Attention Span – Tim Conley

Gunnar Olsson | Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason | Chicago | 2007

The map is a territory, just not the territory in question.

Mark Scroggins | The Poem of A Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007

Illuminating and exemplary. To those writers I know who cannot even imagine why one would read a “literary” biography, I say: read this and see.

Daniel Heller-Roazen | The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation | Zone | 2007

This book isn’t just about that itch you’ve always had but could never quite scratch; it is that itch.

Javier Marías | Your Face Tomorrow, Volume One: Fever and Spear | New Directions | 2005

Robert Kelly | Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 | Black Sparrow | 1995

Kelly’s work has been a recent, embarrassingly late, and joyous discovery for me. “Can you forgive us all? We / who were your alphabets.”

Rebecca Solnit | Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics | California | 2007

Clearing the air. A mind to walk with.

Jean-Michel Rabaté | 1913: The Cradle of Modernism | Blackwell | 2007

Let there be more such histories, a discreet span studied from every angle, profound and multifaceted contemplations of a month in Spain, a single day in an African village, a late afternoon shared by the world.

Jonathan Williams | Jubilant Thicket: New and Selected Poems | Copper Canyon | 2005

John Peel and Sheila Ravenscroft | John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes | Chicago Review | 2007

When radio was something you did, an activity for both listener and programmer. Unexpectedly poignant is how Ravenscroft takes over the narrative when her husband dies: this is a memoir in stereo.

David Graeber | Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology | Prickly Paradigm | 2004

Jay Millar | Mycological Studies | Coach House | 2002

One of my students asked me whether this book was “for real.”

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More Tim Conley here.