Search results for ""Sublime""

What if your work rival was the ex that you’d never actually broken up with? ‘Sizzling’ SOPHIE IRWIN‘Witty’ BETH REEKLES‘Excellent’ JANE CASEY‘Pitch-perfect’ EMMA HUGHES How do you get rid of an ex . . . When you’ve never actually broken up? When arrogant new colleague Benjamin swans into Fia’s small office at her New York law firm, it’s no secret they dislike – no, hate – each other. But there is one secret no one knows. The last time Fia and Benjamin saw each other was one summer night nearly ten years ago, at a little chapel – in Vegas. Benjamin isn’t just Fia’s co-worker, he’s also her long-lost husband. They made a promise – they even signed a pact – that they’d divorce after one year. But they never did. Now, if anyone discovers they’re husband and wife, both their jobs are on the line. And as their marriage starts to finally heat up, it’s a secret that’s getting harder to keep . . . EVERYONE LOVES THE BREAK-UP CLAUSE ‘I REALLY loved . . . so clever, so good, really excellent characters’ JANE CASEY ‘Electric right from the off…a witty, wonderful book with such a wholesome take on friendships and a sizzling romance’ BETH REEKLES ’Hargan has a light touch and a winning sense of humour’ THE TIMES ‘Reminds me of Katherine Heiny . . . her crisp scene-setting wit, her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and her wonderful, wry eye . . . make every page a pleasure to read’ EMMA HUGHES ‘An absolute first class rom-com: smart, funny and sizzling with chemistry’ SOPHIE IRWIN ‘Joyous, funny and very sweet, this is one to savour’ STYLIST ‘One of the very best romcom writers around. It is sublime . . . chemistry/sizzle/snark is off the charts’ CRESSIDA MCLAUGHLIN

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Climate change is the great existential reality of our time. How we approach this crisis will affect life on Earth for present and future generations. In spite of our collective ideals, irreversible damage to the environment is imminent and represents urgent local and global concern. Through artfully rendered photographs of an acutely endangered landscape, Oceano: An Elegy for the Earth explores the deep paradox between the devout, powerful presence of nature and environmental loss and damage.Extending eighteen miles along Central California’s famed coastline and divided into both a natural preserve and a state vehicular recreation area, the Oceano Dune complex has long fascinated photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward and Brett Weston. The ephemeral, ever-changing landscape here expresses a sublime order and reflects many correlations between land and the dynamics of human society. Using metaphors that inspire hope and explore impermanence and darkness contrasted with the purity of suffusing light, Ulrich’s photographs have been likened to Mark Rothko’s “silence and solitude” that express the resonance and subtle dimensions of consciousness.The coastal environment of the Oceano Dunes is tempered by multiple threats such as incessant motorized activity, the toxicity of surrounding industrial-scale agriculture, and some of the worst air quality in the nation. Thus, for the book’s sequence of images, the photographer employs the literary form of an elegy, an extended reflection and lamentation on Earth during the early twenty-first century. An elegy refers to a poetic reflection of sorrow and love, often for a transient, mortal entity. As Ulrich writes: “Sorrow and love for Earth, indeed. No better articulation exists for my regard for our dying planet and common mother.”

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Deftly making use of historically specific events, Raghead examines the Gulf War, relaying untold narratives of occupation and warfare, as well as addressing the violence the war inflicted on the female body and on the land itself. In these poems, Eman Hassan explores the idea of trauma and memory through a maze of recollecting and forgetting, weighed against the importance of “being in in the now.”Raghead examines what’s at stake in a world that places greater value on capitalist machinations of war and oil production than on human life and the environment. With these poems, Hassan urges the reader to transcend the boundaries of identity and values, to reconcile the beautiful and ugly paradox of human existence, and to take a collective responsibility for the present. The work is both feminist and humanist: women are not painted as victims, even though some poems show how their bodies are controlled or abused. Rather, the poems seek to empower the feminine and explore how women can be complicit in power games.Raghead often hits sublime high notes to offset some of the more tonally violent accounts. It offers a glimpse into Gulf-Arab culture that is oftentimes obscured, attempting to show an inherent violence and beauty that has marked the region. The poems are told from the vantage of being bicultural, exploring the inherent tension that comes from being simultaneously Kuwaiti and American, and musing on what it means to be both and yet neither in a journey towards self-emancipation. These lyrical witness poems are sometimes angry, oftentimes spiritual, in an attempt to rekindle a sense of interconnectedness between all people.

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'Will break your heart and open your eyes' Heather Morris, author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz 'I've never read anything quite like Songbirds - a beautifully crafted novel that sits at the intersection of race and class.' Jodi Picoult, bestselling author of Small Great Things She walks unseen through our world. Cares for our children, cleans our homes. She has a story to tell. Will you listen? Nisha has crossed oceans to give her child a future. By day she cares for Petra's daughter; at night she mothers her own little girl by the light of a phone. Nisha's lover, Yiannis, is a poacher, hunting the tiny songbirds on their way to Africa each winter. His dreams of a new life, and of marrying Nisha, are shattered when she vanishes. No one cares about the disappearance of a domestic worker, except Petra and Yiannis. As they set out to search for her, they realise how little they know about Nisha. What they uncover will change them all. Praise for Christy Lefteri: 'This thought-provoking novel of love loss and redemption is thoroughly sublime.' Caroline Montague 'Lefteri is an astonishing weaver of stories.' Daljit Nagra ' . . . broke my heart and kept me turning the pages of her gorgeous novel well into the night.' Alka Joshi, NYT-bestselling author of The Henna Artist and The Secret Keeper of Jaipur 'Christy Lefteri has crafted a beautiful novel, intelligent, thoughtful, and relevant.' Benjamin Zephaniah on The Beekeeper of Aleppo ' . . . it's impossible not to be moved by Lefteri's plea for humanity and perhaps inspired too.' Observer, on The Beekeeper of Aleppo 'Courageous, proactive, haunting.' Heather Morris, on The Beekeeper of Aleppo

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Explore the creation of Guillermo del Toro's early masterpiece through this visually stunning and insightful look at the spine-chilling classic. Released in 2001, Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone marked out the director as a singular talent with the unique ability to mix the macabre with the sublime. Set during the Spanish Civil War, the film focuses on ten-year-old Carlos (Fernando Tielve), an orphan taken in by Republican sympathisers. On his first day at the orphanage, he witnesses a ghostly apparition, the spirit of a young boy named Santi (Andreas Munoz) who disappeared from the institution a year earlier. With the ghost's help, Carlos must uncover the dark secrets that led to Santi's death and help prevent himself and his fellow orphans from meeting the same fate. Seen by del Toro as a spiritual companion piece to his Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth (2006), The Devil's Backbone explores similar themes against the backdrop of the same brutal conflict that turned ordinary men into monsters. This book is written in close collaboration with the director and provides the definitive account of the film's creation, covering everything from del Toro's initial musings through to the haunting designs for Santi, the hugely challenging shoot, and the overwhelming critic and fan reactions upon its release. Including exquisite concept art and rare unit photography from the set, Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone gives readers an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at how this gothic horror masterpiece was crafted for the screen. The book also draws on interviews with every key player in the film's creation to present the ultimate behind-the-scenes look at this unforgettable Spanish-language classic.

