Philosophy: aesthetics Books

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Writer and historian Lydia Pyne finds bookshelves to be holders not just of books but of so many other things: values, vibes, and verbs that can be contained and displayed in the buildings and rooms of contemporary human existence. With a shrewd eye toward this particular moment in the history of books, Pyne takes the reader on a tour of the bookshelf that leads critically to this juncture: amid rumors of the death of book culture, why is the life of the bookshelf in full bloom?Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewAn absorbing meditation on an object of lasting cultural significance. * Sydney Morning Herald *As the page is to the book, so is the bookshelf to our culture, that is the lesson of this delightful and stimulating essay. Anything can happen on a page, so too, we learn, a bookshelf partakes of that astonishing range of possibility, circumscribed only by rectilinear geometry, a mode nonpareil of storing, displaying, distributing, assembling, categorizing and contextualizing knowledge. Even virtually, it continues unabashed, as a metaphor, like browsing. A lovely glimpse of the joy and scale of human culture endeavor, its forms and functions, contexts and containers. * Richard Nash, Publisher, Red Lemonade *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Bookshelf: What’s In a Name? Chapter 1. From Medieval to Modern: Bookshelves in Chains Chapter 2. The Things that Go On a Bookshelf Chapter 3. Bookshelves That Move Chapter 4. Bookshelves as Signs and Symbols Chapter 5. The Life Cycle of a Bookshelf Conclusion. The Plural Futures of Bookshelves Bibliography Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Smokers, survivalists, teenagers, collectors. The cigarette lighter is a charged, complex, yet often entirely disposable object that moves across these various groups of people, acquiring and emitting different meanings while always supplying its primary function, that of ignition. While the lighter may seem at first a niche objectonly for old fashioned cigarette smokersin this book Jack Pendarvis explodes the lighter as something with deep history, as something with quirky episodes in cultural contexts, and as something that dances with wide ranging taboos and traditions. Pendarvis shows how the lighter tarries with the cheapest ends of consumer culture as much as it displays more profound dramas of human survival, technological advances, and aesthetics.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewI didn’t realize how much I needed this book. It brought back terrible memories of an uncle dead in Vietnam, nothing but his Zippos to imagine him by, and the beautiful boy who broke my heart, leaving me with a carpenter pencil and a tiny lighter I could hang from my keychain (though I never did; that would have been much too painful). And that’s just the start! Cigarette Lighter is worth it for the index alone, but there's so much more. Like this gem: 'Your cigarette lighter represents your soul, so you get drunk and give it away to your pal, or your pal steals it without compunction. Either way, you can’t hang onto it forever.' Ah, such is life. * Mary Miller, author of The Last Days of California *This book is a Zippo fueled by the remarkable mind of Jack Pendarvis. A blend of histories—movies and TV, war and cars—Cigarette Lighter is so good I took up smoking. * Chris Offutt, author of My Father, the Pornographer *Cleverly disguising itself as a Rabelaisian account of the cigarette lighter in our films and in our lives, this raucous object lesson takes as its real subject, the indefatigable Ted Ballard—octogenarian, curator of the former National Lighter Museum in Guthrie, Oklahoma, collector, misanthrope, raconteur, and consummate charmer—and becomes, in the end, a sly meditation on impermanence, wherein, in the words of Jack Pendarvis, the lighter finds out what the match already knows. * Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted *Table of ContentsPrologue 1. Taming Fire 2. Age of the Lighter 3. Lighter vs. Match 4. Cars 5. The Lighter in Literature and Popular Culture 6. Romance and Death: Cigarette Lighters Today Index

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Book SynopsisAfter Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of sound. This book is called After Sound because music and sound are, in Barrett''s account, different entities. While musicology and sound art theory alike typically equate music with pure instrumental sound, or absolute music, Barrett posits music as an expanded field of artistic practice encompassing a range of different media and symbolic relationships. The works discussed in After Sound thus use performance, text scores, musical automata, video, social practice, and installation while they articulate a novel aesthetic space for a radically engaged musical practice. Coining the term critical music, this book examines a diverse collection of art projects which intervene into specific political and philosophical conflicts by exploring music's unique historical forms.Through a series of intimate studies of artworks surveyed from the visual and performing arts of the past Trade Review[A] provocative thesis. ... Barrett summarises Cage's manifold aims in one brilliant paragraph ... [and] shows he can write lucidly ... I learned a lot from this book. * The Wire *Barrett’s book goes beyond the protesting of sound-art difference of Cox or Kim-Cohen and addresses the musicophobia of Kane. It identifies an important path and begins to move along it. Then think even harder and give us more ... If writing such as Barrett’s constantly draws our attention back to the dynamic co-existence in music of absolute conceptuality and absolute materiality, and of the social and the individual, it’s performing a vital task. * Journal of Sonic Studies *Doug Barrett’s book marks a crucial intervention into the embattled and often confused contemporary discourses of the sonic. Deftly navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of recent debates (so-called materialists [Cox] versus so-called idealists [Kim-Cohen]), Barrett’s call for a ‘critical music’ offers new terms for thinking and practicing musical art. Against ahistorical theorizations of ‘sound’ as a novel field, Barrett seeks to provoke a genuine interdisciplinary encounter between music and contemporary art, philosophy, and politics. * Bill Dietz, Composer & Co-Chair of Music/Sound, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, USA *Acts of intellectual courage are few and far between in these timid times. But Barrett throws caution to the wind. There is nothing absolute, he argues, about ‘absolute music.’ Except for a brief historical anomaly—lasting, roughly, from Beethoven to Boulez—music has always been embedded in the concatenations of history. What’s more, music has always been the strange bedfellow of power and predicament, time and climate, finance and fellowship. Barrett absolves music (and us) of any recourse to the absolute. Where does that leave us? Here and now, thankfully. * Seth Kim-Cohen, Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA *After Sound is an ambitious and polemical contribution to the debates surrounding the porous domains of sound art, new music, and twenty-first century politics. It offers engaged interpretations of three collectives and five individual artists working at the borderlands of what is customarily taken as music, and handles a wide range of challenging and complex philosophical questions with remarkable ease. * Michael Gallope, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, USA *An analyst in a crowded field of partisans, G. Douglas Barrett has given us a radical tool for apprehending the mess that we call music in the twenty-first century. Favoring clear-headed argument over strident polemics, he diagnoses the limits of discourse and practice in sound art, contemporary (visual) art, and new music by listening through and beyond them. * Benjamin Piekut, Associate Professor of Music, Cornell University, USA *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Music After Sound Silence and Collectivity Chapter 1: The Limits of Performing Cage: Ultra-red’s SILENT|LISTEN Chapter 2: The Silent Network: The Music of Wandelweiser Language and Authority Chapter 3: “IDEAS MATTER”: Žižek Sings Pussy Riot Chapter 4: Music to the Letter: Noise, Language, and the Letter from Schoenberg Speculation and Sense Chapter 5: The Debt of Philosophy: Music, Speculation, and The Sound of Debt Chapter 6: The Metaphoricity of Sense: Hong-Kai Wang's Music While We Work - with Lindsey Lodhie Conclusion: Music After Art Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Questionnaires are everywhere: we fill them out at doctors' offices and at job interviews, to express ourselves and to advance knowledge, to find love and to kill time. But where did they come from, and why have they proliferated? Evan Kindley's Questionnaire investigates the history of the form as form, from the Victorian confession album to the BuzzFeed quiz. By asking questions about the questions we ask ourselves, Kindley uncovers surprising connections between literature and science, psychology and business, and journalism and surveillance.