Popular culture Books

4531 products


  • LUP - University of Michigan Press Henry Ford and Grassroots America

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    Book SynopsisA study of Henry Ford and rural America in the 1920s.

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press A Users Guide to German Cultural Studies

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    Book SynopsisCapitalizes on the ripeness of the German case for interdisciplinary investigation

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press The Cosmopolitan Screen Between the Local and the

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    Book SynopsisInvestigates the extent to which German filmmakers have engaged with the ever more fluid trade of images, meanings, and identities in a globalizing world. This volume traces German cinema's negotiation of the global as a multilayered story in which hopes and fears about the prospect of a more cosmopolitan culture often go hand in hand.Trade ReviewSchindler and Koepnick's formulation of the 'cosmopolitan gaze' as a vehicle for the constitution of a post-national German film studies is both cogent and charged with fruitful possibilities for future work in the field. The admirable mix of lucidity and critical sophistication which this array of scholars bring to their subject will make The Cosmopolitan Screen essential reading for students, scholars, and researchers. - Erica Carter, Professor and Chair of German Studies, University of Warwick

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press Old Roots New Routes

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    Book SynopsisFluid by design, the term Alt Country has forced even the genre's own mouthpiece, the magazine/website ""No Depression"", to declare its terrain to be 'alternative-country music (whatever that is)'. This book explores the influences, meanings, and identity of this significant contemporary music form.

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press Skate Life

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    Book SynopsisExamines how young male skateboarders use skate culture media in the production of their identities. This book offers a comprehensive ethnographic analysis of an Ann Arbor, Michigan, skateboarding community, situating it within a larger historical examination of skateboarding's portrayal in mainstream media.Trade Review"With her elegant research design and sophisticated array of anthropological and media studies approaches, Emily Chivers Yochim has produced one of the best books about race, gender, and class that I have read in the last ten years. In a moment where celebratory studies of youth, youth subcultures, and their relationship to media abound, this book stands as a brilliantly argued analysis of the limitations of youth subcultures and their ambiguous relationship to mainstream commercial culture." - Ellen Seiter, University of Southern California "Yochim has made a valuable contribution to media and cultural studies as well as youth and American studies by conducting this research and by coining the phrase 'corresponding cultures,' which conceptualizes the complex and dynamic processes skateboarders employ to negotiate their identities as part of both mainstream and counter-cultures." - JoEllen Fisherkeller, New York University"

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press My Life as a Night Elf Priest

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    Book SynopsisCompiles more than three years of participatory research in Warcraft play and culture in the US and China. Nardi introduces us to the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press The Word on the Street

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press American Homes

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    Book SynopsisIncorporates poetry, prose, and various schematic devices, including dozens of illustrations by the artist Jacob Heustis, to create a cracked narrative of the domestic spaces we inhabit.

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press The Automobile and American Culture

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    Book SynopsisIntegrating scholarly and popular approaches, this anthology of essays, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and graphics describes the impact of one of this century's most fascinating inventions on American folkways. Now revised, this volume provides an even closer look at the past, present, and future of America's automobile revolution.

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    £999.99

  • LUP - University of Michigan Press That Was the Wild East

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press Brian Friel in Conversation

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press Exclusionary Violence

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    Book SynopsisA comprehensive examination of pre-Nazi violence against Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press The Airplane in American Culture

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press Black Cultural Traffic

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    Book SynopsisBlack Cultural Traffic traces how blackness travels globally in performance, engaging the work of an international and interdisciplinary mix of scholars, critics, and practicing artists.Trade ReviewThe explosion of interest in black popular culture studies in the past fifteen years has left a significant need for a reader that reflects this new scholarly energy. Black Cultural Traffic answers that need. - Mark Anthony Neal, author of Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation

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    £999.99

  • LUP - University of Michigan Press Diplomas and Thatch Houses Asserting Tradition

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    Book SynopsisExamines the people of Pulap, a tiny atoll just north of the Equator in the western Pacific. Pulapese consider themselves and are known to their neighbours as the most traditional islanders, a situation they regard as an asset and not as a sign of backwardness.

