Publisher's Synopsis
Brimming with enigmatic photographs, future memes, and mud drawings, Visible showcases six genre-defying works from around the world that raise questions about the relationship between how we see, how we read, and how we write in "the age of the calligram." In a rewrite of René Magritte's "Les mots et les images," Verónica Gerber Bicecci (translated by Christina MacSweeney) considers "images that think" and the internet. Marie NDiaye's "Step of a Feral Cat," translated by Victoria Baena, follows an academic, inspired by a portrait of an entertainer, as she walks the slippery space between literary ambition and exploitation. Monika Sznajderman (translated by Scotia Gilroy) assembles a fractured family history through photographs of a time she can never possibly know: "the pre-Holocaust world." Focusing on those whose stories have yet to be told-the black Cuban singer Maria Martinez, a Polish family murdered in World War II, workers at a noodle shop in Busan, and the tallest man in recorded history-Visible asks us to interrogate the thin traces of shifting meaning we find in and between words and images, and how we can change that meaning for the future.