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewA marvelous book that gathers an unexpected array of materials under the heading of the questionnaire: from IQ tests to the early days of marriage counseling, from data-mining Facebook quizzes to Scientology's rigged personality tests. Playful, smart and rich with dizzying connections, Evan Kindley’s Questionnaire is no less than a secret history of how we became a nation of oversharers. * Hua Hsu, author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016); Contributor, The New Yorker; Associate Professor of English, Vassar College, USA *Evan Kindley's crisp and fleet Questionnaire travels with extraordinary speed from the quaint and idle to the flat-out alarming, with huge implications for our digital culture now and in the future. * Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris *Be vigilant, friend, for we live in the age of the BuzzFeed Quiz. … Beneath every expression of preference is a rat’s nest of prejudices, insecurities, and empty assertions of selfhood. Fortunately, there’s Evan Kindley’s Questionnaire, one in a new crop from Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series—it offers a rich primer on humankind’s submission to inane paperwork. In the questionnaire, Kindley demonstrates, bureaucrats found a ridiculously simple solution to a long-standing problem: How do you get people to open up about themselves to total strangers? Turns out that just asking, ideally with some veneer of officialdom, is a great way to start. As Kindley writes in his introduction, ‘The decision to provide information about oneself, as irresistible as it sometimes seems, is neither a natural human instinct nor an automatic social good’; it takes a finely tuned questionnaire to coax us out of our shells, and there are dubious intentions behind just about every form. Eugenics, managerial power-plays, electoral politics, Christian matchmaking, latent fascism, female desire—you name it, some questionnaire has interrogated it. Kindley’s book provides a lucid, distressing look at the backbone of demography. -- Dan Piepenbring * The Paris Review *The story of Francis Galton begins the story of Questionnaire, Evan Kindley’s new entry into 'Object Lessons,' a series from Bloomsbury 'about the hidden lives of ordinary things.' … Kindley’s approach keeps with the spirit and method of the series, tracking the evolution of this particular thing—in this case, standardized sets of questions designed to elicit self-report, and the question of whether or not self-reported answers, no matter how well-designed, no matter how robust their sample, can ever be entirely honest or accurate—over the history of its existence. … Kindley does an admirable job of presenting that history, especially given that Object Lesson entries are, as a rule, very short. … [T]he pervasive, vaguely Orwellian character of Big Data is among is the first world’s most pronounced animating anxieties. It is a worry I share, but in reading Questionnaire, I was put in mind of another—not explicitly named, but more remarkable and more troubling: the possibility, already somewhat realized, of a world where the collection of facts is not a means to some nefarious end, but the empty end itself. -- Emmett Rensin * Bookforum *People with a paranoid streak will feel vindicated by Evan Kindley's Questionnaire, a thoughtful exploration of the subject from the Proust questionnaire through Buzzfeed quizzes. As Kindley documents, nearly everyone who puts a quiz in front of you is trying to mine something from you, often (though not always) for profit or to influence your behavior ... Kindley's final chapters on computer dating questionnaires and Buzzfeed quizzes illustrate how powerful and potentially dangerous data science has become, even when personal responses are anonymized. * Milwaukee Journal Sentinel *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Form as Form 1. Private Publicity 2. The Rise and Fall of Testing 3. Your Opinion of You 4. The Art of Asking 5. Pandora’s Checklist 6. Dating and Data 7. Quiz Mania Acknowledgments Endnotes Index

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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. One in two men and one in three women will develop invasive cancer. Tumors have the power to redefine identities and change how people live with one another.Tumor takes readers on an intellectual adventure around the attitudes that shape how humans do scientific research, treat cancer, and talk about disease, treatment, and death. With poetic verve and acuity, Anna Leahy explores why and how tumors happen, how we think and talk about them, and how we try to rid ourselves of them. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewLeahy looks a tough subject right in the eyes, and tells its story with grace, insight, alacrity, and wit. * David Eagleman, Stanford neuroscientist, New York Times bestselling author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, and host of the PBS series The Brain with David Eagleman *In clear, compelling language, Anna Leahy writes with insight and empathy about cancer and the social and cultural dimensions of one of our greatest fears. A blend of science, journalism, and deeply personal storytelling, this book takes a lyrical approach to a complex subject we all face in some way. * Kristen Iversen, Professor of English & Comparative Literature, University of Cincinnati, USA, and author of Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (2012) *Table of Contents1. Tumor in the Family 2. Terms & Conditions 3. Self/Other(s) 4. Part & Parcel 5. Inside/Outside Notes Index

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Book SynopsisShelton Waldrep is Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, USA, and currently the Trustee Professor of the University of Maine System.Trade ReviewOriginal, engaging, and well-researched, Future Nostalgia is a welcome contribution to both the field of popular music studies generally and to Bowie scholarship in particular. Combining an interdisciplinary approach--drawing on musicology, music criticism, cultural studies and cultural history, gender studies, and disability studies--with the author’s comprehensive knowledge of Bowie’s career and oeuvre, this book makes a compelling case for the importance of David Bowie as an artist, performer, and cultural icon. * Alexander Carpenter, Associate Professor and Director of Music, University of Alberta, Augustana Campus, Canada *Future Nostalgia is a logical and rigorous exemplar for unpacking the performative palette of popular music's most complex and enduring star. The author has produced a work that critiques David Bowie's uniquely interdisciplinary performances by examining them through a carefully constructed and appropriately interdisciplinary lens. Simply, this is an essential text within the rapidly growing field of Bowie Studies. * Ian Chapman, Senior Executant Lecturer in Contemporary Music, The University of Otago, New Zealand *This important book is a Tour-De-Force. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, Professor Waldrep's book is a major addition to the growing field of study which seeks to unpack one of the most complex, multilayered and learned icons within popular culture. Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie is a must for both Bowie scholars and Bowie fans alike. * Eoin Devereux, Assistant Dean, Research AHSS Faculty, University of Limerick, Ireland & Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Culture, University of Jyvasklya, Finland *Future Nostalgia emphasizes Bowie’s fascination with theatricality and artifice … Waldrep’s ability to interpret the chameleon twists in Bowie’s work is impressive. He unveils the autobiographical moments and presents a nuanced reading of his often-ambiguous lyrics … Future Nostalgia is the best critical assessment of the Bowie oeuvre that we have; it deftly provides shape and form to an amorphous body of work that often seems to defy interpretation. * LA Review of Books *If you have an interest or even a love for the significance of David Bowie and how he shaped our collective appreciation for all things that define the art world, this book should attract your attention…An essential study of one of recent history’s most remarkable renaissance men. * SLUG Magazine *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Figures Chapter One Introduction:The Pastiche of Gender Chapter Two The Persistence of the Dandy:Subcultures and Resistance Chapter Three Avatars of the Future:Structuring Music Chapter Four The Grain of the Voice:Autobiography and Multiplicity Chapter Five The Lost Decade:Reconsidering the 1980s Chapter Six Music for Cyborgs:Fictions of Disability General 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 sapiens of the sea, whales are the other intelligent, social, and loquacious animal. But they seem to swim away the more people chase after them in an effort to communicate and connect. Why does the meaning of their mesmerizing songs continue to elude us? In times of unprecedented environmental and social loss, Whale Song ponders the problems facing ocean ecosystems and offers lessons from those depths for human social life and intimacy. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewEnchanting … Beautifully written and often deeply moving, Whale Song is more than a fascinating examination of ocean life - it's a balm for the soul … This slim but enthralling work of nonfiction explores what whale song has meant to humans since our first recording of it. * Shelf Awareness *Writing with the clarity and precision of a dolphin’s clicks, Grebowicz covers the history of the sometimes-futile attempts by humans to communicate with whales, dolphins, and other ocean dwellers. Humans could learn much from the dispassionate language of these creatures, whose sonar and other forms of long-range sonic communication is, by necessity, without deceit. * Alvin Lucier, Composer *Whale Song is just the music of the earth we need now. Margret Grebowicz is listening to our Terran cousins in the rising storm. * Donna Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene *Table of Contents1. Songs 2. Loneliness 3. Language 4. Interest 5. Charisma 6. Captivity 7. Noise 8. Waste 9. Music 10. Kissing 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. You can't think about travel without thinking about luggage. And baggage has baggage. Susan Harlan takes readers on a journey with the suitcases that support, accessorize, and accompany our lives. Along the way, she shows how the materials of travel the carry-ons, totes, trunks, and train cases of the past and present have stories to tell about displacement, home, gender, class, consumption, and labor. Luggage considers bags as carefully curated microcosms of our domestic and professional selves, charting the evolution of travel across literature, film, and art. A simple suitcase, it turns out, contains more than you might think. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewIn this welcome addition to Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series, author Susan Harlan packs just enough in her sturdy devices to finish this trip on time and under budget … What is luggage? What is baggage? Are they interchangeable terms, or does the former exist only because it started as the latter? Is a backpack luggage? Questions are asked and answered. * PopMatters *In this short, delicious little extended essay, author Susan Harlan takes a closer look at our luggage, why we have it, why we use it as we do … Brisk writing threads pensive musings about our luggage with the author’s use of her own on one of her many business trips. What we choose to take, which bags and what to pack, their shape and size and appearance and more, all have a lot to say about who we are. Who knew a few bags could have such deep psychological implications? Five stars. * San Francisco Book Review *Susan Harlan writes with empathy and erudition about the things we lug, haul, pack, and leave behind. This little book — compact enough to throw in your carry-on for your next flight — is edifying and entertaining in equal measures. I loved it. * Rosie Schaap, author of Drinking With Men *For those of us who travel for a living, luggage is all things in one: tool, companion, talisman. I think about luggage a lot. Probably too much. But I’ve never read anything that — forgive me here — unpacks the history and meaning of luggage with the same depth and verve as Susan Harlan does. From Shakespeare’s Henry V to an oddly compelling contemporary visit to Alabama’s Unclaimed Baggage Center, this slim volume is worth the journey. * Nathan Thornburgh, Co-founder of Roads & Kingdoms *An intimate look at suitcases, trunks, totes, and other baggage, Luggage illuminates the intricacies of how we carry our lives with us when we travel … Harlan’s exploration of the minutiae of luggage makes for introspection … Harlan mines the life of things we pay little attention to, or simply don’t recall, and calls up nostalgia through the memory of objects. * Brevity *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Travel and Its Objects 1. Luggage and Secrets 2. The Language of Luggage 3. Packing 4. My Luggage 5. Lost Luggage: Alabama's Unclaimed Baggage Center 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.Speed. Bump. Speed. Traffic considers the history and philosophy of roundabouts, speed bumps, the pedestrian mall, and other efforts to manage traffic. Exploring ways to reign in the power of the internal combustion engine, ramp back century-long efforts to increase the flows of traffic, and establish greater balance between humans and machines, Paul Josephson considers the history of traffic, and the political and other controversies that frame the belated technological efforts to calm it. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewTraffic is both insightful and entertaining. Based on a range of sources, it provides us with a fuller understanding of the methods by which we might be able to control the negative effects of the automobile on our cities. * Joel A. Tarr, Richard S. Caliguiri University Professor of History and Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, USA *Paul Josephson, with deft humor and brilliance, shines a spotlight on one of the simplest and most unassuming cures for our traffic ills—the speed bump. That invention is not the new, new thing, like Uber, autonomous vehicles, and paying for transit with your smart phone. The speed bump is tried and true, and represents much more than a lump of pavement. Its very idea is the way we must design the cities of the future for people and not just automobiles. * Lois DeMeester, CEO and Founder of Mobility Lab *These Object Lessons books are interesting little in-depth examinations and philosophical treatises on objects as disparate as cigarette lighters, hotels, questionnaires, eggs, drones, golf balls, shipping containers, and waste. Like many of the other authors in the series, Paul Josephson, through humor and intelligence, offers great insight. He makes reading about traffic much more pleasant than being stuck in it. * Lit Hub *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Mushrooms in Minsk 2. Speed Bumps in Twentieth Century Philosophy 3. Utopian Visions of Machines and People: A World Without Speed Bumps 4. Mumford and Moses 5. The Historical Concatenation of Congestion 6. Speed Bumpology 7. Crashworthy Automobiles as Speed Bumps 8. Race, Equality and Traffic 9. Pedestrian Malls as Large Scale Speed Bumps 10. The Woonerf: The Neighborhood Speed Bump 11. Taming Roads Themselves 12. Curb Cuts for People, Roundabouts for Automobiles 13. The Bicycle as a Neo-Luddite Traffic Solution 14. Gendered Speed Bumps 15. If Stopped in Traffic, Hope for a Crashworthy Automobile 16. Safety Delays in the Name of Freedom 17. Speed Bump Downsides 18. Waxing and Waning of Brazilian Speed Bumps 19. Potholes and Paper Money 20. Speed Bumps for Other Hopeful Technologies Notes 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.The electric candle and faux fur, coffee substitutes and meat analogues, Obama impersonators, prosthetics. Imitation this, false that. Humans have been replacing and improving upon the real thing for millennia from wooden toes found on Egyptian mummies to the Luxor pyramid in Las Vegas. So why do people have such disdain for so-called fakes? Kati Stevens''s Fake discusses the strange history of imitations, as well as our ever-changing psychological and socioeconomic relationships with them. After all, fakes aren''t going anywhere; they seem to be going everywhere. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewFake aims to interrogate what it is we think we’re getting from the ‘real’ thing and what we’re searching for either by clamoring for ‘real’ things or by accepting their imitation … If you revel in the critical examination of objects around you and criticism of commonly accepted attitudes, this book will be your new friend. * Seattle Book Review *Fake is fascinating, clever, and utterly perspective-altering. Kati Stevens is the genuine article. * Emily Anthes, author of Frankenstein’s Cat (2013) *Table of Contents1. The Start of Something Fake 2. That Which Is Fake May Never Die 3. Quorn for Lunch; Oreos for Dessert 4. What Was Never Real Can(not) Be Faked 5. Hippopotamus Teeth 6. Davids 7. Ovid and the Real Girl 8. The Start of Something Fake, Part 2 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. 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 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 SynopsisUncurating Sound performs, across five chapters, a deliberation between art, politics, knowledge and normativity. It foregrounds the perfidy of norms and engages in the curatorial as a colonial knowledge project, whose economy of exploitation draws a straight line from Enlightenment's desire for objectivity, through sugar, cotton and tobacco, via lives lost and money made to the violence of contemporary art.It takes from curation the notion of care and thinks it through purposeful inefficiency as resistance: going sideways and another way. Thus it moves curation through the double negative of not not to uncuration: untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution.Looking at Kara Walker's work, the book invites the performance of the curatorial via indivisible connections and processes. Reading Kathy Acker and Adrian Piper it speculates on how the body brings us to knowledge beyond the ordinary. Playing Kate Carr and Ellen Fullman it re-examines Modernism's colonial ideology, and materialises the vibrational presence of a plural sense. Listening to Marguerite Humeau and Manon de Boer it avoids theory but agitates a direct knowing from voice and hands, and feet and ears that disorder hegemonic knowledge strands in favour of local, tacit, feminist and contingent knowledges that demand like Zanele Muholi's photographs, an ethical engagement with the work/world.Trade ReviewAn actual and effectual processual removing of the residues of decades of artistic and intellectual encrustations. * Morten Søndergaard, Seismograf *Salomé Voegelin's oeuvre epitomizes sonic dynamism. Her latest work is no different. In Uncurating Sound, Voegelin invites us to listen along as she troubles and blurs static lines between knowledge and curation, writers and bodies, sound and the book, reading and performing. As she converses with works by such figures as Kara Walker, Kathy Acker, Adrian Piper, Kate Carr, Ellen Fullman and Manon de Boer, Voegelin reminds us vitally – especially as we continue to emerge from pandemic isolation and sustained distancing – that we are embodied. And questions like, Who is the “I” and the ear that writes? and For whom do we write and listen? are vital to our collective flourishing. Compelling in its speculation and expansive in its sonic wanderings, Uncurating Sound will interrupt our deep assumptions about sound and knowledge as it calls for us, in all our full embodiment, to listen. Where is your body tuned now? * Nicole Furlonge, Professor and Director of the Klingenstein Center, Columbia University, USA *With detours and fuzzy paths, inhalations and exhalations, rivers and their volumes, Uncurating Sound proposes the decolonial and transversal politics of sound is a matter not only for art institutions and their publics but also for a broader untethering from extractive histories and ways of knowing. * Sasha Engelmann, Senior Lecturer in GeoHumanities, Royal Holloway University of London, UK *Salomé Voegelin’s sensitive handling of sound topics as a post-colonial un-discipline is both observational and treatise-ish, caring and critical, and affirms the complex entanglement of curation, the cannon, the archive, and the body, and proposes a new traversing identity of sound studies. A Tour de Force. * Miya Masaoka, composer, artist and Associate Professor of Visual Art (Sound Art) and Director, Sound Art Program MFA, Columbia University, USA *Salomé is able to bring art work and theory into a real dialogue (instead of the art work being subordinated to the theoretical frame), which implies that there’s a win-win situation: on the one hand, Salomé invites the reader to encounter a sonic art work by offering an open theoretical frame; on the other hand, the theories are brought to another plane by confronting them with concrete art works that “speak back.” * Marcel Cobussen, Professor of Auditory Culture and Music Philosophy, Leiden University, Netherlands *Table of ContentsList of figures Acknowledgements Prologue: Sounding Gaps in Pavements Introduction: Taking a breath together Breath 1 Curating politics in the gallery space Breath 2 The possibility of resistance and the performance of alternatives Performance score listen across to uncurate knowledge Breath 3 With voice and hands sound it IIIIIII Breath 4 Postnormal Performing Walls IX Bibliography List of Works 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 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. Why do we sign our names? How can a squiggle both enslave and liberate? Signatures often require a witnessas if the scrawl itself is not enough. What other kinds of beliefs and longings justify our signing practices? Signature addresses these questions as it roams from a roundtable on the Greek island of Syros, to a scene of handwriting analysis conducted in an English pub, from a wedding in Moscow, where guests sign the bride's body, to a San Franciscan tattoo parlor interested in arcane forms. The signature's history encompasses ancient handprints on cave walls, autograph hunters, the branding of slaves, metaphysical poetry, medical malpractice, hip-hop lyrics, legal challenges to electronic signatures, ice cores harvested from Greenland, and tales of forgery and autopens. Part cultural chronicle, part travelogue, Signature pursues the identifying marks made by peTrade ReviewThis is a true ‘essay film’ of a book, with multiple associative bridges flying out from its topic, into the air of pure insight. I’m thrilled to add my name to its covers. * Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude *Table of Contents1. The Dotted Line 2. S for Signature a. Real Fake b. On the Shores of Syros 3. Autograph Collecting a. “To Adam, from Big Daddy” b. A Victorian State of Mind c. Reading Character d. Criminal Signatures e. Autograph Fever 4. The Origins of Signature a. To Astuvansalmi b. There is Nothing Funny about Elk c. The Self, Extended d. Cave Signatures e. Seals and Signets 5. Signing the Body a. I Am You b. Erotic Inscription c. Autographic Skin 6 Digital Signatures, Signaling Digits a. Signing Machines i. Typewriter ii. Film iii. Gramophone b. Fingerprinting c. Electronic Signatures 7 Paw Prints & Ice Cores a. Doctrine of Signatures b. Animal Tracks c. Epigenetic Signatures d. Ice Cores Epilogue Acknowledgments

