Search results for ""author benjamin paloff""

Milan Kundera on Marek Bienczyk's "Transparency" "The subject of transparency has always interested me; in "The Art of the Novel" I discussed it as one of the key words in my personal lexicon. Marek Bienczyk is right to give it an entire book of its own: transparency remains one of the foundational concepts of today's social imaginary, and its role never ceases to grow. These lovely pages, in which the essay brushes up against fiction, offer us more than an historical and philosophical study, but a truly existential, and thus novelistic, investigation of transparency. It's a delight." Drawing on all his resources as a novelist, cultural critic, and scholar, Marek Bienczyk peels away the layers of our contemporary obsession with "transparency," skipping across centuries and continents to piece together the genesis of our fears of deception and overexposure. Highly poignant, and transcending the genres of criticism, personal essay, and the metaphysical novel, "Transparency" is a gorgeous revelation--about our never-ending need for revelation.

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From bestselling, internationally acclaimed author Dorota Masłowska comes a hilarious and devastating satire of consumer culture. Set in a bizarro, all-too-real imaginarium of American pop culture, Honey, I Killed the Cats introduces us to two independent young women struggling to live the lives that television and glossy magazines have promised them. In a collision of street slang and mass-media sloganeering, Masłowska's electrifying prose drives a propulsive story about spiritual longing in a dispirited world. Masłowska’s novel examines the ways we attempt to exist and find meaning in lives defined by what we buy. In this warped world saturated by advertising and materialism, where everything can be bought, from personality and physical traits to religion and self-fulfillment, Joanne and Farah, two very different women form a friendship both bonded in and ultimately destroyed by the manipulations of consumer culture. Joanne has everything the commercials say you should want—confidence, a carefree life, happiness to excess. Farah is a self-loathing, envious, germophobic malcontent. Through a shared metaphysical dream experience that spills over into their increasingly troubled day-to-day lives, these best friends find themselves consumed by their equal-and-opposite obsessions. Widely regarded as Polish literary sensation Masłowska’s best novel yet, Honey, I Killed the Cats is a powerfully emotional, hilariously grotesque satire of Western consumer culture and the trends that go along with it.

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The Flame of Eternity provides a reexamination and new interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy and the central role that the concepts of eternity and time, as he understood them, played in it. According to Krzysztof Michalski, Nietzsche's reflections on human life are inextricably linked to time, which in turn cannot be conceived of without eternity. Eternity is a measure of time, but also, Michalski argues, something Nietzsche viewed first and foremost as a physiological concept having to do with the body. The body ages and decays, involving us in a confrontation with our eventual death. It is in relation to this brute fact that we come to understand eternity and the finitude of time. Nietzsche argues that humanity has long regarded the impermanence of our life as an illness in need of curing. It is this "pathology" that Nietzsche called nihilism. Arguing that this insight lies at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole, Michalski seeks to explain and reinterpret Nietzsche's thought in light of it. Michalski maintains that many of Nietzsche's main ideas--including his views on love, morality (beyond good and evil), the will to power, overcoming, the suprahuman (or the overman, as it is infamously referred to), the Death of God, and the myth of the eternal return--take on new meaning and significance when viewed through the prism of eternity.

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