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Featured on LeVar Burton Reads “Like Oscar Wilde or Ray Bradbury, E. Lily Yu writes the kind of delicious short stories that come with a sting in the tail. Utterly beguiling.” —Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get in Trouble“Each story here is a gem. A trove of fantastical treasures.” —Kirkus Reviews STARRED REVIEW “An astonishing collection of stories…transformative.” —Library Journal STARRED REVIEWThe strange, the sublime, and the monstrous confront one another with astonishing consequences in this collection of twenty-two stories from award-winning writer E. Lily Yu.In the village of Yiwei, a fallen wasp nest unfurls into a beautifully accurate map. In a field in Louisiana, birdwatchers forge an indelible connection over a shared glimpse of a Vermilion Flycatcher, and fall. In Nineveh, a judge who prides himself on impartiality finds himself questioned by a mysterious god. On a nameless shore, a small monster searches for refuge and finds unexpected courage.At turns bittersweet and boundary-breaking, poignant and profound, these twenty-two stories sing, as the oldest fables do, of what it means to be alive in this strange, terrible, beautiful world. For readers who loved the intelligence and compassion in Kim Fu's Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century and the dreamlike prose of Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, this collection introduces the short fiction of E. Lily Yu, winner of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and author of the Washington Book Award–winning novel On Fragile Waves, praised by the New York Times Book Review as "devastating and perfect.""A lovely story." —LeVar Burton, on "The Pilgrim and The Angel" (from Jewel Box: Stories)

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The captivating and beautifully illustrated true story of snakes in America.125 million years ago on the floodplains of North America, a burrowing lizard started down the long evolutionary path of shedding its limbs. The 60-plus species of snakes found in Sean P. Graham's American Snakes have this ancestral journey to thank for their ubiquity, diversity, and beauty. Although many people fear them, snakes are as much a part of America's rich natural heritage as redwoods, bald eagles, and grizzly bears. Found from the vast Okefenokee Swamp to high alpine meadows, from hardwood canopies to the burning bottom of the Grand Canyon, these ultimate vertebrates are ecologically pivotal predators and quintessential survivors.In this revelatory and engaging meditation on American snakes, Graham, a respected herpetologist and gifted writer, • explains the everyday lives of American snakes, from their daily routines and seasonal cycles to their love lives, hunting tactics, and defensive repertoires• debunks harmful myths about snakes and explores their relationship with humans• highlights the contribution of snakes to the American wilderness• tells tales of "snake people"—important snake biologists with inspiring careersNeither a typical field guide nor an exhaustive reference, American Snakes is instead a fascinating study of the suborder Serpentes. Brimming with intriguing and unusual stories—of hognose snakes that roll over and play dead, blindsnakes with tiny vestigial lungs, rainbow-hued dipsadines, and wave-surfing sea-snakes—the text is interspersed with scores of gorgeous full-color images of snakes, from the scary to the sublime. This proud celebration of a diverse American wildlife group will make every reader, no matter how skeptical, into a genuine snake lover.

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What does theology have to say about the place of eroticism in the salvific transformation of men and women, even of the cosmos itself? How, in turn, does eros infuse theological practice and transfigure doctrinal tropes? Avoiding the well-worn path of sexual moralizing while also departing decisively from Anders Nygren’s influential insistence that Christian agape must have nothing to do with worldly eros, this book explores what is still largely uncharted territory in the realm of theological erotics. The ascetic, the mystical, the seductive, the ecstatic—these are the places where the divine and the erotic may be seen to converge and love and desire to commingle. Inviting and performing a mutual seduction of disciplines, the volume brings philosophers, historians, biblical scholars, and theologians into a spirited conversation that traverses the limits of conventional orthodoxies, whether doctrinal or disciplinary. It seeks new openings for the emergence of desire, love, and pleasure, while challenging common understandings of these terms. It engages risk at the point where the hope for salvation paradoxically endangers the safety of subjects—in particular, of theological subjects—by opening them to those transgressions of eros in which boundaries, once exceeded, become places of emerging possibility. The eighteen chapters, arranged in thematic clusters, move fluidly among and between premodern and postmodern textual traditions—from Plato to Emerson, Augustine to Kristeva, Mechthild to Mattoso, the Shulammite to Molly Bloom, the Zohar to the Da Vinci Code. In so doing, they link the sublime reaches of theory with the gritty realities of politics, the boundless transcendence of God with the poignant transience of materiality.

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Web of Life weaves its suggestive interpretation of Jewish culture in the Palestine of late antiquity on the warp of a singular, breathtakingly tragic, and sublime rabbinic text, Lamentations Rabbah. The textual analyses that form the core of the book are informed by a range of theoretical paradigms rarely brought to bear on rabbinic literature: structural analysis of mythologies and folktales, performative approaches to textual production, feminist theory, psychoanalytical analysis of culture, cultural criticism, and folk narrative genre analysis. The concept of context as the hermeneutic basis for literary interpretation reactivates the written text and subverts the hierarchical structures with which it has been traditionally identified. This book reinterprets rabbinic culture as an arena of multiple dialogues that traverse traditional concepts of identity regarding gender, nation, religion, and territory. The author's approach is permeated by the idea that scholarly writing about ancient texts is invigorated by an existential hermeneutic rooted in the universality of human experience. She thus resorts to personal experience as an idiom of communication between author and reader and between human beings of our time and of the past. This research acknowledges the overlap of poetic and analytical language as well as the language of analysis and everyday life. In eliciting folk narrative discourses inside the rabbinic text, the book challenges traditional views about the social basis that engendered these texts. It suggests the subversive potential of the constitutive texts of Jewish culture from late antiquity to the present by pointing out the inherent multi-vocality of the text, adding to the conventionally acknowledged synagogue and academy the home, the marketplace, and other private and public socializing institutions.

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Henry David Thoreau is generally remembered as the author of Walden and "Civil Disobedience," a recluse of the woods and a political protester who once went to jail. To his contemporaries he was a minor disciple of Emerson; he has since joined the ranks of America's most respected and beloved writers. Few, however, really know the complexity of the man they revere--wanderer and scholar, naturalist and humorist, teacher and surveyor, abolitionist and poet, Transcendentalist and anthropologist, inventor and social critic, and, above all, individualist. In this widely acclaimed biography, the eminent Thoreau scholar Walter Harding presents all of these Thoreaus. Scholars will find here the culmination of a lifetime of research and study, meticulously documented, while general readers will find an absorbing story of a remarkable man. Writing with supreme lucidity, Harding has marshaled all the facts so as best to "let them speak for themselves." Thoreau's thoughtfulness and stubbornness, his more than ordinarily human amalgam of the earthy and sublime, his unquenchable vitality emerge to the reader as they did to his own family, friends, and critics. The new afterword evaluates new scholarship about Thoreau. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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Michelle Zerba engages current debates about the relationship between literature and theory by analyzing responses of theorists in the Western tradition to tragic conflict. Isolating the centrality of conflict in twentieth-century definitions of tragedy, Professor Zerba discusses the efforts of modern critics to locate in Aristotle's Poetics the origins of this focus on agon. Through a study of ethical and political ideas formative of the Poetics, she demonstrates why Aristotle and his Renaissance and Neoclassical beneficiaries exclude conflict from their accounts of tragedy. The agonistic element, the book argues, first emerges in dramatic criticism in nineteenth-century Romantic theories of the sublime and, more influentially, in Hegel's lectures on drama and history. This turning point in the history of speculation about tragedy is examined with attention to a dynamic between the systematic aims of theory and the subversive conflicts of tragic plays. In readings of various Classical and Renaissance dramatists, Professor Zerba reveals that strife in tragedy undermines expectations of coherence, closure, and moral stability, on which theory bases its principles of dramatic order. From Aristotle to Hegel, the philosophical interest in securing these principles determines attitudes toward conflict. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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Why do we have the constant feeling that disaster is looming? Beyond the images of atomic apocalypse that have haunted us for decades, we are dazzled now by an array of possible catastrophe scenarios: climate change, financial crises, environmental disasters, technological meltdowns—perennial subjects of literature, film, popular culture, and political debate. Is this preoccupation with catastrophe questionable alarmism or complacent passivity? Or are there certain truths that can be revealed only in apocalypse?In The Future as Catastrophe, Eva Horn offers a novel critique of the modern fascination with disaster, which she treats as a symptom of our relationship to the future. Analyzing the catastrophic imaginary from its cultural and historical roots in Romanticism and the figure of the Last Man, through the narratives of climatic cataclysm and the Cold War’s apocalyptic sublime, to the contemporary popularity of disaster fiction and end-of-the-world blockbusters, Horn argues that apocalypse always haunts the modern idea of a future that can be anticipated and planned. Considering works by Lord Byron, J. G. Ballard, and Cormac McCarthy and films such as 12 Monkeys and Minority Report alongside scientific scenarios and political metaphors, she analyzes catastrophic thought experiments and the question of survival, the choices legitimized by imagined states of exception, and the contradictions inherent in preventative measures taken in the name of technical safety or political security. What makes today’s obsession different from previous epochs’ is the sense of a “catastrophe without event,” a stealthily creeping process of disintegration. Ultimately, Horn argues, imagined catastrophes offer us intellectual tools that can render a future shadowed with apocalyptic possibilities affectively, epistemologically, and politically accessible.

