Not only are computer-based works largely missing from histories of twentieth-century art, it is often hard to avoid the impression that blatant ignorance (as well as, sometimes, nonchalance) about the past reigns even among the artists, gallerists, and critics promoting such art today. One may always claim, of course, that digital art is still a newcomer yet to be embraced by the art world, but there is a considerable body of works, ideas, and theories that has been largely neglected by art curricula, critical discourses, and dominant institutions alike. As a consequence, contemporary digital

A week after moving to New York, I hired a car service to take me to the commercial loading docks at Kennedy Airport. I was trying to pick up several cartons of books I had shipped from Paris. After signing for the contents, I proceeded to the Customs Office, where an agent was waiting to stamp the import papers. I had forgotten my passport; all I had was an expired, out-of-state driver’s license. “Kafka, eh?” he said, looking closely at the license, then at me. There was a pause. “I guess you must find this all pretty Kafkaesque!” He chortled—actually chortled—before permitting me to collect

Country friends have flocked to London for a little shopping, and you’d like to offer them luncheon. Or perhaps your cook’s mother has developed one of those sudden and disastrous illnesses endemic among cooks’ mothers during the holidays. Or maybe you’d like to prepare “a restrained and anglicized Bouillabaisse” for guests who refrain from meat. What do you do?

In the early 1920s, you could open The Times and find advice, complete with recipes, in a series of graceful, anonymous “Kitchen Essays,” the work of one Agnes Jekyll. This Jekyll was neither the famous garden designer (that was her

Tennis may be a joy to play and a pleasure to watch, but it’s not a sport that lends itself easily to literary endeavor. The average tennis match has a few hundred largely indistinguishable points, and the scoring system reads like something out of a high school calculus book. An entire library devoted to the sport might be reduced a handful of volumes and one classic work of nonfiction, John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, published forty years ago.

That book is constructed around a single match, a 1968 US Open semifinal between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. In McPhee’s hands, the otherwise

As a retrospective of the work of Wassily Kandinsky makes its way from Munich to Paris to New York over the course of this year—roughly tracing the artist’s own westward path during his lifetime—fortunate viewers will experience one of the greatest concentrations of his art. Much as previous shows have presented piecemeal considerations of his body of work, so have publications tended toward examinations limited to certain media or particular periods. But to see the evolution of his painting is to witness the birth of a modernist master: early figurative canvases mixing French Impressionism

What secret was trying to pierce through this hallucinatory and hermetic language?” asks poet Ghérasim Luca in his long-lost classic The Passive Vampire. The book, first published in French in 1945 by Les Éditions de l’Oubli in Bucharest, is chimerical and delirious yet remarkably concrete in its lewdness. Blending personal confession, prose poetry, meditation, verbal games, catalogues, and hymns to desire, this hybrid book is a Surrealist carnival that taps satanic and psychic rituals. Bawdy and bizarre, it also evokes the era’s dark history, including anti-Semitic pogroms. Writing of the