Art
Readings From the Vast Unread
Readings from the Vast Unread may not be such a bright idea, but it is historically unprecedented. Never before has a body of recommended readings been cobbled together out of what the contributors themselves have yet to lay eyes on. Never before have minds so joined in struggle to commend to others exclusively what they themselves have yet to do. But here we have it: some 240 books that friends and colleagues of the Rail swear they haven’t read and—crucially—fear and dread they may never get to. This is all that needs to be said to explain the intention behind Readings from the Vast Unread: Instead of pummeling readers—as does every reading list known to the total human past—with hundreds of books that the Illuminati have already read and that they, the bereft, agog, and sallow-faced pedestrians have not, this time around the aim is to enthuse readers with all the Illuminati haven’t read. It is their chance to get ahead; to beat us to it; their chance to leave us in the dust, mired in longing and avoidance. This appears as an unprecedented kindness, no doubt, as if the ages themselves have spontaneously willed to emancipate every next new day as genuinely new, at least for those who want to turn pages. But, caveat emptor, the clever reader might well wonder: Isn’t this one of those deals where one gets nothing for something? A self-consciously downward headed Ponzi scheme? Would you choose a dentist because you have it on reliable information that this dentist remains untried by a person of some repute? Choose a restaurant on that same basis? Vacation exactly where your neighbor swears he couldn’t possibly bring himself to go, perhaps for a lifetime? If so, you have been specially selected to plan your summer life of the mind in consultation with Readings from the Vast Unread. As said: Careful, reader; some of these suggestions are tricky.
Robert Hullot-Kentor
Phong Bui
Louis Althusser (philosopher)
Capital (3 volumes) by Karl Marx
Laurie Anderson (artist)
How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson
Charles Traub (photographer)
The Tanakh
The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher
Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant
Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock
The Golden Bough by James Frazer
Robert Hullot-Kentor (philosopher)
Joseph and his Brothers by Thomas Mann
The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch
Golden Mary and the Sacred Fleece by Vladimir Nabokov
Wings of the Dove by Henry James
Salammbô by Gustave Flaubert
The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate by R. B. Onians
Ellen Phelan (artist)
To be reread:
The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki, translated Arthur Waley
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O’Conner
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart by Joyce Carol Oates
Jean-Baptiste Para (editor)
The Enneads by Plotinus
The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki
Pierre, or, the Ambiguities by Herman Melville
Ellen Levy (writer)
The Four Zoas by William Blake
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
The Cantos by Ezra Pound
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
Lewis Warsh (writer)
The Bible
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
The Telling by Laura Riding
The Movement of the Free Spirit by Raoul Vaneigem
A Scarcity of Love by Anna Kavan
The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan
Michael Wood (literary critic)
Anything but The Prelude by Wordsworth
Anything but Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Anything but Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Anything but something by Anthony Trollope
Anything but The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Anything but Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Ben DeMott (editor)
Tribute to Freud by H.D.
Poems of Madness & Angel by Ray Bremser
L.A. Is the Capital of Kansas by Richard Meltzer
The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout
The Metamorphosis of the Gods by Andre Malraux
The White Goddess by Robert Graves
Douglas Armato (editor)
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and/or Don Juan by Lord Byron
The Golden Bough by James Frazer
The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 2 by Robert Musil
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
IQ84 by Haruki Murakami
Si Newhouse (publisher)
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Ulysses by James Joyce
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Rolf Tiedemann (philosopher)
Conversations of German Refugees by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
Ethics by Baruch de Spinoza
The Savage Mind by Claude Lévi-Strauss
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
Jacques Lacan (psychoanalyst)
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
Matvey Levenstein (painter)
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddartha Mukherjee
The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
The Possessed by Elif Batuman
The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul
Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Victory: An Island Tale by Joseph Conrad
Lisa Yuskavage (painter)
In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard
Magic Seeds, V.S. Naipaul
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
The Keep by Jennifer Egan
Agnes Gund (lover of art)
Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Penny M. Von Eschen
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis
Solo by Rana Dasgupta
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson
Harmony Korine (filmmaker/artist)
Gangsta Rap Coloring Book by Aye Jay
Memoirs of an Amnesiac by Oscar Levant
The Paterson Pimp by Randy Jackson a k a “Jashon”
Picking on Retards by Scott Carpenter
Cooked: From the Streets to the Stove, from Cocaine to Foie Gras by Jeff Henderson
The Good Enema by J.G. Knox
Olof Arnalds (musician/performer)
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Guo Xiaolu
Hitch 22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens
The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman
An English translation of Yosoy by Guðrún Eva Mínervudóttir
Michael Davis (artist)
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Ulysses by James Joyce
