• Augusto Roa Bastos, Son of Man, trans. Rachel Caffyn
• LeRoy C. Breunig, ed., The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology
• Pierre Reverdy, Selected Poems, trans. Mary Ann Caws, Patricia Terry & John Ashbery
• William Goyen, The House of Breath

Films

• International House, directed by
• Poto and Cabengo, dir. Jean-Pierre Gorin
• Routine Pleasures, dir. Jean-Pierre Gorin
• Le Tempestaire, dir. Jean Epstein
• Autumn Fire, dir. Herman G. Weinberg
• La coquille et le clergyman, dir. Germaine Dulac
• Geography of the Body, dir. Willard Maas
• The Mechanics of Love, dir. Willard Maas & Ben Moore
• Visual Variations on Noguchi, dir. Marie Menken
• House of Cards, dir. Joseph Vogel
• The Potted Psalm, dir. Sidney Peterson & James Broughton
• The Cage, dir. Sidney Peterson
• Christmas U.S.A., dir. Gregory Markopoulos
• Adventures of Jimmy, dir. James Broughton
• Interim, dir. Stan Brakhage
• Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection, dir. Stan Brakhage
• The Way to Shadow Garden, dir. Stan Brakhage
• The Extraordinary Child, dir. Stan Brakhage
• Coogan’s Bluff, dir. Don Siegel
• The Fall of the House of Usher, dir. James Sibley Watson & Melville Webber
• Rebus-Film No. 1, dir. Paul Leni
• Pacific 231, dir. Jean Mitry
• Arrière saison, dir. Dimitri Kirsanoff

• Eric Baus, The To Sound
• William Everson, The Engendering Flood: Book One of Dust Shall Be the Serpent’s Food
• Julio Cortázar, Nicaraguan Sketches, trans. Kathleen Weaver
• Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
• Stephanie Young, Picture Palace
• David Shapiro, The Page-Turner
• John Gimlette, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels through Paraguay
• Giorgio Manganelli, All the Errors, trans. Giorgio Manganelli
• Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

Films

• The Old Fashioned Way, directed by William Beaudine
• Island of Lost Souls, dir. Erle C. Kenton
• The Awful Truth, dir. Leo McCarey
• Poppy, dir. A. Edward Sutherland
• Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, dir. Rouben Mamoulian
• Million Dollar Legs, dir. Edward F. Kline
• If I Had a Million, dir. Ernst Lubitsch, Norman Taurog, Stephen Roberts, Norman Z. McLeod, James Cruze, William A. Seiter, H. Bruce Humberstone & Lothar Mendes
• Gabriel over the White House, dir. Gregory La Cava
• My Favorite Wife, dir. Garson Kanin
• The Devil-Doll, dir. Tod Browning
• Mad Love, dir. Karl Freund
• Vivacious Lady, dir. George Stevens
• Shadows, dir. John Cassavetes
• You’re Telling Me!, dir. Erle C. Kenton

Exhibits

• “Grisaille,” Luxembourg & Dayan
• “Late Medieval Panel Paintings: Methods, Materials, Meanings,” Richard L. Feigen & Co.

• Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Albert Cook. I found this on the street for a dollar the other day (the garrulous bookseller went out of his way to explain how the plot of The Unbearable Lightness of Being had relevance to today’s economy) and bought it mostly because I was curious about the translation. It seems fine for the first book.
• Charles M. Doughty, The Cliffs. This book is batshit insane, and I’ll have more to say about it later. I found this copy in Istanbul; it’s a closet drama about the coming of World War I to Britain with mystic elements, and you need the Oxford English Dictionary to get past the first page, which is why it’s taken me so long.
• Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt. I think I bought this thinking that I would like to see what Herodotus had to say about Libya; as it turns out, not very much. Was doing reasonably well with this, but it got mowed under by Gibbon.
• Robert Kelly, Kill the Messenger. I went through a lot of Robert Kelly this year after picking up a bunch of his books for almost nothing; this volume of poetry seems nice so far, though I misplaced it and didn’t finish it off. Four more of his books sit on my shelf untouched.
• William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch. At a certain point I got anxious about having written off Burroughs, like I tend to do with most of the Beats, and I went and read Queer, which is nice, if rough, and then went to finally read this. But it makes me feel too old. If the bookstores hadn’t been studiously hiding Burroughs when I was in high school I might have appreciated him more.
• Andre Furlani, Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After. A biographical study of Guy Davenport is something I should be rushing though and I’m not sure why I haven’t here. Ended up at the bottom of a stack of books, probably.
• Michael Richardson, ed., The Dedalus Book of Surrealism 1 & 2. If I rode the subway more, I would have quickly made my way through these nice anthologies; as it was, I read the Gracq piece (uncollected anywhere else) and left it at that.
• Gérard de Nerval, The Salt Smugglers, trans. Richard Sieburth. I’ve said this before: I hate Archipelago’s book design, because it seems like they care about book design (french flaps, matte covers) but they pay no attention to proportions and they end up with something like this landscape volume, which sets the text in columns (in the ostensible interest of making it look more like feuilleton) which makes it more or less unreadable. I do like Nerval and I was given a very good reason to read this, so I’ll go back to this.
• Wendy Walker, My Man and Other Critical Fictions. Another landscape book, but this one justifies its own design. I’ve worked through a little of this (the story based on Ortese’s The Iguana) though this is clearly a book that needs to be read with its sources close by.
• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. I read a good chunk of this late one night on the train and it seemed absolutely perfect and of the moment as very few other things were this year, but then I failed to go back to it.
• Anna Marie Ortese, A Music Behind the Wall: Selected Stories, trans. Henry Martin. I don’t know if this counts: it’s in two volumes, and I finished the first, after spending an immense amount of time re-reading one of the stories. This is a book I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about; I’ll finish the second volume soon, but it’s a book that requires a lot of mental concentration & and also a book that requires more attention than it’s received. Also currently reading her The Lament of the Linnet, though I’ll finish that soon.
• Raymond Roussel, Impressions of Africa, trans. Mark Polizzotti. I’ve read the previous translation, of course, and my reading of this version has been slow because I keep going back to other versions to see what’s changed. It’s great so far. Will finish this up the next time I have a block of free time.
• Danielle Dutton, Sprawl. I read a good chunk of this on a plane and liked it, but was aware that I was too tired & wasn’t concentrating well enough for a book without paragraph breaks. I’ll come back to this.
• Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Most embarrassing because most public. I made it about three hundred pages in and had a very good idea what was going on, and then I was distracted. I feel awful about this, of course. But this might be a book you have to read during the summer? I had some success reading this on planes (à la The Accidental Tourist) but it demands to be read outside.
• Ivy Compton-Burnett, A House and its Head. I was having a lot of fun reading this aloud – she kind of demands to be read aloud, doesn’t she? and then something happened.
• Lucy Lippard, I See/You Mean. I’ve read this before, but was re-reading again. Someone needs to reprint this book, which I always want to recommend people, but it’s too hard for them to find copies.
• Albert Vigoleis Thelen, The Island of Second Sight. I started this massive German novel about Majorca after seeing the review in the TLS but then I was distracted by other things.
• Marguerite Young, Angel in the Forest. This book, about religious communities in southern Indiana, is fantastic, but Young’s prose makes me fall asleep in the best way.
• Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again. I forget why I thought it was necessary to re-read this, but I made it about halfway through before getting distracted. Periodically I think it’s necessary to make my way through the second half of Proust. Rarely do I think to go back to the first half – I wonder why?
• Gail Scott, The Obituaryx. I liked Gail Scott’s My Paris, but I couldn’t get very far in this, even though it’s not a long book at all. It seems maybe too Canadian?
• Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions. I felt like I needed to give Borges another chance, but he’s so dislikable as a person, even if he has nice ideas. I bogged down in this problem, which isn’t really fair to the book. I do think it’s terrible what Penguin’s done to his translations.
• David Foster Wallace, The Pale King. This fell into the pile of books by the bed and I haven’t retrieved it yet. I should have felt more compelled to finish this; Wallace on the Midwest and boredom is something that I should find urgent and key. I keep meaning to find a copy of Infinite Jest without the Eggers introduction to see if I like the book as much as I did in 1996; that didn’t happen either & will have to wait until I finish this.
• Daniel P. Friedman & Matthias Felleisen, The Little Schemer. I don’t know how much this counts: this is a book about learning Scheme, which was described as a good book about programming for non-programmers. I like it when I pick it up, but I’ve invariably forgotten everything that came before when I return to my place, so I keep starting from the beginning.
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Like everyone else, I started this this year. Will finish this sooner or later: top of a pile.
• Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This doesn’t entirely count because I’m around 1500 pages into it, but it is still unfinished and I don’t even have a copy of the third volume yet.

• Jan Morris, Hav
• Denis Wood, Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas

Films

• Trolljegeren (Troll Hunter), directed by André Øvredal
• I Know Where I’m Going!, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
• Beat the Devil, dir. John Huston
• SLC Punk!, dir. James Merendino
• I Was a Male War Bride, dir. Howard Hawks
• Le Peuple migrateur (Winged Migration), dir. Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud & Michel Debats
• Chinesisches Roulette (Chinese Roulette), dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• She Done Him Wrong, dir. Lowell Sherman
• Scarface, dir. Howard Hawks
• The Man on the Flying Trapeze, dir. Clyde Bruckman & W. C. Fields

Exhibits

• “Lee Bontecou: Recent Work: Sculpture and Drawing,” FreedmanArt
• “Francis Picabia: Late Paintings,” Michael Werner

• Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
• L. S. Asekoff, Dreams of a Work
• Lauren Beukes, Zoo City
• Cecily Mackworth, The Destiny of Isabelle Eberhardt: A Biography