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press Infinity Stage

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    Book SynopsisA moving and genre-defying text, written after a great loss, that blurs the boundaries between writing and performance

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press Acts of Conspicuous Compassion

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    £999.99

  • The University of Michigan Press Muy Pop

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    £999.99

  • Apocalypse Ready

    Thames & Hudson Ltd Apocalypse Ready

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisAn expertly curated compilation of officially published step-by-step guides on how to deal with every kind of disaster imaginable, drawn from government archives all around the world from the 1910s to today. Organized into four broad disaster-themed scenarios - Pandemics, Natural Disasters, Nuclear War and Alien Invasion - this visual guide displays the plethora of public survival advice and scare tactics proposed from all around the globe to deal with every disaster scenario that has occurred or been imagined since the early 20th century. From leaflets showing how to build an earthquake shelter to booklets providing step-by-step advice on how to protect yourself and your family during a nuclear war, and from posters showing how to minimize your chances of catching Spanish flu to documents indicating how to identify aliens, this carefully curated selection of disaster-planning documents reveals differences in public attitudes towards impending catastrophe since the 1910s and showTrade Review'A huge new pictorial history ... a masterclass in avoiding panic' - The Telegraph'Beautiful' - Creative Review'Assembles 100 years of government disaster advice from around the globe into a single volume' - Elephant'For those who approach bad news by laughing to keep from crying... In addition to humorous and ironic vintage illustrations and some dubious, outdated advice, there is useful advice too. It's up to the reader to decide which is which... If you aren't worried when you begin this book, you will be when you're done' - The Atlanta Journal-ConstitutionTable of ContentsIntroduction Pandemic - Tuberculosis - Spanish Flu - Avian Flu and Hong Kong Flu - HIV/AIDS - Recent Viruses Natural Disaster - Extreme Weather - When the Earth Moves - Fighting Fire - Survive in the Wild Nuclear War - Preparation - Shelter - Blast and Fallout Alien Invasion - We Come in Peace - Is There Anyone Out There? - What is the Truth?

    10 in stock

    £23.75

  • Sicker in the Head

    Random House USA Inc Sicker in the Head

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An all-new collection of honest, hilarious, and enlightening conversations with some of the most exciting names in comedy—from lifelong comedy nerd Judd Apatow.“When I need to read an interview with a comedian while in the bathroom, I always turn to Judd Apatow for deeply personal insights into the comedic mind. Place one on your toilet today.”—Amy SchumerONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: VultureNo one knows comedy like Judd Apatow. From interviewing the biggest comics of the day for his high school radio show to performing stand-up in L.A. dive bars with his roommate Adam Sandler, to writing and directing Knocked Up and producing Freaks and Geeks, Apatow has always lived, breathed, and dreamed comedy.In this all-new collection of interviews, the follow-up to the New York Times bestselling Sick in the Head, Apatow sits down with comedy l

    10 in stock

    £15.19

  • The Unbroken Thread

    Random House USA Inc The Unbroken Thread

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisWe’ve pursued and achieved the modern dream of defining ourselves—but at what cost? An influential columnist and editor makes a compelling case for seeking the inherited traditions and ideals that give our lives meaning.“Ahmari’s tour de force makes tradition astonishingly vivid and relevant for the here and now.”—Rod Dreher, bestselling author of Live Not by Lies and The Benedict OptionAs a young father and a self-proclaimed “radically assimilated immigrant,” opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari realized that when it comes to shaping his young son’s moral fiber, today’s America is woefully lacking. For millennia, the world’s great ethical and religious traditions have taught that true happiness lies in pursuing virtue and accepting limits. But now, unbound from these stubborn traditions, we are free to choose whichever way of life we think is most optimal—or, more often than not, merely the easiest. All that remains are the fickle desires that a wealthy, technologically advanced society is equipped to fulfill.The result is a society riven by deep conflict and individual lives that, for all their apparent freedom, are marked by alienation and stark unhappiness.In response to this crisis, Ahmari offers twelve questions for us to grapple with—twelve timeless, fundamental queries that challenge our modern certainties. Among them: Is God reasonable? What is freedom for? What do we owe our parents, our bodies, one another? Exploring each question through the lives and ideas of great thinkers, from Saint Augustine to Howard Thurman and from Abraham Joshua Heschel to Andrea Dworkin, Ahmari invites us to examine the hidden assumptions that drive our behavior and, in doing so, to live more humanely in a world that has lost its way.

