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The Glassbreaker Goes Home (The King Henry Tapes)


Richard Raley - 2018
    Nothing else going on. No girlfriend meeting his father for the first time. No recused sister back in his life after having been missing for a decade. No other sister married to a werecoyote gangster with a freshly born grandchild to show off. Especially no vampires. I promise. THE KING HENRY TAPES Book 1 - "The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady" (released) Book 2 - "The Foul Mouth and the Cat Killing Coyotes" (released) Book 3 - "The Foul Mouth and the Troubled Boomworm" (released) Book 4 - "The Foul Mouth and the Headless Hunny" (released) Book 5 - "The Foul Mouth and the Mancy Martial Artist" (released) Book 5.5 - "King Henry and the Three Little Trips" (released) Book 6 - "The Foul Mouth and the Pit of No Return" (released) Book 6.5 - "Assault on Dread Fortress Paine" (released) Book 6.75 - "The Glassbreaker Goes Home" (released) Book 7 - "The Foul Mouth and the Runaway Rumble" (forthcoming)

No City for Slow Men: Hong Kong's quirks and quandaries laid bare


Jason Y. Ng - 2013
    Ng has a knack for making the familiar both fascinating and achingly funny. Three years after his bestselling début HONG KONG State of Mind, the razor-sharp observer returns with a sequel that is bigger and every bit as poignant.No City for Slow Men is a collection of 36 essays that examine some of the pressing social, cultural and existential issues facing Hong Kong. It takes us on a tour de force from the gravity-defying property market to the plunging depths of old age poverty, from the storied streets of Sheung Wan to the beckoning island of Cheung Chau, from the culture-shocked Western expat to the misunderstood Mainland Chinese and the disenfranchised foreign domestic worker. The result is a treatise on Hong Kong life that is thought-provoking, touching and immensely entertaining.Together with HONG KONG State of Mind (2010) and Umbrellas in Bloom (2016), (2010), No City For Slow Men forms Ng’s "Hong Kong Trilogy" that traces the city’s sociopolitical developments since its return to Chinese rule.

Live Cinema and Its Techniques


Francis Ford Coppola - 2017
    But the time is not far off, Live Cinema and Its Techniques demonstrates, when a director or a collaborative team of filmmakers working across the internet will create "live" movies that will be sent instantly via satellite for viewing throughout the world.Yet the creative demands posed by airing live sporting contests, as impressive as the final product is, pale in contrast with the ambitions of "cinematic auteurs," who are inspired by great directors, like Serge Eisenstein, Max Ophuls, or Alfred Hitchcock, among many others. As daunting as the challenge is, the process of integrating the highest artistic standards of previous generations into the medium of "live cinema" can, Coppola explains, be achieved, thus creating an entirely new art form for the so-called "screen." Tapping into his own encyclopedic knowledge of twentieth-century film history, Coppola threads his vision of this burgeoning cinematic medium with autobiographical and historical vignettes gleaned from the past, recalling his own boyhood obsession with film and his early fascination with the "Golden Age of Television," when 1950s viewers were treated to live productions of classics, like Days of Wine and Roses and Requiem for a Heavyweight.Especially exciting is the exhilaration and drama that results from retraining actors and using a multitude of cameras to create a film that has the in-the-moment energy of a live event. Having already tried out this new medium with "proof-of-concept workshops" at Oklahoma City Community College and at UCLA, Coppola has created an invaluable guide for students and teachers alike. Filled with discussions of how to rehearse actors, how to choose scenery and location, and how to overcome theatrical, as well as technical, obstacles, Live Cinema and Its Techniques reveals how the spontaneity of this new genre can ultimately transport filmmaking into a new era of creativity still unimaginable today.Featuring chapters on:A Short History of Film and TelevisionThe Actors, Acting, and RehearsalThe Question of Style in the CinemaObstacles and Other Thoughts on Live Cinema No Matter What They May BeEquipment: Now and in the Near Future

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978


Adrienne Rich - 1979
    It traces the development of one individual consciousness, "playing over such issues as motherhood, racism, history, poetry, the uses of scholarship, the politics of language". A. Rich has written a headnote for each essay, briefly discussing the circumstances of its writing. "I find in myself both severe and tender thoughts toward the women I have been, whose thoughts I find here".