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The definitive two-way guide to the Cotswold Way: both southbound and northbound routes are described in full. Real Maps: Full Ordnance Survey mapping inside (1:25,000). All accommodation is numbered and marked on the maps 18 different itineraries: schedules of 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 days for hikers and runners. Includes both southbound and northbound itineraries. Difficult calculations of time, distance and altitude gain/loss are done for you. Also includes: * Detailed information on equipment and travelling light * Everything the trekker needs to know: route, costs, difficulty, weather, travel, and more * Full accommodation listings: the best inns, B&Bs and hotels * Detailed section on camping * What to see in the City of Bath * Essential info for both self-guided and guided trekkers * Information on history, plants and wildlife * Numbered waypoints linking the Real Maps to our clear descriptions The Cotswold Way travels 102 miles through the sublime scenery of the Cotswolds, a region which is the epitome of historic England. Along the way, you will travel the crest of the Cotswold Escarpment through exquisite rolling countryside and historic chocolate-box villages, built from lovely honey-coloured stone, which have remained unchanged for centuries. The trekker negotiates this wonderful terrain on a meticulously waymarked series of paths and tracks, far removed from the region's large urban centres. Occasionally, you will pass through a small village or hamlet (with little more than a local pub and a few places to stay) but otherwise, the experience is one of tranquillity. This is England at its best and it will be an adventure that you will never forget.

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The definitive two-way guide to the West Highland Way: both northbound and southbound routes are described in full. Real Maps: Full Ordnance Survey Explorer mapping inside (1:25,000) 17 different itineraries: schedules of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 days for hikers and runners. Includes both southbound and northbound itineraries. Difficult calculations of time, distance and altitude gain are done for you. Also includes: Detailed information on equipment and travelling light Everything the trekker needs to know: route, costs, difficulty, weather, travel, and more Full accommodation listings: the best inns, bed and breakfasts and hotels Detailed section on camping Essential info for both self-guided and guided trekkers Information on geology, history, plants and wildlife Numbered waypoints linking the Real Maps to our clear descriptions The West Highland Way, which is one of 'Scotland's Great Trails', travels 96 miles through sublime scenery, from the outskirts of Glasgow to Fort William. In between, there are countless magnificent mountains, exquisite glens, shimmering lochs and seemingly endless miles of purple heather to experience. The trekker negotiates this wonderfully unpopulated terrain on a meticulously waymarked series of paths and tracks, many of which are old military roads or drovers' paths, built many centuries ago. In this part of the Highlands, you are far away from the region's urban centres. Occasionally, you will meet a road or pass through a small village or hamlet (with little more than a local pub and a few places to stay) but otherwise, the experience is one of tranquillity. This is the Scottish Highlands at their best and it will be an adventure that you will never forget.

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Rick Owens remains one of the most daring and influential fashion designers working today. Recently experimenting with new shapes, the application of new materials, and an unprecedented use of color, this book of entirely unpublished photographs will surprise and delight his legion of devoted fans. Lavishly documenting men s and women s collections and featuring Owens s continuing collaboration with the photographer Danielle Levitt, this book is an unabashed love letter to one of the most devoted followings in contemporary fashion. Picking up where Rizzoli s previous monograph on Owens s work left off, looks from his critically lauded homage to the rock-and-roll designer Larry Legaspi set a frenzied visual pace that never lets up right through the pandemic, when Owens memorably staged shows on the Lido di Venezia. Here, the continued evolution of nearly three decades of Owens s 'grunge-meets-glamour' worldview is seen close up. Grace and grit are paired with an obsession with structural transformation and movement, where diaphanous, flowing shapes contrast with sharp objects. This formal invention is matched by a mania for new and exotic materials. The use of translucent bovine leathers, brightly dyed snakeskin, and the hide of the pirarucu, a massive Amazonian fish, are applied to old and new icons of the brand. Color is now firmly part of the Owens legendarium, and a profligacy of pink, orange, blue, green, and iridescent hues now vie with trademark black, oxblood, and dust that have been part of the palette since the inception of the brand. Owens s newest provocations, grounded by the portraiture of Danielle Levitt, achieves a sublime unity in this essential volume.

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“It is the contemporary elixir from which all manner of being emerges, the metamorphic sublime, an alchemist’s dream.” So begins Palma Africana, the latest attempt by anthropologist Michael Taussig to make sense of the contemporary moment. But to what elixir does he refer? Palm oil. Saturating everything from potato chips to nail polish, palm oil has made its way into half of the packaged goods in our supermarkets. By 2020, world production will be double what it was in 2000. In Colombia, palm oil plantations are covering over one-time cornucopias of animal, bird, and plant life. Over time, they threaten indigenous livelihoods and give rise to abusive labor conditions and major human rights violations. The list of entwined horrors—climatic, biological, social—is long. But Taussig takes no comfort in our usual labels: “habitat loss,” “human rights abuses,” “climate change.” The shock of these words has passed; nowadays it is all a blur. Hence, Taussig’s keen attention to words and writing throughout this work. He takes cues from precursors’ ruminations: Roland Barthes’s suggestion that trees form an alphabet in which the palm tree is the loveliest; William Burroughs’s retort to critics that for him words are alive like animals and don’t like to be kept in pages—cut them and the words are let free. Steeped in a lifetime of philosophical and ethnographic exploration, Palma Africana undercuts the banality of the destruction taking place all around us and offers a penetrating vision of the global condition. Richly illustrated and written with experimental verve, this book is Taussig’s Tristes Tropiques for the twenty-first century.

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Diarmaid MacCulloch's epic, acclaimed history A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years follows the story of Christianity around the globe, from ancient Palestine to contemporary China. How did an obscure personality cult come to be the world's biggest religion, with a third of humanity its followers? This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main facts, ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organization and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society. Taking in wars, empires, reformers, apostles, sects, churches and crusaders, Diarmaid MacCulloch shows how Christianity has brought humanity to the most terrible acts of cruelty - and inspired its most sublime accomplishments. 'A stunning tour de force' Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year 'A landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight ... It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language' Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, Guardian 'A prodigious, thrilling, masterclass of a history book' John Cornwell, Financial Times 'Essential reading for those enthralled by Christianity and for those enraged by it' Melvyn Bragg, Observer, Books of the Year 'Magnificent ... a sumptuous portrait, alive with detail and generous in judgement' Richard Holloway, The Times Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. His Thomas Cranmer won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is the author most recently of Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490 - 1700, which won the Wolfson Prize for History and the British Academy Prize.

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An authoritative look at William Blake's life and enduring relevance as a prophetic artist, poet, and printmakerWilliam Blake (1757–1827) created some of the most iconic images in the history of art. He was a countercultural prophet whose personal struggles, technical innovations, and revelatory vision have inspired generations of artists. This marvelously illustrated book explores the biographical, artistic, and political contexts that shaped Blake's work, and demonstrates why he was a singularly gifted visual artist with renewed relevance for us today.The book explores Blake's relationship with the art world of his time and provides new perspectives on his craft as a printmaker, poet, watercolorist, and painter. It makes sense of the profound historical forces with which he contended during his lifetime, from revolutions in America and France to the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Readers gain incomparable insights into Blake's desire for recognition and commercial success, his role as social critic, his visionary experience of London, his hatred of empire, and the bitter disappointments that drove him to retire from the world in his final years. What emerges is a luminous portrait of a complicated and uncompromising artist who was at once a heretic, mystic, saint, and cynic.With an afterword by Alan Moore, this handsome volume features many of the most sublime and exhilarating images Blake ever produced. It brings together watercolors, paintings, and prints, and draws from such illuminated masterpieces as Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Europe a Prophecy, and apocalyptic works such as Milton and Jerusalem.Published in association with TateExhibition ScheduleTate Britain, LondonSeptember 11, 2019–February 2, 2020

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The Humanities and Human Flourishing series publishes edited volumes that explore the role of human flourishing in the central disciplines of the humanities, and to what degree the humanities can increase human happiness. This volume examines the relationship between history and human flourishing and, more broadly, investigates the ways in which the arts and humanities are related to human well-being. The essays here represent the efforts of a varied and distinguished group of professional historians to consider a deceptively simple question: what is the value of history for life? Each author asks in what ways historians, their work, and the objects of their inquiry might contribute to human well-being and how they might be encouraged to do so. History, in this volume, refers not just to the past writ large, but also to the discipline and practice of historical inquiry, along with the production and consumption of works of historical representation. Thinking of history in these ways, the contributors address a wide variety of subjects in connection to issues of well-being, considering history across time and place as a vocation, a source of the sublime, a site of play, and a repository of meaning with surprising analogues to religious experience. Overall, History and Human Flourishing uses personal experience, insight into the professional and scholarly world of historians, and a variety of historical periods and approaches to highlight the value of studying history in discussions of human flourishing. The essays in this volume identify history and the historical craft as tremendous potential resources for human well-being and of vital importance for our times.

