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Rachel Cohen's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Rachel Cohen recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Rachel Cohen's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Dreaming by the Book

Dreaming by the Book explores the almost miraculous processes by which poets and writers teach us the work of imaginative creation. Writers from Homer to Heaney instruct us in the art of mental composition, even as their poems progress. Just as painters understand paint, composers musical instruments, and sculptors stone or metal, verbal artists understand the only material in which their creations will get made--the back-lit tissue of the human brain. In her brilliant synthesis of literary criticism, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, Elaine Scarry explores the principal practices... more
Recommended by Rachel Cohen, and 1 others.

Rachel CohenScarry’s writing, in a way very technically, about what techniques she thinks writers are using to have their evocative effect. (Source)

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2

Tiepolo Pink

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him—but though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to understand him.

Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo’s series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi, but Roberto Calasso...
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Recommended by Rachel Cohen, and 1 others.

Rachel CohenIn a way, Calasso makes a case for Tiepolo as not the last of the Old Masters, but one of the first of the Moderns. (Source)

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3
Recommended by Rachel Cohen, and 1 others.

Rachel CohenThis essay collection is an old favourite. It’s one I’ve read many times and taught many times. (Source)

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4
What are poets looking at, looking for, when they walk into a room of pictures? Poets on Painters attempts to answer this question by bringing together, for the first time, essays by modern American and British poets about painting. The poets bring to their task a fresh eye and a freshened language, vivid with nuance and color and force. less
Recommended by Rachel Cohen, and 1 others.

Rachel CohenIt brings together roughly a century of Anglo-American poets writing about painting. (Source)

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5

The Ongoing Moment

In his last book, YOGA FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO DO IT, Geoff Dyer confessed that not only did he not take pictures in the course of his travels but that he did not own a camera. With characteristic perversity - and trademark originality - THE ONGOING MOMENT is Dyer's unique and idiosyncratic history of photography. Seeking to identify their signature styles Dyer looks at the ways that canonical figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston have photographed the same scenes and objects (benches, hats, hands,... more
Recommended by Rachel Cohen, and 1 others.

Rachel CohenIt’s a very brilliant and unusual way of entering this material. People tend to isolate photographers and write monographs about one at a time. (Source)

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