Ocean State Libraries

For the first time in English, Severo Sarduy's most autobiographical work, centered on two transvestites who undergo oppositional sexual surgeries (one is castrated, the other is given a new member). This convention-defying, scatological, and very funny novel is a paradise of words, "paradisic by plenitude" (Roland Barthes).

The suspicious death of literary critic Roland Barthes in 1980 Paris reveals the secret history of the French intelligentsia, plunging a hapless police detective into the depths of literary theory as it was documented in a famed linguist's lost manuscript.

"With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of an entire century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of an ordinary family that somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. The family's pursuit of a quiet, civilized,...

Curated by artist Walead Beshty, the exhibition Picture Industry reflects upon transformations in the production and distribution of photographic images as realized through its varied constructions of the corporeal, from its origin as a scientific tool and a means of cultural investigation to its phenomenological effects on the viewer. The exhibition complexifies traditional accounts of the medium, drawing on its application within science and the...