    10 in stock

    £21.60

  • Sleepers

    Random House USA Inc Sleepers

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The extraordinary true story of four men who take the law into their own hands.   This is the story of four young boys. Four lifelong friends. Intelligent, fun-loving, wise beyond their years, they are inseparable. Their potential is unlimited, but they are content to live within the closed world of New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. And to play as many pranks as they can on the denizens of the street. They never get caught. And they know they never will.   Until one disastrous summer afternoon.   On that day, what begins as a harmless scheme goes horrible wrong. And the four find themselves facing a year’s imprisonment in the Wilkinson Home for Boys. The oldest of them is fifteen, the youngest twelve. What happens to them over the course of that year—brutal beatings, unimaginable humiliation—will change their lives forever.

    10 in stock

    £15.30

  • Penguin Putnam Inc Dark Art

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    Book SynopsisCalling all coloring and horror fans! Step into the beautiful, macabre world of François Gautier in this intricate, detailed, and genuinely frightening coloring book.   Color your way through the grim and gruesome world of Dark Art. Featuring elaborately detailed black line artwork of undead clowns, haunted skulls, bleeding hearts, and many other spine-tingling creations, this sinister and beautiful book is perfect for all horror fans with a taste for the macabre.   Use color to bring life (or death) to the intricate and unique pieces throughout. They’ll leave you dying for more....

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    £12.60

  • Lets Get Physical

    Penguin Putnam Inc Lets Get Physical

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £15.30

  • The Power of Fun

    Penguin Putnam Inc The Power of Fun

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisIf you’re not having fun, you’re not fully living. The author of How to Break Up with Your Phone makes the case that, far from being frivolous, fun is actually critical to our well-being—and shows us how to have more of it.“This delightful book might just be what we need to start flourishing.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Adam Grant Journalist and screen/life balance expert Catherine Price argues persuasively that our always-on, tech-addicted lifestyles have led us to obsess over intangible concepts such as happiness while obscuring the fact that real happiness lies in the everyday experience of fun. We often think of fun as indulgent, even immature and selfish. We claim to not have time for it, even as we find hours a day for what Price calls Fake Fun—bingeing on television, doomscrolling the news, or posting photos to social media, all in hopes of filling some of the emptiness we feel inside.In this follow-up to her hit book, How to Break Up with Your Phone, Price makes the case that True Fun—which she defines as the magical confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow—will give us the fulfillment we so desperately seek. If you use True Fun as your compass, you will be happier and healthier. You will be more productive, less resentful, and less stressed. You will have more energy. You will find community and a sense of purpose. You will stop languishing and start flourishing. And best of all? You’ll enjoy the process.Weaving together scientific research with personal experience, Price reveals the surprising mental, physical, and cognitive benefits of fun, and offers a practical, personalized plan for how we can achieve better screen/life balance and attract more True Fun into our daily lives—without feeling overwhelmed. Groundbreaking, eye-opening, and packed with useful advice, The Power of Fun won’t just change the way you think about fun. It will bring you back to life.

    10 in stock

    £22.40

  • Like Literally Dude

    Penguin Putnam Inc Like Literally Dude

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisWith easygoing authority... [Fridland] offers context, and a welcoming spirit, to the many contentious realignments in our language.—The Wall Street Journal“Smart and funny—I loved it! —Mignon Fogarty, author of New York Times bestseller Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better WritingA lively linguistic exploration of the speech habits we love to hate—and why our “like”s  and “literally”s actually make us better communicatorsParanoid about the “ums” and “uhs” that pepper your presentations? Concerned that people notice your vocal fry? Bewildered by “hella” or the meteoric rise of “so”?  What if these features of our speech weren’t a sign of cultural and linguistic degeneration, but rather, some of the most dynamic and revolutionary tools at our disposal?In Like, Literally, Dude, lingu

