His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes -- all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as a serious and sophisticated philosophy. His recent films The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema and Zizek reveal a theorist at the peak of his powers and a skilled communicator. Now Verso are making these four classic titles, that stand as the core of his ever-expanding life's work, available as new editions. Each is beautifully repackaged, including new introductions from Zizek himself. Simply put, they are the essential texts for understanding Zizek's thought and thus cornerstones of contemporary philosophy.

    The author, a lifelong accumulator of books both ancient and modern, lives in a house large enough to accommodate his many thousands of books, as well as overspill from the libraries of his friends. While his musings on the habits of collectors past and present are learned, witty and instructive, his advice on cataloguing may even save the lives of those whose books are so prodigiously piled as to be a hazard... The Phantoms on the Bookshelves ranges from classical Greece to contemporary Iceland, from Balzac and Moby Dick to Google, offering up delicious anecdotes along the way. This elegantly produced volume will be a lasting delight to specialist collectors, librarians, bibliophiles and all those who treasure books.

    In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda introduces nearly ninety of the world’s most entertaining books. Writing with affection as well as authority, Dirda covers masterpieces of fantasy and science fiction, horror and adventure, as well as epics, history, essay, and children’s literature. Organized thematically, these are works that have shaped our imaginations. "Love’s Mysteries" moves from Sappho and Arthurian romance to Sören Kierkegaard and Georgette Heyer. In other categories Dirda discusses not only Dracula and Sherlock Holmes but also the Tao Te Ching and Icelandic sagas, Frederick Douglass and Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Whether writing about Petronius or Perelman, Dirda makes literature come alive. Classics for Pleasure is a perfect companion for any reading group or lover of books. [Source: Amazon]

    The whole West is contained in the burst of sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies. Truth, but not veracity. As virtual as the war itself, their specific violence adds to the specific violence of the war. In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion: feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the end of art, Baudrillard celebrates art's new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole. Conceived and edited by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylv�re Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art presents Baudrillard's writings on art in a complicitous dance with politics, economics, and media. Culminating with War Porn, a scathing analysis of the spectacular images from Abu Ghraib prison as a new genre of reality TV, the book folds back on itself to question the very nature of radical thought.

    Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922) is now generally viewed as the greatest French novelist and perhaps the greatest European novelist of the 20th century. He lived much of his later life as a reclusive semi-invalid in a sound-proofed flat in Paris giving himself over entirely to writing In Search of Lost Time.

     Always Looking opens with “The Clarity of Things,” the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2008. Here, in looking closely at individual works by Copley, Homer, Eakins, Norman Rockwell, and others, the author teases out what is characteristically “American” in American art. This talk is followed by fourteen essays, most of them written for The New York Review of Books, on certain highlights in Western art of the last two hundred years: the iconic portraits of Gilbert Stuart and the sublime landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, the series paintings of Monet and the monotypes of Degas, the richly patterned canvases of Vuillard and the golden extravagances of Klimt, the cryptic triptychs of Beckmann, the personal graffiti of Miró, the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte, and the monumental Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. The book ends with a consideration of recent works by a living American master, the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra. John Updike was a gallery-goer of genius. Always Looking is, like everything else he wrote, an invitation to look, to see, to apprehend the visual world through the eyes of a connoisseur.

    Shields evokes his deeply divided personality (his “ridiculous” ambivalence), his character flaws, his woes, his serious despairs. Books are his life raft, but when they come to feel un-lifelike and archaic, he revels in a new kind of art that is based heavily on quotation and consciousness. And he shares with us a final irony: he wants “literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn’t lie about this––which is what makes it essential.”

    . . A superb outing from a gifted young critic that will spark joy in many readers." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review“Less is more”: Everywhere we hear the mantra. Marie Kondo and other decluttering gurus promise that shedding our stuff will solve our problems. We commit to cleanse diets and strive for inbox zero. Amid the frantic pace and distraction of everyday life, we covet silence-and airy, Instagrammable spaces in which to enjoy it. The popular term for this brand of upscale austerity, “minimalism,” has mostly come to stand for things to buy and consume. But minimalism has richer, deeper, and altogether more valuable gifts to offer.Kyle Chayka is one of our sharpest cultural observers. After spending years covering minimalist trends for leading publications, he now delves beneath this lifestyle's glossy surface, seeking better ways to claim the time and space we crave. He shows that our longing for less goes back further than we realize. His search leads him to the philosophical and spiritual origins of minimalism, and to the stories of artists such as Agnes Martin and Donald Judd; composers such as John Cage and Julius Eastman; architects and designers; visionaries and misfits. As Chayka looks anew at their extraordinary lives and explores the places where they worked-from Manhattan lofts to the Texas high desert and the back alleys of Kyoto-he reminds us that what we most require is presence, not absence. The result is an elegant new synthesis of our minimalist desires and our profound emotional needs.

