Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781784781590)

Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith's thousand-page 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 nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as "Sex," "Central Park," "Commodity," "Loneliness," "Gentrification," "Advertising," and "Mapplethorpe."

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

Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
ISBN-10: 1784781592
ISBN-13: 9781784781590
Publisher: Verso
Language: English
Published: 05/17/2016
Pages: 928
Format: Paperback
Weight: 3.40lbs
Size: 9.80h x 6.90w x 2.00d