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Web of Life weaves its suggestive interpretation of Jewish culture in the Palestine of late antiquity on the warp of a singular, breathtakingly tragic, and sublime rabbinic text, Lamentations Rabbah. The textual analyses that form the core of the book are informed by a range of theoretical paradigms rarely brought to bear on rabbinic literature: structural analysis of mythologies and folktales, performative approaches to textual production, feminist theory, psychoanalytical analysis of culture, cultural criticism, and folk narrative genre analysis. The concept of context as the hermeneutic basis for literary interpretation reactivates the written text and subverts the hierarchical structures with which it has been traditionally identified. This book reinterprets rabbinic culture as an arena of multiple dialogues that traverse traditional concepts of identity regarding gender, nation, religion, and territory. The author's approach is permeated by the idea that scholarly writing about ancient texts is invigorated by an existential hermeneutic rooted in the universality of human experience. She thus resorts to personal experience as an idiom of communication between author and reader and between human beings of our time and of the past. This research acknowledges the overlap of poetic and analytical language as well as the language of analysis and everyday life. In eliciting folk narrative discourses inside the rabbinic text, the book challenges traditional views about the social basis that engendered these texts. It suggests the subversive potential of the constitutive texts of Jewish culture from late antiquity to the present by pointing out the inherent multi-vocality of the text, adding to the conventionally acknowledged synagogue and academy the home, the marketplace, and other private and public socializing institutions.

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An exciting, wide-ranging exploration of the power and diversity of female figures of worship in world cultures and belief systems, from the ancient world to today. ---------- ‘Written in plain and accessible language, without losing academic rigor... Crerar, who, like a contemporary Virgil, introduces us to sublime and terrifying entities, guiding us all the way through the complex and fascinating meanings of femininity and faith.’ – María Pinal Villanueva, The Journal of Folklore Research Reviews ‘An excellent catalogue’ – Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times ‘A lucidly argued and richly illustrated catalogue’ – Marina Warner, The Guardian ---------- Divine women – in many guises – have featured in every world faith from deep history until the present day, inspiring people and cultures across the world. In a cross-cultural and global approach, this book discusses Eve alongside Inanna, Radha and Aphrodite in the context of sex and desire, while in the chapter on evil, witches and Hecate are compared with other deities, like Lamaštu and the Cihuateotl, as well as monstrous women such as Taraka, Medusa, Rangda, and Lilith. Ideas of justice and defence are explored in the figures of Athena, Sekhmet and Kali, and the final chapter on compassion and salvation uncovers links between Isis, Mary, Tara and Guanyin. The publication concludes with a discussion of contemporary feminism and modern interpretations of goddesses. Until the mid-twentieth century, the disciplines of theology, archaeology and history were heavily dominated by male academics, resulting in the under-representation of women’s experience and fewer studies on female divinity. This timely book, which is packed with fascinating insights into different cultures and beliefs, seeks to redress that balance.

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Michelle Zerba engages current debates about the relationship between literature and theory by analyzing responses of theorists in the Western tradition to tragic conflict. Isolating the centrality of conflict in twentieth-century definitions of tragedy, Professor Zerba discusses the efforts of modern critics to locate in Aristotle's Poetics the origins of this focus on agon. Through a study of ethical and political ideas formative of the Poetics, she demonstrates why Aristotle and his Renaissance and Neoclassical beneficiaries exclude conflict from their accounts of tragedy. The agonistic element, the book argues, first emerges in dramatic criticism in nineteenth-century Romantic theories of the sublime and, more influentially, in Hegel's lectures on drama and history. This turning point in the history of speculation about tragedy is examined with attention to a dynamic between the systematic aims of theory and the subversive conflicts of tragic plays. In readings of various Classical and Renaissance dramatists, Professor Zerba reveals that strife in tragedy undermines expectations of coherence, closure, and moral stability, on which theory bases its principles of dramatic order. From Aristotle to Hegel, the philosophical interest in securing these principles determines attitudes toward conflict. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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A blisteringly sharp novel of self-acceptance, friendship and making connections in the most unexpected of places . . . **** 'Emotionally intelligent and thought-provoking. Raw and compelling' DAILY MAIL 'A thought-provoking, quietly devastating novel about loneliness and what people will do to belong' RED 'Best Books of January 2024''Sharp, sublime and achingly hopeful. Nothing Serious takes an honest and heartfelt look at loneliness and longing, friendship and survival. I loved it' CHRIS WHITAKER, New York Times bestselling author 'This book blew me away, I'm still reeling from it . . . This is a powerful novel that will bring out a world of emotions in you . . . Just brilliant' ***** Reader Review****Nicki - 30ish, care worker, living in Brighton - is scrolling for her next hook-up. A difficult home life, a job that's going nowhere, she seeks solace in random encounters. Amber - 17, college student, lost - desperately needs someone to notice her. She creates 'Kevin', a fake dating profile for a man in his thirties.Neither Nicki nor 'Kevin' has any idea what they're about to get into. They quickly match, and an unlikely friendship develops, giving each other the validation they both sorely need. But can you ever truly connect when one of you is a liar?***'A searing exploration into the shape of loneliness and how far we'll go to create connections' HEATHER DARWENT, Sunday Times bestselling author 'Emotive . . . a powerful tale of a skewed but hopeful friendship through which two very different women find the courage to survive' AMY BEASHEL'WHAT. A. BOOK. I was utterly gripped from the first page. One that people will be talking about long after they finish reading' LISA HALL

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As a knowledgeable contemporary of the later Second Temple, Philo of Alexandria's approach to worship and his view of the essence of Jewish worship are of particular interest to the study of that period. Jutta Leonhardt discusses his views on the Jewish festivals, especially the Sabbath, on prayer, psalms, hymns, praise and thanksgiving, and on Temple offerings, sacrifices and purification rites. These aspects are presented with their parallels in Jewish and pagan traditions and in Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. Jewish worship in Philo has never been studied as a coherent whole before. Only individual aspects of worship, such as prayer of petition, or thanksgiving, or Philo has been used in studies on Second Temple Judaism as a quarry for general examples of acts of worship.Philo accepted and participated in Jewish worship, and even knew about details of various Jewish traditions of his time. His writings, however, do not refer to them directly and cannot easily be used to reconstruct Jewish rituals of his time. His main aim is to discuss the rites as collected in the Mosaic Torah, since these are binding for all Jews. These laws are frequently presented using the terminology of pagan cults and interpreted with recourse to Greek philosophy. In this philosophical description of actual rites there are parallels to Plato's references to religion in the ideal state in the Nomoi. Philo presents Judaism as the ultimate Hellenistic cult, which combines the various aspects of the different pagan cults in a sublime and perfect form to represent mankind and the universe in the worship of the one God who created the world.

