Publicity Roundup—Communism, Spices, Keats, and More
The wires and webs are buzzing with news about many of our client presses, and here's your chance to partake of the excitement—
Just in time for the November 9th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tariq Ali will be talking about the past and future of communism at the Harvard Book Store on November 10th at 7:00 pm. Visit the store for more details.
In contrast, an icon of capitalist splendor—Las Vegas—will be on display October 29, 2009 to February 5, 2010 when the Yale School of Architecture presents an exhibit on Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Las Vegas Studio.
If you've seen Bright Star, the new film on John Keats and Fanny Brawne and are eager to learn more about one of the original Romantics, you should check out this new podcast featuring Stephen Hebron, author of John Keats: A Poet and His Manuscripts, discussing what Keats's letters and poems reveal about his creative process.
Fred Czarra, author of Spices: A Global History, reveals his good taste and love of flavor in an article by the Southern Maryland News.
Creatures great and small, covered in fur or scales, get a full treatment in The Chronicle Review's look at Reaktion's Animal Series.
Over at Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Brian Klug discusses his new book from Seagull, Offence: The Jewish Case.
Finally, the excitement is only just beginning for Seagull's new translation of short stories from one of the most unique and significant fiction writers of the 20th Century, Thomas Bernhard.
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As the book went to press, early in 2007, I was updating the manuscript to reflect the early signs of an economic downturn, which had realtors on the East End of Long Island worried. One can no longer speak of a booming real estate market, even here. The East End is Bernie Madoff country, one big Ponzi scheme, which fed on the conviction that property values could not drop, that new money would keep pouring in. "Capitalism," a University of Chicago friend told me years ago, "is the only perpetual motion machine." The machine may have stalled, but the story I tried to tell, of a preserved community struggling to shape its future, has continued.
Starting in 1973, the village became a historic district, giving its citizens a say in any change to their built environment. In an increasingly seasonal community, where many houses are empty much of the time, the people's voice isn't always strong, but recent efforts to organize seasonal residents have changed this somewhat.
The biggest question of all is not yet up for debate: can the community continue to make its living off real estate, selling its property at a profit, or will it find another business? Sag Harbor has faced economic crises before, reinventing itself as a manufacturing center after whaling went belly up in the 1850s, then shifting its focus to tourism when its principal factory, which made watch cases, failed—first in the Depression, then again in 1981. What will it do next?
These issues were on my mind as I prepared a companion exhibition of my photographs for two venues outside Sag Harbor, at New York's 
