Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979, people were enthralled by the novel experience it offered: immersion in the music of their choice, anytime, anywhere. But the Walkman was also denounced as self-indulgent and antisocialthe quintessential accessory for the me generation. In Personal Stereo, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow takes us back to the birth of the device, exploring legal battles over credit for its invention, its ambivalent reception in 1980s America, and its lasting effects on social norms and public space. Ranging from postwar Japan to the present, Tuhus-Dubrow tells an illuminating story about our emotional responses to technological change. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewA compelling and expertly researched study of the Sony Walkman. * New Books Network *An honest & deft entry in [Bloomsbury's] Object Lessons series. * Music Book Review *In 2017, having music pumped into your ears through headphones while existing in public is a thoroughly normal thing to do. But as Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow outlines in the delightful Personal Stereo, being able to do so is a relatively recent development ... Her thoughtfulness imbues this chronicle of a once-modern, now-obsolete device with a mindfulness that isn’t often seen in writing about technology. * Pitchfork (named one of Pitchfork's favorite books of 2017) *[A] careful, astute study. * The Wire *Tuhus-Dubrow illuminates a web of stories connected to the Walkman, her references as ubiquitous as its users ... After finishing Personal Stereo, I found myself wondering about the secret lives of every object around me, as if each device were whispering, “Oh, I am much so more than meets the eye”... Tuhus-Dubrow is a master researcher and synthesizer. It would appear that she has left no Walkman-related stone unturned ... Tuhus-Dubrow [is] an elegant, engaging storyteller who unpacks complex social and political concepts with clarity and panache ... Personal Stereo is a joy to read. * Los Angeles Review of Books *Personal Stereo is loving, wise, and exuberant, a moving meditation on nostalgia and obsolescence. Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow writes as beautifully about Georg Simmel and Allan Bloom as she does about Jane Fonda and Metallica. Now I understand why I still own the taxicab-yellow Walkman my grandmother gave me in 1988. * Nathaniel Rich, author of Odds Against Tomorrow *Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s affectionate history traces the Walkman out of an electronics workshop in bombed-out postwar Tokyo to global icon of solitary, un-networked bliss. * Sasha Issenberg, author of The Sushi Economy *Personal Stereo explores the development of the Walkman, its impact on our culture, and its legacy, not only highlighting its time as a status symbol but discussing its surprising resurgence today as part of the analog revolution. Plus Tuhus-Dubrow shares her own personal memories of Walkman ownership, offering a nice intimate touch to a book full of fun pop-culture trivia and anecdotes. Perhaps the best part of Personal Stereo was seeing parallels between reactions to the Walkman and recent complaints about smartphone ownership. (Particularly regarding selfishness and isolation.) Observing these cyclical historical undercurrents, large and small, is both entertaining and engaging. You might have preferred your iPod, but there’s no doubt the Walkman was worthy of a tribute and brief history like this. * San Francisco Book Review *Tuhus-Dubrow’s valuable historical and pop cultural analysis provides a genuine yet evenhanded portrait of all that has been loved and lost in the way the personal stereo has impacted public spaces and social communication. Personal Stereo is a clear-eyed study on the way this technology continues to disrupt, for better and for worse. * PopMatters *A fascinating and informative, yet also nostalgic, look at the rise and fall of the personal stereo ... The author has worked hard to make this book readable, accessible and thorough in its enquiry ... Tuhus-Dubrow manages to keep the feel of the book light and engaging. It has enough information in to feel academically researched, yet is written in an easily accessible fashion ... Although I enjoyed the final 'Nostalgia' section, I think anybody with an interest in design, business, technology, or social and cultural history, will find the first section, 'Novelty', an interesting delve into the development of Sony as a company, its founders, and its famous Walkman. Five stars. * The Bookbag *Personal Stereo accomplishes a lot in the short time it takes to read. It reminds readers (or informs them) of just how revolutionary the Walkman experience was, and how much it anticipated today's conversations about technology and personal space. * The Current *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Novelty 2: Norm 3: Nostalgia Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This book is about a strange objectstrange in part because it is something that we all have been, and that many of us eat. Nicole Walkers Egg relishes in sharp juxtapositions of seemingly fanciful or repellent topics, so that reproductive science and gustatory habits are considered alongside one another, and personal narrative and broad swaths of natural history jostle, like yolk and albumen. Mapping curious eggs across times, scales, and spaces, Egg draws together surprising perspectives on this common objectegg as food, as art object, as metaphor and feminist symbol, as cultural icon.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewWalker teaches creative writing at a Northern Arizona University, and I imagine she is very good at it. Her interest in other people and their lives holds the book together. Her specific remit, the egg, provides her with a good deal of scope and she enthusiastically takes her readers along for the ride … Much within the lovely covers is delightful. * FoodAnthropology *This is the eggiest book ever, and the egg is everything. Egg is forthright, joyful, mournful and charming, as personal and expansive as the good great egg. * Lucy Corin, Program Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English, University of California, Davis, USA, and author of One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (2013) *Egg is Walker’s third book of nonfiction, and it is just one book from Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons Series… Like its cohorts, Egg offers an unusual lens for observing everyday objects. In this book of thirty short essays, Walker combines equal parts personal narrative, natural history, and cookbook—adding a pinch of cultural history and a dash of mythology—to whip up something that defies genre and is especially palpable in today’s divisive political climate wherein both reproductive rights and the environment are under attack … Walker surveys the depths of virginity and motherhood, global warming and habitat destruction, cooking and art. And she does so with impeccable precision. * Slashnburn *“[A] deeply engrossing and very accessible work of philosophy, a quasi-religious contemplation of someone else’s daily striving possessed of both poetic and factual merit. … Walker’s Egg is the product of her own amalgamation of eggsperiences, refracted through her own poetic syntactical sense and broader environmental interests. … Egg purports to be about eggs, but in the end, eggs are really about Nicole Walker and Walker is really about us. In reading an object meditation such as this, the reader has to engage on several increasingly difficult levels. First, we accept Walker’s fragments for whatever they are, that then evokes our own experiences with eggs, we go on to approach Walker’s text comparatively both for parallels in our experiences and for contrasts in our resultant ideas about eggs. Then, if all has gone according to plan, and we can confidently say that Egg has turned out to be a good book, we can begin to carry a heightened awareness for eggs in our lives in order to collect additional experiences with eggs that will then fuel our further personal growth in this metaphorical area. When you pay mind to an object this deeply, it’s a type of mission work. * PopMatters *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Dear Egg Why We Break the Things We Love the Most Rotten Eggs The Egg Came First Experiment with Eggs by Making a Hollandaise in the Time of Global Warming How to Cook a Planet Spoons The Glue That Holds Us Together All the Eggs in Israel All the Eggs in Ukraine All the Eggs in Korea All the Eggs in China Eggs in Utah Mohawk So Many Eggs, One Small Basket Which Came First? Chicken Porn Can Help You Make Up Your Mind About Eggs Breaking a Few Eggs Blue Planet, Blue Omelet Humpty Dumpty, Revised Do Eggs Bring Skunks? Would You Eat a Red Speckled Egg? The Incredible, Edible Egg What Is a Cloaca? A Million Year Old Egg A Lot of Pressure on One Egg Sidewalk Cooking Eggs A Science Fair Every Year The Sex Lives of Fish The Present Was an Egg Laid by the Past That Had the Future Inside Its Shell—Zora Neale Hurston Recipe for an Already-Cracked Egg

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Book SynopsisChristopher J. Lee is Associate Professor of History at Lafayette College, USA. He has published four previous books and travels frequently.Trade ReviewLee has a gift for making surprising yet apposite associations ... He is best, though, when contemplating the "global capitalist spectacle" of airports, with their unifying corporate flags for individual airlines and the ubiquitous brands displayed down polished corridors. * Times Literary Supplement *In this beguiling book, Christopher J. Lee opens up the whole panorama of jetting off, arriving, and sleeping it off. From T. S. Eliot to Dalí, from Chaplin to Lost in Translation, he shows how jet lag is the deep dark symptom of modern life's struggle with time. Jet Lag is a profound and witty meditation on a key secret of modernity. * Enda Duffy, Arnhold Presidential Department Chair, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, and author of The Speed Handbook *Jet Lag is a revelatory and compelling meditation on the temporal and affective dislocations of global capitalism. Christopher J. Lee lucidly maps the dissonant incompatibility between human beings and technological acceleration but he also insists on the importance of our imaginative cultural and aesthetic responses to the many systemic derangements of individual experience. * Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University, USA, and author of 24/7 *Jet Lag goes beyond the expected, leaving behind the simple science of this curious phenomenon to explore intriguing tangents inspired by the subject. A philosophical musing on the importance of sleep, a short essay exploring our relationship with flying, and even a musing upon jet lag as not only a physical phenomenon but a spiritual one as well…. Lee manages to encompass quite a lot in less than 200 pages, delving into the consequences of modern convenience … Jet Lag is no mere trivia book or brief primer on the subject; it’s one man pondering the relationship between humanity, gravity, time, and space. Four stars. * Tulsa Book Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Esperanto of Jet Lag 1. The Romantic Machine 2. Babel's Clock 3. Circadian Rhythm and Blues 4. Heaven Up Here Conclusion: Jet Lag as a Way of Life Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Notes Index

