29 December 2011

Reading list: Fiction and poetry books with photographs

Terry Pitts, the author of the Vertigo blog on Max Sebald, collects fiction and poetry books embedded with photographs. He records a bibliography of these books in LibraryThing site (this link).

It's a surprising catalog for me since I see some of the books in stores but didn't realize they have photographs in them.


4 comments:

  1. But is this trend of attaching photographs to a text yet another example of dumbing-down to stark literalism and the inability of the reader to visualise from the text provided and/or author unable to accurately delineate and describe with words, or does it really add something new to literary works ?

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  2. In the books I've read (those by W. G. Sebald & Javier MarĂ­as) I think the photographs are an integral part of the storytelling. They add something to the text and sometimes raise the question of authenticity of fiction.

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  3. I think with Sebald, especially in Unrecounted the lithographs act as a dialogue with the poetry.

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  4. That's a wonderful way of putting it, Gary.

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