title stringlengths 3 113 | authors listlengths 1 4 | strapline stringlengths 27 255 | summary stringlengths 119 2.33k | synopsis stringlengths 119 2.33k | review_count int64 0 47 | reviews listlengths 0 47 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Designs on Democracy | [
"Stuart MacDonald"
] | Disasters, pandemics, the War on Terrorism? Whatever your memories of the Noughties, this was also a Scottish decade. Design, politics and identity came together. | Whilst there are some studies of architecture in Scotland post-devolution, writings on design are largely non-existent. Designs on Democracy seeks to fill that gap and ranges over the debates concerning architecture, urbanism, design and the Creative and Cultural Industries and the policies, people and places that stim... | Whilst there are some studies of architecture in Scotland post-devolution, writings on design are largely non-existent. Designs on Democracy seeks to fill that gap and ranges over the debates concerning architecture, urbanism, design and the Creative and Cultural Industries and the policies, people and places that stim... | 0 | [] |
Did You Kill Anyone? | [
"SCOTT BEAUCHAMP"
] | Did You Kill Anyone? asks the question that is rarely discussed publicly: ‘why do soldiers miss war?’. | Most American soldiers in Iraq had a deep, thick plastic box called a “guerrilla box” which usually sat at the end of their cot. Soldiers would keep all kinds of things in their box. Weapon cleaning kits. Extra equipment. Blankets and pillows from home. Footballs. Protein powder. Mine was full of books.
These are not ... | Most American soldiers in Iraq had a deep, thick plastic box called a “guerrilla box” which usually sat at the end of their cot. Soldiers would keep all kinds of things in their box. Weapon cleaning kits. Extra equipment. Blankets and pillows from home. Footballs. Protein powder. Mine was full of books.
These are not ... | 0 | [] |
Diet of Austerity, A | [
"Elaine Graham-Leigh"
] | How and why the working class are being blamed for climate change, and what we can do about it. | Received wisdom is increasingly that we all have to eat less to save the planet, but received wisdom is wrong. A Diet of Austerity argues that, just as the poor are blamed for the economic crisis, Malthusian conceptions about food and ecology are being used to hold the working class responsible for climate change and g... | Received wisdom is increasingly that we all have to eat less to save the planet, but received wisdom is wrong. A Diet of Austerity argues that, just as the poor are blamed for the economic crisis, Malthusian conceptions about food and ecology are being used to hold the working class responsible for climate change and g... | 4 | [
"Elaine has a produced a must-read book for all of us concerned with combatting climate change. We can't diet our way to a better world but we can and must change the system to sustain the future. This book is well written, fascinating, controversial and essential. ~ Derek Wall, Former Green Party of England and Wa... |
Digesting Recipes | [
"Susannah Worth"
] | Chapters become courses in this curious feast, exploring the form of the recipe from post-war to today. | Digesting Recipes: The Art of Culinary Notation scrutinises the form of the recipe, using it as a means to explore a multitude of subjects in post-war Western art and culture, including industrial mass-production, consumerism, hidden labour, and art engaged with the everyday.
Each chapter is presented as a dish in a n... | Digesting Recipes: The Art of Culinary Notation scrutinises the form of the recipe, using it as a means to explore a multitude of subjects in post-war Western art and culture, including industrial mass-production, consumerism, hidden labour, and art engaged with the everyday.
Each chapter is presented as a dish in a n... | 6 | [
"Digesting Recipes switches beautifully between questions of genre, language, art and meaning. Susannah Worth thinks carefully and fruitfully about feminist arguments relating to art history and domesticity in particular, with sensitivity and great insight. Her sparkling prose is smooth and engaging, with fresh rea... |
Disconsolate Dreamers | [
"Rachid M'Rabty"
] | It's time for the Left to consider the pessimist a helpful guide out of the somnolence of capitalist realism. | Our world is increasingly sceptical of happy endings. Notions of resistance or alternatives - of hope - seem evermore ill-fated as we resign to a slow and painful descent further into capitalism. However, from a critical position, one that does not shy away from the scale of the horror facing us, we can begin to rethin... | Our world is increasingly sceptical of happy endings. Notions of resistance or alternatives - of hope - seem evermore ill-fated as we resign to a slow and painful descent further into capitalism. However, from a critical position, one that does not shy away from the scale of the horror facing us, we can begin to rethin... | 1 | [
"Pessimism all along the line - that was the cry of Walter Benjamin, and it is one Rachid M'Rabty takes up in this provocative, stylish theoretical intervention. Expertly drawing on a range of cultural and theoretical touchstones, this short book rejects both the vapid optimism of neoliberalism and the easy avenues... |
Disordered Minds | [
"Ian Hughes"
] | A compelling account of the dangers posed by narcissistic leaders, and why their rise to power has become the hallmark of our age. | Disordered Minds offers a compelling and timely account of the dangers posed by narcissistic leaders, and provides a stark warning that the conditions in which this psychopathy flourishes - extremes of social inequality and a culture of hyper-individualism - are the hallmarks of our present age.
'An excellent account ... | Disordered Minds offers a compelling and timely account of the dangers posed by narcissistic leaders, and provides a stark warning that the conditions in which this psychopathy flourishes - extremes of social inequality and a culture of hyper-individualism - are the hallmarks of our present age.
'An excellent account ... | 8 | [
"Ian Hughes adds new scientific insight to one of the deepest conundrums of politics: that positions of power appeal to the narcissistic, paranoid psychopaths among us, with catastrophic results for humanity. His argument that human institutions, particularly liberal democracy, are needed to constrain the worst of ... |
Dispirited | [
"David Webster"
] | What a post-spiritual world view could look like | This book by David Webster is a counter-blast against the culturally accepted norm that spirituality is a vital and important factor in human life. Rejecting the idea of human wellbeing as predicated on the spiritual, the book seeks to identify the toxic impact of spiritual discourses on our lives. Spirituality makes u... | This book by David Webster is a counter-blast against the culturally accepted norm that spirituality is a vital and important factor in human life. Rejecting the idea of human wellbeing as predicated on the spiritual, the book seeks to identify the toxic impact of spiritual discourses on our lives. Spirituality makes u... | 3 | [
"Should be placed gently but firmly in the hands of any budding convert who thinks that the vacuous claims of a new spirituality are any better than the lies, evasions and hypocrisies of orthodox religion\n\n~ Professor Christopher Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy, Cardiff University",
"Refu... |
Dog Days | [
"Linda Coggin"
] | Peculiar, unique, unusual, elements of Cummings, Stevie Smith and Larkin cohere then fall away, in a collection of darkly clear, or clearly dark poems. | These poems act like short, sharp surprises. They can be oblique and then unravel with raw clarity, a strong and emotional openness pervading their deceptively simple structures. Coggin's strange and singular voice is recognisably English and even colloquial, but with a sophistication and love of imagery, even mystery.... | These poems act like short, sharp surprises. They can be oblique and then unravel with raw clarity, a strong and emotional openness pervading their deceptively simple structures. Coggin's strange and singular voice is recognisably English and even colloquial, but with a sophistication and love of imagery, even mystery.... | 2 | [
"Coggin’s poetry is both incisive and quirkily humourous. Well worth investigating.\n\n~ Emmet O'Cuana, http://abookadaytillicanstay.wordpress.com",
"Linda Coggin's poems are liminal, crossing and recrossing thresholds between real, surreal, and mythic, life and death, the transgressive and the responsible. There... |
Don't Lose Track Vol. 1: 40 Selected Articles, Essays and Q&As | [
"Jordannah Elizabeth"
] | Don't lose track, she moves fast. | Don't Lose Track is a collection from the widely published arts and culture journalist, Jordannah Elizabeth. The book includes reviews, essays and interviews hand selected by Jordannah from a catalog of over 200 articles. | Don't Lose Track is a collection from the widely published arts and culture journalist, Jordannah Elizabeth. The book includes reviews, essays and interviews hand selected by Jordannah from a catalog of over 200 articles. | 4 | [
"http://www.infectiousmagazine.com/industry-interview-jordannah-elizabeth-the-deli-sf-weekly-mtv-networks/ ~ Angela Mastrogiacomo , Infectious Magazine",
"This review inspired me to check out the album. I found it strange but beautiful, just as the author depicted. Excellent article! - Susan Harvey\n\nhttp://amst... |
Drone and Apocalypse | [
"Joanna Demers"
] | An imagined retrospective of apocalyptic art | Drone and Apocalypse is an exhibit catalog for a retrospective of twenty-first-century art. Its narrator, Cynthia Wey, is a failed artist convinced that apocalypse is imminent. She writes critical essays delineating apocalyptic tendencies in drone music and contemporary art. Interspersed amid these essays are “speculat... | Drone and Apocalypse is an exhibit catalog for a retrospective of twenty-first-century art. Its narrator, Cynthia Wey, is a failed artist convinced that apocalypse is imminent. She writes critical essays delineating apocalyptic tendencies in drone music and contemporary art. Interspersed amid these essays are “speculat... | 8 | [
"Demers’ Drone and Apocalypse is a sprawling and inventive meditation on the nature of apocalypse in contemporary art and music. It takes the form of an ‘exhibit catalogue’ pertaining to an exhibition staged in 2213 on the essays and artistic ideas of Cynthia Wey. The book variously focuses on drone music, film, ph... |
Dynamo Island | [
"David Scott"
] | At the crossroads of fiction and social theory, the book confronts fundamental issues facing Western civilization in the 21st century. | Dynamo Island is an account of a contemporary ideal world set in an Ireland-sized island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. It expresses the possibility of a modern society living in harmonious ecological balance with its environment. The ethos of the place is built around the notion of the human being as a dynamo ma... | Dynamo Island is an account of a contemporary ideal world set in an Ireland-sized island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. It expresses the possibility of a modern society living in harmonious ecological balance with its environment. The ethos of the place is built around the notion of the human being as a dynamo ma... | 1 | [
"This is a significant and timely addition to the genre of Utopian fiction, a reminder that the novel is only one way to envision other places. 'Dynamo Island' employs the rhetoric, structure and scruple of the scholarly monograph alongside the plasticity of mind common to the writing of fiction and the creation of... |
Eastern Spring | [
"Neil Kulkarni"
] | Haunting, ferociously powerful look at life as a 2nd-generation immigrant in Coventry, England through the music of an ancient past. | From the grey streets of Coventry, to the green jungles of India, Neil Kulkarni chases the sounds of his past and ancient songs from the sub-continent to try and find himself a new way of listening to some of the oldest music on earth. Part touching memoir, part ferocious polemic, An Eastern Spring confronts race and t... | From the grey streets of Coventry, to the green jungles of India, Neil Kulkarni chases the sounds of his past and ancient songs from the sub-continent to try and find himself a new way of listening to some of the oldest music on earth. Part touching memoir, part ferocious polemic, An Eastern Spring confronts race and t... | 0 | [] |
Eddie the Kid | [
"Leo Zeilig"
] | Eddie Bereskin wants to change the world and stop the war, instead his life unravels after being arrested on a protest. | Eddie Bereskin wants to change the world and stop the war, instead his life unravels after he is arrested on a Halloween protest in 2002. An incredible story about loss and hope set in London, Eddie the Kid takes us to the anti-war movement and two generations of activists, where, amid rioting and arrests, the destinie... | Eddie Bereskin wants to change the world and stop the war, instead his life unravels after he is arrested on a Halloween protest in 2002. An incredible story about loss and hope set in London, Eddie the Kid takes us to the anti-war movement and two generations of activists, where, amid rioting and arrests, the destinie... | 6 | [
"Academic and writer Leo Zeilig begins his first novel at the gates of Downing Street. It's late 2002, and activist Eddie Bereskin is borne on shoulders, megaphone in hand, calling Tony Blair a murderer and ordering the crowd to break the police barricade. He is arrested and charged, and as the movements for and ag... |
Education Revolution | [
"Sam Shain"
] | If the revolution will not be televised, bring it to the classroom | A plea for public education nationwide to teach media literacy, and specifically from the left of the political spectrum.