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Book SynopsisBest Fifteen Books of March 2019, Refinery29Best Nonfiction Books of 2019, Paste MagazineObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Fetishized, demonized, celebrated, and outlawed, the high heel is central to the iconography of modern womanhood. But are high heels good? Are they feminist? What does it mean for a woman (or, for that matter, a man) to choose to wear them?Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, High Heel moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, and from the golden ratio to glam rock. Summer Brennan considers this most provocative of fashion accessories as a nexus of desire and struggle, sex and society, violence and self expression, setting out to understand what it means to be a woman by walking a few hundred years in her shoes.Object Lessons is published in partnershiTrade Review[B]risk, readable … Brennan circles around the shoes from all angles, and her brief chapters add up to a kaleidoscopic view of feminine public existence, both wide-ranging and thoughtful. * Jezebel *High Heel is poetry in prose, and while a serious work about the shoe in worldwide history and contemporary culture, it sounds more rhythmic, like poetry in motion. * San Francisco Book Review *In High Heel, the wonderful Summer Brennan embraces a slippery, electric conundrum: Does the high heel stand for oppression or power? … In 150 little essays, Brennan goes at it with poetry, literary references, myth, the psychopathology of rape, fairy tales, politics, and fashion history. All is brought off so beautifully that you can’t help reading … High Heel elevates us, keeps us off balance, and sharpens the point. * The Philadelphia Inquirer *Myths about the transformative power of high heels are central to Summer Brennan’s latest book, High Heel. Part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, the book traces the history and cultural associations of high heels, primarily as worn by women. Drawing from Ovid’s tales to Cinderella to witch trials to modern courtrooms, Brennan makes the case that high heels are an apt metaphor for the ways in which women have been hobbled in their mobility. She also tackles the relationship between beauty and suffering, highlighting the fraught nature of reclaiming objects defined under patriarchy for feminism. * Paste *The lovely cadences stack up like so many sand castles that sift iconic examples of high heels into a finely grained pile of pros and cons that each reader will sift through quite differently … Whether you're for them or against them, the radical uncertainty of Brennan's take on high heels is worth reflection. High Heel is a properly modern consideration of what is at stake and it uses thoroughly intriguing methods of inquiry to approach a well-balanced lack of resolution. * PopMatters *From Cinderella’s glass slippers to Carrie Bradshaw’s Manolo Blahniks, Summer Brennan deftly analyzes one of the world’s most provocative and sexualized fashion accessories in High Heel, part of the Object Lessons series from Bloomsbury. Told in 150 vignettes that alternately entertain and educate, disturb and depress, the book ruminates on the ways in which society fetishizes, celebrates, and demonizes the high heel as well as the people, primarily women, who wear them … Whether you see high heels as empowering or a submission to patriarchal gender roles (or land somewhere in between), you’ll likely never look at a pair the same way again after reading High Heel. * Longreads *High Heel is thought-provoking meditation on what it means to move through the world as a woman. Brennan’s book, written in very small sections, is short, but powerful enough to completely change your world view. * Refinery29 *High Heel is a riveting, ferociously intelligent, deeply liberating book. I would like to press a copy of it into the hands of every woman I know—and every man, too. -- Jami Attenberg, author of All Grown Up (2017)In the ongoing book series Object Lessons, about the hidden lives of ordinary things, [Brennan] steps into the shoe as a starting point to consider the politics of femininity and of being a woman in public – from the trouble with fairy tales to Sylvia Plath’s black patent pumps. * The Globe and Mail (Canada) *Table of ContentsPart One The Garden of Forking Paths Part Two Daphne in Flight, Daphne in Flower Part Three Ashes, Sea Foam, Glass, Gold Part Four The Minotaur Part Five A Goddess At The End of the World Acknowledgements Selected Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisCarol J. Adams is the author of numerous books, including the seminal The Sexual Politics of Meat (Bloomsbury Revelations). She is the co-editor of several path-breaking anthologies, including most recently Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (co-edited with Lori Gruen, Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Carol J. Adams Reader (2016). Her work is the subject of two recent anthologies, Defiant Daughters: 21 Women of Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Art of the Animal: 14 Women Artists Explore The Sexual Politics of Meat, in which a new generation of feminists, artists, and activists respond to Adams' groundbreaking work. www.caroljadams.comTrade ReviewBurger draws on an accessible combination of history and pop culture to reconsider America’s obsession with the molded-ground-beef sandwich … [It] explore[s] alternative modes of offering cultural critique, pushing against traditional divisions between academic and popular writing, and between history and critique, in search of new, more palatable forms of packaging the unsettling stories behind the Anglo-American diet. * Humanimalia *Adams provides more fascinating details and insights in this compact monograph than most readers can digest in one reading … Ultimately, Burger is a work of advocacy as well as literature and cultural analysis. * New Orleans Review *Best known for her groundbreaking The Sexual Politics of Meat, Adams would seem the least likely person to write about hamburgers with her philosophically lurid antipathy to carnivory. But if the point is to deconstruct this iconic all-American meal, then she is the woman for the job. * Times Higher Education *Burger is a small book with a big punch … Adams approaches her topic as an animal rights advocate as well as a feminist. She reminds us what the ‘everyday object’ of a hamburger really is: ‘The burger — minced, macerated, ground — is the renamed, reshaped food product furthest away from the animal.’ In this way, taking into account the lives of cows, as well as women, Adams convincingly explores the ‘violence at the heart of the hamburger.' * NPR: 13.7 Cosmos and Culture *It's tempting to say that Burger is a literary meal that fills the reader's need, but that's the essence of Adams' quick, concise, rich exploration of the role this meat (or meatless) patty has played in our lives. No matter our predilections or the political implications that often go with what we choose to consume, it's important to understand all sides of the matter … The Object Lessons series … continues to provide great food for thought. The burger … [is] an adaptable and rich subject that Adams handles with energy, expertise, and good humor. * PopMatters *Burger offers a thoughtful homage to the unsustainable modernist solution to protein delivery. Adams does not lose sight of the cultural importance of the burger’s traditional glory, but she does offer an adventurous reckoning with its impact on the planet. As the climate changes, what will take the place of ground beef in our hearts and minds? Among other things, books like this. * James Hamblin, MD, senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body *Carol J. Adams has written a penetrating meditation on the bronze monument of all American food icons, the burger. Keenly observed, richly annotated, and sometimes fierce, this book examines the identity of the hamburger, along the way unraveling a fascinating tangle of American capitalism, environmental policy, and cultural assimilation—nothing less than the messy, scratch-and-kick pursuit of collective American hungers. Adams shows how food is never just food; it always has a beating symbolic heart. * Amy Thielen, chef, TV cook, and author of The New Midwestern Table and Give a Girl a Knife *Feminist Carol J. Adams – the luminary behind The Sexual Politics of Meat – is changing the social justice landscape once again with Burger … Burger provides a long-overdue analysis of everything from the misogynistic roots of this iconic American meal to the future of the burger (spoiler: it’s vegan). * VegNews *This little book … will be treasured by its readers. Highly recommended. * The Peaceable Table *Based on meticulous, and comprehensive, research, Adams has packed a stunning, gripping expose into these few pages – one that may make you rethink your relationship with this food. Five stars. * San Francisco Book Review *Table of Contents1. Citizen Burger 2. Hamburger 3. Cow Burger 4. Woman Burger 5. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Burger and Other Modernist Hamburger Identity Crises 6. Veggie Burger 7. Moon Shot Burger Afterword: Slippage Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.These days the bicycle often appears as an interloper in a world constructed for cars. An almost miraculous 19th-century contraption, the bicycle promises to transform our lives and the world we live in, yet its time seems always yet-to-come or long-gone-by. Jonathan Maskit takes us on an interdisciplinary ride to see what makes the bicycle a magical machine that could yet make the world a safer, greener, and more just place.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewIn his insightful contribution to the Object Lessons series, Jonathan Maskit dives deep into this great yet humble human invention and its role in transportation. After reading Bicycle, you’ll never think of cycling the same way again * Sanna Lehtinen, Research Fellow, School of Arts, Design, and Architecture, Aalto University, Finland *Table of ContentsList of Figures 1. A Tale of Two Cyborgs 2. A Brief History 3. The Magical Machine 4. The Death Machine 5. What Does It Mean to Share the Road? 6. Right of Way 7. Bicycle Diaries 8. Motorism and Motorists 9. The Visible and the Invisible 10. Ghost Bikes 11. Idaho Stop 12. Space 13. History Repeats Itself 15. Dark Clouds, Silver Linings Acknowledgements Bibliography Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A 3-year-old asks her physician father about his job, and his inability to provide a succinct and accurate answer inspires a critical look at the profession of modern medicine. In sorting through how patients, insurance companies, advertising agencies, filmmakers, and comedians misconstrue a doctor's role, Andrew Bomback, M.D., realizes that even doctors struggle to define their profession. As the author attempts to unravel how much of doctoring is role-playing, artifice, and bluffing, he examines the career of his father, a legendary pediatrician on the verge of retirement, and the health of his infant son, who is suffering from a vague assortment of gastrointestinal symptoms. At turns serious, comedic, analytical, and confessional, Doctor offers an unflinching look at what it means to be a physician today.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in Trade ReviewThis little gem should be required reading included in all medical schools as a reference for lessons in empathy for first- and last-year medical students, and for anyone who watches and is wary of the changes that are taking place in healthcare. Five stars. * Manhattan Book Review *Sweetly composed … As much a tribute to the legacy of his pediatrician father as it is an examination of the healing arts … Bomback covers a lot of territory in this small volume … It's a quick and understandable read that offers doorways to many other avenues worthy of deeper exploration. * PopMatters *With intelligence and humor, Andrew Bomback shows how human beings cope with issues of power and vulnerability. Doctor is an insightful read for anyone who's been on either end of the stethoscope. * Amy Fusselman, author of Idiophone (2018) and The Pharmacist's Mate (2001) *A disarming, candid, precise meditation on the inescapable role that 'complication' or 'luck'—otherwise known as 'fate'—plays in the life of any doctor or patient or, indeed, any human. * David Shields, author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (2008) *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Fourth Wall 2. My Favorite Types of Patients 3. I Have Good News and Bad News 4. You Get Better Because We Are Better 5. Doctors at Home 6. Texters and Emailers and Tweeters 7. What Are Their Names? 8. Highly Attentive Medicine 9. It’s Complicated 10. And It Will Last Forever 11. The Business of Medicine 12. A Diagnosis (Something to Do) 13. Everything You Say Is Important to Me 14. Harp Lies 15. The Longer You Stay, the Longer You Stay 16. The Future Is Already Here 17. History and Physical 18. Don’t Worry Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisRandy Malamud is Regents' Professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is the author of ten books, including Reading Zoos (1998) and An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture (2012). He has written for HuffPost, Salon, Film Quarterly, Chicago Sun-Times, and the Los Angeles Times and has appeared on CNN, BBC, and NPR.Trade ReviewThis involving and innovative volume's aggregation of ephemera will no doubt delight the social historian ... The snappy prose and keen engagement help pull together the text into an engaging and successful snapshot of collective experience. * Times Higher Education *In this slyly subversive little book, part rhapsody, part diatribe, Randy Malamud can’t leave e-mail alone. His exuberant rants and riffs give us a new perspective on our infernal electronic inboxes. A fast, funny, compulsive read. * Mikita Brottman, Professor of Humanistic Studies, Maryland Institute College of Art, USA, and author of An Unexplained Death: The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere (2018) and The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison (2016) *Table of ContentsPre-mail Email Compose Subject Attachment Inbox Send Reply-All Delete Junk Out of Office: After Email Postscript: How to Write and Read an Email Index

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Book SynopsisBest Books of 2019Scholarly KitchenObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Hashtags can silence as well as shout. They originate in the quiet of the archive and the breathless suspense of the control room, and find voice in the roar of rallies in the streets. The #hashtag is a composite creation, with two separate but related design histories: one involving the crosshatch symbol and one about the choice of letters after it.Celebration and criticism of hashtag activism rarely address the hashtag as an object or try to locate its place in the history of writing for machines. Although hashtags tend to be associated with Silicon Valley invention myths or celebrity power users, the story of the hashtag is much longer and more surprising, speaking to how we think about naming, identity, and being human in a non-human world.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewThe hashtag is everywhere--but why and what does it do? In this small book, Liz Losh insightfully answers this question through historical research, case studies, and rhetorical analyses that explore the possibilities, dangers, and limitations of #CommunicateThis; #HijackThis; #DoesThisReallyMakeADifference. Brilliant and compellingly written, it takes on #controversies and helps us understand how gender, race, and labor matter. * Wendy Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Simon Fraser University, Canada, and author of Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2017) *This is the story you didn’t know existed--the story of how one little symbol enabled efficient and powerful communication among human beings and between computers. The hashtag is one of the most interesting communicative inventions of this century. Dr. Losh explains how it got this way in clear language and with an eye for detail. * Siva Vaidhyanathan, Robertson Professor of Media Studies, University of Virginia, USA, and author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (2018) *Table of Contents#HASHTAG #OCTOTHORPE #INVENTOR #PERSON #PLACE #SLOGAN #BRAND #ORIGIN #INTERSECTION #NOISE #CHATTER #FILE #METADATA #ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Notes Index