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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 SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Exits are all around us. They are the difference between travelling and arriving, being on the inside or outside. Whether signposted or subversive, personal or political, choices or holes we''ve fallen through, exits determine how we move around our lives, cities, and the world. What does it really mean to exit'? In these meditations on exits in architecture, transport, ancestry, language, garbage, death, Sesame Street and Brexit, Laura Waddell follows the neon and the pictograms of exit signs to see what's on the other side. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewAn incredible writer. Exit is wondrous, cleverly and movingly encouraging us to think of the ordinary in new and challenging ways. As it happens, I read this brilliant book while pondering what an ‘exit’ from the coronavirus lockdown might look like, and the reminder that exits often lead to new and better beginnings was a welcome inspiration indeed. * Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland *Writer, publisher and award-winning Scotsman columnist Laura Waddell straddles the tangible and the theoretical in her thoughtful contribution on exits. * The Scotsman *From its timely nature and broad range of subjects, to the style in which it was written, I would highly recommend Exit, particularly to anyone looking to enjoy their first taste of the Object Lessons series. * The National *Roaming from Glasgow to Kowloon Walled City, Laura Waddell's Exit is deft, compelling and deep; revealing the extent to which the political is always personal. There are no simple escapes in these studies of exclusion, entrapment and exile yet Waddell proves in the persuasive empathy and acuity of her writing that it is possible to throw open our windows to light and sound from outside, elsewhere, one another. * Darran Anderson, author of Imaginary Cities and Inventory *Though physically small, its scope is at once sweeping and intimate, darting ably from urban spaces to individual case studies … a consistent pleasure … dazzling. * Review 31 *Table of ContentsPreface 1. Words Associated with Exit 2. After the World of My Own Language Sank 3. Some Poet Throwing Forked Lightning 4a. The History of Exit Signs 4b. The Poetics of Exit Design 4c. The Future of Exit Signs 5. Grouchland: Brexit, Sesame Street, and Garbage 6. Elevation 7. Evictions and Evacuations 8. Existential Exits 9. EXIT This Way Acknowledgements Notes Index

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Book SynopsisPosing Sex: Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Art views the long and provocative tradition of representing the sexual act in Western art as an occasion for challenging assumptions about personhood. It is uncontroversial that what Singer dubs the sex image, the artist's posing of human figures in the act of coitus, is an enduring compositional armature for artists from antiquity to the present. Singer, however, makes the quite controversial claim that this aesthetic practice, in literature and painting especially, serves as a powerful métier for exploring how the mind is continuous with the sensuously lively body rather than its rationalistic antagonist. Singer draws upon a rich philosophical traditionfrom the Greek Stoics, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hegel to contemporary theorists of perception and aesthetic agencyto show how the stakes of aesthetic experience epitomized in the sex image are essentially ethical. Referencing a broad range of image-based arTrade ReviewThis risk-taking, fearless book is a continually rewarding act of looking and feeling and thinking, insisting on their intimacy but also enacting it on the page, where Singer's intellectual reach and analytical rigor produce an abundance of arresting perceptions of sensuous aesthetic experience. * Ross Posnock, Anna Garbedian Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University, USA *Drawing elegantly on Hegel and Spinoza, as well as contemporaries like John McDowell, Alan Singer regards aesthetic depictions of sex not merely as lewd images, or objects for the male gaze, but as a matrix through which personhood is made intelligible. Posing Sex invites us to see in such images how conceptual capacities are at work in the deliverances of our senses, and how knowledge of self and others can be achieved where we least expect it. * Paul A. Kottman, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, The New School for Social Research, USA, and author of Love as Human Freedom (2017) *[R]emarkably sensitive and intricate in surveying how aesthetic moments may connect to more comprehensive aspects of life by virtue of the kinds of ‘mindfulness’ they pursue … Singer deploys a unique mode of argument that we might best characterize as philosophical bricolage. * Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley, JML Blog Review Roundtable, JML Blog Review Roundtable *A leading virtue of Alan Singer's Posing Sex is its commitment to a theorization of literary and visual art that might please even the opponents of aesthetics. Those partisans will find no shrinking from action here … One value of Singer's literary-critical iconoclasm lies in his ability to bring into the domain of mindedness and action texts that range from Lady Chatterley's Lover to Henry Miller's Sexus to Lolita; and to do the same for erotically-charged visual art by Balthus or Bacon or John Currin, and for the film art of Lars Von Trier. * Robert L. Caserio, The Pennsylvania State University, JML co-editor, JML Blog Review Roundtable *I urge [readers] to ‘taste and see’ for themselves, and in the reading of the entire book … they will experience the surprises of informed and just critical judgments and the shocks of new aesthetic experiences. * Daniel T. O'Hara, Temple University, JML co-editor, JML Blog Review Roundtable *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Posing Sex: Prospects for a Perceptual Ethics 2. Learning from Imagination: Re-Imagining Moral Knowledge 3. The Senses of Personhood: Beyond Allegories of the Body 4. The Impositions of Perception 5. Knowledge in the Flesh Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThere exists a series of contemporary artists who continually defy the traditional role of the artist/author, including Art & Language, Guerrilla Girls, Bob and Roberta Smith, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and Lucky PDF. In Death of the Artist, Nicola McCartney explores their work and uses previously unpublished interviews to provoke a vital and nuanced discussion about contemporary artistic authorship. How do emerging artists navigate intellectual property or work collectively and share the recognition? How might a pseudonym aid ''artivism''? Most strikingly, she demonstrates how an alternative identity can challenge the art market and is symptomatic of greater cultural and political rebellion. As such, this book exposes the art world''s financially incentivised infrastructures, but also examines how they might be reshaped from within. In an age of cuts to arts funding and forced self-promotion, this offers an important analysis of the pressing need for the artistic community to construTrade ReviewThis book is a fine contribution to the study of modern art and artists and will help us to understand the practice and significance of alternative identities, pseudonyms and collective identity. * Art Daily *‘Nicola McCartney is part of a new generation of thinkers about art. Art now is more playful and indiscreet than it has ever been but it also aspires to talk to a political world that is both frightening but also where there is a possibility to reach new audiences. The idea of the artist in this new space is changing. In this book McCartney charts the careers of artists who question the role of the artist and who seek to subvert the notion that art is produced only by artists. McCartney asks: who do these artists think they are?’ -- Bob and Roberta Smith‘Nicola McCartney gets it: anonymous groups subvert the Western convention of the artist as a lone genius (usually a white male).’ -- Guerrilla Girls‘Nicola McCartney offers us a fresh and incisive analysis of moments in modern and contemporary art in which pseudonyms, anonymity, and collective identities are put to use. In doing so, McCartney interrogates the foundations of traditional art history and the art market. Death of the Artist is an important and exciting new contribution to our understanding of art's political efficacy.’ -- Joanne Morra, Reader in Art History and Theory, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts LondonTable of ContentsList of Figures Preface Introduction 1. Parodies of the Self: Surrealism and Ambivalent Authorship in ‘Rrose Selavy’ and ‘Claude Cahun’ 2. Collective Practice: Art & Language and LuckyPDF Interview: Socio-Art & The Art of Interaction: James Early of LuckyPDF Interviewed by Nicola McCartney on 9 May 2013 3. Anonymity and Feminism: Guerrilla Girls Interview: Feminist Avengers: Guerrilla Girls Interviewed by Nicola McCartney on 14 August 2013 4. Pseudonyms: Bob and Roberta Smith Interview: Art Mythologies: Bob and Roberta Smith Interviewed by Nicola McCartney on 18 February 2013 5. Performance and Collaboration: ‘No, I’m Spartacus’. . . Chetwynd! Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Once upon a time, the news was only 15 minutes long and middle-class families huddled around a tiny black-and-white screen, TV dinners on their laps, awaiting weekly sitcoms that depicted an all-white world in which mom wore pearls and heels as she baked endless pies. If this seems a distant past, that's a measure of just how much TV has changedand changed us. Weaving together personal memoir, social and political history, and reflecting on key moments in the history of news broadcasting and prime time entertainment, Susan Bordo opens up the 75-year-old time-capsule that is TV and illustrates what a constant companion and dominant cultural force television has been, for good and for bad, in carrying us from the McCarthy hearings and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet to Mad Men, Killing Eve, and the emergence of our first reality TV president.Object Lessons iTrade ReviewSusan Bordo is old enough to remember when television was a thing—a set, a box, an electric window on a made-up world—and she pays wise, charming, and personal tribute to its meaning for a generation and a culture raised in its blue light. And that's the way it was. * Jeff Jarvis, TV critic for People and TV Guide and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly *In this lively and engaging analysis of what television has done for us and to us, the feminist cultural critic Susan Bordo takes us from Father Knows Best and Walter Cronkite to OJ, MadMen, Fox News, and much more. She shows how TV has shaped our politics and our purchases, our minds and our bodies, our definition of truth and our concept of reality. "We live in an empire of images," Bordo writes—one could not wish for a more knowledgeable and entertaining guide. * Katha Pollitt, poet, essayist, and The Nation columnist. Her most recent book is Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights. *Entertaining… A thought provoking and interesting read. * Irish Tech News *Table of ContentsPreface 1. Waiting for Joseph Welch 2. We Have Six Televisions 3. Growing Up with TV in the Fifties and Sixties 4. The Erosion of the Fact-Based Universe 5. If George Orwell Could Critique Broadcast News 6. Intersections of TV, “Reality,” and Reality 7. TV Deconstructs Gender 8. Epilogue: July 4, 2020 Acknowledgments Notes

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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 SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. OK as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK is a young word, less than 200 years old. It began as an acronym for all correct when the steam-powered printing press pushed newspapers into the mainstream. Today it is spoken and written by nearly everyone in the world. Drawing on linguistics, history, and new media studies, Michelle McSweeney traces OK from its birth in the Penny Presses through telephone lines, grammar books, and television signals into the digital age. Nearly ubiquitous and often overlooked, OK illustrates the never-ending dance between language, technology, and culture, and offers lessons for our own techno-historical moment. ObjecTrade Review[A] slim and lucid addition to the Object Lessons series. . . . McSweeney traces the word's evolution through the present, illuminating the ways in which its meaning developed over time. * The Millions *More than just OK. . . . A quick and fascinating read. . . . Short, but mentally nutritious. * The DreamCage *A concise yet wide-ranging tour though the history of how technology has influenced the way we talk with each other. * Gretchen McCulloch, linguist and author of Because Internet *OK is more than just okay—it's the handiest and most up-to-date account of this mysterious yet deathless little expression available. Witness the history of something we say all day every day that's actually new enough that it would have left Thomas Jefferson scratching his head. * John McWhorter, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Columbia University, USA, author of Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter Then, Now and Forever and host of the podcast Lexicon Valley *Table of Contents1. Ok (Introduction) 2. Oll Korrect (Origins) 3. Ok? (Alternative Origins) Grains of Truth An Exotic Loanword Food 4. Olde Kinderhook (Branding) Ok Products 5. Okay (Literature) 6. Oh-kay (Telephone) A Modern Ok 7. Ok! (Television) Culture, Technology, and War 8. K (the Internet) Bulletin Board Systems 9. Kk (Social Media) English 10. [OK emoji] (Gesture) 11. O.k. Ok, Ok, Lol (Conclusion) Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA unique perspective on one of the most infamous cities in recent American history. - Publisher's WeeklyA book that sticks with you long after you've read it. Volume 1 BrooklynHoke's writing is blunt and honest, and Sticker is a collection worth keeping. Southern Review of BooksI will never forget this book. - T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless GirlsFunny, nostalgic, and weird in the best possible way. - Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, author of My MonticelloFeatured in Electric Lit's The Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of 2022Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Stickers adorn our first memories, dot our notebooks and our walls, are stuck annoyingly on fruit, and accompany us into adulthood to announce our beliefs from car bumpers. They hold surprising power in their ability to define and provoke, and hold a stranTrade ReviewHoke (The Groundhog Forever) offers up an evocative reflection on queerness, race, and his hometown of Charlottesville, Va., in this conceptual 'memoir in 20 stickers.' .” Part of Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series, his book uses the humble sticker as a metaphorical linchpin for a series of essays that [offer] a unique perspective on one of the most infamous cities in recent American history. * Publishers Weekly *We’re not entirely objective here, but we’re quite fond of the Object Lessons series — and Henry Hoke’s contribution might boast the most striking cover design the series has had to date. Hoke’s book uses stickers to chronicle everything from queer identity to the recent history of Charlottesville, Virginia — all of which should make this a book that sticks with you long after you’ve read it. (Pun intended, oh yes.) * Volume 1 Brooklyn *Hoke’s keenly constructed memoir-in-essays is really a memoir-in-stickers, from the glow-in-the-dark stars and coveted Lisa Frank unicorns of childhood to a Pixies decal from his teenage years. The book also peels back the complicated notoriety of the author’s hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia, juxtaposing Dave Matthews’ fire dancer emblem against a truck emblazoned with the words “Are You Triggered?” on its back window heralding the infamous white supremacist march. * Electric Lit *Sticker is a trove of Millennial nostalgia. Its uniqueness lies not only in Hoke’s unabashed storytelling but also in its critical analysis of American current events and its brutal honesty about a city rooted in racism. In Sticker, Hoke’s Charlottesville morphs into a scrapbook, one where Hoke places many of the literal and metaphorical stickers significant to his past and his identity, one in which America memorializes some of its questionable, inhumane history and many of its darkest days. Possessing the evocative power of Melissa Faliveno’s Tomboyland, Hoke’s writing is blunt and honest, and Sticker is a collection worth keeping. -- Nicole Yurcaba * Southern Review of Books *Funny, nostalgic, and weird in the best possible way, Henry Hoke's Sticker weaves evocative personal moments with hometown lore and racial reckoning, all while making you want to dig up your old-school sticker collection—the puffy, the glowy, especially the scratch and sniff. * Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, author of My Monticello *Henry Hoke examines gender, sexuality, music, and the depths of humanity with exuberant whimsy and charm. Sticker pulses with ghost stories, lamplit streets and pine, boyhood, blood. Startlingly original and gorgeously rendered, I will never forget this book. * T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls *Table of ContentsMr. Yuk Unicorn Wahoowa Gold Star Constellation Chiquita Reinforcer Proud Parent Parental Advisory Explicit Content Rotunda Anarchy Blueberry Death to the Pixies Pink Circle Heart Fire Dancer Be Nice to Me I Gave Blood Today Are You Triggered? Hail Satan HH Index

