Winner of the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry PrizeFraternal Light: On Painting While Black is a lyric evocation of the life and work of the great African American artist Beauford Delaney. These poems pay homage to Delaney’s resilience and ingenuity in the face of profound adversity. Although his work never garnered the acclaim it deserves—and is finally receiving—Delaney was well known and highly respected in African American cultural circles, among bohemia...

American essayist and Harper's contributing editor Garret Keizer offers a brilliant, literate look at our strip-searched, over-shared, viral-videoed existence.Body scans at the airport, candid pics on Facebook, a Twitter account for your stray thoughts, and a surveillance camera on every street corner -- today we have an audience for all of the extraordinary and banal events of our lives. The threshold between privacy and exposure becomes more permeable by the minu...

An updated edition of the highly successful and influential Takes On Films, now with twice as many film reviews written by Dan Keizer. He's reviewing new movies, he's reviewing old movies, he's reviewing action, science fiction, art movies, movies about cats, movies about dogs, movies about stupid kids and even movies where it's mostly people just sitting around and talking.With reviews often accompanied by wild conspiracy theories, pointless personal anecdotes and curmudg...

Lightning On Saratoga Ave. is the story of Marvin White's a radical new type of electric generator, built in his back yard on Detroit's east side.

Two veteran 7-Eleven clerks share their thoughts and memories from their years manning the counter around the turn of the century.

In the remote mill town of Salmon Falls, Vermont, the dead of winter can feel like death itself. Jobs are scarce, kids are bored, and it sometimes seems there’s nothing better to do than drink. But when eighteen-year-old Kyle Nelson and a motley group of friends decide to challenge both the legal drinking age and the local drinking culture with a daring act of civil disobedience, they find there’s more to do than they ever imagined. Garret Keizer’s gripping novel about young men and women ...

Weaving anecdotal narrative with trenchant reflections on his profession, Garret Keizer offers one teacher's answer to the hue and cry over the crisis in education. An English teacher in rural Vermont, he writes of the opposing realities he faces every day: the promise and energy of the young and the oppressive effect of their economic disadvantages; the beauty of the countryside and its people and the harsh, sometimes ugly edge of life there; the need for discipline and the importance of ...

English has an interesting variety of noun phrases, which differ greatly in structure. Examples are 'binominal' (two-noun) phrases ('a beast of a party'); possessive constructions ('the author's opinion'); and discontinuous noun phrases ('the review [came out yesterday] of his book'). How are these different noun phrases structured? How do we produce and understand them? These questions are central to this study, which explores the interaction between the form of noun phrases, their meanin...

This book presents essays by an outstanding team of international specialists and covers a wide range of topics, including (inter alia) the relationships between the Austrian and Swedish theories of the business cycle, the on-going debates between Austrians and (Post) Keynesians, Schumpeter's 'Walrasian' stand in the socialist calculation debate, and the Austrian roots of Neo-Institutional economics. The studies stress the unique Austrian contributions to economic methodology and to the th...

Noise is usually defined as unwanted sound: loud music from a neighbor, the honk of a taxicab, the roar of a supersonic jet. But as Garret Keizer illustrates in this probing examination, noise is as much about what we want as about what we seek to avoid. It has been a byproduct of human striving since ancient times even as it has become a significant cause of disease in our own. At heart, noise provides a key for understanding some of our most pressing issues, from social inequality to cli...

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was one of the pre-eminent figures of the Italian Renaissance – he was also one of the most paradoxical. He spent an incredible amount of time writing notebooks, perhaps even more time than he ever held a brush, yet at the same time Leonardo was Renaissance culture’s most fanatical critic of the word. When Leonardo criticized writing he criticized it as an expert on words; when he was painting, writing remained in the back of his mind.In this book, Joos...

The fifteenth-century Italian artist Piero della Francesca painted a familiar world. Roads wind through hilly landscapes, run past farms, sheds, barns, and villages. This is the world in which Piero lived. At the same time, Piero’s paintings depict a world that is distant. The subjects of his pictures are often Christian and that means that their setting is the Holy Land, a place Piero had never visited.The Realism of Piero della Francesca studies this paradoxical aspect of Piero’s...