Some Great Books

Book Review
Some Great Books by Paul D'Agostino

I didn’t have a mandate to compile anything along the lines of a ‘Best Books of the Year’ list, so I didn’t. There are plenty of those out there already anyway. Some even feature hundreds of titles. Hundreds! The restraint is impressive.

Nevertheless, I’d be remiss if I didn’t spread the word a bit about some books I really did relish reading this year, so what follows is a short list of standout titles and a few words about each. Limiting my picks to 12 – plus a couple brief extras I couldn’t resist folding into the mix – seemed logical enough, and they appear here in no particular order. My selections run a gamut and include fiction, nonfiction, essays, critical theory, humor, architecture, art, material history, and a charmingly assembled byproduct of social media. Additionally, several of the titles are books in translation, and ‘excellent syllabus material’ for various types of courses, especially interdisciplinary ones, would be a viable subcategory for nearly everything included here.

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Artists on Coping: JinJin Xu & Jiaoyang Li (Silkworm Pupas)

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Performance still from “In America, You are Asked Why Leaves are Green,” February, 2020; from left, artists JinJin Xu, Jiaoyang Li. Photo courtesy of artists

Silkworm Pupas is a new media arts collective consisting of NYC based Chinese poets Jiaoyang Li and JinJin Xu. Our projects strive for intimate ways to envision attainable, inclusive, and bleeding-edge futures through innovative storytelling, documentary poetics practice, sound installation and video-performance art.

Jiaoyang Li is a Chinese poet and visual artist. Her literary work has appeared in LA Reviews of Books-China channel, 3:AM, Spittoon Magazine, Voice and Verse poetry magazine, and others. Her interdisciplinary practices have been supported by the New York Foundation of Art, The Immigrants Artist Biennial and others. She co-founded the interdisciplinary poetry journal 叵CLIP.

JinJin Xu is a poet and filmmaker from Shanghai invested in docu-poetics. Her work has been featured in The High Line Public Arts, The Harun Farocki Institute, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, and anthologized in Nasty Women Poets. Honors include The Poetry Society of America’s George Borgin Prize and fellowships from The Thomas J. Watson Foundation and the Flaherty Seminar. She teaches hybrid workshops at NYU where she is a Lillian Vernon Fellow.

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Margalit Berriet on HAS – The Magazine of Humanities, Arts and Society

Art Spiel in Dialogue with Margalit Berriet

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Mémoire de l’Avenir in Image, Exposition Kind Of Magic 1, 2019

Arts and Society launches a call for contributions for HAS, the new digital magazine in English and French for the Humanities and Arts in Society, to be published in Spring 2020. Arts and Society is a project launched on the initiative of UNESCO-MOST, the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (CIPSH), Mémoire de l’Avenir (MDA), in partnership with the Global Chinese Arts and Culture Society (GCACS). Arts and Society is a global movement of artists and projects reflecting on the impact of creativity in society, using the arts and cultures as fundamental tools for improvement, innovation and transformation. The goal of this new publication is to analyse current challenges through the lenses of the humanities and the arts. Created for a wide audience, HAS offers a space of expression for the most innovative, enlightening, imaginative, creative and relevant initiatives around the world.

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