Bayreuth is the oldest and most famous of the music festivals. Wagner aficionados know complete scores, are able to detect any mistakes pertaining to performances, reserve their seats five years in advance and are able to endure hard, wooden seats for six-hour performances. This book tells the tale of this venerable edifice, and thus the tale of Wagner and his heirs, who continue to run Bayreuth to this day. Ranges from its construction to Wagner’s specifications in the 1870s to the premiere of The Ring in 1876, through its debasement during the Third Reich—which prompted Thomas Mann to term it “Hitler’s court theater”—to the present. JAT

Publisher: Yale University
Paperback: 334 pages
Illustrated

Argues that the German concept of revolution always contained a racial and anti-Semitic core. Dissecting and analyzing each of Wagner’s operas, the author presents a comprehensive collection of the anti-Semitic elements found within Wagner’s writings and operas. Links Wagner’s strain of anti-Semitism and revolution to the flowering of German Nationalism in the Third Reich. JAT

Publisher: Yale University
Hardback: 246 pages

“During 1915, in the midst of the war years that preceded the Russian Revolution, Malevich devised and displayed a completely unprecedented geometric style of painting that he called Suprematism. By the 1920s, geometric art had become an international phenomenon. John Milner examines Malevich’s art of geometry by looking at its sources of inspiration, its methods and its meanings and, arguing persuasively that it is based on obsolete Russian units of measurement rather than the decimal system, has found a new interpretive tool with which to understand this pioneering art.”

Publisher: Yale University
Hardback: 256 pages
Illustrated

Important but overlooked female Dada collage artist. The beautiful reproductions of her prolific work are unfortunately weighed down by an academic, artspeak text. Don’t hold it against her.

Publisher: Yale University
Paperback: 260 pages
Illustrated

“In this book, the late Dr. Robert J. Stoller, who was one of the world’s leading experts on human sexual behavior, and I.S. Levine, a writer and director of X-rated videos, present interviews with the performers, writers, directors, producers and technicians involved in the production of an adult heterosexual X-rated video, Stairway to Paradise, and examine the backgrounds, motivation and psychological makeup of the participants. The book provides unique insights into the mechanics, aesthetics, and legal and moral implications of such films.”

Publisher: Yale University
Hardback: 246 pages

In his pioneering sexual ethnography, the late Robert Stoller was always careful to qualify his perceptions with the acknowledgment of his own limitations as a perceiver. Under the circumstances, this reviewer can do no less. I was a participant in Stoller’s investigation of the lives and souls of those who make porn and am quoted in this book at some length under the pseudonym “Ron.” I went on to co-author a second book on the subject with Stoller, Coming Attractions, which was published just after his tragic death in an automobile accident.
Like most of his later work, Porn consists mainly of interviews—interlaced with the author’s questions and comments of the performers, directors, writers and associated hangers-on who make their livings cranking out sexually explicit videos. While carefully avoiding political or moral judgments, Stoller nonetheless paints a picture from a definite perspective. By dedicating so many pages to voluble porn industry spokesperson and self-styled moral iconoclast Bill Margold, Stoller makes his case for porn as a refuge of talented misfits and sexual nonconformists. As the author puts it, “The motivating sentiment of porn is less ‘Let’s fuck’ than ‘Fuck you.’” Certainly, by encouraging his informants to share their often-troubled personal histories, elicited with a master psychoanalyst’s seeming effortlessness, he gives plenty of reasons why porn people might be angry and rebellious. Abandonment, abuse and molestation are recurring themes in the narratives of performers and off-camera industry personalities alike. Even interviewees like Nina Hartley, who profess to enjoy their work and disdain the sympathies of those who regard them as exploited, have their share of resentments to unload at anti-porn feminists and younger performers.
Though Stoller’s investigations don’t contribute additional ammo to porn-bashers, they give little comfort to those who prefer to imagine sex work as an endless toga party. Much of the evidence Stoller educes seems to corroborate his much-misunderstood and widely castigated theorem that “the erotic imagination is energized by the element of harm.” It is the angry edge of porn and the people who make it that gives it its vitality. Porn is a tribute to the memory of a scientist who shunned easy polemics in favor of uncomfortable paradoxes. IL

Publisher: Yale University
Hardback: 228 pages

Bayreuth is the oldest and most famous of the music festivals. Wagner aficionados know complete scores, are able to detect any mistakes pertaining to performances, reserve their seats five years in advance and are able to endure hard, wooden seats for six-hour performances. This book tells the tale of this venerable edifice, and thus the tale of Wagner and his heirs, who continue to run Bayreuth to this day. Ranges from its construction to Wagner’s specifications in the 1870s to the premiere of The Ring in 1876, through its debasement during the Third Reich—which prompted Thomas Mann to term it “Hitler’s court theater”—to the present.

Publisher: Yale University
Paperback: 334 pages
Illustrated