The Nature Book

Celebrating the release of Tom Comitta’s debut novel, The Nature Book, out on March 14 from Coffee House Press, Comitta and Kota Ezawa will present a multimedia performance, combining a live reading from the novel with a screening of Ezawa’s video City of Nature (2011), a rotoscoped animation collaging nature scenes from dozens of classic movies.

Originally inspired by Ezawa’s video and hailed in a starred Kirkus review as “a magnum opus,” The Nature Book similarly brings background content to the fore: the book collects nature descriptions from 300 novels and collages them into a single, seamless narrative. To write it, Comitta searched for patterns in how hundreds of authors behold, distort, and anthropomorphize nature and gathered them into a single book that lives somewhere between narrative and archive, lyrical excess, and data analysis. The novel follows hundreds of animals, plants, landforms, and weather patterns through the four seasons, oceans, islands, outer space, prairies, mountains, and deserts.

Tom Comitta is the author of The Nature Book (Coffee House Press). Their fiction and essays have appeared in WIRED, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, and BAX: Best American Experimental Writing 2020. They live in Brooklyn.

Kota Ezawa was born in Cologne, Germany, and lives in Oakland. Since the early nineties, he has made dozens of videos and animations that are shown in galleries and museums all over the world.

City of Nature

Ezawa’s City of Nature, which was commissioned by Madison Square Park (NYC), has been exhibited at the Headlands Center for the Arts and several museums across the U.S. and internationally. The video moves seamlessly from one subject to another: the river of Fitzcarraldo cuts to the river of Deliverance, which cuts to the river of Rambo, which flows to sea of Swept Away, which cuts to the sea of The Old Man and The Sea, and so on. Under the smooth and steady hand of Ezawa’s rotoscoping technique, these nature shots become abstracted, forming a meditation on the politics and poetics of framing and flattening the world into images.