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The #1 Irish Times bestseller A special reissue from Head of Zeus's bestselling anthology collection of the very best Irish short stories, selected by Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations, winner of the Irish Book Award Non Fiction Book of the Year 2019. There have been many anthologies of the short story as it developed in Ireland, but never a collection like this. The Art of the Glimpse is a radical revision of the canon of the Irish story, uniting classic works with neglected writers and marginalised voices – women, LGBT writers, Traveller folk-tales, neglected 19th-century authors and the first wave of 'new Irish' writers from all over the world now making a life in Ireland. Sinéad Gleeson brings together stories that range from the most sublime realism to the downright bizarre and transgressive, some from established literary figures and some that have not yet been published in book form. The collection draws on a tremendous spectrum of experience: the story of a prank come good by Bram Stoker; Sally Rooney on the love languages of the new generation; Donal Ryan on the pains of ageing; Edna O'Brien on the things we betray for love; James Joyce on a young woman torn between the familiar burdens and oppression of her home and the dangerous lure of romance and escape; and the internal monologue of a woman in a coma by Marian Keyes. Here too are vivid and less familiar stories by Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Oein De Bharduin, Blindboy Boatclub and Melatu Uche Okorie. Sinéad Gleeson's anthology is a marvellous representation of a rich literary tradition renewing itself in the 21st century.

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Why do we have the constant feeling that disaster is looming? Beyond the images of atomic apocalypse that have haunted us for decades, we are dazzled now by an array of possible catastrophe scenarios: climate change, financial crises, environmental disasters, technological meltdowns—perennial subjects of literature, film, popular culture, and political debate. Is this preoccupation with catastrophe questionable alarmism or complacent passivity? Or are there certain truths that can be revealed only in apocalypse?In The Future as Catastrophe, Eva Horn offers a novel critique of the modern fascination with disaster, which she treats as a symptom of our relationship to the future. Analyzing the catastrophic imaginary from its cultural and historical roots in Romanticism and the figure of the Last Man, through the narratives of climatic cataclysm and the Cold War’s apocalyptic sublime, to the contemporary popularity of disaster fiction and end-of-the-world blockbusters, Horn argues that apocalypse always haunts the modern idea of a future that can be anticipated and planned. Considering works by Lord Byron, J. G. Ballard, and Cormac McCarthy and films such as 12 Monkeys and Minority Report alongside scientific scenarios and political metaphors, she analyzes catastrophic thought experiments and the question of survival, the choices legitimized by imagined states of exception, and the contradictions inherent in preventative measures taken in the name of technical safety or political security. What makes today’s obsession different from previous epochs’ is the sense of a “catastrophe without event,” a stealthily creeping process of disintegration. Ultimately, Horn argues, imagined catastrophes offer us intellectual tools that can render a future shadowed with apocalyptic possibilities affectively, epistemologically, and politically accessible.

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In this accessible analysis, a philosopher and a science educator look at biological theory and society through a synthesis of mechanistic and organicist points of view to best understand the complexity of life and biological systems. The search for a unified framework for biology is as old as Plato's musings on natural order, which suggested that the universe itself is alive. But in the twentieth century, under the influence of genetics and microbiology, such organicist positions were largely set aside in favor of mechanical reductionism, by which life looks like a more complicated version of physics, one that can be reduced to the behavior of organic molecules. But can organisms truly be understood in mechanical terms, or do we need to view life from the perspective of whole organisms to make sense of biological complexity? The New Biology argues for the validity of holistic treatments of nature from the perspectives of philosophy, history, and biology and outlines the largely unrecognized undercurrent of organicism that has persisted. Mechanistic biology has been invaluable in understanding a range of biological issues, but Michael Reiss and Michael Ruse contend that reductionism alone cannot answer all our questions about life. Whether we are considering human health, ecology, or the relationship between sex and gender, we need to draw from both organicist and mechanistic frameworks. It's not always a matter of combining organicist and mechanistic perspectives, Reiss and Ruse argue. There is scope for a range of ways of understanding the complexity of life and biological systems. Organicist and mechanistic approaches are not simply hypotheses to be confirmed or refuted, but rather operate as metaphors for describing a universe of sublime intricacy.

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Light has been an enduring subject in art. In every conceivable media, artists have exploited the contrasts between light and dark, opposed cool and warm colours, drawn on science, and attempted to capture the transient effects of light and its emotional associations. This book explores how artists have perceived, illustrated and utilised light since the eighteenth century. Beginning with the British artist J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) who captured triumphant explosions of light and sought to represent its ephemerality in paint, it reveals how his expressive use of colour and interest in evanescent light influenced the French Impressionists. For them, light became the subject itself, as the likes of Claude Monet (1840–1926), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Alfred Sisley (1839–99) and others ventured outside to capture the momentary effects of sunlight on canvas. Exploring later innovations in photographic processes, the book also highlights how photography became a critical vehicle through which artists began to use light itself as a medium, eschewing subject matter to create photographs that more closely resembled moving abstractions than still images. While early art-historical associations with light tend to be sublime or spiritual, by the 1960s artists including Dan Flavin (1933–96), James Turrell (1943) and Lis Rhodes (1942–) had begun to work with artificial light to create new types of sculptures and immersive installations, repositioning the spectator as participant. Many artists like Olafur Eliasson (1967–) and Tacita Dean (1965–) continue to work with light, encouraging viewers to question their own positions and perspectives. Showcasing over 100 remarkable artworks from the past 200 years, this beautiful book reveals how the intangibility of light continues to fascinate.

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*WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARDS FOR BEST MEMOIR AND BEST WRITER/ARTIST*'A vast and complex tapestry that captures the humanity of people... it shimmers with grace'ALISON BECHDEL, author of FUN HOMEBefore there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, a tight-knit seaside community. After university, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coast Canadians who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Katie will be far more than she anticipates.Arriving in Fort McMurray, Katie finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world's largest oil companies. As one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. For young Katie, her wounds may never heal.Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.

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The inspiring memoir of the superstar astronaut and TikTok sensation - now on her biggest space mission yet'Today I woke up on Earth. And I will fall asleep in space'In space the sun rises and sets 16 times a day. You fly over every sea, every mountain and desert, every city and every port. The most ordinary things -- eating, sleeping, brushing your teeth or cutting your hair -- have to be relearned, until they become familiar again. This is the story of Samantha Cristoforetti's incredible journey to becoming an astronaut, and her journey beyond Earth.Her voyage as an apprentice astronaut began when she was in her early thirties: five years of intense training around the world, from Houston to Japan to the legendary Star City in Russia. Countless hours spent in centrifuges, spaceship simulators and under water for spacewalk practice. Then, one day, a rocket was waiting for her on the launch pad. And after eight minutes of wild ascent, she was on orbit, crunched up with her two crewmates in a tiny spaceship that took them to the International Space Station.With honesty and warmth, Cristoforetti chronicles the two hundred days she spent on the ISS, the joys and challenges of being in an extraordinary place, from the sublime sight of seeing Earth for the first time to more unusual concerns, such as mastering the art of floating. How do you find your bearings when there is no up and down? What is it like to run in weightlessness? And how do you cook in space?This is an enthralling, inspiring and surprisingly down-to-earth story about what it really takes to pursue your dreams.

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We may all feel we know what an "English" garden is, but do we really? England's Gardens offers a holistic, modern-day tour and an update on the history of some of the most iconic, enduring, and influential gardens across the country.A fresh take on a much-loved subject, this book will help you get to know England's gardens up close and personal. Garden historian Stephen Parker leads you through England's horticultural history, unearthing the cultural context and hidden stories behind the gardens, and bringing lesser-known garden makers to the fore. In five detailed historical chapters, Parker explores the making of the so-called "English" garden - from its origins in the formal splendour of stately homes, all the way to climate-change resilience and future-facing designs of the modern era.Inside the pages of this stunning book on England's country gardens, you will find:- 5 chapters of detailed narrative essays arranged in chronological order.- Detailed profiles showcase significant garden makers.- More than 20 photography-led garden case studies explore key gardens to visit in England today.- Stunning, full-bleed, contemporary photography brings the gardens to life.- Archival photography and historical art sheds light on the history and making of the gardens.Discover the best gardens to visit today - with garden case studies showcasing everything England's gardens have to offer through stunning contemporary photography and careful analysis of planting schemes and garden makers' creative influences. From iconic sites like Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, to more unusual examples such as Prospect Cottage and The Laskett - this book celebrates England's gardens in all their glorious diversity, sublime beauty, and exuberant eccentricity.

