PEP TALK 7: THE RHONDA LIEBERMAN READER

PEP TALK 7: THE RHONDA LIEBERMAN READER

$40.00

The Rhonda Lieberman Reader is the first collection of the author's writing--and a hefty one at that! It brings together over 82 essays, reviews, columns, and talks published or delivered between 1988 and 2016, including nearly all of her Glamour Wounds and Diaries for Artforum. Also collected are syllabi and course materials from Lieberman's time teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the '90s and new contributions including an interview, an autobiographical text, and reflections by a former student. There are illustrations of art works by Lieberman and photographs of the author and her cohort. Additional contributors include Charlie Fox, Bruce Hainley, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, and Todd Meyers. 530+ pages, illustrated.

***

In the glory days, Rhonda Lieberman’s “Glamour Wounds” kept me alive.  And now, here in my happy hand is The Rhonda Lieberman Reader, a cordial, a nightcap, a pick-me-up, a doctorate, a masterpiece, an arcade, a laugh track, a symposium, a giddy acropolis.  Vocally, she can do no wrong.  She scissors capital into pieces, and makes art of the remnants, in stinging sentences that provide their own Mercurochrome.  Be mirthful, Lieberman preaches.  Prankster-intellect, she dispenses, heals, disrupts.  She is one of the very best writers on art I have ever read, and I’m including Baudelaire. —Wayne Koestenbaum

*

Rhonda Lieberman is an unmatchable wit, a superb essayist, a prose stylist of rare felicity and power.  She’s one of the shrewdest, funniest diagnoticians of contemporary America writing today.  I’m always eager to read anything she writes, on any subject—this collection is a banquet of insight, high humor, and fabulous intelligence.  She proves that you can keep your heart in the right place without suffering fools, which is really quite unusually difficult in the strange times we live in. —Gary Indiana

*

You can't begin any essay in The Rhonda Lieberman Reader (I counted 96) without immediately getting the sense of a brilliantly clever writer who also happens to be extremely vulnerable...serious and self effacing, hitting the nail on the head while banging it in from the side of the block and most often hilariously funny. Rhonda Lieberman does not miss a trick and never ceases to brilliantly (did I use the word brilliant twice?) analyze the more complex not to mention the most vacuous issues of our time... I have to stop myself from reading this tome, and it is a tome, all in one gulp!   —Joan Snyder

*

What the world needs now is Rhonda Lieberman’s loving unself-conscious self-consciousness, an ethnic awareness that surpasses the identity anxieties of todays over-sensitive tribes with healing laughter. —David V. Forrest. M.D.

*

…long-awaited binge-read (from a) virtuoso wordsmith

…the most enjoyable writer in the entire art cosmos for decades, bar none. An Artforum regular and popular columnist (‘Glamour Wounds’, 1992–95; ‘Diaries’, 2005–2016), she stood out by a mile for her devastating humour, impeccable sentence structures and dizzying, out-of-the-blue references.

…But she’s more than just the art world’s Joan Rivers…With Lieberman you come for the wisecracks but stay for the content, especially her well-worded projectiles aimed at institutionalized hypocrisy.

—Gilda Williams, Frieze

*

Falling somewhere between the new journalism and critical theory, Rhonda Lieberman wraps complex cultural critique in the readable guise of cultural criticism. Fusing the frivolous with the forbidding, she makes difficult ideas easy and easy ideas difficult. The perpetual outsider brought inside, Lieberman renders the knowable strange and the unknowable familiar. Simply put, The Rhonda Lieberman Reader is the most pleasurably demanding, demandingly pleasurable book you’ll read. —Kenneth Goldsmith

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