Esopus 4 included artists’ projects by Edward Ruscha, Ati Maier, and Shanan Kurtz; New York City chef Jody Williams’s essay on learning the art of “unplugged” cooking in a small town in Northern Italy; a piece on the evolution of that perennial summer anthem, the ice cream truck jingle, by musicologist Daniel Tannehill Neely; “For Emergency Use Only,” fiction from Ethan Rutherford (and second in our New Voices series of work from never-before-published authors); “The Greatest”; an 11-by-52-inch removable poster of Savannah barber Ulysses Davis’s extraordinary carved-wood busts of 40 U.S. presidents; 100 frames from Claire Denis’s 2002 film Vendredi Soir (with an introductory essay by cinematographer Ellen Kuras); a haunting Depression-era “found object” contributed by design historian Steven Heller; Alex Shear’s Object Lesson #4; and Angus Trumble’s “1685 in Retrospect.” 

Our fourth invitational CD, “Imaginary Friends,” closed the issue. For it, we invited Esopus subscribers to submit descriptions of their imaginary friends from childhood, and then asked 13 musicians to each choose one of the descriptions and use it as inspiration for a song.  The selected descriptions were published (and illustrated by Yvetta Federova) in the issue, and participating musicians included the B-52’s Kate Pierson and Pat Irwin, Grant Hart, Vetiver, Jon Langford, Avey Tare (Animal Collective), Solex, Kimya Dawson (The Moldy Peaches), Tim’m T. West, Ruth Gerson, J.F.K., The Caulfield Sisters, and Tara Jane O’Neil.