Organized as a field guide, a literary anthology filled with classic and contemporary poems and essays inspired by wildflowers—perfect for writers, artists, and botanists alikeAmerican Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide collects poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present that focus on wildflowers and their place in our culture and in the natural world. Editor Susan Barba has curated a selection of plants and texts that celebrate diversity: There are foreign-born writers writing about American plants and American writers on non-native plants. There are rural writers with deep regional knowledge and urban writers who are intimately acquainted with the nature in their neighborhoods. There are female writers, Black writers, gay writers, indigenous writers. There are botanists like William Bartram, George Washington Carver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and horticultural writers like Neltje Blanchan and Eleanor Perényi. There are prose pieces by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lydia Davis, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. And most of all, there are poems: from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, Lucille Clifton and Louise Glück, Natalie Diaz and Jericho Brown. The book includes exquisite watercolors by Leanne Shapton throughout and is organized by species and botanical family—think of it as a field guide to the literary imagination.
Funny and insightful, Chart Sensation is a hilarious collection of Power Point illustrations by Michael Lewy, depicting his daily struggle with boredom and malaise, success and failure. Michael Lewy is an artist who holds a day job at MIT in Cambridge, MA. He was born in Rivervale, New Jersey in 1964.
Shut Up Truth is a document of artist Michael Schmelling's friendship with James Holloway, a Texas native and union projectionist. The project began in 1996, when Schmelling met Holloway at a film screening while on assignment in Texas for the Associated Press. Shut Up Truth iis an unflincing and intimate portrait of a single, white middle-aged man. The photographs, taken in El Paso, constitute a documentary of contemporary American life. Michael Schmelling was born in Pittsburgh in 1973. He now lives in New York City and is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The Fader, Details.
'Shapton has created a mystical territory - a performance, an exhibition, a guestbook - in which I felt the ghost within myself; the thing that will outlive me. A fearless and exquisite book' Miranda July
Guestbook explores the glimmering, unsettling things that haunt us in the midst of life, combining stories, vignettes and an evocative curiosity cabinet of artifacts and images - found photographs, original paintings, Instagram-style portraits - to transform the traditional ghost story into something else entirely.
'Leanne Shapton has a way of making books entirely new, surreal, and uncanny ... Guestbook contains ghost stories for a world of images and captions, in which the ghosts are all of us, and our strange time' Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?
J&L Illustrated #2 is the second volume of J&L's collection of drawings and fiction. The work was commissioned in 2004 by asking the contributors to submit work having to do with "Adventure". The fiction was edited by Craig Taylor, and the drawings by Leanne Shapton and Jason Fulford. Contributors include Helon Habila, Miriam Toews, Kevin Sampsell, Adam Sternbergh, Paul Maliszewski, Sarah Shawn, Corey Keegan, Hannah Griffiths, Jeff Johnson, Nathan Whitlock, David Shrigley, Ryan Blomberg, Marcel Dzama, Forest Juziuk, Jason Logan, Justin Peroff, Amy O'Neill, Matthew Sandager, Serge Onnen, Jill Smith, Richard McGuire, Brian Rea, Harrison Haynes, Michelangelo Iaffaldano, James Gallagher, Olia Mishchenko, Leif Parsons, Gary Peter, Will Van Roden, Nick Dewar, Paul Marlow, Ryan Storm, Jemal Hamilton, Alex Romero, Zach Storm, Shawn Creeden, Brendan Nakahara, Al Peterson, Brian Rea, Booh Stoodio, Nicholas Blechman, Joe Mattson, Paul Clark, Tucker Nichols, and Michael Harwell.
Paper Placemats is a book of 40 paper placemats, printed with work by 30 artists and ten writers. Each placemat can be ripped out and used. Contributors were asked to submit work having to do with “Place.” Conceived as a public art project, the placemats were donated to restaurants across the U.S. in 2004/5 with the help of volunteers in each state. Additional copies are sold to cover the costs of production. Contributors include Jennifer Arnow, Amie Barrodale, Jeff Billak, Blixie, Ryan Blomberg, Helen Chough, Fern Cogley, Steve Featherstone, Ted Fair, April Gertler, Michelangelo Iaffaldano, Paul Marlow, Michael Martone, Eileen Maxson, Michael Northrup, Amy O’Neill, Ed Panar, Tim Parrish, Christian Patterson, Gus Powell, Alex Romero, Hadley Ross, Matt Salacuse, Matthew Sandager, Joanna Scott, Ross Schwartzman, Hasanthika Sirisena, Ben Skinner, Gwen Smith, Gilbert Sorrentino, Barry Stone, Zach Storm, Ashley Thayer, Miriam Toews, Lars Tunbjork, Paul West and Lloyd Ziff.
J&L Video is the first in a new series of anthology DVDs featuring 12 original shorts, each under seven minutes, by contemporary artists and filmmakers. In the spirit of the book series J&L Illustrated, J&L Video compiles films and video works from around the world with a sensibility that combines the real and the ridiculous. Featured works include Catherine Ross's split-screen, cropped outtakes from the TV show The Price is Right; Matt McCormick's Destiny, a bizarre world of clicking and applause; dreamy documentary sketches about family by Brock Enright; stock figurative illustrations representing all of human history in a continuous loop by Oliver Laric; Will Rogan's incredibly mundane experiments with chance; Julie Lequin's Sounds Like Julie, in which the artist is imitated by her friends; an exchange between a photographer and his subject in the American Southwest by Amy Harrington; Ed Panar's ebullient music video, Here I Go Again; Shana Moulton's exercise-video fantasy world, Feeling Free; and Andrew Lampert's fashion-shoot nightmare.
