He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria and personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought—the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral “memory libraries” kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, a library of books never written.

    Tragedy permits us to come face to face with what we do not know about ourselves but that which makes those selves who we are. Having Been Born is a compelling examination of ancient Greek origins in the development and history of tragedy--a story that represents what we thought we knew about the poets, dramatists, and philosophers of ancient Greece--and shows them to us in an unfamiliar, unexpected, and original light.

    They include introductions for books of avant-garde poets; collaborations with visual artists, and articles for publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and October.One section focuses on writers and literary works: strange tales from classical and modern China; the Psalms in translation: a skeptical look at E. B. White’s New York. Another section is a continuation of Weinberger’s celebrated political articles collected in What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award), including a sequel to “What I Heard About Iraq,” which the Guardian called the only antiwar “classic” of the Iraq War. A new installment of his magnificent linked “serial essay,” An Elemental Thing, takes us on a journey down the Yangtze River during the Sung Dynasty.The reader will also find the unlikely convergences between Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz, photography and anthropology, and, of course, oranges and peanuts, as well as an encomium for Obama, a manifesto on translation, a brief appearance by Shiva, and reflections on the color blue, death, exoticism, Susan Sontag, and the arts and war.

    Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group's history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself.Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast-West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels' shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he's remembering The Source magazine cover announcing the Tribe's 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg's death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that--like the low end, the bass--are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.

    For Borges it is the tiger and the color red, for Cortázar a pair of amorous lions, and for an early Egyptian scribe the monarch butterfly that metamorphosed into the Key of Life. Ducornet names these powers The Deep Zoo. Her essays take us from the glorious bestiary of Aloys Zötl to Abu Ghraib, from the tree of life to Sade's Silling Castle, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to virtual reality. Says Ducornet, "To write with the irresistible ink of tigers and the uncaging of our own Deep Zoo, we need to be attentive and fearless—above all very curious—and all at the same time.""Ducornet’s skill at drawing unexpected connections, and her ability to move between outrage and meditativeness, are gripping to behold."— Star Tribune "This collection of essays meditates on art, mysticism, and more; it’ll leave a reader with plenty to ponder."— Vol. 1 Brooklyn "Rikki Ducornet's new collection The Deep Zoo is filled with smart and surprising essays that explore our connections to the world through art."— Largehearted Boy ““The Deep Zoo” acts as a kind of foundational text, a lens to view her work and the other essays through. . . Subversive at heart and acutely perceptive.”— Numero Cinq "Ducornet moves between these facets of human experience with otherworldly grace, creating surprising parallels and associations. . . The Deep Zoo is a testament to her acrobatic intelligence and unflinching curiosity. Ducornet not only trusts the subconscious, she celebrates and interrogates it."— The Heavy Feather “What struck me most about this collection, and what I am confident will pull me back to it again, is Ducornet’s obvious passion for life. She is . . .  attentive, fearless, and curious. And for a hundred pages we get to see how it feels to exist like that, what it’s like to think critically and still be open to the world.”— Cleaver Magazine “Rikki Ducornet is imagination’s emissary to this mundane world.”—Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books on the Park"This book is like the secret at the heart of the world; I've put other books aside."—Anne Germanacos, author of TributePraise for Rikki Ducornet"A novelist whose vocabulary sweats with a kind of lyrical heat."— The New York Times "Linguistically explosive . . . one of the most interesting American writers around."— The Nation "Ducornet—surrealist, absurdist, pure anarchist at times—is one of our most accomplished writers, adept at seizing on the perfect details and writing with emotion and cool detachment simultaneously."—Jeff Vandermeer"A unique combination of the practical and fabulous, a woman equally alive to the possibilities of joy and the necessity of political responsibility, a creature—à la Shakespeare's Cleopatra—of 'infinite variety,' Ducornet is a writer of extraordinary power, in whose books 'rigor and imagination' (her watchwords) perform with the grace and daring of high-wire acrobats."—Laura Mullen, BOMB Magazine"The perversity, decadence, and even the depravity that Ducornet renders here feel explosively fresh because their sources are thought and emotion, not the body, and finally there's some pathos too."— The Boston Globe "Ducornet's skill at drawing unexpected connections, and her ability to move between outrage and meditativeness, are gripping to behold."—Tobias Carroll, Star Tribune"This collection of essays meditates on art, mysticism, and more; it'll leave a reader with plenty to ponder."— Vol. 1 Brooklyn "Rikki Ducornet's new collection The Deep Zoo is filled with smart and surprising essays that explore our connections to the world through art."— Largehearted Boy