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Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, nine stories of cosmic horror from the heir apparent to Lovecraft’s throne.Laird Barron has emerged as one of the strongest voices in modern horror and dark fantasy fiction, building on the eldritch tradition pioneered by writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti. His stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, was the inaugural winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.He returns with his second collection, Occultation. Pitting ordinary men and women against a carnivorous, chaotic cosmos, Occultation’s nine tales of terror (two published here for the first time) were nominated for just as many Shirley Jackson awards, winning for the novella “Mysterium Tremendum” and the collection as a whole. Featuring an introduction by Michael Shea, Occultation brings more of the spine-chillingly sublime cosmic horror Laird Barron’s fans have come to expect. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

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The story of the seventh- and eighth-century Muslim conquests, when armies inspired by the new religion of Islam burst out of Arabia to build the Islamic Empire. 'This book delivers drama through sublime writing, but mainly through marvellous images... As sharp as the Arabian desert in the midday sun' Gerard DeGroot, The Times, Books of the Year 'An excellent prelude to Marozzi's previous books' Spectator 'Thoroughly good fun... The narration moves swiftly but gracefully from episode to episode' Sunday Times By the time of his death in 632, the Prophet Mohammed had united the feuding tribes of Arabia at the point of his sword. In the decades that followed, armies inspired by the new religion of Islam burst out of Arabia to subjugate the Levant, southwest and Central Asia, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The Arab Conquests lasted until 750, by which time several generations of marauding Muslim armies had carved out an Islamic empire, soon to be centred on Baghdad, which in size and population rivalled that of Rome at its zenith, extending from the shores of the Atlantic in the west to the borders of China in the east. In the process they had completely crushed one great empire (the old empire of Byzantium), and hollowed out another (that of the Iranian Sasanids). These conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries represent one of the greatest feats of arms in history. Justin Marozzi charts their lightning progress across the Middle East and vast tracts of Asia and explains how an unknown and radically militant faith swept out of the Arabian desert to change the world for ever.

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What does theology have to say about the place of eroticism in the salvific transformation of men and women, even of the cosmos itself? How, in turn, does eros infuse theological practice and transfigure doctrinal tropes? Avoiding the well-worn path of sexual moralizing while also departing decisively from Anders Nygren’s influential insistence that Christian agape must have nothing to do with worldly eros, this book explores what is still largely uncharted territory in the realm of theological erotics. The ascetic, the mystical, the seductive, the ecstatic—these are the places where the divine and the erotic may be seen to converge and love and desire to commingle. Inviting and performing a mutual seduction of disciplines, the volume brings philosophers, historians, biblical scholars, and theologians into a spirited conversation that traverses the limits of conventional orthodoxies, whether doctrinal or disciplinary. It seeks new openings for the emergence of desire, love, and pleasure, while challenging common understandings of these terms. It engages risk at the point where the hope for salvation paradoxically endangers the safety of subjects—in particular, of theological subjects—by opening them to those transgressions of eros in which boundaries, once exceeded, become places of emerging possibility. The eighteen chapters, arranged in thematic clusters, move fluidly among and between premodern and postmodern textual traditions—from Plato to Emerson, Augustine to Kristeva, Mechthild to Mattoso, the Shulammite to Molly Bloom, the Zohar to the Da Vinci Code. In so doing, they link the sublime reaches of theory with the gritty realities of politics, the boundless transcendence of God with the poignant transience of materiality.

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Rebecca Solnit has made a vocation of journeying into difficult territory and reporting back, as an environmentalist, antiglobalization activist, and public intellectual. "Storming the Gates of Paradise", an anthology of her essential essays from the past ten years, takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.S.-Mexican border, from San Francisco to London, from open sky to the deepest mines, and from the antislavery struggles of two hundred years ago to today's street protests. The nearly forty essays collected here comprise a unique guidebook to the American landscape after the millennium - not just the deserts, skies, gardens, and wilderness areas that have long made up Solnit's subject matter, but the social landscape of democracy and repression, of borders, ruins, and protests.She ventures into territories as dark as prison and as sublime as a broad vista, revealing beauty in the harshest landscape and political struggle in the most apparently serene view. Her introduction sets the tone and the book's overarching themes as she describes Thoreau, leaving the jail cell where he had been confined for refusing to pay war taxes and proceeding directly to his favorite huckleberry patch. In this way she links pleasure to politics, brilliantly demonstrating that the path to paradise has often run through prison. These startling insights on current affairs, politics, culture, and history, always expressed in Solnit's pellucid and graceful prose, constantly revise our views of the otherwise ordinary and familiar. Illustrated throughout, "Storming the Gates of Paradise" represents recent developments in Solnit's thinking and offers the reader a panoramic world view enriched by her characteristically provocative, inspiring, and hopeful observations.

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Joinery, Joists and Gender: A History of Woodworking for the 21st Century is the first publication of its kind to survey the long and rich histories of women and gender non-conforming persons who work in wood. Written for craft practitioners, design students, and readers interested in the intersections of gender and labor history—with 200 full-color images, both historical and contemporary—this book provides an accessible and insightful entry into the histories, practices, and lived experiences of women and nonbinary makers in woodworking.In the first half the author presents a woodworking history primarily in Europe and the United States that highlights the practical and philosophical issues that have marked women’s participation in the field. Research focuses on a diverse range of practitioners from Lady Yun to Adina White.This is followed by sixteen in-depth profiles of contemporary woodworkers, all of whom identify fine woodworking as their principal vocation. Through studio visits, interviews, and photographs of space and process, the book uncovers the varied practices and contributions these diverse artisans make to the understanding of wood as a medium to engage spatial, material, aesthetic, and even existential challenges.Beautifully illustrated profiles include Wendy Maruyama, one of the first women to earn an MFA in woodworking in the US; Sarah Marriage, founder of Baltimore’s A Workshop of Our Own, a woodshop and educational space specifically for women and gender non-conforming makers; Yuri Kobayashi, whose sublime work blurs boundaries between the worlds of art and craft, sculpture, and furniture; and Folayemi Wilson, whose work draws equally on African American history and Afrofuturism to explore and illuminate the ways that furniture and wood traditions shape social relations.

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There’s no template for making it as a globally successful pop group. Some of the ingredients remain constant and beyond the music, there’s a mix’n’match selection of premature death, drugs, drink, destroyed friendships, lukewarm solo projects and bungled finances. The saga of Joy Division and New Order has all those clichés, yet both groups defined their times and overturned their musical landscape. First, there was Joy Division. Their music reflected both the barren urban landscape of their native Manchester in the late 1970s and singer Ian Curtis’s heart of darkness. They remain forever set in aspic, not merely – if “merely” is the right word – by the suicide of their extraordinary and extraordinarily volatile singer, but by two albums as close to perfection as music can come. From the ashes of Joy Division rose New Order, who recruited a keyboardist because of – rather than in spite of – the fact she couldn’t play. On the cusp of the British dance music boom, with what seemed like remarkable prescience, they invested in The Haçienda, a club in their native Manchester. In its pomp, the queues were around the block, but its debts would sink their heroically hopeless record label, Factory. If Joy Division were sublime musical darkness, New Order were bathed in sunlight and their globally popular music bridged the chasm between indie and dance and inspired a generation. Having conquered the world while maintaining their credibility, they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and imploded in a tsunami of recrimination, while still making fabulous music to this day. You couldn’t make it up: there’s no need to.

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A visionary new approach to the Americas during the age of colonization, made by engaging with the aural aspects of supposedly “silent” images Colonial depictions of the North and South American landscape and its indigenous inhabitants fundamentally transformed the European imagination—but how did those images reach Europe, and how did they make their impact? In Sound, Image, Silence, noted art historian Michael Gaudio provides a groundbreaking examination of the colonial Americas by exploring the special role that aural imagination played in visible representations of the New World.Considering a diverse body of images that cover four hundred years of Atlantic history, Sound, Image, Silence addresses an important need within art history: to give hearing its due as a sense that can inform our understanding of images. Gaudio locates the noise of the pagan dance, the discord of battle, the din of revivalist religion, and the sublime sounds of nature in the Americas, such as lightning, thunder, and the waterfall. He invites readers to listen to visual media that seem deceptively couched in silence, offering bold new ideas on how art historians can engage with sound in inherently “mute” media.Sound, Image, Silence includes readings of Brazilian landscapes by the Dutch painter Frans Post, a London portrait of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison’s early Kinetoscope film Sioux Ghost Dance, and the work of Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting. It masterfully fuses a diversity of work across vast social, cultural, and spatial distances, giving us both a new way of understanding sound in art and a powerful new vision of the New World.