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The Odyssey by Homer
Alfredo Jaar (artist)
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, Poems 2007-2010 by Adrienne Rich
Between Parentheses by Roberto Bolaño
Les écarts du cinéma by Jacques Rancière
Lives on the Left: Interviews with New Left Review, edited by Francis Mulhern
Blindness by José Saramago
Ken Jacobs (filmmaker)
Reckless Endangerment by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner
Tropic of Chaos by Christian Parenti
Slave Nation by Alfred Blumrosen
Rough Crossings by Simon Schama
Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips
The Eleventh Day by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
Dan Simon (publisher)
Capital by Karl Marx
Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust
The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer
Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
Phong Bui (publisher)
Some of My Lives by Rosamond Bernier
The Shape of Ancient Thought by Thomas McEvilley
Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia: A Translation and Commentary by Johann Georg Hamann, translated James C. O’Flaherty
Humanist without Porfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, translated by Marianne Cowan
The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama
Must We Burn de Sade? by Simon de Beauvoir, translated by Annette Michelson
Jay Sanders (curator)
Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy by David Robbins
Truth and Greatness by Steffani Jemison
C’est la Guerre: Early Writings 1978-1983 by Byron Coley
La Bohème: The Staging of Artists in Photography of the 19th and 20th Century (Exh. Catalogue) Ludwig Museum
When Movies Mattered by Dave Kehr
The Howling Hex: Victory Chimp, A Book by Neil Hagerty
Christoph Türcke (philosopher)
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
Ulysses by James Joyce
Ethics by Baruch de Spinoza
Essays by Michel de Montaigne
Hieronymus Bosch by Wilhelm Fraenger
Gregg Horowitz (philosopher)
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann
Deer Park by Norman Mailer
Opus Postumum by Immanuel Kant
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood by Jane Leavy
New Héloïse by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Kenneth Frampton (architect, writer)
Embers, Sandor Marai
The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch
Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman
The Universitas Project directed by Emilio Ambasz
Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity by Michael E. Zimmerman
Dirk Braunstein (social critic)
Ulysses by James Joyce
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Zettel’s Traum by Arno Schmidt
Nazi Germany and the Jews by Saul Friedländer
The Phenomenology of Spirit by G.W.F. Hegel
Walter Benjamin by Jean-Michel Palmier
Silvia Kolbowski (artist, editor, writer)
Perfume by Patrick Süskind
Capitalism by Geoffrey Ingham
Denial by Jessica Stern
Deathwatch by Robb White
Extinction by Thomas Bernhard
Richard Tuttle (artist)
Principia by Sir Isaac Newton Newton
To be read in original language:
The Nature of Things by Lucretius
Eclogues by Virgil
On Old Age by Cicero
The Illiad by Homer
Phenomenology of Spirit by G.W.F. Hegel
Terry Winters (painter)
Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud translated by John Ashbery
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick
The Microscripts by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky
Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media by Marina Warner
Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life by Lev Loseff and Jane Ann Miller
Listen to This by Alex Ross
Hendel Teicher (art historian, curator)
Inner Revolution by Robert Thurman
Angels by Peter Lamborn Wilson
The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Real by Annie Le Brun
The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, translated by George Szirtes
Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations with introduction by Marcela Valdes
Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich
Peter Eleey (curator)
The Civil Contract of Photography by Ariella Azoulay
Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon by Dan Chiasson,
Serendipities by Eco Umberto
Gordon Matta-Clark: Conical Intersect by Bruce Jenkins
Stories of Youth by James Lord
La Cuisine Acidulée by Michel Troisgros
Patrick Murray (philosopher)
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Metaphysics by Aristotle
The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms by Ernst Cassirer
Collected Short Stories of Wallace Stegner by Wallace Stegner
Robert Kelly (writer, poet)
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
The Saying of Anaximander by Martin Heidegger
The Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en
The Iliad by Homer, as translated by Charles Stein
Jean Santeuil by Marcel Proust
Epic of King Gesar
Leonard Lopate (radio show host)
Men and Bulls by Yusuf Idris
Philosopher or Dog by Machado de Assis
The Paths that Rise by Mouloud Feraoun
The Wedding of Zein by Tayeb Saleh
The Time of the Doves by Merce Rodoreda
A man is not a flea by Mikhail Zoschchenko
Irving Sandler (art historian)
Endgame by Samuel Beckett
The Rebel by Albert Camus
Vol 1. Selected Papers, Modern Art 19th and 20th Centuries and Vol. 4. Theory and Philosophy of Art by Meyer Schapiro
Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara
Joel Shapiro (artist)
The Iliad by Homer
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Complete Works of Isaac Babel
Poems of Paul Celan translated by Michael Hamburger
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (poet)
Becoming Animal by David Abram
Selected Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin
The Turquoise Ledge by Leslie Marmon Silko
Well Then There Now by Juliana Spahr
Death of a Discipline by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
2000 Years of Mayan Literature by Dennis Tedlock
The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangval Rinpoche
Arturas Zuokas (politician)
Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street and the Evolution of SoHo by Roz Bernstein and Shael Shapiro
The Cult of Incompetence by Émile Faguet
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 20th Century by George Friedman
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
The Road by Cormac McCarthy