Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century - Hardcover

Goldsmith, Kenneth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1784781568 ISBN 13: 9781784781569

Publisher: Verso, 2015

Synopsis

Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page beautiful homage to New York City

Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis.

It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from 19th-century Paris to 20th-century New York, bringing the streets to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Commodity,” “Downtown,” “Subway,” and “Mapplethorpe.”

Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly be written? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible passage.

About this title

About the Author:

Kenneth Goldsmith is the founding editor of UbuWeb, teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and is Senior Editor of PennSound. He was an artist and sculptor for many years before taking up conceptual poetry. He has since published ten books of poetry and is the author of a book of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in a Digital Age.

Review:

“The book is an ever-rising crescendo of voices talking over and past one another inside a very confined space, and together that energy becomes the heat and light that made New York City the 20th century’s most necessary city. Capital is as enriching as it is unwieldy, and a must-read for anyone who has even a little skin in this game. Ultimately, with both New York City and Goldsmith’s book, all you have to do is say ‘yes’ to begin. Then, suddenly, everything comes at you all at once.″
—Scott Heins, Gothamist

“Reading Capital feels like walking the city, through time and space, jumping neighborhoods, going in and out of buildings, slipping through wormholes. It’s a kind of exuberant eavesdropping on the muttering, shouting narrative of the twentieth-century city.”
—Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York

“[Goldsmith] gives you the feel of what it is like to be living in New York now.”
—Marjorie Perloff, New Yorker

“A skyscraper of words—literary, journalistic, poetic, and prosaic—to celebrate and chronicle teeming Gotham. The title alludes to Walter Benjamin, and the conceit is one to do him proud ... there is an embarrassment of riches here.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Goldsmith’s material, unmistakably real, refuses to remain in a literary frame.”
—Bookslut

“The spirit of a city constantly wrestled with and romanticized all out of proportion suffuses Capital.” – Andy Battaglia, Wall Street Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1784781568
• ISBN 13: 9781784781569
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 928