lai about the seed for the story of her debut novel, Landscapes, how she settled on the unique structure of the book, background behind the novel's many references, art, objects, violence, the ruinous, future setting, and much, much more. Publishers Weekly: Writers to Watch, Fall 2023 | Jun 30, 2023 Matt Seidel, for Publishers Weekly, spoke with Christine Lai, author of the debut novel Landscapes—included as one of "this season’s crop of promising debut fiction [offering] timeless human dramas from fresh perspectives"—about how her novel came to be written, her inspirations, and more! Q&A with Christine Lai | Dec 12, 2022 Eric Obenauf, editorial director of Two Dollar Radio, talked with Christine Lai about her debut novel Landscapes: "The role of the writer is not unlike that of the archivist, bringing together images and ideas, saving them from dispersal and placing them into a collection that lends them meaning." We hope you enjoy this fascinating interview!
Poetry. "I love this book so much. A work of meticulous craft and profound originality, Mary Biddinger's newest collection of prose poems is one of the best books I've read on our historical moment and the decades that led to it. PARTIAL GENIUS reads like a dossier of the psychological landscape of late capitalist America and the end of empire. In the tradition of John Ashbery, but wholly original in her own vision and voice, Biddinger draws from a deep well of poetic intellect and wit to illuminate the existential threats and imaginative possibilities of our collective self-destruction. In 'The Subject Pool' the speaker watches a man tattoo AU COURANT around her thigh. The tattoo artist has no idea. Every poem is chock-full of revelations in every detail. Reading this book felt like sitting by the fire in some secret location with a double agent, smoking her pipe telling tales of all that went down right in front of our faces, while we were all driven to distraction by outrage. To paraphrase Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, She's got it all in this book."--Heather Derr-Smith "'How many days since you began your last panic...?' Mary Biddinger asks in her latest collection. Quirky, imaginative, and wry in tone, PARTIAL GENIUS is a book that thwarts expectation, turns convention on its head, surprises and delights. Within a narrative scaffolded like a twisting stairway or maze-like hall, these fascinating poems feature high school reunions, job interviews, broken dioramas, and birth control pills; they showcase apologies, parlor games, and consolation prizes, intricacies, illusions, and tricks. Comfort is found in a bar of bathroom soap. An assistant manager wonders why a blazer is named for fire. A radio is implanted in the chest as a companion to the heart. Spheres of uncertainty juxtaposed against landscapes of failure create the book's complex beauty and dangerous edge, as Biddinger claims, 'The best part of figure skating was getting cut.' PARTIAL GENIUS comes to us as both a study of despair and a gleaming beacon of hope."--Jennifer Militello
This book is the biography of Anne Burrows Gilchrist, an Englishwoman of letters and widow of Blake's biographer, who fell in love with Wait Whitman when she read Leaves of Grass. In 1876 she came to America hoping to marry Whitman, but instead became his beloved friend. Illustrated.
An original and captivating history of gentrification, this book challenges the conventional wisdom that New York City began a comeback in the 1990s, locating the roots of Brooklyn's revival in the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Osman examines the emergence of a progressive coalition as young, well-educated brownstoners joined with poorer residents to battle city planners and local machine politicians. Deftly mixing architectural, cultural, and political history, this book offers an eye-opening perspective on the post-industrial city.