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Book SynopsisDinah Lenney is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and the author or editor of four books, including The Object Parade (2014). Her essays and reviews have been published in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post among other publications.Trade ReviewLenney’s book, part of the publisher’s Object Lessons series about the ‘hidden lives of ordinary things,’ is a fluid, involving memoir of her experience of coffee, a pleasurable tour of her memories, reflections, and research on the topic … The result is a winning combination of enthusiasm and naïveté, which allows the reader to explore recent research about coffee and its physiological effects, the more esoteric corners of coffee connoisseurship and fandom, and the cultural attitudes to coffee shown by her friends and family without ever feeling lectured ... This deft memoir-cum-meditation is as savory and stimulating as its subject. * Los Angeles Review of Books *Where Lenney really shines… is in her ability to interweave environmental, sociopolitical, and cultural concerns with reflections on time, womanhood, and family. Her lyrical prose is as invigorating as a strong jolt of caffeine. * Alta *True to its subject, this book is a real stimulant: the prose is caffeinated, zany yet serene and habit-forming. Chock full of odd facts, poignant autobiographical vignettes, comic touches, and wistful philosophical insights, it is a delicious brew, all in all, and as fine and accomplished an example of that contemporary form, the extended mosaic essay, as we are likely to encounter. * Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (2013) *If there's ever been a more perfect pairing of author and subject matter, I can't recall it. Dinah Lenney was meant to write this book. I could say this is not just a book about coffee, but we knew that already. So what I will say is that it's about all that coffee represents; being awake, being cozy, being able to savor what's in your cup as well as what's in your life. Lenney's mastery of these lessons comes from her mastery of the fleeting moment, the quiet revelation, the unlikely holiness of even the most ordinary objects and everyday rituals. She's more than an observer of the world in her midst, she's a precise and careful excavator of the ground beneath her feet. How lucky we are to dig alongside her. * Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion (2014) and The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars (2019) *An expert brew of research, memoir, and introspection, this lovely and satisfying book delivers many pleasures also found in a perfect cup of espresso. Reading Dinah Lenney, one's brain and heart feel quickened. Lenney's writing throughout is moving, intimate, eager, graceful, discerning, tender. The generosity of her self-examining candor and the warmth with which she admits us into her life play off beautifully against her natural reporter's curiosity. And happily, the salutary effects of Lenney's excellent prose last much longer than the buzz of mere caffeine. * Amy Gerstler, author of Scattered at Sea (2015) *Dinah Lenney is a treasure. The acuity of her eye, the precision of her voice: Reading Coffee is like savoring the notes, the nuances, of a finely brewed cup. Energizing and engaging, full of deft and unexpected narrative turns, this book reminds us of the depths inherent in the simplest pleasures, as well as the ongoing relationships and daily interactions that add up to a life. * David L. Ulin, author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles (2015) *Reading Dinah Lenney's frenetic ditty on coffee mimics the thing itself: one tries to quit it, but can't; one tries to put it down, only to pick it up again for stimulus, for agitation, for one more lasting epiphany! * Mark Yakich, Gregory F. Curtin, S.J., Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, and author of Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Spiritual Exercises (2019) *Table of ContentsPrologue 1. The Impossibility of the Task 2. My Mother Is Coming, My Mother Is Coming The Questionnaire 3. Coffee-Milk From the Coffee Diaries #1 4. My Emerging Palate A Coffee Story (Third-Hand) 5. What We Talk About When We Talk About Coffee (Teresa Was Right) 6. Coffee in Brooklyn 7. Twenty-Two Hands... A Coffee Story (First-Hand) Rules Shmules (Just a Few, in No Particular Order) These Things About Coffee Are True From the Coffee Diaries #2 8. Serious Business 9. Shouldn’t Coffee Taste Like Coffee? (If You Say So) 10. Coffee in Paris 11. Extending the Metaphor 12. All the Things You Are 13. The Power of Suggestion 14. One More Prompt 15. Am I Blue From the Coffee Diaries #3 16. A Word About Tea A Riddle (Excellent Advertising) From the Coffee Diaries #4 17. Reunion Coffee and My Father From the Coffee Diaries #5 From the Coffee Diaries #6 18. Coffee and Catastrophe From the Coffee Diaries #7 19. Coffee in Echo Park 20. Coffee and the Jews Coffee and Dad 21. The Widow 22. Altered States From the Coffee Diaries #8 From the Coffee Diaries #9 From the Coffee Diaries #10 Epilogue Acknowledgements My Coffee Book Fort (Further Reading) Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The story of the compact disc is also the story of the end of physical media. It is the story of how the quest for perfection laid the grounds for the death of a great industry. For in the passage from analogue media, like records and tapes, to digital formats, like CDs, something changed in the nature of media and in the relationship we have with music. Music became code, a sequence of 1s and 0s, a flow of pure information. The material structure of the medium itself was always supposed to disappear. But the physical has proved to possess an uncanny knack for returning. Today the CD is a zombie medium, still popular amongst certain avant-garde record labels and Japanese consumers. Against all the odds, the spectre endures.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewThis thoughtful, elegantly written little book pays homage to that least loved of music formats, the compact disc. Filled with engaging anecdotes and philosophical observations, the book offers a concise cultural history of audio recording, describing the vicissitudes of the music industry and the dissolution of sonic objects into codes and clouds. * Christoph Cox, Professor of Philosophy, Hampshire College, USA, and author of Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (2018) *Robert Barry rekindles our wonder for the technology that ‘put a laser in your living room.’ Futuristic and confounding, the CD converted light into sound, philosophers into audio critics, and audio critics into philosophers. But this book is more than the story of a format whose perfection laid the groundwork for its own demise--it’s also an intercultural history of light, the quest for technological perfection, and the art of critiquing that quest through glitches, skips, and stutters. * Mack Hagood, Robert H. and Nancy J. Blayney Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies, Miami University of Ohio, USA, and author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (2019) *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 The Little Disc 2 The Faithful Disc 3 The Wounded Disc 4 The Undead Disc Postscript Acknowledgements Select Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment. Our engagement with the world''s oceans can be destructive, as with today's deluge of plastic trash and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasizes the frailty and resilience of human experience. From ancient stories of shipwrecked sailors to the containerized future of 21st-century commerce, Ocean splashes the histories we thought we knew into salty and unfamiliar places.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewSteve Mentz’s Ocean is both a lyrical and scholarly ode to the sea, encrusting and fluid. * The Millions *Oceans are big things, so Steve Mentz has made a concise book of them. From sailors as cyborgs to Queequeg as a mermaid, from Conrad's mirrored sea to Emily Dickinson's marine visions, Mentz swims like Coleridge's library cormorant, collecting glittering things. The result is a wild and wonderful work; part essay, part reverie, wholly full of watery brilliance. * Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR (2018) *Ocean: a tiny word, but an expansive ecology made fathomable by Mentz's exploration of the human attraction to and fear of the world's oceans as illuminated through poetry, history, and literature. A wondrous read. * Lynne Cox, author of Swimming to Antartica: Tales of a Long-distance Swimmer (2004), Grayson (2006), and Swimming in the Sink: A Memoir (2016) *Mentz takes us on an invigorating 'adventure in thinking,' across vast temporalities and aquatic expanses, rich with strange confluences, and haunted by the terrors of 'wet globalization.' Against the impossibility of understanding the ocean, he casts an inventive blue humanities that lures us with its histories, poetry, theories, queer couplings, exultations, and immersive practices. * Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016) *Table of ContentsDeterratorializing Preface 1. Two Origins: Alien or Core? 2. Seafood before History 3. Myth I: Odysseus, not Achilles 4. Wet Globalization I: The Premodern Anthropocene 5. Sea Poetry I: Adamastor as Warning and Gate 6. Sailors: A Technological History 7. Interlude: Port of New York 8. Sea Poetry II: The Sea in Emily Dickinson 9. Myth II: Queequeg and Other Mermaids 10. Wet Globalization II: Containers 11. Blue Environmentalism: Rachel Carson 12. Swimmers: Immersive Histories Acknowledgments Reading the Blue Humanities: A Bibliographical Essay Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. From its origins in the late 19th century to its decline in the 21st, Sheila Liming's Office narrates a cultural history of a place that has arguably been the primary site of labor in the postmodern economy. During the post-war decades of the 20th century, the office rose to prominence in culture, achieving an iconic status that is reflected in television, film, literature, and throughout the history of advertising. Most people are well versed in the clichés of office culture, despite evidence that an increasing number of us no longer work in offices. With the development of computing technology in the 1980s and 90s, the office underwent many changes. Microsoft debuted its suite of multitasking applications known as Microsoft Office in 1989, firing the first shot in the war for the office's survival. This book therefore poses the question: how did culture become organized aTrade ReviewWhile most of us are all too familiar with the computer screens and supply closets of our own offices, Sheila Liming reintroduces us — through literature, film, television, historical research, and personal memoir — to those other bureaucratic objects that define the office as a distinctive environment: from office plants and office parties to typing pools and networking clubs. In sparkling and witty prose, Liming diagrams the office’s anatomy and social ecology as it has evolved from the mid-19th century to today — and as we reassess its relevance in a future defined by freelancing and social distancing. * Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology, The New School, USA, and author of Code + Clay, Data + Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media *Office is a feat of delightful prose and a suite of engrossing stories: a mini history of labor, architecture, and pop culture; a stirring analysis of social hierarchies; a smart study of physical spaces that is also a necessary critique of economic ideology. Liming’s lithe book is unputdownable! * Anna Kornbluh, Associate Head and Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA, and author of Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury, 2019) *The author draws on both literature and personal experience to make an accessible and thought-provoking read that in effect poses the question: How did culture become organised around the idea of the office, and how will it change? * Work & Place *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Office as Space 2. The Office as Stockpile 3. The Office as Hierarchy 4. The End of the Office Acknowledgments Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Feared and worshiped in equal measure, snakes have captured the imagination of poets, painters, and philosophers for centuries. From Ice Age cave drawings to Snakes on a Plane, this creature continues to enthrall the public. But what harm has been caused by our mythologizing? While considering the dangers of stigma, Erica Wright moves from art and pop culture to religion, fetish, and ecologic disaster. This book considers how the snake has become more symbol than animal, a metaphor for how we treat whatever scares us the most, whether or not our panic is justified.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.Trade ReviewCaptivating * Lit Reactor *Deeply personal and highly readable…The navigation among such disparate topics, often at a rapid pace, is decidedly easy going, which has to be attributed to Wright’s accessible and captivating voice… Snake is full of power, packed with sobering reminders about the human-animal relationship and our responsibility in maintaining it. * Chapter16 *We give no creature as much cultural meaning as we do the snake, as Erica Wright shows us in this winning tour through history and biology, religion and fear, medicine and fashion. But the real meat of this book is Wright’s bright sensibility. What she sees when she writes about snakes includes: environmental and biological apocalypse, the meaning of fear, existential crises trying to sleep through the night in an absolutely dark cave, the complicated sublime, "the grace alongside the fangs…awful and beautiful together.” That’s the genius of this book: the self as both instrument and subject. As it turns out, what we talk about when we talk about snakes is ourselves. * Ander Monson, Professor of English, University of Arizona, USA, and author of I Will Take the Answer (2020) *Table of ContentsPreface 1. Kingsnakes and Beauty Queens 2. The Problem of the Serpent 3. From Mademoiselle Dorita to Britney Spears: The Snake Charmer Girls 4. A Mouse in Your Teeth 5. Say Amen and Pass the Cottonmouth 6. Python Pocketbooks 7. Who’s a Good Boy? 8. Snakes Are Not Cheap: Titanoboa and Other Monsters in the Lake 9. The Hobbyist 10. Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth 11. Magnanimity and True Courage Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisEva Barbarossa is a writer and researcher based in Los Angeles and Italy. Her writing has appeared in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Surface, and The Island Review.Trade ReviewEva Barbarossa delights in details and shows how much fun technology can be when science appears to be magic. * Mark Kurlansky, author of Paper: Paging Through History (2016), Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas (2018), and Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of a Common Fate (forthcoming 2019) *In this delightful and engaging account, Eva Barbarossa shows us how our attraction to magnets is just as much part of culture as it is science--and has been for millennia. Magnet brings together everything from magic and mystery to mesmerism and MRIs as Barbarossa unpacks the meaning of a magnet's pull. Magnet is a must read. * Lydia Pyne, author of Bookshelf (2016) and Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff (forthcoming 2019) *Table of ContentsPrologue In which I eat hundreds of magnets. 1. Birth In which humans find a stone with magical properties. 2. Earth In which we discover we live on an ancient magnet. 3. Home In which we use magnets to find our way. 4. Alignment In which man and beast align to the magnetic fields. 5. North In which we hunt for polar magnets. 6. Health In which we believe magnets harm and heal. 7. Transcendence In which magnetic fluids provide hope. 8. Tricks In which we use magnets to make trouble. 9. Toys In which we find magnets for play and pedagogy. 10. Technology In which everything needs a magnet. Afterword In which I do not eat more magnets. Acknowledgements Selected sources Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Cropping up everywhere, whether steel latticework or tapered monopoles, encrusted with fiberglass antennas, cell towers raise up high into the air the communications equipment that channels our calls, texts, and downloads. For security reasons, their locations are never advertised. But it's our romantic notions of connectivity that hide them in plain sight. We want the network to be invisible, ethereal, and ubiquitous. The cell tower stands as a challenge to these desires. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewAs Steven E. Jones observes, we imagine that our mobile devices connect us to each other, and to a certain version of the world, in a manner that’s invisible and ethereal. But in fact, this illusion depends on a great multiplicity of 200-foot-tall structures that we see, or decline to see, wherever we go: cell towers. Briskly deconstructing these enablers of our digital lives as physical objects, and as quasi-magical connectors of the immaterial, Jones reveals them as secret object-icons of our time. Once you’ve read this, you won’t be able to stop seeing--and thinking about--the cell phone tower. * Rob Walker, author of The Art of Noticing (2019) *Table of Contents1. Cellspotting 2. Invisible waves 3. Camouflage 4. Ethereal connections 5. Design 6. Coverage 7. On Earth List of Figures Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisChristopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2013), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), and The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), all published by Bloomsbury.Trade Review[Schaberg] makes sharp observations on the Anthropocene's reflection across the span of human projects, from the most insignificant to the most magnificent. Schaberg divides the book into two parts: ‘Home Sick’ and ‘Jet Lag.’ … Each part comprises multiple short pieces that speak to large ecological themes. Each piece is a treat of ecological wisdom, self-reflection, critical imagination, and elegant writing. Searching for the Anthropocene carries the ecocritical lessons beyond Michigan and midwestern America to the continental US and beyond, demonstrating how the human ecological footprint has grown into the Anthropocene. An invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocriticism, critical theory, and environmental studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. * CHOICE *Moving nimbly between personal narrative and academic theory, Christopher Schaberg locates the Anthropocene in compelling, illustrative sites--from the sand dunes of his Michigan childhood where he gathered stones derived from 350-million-year-old coral to the new billion-dollar airport terminal being built, ill-advisedly, just above sea level in his current home of New Orleans. This is an elegantly-written book that guides us through the dizzying epiphanies of scale, co-implication, and self-recognition that the Anthropocene concept demands. * Nicole Seymour, Associate Professor of English and Environmental Studies Program Advisor, California State University, Fullerton, USA, and author of Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (2018) *Christopher Schaberg wanders Michigan's north woods and far flung airfields to lyrically ferret out the absurdity of the 'Anthropocene.' Schaberg shows how Homo sapiens are no longer in charge of anything, despite our terrifying and irreversible wounding of a planet reeling from climate change. It's a coin-toss whether there will be anything around at the end of the next decade capable of reading this fine book. * Doug Peacock, author of Grizzly Years (1996) and Walking It Off (2005) *Searching for the Anthropocene is a lyrical reckoning with what it means to love and remember talismanic places in a time when the very foundations of our environmental consciousness have shifted. In this restless search from the shores of Michigan to New Orleans, what Schaberg finds are the contours of a new Nature, one etched with both the tragedy and beauty of human activity. * James Barilla, Associate Professor of English, University of South Carolina, USA, and author of My Backyard Jungle: The Adventures of an Urban Wildlife Lover Who Turned His Yard into Habitat and Learned to Live with It (2013) *Christopher Schaberg embarks on a captivating personal journey that effortlessly weaves experiences in the natural world with the unresolved landscapes of the Anthropocene. He's a competent guide through the quixotic stories we tell ourselves in an attempt to tame a future that terrifies us. * Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions (2012) *What sort of home-makers have we become now we are living so at large in the world? Christopher Schaberg's vivid and original sketchbook reflections on anthropogenic change, as it has transformed the landscapes of once rural Michigan and as it has created a new and defining world habitat in airports and air travel, are really worth having. Here, in his book, academic theoretical thinking that has stirred and shaken our understanding of how we now live in modern nature is usefully tested in the remnant wild, as it were, by being taken for a walk along a polluted beach or by waiting with the rest of us in the economy lounge. Mostly the news is bad, but Schaberg's smart and fine writing answers the still relevant question Bertolt Brecht posed in a mid-20th-century poem: 'Will there be singing in the dark times?'--'Yes, there will be singing--about the dark times.' * Tim Dee, author of Four Fields (2013), Landfill (2018), and Greenery (2020) *Searching for the Anthropocene is a welcome addition to the expanding literature of the epoch. The personal anecdotes recounted by Schaberg are poignant, relatable and relevant to the fast-paced narrative of the Anthropocene whilst drawing attention to the difficulties of writing about place within this context. * Meghann Hillier-Broadley, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism *Interwoven with personal narrative, pop-culture references, and ecological thought, Searching for the Anthropocene: A Journey into the Environmental Humanities builds a path for us to follow through this period we have both defined and rejected. * Sam Risak, Terrain.org *Table of ContentsList of Figures Part I Home Sick Part II Jet Lag Acknowledgements Reprint Acknowledgements Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA WIRED 2020 Book of the YearObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Nothing''s bulletproof, the salesman said. The thing''s only bullet resistant. The New York Times journalist Kenneth R. Rosen had just purchased his first bulletproof vest and was headed off on assignment. He was travelling into Mosul, Iraq, when he realized that the idea of a bulletproof vest is more effective than the vest itself. From its very inception, poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide, or Kevlar, was meant for tires. Its humble roots and mundane applications are often lost, as it is now synonymous with body armor, war zones, and domestic terrorism. What Rosen learned through intimate use of his vest was that it acts as a metaphor for all the precautions we take toward digital, physical, and social security. Bulletproof Vest is at once an introspective journey into the properties and precisions of a bulleTrade ReviewIn Bulletproof Vest, Rosen explores the significance of this war zone accessory with compelling nuance and knowledge of military history. Perhaps more impressive, though, is his willingness to explore the relationship between military protective gear and human vulnerability. * LA Review of Books *For the author, a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, the idea of a bulletproof vest (or a ‘bullet resistant’ one, as the salesman reminded him) suggested a potent metaphor for humanity’s relationship to violence, security, and mortality. His book mixes his own wartime accounts from Iraq and Syria with discussions of anxiety and the history of body armor; along the way, Rosen seeks to describe just what he was trying to banish when he put on his vest. The author’s prose alternates between being confessional and informative … Over the course of this reliably tense book, Rosen does a wonderful job of emphasizing the destructive power of warfare by framing his thoughts around account of being a noncombatant in a war zone. Overall, it’s a quick read but one with great impact, as it asks its audience not only to think about protective vests, but also about the soft, vulnerable things that they’re meant to protect. A compelling, thoughtful dive into the pursuit of being bulletproof. * Kirkus Reviews *Kenneth Rosen, war-reporter, journalist, abyss-looker, intuiter of the human spirit, presents the materials of war, stitches them together in a fascinating story that shows no matter how tight and polymeric the jacket, the true dangers of war are the mental wounds that go straight to your head. His insights into war do what they can to protect us from those wounds--but like the vest, offer an imperfect protection. Thankfully, Kenneth’s words are near perfect and perfectly moving. * Nicole Walker, Professor of English at Northern Arizona University, USA, and author of Sustainability: A Love Story (2018) *A tense but beautifully written frontlines study of war in the fashion of Michael Herr's Vietnam era book 'Dispatches.' * The Day (Conn.) *Table of ContentsPreface: Notes from My Suicide 1. Every Day Was Striking 2. A Thin Metal Sheet 3. Enjoy the War 4. Wholly Aromatic Carbocylic Polycarbonamide Fiber Having Orientation Angle of Less Than About 45 Degrees 5. PPE for Your Thoughts? 6. Support Your Local War Correspondent 7. A Cult of Anxiety 8. Safety is a Cabin in the Woods References Acknowledgments Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Gin tastes like Christmas to some and rotten pine chips to others, but nearly everyone familiar with the spirit holds immediate gin nostalgia. Although early medical textbooks treated it as a healing agent, early alchemists (as well as their critics) claimed gin's base was a path to immortalityand also Satan's tool. In more recent times, the gin trade consolidated the commercial and political power of nations and prompted a social campaign against women. Gin has been used successfully as a defense for murder; blamed for massive unrest in 18th-century England; and advertised for as an abortifacient. From its harshest proto-gin distillation days to the current smooth craft models, gin plays a powerful cultural role in film, music, and literatureone that is arguably older, broader, and more complex than any other spirit. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay seriTrade ReviewIn this expansive volume, Shonna Milliken Humphrey traces the history of gin, exploring the ways it’s been imbibed and the other uses it’s had throughout human history — some of which may surprise you. * Inside Hook *The book is far from a staid account – strange history, trivia, recipes and anecdotes abound, and Humphrey weaves autobiographical episodes throughout, making for an engaging read. * Portland Press Herald *I loved this book even more than I love gin, which is saying a lot. William Blake found a world in a grain of sand, but here Shonna Milliken Humphrey finds the whole universe in a juniper berry. By turns erudite and hilarious, thoughtful and provocative, Shonna shows us the history of the spirit, and—at times—her own heart. One of the most delightful books I’ve ever read. * Jennifer Finney Boylan, Author of Good Boy and She's Not There *This book is written in a light and fun way. Humphrey does a good job of giving you a quick overview to the history of gin, its origins, and evolution ... as a quick intro, and potential stocking filler this book works well. * Irish Tech News *This riveting little pocket-sized book about gin provides excellent rumination for the festive season. * The Australian Women's Weekly *Table of Contents1. Gin and Juice: An Introduction 2. A Potent Three-Letter Etymology 3. The Basics: Juniper 4. The Basics: Distillation 5. Class and Type 6. The Great Style Divide 7. Dutch Courage and the British Navy 8. The British Gin Craze 9. Ice Harvest, American Style 10. Gincidents 11. Portraiture and Visuals 12. Lyrics and Verse 13. Film and Literature 14. Ginaissance Acknowledgments Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Hope, as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, is the thing with feathers. Erik Anderson, on the other hand, regards our obsession with birds as too sentimental, too precious. Birds don't express hope. They express themselves. But this tension between the versions of nature that lodge in our minds and the realities that surround us is the central theme of Bird. This is no field guide. It's something far more unusual and idiosyncratic, balancing science with story, anatomy with metaphor, habitat with history. Anderson illuminates the dark underbelly of our bird fetish and offers a fresh, alternative vision of one of nature's most beloved objects.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewAnderson follows the trail of fallen tail feathers across the grid, articulating his findings with an undeniable personal touch, and a philosophical sting that leaves you wondering, ‘what made us fall so deeply in love with birds? Why did it stick? What is beauty?’ among other considerations. Anderson is the lead explorer in a journey that, for many, is long overdue. Before we know it, the journey extends farther than bird-watching and observation, and we are left looking at nature with the absence of our human goggles. * 433 Magazine *“In his engaging writing style, Anderson skillfully introduces the reader to the spectacular world of birds…” * San Francisco Book Review *From tiny corpses to obsessive scientists, hot sauce on the Gulf and tears in the Hall of Asian Animals, Bird is at once a quirky natural history and a personal journey, one that says as much about humanity as about the feathered creatures we have eaten, shot, studied, extincted, protected, and, sometimes, watched. As I write these words, science tells us North American bird populations have declined by a third. Reading this book is one of the steps we can take toward giving birds back to the air that belongs, first, to them. * Christopher Cokinos, Associate Professor of English, University of Arizona, USA, and author of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (2009) and Bodies, of the Holocene (2013) *Table of Contents1 Put a Bird on It 2 The Hater’s Guide to Birds 3 The Buoy Bird 4 The Hater’s Guide to Birds 5 What a Name Can Do 6 The Hater’s Guide to Birds 7 There Never Was a Bird Acknowledgments Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.In an election year, political signs can be impossible to avoid. They're in front yards, on bumper stickers, and in some places you might never have expected. Tobias Carroll chronicles the permutations and secret histories of political signs, venturing into the story of how they came to be and illuminating how the signs around us shape us in ways we often fail to appreciate. In an era of political polarization and heated debate, what can be learned from studying how our personal space becomes the setting for both? Understanding political signs can help us understand our current political moment, and how we might transcend it.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewA page-turner of cultural analysis and shrewd observation. * Los Angeles Review of Books *During a moment in which Americans are besieged by an onslaught of political messaging from the sublime to the ridiculous, this slim, thoughtful volume helps make sense of what we’re seeing. Tobias Carroll has written a timely meditation on the political sign, an object that telegraphs our deeply held beliefs and exists in 'the space between poetry and prose'… You won’t look at a MAGA hat the same way again. * NPR's Book Concierge *The artifacts he examines look more curious than their familiarity would suggest. * Inside Higher Ed *We have long been taught to think about the politics of signs, but less often is this applied to political signs themselves—our yard signs and bumper stickers and billboards—these strange creatures of the American electoral landscape, some proliferating and gone like dandelions, others stuck in place like barnacles, even as years of political changes leave them as decontextualized fossils. In this brisk and encompassing work, Tobias Carroll examines and makes strange these instruments of power and change and reaction, offering us a sharp and unyielding look at everything that is on the surface that we still do not see. * Mark Doten, author of Trump Sky Alpha *Tobias Carroll has opened my eyes to the signs around me, and now I can’t stop seeing. * Alexis Coe, author of You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George of Washington and Alice+Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Ubiquity of Yard Signs 2. The Sign Wars 3. The Business of Signs 4. The Pros and Cons of Being Generic 5. Political Signs in the Public Eye 6. Signs as Shorthand, Signs as Remakes 7. On Protest Signs 8. The Making of a Protest Sign 9. Sports & Signs & Sponsors 10. Signs in the Seats Interlude: The Punk Chapter 11. Knives Bats New (Political) Tats 12. HOPE and Its Discontents 13. When Art Is a Sign 14. When a Sign Is Art Conclusion Acknowledgments & Thanks Notes Index

