Kenneth Goldsmith: Capital – New York, Capital of the 20th Century (Non-mint)

Hardcover in slipcase | 18.9 x 5.23 x 27.13 cm | 1008 pp

Verso Books | 2015 | 9781784781569

Renowned poet and conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith collects a massive assortment of quotations about New York City in the twentieth century. This kaleidoscopic montage from hundreds of sources is a literary adoration of New York as the capital of the world, and was inspired by Walter Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece, The Arcades Project, a compendium of quotations about nineteenth-century Paris.

Goldsmith brings together an immense archive of quotations from novels, histories, newspapers, memoirs, letters, advertisements and more unlikely sources, all organised into lyrical and philosophical categories. The result is a magisterial and poetic history of New York in the twentieth century, and an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind book of experimental literature.

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 hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He was an artist and sculptor for many years before taking up conceptual poetry. He has since published ten books of poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001) and Day (2003) and Goldsmith’s American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008). He is the author of a book of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in a Digital Age (2011). As editor he published I’ll be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (2004) and is the co-editor of Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011). He was the first Poet Laureate of the Museum of Modern Art. He resides in New York City with his wife, artist Cheryl Donegan and his two sons.

PLEASE NOTE: This book is a NON-MINT item. NON-MINT books are in less than 100% mint condition. They are new but are either ex-display copies or warehouse marked – minor cosmetic imperfections such as scuffs, marks, or minor dents to the covers. If a book has structural cover damage such as cuts, tears or rips images of such will be provided in the listing.