What if there is no ‘space,’ only a permanent, slow-motion mystic takeover, an implausibly careening awning? Nothing is utopian. Everything wants to be. Soft Architects face the reaching middle. If architecture is the language of concrete and steel, then Soft Architecture needs a vocabulary of flesh, air, fabric and colour. It’s about civic surface and natural history. It’s about social space and clothing and urban geography and visual art, and some intersection of all these. This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson, the ambulatory Office for Soft Architecture. There are essays on Vancouver fountains, the syntax of the suburban home, Value Village, the joy of synthetics, sca×olding and the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. There are also seven Walks, tours of Vancouver sites – poetic dioramas, really, and more material than cement could ever be. Soft Architecture exists at the crossroads of poetry, theory, urban geography and cultural criticism, some place where the quotidian and the metaphysical marry and invert. The most intriguing book you’ll encounter this year. ‘We say, on almost every page and with utmost reverence, Holy shit. … Ever since, we have wanted to think like Robertson, write like her, maybe even be her.’ – The Village Voice, listing it as a top pick of 2004 ‘She plucks a subject (object) from the quotidian and banal in order to move through it, uncovering layers of the historical, the lyrical, and the political. The result feels somehow psychedelic.’ – The Stranger

Occasional Work and 7 Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

Literature & Fiction

Robertson, Lisa

Poetry

Clear Cut Pr Llc

These eleven essays span continents, culture, and class. Fiction writer and essayist Charles D'Ambrosio inspects manufactured homes in Washington state; tours the rooms of Hell House, a Pentecostal "haunted house" in Texas; visits the dormitories and hallways of a Russian orphanage in Svrstroy; and explored the textual space of family letters, at once expansive and claustrophobic. In these spaces, or the people who inhabit them, he unearths a kind of optimism, however guarded. He introduces us to a defender of gray whales; the creator of Biosquat, a utopian experiment in Austin, Texas; and a younger version of himself, searching for "culture" in Seattle in 1974. He analyzes the nuances of Mary Kay Letourneau's trial and contemplates the persistence of rain and of memory.

Orphans

D'Ambrosio, Charles

History & Criticism

Frances Johnson doesn’t want to attend the town dance. But there is pressure. The people of Munson, her small Florida town, make their needs known: Ray, her boyfriend who is “overfocused on world history”; Mal, the horsey, earnest, fry cook at Mal’s Pico Diner, who offers her his cabin;Palmer, the town doctor who can find no cure for the mysterious scar Frances bears; her mother, speaking to her through “the mechanical screeching” of Munson’s patched telephone lines. Nearby, a volcano the townspeople call “Sharla” spews lava and stones, lighting the night sky with its portentous burning. At once measured and suspenseful, Frances Johnson is a comedy of manners in the tradition of Jane Bowles.

Frances Johnson: A Novel

Romance

Levine, Stacey

Contemporary

The summer Aldous Bohm turns nine, his parents move to the woods near Snoqualmie ,Washington , "to reinvent the American family." The Bohm's are working class hippies in post-Vietnam America . Their makeshift pastoral takes shape in a haze of pot smoke and good intentions and ultimately births a vortex of personal insecurity and romanticism taking the family deeper into the woods to destroy them. Aldous oversees these tragedies, recalled a decade later, after he has left Snoqualmie to join the military in the buildup to the first Gulf War. Sweeping in scope yet unerringly precise in its detail, Shoot the Buffalo conjoins the dead end narrative of American masculinity with its stubborn twin - the Romantic ideal of nature - to suggest an ambivalent way forward, a path out of these woods.

Shoot the Buffalo

Briggs, Matt

Action & Adventure

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Clear Cut Pr Llc publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Clear Cut Pr Llc