    10 in stock

    £24.00

  • Palimpsest

    Random House USA Inc Palimpsest

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    Book SynopsisVidal on Vidal—a great and supremely entertaining writer on a great and endlessly fascinating subject.A New York Times best American memoir“In the hands of Gore Vidal, a pen is a sword. And he points it at the high and mighty who have crossed his path.” —Los Angeles Times Palimpsest is Gore Vidal''s account of the first thirty-nine years of his life as a novelist, dramatist, critic, political activist and candidate, screenwriter, television commentator, controversialist, and a man who knew pretty much everybody worth knowing (from Amelia Earhart to Eleanor Roosevelt, the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor, Jack Kennedy, Jaqueline Kennedy, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Andre Gide, and Tennessee Williams, and on and on). Here, recalled with the charm and razor wit of one of the great raconteurs of our time, are his birth into a DC political clan; his school days; his service in World

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    £16.20

  • Declassified

    Penguin Putnam Inc Declassified

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis“A refreshingly fun guide” that reads “as if you’re a fly on the wall in conservatory auditions, cutthroat competitions and the obsessive practice routines of professional musicians.” (The New York Times)Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch’s life-long fascination with classical music has taken her through Juilliard and into the shiny world of symphony halls and international concert tours. She’s loved classical music her whole life. But she’s also hated classical music her whole life. After all, if you can like Beyoncé without liking Bieber, you can certainly like Brahms without liking Bach—especially since they were born 148 years apart and the thing we call “classical music” is really just centuries of compositions shoved into one hodge-podge of a genre. In Declassified, Warsaw-Fan Rauch blows through the cobwebs of elitism and exclusion and invites everyone to love and hate

    10 in stock

    £21.60

  • I Feel That

    Penguin Putnam Inc I Feel That

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisFrom popular Instagram artist @QuotesByChristie, an inspiring and colorful quote collection for all of your ups and downs.  Quotes are instant sympathy. A good quote says, “I’ve been there, too,” in just a few words. And the perfect quote in the perfect moment can be just the reminder you need that you’re not alone, and you’re going to get through this. That is why Christina Scotch started QuotesByChristie, her popular Instagram page—to reach out across the Internet void and embrace all of the people going through it, too. In this colorful collection, Scotch shares fan favorites and all new material to hit all of your highs and lows. Perfect for birthdays, graduations, and any other gift-able occasion, I Feel That is sure to be an inspiration for readers everywhere.

    10 in stock

    £14.40

  • Dark Art Supernatural

    Penguin Putnam Inc Dark Art Supernatural

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    Book Synopsis

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    £14.40

  • Color Universe

    Penguin Putnam Inc Color Universe

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    Book Synopsis

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    £15.75

  • Wondrous Animals

    Penguin Putnam Inc Wondrous Animals

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    Book Synopsis

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    £15.30

  • Precious

    Random House Publishing Group Precious

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    10 in stock

    £19.65

  • Dickens and Prince

    Penguin Putnam Inc Dickens and Prince

    10 in stock

    Book Synopsis“An ardent fan letter from Hornby that makes you want to re-read Great Expectations while listening to Sign o’ the Times.” —VogueFrom the bestselling author of Just Like You, High Fidelity, and Fever Pitch, a short, warm, and entertaining book about art, creativity, and the unlikely similarities between Victorian novelist Charles Dickens and modern American rock star PrinceEvery so often, a pairing comes along that seems completely unlikely—until it’s not. Peanut butter and jelly, Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un, ducks and puppies, and now: Dickens and Prince.Equipped with a fan’s admiration and his trademark humor and wit, Nick Hornby invites us into his latest obsession: the cosmic link between two unlikely artists, geniuses in their own rights, spanning race, class, and centuries—each of whom electrified their different disciplines and whose leg

    10 in stock

    £15.30

  • Harvard University Press Lipstick Traces A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

