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.
* 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
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.
From the acclaimed landscape historian and geographer, a comprehensive handbook to understanding the elements that make up the rural landscape. Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title In this book, John Fraser Hart offers a comprehensive handbook to understanding the elements that make up the rural landscape—those regions that lie at or beyond the fringes of modern metropolitan life. Though the last two centuries have seen an inversion in the portion of people living on farms to those in cities, the land still beckons, whether traversed in a car or train, scanned from far above, or as the locus of our food supply or leisure. The Rural Landscape provides a deceptively simple method for approaching the often complex and variegated shape of the land. Hart divides it into its mineral, vegetable, and animal components and shows how each are interdependent, using examples from across Europe and America. Looking at the land forms of southern England, for instance, he comments on the use of hedgerows to divide fields, the mineral or geomorphological features of the land determining where hedgerows will grow in service of the human animal's needs. Hart reveals the impact on the land of human culture and the basic imperative of making a living as well as the evolution of technical skills toward that end (as seen in the advance of barbed wire as a function of modern transportation). Hart describes with equal clarity the erosion of land to form river basins and the workings of a coal mine. He charts shifting patterns of crop rotation, from the medieval rota of food (wheat or rye), feed (barley or oats), and fallow (to restore the land) to modern two-crop cycle of corn and soybeans, made possible by fertilizers and pesticides. He comments on traditions of land division (it is almost impossible to find a straight line on a map of Europe) and inventories a variety of farm structures (from hop yards and oast houses to the use of dikes for irrigation). He identifies the relict features of the landscape—from low earthen terraces once used in the southern United States to prevent erosion to old bank buildings that have become taverns and barns turned into human homes. Carrying the story of the rural landscape into our frantic era, he describes the "bow wave"where city life meets rural agriculture and plots the effect of recreation and its structures on the look of the land.
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.