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The first English translation of an important and evocative interview-turned-book project in Marguerite Duras' illustrious oeuvre"I could talk for hours about this house, this garden. I know it all, I know where every old door is, everything, the walls of the pond, all the plants, the location of every plant, even the wild plants I know the place of, everything." So begins Marguerite Duras’ rhapsody on the spaces she has inhabited throughout her life. The Places of Marguerite Duras was filmed and aired as a two-part television documentary in 1976. Her reminiscences are structured around her memories of specific locations: her house in Neauphle-le-Château; her childhood home in French Indochina, which inspired her acclaimed novel The Sea Wall; the Hôtel des Roches Noires in Trouville, where she wrote The Ravishing of Lol Stein; and the vast seascapes of Indochina, Bengal and Normandy, whose powerful tides compelled her art and life.The transcript of the documentary was published in French two years after the documentary aired, and is now published in English for the first time, just shy of 50 years since the film’s creation. True to the original French edition, Duras’ reflections are accompanied by photographs and film stills. The complete English translation by Alison Strayer includes a new essay by writer and director Durga Chew-Bose.Marguerite Duras (1914–96) was a filmmaker and author, and a leading figure in French postwar cinema. Her novel L’Amant won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959).

On December 18, 1974, Linda Rosenkrantz asked her friend Peter Hujar to write down everything he did one day. Hujar met Rosenkrantz at her apartment on 94th street the following day where she asked him about it in detail. She tape-recorded their conversation and this book is a full transcript of that exchange, published here for the first time since it was recorded 47 years ago. The book features an introduction by Stephen Koch, director of the Peter Hujar Estate.“Peter Hujar’s monologue, prompted by Linda Rosenkranz, is a Warholian gem, and a prize discovery for Magic Hour Press.”— Moyra Davey“This slim volume is Peter’s sexiest self-portrait. Read it and weep if you didn’t know him. Or read it and weep if you did that we lost him.”— Nan Goldin“It’s wonderful to hear Peter’s voice again. The voice I channel when I make his prints [since 2008]. He was my friend, mentor - an inspired printer - my teacher. Thank you, Linda, for your brilliant idea, and thanks for this book, it’s a great gift.”— Gary Schneider

Corita Kent’s photographs of vernacular inspiration—from street signs and folk art to kites, parades and fairsCorita Kent, formerly Sister Mary Corita, is known for her exuberant, colorful serigraphs and her teaching, as evidenced in her lively art classes. As a Catholic nun from 1936 until 1968, Corita lived and worked in the Immaculate Heart of Mary community in Los Angeles. She taught lettering and layout, image finding, and art structure for 20 years in Immaculate Heart College’s art department. There, she screened multiple films simultaneously, hosted guest thinkers including Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller and John Cage, and guided the making of large-scale collaborative projects with students.Corita regularly took her students out for looking sessions at a used car lot or an art exhibition. While constantly looking and discovering visually, Corita shot thousands of 35 mm slides documenting references, the IHC milieu and the art department processes. For Corita, the vernacular environs of advertising, supermarkets and the city’s media landscape were a source of inspiration and raw material. Her slide collection encompasses a wide range of subjects: cookies, coke bottles, toys, presents, experiments, projects, Mary’s Day celebrations stemming from Corita’s classroom, flowers, magazines, seeds, puppets, visits with Charles and Ray Eames, street signs, trade fairs, folk art, boxes, billboards and kites. Drawing from the Corita Art Center’s vast slide collection, Ordinary Things Will Be Signs for Us embodies Corita’s philosophy of looking.Corita Kent (1918–86) was known for her iconic art, innovative teaching methods and messages of social justice. Born Frances Elizabeth Kent in Fort Dodge, Iowa, she entered the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Hollywood at age 18. As a professor and later chair of the art department, she helped establish its reputation as a hub of creativity and liberal thinking. By 1968, her art was enormously popular, showing in more than 230 exhibitions and held in public and private collections around the world. She remained active in social causes until her death in 1986.

