Luc Sante

Luc Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums; the teeming streets--scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape. Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era's opportunities for vice and entertainment--theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn't work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city's tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was. Low Life provides an arresting and entertaining view of what New York was actually like in its salad days. But it's more than simpy a book about New York. It's one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written--an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropolis, which has much to say not only about New York's past but about the present and future of all cities.

Lures and Snares of Old New York

Low Life

Essays offering personal reflections on life in a changing America and a post-Giuliani New York City are accompanied by book and music reviews.

Pieces 1990-2005

Kill All Your Darlings

"A vivid investigation into the seamy underside of nineteenth and twentieth century Paris"--

The Other Paris

In his second collection (after Kill All Your Darlings, 2007), Luc Sante pays homage to Patti Smith, Rene Ricard, and Georges Simenon; traces the history of tabloids; surveys the landscape that gave birth to the Beastie Boys; explores the back alleys of vernacular photography; sounds a threnody for the forgotten dead of New York City. The glue holding the collection together is autobiography. Every item carries deep personal significance, and most are rooted in lived experience, in particular Sante's youth on the Lower East Side of New York in the fertile 1970s and '80s. He traces his deep engagement with music, his experience of the city, his progression as an artist and observer, his love life and ambitions. Maybe the People Would Be the Times is organized as a series of sequences, in which one piece leads into the next. Memoir flows into essay, fiction into critical writing, humor into poetry, the pieces answering and echoing one another, examining subjects from multiple vantages. The collection shows Sante at his most lyrical, impassioned, and imaginative, a writer for whom every assignment brings the challenge of inventing a new form.

Maybe the People Would Be the Times

Factory of Facts

Jann S. Wenner

Annie Leibovitz. The Early Years, 1970-1983

"A collection of 55 evidence photographs taken by the New York City Police Department between 1914 and 1918"--Back cover.

Evidence

Joanna Neborsky

Felix Feneon

Taking strange words and trusty pen in hand, Joanna Neborsky has made a splendid book of killer drawings and fluid design. Excelsior! Maria Kalman Felix Feneonanarchist, art maven, literary instigatoredited Rimbauds Illuminations and was the first to publish James Joyce in French. He was also the author of 1,220 faits-divers that appeared over the course of 1906 in the Paris newspaper Le Matin. As stand-alone pieces, these concise, and often bizarre, three-line reports of death, naval exercises gone awry, petty theft and labor disputes are enigmatic fragments, but when viewed as a whole they form a mosaic of that era in France. The New York Review of Books published Luc Santes English translation of these items as Novels in Three Lines, inspiring artist Joanna Neborsky to create illustrations and collages that vivify a selection of these trenchant vignettes. After studying literature at Yale, teaching English in Toulouse, playing drums in a Ronettes tribute band, leading tours in New York Harbor as a park ranger and living on a horse farm outside Los Angeles, Joanna Neborsky decided all she really wanted to do was draw. She applied to New Yorks School of Visual Arts MFA Illustration program in 2007 and two years later she had self-published four books and delivered the commencement address at Radio City Music Hall. Her work has been recognized in American Illustration and 3x3 Magazine. Her clients include Riverhead Books, Farrar Straus & Giroux, and Gensler, a global architecture firm.

Félix Fénéon

Walker Evans

An introduction to Walker Evan's photography.

Richard Stark

Parker, the ruthless antihero of Richard Stark’s eponymous mystery novels, is one of the most unforgettable characters in hardboiled noir. Lauded by critics for his taut realism, unapologetic amorality, and razor-sharp prose style—and adored by fans who turn each intoxicating page with increasing urgency—Stark is a master of crime writing, his books as influential as any in the genre. The University of Chicago Press has embarked on a project to return the early volumes of this series to print for a new generation of readers to discover—and become addicted to. In The Handle, Parker is enlisted by the mob to knock off an island casino guarded by speedboats and heavies, forty miles from the Texas coast. "Parker . . . lumbers through the pages of Richard Stark’s noir novels scattering dead bodies like peanut shells. . . . In a complex world [he] makes things simple.”—William Grimes, New York Times “Whatever Stark writes, I read. He’s a stylist, a pro, and I thoroughly enjoy his attitude.”—Elmore Leonard “Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible.”—Washington Post Book World “Donald Westlake’s Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you’ve been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust—these are the books you’ll want on that desert island.”—Lawrence Block

A Parker Novel

The Handle

Kate Zambreno

Lauren Aimee Curtis

Emily Bitto

Travis Jeppesen

Wayne Koestenbaum

Natalie Eilbert

Brigitta B. Wagner

Annabel Brady-Brown

Leo Goldsmith

Madeleine Martiniello

Max Nelson

Matthew Porterfield

Agnès Godard

Elena Gomez

Claudia La Rocco

James Lattimer

Justin Wolfers

Rebecca Harkins-Cross

Lauren Carroll Harris

Fireflies Issue #5 pairs a living legend of French cinema with an artist yet to receive due recognition outside of her native Germany, despite being one of the country's pre-eminent cineastes. The issue discusses, dismantles, reinterprets and creatively plays with their cinema, featuring insightful longform interviews with both directors, alongside 29 responses from critics, novelists, poets, filmmakers and visual artists who work with video, sound, photography and sculpture.

