The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away?Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

    Ironically, it also became the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism.Even as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for Freedom—a chasm or a bridge?—the streets fell silent. Not only in India, but all over the world. The coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of Azadi, making a nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could.In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism.The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times.The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world.

    Through rereadings of Freud and Saussure, Agamben proposes a radical reconfiguration of the epistemological foundation of Western culture.

    . . leave it to a poet to tackle the unthinkable so wisely and so wittily."* A literary guide to life in the pre-apocalypse, The Unreality of Memory collects profound and prophetic essays on the Internet age’s media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world’s ills.We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase “Did you see?” The feeling that we’re living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten—and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last.The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end—if indeed it will—and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it.Can we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? With The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert offers a hauntingly perceptive analysis of our new ways of being and a means of reconciling ourselves to this unreal new world."A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery.” *—Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less

    Lewis's classic analysis springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. Crucial to his notion of judging literature is a commitment to laying aside expectations and values extraneous to the work, in order to approach it with an open mind.

    In all his writing, Cioran cuts to the heart of the human experience.

    Human Achievement collects new truths, anxieties, and amusements from the mundane to the surreal in an addictively strange and entertaining picket-sized primer that welcomes the uninitiated and rewards the faithful.

    Each of the 104 ghazals, 7 miscellaneous nazms, and 68 selected letters are presented in the original Urdu text, with a parallel translation in simple, lucid English, and a transliteration in Roman script for readers who are not familiar with Urdu in Persian script. A critical introduction to Ghalib's work, chronology of important events in his life, and bibliography are also provided.

    The only one with answers is the man's godfather - a current fugitive. The guard vanishes to find the man alone while the agent deciphers clues a decade old on his own search, learning as he goes the godfather's unique history and the consequences that could occur if he should fail.

    

    Materials prepared for presentation to authorities when making an application for citizenship. 2. Documents presented as proof of citizenship.There are those in America today who seem to feel we must audition for our citizenship, with "Patriot" offered as the badge for those found narrowly worthy. Let this book stand as Wendell Berry’s application, for he is one of those faithful, devoted critics envisioned by the Founding Fathers to be the life’s blood and very future of the nation they imagined. Adams, Jefferson and Madison would have found great clarity in his prose and great hope in his vision. And today’s readers will be moved and encouraged by his anger and his refusal to surrender in the face of desperate odds. Books get written for all sorts of reasons, and this book was written out of necessity.Citizenship Papers collects nineteen new essays, from celebrations of exemplary lives to critiques of American life, including "A Citizen’s Response [to the new National Security Strategy]"—a ringing call of caution to a nation standing on the brink of global catastrophe.

    Here, acclaimed scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores it with profound appreciation for its cultural and psychological power as literature. From the birth of the Hebrew Bible to the awe-inspiring contributions of Augustine, Dürer, and Milton in bringing Adam and Eve to vivid life, Greenblatt unpacks the story’s many interpretations and consequences over time. Rich allegory, vicious misogyny, deep moral insight, narrow literalism, and some of the greatest triumphs of art and literature: all can be counted as children of our “first” parents.

    Boxed set collecting Poetry For The Beat Generation (1959), Blues and Haikus (1959), and Readings By Jack Kerouac On The Beat Generation (1960), remastered with bonus tracks.

    This entirely new diary is composed in a similar style to the Country Diary, with Edith Holden's thoughts, anecdotes, and writings interspersed with poetry, mottoes, and her exquisite watercolor paintings of flowers, plants, birds, butterflies and landscape scenes.

    YouTube and Facebook dominate the web. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, his landmark new book, David Shields (author of the New York Times best seller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead) argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality” precisely because we experience hardly any.Most artistic movements are attempts to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. So, too, every artistic movement or moment needs a credo, from Horace’s Ars Poetica to Lars von Trier’s “Vow of Chastity.” Shields has written the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists in a variety of forms and media who, living in an unbearably manufactured and artificial world, are striving to stay open to the possibility of randomness, accident, serendipity, spontaneity; actively courting reader/listener/viewer participation, artistic risk, emotional urgency; breaking larger and larger chunks of “reality” into their work; and, above all, seeking to erase any distinction between fiction and nonfiction.The questions Reality Hunger explores—the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real—play out constantly all around us. Think of the now endless controversy surrounding the provenance and authenticity of the “real”: A Million Little Pieces, the Obama “Hope” poster, the sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, Robert Capa’s “The Falling Soldier” photograph, the boy who wasn’t in the balloon. Reality Hunger is a rigorous and radical attempt to reframe how we think about “truthiness,” literary license, quotation, appropriation.Drawing on myriad sources, Shields takes an audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future. People will either love or hate this book. Its converts will see it as a rallying cry; its detractors will view it as an occasion for defending the status quo. It is certain to be one of the most controversial and talked-about books of the year.