PAGE 76
Art Inspired by This Season’s Books
What happens on page 76 in five new titles, as envisioned by the artist Michelangelo Lovelace.
T: The New York Times Style Magazine
September 23, 2018
In the House in the Dark of the Woods
A novel by Laird Hunt
From the book:
“I suppose I would have stayed and tried to put more questions to this Eliza as I had tried to put questions to the other, or pried open the window and called outside, or stepped quietly away and crept back to my room, but then like a bell struck soft but true came the moan again.”
Promising her husband and son berries and cream for dinner, a Puritan woman in colonial New England wanders into the woods, where she strays from the path. It’s her first time on her own and — as she discovers while negotiating the trees, a trio of mysterious women and plenty of darkness, some of it of her own making — the first time she has truly faced herself. To be published by Little, Brown on Oct. 16.
[Michelangelo Lovelace Human Hours; 2018 Ink on Paper 16 x 12 inches]
Michelangelo Lovelace
Human Hours; 2018
Ink on Paper
16 x 12 inches
[Michelangelo Lovelace Godsend; 2018 Ink on Paper 16 x 12 inches]
Michelangelo Lovelace
Godsend; 2018
Ink on Paper
16 x 12 inches
[Michelangelo Lovelace Washington Black; 2018 Ink on Paper 16 x 12 inches]
Michelangelo Lovelace
Washington Black; 2018
Ink on Paper
16 x 12 inches
[Michelangelo Lovelace Page 76 Transcription; 2018 Ink on Paper 12 x 16 in.]
Michelangelo Lovelace
Page 76 Transcription; 2018
Ink on Paper
12 x 16 in.
Human Hours
Poems by Catherine Barnett
From the book:
“I’ve seen a few photos of 433 Eros, Where all the craters are named after famous lovers, and the pictures are very sexy even if it is just a minor planet or the shattered remnant of a planetesimal.”
“Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more,” Barnett writes in her latest collection, though its contents — which concern topics ranging from solitude to sex to the inevitability of time and, with it, decay — brim with emotional intelligence. “433 Eros,” quoted above, highlights the impulse to describe space, that great unknown, in the familiar language of desire. Published by Graywolf on Sept. 4.
Godsend
A novel by John Wray
From the book:
“ ‘Is this so, Brother Suleyman?’ the man said to her.
‘Near enough,’ she heard a voice reply. Her own voice or the voice of the boy she pretended to be. To her relief it sounded confident.”
Wray was thinking of John Walker Lindh, known as the American Taliban, when he wrote this story of 18-year-old Aden Grace Sawyer, who, in defiance of her parents and in search of a sense of purpose, leaves her home in Santa Rosa, Calif., for Pakistan, where she binds her chest to pass as a man and enrolls in a village madrassa to study the Quran. Feeling restless still, she resolves to join militants fighting just over the border in the Afghan hills. The events of 9/11 are mere months away. To be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on Oct. 9
Washington Black
A novel by Esi Edugyan
From the book:
“Mister Philip spat out the first dish she made, a fish soup, kicking back his chair and leaving the room. Her second dish, a breadcrust stuffed with cod and root vegetables, he dropped on the floor in disappointment. The third dish he pushed rudely from the plate onto the table and her fourth dish he forced her to sit and taste.”
When an especially vile new master arrives at the Barbados plantation where Wash (George Washington Black) has spent his boyhood as a slave, it sets off a wave of suicides. For Wash, though, it marks a different sort of turning point: The master’s scientist brother makes him his assistant, opening the child up to reading, writing, drawing and a world beyond the island. In time, Wash decides to live up to his namesake and fight, come what may, for freedom. To be published by Knopf on Sept. 18.
Transcription
A novel by Kate Atkinson
From the book:
“Godfrey. You’re going to Hertford (Or Hatford?)
Walter. This factory here is near Abbot’s Langley. Near the river. This is the canal.
Godfrey. I see.
Walter. Near the railway line. This is a pill box, then this barbed wire fence. Then the railway cutting. Ammunition of gunpowder, I think. They’ve put up a notice — ‘No Smoking within 100 yards,’ you see.
Godfrey. Yes. Have you put a cross against it?
Walter. Not this one. It’s just by Abbot’s Langley. You can probably (inaudible).”
It’s 1940 and Juliet Armstrong is swept up in the British war effort when she is recruited to transcribe the conversations of an MI5 officer, Godfrey, and his unsuspecting fascist-sympathizing acquaintances — only to become a spy herself. A decade later, she’s leading a comfortably monotonous life as a radio producer when she runs into Godfrey on the street and realizes that certain battles wage on. To be published by Little, Brown on Sept. 25.
Nytimes.com