Search results for ""Author Kathryn Scanlan""

Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman’s life at the racetrack—the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner’s circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the “particular language” of “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody”—with economy and integrity. Based on transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, the novel investigates form and authenticity in a feat of synthesis reminiscent of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony. As Scanlan puts it, “I wanted to preserve—amplify, exaggerate—Sonia’s idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller. I arrived at what you could call a composite portrait of a self.” Whittled down with a fiercely singular artistry, Kick the Latch bangs out of the starting gate and carries the reader on a careening joyride around the inside track.

Read more less

A photographic encyclopedia of Western female hairstyles across the ages In The Hunt, London-based French photographer Céline Bodin (born 1990) creates a concise survey of female hairstyles across various periods in time, within the framework of Western culture. The series reflects upon the pictorial qualities of hair: studying its materiality and its ability to convey identity, while also recalling the Victorian “hair medallion”—a small, decorative keepsake made from an ornate curl of a loved one's hair, a pre-photographic memento that draws connections between portraiture, identity and memory. The figures appear as ornate statues, each characterized by the aesthetic associations and revisited stereotypes of their hairstyle. The anonymity of the images presented in The Hunt activates the mind's associative aptitude, drawing upon one's own fantasies and projections of sensuality, innocence, order, freedom, frivolity and social rank. Echoing classical art, these images refer to a mystical icon rather than presenting a portrait of an individual.

Read more less