Distributed Presses

Odds are you're still stuck in your cave or busy vetting a line-by-line assessment of donations to your personal cause if you haven't heard the news from the Cleveland Clinic. At the Distributed Presses blog, we hold tight to our particular penchant for the merging of art and science and couldn't be more engrossed by the minute-by-minute 23-hour account of the world's first human face transplant. Part of the fascinating commentary by surgeons involved, as featured in the New York Times, accounts for the discretionary lines between this high-risk experimental procedure and the social & affective dynamics of facial reconstitution. Says Dr. Eric Kodish, chairman of the Cleveland Clinic's Department of Bioethics, "This is not cosmetic surgery in any conventional sense." Where art thee, Philip K. Dick?

What's so fascinating about the ethos and radical aesthetic / scientific potential at stake here? And, more pressingly, what makes this the right moment for such an operation? In early 2008, FACT (Foundation for Art and Technology) in Liverpool brilliantly anticipated this trend with their influential exhibition SK-INTERFACES, curated by Jens Hauser. Exploring the concept of skin as a technological interface, both literally and metaphorically, the exhibition's accompanying volume provocatively treks through the multidisciplinary wake of this fusion of high art and cutting-edge scientific advances, drawing on politics, architecture, biotechnology, philosophy, and the history of the Western world in order to assess new milestones in this material (re)surfacing.

If that's not enough to wet (or even re-fuse?) your palette, then keep your eyes pealed for FACT / Liverpool University Press's Spring 2009 release Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty (edited by Andy Miah), a not-to-be-missed exploration of technological innovation through the lens of biocultural consumption that considers issues as diverse the ethics and aesthetics of human enhancement and our lost dreams for the space age, among other topics.

In any case, today's a day to celebrate our ability to remake our own somatic architecture—and mull over all the potential becomings at hand. I suggest a back-to-back screening of Robocop and The Bicycle Thief—as new frontiers shift around the body and sentiment.

Posted by KAM at 11:52 AM | Permalink
Posted to Art and Architecture | Liverpool University Press | Science

Neil Pearson's Obelisk, recently published by Liverpool University Press, was highly praised in the December 8th issue of The Guardian:

Neil Pearson's book is a work of enthusiastic bibliographical scholarship, a brief biography, and a series of well-turned pen portraits. . . . Pearson is as adroit a writer as he is watchable an actor. . . . Everyone with an interest in literary history will enjoy Pearson's narrative. His portraits of minor figures such as Marjorie Firminger, who had the misfortune to became infatuated with Wyndham Lewis, are particularly touching and sympathetic.

Read the full Guardian review
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Posted to Liverpool University Press | Reviews

Liverpool University Press author David Supino will be giving the second annual Bernard Breslauer Lecture at the Grolier Club in New York City on Wednesday, May 23rd at 6pm. The event is open to the public and co-sponsored by the American Trust for the British Library. Supino will be discussing his bibliographical work on Henry James. Supino is author of Henry James: A Bibliographical Catalogue of a Collection of Editions to 1921.

All RSVPs and reservations are to be made through Maev Brennan at the Grolier Club, tel. 212-838-6690, ext. 7, or e-mail: mbrennan@grolierclub.org.

The Grolier Club is located at 47 East 60th Street, New York City (between Park and Madison Avenues).

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Posted to Author Events | Literature | Liverpool University Press

Maureen Moran's Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature recently received attention on the Brontë Blog.

Exotic, corrupt, and dangerous, Roman Catholicism functioned in the popular Victorian imagination as a highly sensationalized and implacably anti-English enemy. Maureen Moran's lively study considers a wide range of key authors—including Charlotte Brontë, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, as well as a number of non-canonical writers—to give a detailed account of the cultural tensions between Catholics and Protestants. Moran shows that rather than representing a traditional religious schism, the demonizing of Catholics resulted from secular fears over crime, sex, and violence.

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Posted to Literature | Liverpool University Press | Reviews

Sebastian Peake, son of Mervyn Peake, recently reviewed Peter Winnington's The Voice of the Heart: the working of Mervyn Peake's imagination on The Mervyn Peak Blog. Sebastian Peake calls The Voice of the Heart, ". . . a very welcome and highly illuminating addition to an ever-growing biographical canon."

Peake goes on to credit Winnington's analysis:

Instead of repeating the known facts, . . . Winnington elects to examine themes from Peake's life as disparate as islands, animals and birds, solitude, love, and evil.

. . . Winnington grasps completely the idiosyncratic open individualism and generosity of spirit which produced the work. . . .

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Posted to Literature | Liverpool University Press | Reviews

Adrian Searle recently reviewed the exhibition behind Kodwo Eshun's upcoming book Ghosts of Songs: The Art of the Black Audio Film Collective in the Guardian. The exhibition is presently showing at Liverpool's FACT center.

Searle reviews the history of the Black Audio Film Collective and its penchant for political discussion and debate:

The collective was heavily informed by film and psychoanalytic theory, by political discussion and debate. It is salutory to note how unfashionable these are, however much intense theorising there is in the exhibition catalogue. Sadly, much of it is likely to remain unread. Perhaps the most significant achievement of the group was the formulation of a poetic, a tone of voice, a particular kind of filmic space that resisted categorisation.

He also notes Eshun's commentary :

Kodwo Eshun, the group's most compelling commentator, writes that they "projected a stance of high seriousness with seductive stylishness." Stylishness could be serious too, and they always carried their seriousness with something much more than style.