Within, the author discusses his journalism curriculum, which includes lessons in media literacy, critical thinking, bias, the political spectrum, economics, current events, and more. Additionally,... | A plea for public education nationwide to teach media literacy, and specifically from the left of the political spectrum.
Within, the author discusses his journalism curriculum, which includes lessons in media literacy, critical thinking, bias, the political spectrum, economics, current events, and more. Additionally,... | 2 | [
"We live in a deeply unjust and unequal society. High school students are bombarded with propaganda to justify the status quo, from the reassuring fairy tales about capitalism in their economics classes to textbooks in their U.S. History classes that are splattered with more pictures of eagles and slowly waving fla... |
Embrace of Capital, The | [
"Don Milligan"
] | Capitalism has swallowed us whole. It's a love hate relationship. | The "spectre of communism" which Karl Marx confidently evoked in 1848 is now nothing more than a ghostly and ghastly nightmare, without form or substance. This is because working people have developed a love-hate relationship with capitalism. They hate insecurity, inequality, and greed, and love civic and political fre... | The "spectre of communism" which Karl Marx confidently evoked in 1848 is now nothing more than a ghostly and ghastly nightmare, without form or substance. This is because working people have developed a love-hate relationship with capitalism. They hate insecurity, inequality, and greed, and love civic and political fre... | 2 | [
"Genuinely thought provoking and provocative. A much-needed takedown of what Orwell once called the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of the left, and why they are so distant and alienated from the working class they claim to fight for. ~ Ralph Leonard",
"So refreshing, and joyously subversive, to read a communist's an... |
Emerald City | [
"Joseph Grosso"
] | New York's transformation back into a Gilded city and what to do about it. | Joseph Grosso traces the history of New York's transformation back into a gilded city, and asks what can be done about it. He examines New York's deindustrialization and the elite planning and design that followed; New York's financial crisis of the mid-1970s and the policy decisions made in its wake; New York's housin... | Joseph Grosso traces the history of New York's transformation back into a gilded city, and asks what can be done about it. He examines New York's deindustrialization and the elite planning and design that followed; New York's financial crisis of the mid-1970s and the policy decisions made in its wake; New York's housin... | 0 | [] |
En Abime: Listening, Reading, Writing | [
"Daniela Cascella"
] | An archival fiction of listening, where landscape is reinvented and abstracted across autobiographical narratives of sounds, books, pictures and songs. | En Abime explores listening and reading as creative and critical activities driven by memory and return, reshaped into the present. It introduces an idea of aural landscape as a historically defined cultural experience, and contributes with previously unexplored references to the emerging area of listening as artistic ... | En Abime explores listening and reading as creative and critical activities driven by memory and return, reshaped into the present. It introduces an idea of aural landscape as a historically defined cultural experience, and contributes with previously unexplored references to the emerging area of listening as artistic ... | 14 | [
"Mise en abyme means placed into the abyss. In art theory, it refers to an image containing a smaller copy of itself; in postmodern literary theory it becomes a tool for analysing complicated texts that contain a number of subtexts. To be thrown into the abyss could also be a description of what happens when we lis... |
End of Capitalism, The: The Thought of Henryk Grossman | [
"Ted Reese"
] | With capitalism entering its worst ever and possibly final crisis, Henryk Grossman, the neglected 20th century Marxist who explained the inevitability of such a 'final breakdown' most convincingly, is more relevant than ever – and must be rehabilitated. | Henryk Grossman is a name most socialists or students of political and social theory - let alone the mass of working people around the world - have probably never heard of. Yet Grossman, a Polish Jew born in 1881, deserves recognition as the most sophisticated defender of Karl Marx's theory of capitalism's inevitable c... | Henryk Grossman is a name most socialists or students of political and social theory - let alone the mass of working people around the world - have probably never heard of. Yet Grossman, a Polish Jew born in 1881, deserves recognition as the most sophisticated defender of Karl Marx's theory of capitalism's inevitable c... | 5 | [
"\"Revealing the richness of the Marxist tradition, Reese provides an illuminating introduction into the life and thought of Henryk Grossman, connecting his many insights on the dynamics of capitalism, its contradictions, and its tendency to produce economic crises to present-day developments.\"\n\n-- Asatar Bair, ... |
End of Oulipo?, The | [
"Lauren Elkin",
"Veronica Esposito"
] | As this experiment in literary patterns enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are wondering: where can it go from here? | As this experiment in literary patterns enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are wondering: where can it go from here?
The Oulipo, founded in 1960s, is a group of writers and mathematicians which seeks to create literature using constrained experimental writing techniques such as palindromes, lipogra... | As this experiment in literary patterns enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are wondering: where can it go from here?
The Oulipo, founded in 1960s, is a group of writers and mathematicians which seeks to create literature using constrained experimental writing techniques such as palindromes, lipogra... | 2 | [
"The End of Oulipo? is effective, informative, highly entertaining, and essential reading.\n\nhttp://www.winnipegreview.com/\n\n~ Jeff Bursey, The Winnipeg Review",
"...effective, informative, highly entertaining, and essential reading. ~ Jeff Bursey, The Winnipeg Review"
] |
End of the End of History, The | [
"Alex Hochuli",
"George Hoare",
"Philip Cunliffe"
] | The 'End of History' is over. How did it end - and comes next? | The “End of History” is over. The idea that Western liberal democracy was the “final form of human government” has been exposed as bluster: the old order is crumbling before our eyes. Angry anti-politics have arisen to threaten political establishments across the world. Elites have fallen into hysteria, blaming voters,... | The “End of History” is over. The idea that Western liberal democracy was the “final form of human government” has been exposed as bluster: the old order is crumbling before our eyes. Angry anti-politics have arisen to threaten political establishments across the world. Elites have fallen into hysteria, blaming voters,... | 19 | [
"Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Politics in the 21st Century seems to make no sense and this excellent read at times is a welcome antidote to the echo chamber that is presented by the (anti)social media companies. The best thing about this book is that those from the left and right will find things to agree with and als... |
End of the Megamachine, The | [
"Fabian Scheidler"
] | A uniquely comprehensive page-turner depicting the roots of the current civilizational crisis. | The End of the Megamachine provides a uniquely comprehensive picture of the roots of the destructive forces that are threatening the future of humankind today. Spanning 5000 years of history, the book shows how the three tyrannies of militarized states, capital accumulation and ideological power have been steering both... | The End of the Megamachine provides a uniquely comprehensive picture of the roots of the destructive forces that are threatening the future of humankind today. Spanning 5000 years of history, the book shows how the three tyrannies of militarized states, capital accumulation and ideological power have been steering both... | 29 | [
"This is a brilliant read but one that really takes its toll — not a light weekend read. I can see it being used in many college classes and will recommend it for advanced homeschool high school credit in history, civics and social studies. It definitely gives the reader a deep dive into how we got here. ~ Alicia B... |
Enjoying It | [
"Alfie Bown"
] | This book is a study of enjoyment and of the enjoyment of studying. It asks what enjoyment says about us and what we say about enjoyment, and why. | Using a range of ‘case studies’ from Critical Theory to Candy Crush, ‘Gangnam Style’ to Game of Thrones and Football Manager to Hieronymus Bosch, this book argues that we need to rethink our enjoyment.
Inspired by psychoanalysis, the book offers a new way of thinking about how we talk about what we enjoy and how we en... | Using a range of ‘case studies’ from Critical Theory to Candy Crush, ‘Gangnam Style’ to Game of Thrones and Football Manager to Hieronymus Bosch, this book argues that we need to rethink our enjoyment.
Inspired by psychoanalysis, the book offers a new way of thinking about how we talk about what we enjoy and how we en... | 5 | [
"A year or so ago, in an old university teaching job, one of my students submitted a thought-provoking essay which used Freud’s ideas about the relationship between the id, the ego and the superego to discuss the Grand Theft Auto games. The piece argued that, while we have traditionally conceived of the superego –i... |
Enlightenment Interrupted | [
"Michael Steinberg"
] | Modernity isn't the realization of the Enlightenment but the forgetting of its culmination and self-critique, German idealism. | The modern world claims to inherit the values of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment Interrupted suggests a different genealogy. Instead of carrying on the Enlightenment it grew out of its suppression and forgetting, a founding act of bad faith and willed blindness that has haunted our world from its birth.
In this groun... | The modern world claims to inherit the values of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment Interrupted suggests a different genealogy. Instead of carrying on the Enlightenment it grew out of its suppression and forgetting, a founding act of bad faith and willed blindness that has haunted our world from its birth.
