Barthes’ Mythologies — now unabridged

If you’ve read the 1972 Annette Lavers translation of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, you have not read all the essays in the 1957 French original. A new edition, translated by Richard Howard (Hill and Wang, $27.00), adds more than 20 essays left out of the Lavers edition.  Publishers Weekly notes that “with so much new material now included, this volume is not an unabridged reissue so much as a celebration anew.”

Wondering about US policy on Iran?

Trita Parsi’s new book A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran (Yale University Press, $27.50) assesses the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions (a change from the more aggressive approach of the Bush administration). Tarsi, an expert on the Middle East, spoke to more than 70 officials from the US, Iran, Europe, Israel and Saudi Arabia in researching the book.

Parsi was recently interviewed on the topic on John Stewart’s The Daily Show.

On Display: a sampling of one of the many thought-provoking displays at the Penn Book Center. Visit us and see more!

New from Marilynne Robinson

(Farrar, Straus and and Giroux, $24.00)

New in paper…

“Mark Sundeen’s astonishing and unsettling book goes directly to the largest questions about how we live and what we have lost in a culture obsessed with money. Sundeen tells the story of a gentle and generous man who sought the good life by deciding to life without it. What’s most unsettling and astonishing is that he appears to have succeeded.”

                         –William Greider

Purple Passages

Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry ($39.95, Iowa Press)

What is patriarchal poetry? How can it be both attractive and tempting and yet be so hegemonic that it is invisible? How does it combine various mixes of masculinity, femininity, effeminacy, and eroticism? At once passionate and dispassionate, Rachel Blau DuPlessis meticulously outlines key moments of choice and debate about masculinity among writers as disparate as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg, choices that construct consequential models for institutions of poetic practice.

As DuPlessis writes, “There are no genderless subjects in any relationship structuring literary culture: not in production, dissemination, or reception; not in objects, discourses, or practices; not in reading experiences or in interpretations.” And, as she reveals in careful and enthralling detail, for the poets at the center of this book, questions of masculinity loomed large and were continuously articulated in their self-creation as writers, in literary bonding, and in its deployment.

These gender-laden choices, debates, and contradictions all have a striking influence today. In this empathic yet critical historical polemic, DuPlessis reveals the outcomes of these many investments in the radical reconstruction of masculinity, in their strains, incompleteness, tensions—and failures. At the heart of modernist maleness and poetic practices are contradictions and urgencies, gender ideas both progressive and defensive.In a striking book on male behavior in poetic dyads, the third book in a feminist critical trilogy, DuPlessis tracks the poetic debates and arguments about gender that continuously affirm patriarchal poetry.

 

 

“Imagine if 1,225 West Philadelphians joined together in intentional commitment to buying books from local vendors at fair market prices?”

PBC staffer Emma Eisenberg also writes for the West Philly Local.  See her recent column  in support of local bookstores