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From one of America’s most brilliant writers, a New York Times bestselling journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness.At the heart of Buddhism is a simple claim: The reason we suffer—and the reason we make other people suffer—is that we don’t see the world clearly. At the heart of Buddhist meditative practice is a radical promise: We can learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness. In this “sublime” (The New Yorker), pathbreaking book, Robert Wright shows how taking this promise seriously can change your life—how it can loosen the grip of anxiety, regret, and hatred, and how it can deepen your appreciation of beauty and of other people. He also shows why this transformation works, drawing on the latest in neuroscience and psychology, and armed with an acute understanding of human evolution. This book is the culmination of a personal journey that began with Wright’s landmark book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, and deepened as he immersed himself in meditative practice and conversed with some of the world’s most skilled meditators. The result is a story that is “provocative, informative and...deeply rewarding” (The New York Times Book Review), and as entertaining as it is illuminating. Written with the wit, clarity, and grace for which Wright is famous, Why Buddhism Is True lays the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age and shows how, in a time of technological distraction and social division, we can save ourselves from ourselves, both as individuals and as a species.

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Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a visionary German novelist, theorist, poet, and artist who made a lasting impression on such icons of modernism as Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius. Fascinated with the potential of glass as a medium for expressionist architecture and moved by tales of the fantastic, Scheerbart envisioned the sublime through a series of futurist milieus composed entirely of crystalline, colored glass architecture. In 1912, Scheerbart published "The Light Club of Batavia", a novelette about the formation of a club dedicated to building a glass spa for bathing - not in water, but in light - at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft. Translated here into English for the first time, this rare story serves as a point of departure for Josiah McElheny, who, with an esteemed group of collaborators, offers a fascinating array of responses to this enigmatic work. "The Light Club" makes clear that the themes of utopian hope, desire, and madness in Scheerbart's tale represent a part of modernism's lost project: a world that would have looked entirely different from the one we now inhabit. In his compelling introduction, McElheny describes Scheerbart's life as well as his own enchantment with the artist, and he explains the ways in which 'The Light Club of Batavia' inspired him to produce art of uncommon breadth. "The Light Club" also features inspired writings from Gregg Bordowitz and Ulrike Muller, Andrea Geyer, and Branden W. Joseph, as well as translations of original texts by and about Scheerbart. A unique response by one visionary artist to another, "The Light Club" is an unforgettable examination of what it might mean to see radical potential in the readily transparent.

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SOON A MAJOR NETFLIX SERIES – from director Shawn Levy, starring Louis Hofmann, Lars Eidinger and Marion Bailey, with Hugh Laurie and Mark Ruffalo, and introducing Aria Mia Loberti. WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTIONNATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure has been blind since the age of six. Her father builds a perfect miniature of their Paris neighbourhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. But when the Nazis invade, father and daughter flee with a dangerous secret. Werner is a German orphan, destined to labour in the same mine that claimed his father’s life, until he discovers a knack for engineering. His talent wins him a place at a brutal military academy, but his way out of obscurity is built on suffering. At the same time, far away in a walled city by the sea, an old man discovers new worlds without ever setting foot outside his home. But all around him, impending danger closes in. Doerr’s combination of soaring imagination and meticulous observation is electric. As Europe is engulfed by war and lives collide unpredictably, All The Light We Cannot See is a captivating and devastating elegy for innocence. ‘Sublime’ The Times ‘Such a page-turner, entirely absorbing … Magnificent’ Guardian ‘A masterpiece’ Financial Times ‘Epic … A bittersweet and moving novel that lingers in the mind’ Daily Mail ‘A vastly entertaining feat of storytelling’ New York Times

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La reflexion sur le langage est aujourd'hui en honneur. C'est pourquoi les travaux sur la rhetorique prennent une importance nouvelle. Mais ils ne peuvent se borner a proposer des recettes. Ils mettent en jeu les exigences essentielles de l'expression oratoire mais, plus largement, orale, philosophique et poetique. Rome et ses orateurs, Ciceron surtout, ont apporte a ce sujet les indications les plus fecondes.Le premier chapitre de ce livre montre, de maniere politique et sociologique, les questions qui se posaient dans l' "Vrbs". Mais l'ensemble de l'ouvrage traite, selon les enseignements de Ciceron, de la place que tiennent la culture et la sagesse philosophique dans les creations de la parole. Il n'y a pas de rhetorique sans une philosophie du "logos". Il existe a ce propos une querelle entre philosophie et rhetorique. Platon adopte la premiere. Aristote tente une mediation entre elles. Ciceron, s'appuyant sur les autres Ecoles et notamment sur les theories du vraisemblable et de la probabilite, propose une synthese qui s'est prolongee du Moyen Age a la modernite a travers la Renaissance.Alain Michel etudie l'art de la persuasion dialectique, l'usage (bon ou mauvais) des passions, de la vehemence, du rire, l'esthetique du sublime et la grace. Il envisage ensemble l'art de la composition (dispositio) et les exigences de l'education - nature et art, recherche de l'ideal dans le cadre de l'humaine comprehension. Cela conduit a une recherche sur le droit, qui unit competence concrete et recherche liberale de l'equite, sur l'activite politique de l'orateur, qui n'a jamais transige avec sa double exigence de justice et de paix ni evite la confrontation lucide du pour ou du contre. Ciceron vecut la fin d'un monde, alors que s'effrondaient les democraties antiques. Il a donne sa vie plutot que de s'incliner. C'est dans cet esprit qu'il a toujours accorde la grace et la beaute, la finesse et la grandeur, la sagesse humaniste faite de comprehension, d'amitie, d'intelligence, et de savoir domine par le sens du dialogue.

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The third full-length collection by Julien Poirier, Out of Print is a truly bicoastal volume, reflecting the poet's years in New York as well as his return to his Bay Area roots. Consider it a meetinghouse between late New York School and contemporary California surrealism, a series of quips intercepted from America's underground poetry telegraph, or an absurdist mirror held up to consumerist culture. "Welcome Julien Poirier! What a distinct inspired voice. His work is abundant in surprise. His musical,often bonkers play of language is, for me, a source of delight & revelation."--David Meltzer "Julien Poirier's poems calibrate the vernacular in a sublime mathematics of commonalities. The effect is that of feelings on the run, enunciated clearly. In a sudden down-draught-'You're wind, you melt on my tongue'-he'll take the contemporary love poem into new stretches of believability while knowingly calling to account the failings that, whether perennial or merely topical, hem round ourselves to disastrous effect. For, no mistake, Out of Print means business: a forceful wake-up call, allowing as how for this old world the time for meaningful action may well have run out and we've joined the fabled damned, lost but for such eloquence, affection, and mad, mad laughter in Hell's despite."-Bill Berkson "Out of Print's unexpectedly a love poem, its humor sharpening into dissonant pleasure. And what a pleasure! Julien Poirier's weirdly direct and directly weird poems notice what an event is, whether it's four square monks in a Coupe de Ville or becoming the Invisible Hand, and render that event into a sensual and searching landscape. You are really there, no where, but there, in poetry as a means to think differently, and maybe, absurdly, hope."--Karen Weiser Julien Poirier is the co-founder of Ugly Duckling Presse. He has taught poetry in New York City and San Francisco public schools and at San Quentin State Prison. Previous books include Way Too West (2015) and El Golpe Chileno (2010).