What Is Love? A Simple Guide to Romantic Happiness


Taro Gold - 2003
    Presents practical, Buddhist-based guidelines to achieving happiness in romantic relationships through a series of inspirational quotes complemented by thematic watercolors and divided into three sections that explore the concepts of illusion, reality, and life.

Mea Culpa: The Election Essays


Michael Cohen - 2020
    For the first time, fans of Cohen’s hit podcast, Mea Culpa, can now read the very best of his essays and political analysis from the show all in once place. This book serves as a snapshot of an incredibly dark 50 days in the run up to the most divisive election in modern history. With his signature wit and New Yawk sensibility, get inside the head of Donald J. Trump from the man who knew him best.

The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination


Wallace Stevens - 1951
    His aim is not to produce a work of criticism or philosophy, or a mere discussion of poetic technique. As he explains in his introduction, his ambition in these various pieces, published in different times and places, aimed higher than that, in the direction of disclosing poetry itself, the naked poem, the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words. Stevens proves himself as eloquent and scintillating in prose as in poetry, as he both analyzes and demonstrates the essential act of repossessing reality through the imagination.

For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies


Pauline Kael - 1994
    This marvelous reprise of the most entertaining movie reviews ever written is a boon to serious moviegoers and the perfect companion in the age of the VCR. Today, the best place to find "the movies" is in books--and "the best books to go to remain those of Pauline Kael" (New York Magazine).

The Freezer Door


Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore - 2020
    The Freezer Door records the ebb and flow of desire in daily life. Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over city life.Ferocious and tender, The Freezer Door offers a complex meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity.

Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings


A.S. Byatt - 1990
    Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of Barbara Pym or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging, entertaining, and unflinchingly committed to the alliance of literature and life.

Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?


Nick Bostrom - 2003
    It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

Surrealist Women: An International Anthology


Penelope RosemontGisèle Prassinos - 1998
    Indeed, few artistic or social movements can boast as many women forebears, founders, and participants-perhaps only feminism itself. Yet outside the movement, women's contributions to surrealism have been largely ignored or simply unknown. This anthology, the first of its kind in any language, displays the range and significance of women's contributions to surrealism. Letting surrealist women speak for themselves, Penelope Rosemont has assembled nearly three hundred texts by ninety-six women from twenty-eight countries. She opens the book with a succinct summary of surrealism's basic aims and principles, followed by a discussion of the place of gender in the movement's origins. She then organizes the book into historical periods ranging from the 1920s to the present, with introductions that describe trends in the movement during each period. Rosemont also prefaces each surrealist's work with a brief biographical statement.

The Truth about the Truth: De-confusing and Re-constructing the Postmodern World


Walter Truett Anderson - 1995
    Includes essays and excerpts from the works of prominent modern thinkers such as Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, and Isaiah Berlin among others.

The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth


Robert Graves - 1948
    In this tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities—the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death—who was worshipped under countless titles. He also uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar and mythic language.

Generation Hex: New Voices from Outside Reality


Jason Louv - 2005
    In Generation Hex, editor Jason Louv assembles a collection of dispatches from the edge—a generation of young adults who are inventing and imagining radically new directions for spirituality and human evolution.Arising from the magical and occult underground of the early twenty-first century, the authors, artists, thinkers, and magicians assembled in Generation Hex collectively point the way to a future in which fanaticism and dogma have disappeared, in which human beings are free to realize their own destinies, and where the theory and practical applications of magic—the psychic ability of all human beings to engage and participate with the creative energy of the universe itself—-saturate and regenerate this troubled planet.Through critical essays and practical demonstrations of how a positive interaction with the occult, esoteric, and psychic undercurrents of human life can radically alter one’s existence, the young magicians collected here provide a collective snapshot of a dramatically new way forward for global culture as it emerges from the fringes and into the mainstream, from counterculture to ultraculture.Generation Hex offers the reader an excursion into the lives and practices of real-life Harry Potters, young men and women who practice real magic, here stripped of its sinister trappings and revealed to be what it truly is—the key to human evolution. Generation Hex provides a blueprint for escaping the suicidal rut of modern life and the radical redesign of the very essence of what it means to be human.Jason Louv is a New York-based writer and editor. He has spent the last six years researching and practicing magic, being initiated into various questionable secret societies, traveling around the Near East, and learning how to cloud minds. This is his first book.