Autofocus Books – förlag

A SEARING EXPLORATION OF FAILURE—PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL—THROUGH THE LENS OF DOCUMENTARY FILM AND THE PRISM OF SELF // In Failure Is the Only Subject, we encounter David Shields—memoirist, novelist, and filmmaker—undergoing psychoanalysis in the aftermath of divorce and in the throes of an addictive new relationship. Struggling to piece his life back together, Shields watches (and rewatches) documentaries about human disappointment by such groundbreaking directors as Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Kitty Green, Adam Curtis, and Michael Winterbottom. // Contemplating the filmmakers' choices, Shields asks painful questions about his life, any life, life itself. What happens when the mask falls off and we come face-to-face with the abyss within? Is there a way to bear such harrowing knowledge—about ourselves and the world? Renowned for his discomfiting candor, Shields is at his best here: unsparing in his scrutiny.

Inspired to "take a break from life" by the idyllic housesitting situation they were offered for the summer, Aaron and Amber find themselves in Aaron's hometown of Tacoma, Washington. Amber works her remote job, Aaron tries to write and goes for runs along the waterfront, and they explore their temporary summer city on daily walks and regular excursions. Soon, noticing that the landscape seems to keep shifting around them, Aaron starts drawing a map of it all, attempting to document and make sense of the changes. When Tacoma starts to open up bigger and bigger with possibility and wonder, Tacoma starts to fold in on itself, becoming both more self-referential and more like the spontaneous, fantastical stories Aaron has been writing. A friend rides an orca to come visit. Pirates guard a wormhole in the forest. A secret doorway in the Tacoma Mall tunnels back to Aaron's childhood bedroom. Blending autofiction with fantasy, meta with magic, and earnestness with absurdity, Tacoma presents a recognizable but also magical world where we ask, if nothing is real, then why not have as much fun as possible?

Lauren Lavín is trying to embrace the boundaries imposed upon life by love and death. But there are distractions: the younger brother she lost to suicide, the friends and ex-lovers who've passed, her husband's illness and fear of dying, her own pull toward the abyss. In The Third Beat, Lavín examines her related impulses to seek, to be seen, to exit the body (through sex, music, alcohol, humor), and to return into it. With liberating scope and candor, Lavín's short essays consider the ways that we consume ourselves and allow ourselves to be consumed: in grief, in a lover's eye, in obsessive patterns, in decay, in pursuit of the perfect punch line. And much like comedy's rule of three, expectations in The Third Beat exist to be subverted. Lavín's fast and loud prose always renders her existential dread captivating and alive. Rather than answers, Lavín offers pauses at the places our minds are afraid to stop.

On a hot August day, Beowulf Sheehan and his assistant Chika arrive at the Santa Fe Institute to meet and photograph Cormac McCarthy, writer of masterpieces such as Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, auteur of the Southern Gothic, and figure renowned for avoiding the public eye. Their day together takes them from the light of Santa Fe to the shadows of Cormac's home, exploring his art and life as they go, making what would become Cormac's author portrait for his novels The Passenger and Stella Maris and, less than one year after they are published, the image used to announce the global news of his passing. The Father of the Man: The Last Author Portrait Sitting with Cormac McCarthy is a recounting of that great day, a photo essay (including many pictures published for the first time), an homage to Cormac and his art, and a reflection of Cormac's work to serve as a lens through which Beowulf Sheehan better sees, understands, and loves his own father.