Results by title

A uniquely structured collection of essays from one of today’s most esteemed scholars of black studies

A thoughtfully curated selection of texts by preeminent black feminist scholar Katherine McKittrick, Heartbreak and Other Geographies showcases the remarkable depth of inquiry she has generated over twenty years. Edited by Brittany Meché and Camilla Hawthorne, this collection highlights McKittrick’s enduring commitment to ideas around radical placemaking and the creative articulations of and within the black diaspora.

McKittrick’s work is marked by a recurring engagement with anticolonialism, practices of liberation, and radical methodologies of black cultural production. Through discussions of figures such as Toni Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Édouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy, Nina Simone, and Sylvia Wynter, the writing in Heartbreak and Other Geographies spans the author’s investigations into scientific method, liberal modernity, the cycles that perpetuate racial violence, and the poetics and sonics of black livingness.

Bringing together recent texts, influential pieces, and lesser-known essays, the unconventional format of Heartbreak and Other Geographies includes an introductory conversation with McKittrick as well as a series of creative interludes from the editors throughout the book. Innovative in both form and content, this wide-ranging volume invites us to rethink the boundaries between disciplines and the ways that scholarship can embody a more collaborative form of worldmaking.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

A swing note is, to the listener of the rhythm, an unexpected note, and it is the spark of life in jazz and its relatives. Whether playing the standards or the most experimental piece, it is how a musician handles these notes—fearlessly or safely—that determines the fate of the performance. Howard Reich’s critical writing is similarly unexpected and fearless, and Let Freedom Swing is a collection of the articles from the past three decades that best capture this spirit.

Each section of Let Freedom Swing composes a suite, focusing on either a person, place, or scene. Reich gives new life to the standards with his profiles and elegies for such giants as Gershwin, Ellington, and Sinatra. A profile of Louis Armstrong brings out the often angry side of Satchmo but also reveals a more remarkable musician and human being.

His open-mindedness makes Reich a particularly astute observer of the experimental and new, from Ornette Coleman to Chicago experimentalist Ken Vandermark. And his observations about street music open our ears to the songs of everyday life. Reich’s fearlessness is evident in his writing about daunting subjects, such as the New Orleans music scene after Katrina, the lost legacy of jazz in Panama, and the complicated legacy of "race music" in America.

Howard Reich combines a deep enthusiasm for music, a breadth of knowledge, and an ability to share his world with his readers, and Let Freedom Swing is essential reading for anyone interested in the continuing vitality of jazz, gospel, blues, and American music in general.

This annotated anthology presents the first English translation of German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch’s collected writings.
 
A towering figure in the history of photography, Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897–1966) has come to epitomize New Objectivity, the neorealist movement in modernist literature, film, and the visual arts recognized as the signature artistic style of Germany’s Weimar Republic. Today, his images are regularly exhibited and widely considered key influences on contemporary photographers. Whether they capture geometrically intricate cacti, flooded tidal landscapes, stacks of raw materials, or imposing blast furnace towers, Renger-Patzsch’s photographs embody what his peer Hugo Sieker termed “absolute realism,” an approach predicated upon the idea that photographers have one task: to exploit the camera’s unique capacity to document with uncompromising detail.
 
Not only a photographer, Renger-Patzsch was also an influential and lucid writer who advocated his unique brand of uncompromising realism in almost a half century’s worth of articles, essays, lectures, brochures, and unpublished manuscripts addressing photography, technology, and modernity. Drawing on his papers at the Getty Research Institute and other archives, The Absolute Realist unites in one volume this skillful photographer’s ideas about the defining visual medium of modernity.

The voice behind the legend—Zelda Fitzgerald in her own words.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald has long been perceived as the tragic "other half" of the Scott and Zelda legend. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, the high-spirited tomboy turned flapper was talented in dance, painting, and writing but lived in the shadow of her husband's success. Her writing can be experienced on its own terms in Matthew Bruccoli's meticulously edited The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald.

The collection includes Zelda's only published novel, Save Me the Waltz, an autobiographical account of the Fitzgeralds' adventures in Paris and on the Riviera; her celebrated farce, Scandalabra; eleven short stories; twelve articles; and a selection of letters to her husband, written over the span of their marriage, that reveals the couple's loving and turbulent relationship.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald has long been an American cultural icon. The Collected Writings affirms her place as a writer and as a symbol not only of the Lost Generation but of all generations as she struggled to define herself through her art.