february 1–15, 2019

Books

  • Ricardo Piglia, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years, translated by Robert Croll
  • Paul Blackburn & Julio Cortázar, “Querido Pablito”/”Julissimo Querido”: Selected Correspondence 1958–1971
  • Lugwig Hohl, Ascent, trans. Donna Stonecipher
  • Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, trans. William Weaver
  • Patrick Modiano, The Search Warrant, trans. Joanna Kilmartin
  • Joshua Cohen, Moving Kings
  • Patrick Modiano, Honeymoon, trans. Barbara Wright
  • Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho, trans. Chris Andrews
  • Geeta Dayal, Another Green World
  • Patrick Modiano, Villa Triste, trans. John Cullen
  • Raymond Queneau, Hitting the Streets, trans. Rachel Galvin
  • Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste
  • David Stuart MacLean, The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Tale of Amnesia

Films

  • One More Time with Feeling, directed by Andrew Dominik
  • Tiger Bay, dir. J. Lee Thompson
  • Support the Girls, dir. Andrew Bujalski
  • Popeye, dir. Robert Altman
  • The Killing of a Sacred Deer, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
  • Harvey, dir. Henry Koster

january 16–31, 2019

Books

  • Patrick Modiano, Sleep of Memory, translated by Mark Polizzotti
  • Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
  • Othman Wok, Malayan Horror: Macabre Tales of Singapore and Malaysia in the 50’s, trans. Tuminah Sapawi & M. M. Basalamah
  • Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order
  • Patrick Modiano, The Black Notebook, trans. Mark Polizzotti
  • Patrick Modiano, The Night Watch, trans. Patricia Wolf & Frank Wynne
  • Gabriel García Márquez, Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín, trans. Asa Zatz
  • Charles Willeford, Pick-up
  • Patrick Modiano, Ring Roads, tras. Caroline Hillier & Frank Wynne
  • James Fenton, Selected Poems
  • Patrick Modiano, Missing Person, trans. Daniel Weissbort
  • Keith Gessen, A Terrible Country
  • Matt Ruff, Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy
  • José Saramago, Small Memories, trans. Margaret Jull Costa
  • Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading
  • Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar
  • Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World
  • Wallace Stevens, Transport to Summer
  • Patrick Modiano, Pedigree, trans. Mark Polizzotti
  • Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

Films

  • Roma, directed by Alfonso Cuarón
  • Brainstorm, dir. Douglas Trumbull

Exhibits

  • “Jef Geys: Quadra Medicinale Singapore,” NTU CCA
  • “Izat Arif: Semangat Kejiranan / everybody loves good neighbours,” NTU CCA
  • “Buddhist Archive of Photography/Amy Lien/Enzo Camacho: And in the Chapel and in the Temples,” NTU CCA
  • “Michelangelo Pistoletto: The Third Paradise – Between Observe and Reverse,” Partners + Mucciaccia
  • “Women’s Work: Contemporary Art from Asia and the Middle East,” Sundaram Tagore
  • “Hopes & Dialogues in Rumah Kijang,” Mizuma Gallery
  • “Cheng Ran: The Lament: Mountain Ghost,” Ota Fine Arts
  • “Boedi Widjaja: Rivers and Lakes / Tanah dan Air,” Shanghart Gallery
  • “Frictional: Ben Loong & Zulkifli Lee,” Pearl Lam Galleries

january 1–15, 2019

Books

  • Francis M. Naumann, Mentors: The Making of an Art Historian
  • Gabriel García Márquez, News of a Kidnapping, translated by Edith Grossman
  • Michael D. Gordin, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe
  • Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key
  • Patrick Modiano, La Place de l’Étoile, trans. Caroline Hillier
  • Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream, trans. Megan McDowell
  • Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties
  • Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
  • Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man
  • Cyril Wong, After You
  • Cyril Wong, Oneiros
  • Herman Melville, Typee
  • Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case
  • Jason Wee, An Epic of Durable Departures
  • Ross Macdonald, The Ferguson Affair
  • Ross Macdonald, Blue City

Movies

  • Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull

december 16–31, 2018

Books

  • James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
  • Lynne Murphy, The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English
  • Javier Cercas, The Impostor: A True Story, translated by Frank Wynne
  • Robert Sheckley, Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley
  • Gabriel García Márquez, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, trans. Randolph Hogan
  • Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, trans. Edith Grossman
  • Thorkild Hansen, Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761–1767, trans. James McFarlane & Kathleen McFarlane
  • Julie J. Thomson, ed., That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson
  • Tiziano Terzani, A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East
  • Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

