Jennifer Bornstein

by Ann Goldstein, Jennifer Bornstein (Artist)

The copperplate etchings that fill this small monograph by the Los Angeles based artist Jennifer Bornstein read deceptively simply--they echo sketches on looseleaf. "Marvin with His Skateboard" shows its title subject, defiant, in a "Smiths" T-shirt with its lettering crossed out and "Ramones" written in. Other young models do homework, play guitar, and model even wittier T-shirts. But it's not as direct as all A few pages on, the slackers are interleaved with "Margaret Mead in Authentic Samoan Dress," and then later "Buster Keaton on Crutches." Bornstein was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1970. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Blum & Poe, Santa Monica; and Leo Koenig, Inc., New York.

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Ann Goldstein has been working as a translator from Italian for over fifteen years. Her first published translation appeared in The New Yorker in 1992: Aldo Buzzi's essay "Checkov in Sondrio." Just one year later, her translation of Aldo Buzzi's 1994 collection Journey to the Land of Flies and Other Travels received the PEN Renato Poggioli Prize. She has also translated works by Roberto Calasso, Serena Vitale, Alessandro Baricco, and Pope John Paul II. In 2007 alone, she translated Alessandro Piperno's The Worst Intentions (Europa Ed.), and Antonio Monda's Do You Believe? (Vintage); and she edited and wrote an introduction for A Tranquil Star (Norton), a collection of seventeen stories by Primo Levi--nine of which she translated--that had never appeared in English before. During her Guggenheim term, she will be working on a translation of the complete works of Primo Levi.

Ms. Goldstein earned a B.A. in literature from Bennington College in 1971, and then studied comparative philology at University College, London, before joining the staff of The New Yorker as a proofreader and copyeditor in 1974. She was promoted to editor and head of the copy department in 1987, positions she has held ever since. In that capacity, she has worked with John Updike, Roger Angell, Janet Malcolm, Adam Gopnik, and Simon Schama, among other noted writers. In addition to her Guggenheim Fellowship, she has been a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy twice (1995, 2006) and a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome twice (1993-94, 2002).