In this groun... | 3 | [
"Steinberg (independent scholar) here gives a detailed account of why the expectations of the Enlightenment were not fulfilled, indeed, why they could not be fulfilled. For Steinberg, the Enlightenment tradition is broadly conceived to include \"the philosophers and poets of the German idealist tradition, figures t... |
Ethical Portraits | [
"Hatty Nestor"
] | Ethical Portraits investigates the representation of the incarcerated in the U.S. criminal justice system. Through interviews, creative non-fiction, and cultural theory, Hatty Nestor deconstructs a range of different prison portraiture. | Prisons systematically dehumanise the imprisoned. Visualised through mugshots and surveillance recordings, the incarcerated lose control of their own image and identity. The criminal justice system in the United States does not only carry out so-called justice in ways that compound inequality, it also minimises the pos... | Prisons systematically dehumanise the imprisoned. Visualised through mugshots and surveillance recordings, the incarcerated lose control of their own image and identity. The criminal justice system in the United States does not only carry out so-called justice in ways that compound inequality, it also minimises the pos... | 5 | [
"As a result of the privatization of prisons, greater powers of arrest for minor criminal offences, and systemic racism, the US prison population has soared from 200,000 in 1970 to nearly two million today. Hatty Nestor’s debut book, Ethical Portraits (2021), adds to the conceptual framework of debate about the pri... |
European Union and the End of Politics, The | [
"James Heartfield"
] | Despite its crises the European Union keeps on getting stronger – its power comes from the decline of participation in national politics. | Europe is in crisis, but the European Union just gets stronger. Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland have all been told that they must submit their budgets to EU-appointed bureaucrats. The 'soft coup' that put EU officials in charge of Greece and Italy shows that the Union is opposed to democracy. Instead of weakening t... | Europe is in crisis, but the European Union just gets stronger. Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland have all been told that they must submit their budgets to EU-appointed bureaucrats. The 'soft coup' that put EU officials in charge of Greece and Italy shows that the Union is opposed to democracy. Instead of weakening t... | 4 | [
"Synopsis: Even though Europe is in a state of social, economic, and political crisis, the European Union just gets stronger. Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland have all been told that they must submit their budgets to EU-appointed bureaucrats. The 'soft coup' that put EU officials in charge of Greece and Italy sh... |
Event Horizon | [
"Bonni Rambatan",
"Jacob Johanssen"
] | When our desires become the product of tech giants, what ways are there left for us to dream? | In an age where Silicon Valley dictates what it means to innovate a painless future, knowledge and enjoyment are fertile breeding grounds of political contestation. But it’s not exactly democracy. We are controlled through platforms that turn us into data for the profit of billionaires. Control has become so playful th... | In an age where Silicon Valley dictates what it means to innovate a painless future, knowledge and enjoyment are fertile breeding grounds of political contestation. But it’s not exactly democracy. We are controlled through platforms that turn us into data for the profit of billionaires. Control has become so playful th... | 6 | [
"\"The book’s title draws on an astrophysics concept (said horizon is the edge of a black hole), with the “black hole” variously capitalism or digital culture in general, but also on Badiou’s notion of the event as a rupture in political, scientific, or artistic domains. In six tightly argued chapters, they show, i... |
Expanding World, The | [
"Michael Cronin"
] | The world gets bigger not smaller all the time and this is very good news for humanity. | Are we really living in a shrinking world? Is it true that diversity is on the decline everywhere? Are we condemned to live on a planet without difference or hope? The Expanding World challenges the basic notion of a shrinking world in current debates around globalization and argues that it informs ways of thinking and... | Are we really living in a shrinking world? Is it true that diversity is on the decline everywhere? Are we condemned to live on a planet without difference or hope? The Expanding World challenges the basic notion of a shrinking world in current debates around globalization and argues that it informs ways of thinking and... | 0 | [] |
Exposing Phallacy | [
"Kate Gould"
] | A sexual climate consumed by display ought to be ideal for flashers, yet their actions are taboo and illegal. | While others flirt with the accoutrements of romance and sexiness for lovers, flashers confront the spectator with sex organs. They ask no consent, baring the genitals of which they are so proud, convinced their spectators will desire them. But they rarely do. Instead, they are more likely to object to the imposition o... | While others flirt with the accoutrements of romance and sexiness for lovers, flashers confront the spectator with sex organs. They ask no consent, baring the genitals of which they are so proud, convinced their spectators will desire them. But they rarely do. Instead, they are more likely to object to the imposition o... | 9 | [
"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Flasher\n\nMost of us might think that a book about flashing would have little to say about our day-to-day existence. Surprisingly, Kate Gould’s Exposing Phallacy shows how we are all, however involuntarily, inevitably linked to exhibitionism. In her latest book, Gould brings to the fore t... |
F.M.R.L. | [
"Daniela Cascella"
] | Ephemeral, F.M.R.L: A collection of fragments and essays recording accidents of hearing and detours of thought in response to the peripheral nature of listening and reading. | Listening into writing, reading into writing take shape in F.M.R.L. through a collection of short texts, fragments and ‘deranged essays’, with attention to pacing and linguistic derives. An archive of books, notebooks, events and records prompts the texts in these pages, responding to encounters with Michel Leiris’s au... | Listening into writing, reading into writing take shape in F.M.R.L. through a collection of short texts, fragments and ‘deranged essays’, with attention to pacing and linguistic derives. An archive of books, notebooks, events and records prompts the texts in these pages, responding to encounters with Michel Leiris’s au... | 10 | [
"Writing about sound is no easy matter, particularly in a second language. Daniela Cascella’s accomplishment in her second book, F. M. R. L.: Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound (Zero Books), is to take the receptive reader far beyond sound, music and listening into the fragmented recesses o... |
Failure of Vision, A | [
"Doug Greene"
] | An in-depth and critical look at the life and ideas of Michael Harrington, one of America's most important democratic socialists. | Doug Greene takes an in-depth and critical look at the life and ideas of Michael Harrington, one of America's most important democratic socialists.
A Failure of Vision discusses one of the most important champions for democratic socialism in the United States. Michael Harrington (1928–1989) is widely recognized for wr... | Doug Greene takes an in-depth and critical look at the life and ideas of Michael Harrington, one of America's most important democratic socialists.
A Failure of Vision discusses one of the most important champions for democratic socialism in the United States. Michael Harrington (1928–1989) is widely recognized for wr... | 8 | [
"\"I propose that revolutionary socialists use Greene’s book in an educational campaign aimed at the young workers and students who are attracted to the current DSA. It not only exposes the fatal flaws of DSA and its commitment to the Democratic Party, it also provides, in the Appendix, a very useful introduction t... |
Failure, A Writer's Life | [
"Joe Milutis"
] | Failure is a catalogue of literary monstrosities, a philosophy for the unreadable, and a map for new literary worlds. | Failure, A Writer’s Life is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds. | Failure, A Writer’s Life is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds. | 2 | [
"\"The unfinished, unreadable, unpublishable — the scribbled and illegible, the too slowly published, the countless unpublished, all that does not seem to count at all. . . . here lie all manner of ruins. From Marguerite Duras to Google Maps, Henri Bergson to H.P. Lovecraft, Orson Welles to Walter Benjamin to a hos... |
Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, The | [
"David J. Blacker"
] | Our education system is chained to the hold of a sinking capitalist ship. Is there any escape? | The current neoliberal mutation of capitalism has evolved beyond the days when the wholesale exploitation of labor underwrote the world system’s expansion. While “normal” business profits plummet and theft-by-finance rises, capitalism now shifts into a mode of elimination that targets most of us—along with our environm... | The current neoliberal mutation of capitalism has evolved beyond the days when the wholesale exploitation of labor underwrote the world system’s expansion. While “normal” business profits plummet and theft-by-finance rises, capitalism now shifts into a mode of elimination that targets most of us—along with our environm... | 15 | [
"A is for apocalypse\n\nDavid J. Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, Zero Books, Winchester and Washington DC, 2013. 319 pp., £15.99 pb., 978 1 78099\n\n578 6.\n\nAmidst the recent flood of lachrymose reports on the neoliberal assault upon education, this book stands out for its unflin... |
Famous for Fifteen People | [
"John William Daniel Robinson"
] | The life and songs of singer/songwriter Momus during his time at Creation records and beyond. | The life and songs of singer-songwriter Momus during his time at Creation records and beyond.
Momus - the stage name of musician Nicholas Currie - is one of the most prolific and talented indie songwriters of the last forty years. His work is controversial, influential and highly regarded. From aspiring indie pop star... | The life and songs of singer-songwriter Momus during his time at Creation records and beyond.
Momus - the stage name of musician Nicholas Currie - is one of the most prolific and talented indie songwriters of the last forty years. His work is controversial, influential and highly regarded. From aspiring indie pop star... | 7 | [
"Rating 5*. Vital! Truly superb writings on the early works of Momus. This is not only insightful and intelligent but it is also occasionally very funny too. Consider this line in the chapter relating to ‘the poison boyfriend’ and specifically the track ’closer to you’: “it’s Barry White, if Barry White had read a ... |
Farewell to Democracy? | [
"Jack Luzkow"
] | If you think you are living in an era of post-truth, you likely are. Farewell to Democracy? shows us what happens when we speak truth to power. It details the strength of mass protest. It pulls back the veil on post-truth. | If you think you are living in an era of post-truth, you likely are. If something sounds like magical thinking, it is. Nationalism makes no country great; it often leads to war, genocide, terror, destroyed economies and the turning of cities into rubble. Technology will not get us to paradise. It has made us more unequ... | If you think you are living in an era of post-truth, you likely are. If something sounds like magical thinking, it is. Nationalism makes no country great; it often leads to war, genocide, terror, destroyed economies and the turning of cities into rubble. Technology will not get us to paradise. It has made us more unequ... | 1 | [
"......It’s a little book (only a hundred pages) but it has a big message: that in the twenty-first century we are facing threats similar to the totalitarianism that emerged in the twentieth century. Luzkow writes from a US standpoint, but his book has relevance worldwide, raising as it does issues and questions of... |
Fear Before the Fall | [
"Alexander Herbert"
] | Having initially been considered bourgeois, horror films emerged only under late socialism as the country underwent widespread social, cultural, and economic changes. In this book, Alexander Herbert examines those changes through the various fears and anx | Alienation, generational tensions, rampant nationalism and the pervasiveness of atomic danger are all topics that haunted late Soviet citizens, and those fears are reflected in the films meant to represent their horror genre.
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, production of horror movies from independent film... | Alienation, generational tensions, rampant nationalism and the pervasiveness of atomic danger are all topics that haunted late Soviet citizens, and those fears are reflected in the films meant to represent their horror genre.
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, production of horror movies from independent film... | 4 | [
"Us in the ‘west’ have heard all kinds of stories about what life was like within the Soviet Union; usually stories that paint it as an awful place thanks to residual anti-Soviet propaganda and hate, so we’ve probably either never thought about their film industry, or assumed that it was all government-made pro-com... |
Fear of Music (2nd Edition) | [
"David Stubbs"
] | An examination of why modern art can be easier to appreciate than modern music. | Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon make headline news. However, while the general public has no ... | Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon make headline news. However, while the general public has no ... | 1 | [
"Praise for the 1st edition of this title released in 2009: The title belies the fact that the main thrust of the content is a parallel history of contemporary art and music with a conclusion that attempts to answer the question inherent in the title, but, of course, fails. That's not a criticism as the content is ... |
Feminism's Founding Fathers | [
"Kaevan Gazdar"
] | The first book to tell the untold story of the male pioneers and fellow-travellers of Women's Lib. | Why have so many remarkable men fought for women's rights, often risking their careers and ruining their health? Who were these men, what were their backgrounds, above all: what kind of relationships did they have with women? Finally, if there have been so many deviations from the male-oppressor/female-victim cliché, d... | Why have so many remarkable men fought for women's rights, often risking their careers and ruining their health? Who were these men, what were their backgrounds, above all: what kind of relationships did they have with women? Finally, if there have been so many deviations from the male-oppressor/female-victim cliché, d... | 1 | [
"This book gave me a whole new perspective about the history of the feminist movement. I hope that a lot of men read this book, and see why everyone (not just women) need feminism.\n\n~ Justine Kraemer, Librarian, NetGalley"
] |
Film, Nihilism and the Restoration of Belief | [
"Darren Ambrose"
] | This book explores the possibility that cinema can challenge our contemporary nihilism and restore belief in new transformative possibilities for life. | Despite the clichés which govern much of its current forms, the cinema continues to have a vital political and aesthetic significance. Our commitment to, and our sincerity towards, our ways of being in the world have become catastrophically eroded. Nihilism and despair have taken hold. We must find a way to renew our f... | Despite the clichés which govern much of its current forms, the cinema continues to have a vital political and aesthetic significance. Our commitment to, and our sincerity towards, our ways of being in the world have become catastrophically eroded. Nihilism and despair have taken hold. We must find a way to renew our f... | 1 | [
"‘In our time of economic misery, war and conflict, and general lethargy, it has been easy for nihilism and discontent to become widespread. To lose faith in humanity has become acceptable within our society. However, the culture of alienation is reaching a tipping point, we must begin to think, act and enact towar... |
Fire Hides Everywhere | [
"Julian Feeld"
] | Technology failed, most died. On an abandoned farm in the middle of France, an old man cares for a group of survivors: all children. Then he suffers a stroke, which comes to end their world for a second time. | Fire Hides Everywhere is a speculative fiction novel exploring a question central to identity: do we exist beyond our subject positions?
