Edoardo Nesi never wanted to run a textile factory, but he didn’t have much choice in the matter. Nesi thought of himself primarily as a writer, but since the 1920s, his family had operated a weaving mill in the Tuscan city of Prato, and working at the mill was a rite of passage. So after flunking out of law school and rotating through a series of factory-floor positions as “assistant foreman in charge of raw materials, assistant technician in charge of mixing and blending fibers, assistant warehouseman … assistant everything, once all was said and done,” Nesi finally became the

Fleming’s Bond was a sadistic racial essentialist prone to rhapsodise about the “sweet tang of rape”. In contrast, Boyd’s Bond is a “careful” lover who is also careful about meting out violence: one assailant is coshed like a cow felled by a “humane killer”. His mission to the warring African state of Zanzarim doesn’t inspire dodgy racial observations.

IN THE ACT documents five evenings of performances that took place in Stockholm and Malmö, Sweden, and in New York City. Conceived by artist Imri Sandström and curator Hanna Wilde and presented by the Swedish collective Högkvarteret, this collaboration—as the first page of the book boasts in all capital letters—“brought together a total of 44 Swedish and international performance artists, curators, and writers working within overlapping artistic domains across varied geographical spheres.” IN THE ACT is an extension of the performance work it documents, addressing many issues in contemporary performance, e.g. re-performance and citationality, the archive and documentation practices, the

“In my doctor’s office I hold up a worksheet and ask him how many I have to fill out before I feel better,” the author and artist Leanne Shapton writes in her 2012 memoir, Swimming Studies, recalling a visit to her therapist. A former competitive swimmer who twice made Olympic trials, Shapton feels adrift after quitting the sport—no longer the athlete she was and not yet the artist she will soon become. Her therapist tells her: a hundred. “I get it, like laps,” Shapton writes. “I settle in, blinker myself, count the laps. Six months and a hundred and fifty

To speak is to know that language is amoral—equally congenial to truth and falsehood, clarity and circumlocution. And therein lies the impetus not only for everyday mendacity but also for artful systems of linguistic subterfuge. As Daniel Heller-Roazen observes, human beings seem to have an innate impulse to “break and scatter” language, to alter their native idioms in order to conceal, bewilder, and dissimulate. In his fascinating Dark Tongues—which might be construed as either a highly episodic history or a collection of case studies ranging across eras and cultures—Heller-Roazen investigates this tendency, paying particular attention to those instances when secret

At first, the “Hydrospatial City,” Argentine artist Gyula Kosice’s expansive conceptual work begun in 1972 and continuing to this day, seems firmly planted in the long tradition of floating cities. Around the time Kosice began working on his project, plans for utopian cities were gaining prominence, especially within architecture—see Kenzo Tange’s 1960 plan for Tokyo Bay, Mayor John Lindsay’s 1967 “Linear City for New York,” and Amancio Williams’s 1974 project “The City Which Humanity Needs” for Buenos Aires. The primary maquettes for Kosice’s project are hovering discs, each dotted with transparent bubbles, rings, and platters for various habitats—the regular stuff

In the general rare books college at Princeton University Library sits a stunning two-volume edition of John Milton that once belonged to Herman Melville. Melville’s tremendous debt to Milton — and to Homer, Virgil, the Bible, and Shakespeare — might be evident to anyone who has wrestled with the moral and intellectual complexity that lends Moby Dick its immortal heft, but to see Melville’s marginalia in his 1836 Poetical Works of John Milton is to understand just how intimately the author of the great American novel engaged with the author of the greatest poem in English. Checkmarks, underscores, annotations, and