Books

Paradise Logic

APPARENTLY, SIR CAMERON NEEDS TO DIE.

Ghost Pains

Stevens's women throw disastrous parties in the post-party era, flirt through landscapes of terror and war, and find themselves unrecognizable after waking up with old flames in new cities. They navigate the labyrinths of history, love, and ethics in a fractured American present, seeing first-hand how history influences the ways in which we care for-or neglect-one another.

Games

Games are a unique art form. They do not just tell stories, nor are they simply conceptual art. They are the art form that works in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be in games and what to care about; they designate the player's in-game abilities and motivations. In other words, designers create alternate agencies, and players submerge themselves in those agencies. Games let us explore alternate forms of agency. The fact that we play games demonstrates something remarkable about the nature of our own agency: we are capable of incredible fluidity with our own motivations and rationality. This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on games' unique value in human life. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part of how we become mature, free people. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. We can pursue goals, not for their own value, but for the sake of the struggle. Playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life, and the fact that we can engage in this motivational inversion lets us use games to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, then, are a special medium for communication. They are the technology that allows us to write down and transmit forms of agency. Thus, the body of games forms a "library of agency" which we can use to help develop our freedom and autonomy. Nguyen also presents a new theory of the aesthetics of games. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. They are unlike traditional artworks in that they are designed to sculpt activities - and to promote their players' aesthetic appreciation of their own activity.

Love Me Tender

On the Calculation of Volume I

WINNER OF THE 2022 NORDIC COUNCIL LITERATURE PRIZETara Selter has slipped out of time.Her days no longer stack up into weeks, months or seasons. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.[Bokinfo].

Tell

The co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, Tell is a probing, exuberant and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our lives and of other people's.

The Last Samurai

"Sibylla, a single mother from a long line of frustrated talents, has unusual ideas about child rearing. Yo Yo Ma started piano at the age of two; her son starts at three. J.S. Mill learned Greek at three; Ludo starts at four, reading Homer as they travel round and round the Circle Line. A fatherless boy needs male role models, so she plays the film of Seventh Samurai as a running backdrop to his childhood. Ludo, aged five, moves on to Hebrew, Arabic and Japanese, edible insects of the world and aerodynamics. At last, he embarks on the search for his father. A dazzling concoction of a book, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, it is a book for anyone who has ever wanted better parents than those fate has provided - a novel for anyone who has ever learned an alphabet and never wanted to eat an insect."

People Who Lunch

A riveting investigation of the utopian experiments attempting to resist the unrelenting demands of late-stage capitalism--only to end up living comfortably alongside it. What do post-work politics, the cult of crypto, clubbing, and polyamory have in common? All have spawned thriving subcultures united in their rejection of the patriarchal capitalist order: from wage labor, to the reign of the shareholder class over capital markets, to romantic relationships that feel like contractual arrangements to be negotiated, and more. People who Lunch is about hating work and needing to work, intimacy and technology, labor and leisure, and the challenge of living our ideals in a less than ideal world. In it, Sally Olds brings her "unsparing scrutiny to bear...as she grapples with the sense of entrapment in the machinery of capitalism and remorseless logic of commodification" (ABC arts). In one essay, her brief flirtation with post-monogamy forces her to confront the emotional prison of the "open relationship;" in another, a multi-hour viewing of a critically acclaimed performance art piece highlights how even the highest forms of culture exist to convert pleasure into capital. In the end, her forays into these colorful worlds betray a deep irony: escaping a system built on the exchange of wage labor is, quite simply, a lot of work.

Final Cut

An exploration and reimagining of the 50 'nature' words removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

The Lost Words

This book was inspired by the decision to remove 50 'nature' words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. These words included conker, bluebell, kingfisher, and acorn.

CHILDISH LITERATURE.

LOST IN THE GARDEN.

Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis

Mixing dystopian sci-fi, mythic fantasy, and zombie horror, Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis, is a graphic novel based on a suppressed opera written in 1943 by Peter Kien and Viktor Ullmann, two prisoners at the Terezín concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. The authors did not live to see their masterpiece performed. Set in an alternative universe where Atlantis never sank but instead became a technologically advanced tyranny, the power-mad buffoonish Emperor declares all-out war - everyone against everyone. Death goes on a labor strike, creating a hellscape where everyone fights, but no one dies. Can the spirit of Life stop this terror with the power of love? Includes designs from the original opera, historical essays, photographs, and more.

She's Always Hungry

Fourteen Days

The Address Book

After finding a lost address book, the artist sets out to understand its owner by randomly interviewing contacts to learn more about the personality and past of its owner.

Aliss at the Fire

A haunting exploration of love and loss by the Beckett of the twenty-first century (Le Monde).

Return to Romance

By turns amusing and disturbing, this collection of 1960s romance comic strips provides a provocative window into male-female power dynamics as conceived by one of mid-century America's foremost comic book artists. Ogden Whitney was one of the unsung masters of American comics. He is perhaps best remembered for co-creating the satirical superhero Herbie Popnecker, also known as the Fat Fury, but his romance comics of the late 1950s and 1960s may be even more unique. In Whitney's hands, the standard formula of meet-cute, minor complications, and final blissful kiss becomes something very different: an unsettling vision of midcentury American romance as a devastating power struggle, a form of intimate psychological warfare dressed up in pearls and flannel suits. From suburban lawns and offices to rocket labs and factories, his men and women scheme and clash, dominate and escape. It is darkly hilarious, truly terrifying, and yes, occasionally even a bit romantic.