Following an apocalypse in which all except those just born or about to die disappeared, Julian Feeld's novel sets out to explore the eternal Buddhist question: "Who is born? Who die... | Fire Hides Everywhere is a speculative fiction novel exploring a question central to identity: do we exist beyond our subject positions?
Following an apocalypse in which all except those just born or about to die disappeared, Julian Feeld's novel sets out to explore the eternal Buddhist question: "Who is born? Who die... | 2 | [
"A rich, haunting and haunted, fever dream of a novel. ~ Tom Lutz, novelist and editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books",
"Fire Hides Everywhere is gripping fiction by way of fascinating literary experimentation. Instead of simply dramatizing existing ideas on the subject, it defies subjectivity itself... |
Flatline Constructs | [
"Mark Fisher"
] | Mark Fisher's doctoral thesis - a metaphysics of cybernetic realism's anti-representation - more than a blur between between fiction and reality. | Completed in 1999 during his time with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Mark Fisher’s PhD thesis, Flatline Constructs, invents a fusion of culture, critique, and radical philosophy that would define his signature style from Capitalist Realism to Acid Communism. Drawing on sources from David Cronenberg to Gilles De... | Completed in 1999 during his time with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Mark Fisher’s PhD thesis, Flatline Constructs, invents a fusion of culture, critique, and radical philosophy that would define his signature style from Capitalist Realism to Acid Communism. Drawing on sources from David Cronenberg to Gilles De... | 2 | [
"Flatline Constructs is Mark Fisher’s piercing précis of the metaphysics of cybernetics, whose herald is Spinoza. Fisher’s ‘gothic flatline’ annuls the difference between fiction and reality, obliterating representation with circuitry, the mirror with the screen, and law with code. If Flatline Constructs’ principal... |
Folk Opposition | [
"Alex Niven"
] | From Ridley Scott to Raoul Moat: why the left must recapture the imagination of the British folk populace. | For David Cameron and Big Society Tories, folk culture means organic food, nu-folk pop music, and pastoral myths of Englishness. Meanwhile, postmodern liberal culture teaches us that talking about a singular folk is reductive at best, neo-fascist at worst. But what is being held in check by this consensus against the p... | For David Cameron and Big Society Tories, folk culture means organic food, nu-folk pop music, and pastoral myths of Englishness. Meanwhile, postmodern liberal culture teaches us that talking about a singular folk is reductive at best, neo-fascist at worst. But what is being held in check by this consensus against the p... | 11 | [
"\"... eminently readable, highly intelligent, and attractively wide-ranging. And the slagging off [of me] is well justified.\"\n\n~ Terry Eagleton, Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the Universities of Lancaster and Notre Dame",
"\"While an invaluable new contribution to the progressive patriotism... |
For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists | [
"Robert T. Tally Jr."
] | Facing an uncertain future and an unstable present, our most urgent task today involves a ruthless critique of all that exists. | For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists takes as its point of departure two profound and interrelated phenomena. The first is the pervasive sense of what Mark Fisher had called “capitalist realism", in which (to cite the famous expression variously attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek) it is easier to imag... | For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists takes as its point of departure two profound and interrelated phenomena. The first is the pervasive sense of what Mark Fisher had called “capitalist realism", in which (to cite the famous expression variously attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek) it is easier to imag... | 5 | [
"Tally’s new book, For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism, is particularly concerned with this question of the conditions of imagination under late capitalism, the ways in which it might be kept alive in the face of market forces that conspire to deaden it.\n\nIf we w... |
Frontlines | [
"Nick Meynen"
] | Take a journey to the shadowy frontlines of the world's global economy. Nick Meynen reveals powerful stories of the fight for justice and proposes ways out of this mess. | Every unpacked frontline is one cutting edge of an economic system and political ideology that is destroying life on earth. Revealing our ecosystems to be under a sustained attack, Nick Meynen finds causes for hope in unconventional places.
'In his wide-ranging journalism and writing, Nick Meynen has been vividly mapp... | Every unpacked frontline is one cutting edge of an economic system and political ideology that is destroying life on earth. Revealing our ecosystems to be under a sustained attack, Nick Meynen finds causes for hope in unconventional places.
'In his wide-ranging journalism and writing, Nick Meynen has been vividly mapp... | 12 | [
"5 out of 5 stars. I very much enjoyed reading this book, which is easy to read, yet witted and very informative. Nick takes the reader on a journey to talk about human struggles in an economic system and mindset which has failed to respect planetary and social boundaries. In his book, he draws the contours of the ... |
Fucking Law | [
"Victoria Brooks"
] | An urgent call for everyone to find inventive ways to question the ethics of sexuality. | Fucking Law is an urgent call for everyone, not just academics and researchers, to find inventive ways to question the ethics of sexuality. Since a sex life is full of so many diverse moments of joy and suffering, for each and everybody, the book attempts to bridge a gap between philosophical and non-philosophical ques... | Fucking Law is an urgent call for everyone, not just academics and researchers, to find inventive ways to question the ethics of sexuality. Since a sex life is full of so many diverse moments of joy and suffering, for each and everybody, the book attempts to bridge a gap between philosophical and non-philosophical ques... | 21 | [
"Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Sex is still so taboo in our society, especially when it comes to women and their sexuality. Often women are shamed for not being chaste and vanilla. Brooks opens up a big discussion that needs to be had, from a philosophical POV with real-world experiences mixed in. This book is a must-r... |
Furnace of this World | [
"Ed Simon"
] | A fragmentary, digressive, impressionistic account of what the radical implications of goodness could possibly be in late capitalism. | In the tradition of Roland Barthes' Mythologies and Walter Benjamin's aphoristic Theses on the Philosophy of History, Ed Simon's Furnace of this World is a fragmentary, digressive, impressionistic account of what the radical implications of goodness could possibly be in late capitalism. Furnace of this World interrogat... | In the tradition of Roland Barthes' Mythologies and Walter Benjamin's aphoristic Theses on the Philosophy of History, Ed Simon's Furnace of this World is a fragmentary, digressive, impressionistic account of what the radical implications of goodness could possibly be in late capitalism. Furnace of this World interrogat... | 4 | [
"Imagine you stop to listen to a street corner preacher calling out to no one and everyone. Imagine that, like a subway musician who hits a lick that catches your year, he piques your interest with a vision that is like an impossible mashup of William James and George Carlin. Reading Ed Simon's ruthless Furnace of ... |
Gathering of Promises, A | [
"Ben Graham"
] | The neglected story of how Texan musicians pioneered and explored psychedelic rock, and the too-high price they often paid. | A Gathering of Promises is a history of acid rock and psychedelic music in and from the state of Texas, focusing largely on its mid-1960s origins with the 13th Floor Elevators and contemporaries such as the Golden Dawn, the Red Crayola and Bubble Puppy, and following its development to the present day and the popularit... | A Gathering of Promises is a history of acid rock and psychedelic music in and from the state of Texas, focusing largely on its mid-1960s origins with the 13th Floor Elevators and contemporaries such as the Golden Dawn, the Red Crayola and Bubble Puppy, and following its development to the present day and the popularit... | 2 | [
"... masterful, thoroughly wrought, vivid and exciting to read.The writing is both deep and wide. There is... much truth and insight about our lives. You are a very fine writer indeed. ~ Clementine Hall (13th Floor Elevators)",
"Congratulations on putting together the most accurate, comprehensive account of those... |
Georgian Portraits | [
"Martin Demant Frederiksen",
"Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen"
] | Ten ethnographic portraits telling the story of the social and political aftermaths of revolution. | Georgian Portraits chronicles everyday life in the Republic of Georgia in the decade that followed the Rose Revolution of 2003. Recent anthropological developments argue for the use of “afterlives” as an analytical notion through which to understand processes of socio-political change. Based on a series of portraits, M... | Georgian Portraits chronicles everyday life in the Republic of Georgia in the decade that followed the Rose Revolution of 2003. Recent anthropological developments argue for the use of “afterlives” as an analytical notion through which to understand processes of socio-political change. Based on a series of portraits, M... | 3 | [
"What happens after a revolution, when the bright and shiny finish has worn off its ideals? Capturing the weirdness and the wonder of post-revolutionary Georgia, Frederiksen and Gotfredsen also capture people's very real struggles to get by, their fears of war and their dreams of a \"European\" future. Beautifully ... |
Ghosts of My Life | [
"Mark Fisher"
] | Collected essays on popular culture by a major critic. | This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.
THIS BRAND NEW EDITIO... | This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.
THIS BRAND NEW EDITIO... | 11 | [
"What is excellent are the two new essays; Matt Colquhoun’s Introduction contextualises Fisher’s work and makes a strong case for Ghosts of My Life being a foundational book for the author, and Reynolds is not scared to criticise Fisher’s work as he attempts to understand the despair and social and political declin... |
Give Them an Argument | [
"Ben Burgis"
] | The left must learn to argue. | Many serious leftists have learned to distrust talk of logic and logical fallacies, associated with right-wing "logicbros". This is a serious mistake. Unlike the neoliberal technocrats, who can point to social problems and tell people "trust us", the serious Left must learn how to argue and persuade. In Give Them an Ar... | Many serious leftists have learned to distrust talk of logic and logical fallacies, associated with right-wing "logicbros". This is a serious mistake. Unlike the neoliberal technocrats, who can point to social problems and tell people "trust us", the serious Left must learn how to argue and persuade. In Give Them an Ar... | 2 | [
"In \"Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left\", Burgis arms his reader with the essential knowledge of formal logic and informal fallacies that will be required for any political discussion in this polarized times. Critique: Informative, thoughtful, exceptionally well organized and presented, \"Give Them an Argu... |
Going Nowhere, Slow | [
"Mikkel Krause Frantzen"
] | An unique analysis of four cultural works of depression and what they say about our society and our time. | Using examples from art and literature, Frantzen explores the social, political and economic implications of both real and imagined depression. Is feeling blue a symptom of the death of progress? Was the suicide of David Foster Wallace a proverbial canary in a coal mine?