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    Book SynopsisThis is a secret history of modern times, told by way of what conventional history tries to exclude. Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.Trade ReviewA coruscatingly original piece of work, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out. -- Terry Eagleton * New York Times Book Review *That Marcus can kick off and end his exhaustive, but always clear-headed, cross-epochal trek with the Sex Pistols—and make it all cohere—is but one indication of how fully he meshes the academy and the gutter. -- Katherine Dieckmann * Village Voice Literary Supplement *Lipstick Traces has the energy of its obsessions, and it snares you in the manner of those intense, questing and often stoned sessions of intellectual debate you may have experienced in your college years. It was destined, in other words, to achieve cult status. -- Ben Brantley * New York Times *In 1989, Harvard University Press published Lipstick Traces, the second book by the American writer and critic Greil Marcus. It was a dazzling creation, mapping out an untold 'secret history' which connected the Sex Pistols, the Dadaists, the Parisian événements of 1968, that legendary subversive clique the Situationist International and an Anabaptist revolt in 16th-century Germany, led by a notorious libertine named John of Leyden. Among the book's most ardent fans, it sparked real epiphanies… It stands as a singularly idiosyncratic product of a genre-cum-tradition rooted in the business of writing about musicians and the whirl of ideas that once surrounded them… [Marcus] manages some of the finest music writing ever to make it on to the page… My 20-year-old copy of Lipstick Traces is the one book I would save from my proverbial burning house. -- John Harris * The Guardian *For anybody who wants to go deeper into the ontology of an idea that animates a kind of music, or is illuminated by that music, read Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, just reissued in an expanded edition for the book's twentieth anniversary. I often say that Traces is the best book ever written about music, even though it's not actually about music: it is about the life of an idea. -- Sasha Frere-Jones * New Yorker online *I first read Lipstick Traces as a penniless traveler, hiding in the bathroom of a late-night express train from Cologne to Berlin. My paranoia was considerably eased as I delved into the lives of various misfits and aesthetic revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century. As dawn broke and the train pulled into the station, I disembarked, feeling not shell-shocked from the conductor's repeated passes to my stall, but decidedly refreshed. -- J. Scott Burgeson * East Bay Express *The 'secret' of Marcus's history is its poetry…widely separated persons and events call out to each other and 'connect' precisely because so many of ordinary history's causal and syntactic arrangements have been positively negated. -- Jerome McGann * London Review of Books *Greil Marcus has developed an ability to discern an art movement, or an entire country, lurking inside a song. * New Yorker *Probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson. -- D. D. Guttenplan * London Review of Books *