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This is an amazing collection of some of the best short fiction ever written in the SF genre, by an author acclaimed as 'the mastersinger of space opera' The TimesThis collection includes ZIMA BLUE, one of the standout episodes in Netflix's LOVE, DEATH AND ROBOTSWith an introduction by noted SF critic Johnathan Strahan, this collection of twenty short stories, novellettes and novellas includes ZIMA BLUE, one of the standout shorts in Netflix's LOVE, DEATH AND ROBOTS, as well as MINLA'S FLOWERS, SIGNAL TO NOISE, TROIKA, and seven previous uncollected stories, including TRAUMA POD, THE WATER THIEF and IN BABELSBERG.Alastair Reynolds has won the Sidewise Award and been nominated for The Hugo Awards for his short fiction. One of the most thought-provoking and accomplished short-fiction writers of our time, this collection is a delight for all SF readers.Readers are hooked on Alastair Reynolds' short stories:'This collection was my first introduction to Alastair Reynolds' work. I'm impressed - this is good stuff!' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐'Reynolds is at his best . . . one of the best collections that I've ever read' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐'This book contains a brilliant collection of short stories, all of them highlighting Reynolds' great imaginative powers and his first-class worldbuilding' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐'These stories of his are SO COOL. I mean, like glittering jewels of complete mind-blowing and written with real talent and clear vision' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐'Big questions and existential dread creeping through the elegantly described universes' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐'He achieves with his stories something sublime in science fiction writing. There are some truly inspiring ideas and fantastic tales to be read here. I can truly attest that Reynolds is a true genius in the short story form' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

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Dominick LaCapra's History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of "Practice Theory" and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme cases, specifically events and experiences involving violence and victimization. He asks how historians treat and are simultaneously implicated in the traumatic processes they attempt to represent. In addressing these questions, he also investigates violence's impact on various types of writing and establishes a distinctive role for critical theory in the face of an insufficiently discriminating aesthetic of the sublime (often unreflectively amalgamated with the uncanny). In History and Its Limits, LaCapra inquires into the related phenomenon of a turn to the "postsecular," even the messianic or the miraculous, in recent theoretical discussions of extreme events by such prominent figures as Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj Zizek. In a related vein, he discusses Martin Heidegger's evocative, if not enchanting, understanding of "The Origin of the Work of Art." LaCapra subjects to critical scrutiny the sometimes internally divided way in which violence has been valorized in sacrificial, regenerative, or redemptive terms by a series of important modern intellectuals on both the far right and the far left, including Georges Sorel, the early Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, and Ernst Jünger. Violence and victimization are prominent in the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra questions prevalent anthropocentrism (evident even in theorists of the "posthuman") and the long-standing quest for a decisive criterion separating or dividing the human from the animal. LaCapra regards this attempt to fix the difference as misguided and potentially dangerous because it renders insufficiently problematic the manner in which humans treat other animals and interact with the environment. In raising the issue of desirable transformations in modernity, History and Its Limits examines the legitimacy of normative limits necessary for life in common and explores the disconcerting role of transgressive initiatives beyond limits (including limits blocking the recognition that humans are themselves animals).

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In Every Step a Lotus, Dorothy Ko embarks on a fascinating exploration of the practice of footbinding in China, explaining its origins, purpose, and spread before the nineteenth century. She uses women's own voices to reconstruct the inner chambers of a Chinese house where women with bound feet lived and worked. Focusing on the material aspects of footbinding and shoemaking--the tools needed, the procedures, the wealth of symbolism in the shoes, and the amazing regional variations in style--she contends that footbinding was a reasonable course of action for a woman who lived in a Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on domesticity, motherhood, and handwork. Her absorbing, superbly detailed, and beautifully written book demonstrates that in the women's eyes, footbinding had less to do with the exotic or the sublime than with the mundane business of having to live in a woman's body in a man's world. Footbinding was likely to have started in the tenth century among palace dancers. Ironically, it was meant not to cripple but to enhance their grace. Its meaning shifted dramatically as it became domesticated in the subsequent centuries, though the original hint of sensuality did not entirely disappear. This contradictory image of footbinding as at once degenerate and virtuous, grotesque and refined, is embodied in the key symbol for the practice--the lotus blossom, being both a Buddhist sign of piety and a poetic allusion to sensory pleasures. Every Step a Lotus includes almost one hundred illustrations of shoes from different regions of China, material paraphernalia associated with the customs and rituals of footbinding, and historical images that contextualize the narrative. Most of the shoes, from the collection of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, have not been exhibited before. Readers will come away from the book with a richer understanding of why footbinding carries such force as a symbol and why, long after its demise, it continues to exercise a powerful grip on our imaginations. A Copublication with the Bata Shoe Museum

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Squeaky Clean Riddles to Tickle Your Funny BoneSqueaky Clean Super Funny Riddles for Kidz. From Craig Yoe, the former Creative Director, Vice President, and General Manager of Jim Henson's Muppets─and former Creative Director at Nickelodeon and Disney─comes a series of wholesome joke books for kids of all ages. Squeaky Clean Super Funny Riddles for Kidz is the fourth of the series and you’ll want to own them all! Laugh-out-loud (LOL) funny jokes. Craig, a retired pastor, believes that there is nothing better in life than making kids laugh and feel happy. He has been collecting jokes for years, and now he is releasing his hand-picked jokes for kids in the “Squeaky Clean” series. It’s packed with wholesome, edifying, LOL funny jokes and riddles to encourage reading and entertain children for hours. A career devoted to making kids happy. Yoe is the winner of an Eisner Award (the comics industry's equivalent of the Academy Awards) and a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators. He is an author, editor, art director, graphic designer, cartoonist and comics historian. Craig is currently operating Yoe! Studio creations and Yoe! Books. Publisher Weekly says he's the “archivist of the ridiculous and the sublime” and calls his work "brilliant." Library Journal “calls him a comics guru”. Jim Henson once said that “Craig brings with him his valuable creativity and enthusiasm. He has a nice mix of business and creative talent!” Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame quipped, “I keep buying books from Yoe Books as gifts, then keeping them for myself!” Perfect gift for kids (and parents and grandparents). If you and your kids have enjoyed books such as Silly Jokes for Silly Kids, Belly Laugh Jokes for Kids, or Laugh-Out-Loud A+ Jokes for Kids; you and your child will love Craig Yoe’s Squeaky Clean Super Funny Riddles for Kidz. No boogers, ghosts, witches, scary monsters, insults or put-downs─all giggle-filled good clean fun for young and old alike.

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LONGLISTED FOR THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT AWARD'Sharp, funny . . . the best sort of murder mystery' Tatler'A perfect antidote to all the real-life craziness going on' Daily MailSir Ecgbert Tode of Tode Hall has survived to a grand old age - much to the despair of his younger wife, Emma. But at ninety-three he has, at last, shuffled off the mortal coil.Emma, Lady Tode, thoroughly fed up with being a dutiful Lady of the Manor, wants to leave the country to spend her remaining years in Capri. Unfortunately her three tiresome children are either unwilling or unable (too mad, too lefty or too happy in Australia) to take on management of their large and important home, so the mantle passes to a distant relative and his glamorous wife.Not long after the new owners take over, Lady Tode is found dead in the mausoleum. Accident? Or is there more going on behind the scenes of Tode Hall than an outsider would ever guess....?In the traditions of two great but very different British writers, Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse, Waugh's hilarious and entirely original twist on the country house murder mystery comes complete with stiff upper lips, even stiffer drinks, and any stiffs that might embarrass the family getting smartly brushed under the carpet...What everyone's saying about In the Crypt with a Candlestick...'I couldn't put it down' Santa Montefiore'A delightful treat' The Lady'Deliciously entertaining' Andrew Wilson'An irresistible champagne bubble of pleasure and laughter' Rachel Johnson'A perfect antidote to wintry gloom' The Literary Review'What a triumph!' Antonia Fraser'A masterclass in how to write a rollicking good read' Sarah Vine'A jolly farce that never takes itself too seriously' Red Magazine'Fizzles, crackles and sparkles' Elizabeth Buchan'A work of sublime silliness' Simon Brett'An effervescent madcap whodunnit' Metro'A marvellous rollicking read' Mary Killen'She's skewered her targets brilliantly' Imogen Edwards-Jones

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