Margaret Thatcher once declared that there is n... | Using examples from art and literature, Frantzen explores the social, political and economic implications of both real and imagined depression. Is feeling blue a symptom of the death of progress? Was the suicide of David Foster Wallace a proverbial canary in a coal mine?
Margaret Thatcher once declared that there is n... | 4 | [
"...............Going Nowhere, Slow is a compelling read for anyone interested in conceptualization and representations of depression, or the relation between contemporary culture and mental illness more generally. Frantzen’s writing is high-paced, erudite and at times humorous. Despite the subject matter, the auth... |
Good Day Today | [
"Daniel Neofetou"
] | This book argues that the films of David Lynch pose a radical challenge to conservative and absolutist ideologies. | In his speech following the 2011nationwide riots in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron spoke out against people “being too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong” and proclaimed “this relativism – it’s not going to cut it anymore”. He was, then, presumably laying the foundation for one-... | In his speech following the 2011nationwide riots in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron spoke out against people “being too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong” and proclaimed “this relativism – it’s not going to cut it anymore”. He was, then, presumably laying the foundation for one-... | 1 | [
"Neofetou on Lynch is an original on an original. This book is a learned and lucid work in which Neofetou demonstrates how Lynch’s deeply entrancing filmmaking greatly destabilises the viewer into seeing and feeling outside the norm. ~ Jose Arroyo, Lecturer, University of Warwick Department of Film & Television Stu... |
Good Times in Dystopia | [
"George F."
] | How to party through the Apocalypse. | London drowns in sewage and Europe burns. In this creative nonfiction, George F. falls in with a band of chaos punks who drink, fight and struggle for shelter when the world ends. From mass demonstrations in Paris, the rotten squats of Shoreditch, and the lawless forests of the borderlands, to carnival riots in the aut... | London drowns in sewage and Europe burns. In this creative nonfiction, George F. falls in with a band of chaos punks who drink, fight and struggle for shelter when the world ends. From mass demonstrations in Paris, the rotten squats of Shoreditch, and the lawless forests of the borderlands, to carnival riots in the aut... | 7 | [
"I’ve been intrigued by punk culture and the concept of anarchy since the age of 16. That was when I first started getting into music from the 70s and enrolled on a Government and Politics A-level course in college. I thought that, despite my timid nature, inherent respect for authority and deep-seeded fear of conf... |
Graham Harman Reader, The | [
"Graham Harman"
] | The essential compendium of shorter works by one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century. Written in Harman’s typical clear and witty style, the Reader is an essential resource for veteran readers of Harman and newcomers alike. | The Graham Harman Reader is the essential compendium of shorter works by one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century. The writings in this volume are split into seven chapters. The first concerns Harman’s resistance to both downward and upward reductionism. The second chapter contains works tha... | The Graham Harman Reader is the essential compendium of shorter works by one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century. The writings in this volume are split into seven chapters. The first concerns Harman’s resistance to both downward and upward reductionism. The second chapter contains works tha... | 2 | [
"Overcoming the war of religion between analytics and continentals with a brand-new metaphysical insight, Graham Harman has restored to philosophy its greatness and value. ~ Maurizio Ferraris, Italian continental philosopher and author of the Manifesto of New Realism",
"I don't read a lot of metaphysics, but 'The... |
Greece: what is to be done? | [
"Karl Heinz Roth"
] | In-depth analysis of the Greek debt crisis, and alternatives to the socioeconomic destruction of Greece and the Eurozone | "Greece – What is to be done" analyzes the Greek debt crisis, the multilateral austerity countermeasures, and offers alternatives to the socioeconomic destruction of Greece and the Eurozone. | "Greece – What is to be done" analyzes the Greek debt crisis, the multilateral austerity countermeasures, and offers alternatives to the socioeconomic destruction of Greece and the Eurozone. | 1 | [
"Greece has become the storm centre of class struggle in Europe for the duration of this decade. The country has been the site of a relentless economic and political assault by the internal and external forces of neoliberalism. The onset of global recession at the turn of this decade impacted on Greece in the form ... |
He Was Our Man in Washington | [
"Owen Symes"
] | A fair-minded but highly critical interpretation of president Obama and his brand of "hope and change," grounded in a reality that goes beyond the headlines. | He Was Our Man in Washington provides a detailed narrative of the years of the Obama administration gravitating around six key topics: the War on Terror, the Great Recession, marginal struggles, the Affordable Care Act, climate change, and Indigenous issues, that sit at the intersection of the other topics. Each chapte... | He Was Our Man in Washington provides a detailed narrative of the years of the Obama administration gravitating around six key topics: the War on Terror, the Great Recession, marginal struggles, the Affordable Care Act, climate change, and Indigenous issues, that sit at the intersection of the other topics. Each chapte... | 9 | [
"Overall, although the book acknowledges improvements in health insurance availability and progress on civil rights issues, its assessment of Obama’s record is generally highly critical, indeed...Written topically rather than chronologically, this history of the Obama years effectively focuses on six key areas: for... |
Hearing the Cloud | [
"Emile Frankel"
] | How do platform technologies change the way we listen, and can music help reimagine the future? | Can music be a curse? Here is an alternate history of online politics and new technology from the perspective of listening, typing, composing, and shared hearing.
Emile Frankel presents a rigorous account of a world felt to be in crisis. The aesthetic and tonal ramifications for such feelings are twisted within the op... | Can music be a curse? Here is an alternate history of online politics and new technology from the perspective of listening, typing, composing, and shared hearing.
Emile Frankel presents a rigorous account of a world felt to be in crisis. The aesthetic and tonal ramifications for such feelings are twisted within the op... | 1 | [
"Hearing the Cloud guides us through the soundscapes of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, from chillstep to nightcore, and recaptures the possibilities of collective listening embedded within these musical forms. Emile Frankel traces a pattern recognition of our moment, poised between dystopian nihilism and the r... |
Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists | [
"Aaron J. Leonard",
"Conor A. Gallagher"
] | A critical history of the largest Maoist organization to emerge in the US out of the tumultuous sixties, and the FBI's unrelenting campaign against it. | Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists is a history of the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party — the largest Maoist organization to arise in the US — from its origins in the explosive year of 1968, its expansion into a national organization in the early seventies, its extension into maj... | Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists is a history of the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party — the largest Maoist organization to arise in the US — from its origins in the explosive year of 1968, its expansion into a national organization in the early seventies, its extension into maj... | 14 | [
"Leonard and Gallagher do a tremendous service for activists today who are active in the Black Lives Matter movement, the fast food worker movement, and other social movements by showing in tremendous and rigorous detail what exactly the FBI did to destroy the radical left of the 1970s. ~ Bradley Duncan, Against th... |
Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists (second edition) | [
"Aaron J. Leonard",
"Conor A. Gallagher"
] | A critical history of the largest Maoist organization to emerge in the US out of the tumultuous sixties, and the FBI's unrelenting campaign against it. | Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists is a history of the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party - the largest Maoist organization to arise in the US - from its origins in the explosive year of 1968, its expansion into a national organization in the early '70s, its extension into major in... | Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists is a history of the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party - the largest Maoist organization to arise in the US - from its origins in the explosive year of 1968, its expansion into a national organization in the early '70s, its extension into major in... | 14 | [
"Leonard and Gallagher do a tremendous service for activists today who are active in the Black Lives Matter movement, the fast food worker movement, and other social movements by showing in tremendous and rigorous detail what exactly the FBI did to destroy the radical left of the 1970s. ~ Bradley Duncan, Against th... |
Henry, Henry | [
"Brian Willems"
] | A brilliantly conceived, wild and thought-provoking tale of composer Henry Purcell and his unscholarly contemporary biographers. | Henry, Henry is a brilliantly conceived experimental novel comprising two alternating stories: a factually inaccurate pseudo-biography of 17th-century composer Henry Purcell and the mid-20th-century story of the people writing the biography.
In the 17th-century narrative, the young Henry is repeatedly imprisoned, has ... | Henry, Henry is a brilliantly conceived experimental novel comprising two alternating stories: a factually inaccurate pseudo-biography of 17th-century composer Henry Purcell and the mid-20th-century story of the people writing the biography.
In the 17th-century narrative, the young Henry is repeatedly imprisoned, has ... | 1 | [
"Inventive. I love anything that manages to be experimental without being pretentious. This book pulls it off. ~ Jennifer Williams (librarian), GoodReads"
] |
Heterotopia | [
"Caroline Baillie",
"Jens Kabo",
"John Reader"
] | Thoughts, ideas and a Heterotopia in which to examine the transformations necessary in contemporary society. | Many of us are concerned with the structures, systems and values that we meet on a day-to-day basis. We seem to be rushing headlong to a destination not of our choosing. How did we get here and what can we do about it? This book is the result of an exploration into the ideas of transformation. What does it mean to tran... | Many of us are concerned with the structures, systems and values that we meet on a day-to-day basis. We seem to be rushing headlong to a destination not of our choosing. How did we get here and what can we do about it? This book is the result of an exploration into the ideas of transformation. What does it mean to tran... | 3 | [
"This is a great project. It has plenty of content and relational structures that will continue to provoke insights and lift aspects of cultural hypnosis from its readers. ~ Chris Rose, Senior Critic, Department of Furniture Design, Rhode Island School of Design",
"This book represents a bold, exciting and though... |
Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future | [
"Justin Barton"
] | The future is alongside us, sometimes closer, sometimes further away. | The future is alongside us, sometimes closer, sometimes further away.
Hidden Valleys starts from the perception that the human world is an eerie place, particularly in relation to its stories and dreams. It also starts from events that took place in North Yorkshire, in 1978. A work of philosophy, an account of experie... | The future is alongside us, sometimes closer, sometimes further away.
