north by north/west
(an attention to frequency)
(0 vote)Average rating:
| 0 | rating |  = We can do without |
| 0 | rating |  = Good book |
| 0 | rating |  = Excellent book |
| 0 | rating |  = Unique / a reference |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
north by north/west is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction assembled as several iterative sequences—a discontinuous itinerary—of exile. Harnessing both montage and collage to represent the incohesive experience of being between cultures, categories, and language, this book is a personal, critical, and autoethnographic exploration of diasporic identity formation and creative expression amidst the cultural and political impacts of Cold War colonialism and fragmentation. As the narrator begins work on a rough translation of the 1959 film North by Northwest, focal points surface through textual correspondences with distant coordinates, shifting between close readings of Whitney Houston’s early music videos, current events reportage, illness journals, eighties spy movies, the most recent solar eclipse, Alfred Hitchcock’s unproduced films, Cold War “stay-behind operations,” an ill-fated party at the Festival de Cannes, and family accounts of migration. These meticulously arranged narrative threads—harnessing elements of a novel alongside poetry, photographs, and field notes—attempt to discompose the epistemology of the West/Global North in order to conceptualize a genre of work by the children of exiles who have been called “the post-dictatorship generation.”
About the Author:
Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. The son of exiles from Cuba and Poland, Campanioni is a writer, multimedia artist, and instructor. He is a recipient of the International Latino Book Award for his debut novel, Going Down (Aignos, 2013); the Pushcart Prize for “Soft Opening” from his cross-genre collection Death of Art (C&R Press, 2016); and the 2013 Academy of American Poets College Prize.
Press Reviews:
"Chris Campanioni’s north by north/west is a conceptually roving surveillance of the self through the language of technology and mechanical reproduction. Evading classification at every turn, this deeply associative text is migratory and nationless, if genre can be understood as a state from which to emigrate. Campanioni’s writing—in the form of personal and intellectual contraband—deepens and dazzles in this remarkable performance."
—Richard Scott Larson, author of The Long Hallway
"This work is a tour-de-force of creative critical praxis, a work that establishes a new genre for exiles and immigrants. north by north/west is constantly positing what it might be and do by questioning labels, genres, and sources in ways that open up current academic discourse."
—Christine Hume, author of Everything I Never Wanted to Know
See the publisher website: West Virginia University Press
See North by Northwest (1959) on IMDB ...
> On a related topic:
La Mort aux trousses (1999)
by Ernest Lehman
(in French and English)
Subject: One Film > North by Northwest
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Taxidermy (2025)
Fashioning Corpses
Rear Window (2025)
The Making of a Hitchcock Masterpiece in the Hollywood Golden Age
Subject: One Film > Rear Window
Criss-Cross (2025)
The Making of Hitchcock's Dazzling, Subversive Masterpiece Strangers on a Train
Subject: One Film > Strangers on a Train
Classical Vertigo (2024)
Mythic Shapes and Contemporary Influences in Hitchcock's Film
Back