Films

  • Shirkers, directed by Sandi Tan

december 1–15, 2018

Books

  • Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
  • Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
  • Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus, translated by Klara Glowczewska
  • Domenico Starnone, Trick, trans. Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus
  • Claudia Rankine, The End of the Alphabet
  • Nigel Barley, Island of Demons
  • Malcolm X & Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Films

  • Doubles vies (Non-Fiction), directed by Olivier Assayas
  • Nuestro tiempo (Our Time), dir. Carlos Reygadas
  • The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

november 16–30, 2018

Books

  • Filippo-Tommaso Marinetti, Mafarka the Futurist, translated by Carol Diethe & Steve Cox
  • Domenico Starnone, Ties, trans. Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, trans. Dick Davis
  • Dag Solstad, Professor Anderson’s Night, trans. Agnes Scott Langeland
  • Amir D. Aczel, The Jesuit & the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man
  • R. O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

Films

  • Sorry to Bother You, directed by Boots Riley
  • The Hudsucker Proxy, dir. Joel Coen
  • The Big Lebowski, dir. Joel Coen
  • Le Livre d’image (The Image Book), dir. Jean-Luc Godard

books & paper

“The economic wisdom of this century can be measured by what happens with the so-called ‘compact’ editions, where there is little consumption of paper, and endless wear and tear on the eyesight. However, in defence of saving paper on books one might mention that it is the custom in this century to print much and read nothing. To this custom belongs also the abandonment of those round letters which were used generally in Europe in past centuries, and the substitution for them of long letters, to which we might add the gloss on the paper. These are things which are the more beautiful to look at the more harmful they are to the reader’s eye. But all this is very reasonable at a time when books are printed to be seen and not to be read.”

(Giacomo Leopardi, Thoughts, § 3, p. 7 in J. G. Nichols’s translation.)

november 1–15, 2018

Books

  • Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon
  • Helen DeWitt, Some Trick
  • Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver
  • Cesare Pavese, The Leather Jacket, trans. Alma Murch
  • Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere
  • Pascal Quignard, A Terrace in Rome, trans. Douglas Penick & Charles Ré

october 16–31, 2018

Books

  • Sandro Veronesi, Quiet Chaos, translated by Michael F. Moore
  • Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhoun
  • Rain Chudori, Imaginary City: A Guide Book

I’ve been reading a fair amount of contemporary southeast Asian literature – this Indonesian novel picked up at random at the Ubud literary festival – and I’m not sure what to make of a lot of it, other than I can’t find a way in. This one is more formally interesting than most I’ve read: one lover takes another through her personal version of Jakarta, starting from the form of a travel guide, with photographs and full-page pullquotes. There’s a pull-out map detailing the locations described. With this, as with a lot of regional contemporary art and writing, there’s a twee quality that I can’t really do anything with: everything is attractive, but with no edge at all. The lovers sigh about the necessary end of their romance, but there’s no visible conflict. The end effect is something like a spread in Kinfolk: perhaps attractive, certainly with high production values, but not art in any way that I can understand.

  • Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone, trans. Susan Bernofsky
  • Imogen Hermes Gowar, The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock
  • Hwang Jungeun, One Hundred Shadows, trans. Jung Yewon
  • Roland Schimmelpfennig, One Clear, Ice-Cold January Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century, trans. Jamie Bulloch

Films

  • Sons of the Desert, directed by William A. Seiter
  • Way Out West, dir. James W. Horne
  • The Big Noise, dir. Mal St.Clair
  • The Nutty Professor, dir. Jerry Lewis
  • The Flying Deuces, dir. ‎A. Edward Sutherland 

Exhibits

  • Museum Pasifika, Nusa Dua, Indonesia
  • Art Bali 2018, Nusa Dua, Indonesia
  • Neka Museum, Ubud, Indonesia

october 1–15, 2018

Books

  • Yoko Tawada, The Last Children of Tokyo, translated by Margaret Mitsutani
  • David B., Black Paths, trans. Nora Mahony
  • Joshua Mattson, A Short Film about Disappointment
  • Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War
  • Italo Svevo, A Perfect Hoax, trans. J. G. Nichols
  • Umberto Saba, Ernesto, trans. Mark Thompson
  • Eve Babitz, Sex & Rage
  • Luis Francia, The Beauty of Ghosts: Five Voices: A Theater of Poetry

Films

  • Senso, directed by Luchino Visconti