Hidden Valleys starts from the perception that the human world is an eerie place, particularly in relation to its stories and dreams. It also starts from events that took place in North Yorkshire, in 1978. A work of philosophy, an account of experie... | 3 | [
"From an article about On Vanishing Land\n\n\"At its most intense this audio-essay hollows out reality - the two artists are \"a dream within a dream, the planet is a dream within a dream\" - even as it viscerally conjures material presences from a land of disjunctive temporalities.\" ~ T.J..Demos, ART FORUM Sept 2... |
Holes In The Whole | [
"Krzysztof Nawratek"
] | This book seeks meaning and reasons for the existence of the city. It demonstrates the urgent need to define the city not as a territory of exploitation and resource for global corporations but as a self-governed subject. | Holes in The Whole seeks meaning and reasons for the existence of the city. It demonstrates the urgent need to expand the sphere of urban activity - to define the city not only as a territory of exploitation, but as space of human existence in its fullest dimension. The book defines the conditions under which the city ... | Holes in The Whole seeks meaning and reasons for the existence of the city. It demonstrates the urgent need to expand the sphere of urban activity - to define the city not only as a territory of exploitation, but as space of human existence in its fullest dimension. The book defines the conditions under which the city ... | 4 | [
"Holes in the Whole is a welcome contribution to an increasingly crowded field of writing on cities. The book is a short but always a stimulating read, provoking questions and offering flashes of insight. Fighting against city-making that is too often captured by the “totalitarian logic of profit” and the focus on ... |
Hontology | [
"Mark Payne"
] | Is shame the route by which we access the capabilities for living that are abrogated in modernity? | Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx has had an enormous influence on recent thought about the fate of human capabilities in late capitalism, especially in Europe. Hontology explores a road not taken in Specters of Marx - the idea that shame is the route by which we access the capabilities for living that are abrogated i... | Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx has had an enormous influence on recent thought about the fate of human capabilities in late capitalism, especially in Europe. Hontology explores a road not taken in Specters of Marx - the idea that shame is the route by which we access the capabilities for living that are abrogated i... | 0 | [] |
Horror of Philosophy | [
"Eugene Thacker"
] | Eugene Thacker’s three cult-classic volumes of supernatural horror come together in this new Zer0 Books omnibus, revised with updated material, offering an essential resource for thinking about the unthinkable world. | Zer0 Books presents a new, omnibus edition of a cult classic: all three volumes of Eugene Thacker’s Horror of Philosophy trilogy, revised and expanded by the author. Across the three volumes of the series Thacker adopts a unique approach, reading works of horror as if they were philosophy, and works of philosophy as if... | Zer0 Books presents a new, omnibus edition of a cult classic: all three volumes of Eugene Thacker’s Horror of Philosophy trilogy, revised and expanded by the author. Across the three volumes of the series Thacker adopts a unique approach, reading works of horror as if they were philosophy, and works of philosophy as if... | 1 | [
"Praise for In the Dust of This Planet: Thacker’s discourse on the intersection of horror and philosophy is utterly original and utterly captivating...In the Dust of This Planet is an encyclopedic grimoire instructing us in the varieties of esoteric thought and infernal diversions that exist for the reader’s furthe... |
Hothouse Utopia | [
"Ryan Gunderson"
] | What is to be done when the future's already ablaze? | What is to be done when the future's already ablaze?
With the international spread of right-wing "populism," widening inequalities, precarious forms of labor becoming normative, surveillance capitalism, and a worsening ecological crisis, the future is bleak. One issue in particular, the likelihood of catastrophic clim... | What is to be done when the future's already ablaze?
With the international spread of right-wing "populism," widening inequalities, precarious forms of labor becoming normative, surveillance capitalism, and a worsening ecological crisis, the future is bleak. One issue in particular, the likelihood of catastrophic clim... | 2 | [
"“The passage from radical theory to transformative practice may seem today more strewn with obstacles and bereft of guideposts than ever before. And yet, as Ryan Gunderson urges in his unsentimental account of ‘hothouse utopianism,’ the challenges we face in pursuing it should not lead us down the opposite path to... |
How Capitalism Ends | [
"Steve Paxton"
] | Capital's drive for profit has pushed technological development to previously unimagined heights, and now capitalist production is pushing progress in all the wrong directions. | While the past 300 years have witnessed immense growth in productive capacity, the ‘logic’ of capitalist production is now pushing progress in all the wrong directions. We’ve passed the point where our biggest enemy is material scarcity. Our problems no longer revolve around insufficient production, but iniquitous dist... | While the past 300 years have witnessed immense growth in productive capacity, the ‘logic’ of capitalist production is now pushing progress in all the wrong directions. We’ve passed the point where our biggest enemy is material scarcity. Our problems no longer revolve around insufficient production, but iniquitous dist... | 1 | [
"Lucid, practical, and impeccably argued, Steve Paxton's 'How Capitalism Ends' provides a road map with which to navigate an imminent social change more profound than we've seen in centuries. This is a necessary book. ~ Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Jerusalem"
] |
How the Establishment Lost Control | [
"Chris Nineham"
] | An examination of dramatic developments across the British political landscape and the current crisis of consent, post-Brexit. | The post-war consensus is breaking up. The general election result, the 2014 Scottish referendum and the Brexit vote all testify to an insurgent mood amongst swathes of the population. This book attempts to explain these dramatic developments and to show how they question received notions about politics, history and ho... | The post-war consensus is breaking up. The general election result, the 2014 Scottish referendum and the Brexit vote all testify to an insurgent mood amongst swathes of the population. This book attempts to explain these dramatic developments and to show how they question received notions about politics, history and ho... | 11 | [
"A great read about the current moment in the Left -- it's specifically about the Left in the U.K., but a lot of the observations are easily applicable to the US. There's a lot of stuff I'm definitely gonna take to heart with my own political organizing. ~ Hannah Spaulding, NetGalley",
"How the Establishment Lost... |
How to Dismantle the English State Education System in 10 Easy Steps | [
"Terry Edwards",
"Carl Parsons"
] | The story of the takeover of England’s schools by the super-efficient, modernising, academising machine. | Terry Edwards and Carl Parsons tell the story of the takeover of England’s schools by the super-efficient, modernising, academising machine, which, in collaboration with a dynamic, forward-looking government is recasting the educational landscape.
England’s school system is turbo-charged into a new era and will be the... | Terry Edwards and Carl Parsons tell the story of the takeover of England’s schools by the super-efficient, modernising, academising machine, which, in collaboration with a dynamic, forward-looking government is recasting the educational landscape.
England’s school system is turbo-charged into a new era and will be the... | 7 | [
"A sharp and incisive account of how state education has been dismantled into a system of competing Multi-Academy Trusts. We were told ‘choice’ would deliver higher standards. It didn’t. It made the system more chaotic, wasteful and segregated. This book explains how it was done. ~ Alasdair Smith, National Secretar... |
How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps (second edition) | [
"Youssef El-Gingihy"
] | The story of how your NHS was sold off and why you will have to buy private health insurance soon. | Events have spiralled since the first edition of How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps. The junior doctors' strike, the Conservative victory in the 2015 general election, the Corbyn phenomenon, the unexpected Brexit vote and the arguably even more unexpected loss of the Conservative majority in 2017. Further, since... | Events have spiralled since the first edition of How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps. The junior doctors' strike, the Conservative victory in the 2015 general election, the Corbyn phenomenon, the unexpected Brexit vote and the arguably even more unexpected loss of the Conservative majority in 2017. Further, since... | 8 | [
"Like an increasing number of British doctors, El-Gingihy has gone through disbelief, anger and radicalisation at what he sees as the inexorable privatisation of our public health service..How to Dismantle the NHS in Ten Easy Steps is an attempt to translate the changes into plain English..El-Gingihy’s account is e... |
How To Guide to Cosmopolitan Socialism, A | [
"Matthew McManus"
] | A tribute to the late Michael Brooks, and a defense of his vision of cosmopolitan socialism. | Socialism has always had internationalist ambitions, but what those ambitions should be and how to rethink them in the 21st century remain open questions. Before his tragic passing in 2020, Michael Brooks talked about a new kind of cosmopolitan socialism that would be appropriate for our time. A How To Guide To Cosmopo... | Socialism has always had internationalist ambitions, but what those ambitions should be and how to rethink them in the 21st century remain open questions. Before his tragic passing in 2020, Michael Brooks talked about a new kind of cosmopolitan socialism that would be appropriate for our time. A How To Guide To Cosmopo... | 2 | [
"Matthew McManus is swiftly becoming of the globally leading figures on liberal socialism. This book shows why. Combining his encylopaedic knowledge of the topic with easy-to-access pros, McManus convincingly argues that cosmopolitan socialism is central to a just future. You’ll walk away angry, but well-equipped t... |
How To Like Everything | [
"Paul Shepheard"
] | There is no absolute truth but there is absolutely everything | How To Like Everything is a utopia. 'Utopia' is a word invented five hundred years ago at the start of the modern age as a description of the ideal society. It's composed of Latin parts that taken together mean 'no place' or 'nowhere'. We now use the word utopia to mean an impossible dream of perfection. How To Like Ev... | How To Like Everything is a utopia. 'Utopia' is a word invented five hundred years ago at the start of the modern age as a description of the ideal society. It's composed of Latin parts that taken together mean 'no place' or 'nowhere'. We now use the word utopia to mean an impossible dream of perfection. How To Like Ev... | 2 | [
"Paul Shepheard is one of the finest thinkers and writers alive today. ~ Jem Finer, sound artist",
"Het is niet eenvoudig om na lezing van Paul Shepheard's boeken de wereld met eigen ogen te zien. (It's not easy to see the world with your own eyes after reading Paul Shepheard.) ~ Andre Dekker, Observatorium"
] |
How to Read a History Book | [
"Marshall T. Poe"
] | How to Read a History Book explains who writes history books, how the writers are trained, and why they write them. | A deconstruction of the modern history book as artifact, How to Read a History Book explains who writes history books, how the writers are trained, and why they write them. It also discusses genre, bias (political and otherwise) and how to read history books between the lines.
Written for undergraduates, intro graduat... | A deconstruction of the modern history book as artifact, How to Read a History Book explains who writes history books, how the writers are trained, and why they write them. It also discusses genre, bias (political and otherwise) and how to read history books between the lines.
Written for undergraduates, intro graduat... | 2 | [
"This book introduces the reader in an easy and understandable way into the genre of history books. Through fictional stories and examples, it becomes clear what difficulties historians encounter when writing such books. It also details the function of key components of history books. The book is valuable in giving... |
Human Rights - Illusory Freedom | [
"Luke Gittos"
] | A progressive argument for repealing the Human Rights Act. | A progressive argument for repealing the Human Rights Act.
Contrary to contemporary panic around human rights repeal, Human Rights - Illusory Freedom puts a progressive case against the Human Rights Act. It describes how human rights arose as a new language for western governments following the collapse in their colle... | A progressive argument for repealing the Human Rights Act.