Films

• A Time to Love and a Time to Die, dir. Douglas Sirk
• The Tarnished Angels, dir. Douglas Sirk
• Pootie Tang, dir. Louis C.K.
• Gray’s Anatomy, dir. Steven Soderbergh
• And Everything Is Going Fine, dir. Steven Soderbergh
• The Accidental Tourist, dir. Lawrence Kasdan
• To Be or Not To Be, dir. Ernst Lubitsch
• Rare Exports, dir. Jalmari Helander

Exhibits

• “Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life,” Grey Art Gallery
• “Transition to Christianity: Art of Late Antiquity, 3rd–7th Century A.D.,” Onassis Cultural Center
• “Elizabeth Bishop: Objects & Apparitions,” Tibor de Nagy
• “Jess: Paintings,” Tibor de Nagy
• “Material Witness,” Pavel Zoubok
• “Yoko Ono: Uncursed,” Galerie Lelong
• “Hiroshi Sugimoto: Surface of the Third Order,” Pace Gallery
• “Matta: A Centennial Celebration,” Pace Gallery
• “Peter Hujar: Three Lives: Peter Hujar, Paul Thek, & David Wojnarowicz,” Matthew Marks
• “Karen Knorr: India Song,” Danziger Gallery
• “Ben Vautier: Solo Show,” Vicky David Gallery

• Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
• Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
• L. S. Asekoff, The Gate of Horn
• L. S. Asekoff, Freedom Hill
• Renee Gladman, The Ravickians
• Anka Muhlenstein, Balzac’s Omelette, trans. Adriana Hunter

Films

• Roma, directed by Federico Fellini
• You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, dir. George Marshall & Edward F. Cline
• Little Shop of Horrors, dir. Roger Corman
• The Creature from the Haunted Sea, dir. Roger Corman
• King of the Hill, dir. Steven Soderbergh
• Inside Job, dir. Charles Ferguson

Exhibits

• “Art in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1515: Paintings and Drawings from the Museum’s Collection,” Met
• “Perino del Vaga in New York Collections,” Met
• “Picasso’s Drawings, 1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition,” Frick
• “Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism,” Acquavella Galleries
• “Influential Friends by Peter Hujar,” John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

• Parker Tyler, Florine Stettheimer: A Life in Art
• John Crowley, Conversation Hearts
• Roberto Arlt, Mad Toy, trans. Michele McKay Aynesworth
• Percival Everett, Glyph
• Robert Kelly, Queen of Terrors

Films

• Rome Against Rome, directed by Giuseppe Vari
• Nothing Sacred, dir. William Wellman
• A Bucket of Blood, dir. Roger Corman
• Absolute Wilson, dir. Katharina Otto-Bernstein
• Nóż w wodzie (Knife in the Water), dir. Roman Polanski

Exhibits

• “Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe,” Met
• “Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz,” Met
• “Historic Images of the Greek Bronze Age: The Reproductions of E. Gilliéron & Son,” Met
• “John Ashbery: Recent Collages,” Tibor de Nagy

• Robert Graves, King Jesus
• Julio Cortázar, Unreasonable Hours, trans. Alberto Manguel
• Rikki Ducornet, Netsuke

Films

• Logan’s Run, directed by Michael Anderson
• The Epic That Never Was, dir. Bill Duncalf

• Bilge Karasu, The Garden of Departed Cats, trans. Aron Aji
• Jerome Rothenberg, ed., Revolution of the Word: A New Gathering of American Avant-Garde Poetry 1914–1945

Films

• Ossessione, directed by Luchino Visconti
• Hannah and Her Sisters, dir. Woody Allen
• Bill Cunningham New York, dir. Richard Press
• Possessed, dir. Clarence Brown

Exhibits

• “Beatrice Wood (1893–1998),” Francis M. Naumann Fine Arts
• “John Beerman: Recent Paintings,” Tibor de Nagy Gallery
• “Donald Evans: Selected Works,” Tibor de Nagy Gallery
• “Niki de Saint Phalle: Retrospective 1960–2002,” Nohra Haime Gallery
• “Gabriel Orozco: Corplegados and Particles,” Marian Goodman Gallery
• “Richard Serra: Junction/Cycle,” Gagosian
• “Sterling Ruby/Lucio Fontana,” Andrea Rosen Gallery
• “Carsten Nicolai: Pionier,” Pace
• “Matthew Barney: Djed,” Gladstone
• “Meredyth Sparks: Stripped Bare, Even and Again,” Elizabeth Dee Gallery
• “Manfred Mohr: 1964–2011, Réflexions sur une esthétique programmée,” Bitforms

• Christopher Logue, All Day Permanent Red
• Manuela Draeger, In the Time of the Blue Ball, trans. Brian Evenson
• Henry McBride, Florine Stettheimer
• Ilya Ilf & Evgeny Petrov, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, ed. Erika Wolf, trans. Anne O. Fisher
• Elizabeth Sussman & Barbara J. Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer: Manhattan Fantastica
• Julien Gracq, The Peninsula, trans. Elizabeth Deshays

Films

• Carnival of Souls, directed by Herk Harvey

Exhibits

• “De Kooning: A Retrospective,” MoMA
• “Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions 1962–1978,” MoMA
• “Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos,” Institute for the Study of the Ancient World