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Book SynopsisClaudia Brodsky marshals her equal expertise in literature and philosophy to redefine the terms and trajectory of the theory and interpretation of modern poetry. Taking her cue from Wordsworth's revolutionary understanding of real language, Brodsky unfolds a provocative new theory of poetry, a way of looking at poetry that challenges traditional assumptions. Analyzing both theory and practice, and taking in a broad swathe of writers and thinkers from Wordsworth to Rousseau to Hegel to Proust, Brodsky is at pains to draw out the transformative, active, and effective power of literature. Poetry, she says, is only worthy of the name when it is not the property of the poet but of society, when it is valued for what it does. Words'' Worth is a bold new work, by a leading scholar of literature, which demands a response from all students and scholars of modern poetry.Trade ReviewIn this compelling study, Claudia Brodsky radically revises our understanding of what the poet does, above all by developing dazzling readings of what Wordsworth meant by such central terms as real language, imagination, and nature. Through Brodsky’s tenacious, fine-grained readings of Wordsworth’s poetry and poetics – and also through her perceptive discussions of other writers from Diderot to De Man – language emerges as uniquely active and as capable of producing a distinctive kind of knowledge that goes beyond the merely empirical. This is a revelatory book that will transform our sense of the capacities of poetry for good. * Ross Wilson, University Lecturer in English, University of Cambridge, UK, and author of Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (2013) *'Word's worth' or the 'worthy purpose' of language, and in particular what Wordsworth called alternately 'the real language of men' and 'the language really spoken by men,' is the subject of Claudia Brodsky's illuminating book. In a series of suggestive readings of Wordsworth's poetry and prose Brodsky discovers a force of this real and really spoken language that is analogous to the transcendental power to think what cannot be known in the cognitive sense--what Kant called the sublime. * Kevin McLaughlin, Dean of the Faculty and George Hazard Crooker Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Brown University, USA, and author of Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant (2014) *In Words' Worth, Claudia Brodsky accomplishes the seemingly impossible: an original reading of Wordsworth that renders his potent commonplaces strange, much in the manner of the poet himself. Rigorously lucid and seriously playful, engaging a range of interlocutors from Kant to Rousseau to Proust to Hegel to de Man, this meditation on language, aesthetics, power and knowledge puts Wordsworth’s work into philosophical motion, uniting poetry, philosophy and the work of the critic herself in a common endeavor of making and/as knowing. * Helen Deutsch, Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles, USA *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Part I. Language Theory and Poetics 1. Wordsworth and the “Material Difference” of the “Real Language of Men” 2. A “Complex Scene” 3. “What the Poet Does” 4. The Poetics of Contradiction 5. “The True Difficulty” 6. “Spontaneous Overflow” Staged Part II. “Real Language” in Action 7. “Strange Fits” 8. “A Slumber . . .” 9. “Imagination” Part III. Necessary Poetics: Theory of the Real 10. “The Real Horizon” (Beyond Emotion): “Living Things” “That Do Not Live Like Living Men,” or the “Path” of the Subject Crossed 11. “The Real Horizon” (Before Emotion): What Proust (Rousseau, Diderot, and Hegel) Had "in" Mind Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.When is the beautiful game at its most beautiful? How does football function as a lens through which so many view their daily lives? What's right in front of fans that they never see? Football celebrates and scrutinizes the world's most popular sportfrom top-tier professionals to children just learning the game. As an American who began playing football in the 1970s as it gained a foothold in the States, Mark Yakich reflects on his own experiences alongside the sport's social and political implications, its narrative and documentary depictions, and its linguistic idiosyncrasies. Illustrating how football can be at once absolutely vital and only a game, this book will be surprising and insightful for the casual and diehard fan alike.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewFootball is Mark Yakich's reflection on not only the sport itself, but on his own experiences alongside it, from the ways it is portrayed, its implications, and even its language. * Buzzfeed *In the times of pandemic soccer, Mark Yakich rediscovered the importance of a harmless disease: fever pitch. His well informed and passionate book on the “beautiful game” is a survival kit. It shows that reading about football can be as intense and joyful as smelling the grass. * JUAN VILLORO is the author of half a dozen novels, including God is Round: Tackling the Giants, Villains, Triumphs, and Scandals of the World's Favorite Game, and a columnist for the newspapers Reforma and El Periódico de Catalunya. In 2004, he received the Herralde Prize for his novel El testigo (The Witness). *New Orleans is my favorite city, and pickup is my favorite thing; naturally, I loved reading about Yakich's hometown game, which serves as a starting point for thoughtful, affectionate reflections on football in all its forms. * Gwendolyn Oxenham, author of Under the Lights and in the Dark: Untold Stories of Women’s Soccer and Finding the Game: Three years, Twenty-five Countries, and the Search for Pickup Soccer *In this lyric study of the sport of football, Mark Yakich invites us to look away from the bright lights of Wembley and the Maracanã to the ordinary, unmaintained pitches where football is doing its most sacred work. Through stories of his own reverie during pick-up games in New Orleans during the height of the pandemic, to memorable lore of football’s eccentric legends, to an etymological survey of the varied global languages of the game, Yakich reveals football’s power to help people realize our interconnectedness - and to restore us. * Benjamin Gucciardi, founder of Soccer Without Borders *Table of Contents1. Introduction to a Slightly New Game 2. A Concession 3. The Name of the Game 4. Popularity, Contests 5. Standstill 6. How to Make a Football 7. Two Games 8. 90-Minute Meds 9. Geisterspiel 10. Pickup 11. The Life-Changing Magic of Three-Touch 12. Of Nutmegs and Fish up a Tree 13. For the Love of a Pretty Move 14. Zone 15. A 21st Century Portrait 16. Zone Painting 17. Future Stronger in Color 18. Reset 19. The Best Seats 20. Hacking, Diving, Hugging 21. Intersectionality 22. Live Football in a Pandemic 23. Child’s Play 24. Assessment Acknowledgments Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Recipe reveals the surprising lessons that recipes teach, in addition to the obvious instructions on how to prepare a dish or perform a process. These include lessons in hospitality, friendship, community, family and ethnic heritage, tradition, nutrition, precision and order, invention and improvisation, feasting and famine, survival and seduction and love. A recipe is a signature, as individual as the cook's fingerprint; a passport to travel the world without leaving the kitchen; a lifeline for people in hunger and in want; and always a means to expand one's worldview, if not waistline.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewFascinating. . . . [Bloom] explains how recipes unite us, contain lessons about hospitality, and can be a signature as individual as fingerprints. * Globe and Mail *Lynn Bloom’s Recipe celebrates the complications and contradictions, the serious and play, the bounty and scarcity, represented by the simple instructions that put food on the table. This book, like the object itself, 'exists as much in the imagination' as on the plate, a satisfying examination of the marvelous 'process and promise' of the humble recipe. * Karen Babine, author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life *A really great read. * Randomly Yours, Alex *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Secret Life of Recipes 1. “First, Turn and Face the Stove.” The Recipe as an Instruction Guide 2. “You say toma¯to, I say tomahto”: The Recipe as Conversation 3. A Taste of Home: The Recipe for Comfort Cooking in Tough Times 4. Joys of Cooking—and Eating: The Great American Thanksgiving Celebration Recipe 5. “Please, sir, I want some more.” The Recipe as a Manifestation of Power, Politics Poverty, and Punishment 6. Play With Your Food, the Recipe as Jazz Lagniappe: The Best Blueberry Pie Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Our sense of smell is crucial to our survival. We can smell fear, disease, food. Fragrance is also entertainment. We can smell an expensive bottle of perfume at a high-end department store. Perhaps it reminds us of our favorite aunt. A memory in a bottle is a powerful thing. Megan Volpert''s Perfume carefully balances the artistry with the science of perfume. The science takes us into the neurology of scent receptors, how taste is mostly smell, the biology of illnesses that impact scent sense, and the chemistry of making and copying perfume. The artistry of perfume involves the five scent families and symbolism, subjectivity in perfume preference, perfume marketing strategies, iconic scents and perfumers, why the industry is so secretive, and Volpert''s own experiments with making perfume. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic<Trade ReviewFascinating. * Zoomer *Perfume is an enthusiastic exploration worthy of its complex subject, pointing to mysteries related to the art and science of fragrance and welcoming newcomers to revel in them — with the understanding that some may never be solved. * Elizabeth Barrial, Founder and Head Perfumer, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab *A well-researched delight. * Glam Adelaide *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Science 2. Literature 3. Space 4. Time 5. Technology 6. Performance 7. Self 8. Other Selected Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisWhat happens when fashionable forms of unserious speech prove to be contagious, when they adulterate and weaken communicative spheres that rely on honesty, trust, and sincerity? Demonstrating how the tension between irony and avowal constitutes a central conflict in Fontane's works, this book argues that his best-known society novels play out a struggle between the incompatible demands of these two modes of speaking. Read in this light, the novels identify an irreconcilable discrepancy between word and deed as both the root of emotional discord and the proximate cause of historical and political upheaval. Given the alarm since 2016 over unreliability, falsehood, and indifference to truth, it is now easier to perceive in Fontane's novels a profound concern about language that is not sincere and not meant to be taken literally. For Fontane, irony exemplifies a discrepancy between language and meaning, a loosening of the ethical bond between words and the things to which they refer. HTrade Review[Theodor Fontane] suggests intriguing critical and theoretical reorientations. * The German Quarterly *An original and invigorating approach to the social novels of Theodor Fontane, this sensitive study examines how Fontane’s use of language traverses the gradations between avowal and irony. Tucker reveals that this 19th-century German novelist was a sharp observer and critic of the ‘Berlin idiom’ and its historical consequences. He demonstrates that, in the end and despite all his ironic play with language, Fontane seeks accuracy and reliability in human conversation, a ‘tighter . . . connection between words and things.’ Tucker’s insightful parsing of Fontane’s brilliant engagement with language inspires us to read these novels anew amid the delusions and confusions of our own ‘post-truth’ moment. * Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Director of Comparative Literature, Washington University in St. Louis, USA *In this important study, Brian Tucker examines the tension between serious and ironic language in Theodor Fontane’s work. By showing how Foucault’s concept of avowal can serve as an antidote to corrosive irony, Tucker demonstrates the ways in which Fontane’s fiction exposes the corruption of language in his contemporary Prussian society. Tucker develops his argument through lucid readings of Fontane’s major novels, challenging along the way the common assumption that linguistic decadence is the inevitable byproduct of historical change. The book makes a major contribution to Fontane scholarship and shows why Fontane’s writings continue to resonate deeply today. * Todd Kontje, Distinguished Professor and Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of California at San Diego, USA *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Editions and Translations Introduction 1. The Dilemma of Choice in Irrungen, Wirrungen 2. The Broken Word: On the Rhetoric of Trust and Honor in Schach von Wuthenow 3. Graf Petöfy and the Empty Vow 4. L’Adultera, Adulteration, and Avowal 5. Unwiederbringlich, or the Impotence of Being Earnest 6. Haunting Ambivalence: The Rhetorical Education of Effi Briest 7. All Talk: In Lieu of a Conclusion, Stechlin Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisWhile many of Freud's original formulations have required either revision or rejection and replacement with newer models, his cultural books, such as Civilization and Its Discontents and Totem and Taboo, though extremely influential in the early part of the 20th century, have more recently been either neglected or else dismissed as long-outdated fantasies. Robert A. Paul shows that Freud''s ideas in these books, and his thinking on how human society is possible, given the unpromising materials out of which it is constructed (i.e. human beings), can appear in a different and more favorable light when viewed through the lens of contemporary anthropology, cultural studies, and evolutionary theory.Trade ReviewBased on his dual inheritance theory, Robert Paul provides us with an excellent integration of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking, evolutionary theory, and cultural anthropology, without minimizing the contributions of each of them. This thought-provoking book shows ways to bridge the gap between the disciplines and how this opens up new insights and approaches for psychoanalytic theory-building. * Werner Bohleber, PhD, psychoanalyst, former editor-in-chief of the German psychoanalytic journal Psyche *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Stream and the Road Part I. DROSS INTO GOLD: Recuperating Freud’s Social Theory 1. Freud’s Theory of Society 2. Biology and Culture in Civilization and Its Discontents 3. Yes, the Primal Crime Did Take Place PART II. LIKE RABBITS OR LIKE ROBOTS? Sexual versus Non-Sexual Reproduction in the Western Tradition 4. The Genealogy of Civilization 5. Sons or Sonnets? 6. The Pygmalion Complex PART III. OUR TWO TRACK-MINDS: A Dual Inheritance Perspective on Some Classic Psychoanalytic Issues 7. Incest Avoidance: Oedipal and Preoedipal, Natural and Cultural 8. Sexuality: Biological Fact or Cultural Construction? 9. Consciousness, Language, and Dual Inheritance References Index

