\
  "What am I going to do without him?" I asked in a hollow voice, and Cope replied immediately, with great force and conviction. "Write about him, Paul," he said. "That's what you have to do."\
It's a book about LIFE and LOVE, not about death, emotional lines full of overwhelming sadness and grief and painful lost and regret and beautiful lyric and heartbreaking tenderness and touching memories...and LOVE, REAL LOVE. \
  ...we never talked about dying because we were fighting so hard to stay alive.\
Paul Monette and Roger Horwitz\
No Goodbyesby Paul Monettefor hours at the end I kissed your temple strokedyour hair and sniffed it it smelled so clean we'dwashed it Saturday night when the fever brokeas if there was always the perfect thing to doto be alive for years I'd breathe your hairwhen I came to bed late it was such pure youwhy I nuzzle your brush every morning becauseyou're in there just like the dog the nightwe unpacked the hospital bag and he skippedand whimpered when Dad put on the redsweater Cover my bald spot will youyou'd say and tilt your head like a parrotso I could fix you up always alwaystill this one night when I was reduced toI love you little friend here I am mysweetest pea over and over spending all ourendearments like stray coins at a borderbut wouldn't cry then no choked it becausethey all said hearing was the last to gothe ear is like a wolf's till the very endstraining to hear a whole forest and Iwanted you loping off whatever you couldstill dream to the sound of me at 3 P.M.you were stable still our favorite wordat 4 you took the turn WAIT WAIT I AMTHE SENTRY HERE nothing passes as long asI'm where I am we go on death isa lonely hole two can leap it or elseor else there is nothing this man is minehe's an ancient Greek like me I doall the negotiating while he does battlewe are war and peace in a single bedwe wear the same size shirt it can't it can'tbe yet not this just let me brush his hairit's only Tuesday there's chicken in the fridgefrom Sunday night he ate he slept oh whydon't all these kisses rouse you I won't won'tsay it all I will say is goodnight pattinga few last strands in place you're covered nowmy darling one last graze in the meadowof you and please let your final dream bea man not quite your size losing the wholeworld but still here combing combingsinging your secret names till the night's gone\


A child of the 1950s from a small New England town, "perfect Paul" earns straight A's and shines in social and literary pursuits, all the while keeping a secret -- from himself and the rest of the world. Struggling to be, or at least to imitate, a straight man, through Ivy League halls of privilege and bohemian travels abroad, loveless intimacy and unrequited passion, Paul Monette was haunted, and finally saved, by a dream of "the thing I'd never even seen: two men in love and laughing."Searingly honest, witty, and humane, Becoming a Man is the definitive coming-out story in the classic coming-of-age genre.

Perhaps the great book of the oncoming Trump era. Adorno's depth of observation, critical analysis, and disgust at late-capitalist culture reads as a cry from the least false oracles of Delphi. His intellect burns ultra-bright, spouts of water on a magnesium fire. Aphorism as razor to drain the infection, but where are the willing nurses? The entire work could be quoted, but who's listening? A few will take heed as humanity passes on sedate, confused, uninvolved, happy, dumb, unflowering, swollen and mute with delusion into the graveyard of potential.

A New York Times Notable BookDaring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer's subjects: his mother, a self-described "Negress," who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother of Malcolm X, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son's misogyny and racism; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other blacks or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men; and the late Owen Dodson, a poet and dramatist who was female-identified and who played an important role in the author's own social and intellectual formation.Hilton Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to his inimitable scrutiny with relentless humor and sympathy. The results are exhilarating. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that creates a form of all its own.

 “Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.” - James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son James Baldwin was a fascinating and eloquent man, one who I would have loved to have had a conversation with. His insights into racial issues are truly phenomenal.This is a collection of short essays about Baldwin's experience with race. In the first three essays Baldwin critiques various books and movies on black culture that he believes do the race a disservice. In the 1950s when black representation was relatively low in both literature and film, I would assume that most black people would have been glad just to see themselves in print and on film;however, Baldwin talks about how misrepresentation is just as damaging as non-representation. I admire him a lot for that.The other essays go into the black experience in the States and in Europe. One thing he said about his experiences in a small village in Switzerland was truly profound: “I thought of white men arriving for the first time in an African village, strangers there, as I am a stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded populace touching their hair and marveling at the color of their skin. But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know” My favourite essay in this book was probably the titular one, Notes of a Native Son. It was heartbreaking and touching. I've read "Go Tell it on the Mountain" and I detested Baldwin's father. However, after reading this essay, my perception has changed a little. I still found the father unlikeable but now I'm appreciating how difficult it must have been for a black man, an authoritative one trying to raise his family in a society in which all his hard work accounts for next to nothing, a society in which he is the king at home and is considered a "boy" in the white world. I could tell that Baldwin was trying to understand and forgive his father, and let go of his anger; it was truly touching:  “… I did not want to see him because I hated him. But this was not true. It was only that I had hated him and I wanted to hold on to this hatred… one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.” Very powerful essays.

