Paul Auster

Rosmarie Waldrop

Jean Frémon

Michael Palmer

John Ashbery

Poetry. Translation. Translated from the French by Norma Cole, Lydia Davis, Serge Gavronsky and Cole Swensen. The serial poems in DISTANT NOISE present spare scenes shot through with surprise and the kind of truth found only in disorientation. Emperors and students gaze across landscapes of uncertainty, and ordinary human interaction has become a game of stilted gestures and official regulations. "Sublime and compelling and like no other work that exists today--whether French, American or Chinese. Jean Fr‚mon is a wholly singular artist, a writer who lives in the radiant zone where poetry, philosophy and storytelling meet"--Paul Auster. Cover by Louise Bourgeois.

Distant Noise

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Translated from the French by Cole Swensen. Jean Fremon writes about painters he loves, contemporary and otherwise, about writers, whose books are sometimes named, and who at other times stay unnamed. He visits each one at a crucial moment of his life, creating thus an essential and spiritual biography of each. The particular elegance of his writing and the form he uses make us privileged witnesses of his investigations. "Jean Fremon's REAL LIFE OF SHADOWS delivers its dazzling recits with delicately calibrated irony. Fremon writes in "the words of others" tales of stunning quiet mystery. His painterly journey, ably translated by Cole Swensen, portrays a parallel present of chance and circumstance, where fragmented narrative, or narrative fragments, fall into the gaps as well as the text, intervals fulfilling inscription." Norma Cole"

The Real Life of Shadows

Cultural Writing. Poetry. Jean Fremon was born in Asnieres, outside Paris, in 1946. Poet, novelist, art critic, he has published numerous books in France and has been translated into English by Lydia Davis, Stacy Doris, Tom Mandel, and Norma Cole. PAINTING, translated by fiction writer Brian Evenson, is his first single-author volume to appear in English. Composed of three lyrical essays, Eclipse, Painting, and Summer (Been), PAINTING explores the divide between experience and representation, event and narrative. Saddlestapled chapbook.

Painting

The Botanical Garden is a work of philosophical fiction that explores humanity by speculating on art literature and life. This text allows readers to bathe in Fremon's flow of ideas, aphorisms, and bits and pieces of biology and anthropology in relation to his philosophical garden. He writes, I liked the sort of chaos made from disorder and improvisation in which I lived. The idea of having several personalities on hand at once... the assurance of being able at will to leave one part of yourself so as to take refuge in an other... Why not... treat oneself to this luxury?''

The Botanical Garden

Cultural Writing. Art. Translated from the French by Brian Evenson. Jean Fremon's THE PARADOXES OF ROBERT RYMAN is a collection of essays about the American abstract painter, Robert Ryman. Robert Ryman's remarks were written down by Fremon during the course of many visits to his studio in 1989 and 1990. Fremon wrote down his thoughts and Ryman's remarks in French, even though their conversations were spoken in English. From these notes Fremon wrote a collection of essays that were then retranslated into English for this book, and thus they may differ slightly from the original. Fremon is the author of many novels, works of criticism, and volumes of poetry, including PAINTING (Black square editions, 2000), DISTANT NOISE (Avec Books, 2003), and ISLAND OF THE DEAD (Green Integer, 2003), all of which SPD carries.

The Paradoxes of Robert Ryman

Está claro, con un lápìz, David Hockney hace lo que quiere. Pero no hace aquello que no sabe desear. Cualquier conocimiento, cualquier técnica, le descubre un nuevo método, se lanza a él ávidamente y lo hace suyo. El resultado es siempre Hockney, reconocible a primera vista, pero es siempre un Hockney nuevo, fresco y avispado, en sintonía con el mundo que lo rodea. Inventando, Hockney se divierte, y mientras Hockney se divierta, es imposible que nos aburra. Su pasión por observar (el paisaje, a sus amigos) se convierte en nuestra pasión por mirar (sus cuadros).

David Hockney

Louise Bourgeois femme maison

Fables, souvenirs, choses lues, vues, transposées ou inventées, les historiettes rassemblées ici ont pour thème commun le portrait, les portraitistes et les portraiturés. On y croise pêle-mêle Vigée-Lebrun, Rembrandt, David Hockney et Louise Bourgeois, Lucian Freud, Monsieur Bertin, Saul Steinberg, Le Bernin ou Bram Van Velde, le sultan d’Istanbul, l’empereur de Chine ou Martin Luther. Plotin déjà mettait en garde contre ce vilain usage de laisser derrière soi une image de notre apparence, mais nous n’avons pas cessé pour autant de nous livrer à ce besoin de repousser la mort par l’image.

Le Miroir magique

L'art d'aujourd'hui, quand il n'est pas seulement un aimable divertissement, reste hanté par un conflit engagé dès ses origines, bien avant même que l'art se pense comme tel : figurer-défigurer, produire de l'image ou bannir l'image, capter l'illusion de la vie ou se réfugier dans le sublime d'une vibration lumineuse. Désir d'image et haine de l'image sont indissociables. Nous voulons dire et taire à la fois, montrer et cacher, créer et détruire. Le règne des images est celui des passions violentes, mais c'est un monde d'où la vulgarité est absente, c'est rare; et que la grâce parfois visite.

Gloire des formes

Jean Fremon

A long fiction by the noted French author, Jean Frémon.

Island of the Dead

Financial Times Book of the Year The extraordinary artist, the spider woman, the intellectual, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the “good girl” sing together in this exuberant, lithe text beautifully translated by Cole Swensen. This brilliant portrait of the renowned artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) shows a woman who was devoted to her art and whose life was also that of her century. The art world’s grande dame and its shameless old lady, spinning personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks with her characteristic insolence and wit, through a most discreet, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and adult life in America, to her death, this phosphorescent novella describes Bourgeois’s inner life as only one artist regarding another can. Included as an afterword is Frémon’s essay about his own “portrait writing” and how he came to know and work with Louise Bourgeois.

Jean Frémon

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