Search results for ""Oldcastle Books Ltd""

A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley startup, Cassie is trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses and unethical projects, she struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of houseless people bathing in the bay. Startup burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets. Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, the black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, its size changing in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever closer as the world around her unravels. When her CEO's demands cross an illegal line and her personal life spirals towards a bleak precipice, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are worth the pain, or succumb to the black hole.

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Ghosts and spectres, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The concept of Hauntology has evolved since first emerging in the 1990s, and has now entered the cultural mainstream as a shorthand for our new-found obsession with the recent past. But where does this term come from and what exactly does it mean? This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the history of our fascination with the uncanny from the golden age of the Victorian ghost story to the present day. From Dickens to Derrida, MR James to Mark Fisher; from the rise of Spiritualism to the folk horror revival, Hauntology traces our continuing engagement with these esoteric ideas. Moving between the literary and the theoretical, the visual and the political, Hauntology explores our nostalgia for the cultural artefacts of a past from which we seem unable to break free.

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Artists and writers from the colder climes of northern Europe have long felt the lure of the South of the continent. Goethe was revitalised by his encounters with Mediterranean culture on his journey to Italy. Nietzsche took flight southwards to begin his life anew, while DH Lawrence sought the health-giving southern sun in Sicily and Sardinia. But across the centuries, other outposts of the South have provoked a similar obsession. The South Seas cast a spell over figures such as Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin. The American Deep South and the southermost reaches of Latin America have been celebrated in the works of writers as diverse as John Muir, Jack Kerouac and Jorge Luis Borges. While the Great White South of the Antarctic has provided the backdrop to the darkest imaginings of Coleridge, Poe and Lovecraft. Even London, south of the river, is a place where novelists compete today to stake out a literary territory of their own. Moving between geography and mythology, literature and history, South is the first book to look at all things Southern in one volume. It examines the idea of the South as a symbol of freedom and escape, as well as the depository for many of our deepest unconscious fears and desires. It also charts the history of the South as the chosen location for the utopian visions of the North. From the beaches of Tahiti to the streets of Buenos Aires, from Naples to New Orleans, Merlin Coverley's brilliant and wide-ranging study throws light on the ways in which the idea of the South, in all its forms, has come to exert such a powerful hold on our collective imaginations.

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