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Book SynopsisFrom its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, Salomé Voegelin expands possible world theory' to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological life-worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thinkable and accessible as the possibility of the everyday and of art: to reach a new materialist understanding from the invisible and to develop an ear for the as yet inaudible. This revised edition continues Voegelin's exploration of the sonic possibility of the world into the sonic possibility and impossibility of the body. Listening to work by Áine O'Dwyer, Hannah Silva and Jocy de Oliveira, it considers sonic possible worlds' radical power to rethink normative constructions and to fabulate a difTrade ReviewSalomé Voegelin is a brilliant and subtle thinker about sound and music, so Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, Revised Edition is a deeply explored and essential study of the necessity of listening, of openly absorbing what sound tells us of our shared world, listening which gives us access to the fluid nature of relationships and connections, to the interactive web of the world and our participation in it through awareness of this 'complex continuity' and of ourselves inextricably enmeshed within it. Salomé Voegelin generously maps many ways of practicing listening to sonic worlds and of sharing access to the ever-expanding “possible world” of sound-life, then goes further, leaping beyond our physical and conceptual limits, diving into sound we cannot hear but which affects us, becoming part of our apprehensible world and of our learning how to live within it. * Annea Lockwood, Composer and Professor Emeritus, Vassar College, USA *The first edition of this book opened up new ways of thinking about sound and listening, which seemed provocative at the time, engaging with “possible world theory,” speculating on what and how sound means without referring it to the visual, and proposing a continuum of hearing between sound art and music. In this highly anticipated and essential new edition, Voegelin thinks about bodies and presents with rigor and extraordinary clarity the way sound may open us up to the plural possibility of bodily existence. Effortlessly interlacing phenomenology, feminist and queer theories, and weaving together sound thought and practice, while remaining precise yet accessible, the author invites us to listen to our own and each other’s bodies, enjoy their transforming, hybrid and even monstrous capacities, and discover the emancipatory force of their soundings. * Mikhail Karikis, film director and Professor, MIMA School of Art & Design, Teesside University, UK *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Landscape as Sonic Possible World 2. Into the World of the Work: The Possibility of Sound Art 3. Sonic Materialism: the Sound of Stones 4. Hearing the Continuum of Sound 5. Listening to the Inaudible: the Sound of Unicorns 6. Possible and Impossible Bodies Notes Bibliography List of works Index

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Book SynopsisThe interdisciplinary French-American thinker René Girard (1923-2015) has been one of the towering figures of the humanities in the last half-century. The title of René Girard's first book offered his own thesis in summary form: romantic lie and novelistic truth [mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque]. And yet, for a thinker whose career began by an engagement with literature, it came as a shock to some that, in La Conversion de l'art, Girard asserted that the novel may be an outmoded form for revealing humans to themselves. However, Girard never specified what, if anything, might take the place of the novel. This collection of essays is one attempt at answering this question, by offering a series of analyses of films that aims to test mimetic theory in an area in which relatively little has so far been offered. Does it make any sense to talk of vérité filmique? In addition, Mimetic Theory and Film is a response to the widespread objection that there is nTrade ReviewRecognizing a growing interest at the international level, this volume is a timely publication in studies of film, philosophy, and the work of René Girard, exploring with insight and acuity the intersections of mimetic dynamics, sacrifice, and the moving image. Assembling authoritative critical voices on mimetic theory and analysing both classic and recent films, this book shows the hermeneutical and critical productivity of Girard's theoretical insights for film studies. A must-read for anyone in the field. * Pierpaolo Antonello, Reader in Modern Italian Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge, UK, and co-editor of Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: René Girard and Literary Criticism (2015) *A strong collection of major Girard scholars who persuasively argue for reading film through René Girard’s mimetic theory. The introduction by Fleming and Bubbio itself is a valuable guide for extending Girard’s ideas. This volume will be of great interest and use for readers in film studies, popular culture, and those following the exciting (re)turn to Girard occurring at Bloomsbury. * William A. Johnsen, Professor of English, Michigan State University, USA, and editor of Contagion: The Journal of The Colloquium on Violence and Religion *For over fifty years, Rene´ Girard's mimetic theory has given us a startling way of reading texts, especially novels and other classic literature. His approach identifies a strong complicity between ‘the sacred’ and the violence which is at the root of social and cultural formation. The present volume offers an overdue extension of this hermeneutic, by exploring the mimetic dimension of cinema. However, the essays are far from being a simple mechanical application of Girard's theory. Once again, the remarkable energy and creativity of the Australian circle of Girardian scholars have yielded fresh questions, but also a new fertility, with regard to Girardian theory. * Michael Kirwan, SJ, Research Associate, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK, and co-editor of Philosophy, Theology and the Jesuit Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2017) *Table of ContentsNotes on Editors and Contributors Introduction Diego Bubbio and Chris Fleming, Western Sydney University, Australia 1. Buñuel’s Apocalypse Now Andrew McKenna, Loyola University Chicago, USA 2. On Fiction and Truth: Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing Paul Dumouchel, Ritsumeikan Uiversity, Japan 3. Passing "The Imitation Game": Ex Machina, the Ethical, and Mimetic Theory Sandor Goodhart, Purdue University, USA 4. Femina ex-machina Jean-Pierre Dupuy, École Polytechnique, Paris, France 5. Looking for a Scapegoat and Finding Oneself: Kieslowski’s Decalogue and Mimetic Theory Jeremiah Alberg, International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan 6. Violence and Politics in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood Richard van Oort, University of Victoria, Canada 7. The Screenic Age Eric Gans, UCLA, USA 8. A Sacrificial Crisis Not Far Away: Star Wars as a Genuinely Modern Mythology Paolo Diego Bubbio, Western Sydney University, Australia 9. Mimetic Magic and Anti-Sacrificial Slayage: A Girardian Reading of Buffy the Vampire Slayer George A. Dunn, University of Indianapolis, USA, and Brian McDonald, Indiana University, USA 10. It’s Not the End of the World: Post-Apocalyptic Flourishing in Cartoon Network's Adventure Time Emma A. Jane, University of New South Wales, Australia 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 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.We think we know the trench coat, but where does it come from and where will it take us? From its origins in the trenches of WW1, this military outerwear came to project the inner-being of detectives, writers, reporters, rebels, artists and intellectuals. The coat outfitted imaginative leaps into the unknown. Trench Coat tells the story of seductive entanglements with technology, time, law, politics, trust and trespass. Readers follow the rise of a sartorial archetype through media, design, literature, cinema and fashion. Today, as a staple in stories of future life-worlds, the trench coat warns of disturbances to come.