    But although he lived in the German golden age of Goethe, Schiller and Mozart, he also believed that art was in terminal decline.To resolve this apparent paradox, as Michael Inwood explains in his incisive Introduction, we must understand the particular place of aesthetics in Hegel's vast intellectual edifice. Its central pillars consist of logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit. Art derives its value from offering a sensory vision of the God-like absolute, from its harmonious fusion of form and content, and from summing up the world-view of an age such as Homer's. While it scaled supreme heights in ancient Greece, Hegel doubted art's ability to encompass Christian belief or the reflective irony characteristic of modern societies. Many such challenging ideas are developed in this superb treatise; it counts among the most stimulating works of a master thinker.Table of ContentsIntroductory Lectures on Aesthetics Introduction A Note on the Translation and CommentaryINTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON AESTHETICSChapter I: The Range of Aesthetic Defined, and Some Objections against the Philosophy of Art Refuted[α Aesthetic confined to Beauty of Artβ Does Art merit Scientific Treatment?γ Is Scientific Treatment appropriate to Art?δ Answer to βε Answer to γ]Chapter II: Methods of Science Applicable to Beauty and Art[1. Empirical Method - Art-scholarship(a) Its Range(b) It generates Rules and Theories(c) The Rights of Genius2. Abstract Reflection3. The Philosophical Conception of Artistic Beauty, general notion of]Chapter III: The Conception of Artistic BeautyPart I - The Work of Art as Made and as Sensuous1. Work of Art as Product of Human Activity[(a) Conscious Production by Rule(b) Artistic Inspiration(c) Dignity of Production by Man(d) Man's Need to produce Works of Art]2. Work of Art as addressed to Man's Sense[(a) Object of Art - Pleasant Feeling?(b) Feeling of Beauty - Taste(c) Art-scholarship(d) Profounder Consequences of Sensuous Nature of Art(α) Relations of the Sensuous to the Mind(αα) Desire(ββ) Theory(γγ) Sensuous as Symbol of Spiritual(β) The Sensuous Element, how Present in the Artist(γ) The Content of Art Sensuous]Part II - The End of Art3. [The Interest or End of Art(a) Imitation of Nature?(α) Mere Repetition of Nature is -(αα) Superfluous(ββ) Imperfect(γγ) Amusing Merely as Sleight of Hand(β) What is Good to Imitate?(γ) Some Arts cannot be called Imitative(b) Humani nihil - ?(c) Mitigation of the Passions?(α) How Art mitigates the Passions(β) How Art purifies the Passions(αα) It must have a Worthy Content(ββ) But ought not to be Didactic(γγ) Nor explicitly addressed to a Moral Purpose(d) Art has its own Purpose as Revelation of Truth]Chapter IV: Historical Deducation of the True Idea of Art in Modern Philosophy1. Kant[(a) Pleasure in Beauty not Appetitive(b) Pleasure in Beauty Universal(c) The Beautiful in its Teleological Aspect(d) Delight in the Beautiful necessary though felt]2. Schiller, Winckelmann, Schelling3. The IronyChapter V: Division of the Subject[1. The Condition of Artistic Presentation is the Correspondence of Matter and Plastic Form2. Part I - The Ideal3. Part II - The Types of Art(α) Symbolic Art(β) Classical Art(γ) Romantic Art4. Part III - The Several Arts(α) Architecture(β) Sculpture(γ) Romantic Art, comprising(i) Painting(ii) Music(iii) Poetry5. Conclusion]Commentary

    Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur’an; Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt—all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power.Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison’s earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility—and its enduring importance to humanity.

    What is less known until now is that Jonathan Biss writes about music in a most compelling and engaging way. For anyone who has ever enjoyed a Beethoven concert or a Beethoven recording or one of the many films about Beethoven, this Kindle Single is an inspiring reading experience. For those of you who have heard Beethoven in concert or listened to a Beethoven recording, Jonathan Biss takes you behind the scenes of those performances. If your musical interests are much broader than Beethoven or if your interests focus on the creative process , this Single will fully engage you.“On April 24th, 2007, Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 109 made me lose my mind.”

    With dishy detail, Joseph Epstein skewers all manner of elitism in contemporary America. He offers his arch observations of the new footholds of snobbery: food, fashion, high-achieving children, schools, politics, being with-it, name-dropping, and much more. Clever, incisive, and immensely entertaining, Snobberyexplores the shallows and depths of status and taste -- with enviable results.

    Following the success of Phaidon's The Art Book and The Photography Book, this volume takes a fresh look at the fashion world and the people who created and inspired it.

    In Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, Ben Watson explains that these characteristics are not mutually exclusive; it is misguided to suppress either aspect of Zappa's genius. His socially transgressive shocks - designed to show up the repressions of contemporary culture - are central to his art, . Watson brings serious critical attention to the musician, dissecting Zappa within his context, and analyzing him alongside such artists as John Cage and Pierre Boulez. Zappa's ideas are interpreted as an extension of a Western radical tradition that encompassed the Marquis de Sade, the Surrealists, and beyond, from musique concrete to doowop, Theodor Adorno to Suzy Creamcheese, Plato to Punky Meadows, the Situationists to the PMRC. Zappa's politics, as well a his wit and relentless attempts to break standard forms, are integral to his music.

    How to Read Literature is the book of choice for students new to the study of literature and for all other readers interested in deepening their understanding and enriching their reading experience. In a series of brilliant analyses, Eagleton shows how to read with due attention to tone, rhythm, texture, syntax, allusion, ambiguity, and other formal aspects of literary works. He also examines broader questions of character, plot, narrative, the creative imagination, the meaning of fictionality, and the tension between what works of literature say and what they show. Unfailingly authoritative and cheerfully opinionated, the author provides useful commentaries on classicism, Romanticism, modernism and postmodernism along with spellbinding insights into a huge range of authors, from Shakespeare and Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett and J. K. Rowling.