Contrary to contemporary panic around human rights repeal, Human Rights - Illusory Freedom puts a progressive case against the Human Rights Act. It describes how human rights arose as a new language for western governments following the collapse in their colle... | 3 | [
"When the topic of human rights peeks through the headlines, garnering action and progressive debate, my ears are at attention. Luke has penned a treatise on freedom, touching on the enigma revolving around the mosaic of ethicolegal concerns where human rights is center stage. He skillfully expounds upon various ar... |
Human Rights Manifesto, The | [
"Julie Wark"
] | Universal human rights are intrinsically radical in espousing liberty, equality and fraternity for every single person. We must claim them. | Universal human rights are intrinsically radical in espousing liberty, equality and fraternity for every single person. We must claim them. | Universal human rights are intrinsically radical in espousing liberty, equality and fraternity for every single person. We must claim them. | 9 | [
"Featured with 6 other Zero titles on \"Publishers in Focus\" webpage by Blackwell Oxford\n\n\"Many publishers struggle to get the exposure that we feel their books deserve. On this page we will bring you a selection of the independent, interesting and essential that are worthy of greater attention\" ~ Blackwell Ox... |
Hungry Capital | [
"Luigi Russi"
] | A compelling analysis of how global finance is devouring the food system and gambling with our future in the process. | Over the past thirty years, the ability of global finance to affect aspects of everyday life has been increasing at an unprecedented rate. The world of food bears vivid testimony to this tendency, through the scars opened by the 2008 world food price crisis, the iron fist of retailing giants that occupy the supply chai... | Over the past thirty years, the ability of global finance to affect aspects of everyday life has been increasing at an unprecedented rate. The world of food bears vivid testimony to this tendency, through the scars opened by the 2008 world food price crisis, the iron fist of retailing giants that occupy the supply chai... | 7 | [
"In ‘Hungry Capital’, Luigi Russi considers the relationship between food production, consumption and finance in a short but interesting, revelatory but not revolutionary, and original but somewhat disconnected book. The metaphor of Hobbes’s leviathan is adopted to set the scene, situating capitalism as the monster... |
iCommunism | [
"Colin Cremin"
] | Capitalism promised us shiny things but only communism can deliver them in a different, more liberating, universal and sustainable form. | Our relationship to consumption is not an easy one. Apart from being self-centred, superficial and narcissistic, the consumer is held responsible for global warming, poverty and now, by binging on easy credit, economic crisis. A straw man has many uses, including being part of the solution by reducing carbon footprints... | Our relationship to consumption is not an easy one. Apart from being self-centred, superficial and narcissistic, the consumer is held responsible for global warming, poverty and now, by binging on easy credit, economic crisis. A straw man has many uses, including being part of the solution by reducing carbon footprints... | 2 | [
"The icon-shattering publishing house, Zero books, added Colin Cremin’s iCommunism to its increasingly impressive list of titles. This is a book that updates Frankfurt School style radicalism for the web 2.0 generation. Breathlessly modernist and radical at the same time, the perfect combination. Jodi Dean’s The Co... |
Ideology and the Virtual City | [
"Jon Bailes"
] | An exploration of modern society and the critical value of popular culture. | Ideology and the Virtual City is an exploration of modern society and the critical value of popular culture. It combines a prescient social theory that describes how ‘neoliberal’ ideology in today’s societies dominates our economic, political and cultural ideals, with an entertaining exploration of narratives, characte... | Ideology and the Virtual City is an exploration of modern society and the critical value of popular culture. It combines a prescient social theory that describes how ‘neoliberal’ ideology in today’s societies dominates our economic, political and cultural ideals, with an entertaining exploration of narratives, characte... | 2 | [
"Videogames are gradually recognized as a new cultural form which reaches far beyond mere entertainment: they enact new forms of subjectivity and temporality. However, this fascination with the new form should not render us blind for the fact that, in their content, even at its most magic, videogames are firmly roo... |
Ignoble Displacement | [
"Stephanie Polsky"
] | A radical reinterpretation of Dickens's novels made consequential to an understanding of capitalism in the neoliberal age. | We live in a time of great social, political and economic crisis that many date to the collapse of the global banking system in 2008. Many are finding it difficult to contextualise the hardships that have taken place in the years following on from those events. It is difficult to find the answers in our present media l... | We live in a time of great social, political and economic crisis that many date to the collapse of the global banking system in 2008. Many are finding it difficult to contextualise the hardships that have taken place in the years following on from those events. It is difficult to find the answers in our present media l... | 1 | [
"Synopsis: We live in a time of great social, political and economic crisis that many date to the collapse of the global banking system in 2008. Many are finding it difficult to contextualise the hardships that have taken place in the years following on from those events. It is difficult to find the answers in our ... |
Imaginary Games | [
"Chris Bateman"
] | Can games be art or is all art a kind of game? A philosophical investigation of play and imaginary things. | Can games be art? When film critic Roger Ebert claimed in 2010 that videogames could never be art it was seen as a snub by many gamers. But from the perspective of philosophy of art this question was topsy turvey, since according to one of the most influential theories of representation all art is a game. Kendall Walto... | Can games be art? When film critic Roger Ebert claimed in 2010 that videogames could never be art it was seen as a snub by many gamers. But from the perspective of philosophy of art this question was topsy turvey, since according to one of the most influential theories of representation all art is a game. Kendall Walto... | 4 | [
"To the extent that Bateman aims to refute Ebert’s claims by treating games with the attention and rigorousness with which he feels they deserve, he succeeds unequivocally. His consultation of source material is nearly exhaustive – literally from A through Z, from Aristotle to Žižek, from the Atari game systems to ... |
Imaginoscope for Organizers, An | [
"Monika Kostera"
] | Human beings are storytelling creatures. The imaginoscope is an (imaginary) device that people can use to create better organizations. | An Imaginoscope for Organizers offers practical exercises to use both individual and collective imagination to activate and mobilize creative organizing impulses. It proposes intellectual, symbolic and poetic food for thought and practice. Each chapter is a step on the quest for creative ideas and practices and introdu... | An Imaginoscope for Organizers offers practical exercises to use both individual and collective imagination to activate and mobilize creative organizing impulses. It proposes intellectual, symbolic and poetic food for thought and practice. Each chapter is a step on the quest for creative ideas and practices and introdu... | 4 | [
"There is, in my view, an urgent need for teaching that encourages imagination rather than compliance, and when this is done well students inevitably enjoy the experience. I have found this to be particularly so for post-experience (MBA) students, but the need to engage imagination actually pervades teaching at all... |
In Confidence: Talking Frankly about Fame | [
"Laurie Taylor"
] | Celebrity artists, scientists, actors, film-makers and novelists on being famous. | A study of celebrity based on the seventy odd interviews featured in the Sky Arts television series, In Confidence. Informants include David Schwimmer, Stephen Fry, Harry Belafonte, Alan Ayckbourn, Kathie Burke, Michael Frayn, Christopher Hitchens, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sheila Hancock, Richard Dawkins, Miriam Marg... | A study of celebrity based on the seventy odd interviews featured in the Sky Arts television series, In Confidence. Informants include David Schwimmer, Stephen Fry, Harry Belafonte, Alan Ayckbourn, Kathie Burke, Michael Frayn, Christopher Hitchens, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sheila Hancock, Richard Dawkins, Miriam Marg... | 3 | [
"Subtitled ‘talking frankly about fame’ this is a compilation of a series of interviews on Sky Arts that constitutes a reflection on the nature of celebrity. The introduction reminds the reader of other interview series such as Face to Face with John Freeman, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair with Anthony Clare and the s... |
In Land | [
"Ben Tufnell"
] | A collection of essays about Land art, one of the most important artistic movements of our times. | An attempt to melt an iceberg with a blowtorch, an indoor lake of tequila, an ascent of Mt Everest, driftwood burnt with sunlight focused through a magnifying glass and a doorbell that emits the sound of a dying star; these are some of the extraordinary artistic strategies covered in this collection.
Gathering togethe... | An attempt to melt an iceberg with a blowtorch, an indoor lake of tequila, an ascent of Mt Everest, driftwood burnt with sunlight focused through a magnifying glass and a doorbell that emits the sound of a dying star; these are some of the extraordinary artistic strategies covered in this collection.
Gathering togethe... | 9 | [
"Gallerist and curator Ben Tufnell has worked closely with most of the artists he writes about, and his approach to Land art, a mode of radical practice emerging in the later 1960s, in which artists worked directly in the landscape, and which he wrote about in the excellent 2006 monograph Land Art (published by Tat... |
In Praise of Friendship | [
"Michał Herer"
] | If we are to resist returning to the logic of clashing, violent particularisms and defend ourselves against fascist or fascistoid tendencies that appear on the political horizon, we need a renaissance of the culture of friendship. | We are living in the age of decline, or at least crisis, of what might be called a ‘culture of friendship’. Our existence as social beings is constricted in a triangle whose three apices are: the alienated work, subjected to the principle of ruthless competition, the closed, isolated nuclear family and the national or ... | We are living in the age of decline, or at least crisis, of what might be called a ‘culture of friendship’. Our existence as social beings is constricted in a triangle whose three apices are: the alienated work, subjected to the principle of ruthless competition, the closed, isolated nuclear family and the national or ... | 3 | [
"This is a surprisingly, maybe even shockingly classical view of friendship, while fully aware of all the counter-arguments available. Michał Herer’s essay is preoccupied by the main question of moral and political philosophy, to wit, how are we to live together. In the last two centuries or so we’ve been telling e... |
In the Dust of This Planet | [
"Eugene Thacker"
] | Supernatural horror defined as the thought of the unthinkable. In this bestselling book, Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. | #1 Amazon Bestseller in Philosophy Criticism
The world is increasingly unthinkable, a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. In this book Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. To confront t... | #1 Amazon Bestseller in Philosophy Criticism
The world is increasingly unthinkable, a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. In this book Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. To confront t... | 1 | [
"Thacker’s discourse on the intersection of horror and philosophy is utterly original and utterly captivating...In the Dust of This Planet is an encyclopedic grimoire instructing us in the varieties of esoteric thought and infernal diversions that exist for the reader’s further investigation, treating us to a delig... |
In The Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling | [
"Stuart Walton"
] | A thorough-going re-elaboration of modern experience via the senses. | The five physical senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching have been held to underpin the complexity of human experience ever since Aristotle first theorised about how they worked. Classical and scholastic philosophy up to the time of the European Enlightenment relegated their operations to its margins... | The five physical senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching have been held to underpin the complexity of human experience ever since Aristotle first theorised about how they worked. Classical and scholastic philosophy up to the time of the European Enlightenment relegated their operations to its margins... | 0 | [] |
Infinite Fictions | [
"David Winters"
] | Selected writings by one of today's leading young literary critics. | David Winters has quickly become a leading voice in the new landscape of online literary criticism. His widely-published work maps the furthest frontiers of contemporary fiction and theory. The essays in this book range from the American satirist Sam Lipsyte to the reclusive Australian genius Gerald Murnane; from the "... | David Winters has quickly become a leading voice in the new landscape of online literary criticism. His widely-published work maps the furthest frontiers of contemporary fiction and theory. The essays in this book range from the American satirist Sam Lipsyte to the reclusive Australian genius Gerald Murnane; from the "... | 8 | [
"David Winters is a brilliant young literary critic. His literary essays, which have appeared in a vast range of publications, both on- and offline, go far beyond the usual precis-and-evaluation typical of book reviews. He is unique in the philosophical subtlety and depth he brings to his work, and in the striking ... |
Infinite Music | [
"Adam Harper"
] | A new system for imagining music, built on the infnite possibilities of twenty-first century technology. | A timely analysis of musical evolution at a moment when many practitioners have become fixated on the past and thinkers have found themselves unable to locate possible futures.
Steve Goodman,author of Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear
In the last few decades, new technologies have brought composer... | A timely analysis of musical evolution at a moment when many practitioners have become fixated on the past and thinkers have found themselves unable to locate possible futures.
