Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, by Mark Fisher
‘The whisper at your shoulder that what might have been may yet be the dream that saves you. This is essentially Fisher’s thing when it comes to music, film and (less so) writing: the vestige of a future lost in half-remembered fragments from half a life ago’
Selected Writings, 2000–2014, by Paul Chan
‘The first section of the book brings together a series of texts originally presented in art magazines or as lectures but as you read through them collectively, they offer up a series of aphoristic statements concerning the nature of their author’s profession’
The Ringtone Dialectic, by Sumanth Gopinath
‘This unique and often fascinating volume unearths a sufficient number of intriguing artistic responses to suggest that there may have been more to the ringtone as cultural form than Für Elise rendered in coarse FM synthesis and dididing ding bing bing’
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt
Hustvedt surrounds the reader with multiple unreliable narrators and all are implicated as misrememberers, all telling the wrong stories about ourselves, warped and blinded as we are by perspective, memory and desire’
Book from the Ground: From Point to Point, by Xu Bing and The Book About Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground, edited by Mathieu Borysevicz
‘When considering the implications of a global language Xu’s project is a highly relevant one… but pushing the literary possibilities of an existing language, is not the same as attempting to tell a story through simplified signs and symbols’
The Duchamp Dictionary by Thomas Girst
‘Once you get into the broken rhythm of the book, then – assuming you can ignore the one big flaw, an interlaced sequence of terrible, crass, collaged illustrations – it’s surprisingly absorbing’
This article was first published in ArtReview newsletter 57, 1 August 2014