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Book SynopsisOver the past three decades, Jean-Luc Nancy has become one of the most celebrated contemporary philosophers. His remarkably diverse body of work, which deals with such topics as post-Heideggerian ontology, Christian painting, the experience of drunkenness, heart transplants, contemporary cinema and the problem of freedom, is entirely immersed in modernity, as he puts it. Within this plural framework, art which he explicitly defines as a modern construct plays a singular role in that it is the very prism through which he explores the problems of sense and feeling in general, particularly as they relate to our experience of modernity. The contributors to Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism fully delve into the heretofore under-acknowledged and under-explored modernism of Nancy's writings on philosophy and the arts through close readings of his key works as well as broader essays on the relationship between his thought and aesthetic modernity. In addition to an intervieTrade ReviewThis is a stunning collection that will be a priceless resource for readers of Nancy’s work. The essays are deeply knowledgeable and together they chart remarkably clear paths through all the major features of Nancy’s world and his thinking of 'world.' * Peggy Kamuf, Professor Emerita of French and Italian and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California, USA *The texts included here demonstrate in incisive ways not only how Nancy's writings open onto understanding modernity but also how questions of modernity offer new and compelling paths for reading Nancy. It is a wonderfully impressive volume. * Philip Armstrong, Professor of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University, USA *This volume is a timely and much-needed contribution to scholarship specifically on the critical pertinence of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking to modernism. What makes this volume additionally delightful is that it brings together experts on Nancy’s thought alongside up-and-coming scholars committed to advancing his thinking further into the future. * Irving Goh, Associate Professor of Literature, National University of Singapore, and author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (2014), L’Existence Prépositionnelle (2019), and The Deconstruction of Sex (2021, with Jean-Luc Nancy) *Table of ContentsIntroduction (Cosmin Toma, University of Oxford, UK) Part I – Conceptualizing Nancy 1.“Jean-Luc Nancy’s Expectation: Rephrasing ‘Philoliterature’” (Ginette Michaud, Université de Montréal) 2. “Fort-pflanzung: The Literary Absolute’s Botanic Afterlife” (Stefanie Heine, University of Copenhagen) 3.“Back to The Muses: a Di-versation on the World and the Arts” (Nicholas Cotton-Lizotte, Princeton University / Collège Édouard-Montpetit) 4.“After Listening: Music, Musicians and Modernity” (Sarah Hickmott, Durham University) 5.“Fabula, Bucca, Humanitas: On Ego Sum” (Andrea Gyenge, University of Toronto) 6.“From Dis-Enclosure to Adoration: Literature and the Deconstruction of Christianity” (Schalk Gerber, Stellenbosch University / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Part II – Nancy and Aesthetics 1.“From the Abyss” (Jean-Luc Nancy, Université de Strasbourg; trans. Mike Holland, University of Oxford / St Hugh’s College) 2. “Close Relations: Nancy and the Question of Psychoanalysis” (Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania) 3.“Noli me operare: Reading Nancy (Re)reading Blanchot” (Aukje van Rooden & Andreas Noyer, University of Amsterdam) 4. “Streams of Consciousness: River Poetry from Heidegger to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe” (John McKeane, University of Reading) and “Altus” (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Université de Strasbourg) 5.“The Regime of Technique: Nancy, Science and Modernism” (Ian James, Cambridge University) 6.“Le fond du film: Worlds, Images, and the Machining of Grounds (or: Blanchot Not/Beyond Nancy)” (Jeff Fort, University of California, Davis) 7.“The Poetics and Politics of Disenclosure: Nancy, Mbembe” (Michael Krimper, New York University) 8.“Nancy(’s) Surfaces” (James Martell, Lyon College) 9.“Between Modernism and Modernité: An Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy” (Jean-Luc Nancy, Université de Strasbourg & Cosmin Toma, St Hugh’s College) Part III – Glossary of Key Terms “Art” (John McKeane, University of Reading) “Body” (Juan Manuel Garrido Wainer, Universidad Alberto Hurtado) “Excription” (John Ricco, University of Toronto) “Globalization” (Barney Norman, independent scholar) “Sense” (Isabelle Perreault, Université du Québec à Rimouski) “With” (Jérôme Lèbre, ENS Lyon)

