Capital

Reviews / Votes

Capital scintillates . Goldsmith has produced a book that reminds us how close we can still get, via the labour of sound and thought and syntax, to the rhythms of a real city. -- Brian Dillon * Guardian * Goldsmith's material, unmistakably real, refuses to remain in a literary frame. * Bookslut * [Goldsmith] gives you the feel of what it is like to be living in New York now. -- Marjorie Perloff * New Yorker * A skyscraper of words-literary, journalistic, poetic, and prosaic-to celebrate and chronicle teeming Gotham. The title alludes to Walter Benjamin, and the conceit is one to do him proud . there is an embarrassment of riches here. * Kirkus Reviews * Reading Capital feels like walking the city, through time and space, jumping neighborhoods, going in and out of buildings, slipping through wormholes. It's a kind of exuberant eavesdropping on the muttering, shouting narrative of the twentieth-century city. -- Jeremiah Moss * Vanishing New York * Capital is . meant to be dipped into, to surprise, like a chance encounter on the street. The infinite richness of the city is an apt form for [Goldsmith's] ambition. Capital is a book to get lost in for hours, like some obscure corner of the Lower East Side; it helps us see the universe in a chunk of asphalt. -- Lauren Elkin * Financial Times * The spirit of a city constantly wrestled with and romanticized all out of proportion suffuses Capital. -- Andy Battaglia * Wall Street Journal * Capital could be seen as Goldsmith scaling up, a skewed take on the Great American Novel. -- Sukhdev Sandhu * Guardian * [Capital] is an extravagantly complex construction, opening with a cinematic sweep of the city as a dream-like impossibility, then diving down from sky to earth, languishing in the street before digging underground and emerging to the sky, the weather, the atmosphere and, finally, the apocalypse . [Be] astounded by this epic, ten-year effort to shape an impossible portrait of a miraculous city which-as EB White puts it-should never have existed. -- Gilda Williams * Art Monthly * As massive, intimidating and fascinating as its subject . The book is much like the city it describes: once you start exploring, you won't want to stop. -- Pat Padua * Spectrum Culture * A fascinating work. Kenneth Goldsmith has set before us a Petronian feast in which every page offers up a toothsome morsel to anyone with an interest in New York and its pre-eminent place in the cultural life of the twentieth century. * Times Literary Supplement *