    Out of stock

    £999.99

  • Stranger Magic  Charmed States and the Arabian Nights

    Harvard University Press Stranger Magic Charmed States and the Arabian Nights

    Out of stock

    Book SynopsisOur foremost theorist of myth, fairytale, and folktale explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the profound impact of the Arabian Nights on the West, the progressive exoticization of magic, and the growing acceptance of myth and magic in contemporary experience.Trade ReviewMy favorite work of non-fiction this year was Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. In her exploration of this immense, protean and much-translated Arabic collection of folk and fairy tales (fifteen of them banded in here at intervals) she has found a subject which seems an ideal fit for her own particular cast of mind. This book is like one of the densely patterned carpets it describes, rich in overlapping narrative strands and in associative weave of thought. A gorgeous last chapter, ‘The Couch: A Case History,’ glides from the coded site of passion, the flying sofa, to the magic carpet via prayer mat, festive balcony hanging, nomadic house, Smyrna rug on Freud’s analytical couch—recalling the structural importance of eavesdropping in the Arabian Nights—then a description of Gabbeh, an Iranian film about tribal carpet-weaving, and back to Freud and his thoughts on levitation and sexual delight (with a side swoop over Goethe’s Faust calling for a magic cloak). -- Helen Simpson * Times Literary Supplement *Marina Warner is a veteran magus, and an adept mythographer of the vast global traditions of magic, metaphor and myth… Pursuing the enigmas of imaginative desire throughout her career, Warner persuasively redefines The Arabian Nights as an overgrown garden of the delights and hazards of desire… Warner quests for contemporary meaning in the major traditions of literary magic and carries with her, back to The Arabian Nights, our sore need for another way of knowledge… Warner’s Stranger Magic harbors many richnesses, of which I find the most beguiling what she names, in her subtitle, ‘charmed states.’… Warner takes an honored place in the sequence of those who have studied what Isaiah Berlin and others have called the Counter-Enlightenment, the speculations that renewed Neoplatonic and Gnostic heterodox versions of ancient wisdom. Her choice of The Arabian Nights, as a vital strand in the Counter-Enlightenment, is refreshing, since she shows some of the ways in which storytelling is essential to this kind of knowledge. As a contemporary scholar of myth and magic, she aids immensely in the struggle for literary values that has to be ongoing, whatever the distractions of our moment. -- Harold Bloom * New York Times Book Review *Stranger Magic is an unabashedly joyful work of scholarship, a study of the history of the human imagination as it shapes and reinvents reality through stories. Here, Warner comes close to inventing a genre of literary criticism: she takes fifteen tales from the Nights and uses them as her own frame tales to embark on a series of erudite adventures. She performs a kind of intellectual free association based on rigorous research and enhanced by handsome illustrations, a number from her own collection. In homage to the Nights, this is a scholarly entertainment…Warner demonstrates that there is nothing idle about imagining. -- Patricia Storace * New York Review of Books *[A] wide-ranging, erudite, wondrously polymathic exploration of the tales of magic, bound to the ‘huge narrative wheel’ with which Scheherazade enchanted the Sultan Shahryar through one thousand and one nights of storytelling. Warner, too, is a beguiling storyteller: her fascination with true knowledge embedded in realms of wonder. She releases the jinn of cultural modernism and scientific progress from the bottle in which it has been long confined by Western tradition. -- Iain Finlayson * The Times *Ebullient… With Stranger Magic, Warner has written a nimble but daring work of criticism that draws on her work as a novelist and scholar, combining aspects of literary history, formal analysis, personal essay, and cultural forensics into topics as disparate as the ‘Smyrna rug’ that draped Freud’s couch to the flying turtles that Danish artist Melchior Lorck sketched in the 1550s. It’s a remarkable feat of synthetic knowledge, with particularly rich forays into those whom the Arabian Nights provided both fantastic inspiration and parodic ‘cover’: from Voltaire, Goethe, who taught himself Persian to compose West-Eastern Divan, and William Beckford to such unexpected veins of influence as Sir Walter Scott. There are historical personages both familiar (Richard Burton, Edward W. Lane) and less so (John Wilkins, Robert Patlock) brought into an encyclopedic sweep of French, German, and British sources. Even given the thoroughness of her investigation into just how deep an impression Orientalist fantasies left on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, especially after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, she offers an inspired reading of why it was cinema—particularly the phantasmagoric chic-of-Araby ‘Easterns’ of the early silver screen—that offered a germane new life to Aladdin and Ali Baba… Warner has created a sparkling work of criticism, full of graciousness, learning, and fascination. -- Eric Banks * National Book Critics Circle blog *I was entranced by Marina Warner’s encyclopedic and pathbreaking study, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. -- Pankaj Mishra * The Guardian *Wonderful… Warner is herself something of a Shahrazad, though she weaves her account under less threatening auspices… Many of the stories in the Nights take place in a legendary Baghdad or draw on older Persian sources, but a few—such as the story of Hayqar the Wise—date back to ancient Egyptian tales from the seventh century BC. Warner is