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Book SynopsisSecrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction examines the relation between secrecy and community in a diverse and international range of contemporary fictional works in English. In its concern with what is called ''communities of secrecy'', it is fundamentally indebted to the thought of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, who have pointed to the fallacies and dangers of identitarian and exclusionary communities, arguing for forms of being-in-common characterized by non-belonging, singularity and otherness.Also drawing on the work of J. Hillis Miller, Derek Attridge, Nicholas Royle, Matei Calinescu, Frank Kermode and George Simmel, among others, this volume analyses the centrality of secrets in the construction of literary form, narrative sequence and meaning, together with their foundational role in our private and interpersonal lives and the public and political realms. In doing so, it engages with the Derridean ethico-political value of secrecy and Derrida'sTrade ReviewThe secret as index of ineradicable opacity rather than hidden knowledge to be disclosed; the forms of community that come from honoring the singularity and inviolability of others; and literature as an especially revelatory location for both of these operations – these are among the insights provided by this well-conceived, eclectic collection. Secrecy and Community highlights the urgency of recasting our sense of the present through the medium of Derrida’s late work. It is an impressive and moving achievement, and a welcome addition to contemporary thought. * Greg Forter, Professor of English, University of South Carolina, USA, and author of Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction: Atlantic and Other Worlds (2018) *This much-needed volume of essays extends Derridean theory through close readings of a wide range of 21st-century narrative texts, thus demonstrating the complex interrelationship between secrets and community, identity politics and literature. * Leslie W. Lewis, Susan D. Morgan Distinguished Professor of English, Goucher College, USA, and author of Telling Narratives: Secrets in African American Literature (2017) *Many anthologies on secrecy exist, but only a few include cutting-edge essays and vivid empirical studies. In this timely book, the studies compiled by María J. López and Pilar Villar-Argáiz explore the link between secrecy, community, democracy and literature with admirable articulacy and precision. This volume attests to the intersectional articulation of these elements, and will contribute much to research on the different dimensions of literary secrecy. * Eduardo Barros Grela, Professor of English Studies, University of A Coruña, Spain, and co-editor of American Secrets: The Politics and Poetics of Secrecy in the Literature and Culture of the United States (2011) *Table of ContentsNotes on contributors Foreword Joseph Hillis Miller (University of California, Irvine, USA) Acknowledgements Introduction: Secrecy and community in twenty-first-century fiction María J. López (University of Córdoba, Spain) Part One. SECRECY, LITERARY FORM AND THE COMMUNITY OF READERS 1. Secrecy and community in ergodic texts: Derrida, Ali Smith and the experience of form Derek Attridge (University of York, UK) 2. Protective mimicry: Reflections on the novel today Nicholas Royle (University of Sussex, UK) 3. ‘Where all is known and nothing understood’: Narrative sequence and textual secrets in Toni Morrison’s Love Paula Martín-Salván (University of Córdoba, Spain) 4. Challenging stereotypes of femininity through secrets in Alice Munro’s fiction Mercedes Díaz Dueñas (University of Granada, Spain) 5. Zoë Wicomb and the secrets of the canon Liani Lochner (Université Laval, Canada) Part Two. COMMUNITIES OF SECRECY 6. Cryptaesthetic resistance and community in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland María Luisa Pascual Garrido (University of Córdoba, Spain) 7. Queering the Maori crypt: Community and secrecy in Witi Ihimaera’s The Uncle’s Story Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas (University of Granada, Spain) 8. Secrecy, invisibility and community in Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate Juan L. Pérez-de-Luque (University of Córdoba, Spain) 9. Novel mediums: The art of not speaking in (and of) Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black Hannu Poutiainen (Tampere University, Finland) Part Three. SECRECY, POSTCOLONIALISM AND DEMOCRACY 10. Shame and the idea of community in Ian Holding’s Of Beasts and Beings and What Happened to Us Mike Marais (Rhodes University, South Africa) 11. ‘Whilst our souls negotiate': Secrets and secrecy in Jonathan Franzen’s Purity Jesús Blanco Hidalga (University of Córdoba, Spain) 12. Conversing with spectres: Secrets and ghosts in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees Kim L. Worthington (Massey University, New Zealand) Index

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Book SynopsisWho are we and how do we define our inner selves? In his last work, Professor Stephen Prickett presents a literary and cultural exploration of our inner selves and how we have created and written about them from the Old Testament to social media. What he finds is that although our secret, inner, sense of self what we feel makes us distinctively us' seems a natural and permanent part of being human, it is in fact surprisingly new. Whilst confessional religious writings, from Augustine to Jane Austen, or even diaries of 20th-century Holocaust victims, have explored inwards as part of a path to self-discovery, our inner space has expanded beyond any possible personal experience. This development has enhanced our capacity not merely to write about what we have never seen, but even to create fantasies and impossible fictions around them.Yet our secret selves can also be a source of terror. The fringes of our inner worlds are often porous, ill-defined and susceptible to frightening formsTrade ReviewSecret Selves is a remarkable book, at once deeply personal and also a reflection on a profession spent with literature and art ... the product of lifetime of reading and teaching, moving with ease across texts and the images of Western art. It is a reflection on the selves whom we think we know well, and the selves in all of us that remain secret. * The Coleridge Bulletin *This is a fascinating book, written with clarity and charm. What is engaging as well as convincing is how Stephen Prickett traces out the visible emergence, usually in literature but also painting and film, of a conception of the interior life, suggesting how we might read evidence of it even in a single word or phrase. An impressive, memorable study that will, aptly, linger in the mind. * Francis O’Gorman, Saintsbury Professor of English Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK, and author of Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History *With a beguiling lightness of touch, Stephen Prickett explores the immense and fascinating landscape of the human mind. His book provokes, challenges and delights in equal measure. It's a joy. * The Rt Revd Dr Christopher Herbert, Visiting Professor in Christian Ethics, University of Surrey, UK *Stephen Prickett's many books on the evolution of the modern European imagination were without fail deeply original, written with wit, clarity and an immense range of reference. This – sadly posthumous – work is no exception. I can think of no other recent book that offers so rich an exploration of how modern people learned to think about their “inner selves,” with examples ranging from children's books to debates on Artificial Intelligence. A brilliant, humane, many-faceted study. * Rowan Williams, former Master of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, UK *Table of ContentsIntroduction: A Self-Conscious Story 1. Visions, Dreams – and that which hath no Bottom 2. Room On All Three Floors: Dante to Macdonald 3. The Mind has Mountains: Landscape into Psyche 4. From China to Peru: Global Imaginations 5. Children’s Spaces: Adult Fantasies 6. Far Fetched Facts and Further Fictions: Furnishing with Extremes 7. Experience of Self: From Identity to Individuality Conclusion: Know Thyself: Facebook, Cyborgs, and Reincarnation Index

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Book SynopsisPsychological Roots of the Climate Crisis tells the story of a fundamental fight between a caring and an uncaring imagination. It helps us to recognise the uncaring imagination in politics, in culture - for example in the writings of Ayn Rand - and also in ourselves.Sally Weintrobe argues that achieving the shift to greater care requires us to stop colluding with Exceptionalism, the rigid psychological mindset largely responsible for the climate crisis. People in this mindset believe that they are entitled to have the lion's share and that they can rearrange' reality with magical omnipotent thinking whenever reality limits these felt entitlements.While this book''s subject is grim, its tone is reflective, ironic, light and at times humorous. It is free of jargon, and full of examples from history, culture, literature, poetry, everyday life and the author's experience as a psychoanalyst, and a professional life that has been dedicated to helping people to face difficult truths.Trade ReviewAmong the lessons Weintrobe’s book holds for climate scientists is that human vulnerability to climate change cannot be measured on a simple quantitative scale running from the most vulnerable populations to the most resilient. To be sure, the risks of climate change are distributed highly unevenly, with poor, marginalized communities likely to suffer the worst effects. Yet, for the privileged readers to whom Weintrobe addresses this book, vulnerability is not the opposite of resilience. Rather, feeling vulnerable is the first step toward building sustainable relationships. * Science *Weintrobe brilliantly weaves together insights from psychology, economics and environmental science. Her book offers a vital critique of neoliberal orthodoxies and the social, psychological and ecological toll that they have exacted. But she also charts a way forward, one that begins by regenerating our embattled cultures of care. This book is a tour de force. * Rob Nixon, Barron Family Professor of Environment and Humanities, Princeton University, USA *The distinction between the caring and uncaring parts of the human psyche was, for me, a new and powerful formulation – one that sheds much light on the mess we find ourselves in and perhaps offers some routes out! * Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? *In his first speech as U.S. President-Elect, Joe Biden said: “Our nation is shaped by the constant battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses. It is time for our better angels to prevail.” His words are a fitting endorsement of Sally Weintrobe’s new book Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare. In it she peels back the lid on human exceptionalism and our ability to "uncare." She argues convincingly that these elemental features of the dominant neoliberal economic and political creed lie at the heart of the climate crisis. Unless and until we reassert our fundamentally caring nature, our ability to recognise planetary limits and retain control of our climatic destiny will continue to slip away. The book provides a powerful case that although technological solutions driven from within free markets will help to lessen the climate crisis, they will not be enough. Human behaviour will need to change also. * Chris Rapley, CBE, Professor of Climate Science, University College London, UK *Sally Weintrobe uses her psychoanalytic mind and her sociocultural experience to create a brilliant presentation of intersecting historical, political, economic and psychological determinants of the climate crisis. She uses personal, clinical, literary, biblical, sociological, economic, and scientific information and metaphors to bring alive the overwhelming realities of ecocide and denialism. Her detailed elaboration of neoliberal exceptionalism and the current Western culture of uncare sets what she terms ‘the bubble of disavowal’ in bold context. Her own care for the safety of the planet – and its human and animal inhabitants – permeates the aspect of this book that inspires the reader to face the crisis and become an agent of change. * Harriet L. Wolfe, M.D., President-elect, International Psychoanalytical Association, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California San Francisco, USA *The problem of climate change has, for a generation, produced nothing approaching an adequate response – particularly among those in the wealthy west, many of whom see themselves as triumphalist technocrats capable of fixing anything at all. In her brilliant, dizzyingly insightful book, Sally Weintrobe explains why: a political culture that teaches those in the global north that they are not just entitled to a stable and prosperous world but entitled, as well, to live as though they had no responsibility for preserving it, indeed entitled to guiltlessness and ignorance at once. As she writes, neoliberalism is an ideology of power, but it is built through psychological appeals we have tragically come to accept as "reality." We are, she writes, living in Wonderland – though not for long. * David Wallace-Wells, editor-at-large of New York Magazine and author of The Uninhabitable Earth *Weintrobe’s book holds invaluable insights for people of all ages and masterfully breaks down academic jargon for a popular audience. * Harvard Political Review *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction EXCEPTIONALISM: THE PSYCHOLOGY EXPLAINED 1. The conflicted self 2. The ordinary exception (contained by care) 3. The Exception (in charge and unbound) EXCEPTIONALISM’S RISE TO POWER IN THE NEOLIBERAL AGE 4. Neoliberal Exceptionalism 5. Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan 6. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged 7. Globalizing the neoliberal way 8. Neoliberals’ rise to power 9. The earth seen as a globe 10. Implementing neoliberal economic policy WHAT CONTAINS EXCEPTIONALISM 11. Frameworks of care 12. The power of love THE CULTURE OF UNCARE 13. Culture and the birth of consumerism 14. Neoliberalism’s culture of uncare HOW THIS CULTURE OPERATES 15. New Speak 16. The World Bank using New Speak 17. Mass media 18. Promoting denial 19. Advertising 20. Political framing 21. Blocking tears 22. Infantilizing people WE COLLUDE 23. On collusion EXCEPTIONALISM GROWS FRAUD BUBBLES 24. Case studies: Enron and fund managers 25. The corporation 26. Social groups 27. Trickledown THE NEW CARING IMAGINATION TODAY 28. Paradigm shift 29. Frameworks of care for a sustainable world 30. Living on Planet Earth not Planet La La THE CLIMATE BUBBLE IS BURSTING 31. The damage 32. Living with our feelings about the climate crisis ‘THE CRAZY’: EXCEPTIONALISM RUNS AMOK 33. ‘The crazy’ in politics 34. Noah’s Arkism 21st-century style 35. We are gods 36. The ‘all or nothing-ness’ of having to be ideal 37. Bad leaders drive ‘the crazy’ 38. The problem of guilt 39. Good leaders Conclusion Acknowledgements References Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Glitter reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Nicole Seymour describes how glitter's consumption and status have shifted across centuriesfrom ancient cosmetic to queer activist tool, environmental pollutant to biodegradable accessoryalong with its composition, which has variously included insects, glass, rocks, salt, sugar, plastic, and cellulose. Through a variety of examples, from glitterbombing to glitter beer, Seymour shows how this substance reflects the entanglements of consumerism, emotion, environmentalism, and gender/sexual identity. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewHard facts, philosophical musings, and trivia galore commingle in this madcap toss of shimmery delight. * Passport Magazine *Nicole Seymour peers beyond the surface of glitter and finds a material that is irreverent and political, sticky and elusive, that shapes communities as it challenges preconceptions. Glitter shines with new ways of thinking. * David Farrier, Professor of Literature and the Environment, University of Edinburgh, UK *Glitter is an original, nuanced and thorough analysis that examines glitter’s significance beyond its usual connotations of frivolousness at best and environmental disaster at worst. As vibrant as the substance itself, Seymour’s thoughtful exploration situates glitter in current cultural and political contexts without dulling its shine. Positively dazzling! * Hillary Belzer, Founder and Curator, The Makeup Museum *Table of ContentsDiary Entry: Glitter in Quarantine 1. The Great Glitter Backlash Glitter Bar: A Makeover Takeover! 2. “Feel the Rainbow!”: Glitter as Tactic Poetry Reading: CAConrad 3. “Too Much Bling”: Glitter in Children’s Entertainment Interview: Machine Dazzle 4. Recrafting Glitter: The Sustainable Turn Taste Test: Glitter Beer 5. Conclusion: Facing the Plasticene Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Alarms are alarming. They wake us up, demand our attention and force us to attend to things we've preferred to ignore. But alarms also allow us to feel secure, to sleep and to retreat from alertness. Theytake over vigilance on our behalf. From the alarm clock and the air-raid siren to the doorbell and the phone alert, the history of alarms is also the history of work, security, technology and emotion. Alarm responds to culture's most urgent calls to attention by examining all kinds of alarms, from the restless presence of the alarm clock in modernist art to the siren the sound of the police in classic hip hop. More than just bells and whistles, alarms are objects that have defined sleeping and waking, safety and danger, and they have fundamentally shaped our understanding of the mind and its capacity for attention.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay seTrade ReviewBy revealing the uncanny ubiquity of alarms in our daily life, by making us smile about their profound ambivalence, Alice Bennett has written a pleasurable and soothing book. From burglary to belatedness, from house fires to climate change, this exemplary collaboration between literary studies and the social sciences sheds a reflexive, nuanced and joyful light on our darker anxieties. A most accessible, elegant and important lesson in attention ecology. * Yves Citton, Professor in Literature and Media, University Paris 8, France, and author of The Ecology of Attention *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction 1. Clock 2. Fire 3. Security 4. Siren 5. Failure, False, Fatigue 6. Future Image Credits Notes Index