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewTrench Coat maps the extraordinary lives of this seemingly simple garment, which emerged from early industrialized warfare to become the screen for a multitude of projected dreams, fears and desires across the 20th century to the present. Jane Tynan’s material and cultural history charts the evolution of a coat that is practical yet cryptic, hyper-visible but concealing, possessed of vitality whilst also a form of camouflage. * Rachel Woodward, Professor of Human Geography, Newcastle University, UK *Jane Tynan’s Trench Coat is a delight – richly informative and written in prose as stylish as the object it describes. Uncovering the ‘dark and dangerous energy’ behind this icon of modernity, Tynan vividly captures the trench coat’s perennial appeal. * Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture, Lancaster University, UK, and author of Fashioning Gothic Bodies *Really interesting. . . . There's so many iconic moments that this analysis helps us peer more closely into. * New Books Network *Another engaging, thought-provoking paperback in Bloomsbury's excellent 'Object Lessons' series. * The Irish Scene *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Substance 2. War 3. Mobility 4. Insurgency 5. Reportage 6. Heroes or Villains 7. Outsiders 8. Style Conclusion Postscript Notes 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 SynopsisAesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler frames the intertwined relationship between artistic endeavours and scientific fields and their sociopolitical implications. Each chapter is either an explication of, or a critique of, some aspect of Bernard Stiegler's technological philosophy; as it is his technological-political-aesthetical-ethical theorisations which form the philosophical foundation of the volume.Emerging scholars bring critical new reflections to the subject area, while more established academics, researchers and practitioners outline the mutating nature of aesthetics within historical and theoretical frameworks. Not only is interdisciplinarity a prevailing topic at work within this collection, but so too is there a delineation of the mutating, hybrid role inhabited by the arts practitioner at once engineer, scientist and artist in the changing landscape of digital cultural production.Trade ReviewI warmly recommend this volume. Stiegler’s perspective is one of the deepest critique of digital capitalism and, at the same time, one of the strongest proposal for a new kind of technological development, especially in the social and academic fields. The book is not only able to fully represent such a perspective, but it is also a way to improve both Stiegler’s perspective and the ongoing research in digital arts. * Paolo Vignola, Professor of Philosophy of Literature and Literary Theory, Universidad de las Artes, Ecuador *Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler offers an interesting focus on Stieglerian philosophy, passing through epistemology, politics and the arts. This strong theoretical approach keeps together voices from different authors and perspectives, all of which cover an important lack in the several publications concerning Stiegler’s philosophy, that is, aesthetics and the arts. Being this one of the main concerns of the French philosopher, the book offers an important introduction to this field. * Sara Baranzoni, co-founder of La Deleuziana *Table of Contents“Je suis philosophe”: A personal note to Bernard Stiegler Noel Fitzpatrick (Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland) Digital Studies and Aesthetics: Neganthropology Bernard Stiegler (Centre Georges-Pompidou, France) interviewed by Noel Fitzpatrick (Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland) Introduction: Prolegomenon to a Digital Studies Manifesto Gerald Moore (Durham University, UK) I – Tertiary Retention Introduction Cormac Deane (Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin, Ireland), Néill O’Dwyer (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), and Michael O’Hara (Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland) 1. Organology, Grammatisation and Exosomatic Memory in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape Néill O’Dwyer (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) 2. A Therapeutics of the Image Michael O’Hara (Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland) 3. The Control Room Imaginary and the Production of Sovereignty Cormac Deane (Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin, Ireland) II – On Pharmacology Introduction Aidan Delaney (Middlesex University, UK) and Jeanette Doyle (Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland) 4. Film Studies Between Ekphrasis and Quotation Aidan Delaney (Middlesex University, UK) 5. Thirty Years: An Analysis of the Exhibition Art Post-Internet through the Work of Bernard Stiegler with Reference to Jean-François Lyotard’s Exhibition Les Immatériaux Jeanette Doyle (Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland) 6. Pokémon UNÉSGO: Grammatization, Gamification and Listification in Contemporary Culture Connell Vaughan (Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland) III – The Neganthropocene Introduction Noel Fitzpatrick (Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland) 7. Pregnant Pause: Technological Disruption and the Neganthropic Aesthetics of Landscape in Ireland’s Borderland El Putnam (Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland) 8. Mischievous Hermes: Digital Hermeneutics and Stiegler’s Therapeutics Noel Fitzpatrick (Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland) Notes on Contributors Bibliography 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 SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Few clothing items are as ubiquitous or casual as blue jeans. Yet, their simplicity is deceptive. Blue jeans are nothing if not an exercise in opposites. Americans have accepted jeans as a symbol of their culture, but today jeans are a global consumer product category. Levi Strauss made blue jeans in the 1870s to withstand the hard work of mining, but denim has since become the epitome of leisure. In the 1950s, celebrities like Marlon Brando transformed the utilitarian clothing of industrial labor into a glamorous statement of youthful rebellion, and now, you can find jeans on chic fashion runways. For some, indigo blue might be the color of freedom, but for workers who have produced the dye, it has often been a color of oppression and tyranny. Blue Jeans considers the versatility of this iconic garment and investigates what makes denim a universal signifier, ready to fit Trade ReviewLike a best friend in a changing room, Purnell provides funny, fascinating, and sometimes horrifying commentary on your taste in jeans. Never again will you slip on a pair without thinking about the global historical and economic forces shaping your rear end. * Erin Thompson, Associate Professor of Art Crime, CUNY, USA *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction: The Most Versatile Garment 1. Distress Blue Blood Blue Dye Blue Is Not Green Blue Collar 2. Cut The Wild One Hemmed In It’s All in the Jeans The Denim Defense 3. Comfort Everywhere Everywhen Everyday Everyone Conclusion: The Paradox of Jeans Index

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