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My Heart & I Agree
In her third collection, Lucy Sante learns to dance by watching Soul Train, dissects the image of the cowboy, reads the telephone book, visits famous writers, tours dead factories, wonders whatever happened to the revolution, plunges into the vast sea of discarded snapshots, asks whether “surrealist photography” might be a redundancy, imagines Andy Warhol’s unmade movie, traces how Bob Dylan wrote his songs, observes the transience of all things with the Kinks.
While many of the pieces here were written on commission for magazines, publishers, and art catalogs, Sante’s writing always coheres around an enduring set of cities, social progress, photography, the semi-popular arts, and the detritus of daily life. Beginning with poems and concluding with fiction and memoir, the collection is divided into segments based on affinity. The first stretches back to the night of a century and a half ago; the second traces the long fall of utopian hopes over the last fifty years; the third observes great narrative travelers on their roads; the fourth is all image and flash; the fifth has a rhythm track running under it. There are hit singles here, as well as album cuts, non-LP B-sides, import-only EPs, and at least one bootleg.
While many of the pieces here were written on commission for magazines, publishers, and art catalogs, Sante’s writing always coheres around an enduring set of cities, social progress, photography, the semi-popular arts, and the detritus of daily life. Beginning with poems and concluding with fiction and memoir, the collection is divided into segments based on affinity. The first stretches back to the night of a century and a half ago; the second traces the long fall of utopian hopes over the last fifty years; the third observes great narrative travelers on their roads; the fourth is all image and flash; the fifth has a rhythm track running under it. There are hit singles here, as well as album cuts, non-LP B-sides, import-only EPs, and at least one bootleg.
288 pages, Paperback
Published April 28, 2026
About the author
Lucy Sante
104 books247 followersLucy Sante was born in Verviers Belgium and emigrated to the United States in the early 1960s. Since 1984, she has been a teacher and writer, and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Her publications include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, and The Factory of Facts and Folk Photography. She currently teaches creative writing and the history of photography at Bard College in New York State.
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August 10, 2026
While I first learned of Lucy Sante as a writer starting with Low Life, much of her life was spent as a professor at Bard. That makes sense. Her books are enlightening. The new collection of essays My Heart and I Agree is an education
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