alert to these earlier echoes but she is more interested in the far-reaching cultural and literary impact of the Nights on artists, composers and writers… From Voltaire and Goethe to Hans Christian Andersen and William Beckford down to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino—on all of whom Warner offers illuminating discussions—the influence of the Nights has been pervasive; but composers (such as Mozart), artists and designers, illustrators and film-makers have also fallen under their spell. -- Eric Ormsby * Literary Review *In Stranger Magic Warner surveys just how pervasively The Arabian Nights has influenced art and literature since the eighteenth century. On the surface, her book covers what more dogmatic critics would call the West’s cultural appropriation of the East… Stranger Magic is packed with information and insight… Warner writes with clarity, and sometimes with exquisite beauty… Warner possesses an exceptionally synoptic mind, almost Sherlockian in its sensitivity to connections and repeated motifs… Stranger Magic is, in fact, simply the latest in an exhilarating series of studies that reexamine the West’s fantastic imagination. From the Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman, and Phantasmagoria explore the cultural meanings of folktales and Mother Goose stories, children’s literature, and fairy tales, the fearful monsters, beasts, and ogres of nightmare, and all the ways humankind has attempted to represent the spiritual. Ranged together, these substantial works, now joined by Stranger Magic, look solid and magisterial on the bookshelf, calling to mind the encyclopedic scholarship we associate with an earlier age. Nonetheless, while Marina Warner is as learned as any Victorian polymath, she also employs contemporary feminist theory and the insights of cultural studies to make us look once more, or look more deeply, at the history of cinema, art, theater, and literature. Each of her books is an Aladdin’s cave of wonders. -- Michael Dirda * Barnes & Noble Review *Insightful… It’s fascinating and highly informed. -- Doug Johnstone * Big Issue *[Warner] astonishes with the granularity of her accounts of the impact of these stories on their original European readers… What kind of stories is Shahrazad telling us now? Immediately obvious is the relevance of Arabian Nights to crucial questions of perception of the East by the West during this season of Arab thaw and Iranian freeze… Warner does a good job, especially in her ‘Conclusion: “All the story of the night told over…”’ to tease out these new interpretative figures in the textual carpet. -- Brad Gooch * Daily Beast *Warner’s massive work remains a powerful testimony to the enduring appeal of the 1,001 Nights. Complex, frequently subtle…her book will reward readers with sophisticated insights into the cultural exchange between West and East—a bit like The Arabian Nights itself. -- Paul McMichael Nurse * Globe and Mail *If we might forget how central [The Arabian Nights] tales are to our culture, Marina Warner’s wondrous Stranger Magic is a scholarly excursion around some of the stories, her mind as rich and fascinating as the stories themselves, taking us on a magic carpet from Borges and Goethe, to Edward Said and the movies. -- Hanif Kureishi * The Guardian *Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic is as absorbing, wise and playful as the Arabian Nights tales themselves. A book about the triumph of imagination over experience. -- Jeanette Winterson * The Guardian *Stranger Magic is an enormous work, 436 densely erudite and eclectic pages plus another hundred of glossaries and notes. In its relentless connecting up of diverse stories, from the Inferno to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, it’s reminiscent of Christopher Booker’s brick-sized Seven Basic Plots. Warner’s chapters, allocated into five parts, are beautifully illustrated and interspersed with 15 tales concisely retold… Stranger Magic is a scholarly work that often reads like a fireside conversation. It’s encyclopedic, a book to be savored in slices. -- Robin Yassin-Kassab * The Guardian *Warner’s gentle authority proves to be the perfect guide not only through many of the tales themselves but also through their attendant history, and theories about them. What she’s really exploring is the West’s fascination with the Orient, and how it has accommodated that alternative culture into its own: why was The Arabian Nights, a text that wasn’t sacred and wasn’t even valued, the one that the West alighted on so eagerly? The fabulism, the shape-shifting, the play between the figurative and the literal, that is found in the tales, speaks to something in the West’s psyche, a need for fantasy. Warner cleverly relates this to 20th-century psychiatry (Freud and his dreams), and new technologies such as cinema and aeroplanes (the allure of that magic carpet). Her immersion in her subject makes for an enthusiasm that proves to be infectious. -- Lesley McDowell * The Independent *Wondrous and lucid… When it comes to the tales themselves and their fantastical content, Warner is an excellent guide and a stylish storyteller in her own right: her renderings of 15 of the stories punctuate the book… The remarkable feat she has pulled off in Stranger Magic [is] nothing less than a history of magic, storytelling and centuries of cultural exchange between east and west. All in the guise of a book about one book, albeit an inexhaustible one. There are more dutiful histories of those subjects, just as there are scholarly studies of Arabian Nights that adequately describe its form, politics or translations but never truly fly. The product of Warner’s meticulous research is a weighty volume that feels airborne on every page. -- Brian Dillon * Irish Times *More even than an inquisitive, authoritative study of one of the greatest imaginative enterprises of human history, this is a further chapter in Warner’s unfolding of the power—the magical power as it may be—of the magical imagination… Some of the most original and compelling arguments in Stranger Magic concern the uses of Arabian flights of fantasy as vehicles for scientific and technological speculation… Jung said that the job of the mythographer might be not so much to spell out the meaning of myth as to ‘dream the myth onward.’ This is in a sense what Warner has undertaken to do, for her account of The Arabian Nights and their transmigrations is itself knitted into the fabric of the history she presents. Each section of her account is prefaced by a retelling of one of the stories, usually a neglected or less well known one, and in the writing and the reading, the separate threads of her argument—her accounts of the history of magic, or the responses of particular writers to the stories, or the nature of magical things, or the politics of enchantment—pass under and over each other. Warner’s scholarly imagination has never been less than compendious, but it has never before been so intricately wrought, or drawn together with such ingenuity the hitherto distinct currents of her writing, as mythographer, fabulist, critic, speculator and polemicist. -- Steven Connor * London Review of Books *This remarkable study is an arabesque, and an intricate Persian rug of themes, eras, tales, and authors—of the Middle East and West, playing on ‘states of consciousness’ as well as state-cultures. With a basic knowledge of Arabic from childhood as well as a Catholic upbringing, Warner is almost divinely positioned to unravel the infinite strands of the wily Scheherazade, as she weaves her way through the Arabian Nights, exploring their boundless capacity to ‘keep generating more tales, in various media, themselves different but alike: the stories themselves are shape-shifters.’ From Disney’s Aladdin to the works of Freud, Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen, and others, Warner explores the impact of the Arabian Nights on the West and the power of enchantment and fantasy. Like all myth, these of flying carpets, sofas, and beds of genies and heroic connivers grant lasting insights into human aspirations, transcendence, and love. Carefully documented, Warner’s ever shifting work takes its place alongside that of Edward Said, though she is refreshingly less polemical and less theoretical. No one need cover this enchanting ground again. * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *Noted mythographer and novelist Marina Warner here turns her piercing gaze to one of the most influential set of fables ever assembled, The Thousand and One Nights. Analyzing the inner meanings of Scheherazade’s tall tales, she finds in these familiar narratives fresh import and life-changing potential. * Barnes & Noble Review *Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic has a double mission: On the one hand, the author traces, with a swelling, orchestral richness, why the [Arabian] Nights held such potent sway over figures like Coleridge, becoming a runaway best seller in Europe and retaining a lock grip over the Western imagination for generations. But she also shows why its themes and preoccupations remain relevant today… Stranger Magic explores, with immense learning and panache, how it might be possible to develop an intellectual, reasoned relationship to magic, conjuring an alternative to the binary choice between Enlightenment thought and esoterica… Warner sprinkles the historical detective work of Stranger Magic with her own versions of key scenes from the Nights, and her verve as a storyteller is among the book’s delights… Stranger Magic is a large volume, and it can sometimes be difficult not to get disoriented, or suffer what Warner nicely dubs ‘eyeskip’ in the twists and involutions of the arabesque patterns being traced. However, one of the merits of the book is that it teaches us why getting lost now and again can be salutary. In our absurdly busy, bottom-line–fetishizing lives, digression has become a bad word. But it’s precisely the wide-roaming, whirling vicissitudes of Shahrazad’s tales that dazzle the sultan and keep her alive. Stranger Magic reveals that the fate of the human spirit hangs not by a single thread, but by an extravagant skein of fancy. -- George Prochnik * Bookforum *This learned, lively, and well-written book concerns the wide-ranging influence of The Arabian Nights—a polyvocal anthology of world myths, fables and fairy tales—on Western culture… Warner’s densely detailed, loose, baggy monster of a book covers an impressive array of subjects from Voltaire and Goethe to Borges and Nabokov. -- Jeffrey Meyers * Booklist *Warner’s analysis of Arabian Nights aims at redefining the relationship between East and West, reason and imagination, science and magic. -- S. Gomaa * Choice *Warner has long been recognized as one of the foremost scholars of the fairy tale and myth. Here, she brings her characteristic erudition and insight to one of the great works of world literature, The Arabian Nights, using the best-known as well as some of the lesser-known stories to demonstrate how the Nights contributed to the rise of magical thinking across European and world culture… She ably demonstrates how the tales loom large in European culture and have provided the basis for much creativity and imagination since their discovery by the West in the 18th century… General readers and scholars in folklore, history, and Arabic literature alike will appreciate Warner’s ability to make connections between the Nights and the way the stories have resonated over time and space. -- David S. Azzolina * Library Journal *An elegant study of The Arabian Nights and the far-reaching influence of Scheherazade’s endlessly unfolding takes on Western culture and on our visions of enchantment and fantasy. * Publishers Weekly *

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