Agnès Varda

Fireflies #5

Melissa Pierson

Writers on Movie Actors

O.K. You Mugs

Ash Carter

Larry Fink

Vanity Fair's Oscar parties have become a legend of their own over the last decade. A summit of the greatest Hollywood stars, they are the ultimate melting pot of beauty, fame, glamour, and wealth. For ten years American photographer Larry Fink, famous for a keen, uniquely sensual documentary eye, has been the official interpretive Vanity Fair photographer of these events. His view of superstars and their entourages is in sharp contrast to everything we know and expect of official Hollywood. His look is clear and honestly searing; his flash light is married to the instant in devilishly expressive ways. His photographs capture the atmosphere of these meetings reminiscent of evenings at a royal court. With his sensual and intuitive eye, Larry Fink shows the celebrities of the glamorous movie world anxiously at leisure.

Hollywood Parties 2000-2009 : Photographs

The Vanities

In his books and in a string of wide-ranging and inventive essays, Luc Sante has shown himself to be not only one of our pre-eminent stylists, but also a critic of uncommon power and range. He is “one of the handful of living masters of the American language, as well as a singular historian and philosopher of American experience,” says the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl. Kill All Your Darlings is the first collection of Sante’s articles—many of which first appeared in the New York Review of Books and the Village Voice—and offers ample justification for such high praise. Sante is best known for his groundbreaking work in urban history (Low Life), and for a particularly penetrating form of autobiography (The Factory of Facts). These subjects are also reflected in several essays here, but it is the author’s intense and scrupulous writing about music, painting, photography, and poetry that takes center stage. Alongside meditations on cigarettes, factory work, and hipness, and his critical tour de force, “The Invention of the Blues,” Sante offers his incomparable take on icons from Arthur Rimbaud to Bob Dylan, René Magritte to Tintin, Buddy Bolden to Walker Evans, Allen Ginsberg to Robert Mapplethorpe.

Tim Davis

On the Creation and Promise of Water for New York City

Nineteen Reservoirs

Annie Leibovitz began working as a photographer in the early 1970s, which was a volatile and frenetic time in America. The lines had yet to be drawn between journalists and the people they covered, so she had access that would now be considered unusual. This unique collection provides a vivid account both of Leibovitz's development as an artist...

Annie Leibovitz. The early years 1970-1983. Ediz. italiana e spagnola

The seventh book in the Parker series, this describes the aftermath of a brilliant heist at a college football game.

The Seventh

Toby Miller

Barry Gifford

Nicholas Christopher

Lester Goran

Dahlia Schweitzer

Andrew Nette

Jonathan Aaron

Noel King

Matthew Asprey

Contrappasso Magazine

Mick Counihan

Morris Lurie

Suzanne Lummis

Chris Oakey

Robert Mezey

Floyd Salas

A special noir-themed issue of Contrappasso Magazine, an independent journal of international writing. This one's a grab bag of essays, interviews, and new and classic poetry focusing on noir in film and fiction. We cover everything from 'The Maltese Falcon' to 'The Strange Love of Martha Ivers', from Dashiell Hammett to Charles Willeford and Walter Mosley. Contains essays by Luc Sante, Lester Goran, Dahlia Schweitzer & Toby Miller, Morris Lurie, Andrew Nette, Mick Counihan, Noel King, and Matthew Asprey; poetry by Barry Gifford, Nicholas Christopher, Suzanne Lummis, Jonathan Aaron, Robert Mezey, Chris Oakey, and Floyd Salas; and interviews with Adrian Wootton, Matthew Moring, and Dennis McMillan.

International Writing

Contrappasso, Noir Issue

Following Low Life, Luc Sante's acclaimed evocation of the underside of New York City's history, Evidence is an investigation into the mysteries of crime, death, and photography that only this brilliant and original writer could conduct. In one sense Evidence is a picture book - a collection of 55 evidence photographs taken by the New York City Police Department between 1914 and 1918. These are startling images, some brutal, some poetic, and all possessed of a strange and spectral beauty. Luc Sante minutely examines these pictures of crime scenes and draws them out by every possible means: speculating about the lives and deaths depicted; discussing the progress of the forensic use of photographs and the mission of photography itself; and, where possible, reconstructing the events that led up to these frozen terminal images. Evidence is many things at once: aesthetic object, historical and sociological document, mystery novel, memento mori, and time machine.

Luc Sante

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