Our EPM team are avid readers and we wanted to share with you what we are currently into. We would love to hear back from you with any suggestions you might have. We want to make this a place we can share and exchange ideas, so comment away!
ERIN’S PICK
The New York Times–bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works
Irrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen. Irrealis moods are also known as counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative—all best expressed in this book as the might-be and the might-have-been.
One of the great prose stylists of his generation, André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, C. P. Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection on the imagination’s power to forge a zone outside of time’s intractable hold.
You can find our more about the book HERE.
SARAH’S PICK
Beautifully illustrated with many of Nabongo’s own photographs, the book documents her remarkable experiences in each country, including:
A harrowing scooter accident in Nauru, the world’s least visited country,
Seeing the life and community swarming around the Hazrat Ali Mazar mosque in Afghanistan,
Horseback riding and learning to lasso with Black cowboys in Oklahoma,
Playing dominoes with men on the streets of Havana,
Learning to make traditional takoyaki (octopus balls) from locals in Japan,
Dog sledding in Norway and swimming with humpback whales in Tonga,
A late night adventure with strangers to cross a border in Guinea Bissau,
And sunbathing on the sandy shores of Los Roques in Venezuela.
Along with beloved destinations like Peru and South Africa, you’ll also find tales from far-flung corners and seldom visited destinations, including Tuvalu, North Korea, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. Nabongo’s stories are love letters to diversity, beauty, and culture―and most of all, to the people she meets along the way. Throughout, she offers bucket-list experiences for other travel-lovers looking to follow in her footsteps.
You can find out more about Jessica and the book HERE.
ANNA’S PICK
At 18, Corita Kent (1918-86) entered the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, where she taught art and eventually ran the art department. After more than 30 years, at the end of the 1960s, she left the order to devote herself to making her own work. Over a 35-year career she made watercolors, posters, books and banners--and most of all, serigraphs--in an accessible and dynamic style that appropriated techniques from advertising, consumerism and graffiti. The earliest, which she began showing in 1951, borrowed phrases and depicted images from the Bible; by the 1960s, she was using song lyrics and publicity slogans as raw material. Eschewing convention, she produced cheap, readily available multiples, including a postage stamp. Her work was popular but largely neglected by the art establishment--though it was always embraced by such design luminaries as Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller and Saul Bass. More recently, she has been increasingly recognized as one of the most innovative and unusual Pop artists of the 1960s, battling the political and religious establishments, revolutionizing graphic design and making some of the most striking--and joyful--American art of her era, all while living and practicing as a Catholic nun. This first study of her work, organized by Julie Ault on the 20th anniversary of Kent's death, with essays by Ault and Daniel Berrigan, is the first to examine this important American outsider artist's life and career, and contains more than 90 illustrations, many of which are reproduced for the first time, in vibrant, and occasionally Day-Glo, color.
You can find out more about Sister Corita and her work HERE.