A fresh edition of the novel that expands upon the autofictional world introduced in Guibert's cult classic, Suzanne and Louise (1980)Hervé Guibert's novel The Gangsters opens at the front door of a Paris townhouse inhabited by the narrator's elderly great-aunts, Suzanne and Louise. The narrator, distracted by a health crisis and his pursuit of an ambivalent lover, arrives to find suspicious renovation work taking place. But even after the great-aunts confess to being intimidated and extorted, neither he nor the incompetent police can stop the ongoing larceny. Readers of Guibert's writing may already recognize the narrator (also named Hervé) and his great-aunts from the groundbreaking photo-novel Suzanne and Louise (1980). Like his other books, The Gangsters is a work of autofiction. Here, he uses the crime-novel format to explore universal motifs, such as cruelty, desire and mortality. "When I disappear," Guibert continued, "I will have said it all. I will have striven to reduce this distance between the truths of experience and writing." Originally published in 1988, The Gangsters was his first book to be translated into English. This new edition from Magic Hour features Iain White's original translation and a new afterword by the writer Janique Vigier.Astoundingly prolific, the French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert (1955–91) authored 25 books and published numerous texts on photography. Memorialized as a leading exponent of French autofiction, Guibert rose to acclaim for his bestselling AIDS novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990).

Fratino’s expressive style combines painting’s rich history with a sensibility that is unique to the present momentSince his critically acclaimed 2019 solo exhibition in New York, American painter Louis Fratino (born 1993) has been at the forefront of figurative painting’s international resurgence. This is the first major monograph for the artist, gathering more than 50 of his most important works to date. Although he has spoken of his admiration for modernist painters including Picasso and Marsden Hartley, Fratino's approach to the medium is highly personal, reconstructed from memories of his own fleeting perceptions. His figures radiate desire; whether poised in a moment of tranquility or entwined in a coital knot, he depicts them with a frankness that speaks to the intimacy of the artist’s tender gaze. For this publication, Fratino’s work is presented in a generously sized folio format inspired by 1930s avant-garde publications such as Minotaure and Verve, and its dust jacket features a new artwork by the artist.

Lankton's iconic and startling doll sculptures as we have never seen them before: through her own eyesThis is the first monograph on the trans visionary artist Greer Lankton (1958–96), whose lifelike doll sculptures shocked 1980s New York. Lankton's dolls, which she began making as a child and produced obsessively until her death at age 38, were a means to explore her fraught relationship with the human body. In the book's 100 photographs, all shot by Lankton herself, these figures take on a life of their own, kvetching at a party, strolling along a beach, or lounging on a stoop in the East Village. Among this extraordinary cast of oddballs—usually femme, often freakish, always radiating a glamorous confidence—we find characters of Lankton's own invention alongside well-known icons such as Divine, Coco Chanel, Andy Warhol and even Lankton herself.Born in 1958 to a Presbyterian minister in Michigan, Greer Lankton moved to New York in 1978 and became a rising star of the downtown scene. There, her deviant elegance was immortalized in photographs by Peter Hujar, David Armstrong and Lankton's close friend Nan Goldin, who described her as "one of the luminaries of the East Village renaissance: beautiful, glamorous, wild and hysterically funny." Lankton's work was a neighborhood fixture, in exhibitions at the gallery Civilian Warfare and in regular window displays at Einstein's Boutique, and was also celebrated farther afield, in era-defining group shows at PS1 and the Venice Biennale. Her final work, an immersive installation created for the Mattress Factory in 1996, remains on permanent view.

Salvaged from a devastating fire, Day's photographs and stories provide glimpses into her close friendship with author Hervé GuibertIn the fall of 2013, the house of American photographer Anne Day burnt to the ground. A few of her prints and negatives survived in a file cabinet but had become completely charred: only remnants of images and traces of a younger self remained. A close friend of hers in the early 1980s was the French photographer and author Hervé Guibert (1955–91). They worked together on magazine assignments for Le Monde, profiling Orson Welles, Jane Fonda and the antique dealer Madeleine Castaing, to name a few. When not working, they took day trips to the seaside; Guibert introduced Day to his Parisian circle of friends. He took her to see performances by Pina Bausch and Mark Morris and they dined with Cartier-Bresson and Duane Michals. While Day made her living as a photographer, it was the photos she took of her grandmother that Guibert loved the most. Taking its title from an article Guibert wrote about Day, this volume mixes Day's burnt prints with her anecdotes about the people she knew and the places she frequented.