Contemporary best-sellers this week

By Harriet Staff

This week on the contemporary best-seller list, we have three familiar names in the top 5 (Collins, Oliver, Smith) sandwiched between two newcomers. Topping off the list is the much-anticipated Antigonick, by Anne Carson, with illustrations by Bianca Stone. In keeping with the book-as-art-object from Carson’s previous title Nox, her latest combines translations and adaptations from Sophokles’s classic text with a striking design. “With text blocks hand-inked on the page by Anne Carson and her collaborator Robert Currie, Antigonick features translucent vellum pages with stunning drawings by Bianca Stone that overlay the text… Antigonick is her first attempt at making translation into a combined visual and textual experience. Sophokles’ luminous and disturbing tragedy is here given an entirely fresh language and presentation.” Coming in at #5 is Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010, the first posthumously published title by Adrienne Rich, who sadly passed away in March of this year. Keeping with themes Rich has developed over her long, storied career, “Relationships partings/reconciliations, solidarities/ruptures, trust/betrayal, exposure/withdrawal—are the deep fabric of this forceful work.” Rich’s poetic vision delivers a writing of “compressed lyrics [that] flash among larger scenarios where images, dialogues, blues, and song spiral into political visions.” Finally, Lucia Perillo’s sixth title ‪On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths enters the list at #13. Her latest “takes an unflinching, though not unsmiling, look at mortality. Perillo has a penchant for dark humor, for jokes that stick.”

Posted in Uncategorized on Friday, May 25th, 2012 by Harriet Staff.