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Book SynopsisMikhail Epstein is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, USA, and former Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory at Durham University, UK. He has authored 30 books (in English and Russian), including The Transformative Humanities (Bloomsbury, 2012), and approximately 600 essays and articles, translated into 16 languages. Professor Epstein has won national and international awards, including The Andrei Bely Prize (S.-Petersburg, 1991) and the Liberty Prize, awarded annually for the outstanding contribution to the development of Russian - U.S. cultural relations (New York, 2000).Trade ReviewFew books could be a better, more incisive and captivating guide to the intellectual richness of an important historical period than Mikhail Epstein’s history of Russian thought in the late Soviet period ... a treasure-trove of discovery, opening up a vault of riches that is vast and multi-leveled. * Slavic Review *The Phoenix of Philosophy benefits from its author’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the many philosophical tendencies and the individual philosophers he describes. He is brilliant at summarising their ideas ... Epstein’s work is a great achievement * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books *Both a provocative analytical study and a philosophical dictionary of sorts, the book is absorbing and extremely valuable and should hopefully reach a large—and not just Slavic—audience. * Slavic and East European Journal *[T]his is a very helpful and stimulating work. * Slavonic & East European Review *Bold, comprehensive, and beautifully written, this book retrieves one of the best-forgotten parts of global intellectual history. While the lives of leading Soviet thinkers were tragic, Mikhail Epstein presents their philosophy as liberating: a sublime lesson of hope and resistance for our time. * Alexander Etkind, Professor of History of Russia-Europe Relations, European University at Florence, Italy *An impressive work of synthesis, this book offers a fascinating panorama of Soviet intellectual life in the second half of the 20th century. Epstein writes with clarity and conviction that stem from his knowledge and immediate experience of the times he revisits in these often riveting pages. * Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London, UK *This beautifully written book by one of our most eminent scholars of Russian culture confirms that even in the most inhospitable circumstances, such as Soviet ideocracy, Russian thought flourishes and liberates. It is a brilliant testimony to the power of ideas and of the human spirit. * Randall A. Poole, Professor of History, College of St. Scholastica, USA *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part 1. Vicissitudes of Soviet Marxism Part 2. Neo-rationalism. Structuralism. General methodology Part 3. The philosophy of personality and of freedom Part 4. Culturology, or, the philosophy of culture Conclusion Works cited Appendix: Original Russian and other foreign-language titles Name index Subject index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic culture that gave gynecologiststhe majority of whom were mencontrol over information about women's bodies.However, while science so often promises clear-cut answers, the reality of pregnancy is often much messier. Pregnancy Test explores how the pregnancy test has not always lived up to the fantasy that more information equals more knowledge. Karen Weingarten examines the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how this object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Object LesTrade ReviewA new gem from Object Lessons. . . . A quick and quirky read. * Zoomer Magazine *Karen Weingarten illuminates the fascinating history, politics, and culture of the pregnancy test in this kaleidoscopic and entertaining volume. It’s all in there: life and death, feminist empowerment and patriarchal coercion, scientific discovery and sci-fi dystopia. Weingarten shows how a seemingly modest yet ingenious technology has profoundly shaped—and even brought into being—some of our most intimate, vulnerable, and meaning-filled moments. * Lara Freidenfelds, Ph.D., author of The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America *As anyone who has anxiously shut a bathroom door to take one knows, the home pregnancy test is a riveting plot in and of itself: within its pages, lives are made and unmade. Karen Weingarten’s Pregnancy Test tells the fascinating story of how this intimate technology came to be with insight and compassion, suggesting that the strange mix of reproductive agency and reproductive surveillance the home pregnancy test has enabled in US culture will be of central importance as these private dramas become ever more encroached upon by the state. * Sarah Blackwood, Associate Professor of English, Pace University, USA *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part One: History 1. Designing the Home Pregnancy Test 2. Hormones 3. Urine and Blood 4. The Stick Part Two: Culture 5. Tell Me Doctor 6. The Psychological Torture of a Beautiful Young Woman 7. There is No Pregnancy Without the Pregnancy Test 8. The Science Fiction of Pregnancy Testing Afterword Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.What can underground pipes tell us about human eating habits and the spread or containment of disease, such as COVID-19? Why are sewers spitting out plastic and trash into waterways around the world? How are clogs getting gnarlier and more numerous? Jessica Leigh Hester leads readers through the past, present, and future of the system humans have created to deal with our own waste and argues that sewers can be seen as a mirror to the world above at a time when our behaviors are drastically reshaping the environment for the worse. Sifting through the muck offers a fresh way to approach questions about urbanization, public health, infrastructure, ecology, sustainability, and consumerism and what we value. Without understanding sewers, any attempt to steward the future is incomplete.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The AtlantTrade ReviewGet ready to dive into the wondrous underworld of waste. . . . It's perfect for the fatberg fan in your life. * Mental Floss *Hester goes deep on a topic that few relish: the inner workings of wastewater infrastructure. The book . . . dives into the past and present worlds of pipes and pumping stations, sifts through archives for blueprints, and tags along crews on late-night excursions to tackle gnarly clogs and whale-sized fatbergs — all to answer questions of how human habits are reshaping the environment, and what needs to change. * Bloomberg CityLab *Takes readers on a journey underground to the meandering pipes and waterways underneath us where waste ferments and disease percolates. The oft-forgotten and hidden-but-so-necessary infrastructure below us has deep implications for urbanization, public health, infrastructure, ecology, and sustainability, not to mention our future. * Architect’s Newspaper *Hester peels off the layers of discomfort of the sewer, and brings readers to a full understanding of the function, history, and future of sewers, and how climate change needs to be factored in to how sewers operate. . . . This is an easy to read, approachable book, written in a captivating style. * Viewpoint Vancouver *Overall a fascinating and short read, pretty well exactly what it was designed to be. Very much recommended. * BookAnon *Sewer gives you that magical feeling of peeking behind the curtain—or should I say, under the manhole—into a hidden world. Let Jessica Leigh Hester be your guide to fatbergs, sea snot, and all the things we might think we don't want to ponder, but which nevertheless become enchanting in her winsome prose. * Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic *Jessica Leigh Hester drops feet-first into a Hadean underworld of tunnels and drains, bacteria and geology. Sewer proves that some of our most consequential urban achievements are seldom seen—and rarely so well illuminated. Come for the fatbergs, stay for Hester’s lucid history of architecture and engineering, public health and political ambition. * Geoff Manaugh, New York Times-bestselling author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City *This book is really remarkable ... it’s personal and it’s deeply researched and it’s fascinating. * Randomly Yours, Alex *Very few scholars working on drainage infrastructure can reach as wide an audience as Hester has managed to do with this book. * H-Net Reviews *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Our Sewers, Ourselves 1. Cathedrals of Sewage 2. Wipes & Pipes 3. Fatbergs 4. Waterways 5. Super Sewers 6. The Innovators 7. Conclusion: The Afterlife Acknowledgments Index

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Book SynopsisThe enormous success of writers such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that African literatures are now an international phenomenon. But the apparent global legibility of a small number of (mostly Anglophone) writers in the diaspora raises the question of how literary producers from the continent, both past and present, have situated their work in relation to the world and the kinds of material networks to which this corresponds. This collection shows how literatures from across the African continent engage with conceptualizations of ''the world'' in relation to local social and political issues. Focusing on a wide variety of geographic, historical and linguistic contexts, the essays in this volume seek answers to the following questions: What are the topographies of ''the world'' in different literary texts and traditions? What are that world's limits, boundaries and possibilities? How do literary modes and forms such as realism, narrative poetry or the

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Book SynopsisCarol J. Adams is the author of numerous books, including The Sexual Politics of Meat, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals, and The Pornography of Meat. Her work is the subject of two recent anthologies, Defiant Daughters: 21 Women of Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Art of the Animal: 14 Women Artists Explore The Sexual Politics of Meat, in which a new generation of feminists, artists, and activists respond to Adams' groundbreaking work. Lori Gruen is William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University, USA, where she is also a professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. Her work lies at the intersection of ethical theory and ethical practice, with a particular focus on ethical issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional ethical investigations, e.g. women, people of color, non-human animals. She is the authTrade ReviewCarol J. Adams and Lori Gruen are two of the leading scholars in the field of animal studies. This is a pathbreaking book with current, relevant, and important insights for the entire field. It should be required reading for anyone concerned with animals, feminism, or the environment – which is to say, everyone. * Vasile Stanescu, Associate Professor of Communication Studies & Theatre, Mercer University, USA *This is a breakthrough collection of updated influential essays in the field and fresh and diverse animal-centered analyses addressing urgent questions of climate, care, and affect. Adams and Gruen have curated a superb text for readers new to ecofeminist thought as well as seasoned scholars. * Maneesha Deckha, Professor and Lansdowne Chair, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, Canada *Climate justice requires attention to the historical roots of our environmental crises, and transformative philosophies to help foster liberation, respect for other animals, and a flourishing Earth. The multicultural conversation woven together in this brilliant volume shows why ecofeminist praxis is crucial for understanding the manifold harms of oppression, and nurturing more powerful ethics of resistance, caring, and solidarity. * Christine J. Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies, University of Georgia, USA *With the growing interest in intersectional theories there has been a recent, renewed interest in ecofeminism. This book rises to meet this demand in the form of a collection of essays, which answers the concern of essentialism by embracing a wide range of scholarly voices from the field ... engaging and mind-opening ... a must-read for both feminists and also, no doubt, for meat-eaters. * Anna Maguire, U.S. Studies Online [on the 1st edition] *This provocative new anthology is to be warmly welcomed for the diversity of its voices and the breadth of its critical analyses and agenda. Ecofeminism encompasses theory and lived experience at the multiple and sometimes contested intersections of gender identity, disability rights, race, and animal advocacy. * Martin Rowe, Author of The Polar Bear in the Zoo: A Speculation [on the 1st edition] *The past three decades or so have seen the publication of a fair number of collections presenting feminist perspectives on human-animal relations. So when coming to a new volume that walks this well-traversed terrain, it's hard not to approach it with the thought that there had really better be something new here. Happily, Ecofeminism delivers the fresh goods. … What the collection as a whole conveys, primarily, is the roots-in-the-dirt entanglement of the various strands of social life with human and nonhuman animals. With animal studies now making the transition from applied ethics to social philosophy, Ecofeminism makes worthy contributions to an emerging and exciting literature. * Jason Wyckoff, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy [on the 1st edition] *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Preface Carol J. Adams (Independent Scholar, USA) and Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University, USA) 1. Ecofeminist Footings Carol J. Adams (Independent Scholar, USA) and Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University, USA) Part 1 Affect Introduction to Affect 2. Caring to Dialogue: Feminism and the Treatment of Animals Josephine Donovan (University of Maine, USA) 3. Compassion and Being Human Deane Curtin (Gustavus Adolphus College, USA) 4. Ecology is a Sistah's Issue Too Shamara Shantu Riley (Independent Scholar) 5. Joy Deborah Slicer (University of Montana, USA) 6. Eros and the Mechanisms of Eco-Defense pattrice jones (Independent Scholar and Co-founder of Vine Sanctuary, USA) 7. Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethics of Care Sunaura Taylor (University of California at Berkeley, USA) 8. Facing Death and Practicing Grief Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University, USA) Part 2 Context Introduction to Context 9. Inter-Animal Moral Conflicts and Moral Repair: A Contextualized Ecofeminism Approach in Action Karen S. Emmerman (University of Washington, USA) 10. Michael Vick, Race, and Animality Claire Kim (University of California at Irvine, USA) 11. Caring Cannibals: Testing Contextual Edibility for Speciesism Ralph Acampora (Hofstra University, USA) 12. Ecofeminism and Veganism: Revisiting the Question of Universalism Richard Twine (Edge Hill University, UK) 13. Why a Pig? A Reclining Nude Reveals the Intersections of Race, Sex, Slavery, and Species Carol J. Adams (Independent Scholar, USA) 14. Toward New EcoMasculinities, EcoGenders, and EcoSexualities Greta Gaard (University of Wisconsin-River Falls, USA) Part 3 Climate Introduction to Climate 15. Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies Susan Fraiman (University of Virginia, USA) 16. Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto Chelsea Mikael Frazier (Cornell University, USA) 17. The Animals Call It: Climate Crisis, Gender Crisis, and Ecofeminist Listening Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (University of Wollongong, Australia) 18. Global Atmospheres of Exploitation: Shifting Terrains of Othering in Ecofeminist Kathryn Gillespie (University of Kentucky, USA) and Yamini Narayanan (Deakin University, Australia) 19. Maximum Plunder: The Global Context and Multiple Threats of Animal Agriculture Mia MacDonald (Policy Analyst, Executive Director and Founder of Brighter Green, USA) 20. Upsetting Boundaries: Trans Queer Interspecies Ecofeminisms Leah Kirts (Freelance Writer and Activist, USA) References Index