Steve Goodman,author of Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear
In the last few decades, new technologies have brought composer... | 7 | [
"Adam Harper’s thorough, considered and cogent attempt to suggest a means of taking music forward by liberating it from restrictive modes of perception and regressive, habitual practices is an admirably high-minded undertaking. Musical variables, dimensions in music space and music criticism are among the myriad fa... |
Instagram Archipelago, The | [
"Elliot C. Mason"
] | Through a raucous tour of Instagram’s fisherwomen, The Instagram Archipelago proposes a radical new ethics of gender and race. | Set on Idan Hayosh’s peculiar Instagram page of women holding dead fish, The Instagram Archipelago is a conversation with contemporary culture’s logics of gender and race. Working through recent thinking in Black studies and Hayosh’s satirical images, Elliot C. Mason presents the aesthetics of capitalism as a sea that ... | Set on Idan Hayosh’s peculiar Instagram page of women holding dead fish, The Instagram Archipelago is a conversation with contemporary culture’s logics of gender and race. Working through recent thinking in Black studies and Hayosh’s satirical images, Elliot C. Mason presents the aesthetics of capitalism as a sea that ... | 3 | [
"By way of a personal response to Idan Hayosh’s deeply weird images, Elliot C. Mason has conjured a bracingly witty, original and lyrical meditation on architecture, fishing, bikinis and the possibility of escape from the ‘eclipsing wetness’ of our homogenizing neoliberal culture. ~ Josh Cohen",
"Elliot C. Mason ... |
Is the East Still Red? | [
"Gary Blank"
] | Leftist observers of China's political economy, whether they are adulatory or dismissive, have fundamentally misunderstood the role of the market | Does China represent a non-capitalist alternative to neoliberal development models? Commentators on the left have offered sharply divergent assessments over the last two decades. A few still cling the old dream of market socialism, twinning efficiency with social justice. For most, however, China is proof that market r... | Does China represent a non-capitalist alternative to neoliberal development models? Commentators on the left have offered sharply divergent assessments over the last two decades. A few still cling the old dream of market socialism, twinning efficiency with social justice. For most, however, China is proof that market r... | 0 | [] |
It’s Not Over | [
"Pete Dolack"
] | A comprehensive historical study to understand today's world and find a better world tomorrow. | The path to a better world can’t be found without knowledge of history. "It’s Not Over" analyzes attempts to supplant capitalism in the past in order to draw lessons for emerging and future movements that seek to overcome the political and economic crises of today. This history is presented through the words and action... | The path to a better world can’t be found without knowledge of history. "It’s Not Over" analyzes attempts to supplant capitalism in the past in order to draw lessons for emerging and future movements that seek to overcome the political and economic crises of today. This history is presented through the words and action... | 3 | [
"As Cold War taboos on honest discussions of capitalism and socialism lose their force, important books like this are emerging. They ask why capitalism keeps provoking movements to go beyond it, why they have not yet achieved that goal, and what we must learn from them so the next efforts prove more effective. Dola... |
Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict | [
"James Crossley",
"Robert J. Myles"
] | A major biography of Jesus from a historical materialist perspective | What made the Jesus movement tick? By situating the life of Jesus of Nazareth in the turbulent troubles of first-century Palestine, Crossley and Myles give a thrilling historical-materialist take on the historical Jesus. Delivering a wealth of knowledge on the social, economic, and cultural conflicts of the time, Jesus... | What made the Jesus movement tick? By situating the life of Jesus of Nazareth in the turbulent troubles of first-century Palestine, Crossley and Myles give a thrilling historical-materialist take on the historical Jesus. Delivering a wealth of knowledge on the social, economic, and cultural conflicts of the time, Jesus... | 12 | [
"Christianity has justified oppressive hierarchies aplenty. But it has also justified resistance to them. This book does a very good job of showing us why. ~ Dragan Plavšić , Counterfire",
"Despite being written from a perspective that questions many of the traditions of the Christian faith, it is respectful in i... |
Kill All Normies | [
"Angela Nagle"
] | How internet subcultures are conquering the mainstream, from from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right. | Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the "alt right" ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-support... | Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the "alt right" ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-support... | 16 | [
"This dynamite stick packaged as a short book, analyzes the twin reactions to the liberal-democratic consensus which served till recently as the self-evident normative foundation of our society: alt-right and Political Correctness. Nobody is spared in Nagle’s razor-sharp critical probing: while she brings out the s... |
LACONIA: 1,200 TWEETS ON FILM | [
"Masha Tupitsyn"
] | If the sound bite is the new order, then how do we make every word count? | If the sound bite is the new order, then how do we make every word count? In todays surplus world of communication overload and cultural clutter, writer and cultural critic Masha Tupitsyn turns to the media matrix of Twitter to explore the changing ways that we construct and consume narrative. Loosely applying the disc... | If the sound bite is the new order, then how do we make every word count? In todays surplus world of communication overload and cultural clutter, writer and cultural critic Masha Tupitsyn turns to the media matrix of Twitter to explore the changing ways that we construct and consume narrative. Loosely applying the disc... | 12 | [
"\"In LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Films, Masha Tupitsyn explores the curious intersection of the print tradition of books and the micronarrative model of Twitter. The project is essentially an experiment that appropriates the forms of social media — soundbites, fragmented commentary, quotes, condensed reactions — in a... |
Land of Hunger | [
"Wayne Holloway"
] | A collection of short stories; or one long one. | Land of Hunger is a collection of short stories, that interconnect, loop and return upon each other despite their seemingly disparate subject matter. Fragments that resonate across time and place, from the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, to the miners' strike, to the world of animal rights protestors.
The storie... | Land of Hunger is a collection of short stories, that interconnect, loop and return upon each other despite their seemingly disparate subject matter. Fragments that resonate across time and place, from the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, to the miners' strike, to the world of animal rights protestors.
The storie... | 2 | [
"Wayne Holloway delivers a clenched fist rammed hard into the flabby belly of what post-modern writing has become! ~ Stewart Home, author of 69 Things to do with a dead princess, Slow Death and Tainted Love",
"At long last: A short-story collection packed with meaning. LAND OF HUNGER is a socio-political odyssey ... |
Last Night, The | [
"Federico Campagna"
] | By replacing hope and faith with adventure, The Last Night of our lives might finally become the first morning of an autonomous future. | Our secular society seems to have finally found its new God: Work. As technological progress makes human labour superfluous, and over-production destroys both the economy and the planet, Work remains stronger than ever as a mantra of universal submission. This book develops a fully-fledged theory of radical atheism, ad... | Our secular society seems to have finally found its new God: Work. As technological progress makes human labour superfluous, and over-production destroys both the economy and the planet, Work remains stronger than ever as a mantra of universal submission. This book develops a fully-fledged theory of radical atheism, ad... | 5 | [
"By turns lyrical, acerbic and fabular, Federico Campagna updates existentialism for the 21st century. If death is certain, surely we can't afford to sacrifice our lives to the pointless labour which capital demands of us. Why do we continue to waste our lives doing it? What are the invisible bonds that keep us in ... |
Last Tape, The | [
"Alex Niven"
] | In this haunting debut collection, Alex Niven explores a poetic hinterland that is also a psychological and cultural wilderness. | In this haunting debut collection, Alex Niven explores a poetic hinterland that is also a psychological and cultural wilderness. Adopting a style grounded in the radical minimalism of northern English modernism and romanticism, Niven writes poems constructed out of traditional forms cut up and reassembled to produce an... | In this haunting debut collection, Alex Niven explores a poetic hinterland that is also a psychological and cultural wilderness. Adopting a style grounded in the radical minimalism of northern English modernism and romanticism, Niven writes poems constructed out of traditional forms cut up and reassembled to produce an... | 2 | [
"Alex Niven always has something to say that I’m better for having heard said. And he says it with passion and eloquence. One of his loci is a North of mind and place, and these poems remind us there is a north in every southern town, a south in every north.\n\n~ Tom Pickard",
"'One of these days there will be mo... |
Lazarus in the Multiple | [
"Camaren Peter"
] | Surviving the anthropocene; the era of complexity! | Lazarus in the Multiple presents a new philosophy on how to navigate the complex challenges that society faces in the 21st Century. It deploys the biblical “Lazarus” as the everyman of modernity, who is caught between past and present, life and death, and sleep and awakening amidst the humdrum and complexity of the “mu... | Lazarus in the Multiple presents a new philosophy on how to navigate the complex challenges that society faces in the 21st Century. It deploys the biblical “Lazarus” as the everyman of modernity, who is caught between past and present, life and death, and sleep and awakening amidst the humdrum and complexity of the “mu... | 0 | [] |
Left for Itself, A | [
"David Swift"
] | The first full length analysis of the rise of left-wing hobbyists, performative radicals and the identity Left. | In the first full length analysis of the rise of left-wing hobbyists, performative radicals and the 'Identity Left', A Left for Itself interrogates the connection between socio-economic realities and politico-cultural views and boldly asks what is a worthy politics, one for the follower count or one for effecting chang... | In the first full length analysis of the rise of left-wing hobbyists, performative radicals and the 'Identity Left', A Left for Itself interrogates the connection between socio-economic realities and politico-cultural views and boldly asks what is a worthy politics, one for the follower count or one for effecting chang... | 13 | [
"5 out of 5 stars: Really good analysis from the left of one of the key issues that is holding Labour back from winning elections in the UK. Very persuasively argued, and written in an accessible, easily read style (rather than the heavy academic stuff that some books of this ilk choose)\n\nLabour supporters would ... |
Lenin Lives! | [
"Philip Cunliffe"
] | What if history had had a happy ending? To change the future, we need to reimagine the past. | Of all the tomes published on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, none will reckon with a key part of the story: what if the revolutionaries' dreams had come true, instead of being dashed? Yet no tale of the Russian Revolution is complete without asking 'what if ...?'
Lenin Lives! lays out a narrative account of ... | Of all the tomes published on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, none will reckon with a key part of the story: what if the revolutionaries' dreams had come true, instead of being dashed? Yet no tale of the Russian Revolution is complete without asking 'what if ...?'
Lenin Lives! lays out a narrative account of ... | 4 | [
"In this thought-provoking and entertaining book, the author goes back to 1917 to reimagine the Russian Revolution and its results to explore how we have ended up with the world we have today. He suggests what might have happened, what could have happened, if the Revolution had panned out differently and spread to ... |
Levinas Unhinged | [
"Tom Sparrow"
] | Levinas Unhinged presents philosopher Emmanuel Levinas as a metaphysician racked by the sensuous, and often terrifying, materiality of existence. | Through six heterodox essays this book extracts a materialist account of subjectivity and aesthetics from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. More than a work of academic commentary that would leave many of Levinas’s pious commentators aghast, Sparrow exhibits an aspect of Levinas which is darker, yet no less fundament... | Through six heterodox essays this book extracts a materialist account of subjectivity and aesthetics from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. More than a work of academic commentary that would leave many of Levinas’s pious commentators aghast, Sparrow exhibits an aspect of Levinas which is darker, yet no less fundament... | 3 | [
"Admitting from the off that his aim is not to ‘get Levinas right’, [Sparrow] seeks to defamiliarize Levinas through a series of powerful readings, each foregrounding the strange, unsettling and liminal aspects of his philosophy: the centrality of the body, materiality, the night. The result is impressive. Sparrow ... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.