The title of this surprising collection of image/text works by twenty-five female visual artists and writers is a phrase borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. As Lisa Pearson writes in her afterword, It Is Almost That describes "the humming state of the not-quite this and not quite that," namely, "what familiar taxonomies cannot order." Hak Kyung Cha’s piece—composed of faltering phrases projected on black-and-white slides—points to the provisional nature of language and speech. While Pearson’s penchant for this open, indeterminate state might seem at first to evoke categories

n the long-ago epoch when Bill Clinton made a credible-sounding populist run at the presidency, he hymned the American dream as a compact securing a better future for those who “worked hard and played by the rules.” Here at the shank end of the great financial collapse of 2008, however, the national credo is pretty much “what work?”—and “screw the rules.”

What is it about the promise of a frozen treat on a hot day that can make a five-year-old wake up in the pitch black of 5:00 am and pad to his mother’s bedside to poke her unceremoniously and ask: “Is it time to make the popsicles?” (No. No, it is not. Not before daylight, and certainly never before coffee.) It is, I suspect, more than just a craving for sugar and cooler temperatures. I’m almost certain, in fact, that it’s the same thing that compelled me to wear a shirt with a repeating pattern of ice-cream parlors on it almost every single day the summer I was six, the feeling that makes me

The mystery is not who Davy Crockett was but how he got that way and why.

In 1834, two years before he died at the Alamo at 49, Crockett himself posed the same question: "I know that, obscure as I am, my name is making a considerable fuss in the world," he wrote in his autobiography. "I can't tell why it is, nor in what it is to end. Go where I will, everybody seems anxious to get a peep at me. . . . Therefore, there must be something in me, or about me, that attracts attention, which is even mysterious to myself."

Take an apartment. Trash it thoroughly. Strip. Smear yourself with blood, bind your wrists, and bend over a table. Wait for your friends to discover your “corpse.”

Too much?

Take a city sidewalk. Take a bucket of “blood.” Splatter. Hide. Look at people looking at the “blood.”

How much is too much?

This is the horror art of Ana Mendieta, the Cuban-American performance artist; the scenarios are taken from 1973’s Rape Scene and People Looking at Blood, Moffitt. Mendieta is one of the battalion of painters, filmmakers, and novelists analyzed in The Art of Cruelty, an earnest but scattershot

No sooner had essays and novels emerged as popular literary forms in seventeenth-century Europe than readers came to seek in them the kinds of spiritual and practical guidance they had always found in more overtly philosophical works like Ecclesiastes and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson was certainly aware of this when he extracted what he called “moral and instructive sentiments, maxims, cautions, and reflexions” from his own novels and published them as a separate volume. The desire to distill wisdom from literature is still with us, albeit

Reading David Browne’s exhilarating and meticulously researched Fire and Rain, I was reminded of an old Woody Allen stand-up routine about a costume party in which he was about to be hung by the Ku Klux Klan: “My life passed before my eyes. I saw myself . . . swimmin’ in the swimmin’ hole. Fryin’ up a mess o’ catfish. . . . Gettin’ a piece of gingham for Emmy Lou. . . . I realize, it’s not my life.” I lived through the same tumultuous year, 1970, that Browne documents in Fire and Rain and listened to much of the same music, and though our experiences were similar, our recollections are quite