White Girls, Hilton Als’s first book since The Women fourteen years ago, finds one of The New Yorker's boldest cultural critics deftly weaving together his brilliant analyses of literature, art, and music with fearless insights on race, gender, and history. The result is an extraordinary, complex portrait of "white girls," as Als dubs them—an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures as diverse as Truman Capote and Louise Brooks, Malcolm X and Flannery O’Connor. In pieces that hairpin between critique and meditation, fiction and nonfiction, high culture and low, the theoretical and the deeply personal, Als presents a stunning portrait of a writer by way of his subjects, and an invaluable guide to the culture of our time.

As a novelist, art critic, and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight, whose work amounts to a subtle, powerful critique of the canons of our civilization. In About Looking he explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. How do the animals we look at in zoos remind us of a relationship between man and beast all but lost in the twentieth century? What is it about looking at war photographs that doubles their already potent violence? How do the nudes of Rodin betray the threats to his authority and potency posed by clay and flesh? And how does solitude inform the art of Giacometti? In asking these and other questions, Berger quietly -- but fundamentally -- alters the vision of anyone who reads his work.

Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm.What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike.   “A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum 

"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)--known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky--as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology.Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.

I started taking photography seriously about two years ago, when I first bought my Voigtlander's Bessa R2a camera in Singapore. Previously, I was happy being an ignorant amateur, armed with my lomo LC-A, taking pictures of friends and sceneries I liked. But gradually, I had become more and more sensitive towards the quality of the images I took. I started getting mad when the images didn't come out the way I wanted to be (or as I saw it). Then I started to research more about photography, and for the first time acquainted with the name Henri Cartier-Bresson who, in my opinion, one of the few that had lived his life as a photographer to the fullest extent (he lived to his 90s!), therefore logically, his wisdom about the subject is unparalleled. He had inspired me greatly ever since. My Leica says a lot about it. The Mind's Eye, is a book that I have been wanting to read for long. Unfortunately it is such a rare title it wasn't available in most bookstores. Until recently I told myself, "it is now or never." I bought the book via amazon and forked up a whole load of extra wads into it, plus 3 weeks of anxiety—for the delivery.The book arrived just fine. It is nicely bound, in hardcover and seems like built to last. Also, it is so light (only over 100 pages) I did two rounds of reading today in the office. However being short in words only makes it fare more in meaning and context. It is the kind of book that once you take out from your shelf, you will not likely to return it for a long time. It is the book that you would want to read again and again—either it is to understand it more, while away time, or just simply as a general reminder whenever you need it, therefore it would be nice to have it with you all the time—present and ever-ready on your desk.I think HCB is a great teacher as he is a great photographer, but don't expect an instant revelation from his writing. He wrote as a photographer and that also demands an attentive photographer to understand what he talked about. It is philosophical and it ventures about photography in its very primal, basic comprehension more than in its technical qualities. It really helps me a lot for it teaches me exactly what I am lacking of as a dilettante.As a sweet lagniappe, not only talking about photography, The Mind's Eye invites you to understand HCB's relationships with his close friends, such as Giacometti, Renoir and Breton—amusing tales that worth talking about over a hearty dinner with close friends.

The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.

Like Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keefee, Diane Arbus exerts a fascination rooted in both her art and her life. Her startling photographic images of dwarfs, twins, transvestites, and freaks seemed from the first to redefine both the normal and the abnormal in our lives and they were already becoming part of the iconography of the age when Arbus committed suicide in 1971. Arbus herself remained an enigma until the publication of this first full biography. Patricia Bosworth examines the life behind the eerie, mesmerizing photographs: Diane's pampered childhood; her passionate marriage to Allan Arbus and their work together as fashion photographers during the fifties; the emotional upheaval surrounding the end of that marriage; and the radically dark, liberating, and ultimately tragic turn Diane's art took during the sixties. Bosworth's engrossing book is a compassionate portrait of the woman behind some of the most powerful photographs of our time.

Studies on contemporary art and culture by one of the most original, critical and analytical minds of this century. Illuminations includes Benjamin's views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust (both of whom he translated), his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an illuminating discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his thesis on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and prefaces them with a substantial, admirably informed introduction that presents Benjamin's personality and intellectual development, as well as his work and his life in dark times. Reflections the companion volume to this book, is also available as a Schocken paperback.Unpacking My Library, 1931The Task of the Translator, 1913The Storyteller, 1936Franz Kafka, 1934Some Reflections on Kafka, 1938What Is Epic Theater?, 1939On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 1939The Image of Proust, 1929The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936Theses on the Philosophy of History, written 1940, pub. 1950

We canremark in passing that there is no better starting point for thought than laughter. In particular, thought usually has abetter chance when one is shaken by laughter than when one’s mind is shaken and upset. The only extravagance ofthe epic theatre is its amount of laughter.This is a much more disparate collection than Illuminations. Surely this is to be expected The isfting and editing. The indecision. Reflections' opening section A Berlin Chronicle is a cartographic autobiography. It is a spatial narrative in the weirdest sense. There is a disorientation present. I also liked the Conversations With Brecht and the Author as Producer though my attentions waned upon approaching the lengthy piece on Karl Kraus. The concluding fragments appear rich with insight but frankly I was spent by that time.

Essays/Memoirs/Cultural Criticism

More lists by nick bosi

Fiction

Leftist theory reading list

Philosophy

Poetry

Queer Non-fiction reading list

Photography

Queer Non-fiction reading list