    Indeed it was with a Salon review that he made his literary debut: and it is significant that even at this early stage - in 1845 - he was already articulating the need for a painter who could depict the heroism of modern life. This he was to find in Constantin Guys, whom he later celebrated in the famous essay which provides the title-piece for this collection. Other material in this volume includes important and extended studies of three of Baudelaire's contemporary heroes - Delacroix, Poe and Wagner - and some more general articles, such as those on the theory and practice of caricature, and on what Baudelaire, with intentional scorn, called philosophic art. This last article develops views only touched on in Baudelaire's other writings. This volume is extensively illustrated with reproductions of works referred to in the text and otherwise relevant to it. It provides a survey of some of the most important ideas and individuals in the critical world of the great poet who has been called the father of modern art criticism.

    It is a book about the delicacy and bluntness of American life, about how pop culture sticks its finger deeply into the ethical dilemmas of our time, and how to negotiate between the old and the new, the high and the low, the global and the local, the sacred and the profane. At the heart of these reflections lies a central question: What should you do when you don't know what to do?Taken together, these essays comprise a guide for the overhaul of "the administrativersity" of contemporary American life, a bureaucratic prison where the brain needn't work anymore. These pieces investigate the writer's own way of thinking—putting forth new ideas, questioning them, and urging the reader to adopt the same spirit of critical reexamination.

    Tolkien assembled in this new paperback edition were with one exception delivered as general lectures on particular occasions; and while they mostly arose out of Tolkien’s work in medieval literature, they are accessible to all. Two of them are concerned with Beowulf, including the well-known lecture whose title is taken for this book, and one with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, given in the University of Glasgow in 1953.Also included in this volume is the lecture English and Welsh; the Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford in 1959; and a paper on Invented Languages delivered in 1931, with exemplification from poems in the Elvish tongues. Most famous of all is On Fairy-Stories, a discussion of the nature of fairy-tales and fantasy, which gives insight into Tolkien’s approach to the whole genre.The pieces in this collection cover a period of nearly thirty years, beginning six years before the publication of The Hobbit, with a unique ‘academic’ lecture on his invention (calling it A Secret Vice) and concluding with his farewell to professorship, five years after the publication of The Lord of the Rings.

    The author, editor, or translator of nearly three dozen books of criticism and works of literature, Keene now offers an enjoyable and beautifully written introduction to traditional Japanese culture for the general reader.The book acquaints the reader with Japanese aesthetics, poetry, fiction, and theater, and offers Keene's appreciations of these topics. Based on lectures given at the New York Public Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the University of California, Los Angeles, the essays -though written by a renowned scholar- presuppose no knowledge of Japanese culture. Keene's deep learning, in fact, enables him to construct an overview as delightful to read as it is informative.His insights often illuminate aspects of traditional Japanese culture that endure today. One of these is the appreciation of "perishability." this appreciation os seen in countless little bits of Japanese life: in temples made of wood instead of durable materials; in the preference for objects -such as pottery- that are worn, broken, or used rather than new; and in the national love of the delicate cherry blossom, which normally falls after a brief three days of flowering. Keene quotes the fourteenth-century Buddhist monk Kenko, who wrote that "the most precious thing about life is its uncertainty."Throughout the volume, Keene demonstrates that the rich artistic and social traditions of Japan can indeed be understood by readers from our culture. This book will enlighten anyone interested in Japanese literature and culture.