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Posted to Art and Architecture | Black Studies | Film and Media | Liverpool University Press | Reviews

A.N. Wilson recently reviewed David Goodway's Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward in the UK's Daily Telegraph. Wilson proclaims that Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow is, "A splendid survey of 'Left-libertarian thought' . . . . Though it is very learned, it isn't dry."

From William Morris to George Orwell, left-libertarian thought has long been an important but neglected part of British history. In Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow, David Goodway seeks to recover and revitalize that indigenous anarchist tradition.

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Posted to History | Literature | Liverpool University Press | Philosophy

John Belcham, editor of Liverpool 800, recently spoke on the celebration of Liverpool's 800th year on BBC's Thinking Allowed. Belcham discusses Liverpool architecture, cultural quarters, and the importance of sugar to the city's history.

In anticipation of Liverpool's eight-hundredth anniversary in 2007, Liverpool 800 is the definitive biography of this magnificent world city. The book uses the latest historical research to explore the life of Liverpool over eight centuries to the present day, and includes detailed sections on politics, economics, and culture. Written by experts on Liverpool history, such as Donald M. MacRaild and Colin G. Pooley and incorporating exquisite color illustrations, Liverpool 800 offers an insider's perspective on the city the European Union has named "European Capital of Culture" for 2008.

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Posted to Art and Architecture | Author Events | History | Liverpool University Press | Politics and Current Events

Clarisse Zimra of Southern Illinois University recently reviewed Debra Kelly's Autobiography and Independence: Self and Identity in North African Writing in French in the online H-France Review:

With this book, professor Debra Kelly, who teaches at the University of Westminster, proffers a richly researched study on four authors raised as subjects of Empire in North Africa during the first half of the twentieth century: Algeria's Mouloud Feraoun, a Kabyle born in 1913 and Assia Djebar, an Andalusian-Berber born in 1936; Albert Memmi, a Tunisian Sephardim born in 1923 and Abdelkébir Khatibi, a Moroccan Arab born in 1938. None had French as a native tongue. All wrote in the language of the colonizers. Trained in the schools of their colonial masters, witnesses to their countries' access to full independence, their writings have been stamped by a personal experience profoundly marked by the cultural and political trauma of colonial history. Such history has defined them and shaped their craft. Therefore, Kelly posits, these four must be read along two simultaneous axes of interpretation: (a) the biographical connection that sees their works as the painful coming of age of the colonized self seeking agency; and (b) the socio-political context against which they define and eventually achieve their own private and public decolonization.

Read the Full Review on H-France

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Posted to Biography | History | Literature | Liverpool University Press | Reviews

In 2004, alarm bells sounded nationwide with the release of the National Endowment for the Arts' report "Reading at Risk." The report declared that less than half of the American adult population read literature for pleasure and thus American literary culture was in dire straits. But now there is hope with the publication of The Reader, a witty and engaging literary magazine that celebrates the act of reading and the joys of literature in all their facets.

This newest issue examines "Americans" on the literary stage, with a fascinating range of articles that ably tackle the broad subject. Features include essays on Carson McCullers, Anne Bradstreet, and Toni Morrison; a piece by Lawrence Weschler on Rebecca Solnit; and an essay on the Brooklyn Bridge by Erica Wagner. The issue also contains regular features such as a literary quiz, book reviews, new fiction and poetry, and a publishing industry gossip column "Our Spy in NY." A rich and engaging quarterly for the book lover and bibliophile, The Reader throws open the door of the literary world to readers from all walks of life.


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Posted to Literature | Liverpool University Press | Press Releases

"A testament to the right-on spirit of 1967 and a document of a complex period when 'turn on, tune in, drop out' was a political mantra. . . . This provides a welcome reminder." The Guardian

"A mesmerising attempt to revive interest in the liberating spirit of the pyschedelic moment." New Statesman

"Turn on, tune in, drop out": That mantra defined the 1960s, and from tie-dyed shirts to Cream record album covers, psychedelic was the name of the gave--a kitschy mix of stream-of-consciousness poetry, surrealistic music, vividly colored dreamy art, and acid-dropping hippies too strung out to know what was going on. Or so the story goes. Summer of Love reclaims psychedelia from this realm of drug-related kitsch, offering a rare in-depth examination of psychedelia's true power as a social aesthetic and how it was intedgral to the powerful poliitcal shockwaves that reverbertated throughout America and Europe in the 1960s.

Summer of Love dives into the heart of the decade's madness: the LSD parties and "acid-evangelists," iconic fashions, artist collectives, and the radical politics that upended meanings of freedom, art, and justice. Jonathan Harris and Christoph Grunenberg gather here a fresh and incisive collection of essays that explore how psychedelia, in its multiple visual and chemical manifestations, was the engine of the counterculture. The contributors expolore a fascinating range of topics--from the ocunterculture in San Francisco to the psychedelic scenes in New York and "swinging London"; and from the art of Andy Warhol and the Beatles' seminal Sgt. Pepper album to the complex and volatile anti-war and civil rights movements

An unparallelled re-evalutation of 1960's psychedelia and its legacy, Summer of Love offers a profound and considered examination of an oft-referenced but still poorly understood pivotal era in modern history.

Christoph Grunenberg is director of Tate Liverpool, where he curated the recent exhibition "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era." Jonathan Harris is professor of art history at the University of LIverpool. He is author of several books, including Art, Money, Parties: New Institutions in the Political Economy of Contemporary Art; Federal Art and National Culture; and The New Art History: A Critical Introduction.

Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris are available for interviews. Please contact Harriett Green at (773) 702-4217 for more information

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Posted to History | Liverpool University Press | Press Releases