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Book SynopsisExplores and illuminates the impact of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin on our understanding of literary modernism.This volume explores the subject of modernism as seen through the lens of Bakhtinian criticism and in doing so offers a rounded and up-to-date example of the application of Bakhtinian theory to a field of research. The contributors consider the global spread of modernism and the variety of its manifestations as well as modernism's relationship to popular culture and its collective elaboration, which are dominant concerns in Bakhtin's thinking. As with other volumes in the Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism series, the volume is divided into three parts. Part 1 provides readings of Bakhtin's work in the context of literary modernism. Part 2 features case studies of modernist art and artists and their relation to Bakhtinian theory. The final part provides a glossary of key terms in Bakhtin's work.Trade ReviewFrom the novel to poetry, dance, and philosophy, this wide-ranging volume seeks to recover and mobilize the resources of Bakhtinian thought in making sense of modernism and modernity. With essays by some of the most visible Bakhtin scholars today, this book is for all those who wish to explore his work, its contexts, and its continuous impact. * Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London, UK *A very timely and helpful volume by an impressive range of scholars, which clarifies Bakhtin's relationship to modernity and to modernist literature as well as making connections with some of the most prominent European thinkers on the issue. The inclusion of a glossary of some of Bakhtin's key terminology provides an excellent resource for those seeking to make sense of this influential thinker without falling prey to the many misconceptions that have commonly dogged critical work in the field. * Craig Brandist, Professor of Cultural Theory and Intellectual History and Director of the Bakhtin Centre, University of Sheffield, UK *Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations Notes on Contributors Introduction: Bakhtin at Interpretative Crossroads Philippe Birgy (University of Toulouse 2 Jean Jaures, France) Part I: Conceptualizing Bakhtin 1. From Heteroglossia to Contemporaneity: Bakhtin's Modernist History of the Novel Ken Hirschkop (University of Waterloo, Canada) 2. Mikhail Bakhtin and the History of Literature: The Past in the Present and the Present in the Past Anker Gemzoe (Aalborg University, Denmark) 3. On Death and Turn-Taking in Conversation: The Notion of Succession (smena) in Bakhtin's Late Philosophy Sergeiy Sandler (Independent Scholar) 4. Bakhtin’s Chronotope: Crisis-time and Great Time in Benjamin and Hölderlin Jeremy Tambling (University of Manchester, UK) 5. Bakhtin’s Scenarios of Selfhood: Modernism between Intersubjectivity and Transindividuality Ilya Kliger (Independent Scholar) 6. Anticipation and Prevention: A Dialogical Approach to the Modern Unconscious Jonathan Hall (University of Sheffield, UK) 7. Bakhtin, Habermas, and the “Revenge of the Real” Michael E. Gardiner (Independent Scholar) 8. Decolonizing Aesthetics: Bakhtin, Modernism, and Anti-Colonial Poetics Peter Hitchcock (Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA) Part II: Bakhtin and Modernism 9. “New Philosophical Wonder”: Bakhtin, Shklovsky, and the Re-enchantment of the World Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan (Independent Scholar) 10. Gide, Bakhtin, and the Threshold of Modernism Tara Collington (University of Waterloo, Canada) 11. Sensation and Abstraction: The Station as a Modernist Chronotope Anker Gemzoe (Aalborg University, Denmark) 12. Bakhtin and the Protomodernist Dickens from an Anthropological Perspective Michael Hollington (University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, France) 13. “An Irish clown, a great joker at the universe”: Joyce and the Modern Carnival Yann Tholoniat (Université de Lorraine, France) 14. Mikhaïl Bakhtin, Modern Dance, and the Body’s Unmediated Presence in the World Robert Barsky (Vanderbilt University, USA) and Marsha Barsky (Kennesaw State University, USA) Part III: Glossary 15. Introduction to the Glossary Sergeiy Sandler 16. Architectonics (inc. Event, I-for-myself, I-for-the-other and Other-for-me) Ken Hirschkop 17. Author and Hero (inc. Hero and Authorship) Sergeiy Sandler 18. Becoming Jonathan Hall 19. Carnival Yann Tholoniat 20. Chronotope Sergeiy Sandler 21. Completion Sergeiy Sandler 22. Contemporaneity Ken Hirschkop 23 Deed Sergeiy Sandler 24 Dialogue/Dialogical/Dialogization Ken Hirschkop 25 Genre Sergeiy Sandler 26 Heteroglossia Ken Hirschkop 27 I and Other Philippe Birgy 28 Menippean Satire Yann Tholoniat 29 Outsidedness Sergeiy Sandler 30 Present/Past/Future Philippe Birgy 31 Responsibility/Answerability Philippe Birgy 32 Style Ken Hirschkop 33 Utterance Sergeiy Sandler 34 Word/Discourse Sergeiy Sandler Index

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the AATSEEL 2022 Award for Best Edited Multi-Author Scholarly Volume (AATSEEL is The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages) Theory in the Post Era brings together the work and perspectives of a group of Romanian theorists who discuss the morphings of contemporary theory in what the editors call the post era. Since the Cold War''s end and especially in the third millennium, theorists have been exploring the aftermath - and sometimes just the after - of whole paradigms, the crisis or passing of anthropocentrism, the twilight of an entire ontological and cultural condition, as well as the corresponding rise of an antagonist model, of an anti, meta, or neo alternative, with examples ranging from posthumanism and post-postmodernism to post-aesthetics, postanalog interpretation or digicriticism, post-presentism, post-memory, post- or neo-critique, and so forth. It is no coincidence, the contributors to this volume argTrade ReviewTheory in the “Post” Era manages to assemble a heterogenous collection of interventions which capture the essential cultural gestures and ethical reflexes of “an era that seems at once epistemologically insurgent and blasé” (173). In doing so, it lays the lexical groundwork for its envisioned projects of communal futurity. * Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory *What Theory in the Post Era, as a collective manifesto – for a new age, a “post” age of literary theory – excels at is finding new and functional alternatives to an otherwise overused and exhausted set of working notion for the study of literary and critical phenomena in and from the margins and deliver them to the world. More than that, there are several concepts introduced for the very first time (at least in a similarly ambitious editorial project) that could feasibly form the basis for a new “communality” in Eastern European literary theory and that could rapidly enter the world theory system. * Philologica Jassyensia *Even readers annoyed by the proliferation of constructions in “post-“ will discover much to engage and provoke in this lively collection by a group of Romanian scholars. Writing from the periphery of Europe yet well-versed in contemporary Western critical thought, they offer original, estranging perspectives on issues of the moment, whether proposing an Easthetics, a Constructuralism, or literary criticism as diplomacy. * Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, Cornell University, USA *Just as there is ‘World Literature,’ this book urges us to consider ‘World Theory.’ While we often tout the globalism of theory, its history typically focuses on Western Europe and the US. Reminding us that the story of theory is a travel narrative, this collection features work arising from Romania’s Critical Theory Institute, whose members have been investigating the various possibilities of theory in the new millennium. One way to think of theory is as the genre that allows us to speak critically across various national, disciplinary, and temporal borders, and Theory in the ‘Post’ Era works to create a contemporary intellectual commons. * Jeffrey Williams, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, and co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism *This group of inspired Romanian 'post' theorists decisively shows two things. First, theory is no thing. You cannot be for or against it. It is rather the ubiquitous fabric of our global conversation on politics, culture, science, and art. Second, theory is no longer (and never really was) an elite discourse promulgated in Paris, New York, New Haven, and Irvine. It is a radically decentered interrogation that is elaborated in both Cluj and Greensboro, in Walla Walla and Taipei. It is alive and well and living on the periphery! * Paul Allen Miller, Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina, USA *Boldly recasting theory as World Theory, this timely volume makes a compelling case for 'theory commons,' for what we as theorists translate and share as an open-ended, transnational community, a community—needed by theory and in need of theory—invested in thinking inventively and comparatively the plethora of “posts” endemic to our infinitely interconnected planetary condition. * Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature, Whitman College, USA *‘Romania,’ amid the planetary turbulence of 2021, is every bit as a propos as the more customary ‘deconstruction’ or ‘Cultural Studies’ in denoting that interstitial zone (or lab) where new modalities of critical reception, theoretical investigation, and cultural mapping, prompted by turbulent developments, get generated. Romanian intellectuals have routinely coped with their country’s historical placement in a multicultural ‘outskirts’ of European culture, with its World War II suppression under Nazism, followed by the singularly cruel abuses and meltdown of its Communist regime. It is no accident that we turn to an ‘A-team’ of Romanian commentators assembled by the editors of Theory in the ‘Post’ Era in our own efforts to process distortion effects now entrenched but particularly rampant since 2016, with no end in sight. In treating the periphery as a theoretical phenomenon on a planetary scale in its own right; in registering the inroads made by such factors as science, systems theory, cybernetics, design, geography, and diplomacy into contemporary cultural deliberation, the collective authorship of Theory in the ‘Post’ Era casts luminous insight on present-day impasses, while crystallizing the vision necessary for addressing the future. * Henry Sussman, Professor Emeritus, Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo, USA *Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward a “Post” Vocabulary-- A Lab Report Alexandru Matei, Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania; Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA; and Andrei Terian, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania Part I: Aesthetics 1. Constructualism: Literary Evolution as Multiscalar Design Teodora Dumitru, G. Calinescu Institute of Literary History and Theory of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania 2. Post-Aesthetics: Literature, Ontology, and Criticism as Diplomacy Alexandru Matei, Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania 3. Eastethics: The Ideological Shift in Narratology Alex Goldis, Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania 4. Metapolitics: Recommitting Literature in the Populist Aftermath Ioana Macrea-Toma, Central European University of Budapest, Hungary 5. Communality: Un-Disciplining Race, Class, and Sex in the Wake of Anti-“PC” Monomania Andrei Terian, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania 6. Anarchetype: Reading Aesthetic Form after “Structure” Corin Braga, Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania Part II: Temporalities 7. Post-Synchronism: “Cultural Complex,” or Critical Theory’s Unfinished Business Carmen Musat, University of Bucharest, Romania 8. Post-Presentism: The Past, the Passed, and “Now” as Critical Operator Bogdan Cretu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania 9. Postfuturism: Contemporaneity, Truth, and the End of World Literature Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA 10. Post-Memory: The Labor of Critical Remembrance after Communism Andreea Mironescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania 11. Biofiction: Metamorphoses of Life-Writing across Criticism, Theory, and Literature Laura Cernat, Independent Scholar Part III: Critical Modes 12. Geocritique: Siting, Poverty, and the Global Southeast Stefan Baghiu, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania 13. Neocritique: Sherlock Holmes Investigates Literature Mihai Iovanel, G. Calinescu Institute of Literary History and Theory of the Romanian Academy, Romania 14. Digicriticism: Profession On(the)Line Adriana Stan, Sextil Puscariu Institute of Linguistics and Literary History of the Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca, Romania 15. Somatography: Writing as Incorporated Cognition, or the Body Knows More Caius Dobrescu, University of Bucharest, Romania 16. Post-Canonicity: Curating World Literary Archives after Postmodernism Cosmin Borza, Sextil Puscariu Institute of Linguistics and Literary History of the Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca, Romania Bibliography Contributors Index

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