    Lovecraft to the Speculative Realist philosophers. Lovecraft was one of the brightest stars of the horror and science fiction magazines, but died in poverty and relative obscurity in the 1930s. In 2005 he was finally elevated from pulp status to the classical literary canon with the release of a Library of America volume dedicated to his work. The impact of Lovecraft on philosophy has been building for more than a decade. Initially championed by shadowy guru Nick Land at Warwick during the 1990s, he was later discovered to be an object of private fascination for all four original members of the twenty-first century Speculative Realist movement. In this book, Graham Harman extracts the basic philosophical concepts underlying Lovecrafts work, yielding a "weird realism" capable of freeing continental philosophy from its current soul-crushing impasse. Abandoning Heideggers pious references to Hölderlin and the Greeks, Harman develops a new philosophical mythology centered in such Lovecraftian figures as Cthulhu, Wilbur Whately, and the rat-like monstrosity Brown Jenkin. The Miskatonic River replaces the Rhine and the Ister, while Hölderlin Caucasus gives way to Lovecrafts Antarctic mountains of madness.

    So-called illiberal democracy and authoritarian populism are in the political ascendant; the shelves of our bookshops groan with the work of attention-grabbing thinkers insisting that permissiveness, multiculturalism and 'identity politics' have failed us and that we must now fall back on some notion of tradition. We have had our fun, and now it's time to get serious, to shore our fragments against the ruin of postmodernist meaninglessness. It's not only the usual, conservative suspects who have got on board with this argument. Authentocrats critiques the manner in which post-liberal ideas have been mobilised underhandedly by centrist politicians who, at least notionally, are hostile to the likes of Donald Trump and UKIP. It examines the forms this populism of the centre has taken in the United Kingdom and situates the moderate withdrawal from liberalism within a story which begins in the early 1990s. Blairism promised socially liberal politics as the pay-off for relinquishing commitments to public ownership and redistributive policies: many current centrists insist New Labour's error was not its capitulation to the market, but its unwillingness to heed the allegedly natural conservatism of England's provincial working classes. In this book, we see how this spurious concern for 'real people' is part of a broader turn within British culture by which the mainstream withdraws from the openness of the Nineties under the bad-faith supposition that there's nowhere to go but backwards. The self-anointing political realism which declares that the left can save itself only by becoming less liberal is matched culturally by an interest in time-worn traditional identities: the brute masculinity of Daniel Craig's James Bond, the allegedly 'progressive' patriotism of nature writing, a televisual obsession with the World Wars. Authentocrats charges liberals themselves with fuelling the post-liberal turn, and asks where the space might be found for an alternative.

    But for many, the theory remains an impenetrable enigma. Now, two physicists seek to remedy this situation by both drawing on their scientific expertise and their talent for communicating science to the general reader. In this lucid, informative book, designed for the curious, they make the seemingly daunting subject of quantum physics accessible, appealing, and exciting. Their story is partly historical, covering the many "Eureka" moments when great scientists—Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and others—struggled to come to grips with the bizarre realities that quantum research revealed. Although their findings were indisputably proven in experiments, they were so strange and counterintuitive that Einstein refused to accept quantum theory, despite its great success. The authors explain the many strange and even eerie aspects of quantum reality at the subatomic level, from "particles" that can be many places simultaneously and sometimes act more like waves, to the effect that a human can have on their movements by just observing them! Finally, the authors delve into quantum physics’ latest and perhaps most breathtaking offshoots—field theory and string theory. The intricacies and ramifications of these two theories will give the reader much to ponder. In addition, the authors describe the diverse applications of quantum theory in its almost countless forms of modern technology throughout the world. Using eloquent analogies and illustrative examples, this book renders even the most profound reaches of quantum theory understandable and something for us all to savor.

    In Process, acclaimed journalist Sarah Stodola examines the creative methods of literature’s most transformative figures. Each chapter contains a mini biography of one of the world’s most lauded authors, focused solely on his or her writing process. Unlike how-to books that preach writing techniques or rules, Process puts the true methods of writers on display in their most captivating incarnation: within the context of the lives from which they sprang. Drawn from both existing material and original research and interviews, Stodola brings to light the fascinating, unique, and illuminating techniques behind these literary behemoths.

    From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.

    Here is one such beginning, an examination of the creative genius being The Sandman, American Gods, Coraline and so much more. His prose fiction has achieved enormous acclaim and popularity. Now leading scholars provide insights into the Sandman universe, its mythological underpinnings, Gaiman's technique and his relationship to other masters of the fantastic imagination. Two extensive interviews with Gaiman are included, along with a thorough bibliography of his work to date.