Download or read book Picnic Comma Lightning written by LAURENCE. SCOTT and published by Windmill Books. This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK** 'A stylish, playful exploration of what digital life is doing to the way we find meaning in the world.' Guardian, 'Book of the Week' 'A report from the front line of the digital generation by someone superbly well-equipped to read and decode the signals.' Sunday Times 'A bravura investigation of our turbulent times.' New Scientist 'Clever, funny and deeply moving... an engaging and thought-provoking journey through the fakery of modern life.' Mail on Sunday A spellbinding examination of the nature of reality, by one of the brightest thinkers of today. Cognitive science proposes that we have evolved to build mental maps of the world not according to its actual, physical nature, but according to what allows us to thrive. In other words, our individual and collective realities are fictions - carefully constructed to enable us to maintain our particular perspectives. It used to be that our fictions were rooted to reasonably solid things: to people, places and memories. Today, in an age of online personas, alternative truths, constant surveillance and an increasingly hysterical news cycle, our realities are becoming more flimsy and more vulnerable than ever before. Ours is now a zoomed-in perspective, where the backstage is centre stage. We are both camera person and subject, with new powers and new weaknesses. Our personal and political spheres are dangerously merging. How will the form and grammar of our feelings have to change in this over-exposed environment? Should any of our stories remain secret? How are these phenomena changing the way we live? How do we maintain a sense of reality in an increasingly fantastic world? Picnic Comma Lightning is an innovative examination of the nature of reality in the twenty-first century, one that explores the key ethical, political and neurological forces contouring our inner selves, but also the old influences of grief and desire, memory and imagination. In it, award-winning author Laurence Scott provides a lively and accessible new philosophy for this epoch in Western civilisation, one that will change the way you see the world, and your place within it.
Download or read book Picnic Comma Lightning written by Laurence Scott and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A stylish, playful exploration of what digital life is doing to the way we find meaning in the world." —Guardian In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert offers a memorably brief account of his parents’ death: “picnic, lightning.” Picnic Comma Lightning, too, opens with death—that of Laurence Scott’s mother—because, for a philosopher, death raises a profound existential question: How do we know what is real, especially when we have come to question the reality of so many of our day-to-day experiences? Writing from the intersection of philosophy, politics, and memoir, Scott transforms his personal meditation on loss into a beguiling exploration of what it means to exist in the world today. It used to be that our lives were rooted in reasonably solid things: to people, places and memories. Now, in an age of online personas, alternative truths, constant surveillance and an increasingly hysterical news cycle, our realities are becoming flimsier and more vulnerable than ever before. Scott’s far-ranging examination charts the ways our traditional mental models of the world have started to fray. He ponders how ubiquitous cameras reframe our private lives (an event only exists once someone posts the video), how mysterious algorithms undermine our attempts at self-definition through their own data-driven portraits, and what happens in those moments when our illusions about reality are ruptured by incontrovertible facts (like the death of a parent or a bolt of lightning). “A report from the front line of the online generation” (Sunday Times), Picnic Comma Lightning is an essential account of how we’ve started to make sense of our strange new world.
Download or read book Picnic Comma Lightning The Experience of Reality in the Twenty First Century written by Laurence Scott and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A stylish, playful exploration of what digital life is doing to the way we find meaning in the world." —Guardian In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert offers a memorably brief account of his parents’ death: “picnic, lightning.” Picnic Comma Lightning, too, opens with death—that of Laurence Scott’s mother—because, for a philosopher, death raises a profound existential question: How do we know what is real, especially when we have come to question the reality of so many of our day-to-day experiences? Writing from the intersection of philosophy, politics, and memoir, Scott transforms his personal meditation on loss into a beguiling exploration of what it means to exist in the world today. It used to be that our lives were rooted in reasonably solid things: to people, places and memories. Now, in an age of online personas, alternative truths, constant surveillance and an increasingly hysterical news cycle, our realities are becoming flimsier and more vulnerable than ever before. Scott’s far-ranging examination charts the ways our traditional mental models of the world have started to fray. He ponders how ubiquitous cameras reframe our private lives (an event only exists once someone posts the video), how mysterious algorithms undermine our attempts at self-definition through their own data-driven portraits, and what happens in those moments when our illusions about reality are ruptured by incontrovertible facts (like the death of a parent or a bolt of lightning). “A report from the front line of the online generation” (Sunday Times), Picnic Comma Lightning is an essential account of how we’ve started to make sense of our strange new world.
Download or read book The Four Dimensional Human Ways of Being in the Digital World written by Laurence Scott and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You are a four-dimensional human. Each of us exists in three-dimensional, physical space. But, as a constellation of everyday digital phenomena rewires our lives, we are increasingly coaxed from the containment of our predigital selves into a wonderful and eerie fourth dimension, a world of ceaseless communication, instant information, and global connection. Our portals to this new world have been wedged open, and the silhouette of a figure is slowly taking shape. But what does it feel like to be four-dimensional? How do digital technologies influence the rhythms of our thoughts, the style and tilt of our consciousness? What new sensitivities and sensibilities are emerging with our exposure to the delights, sorrows, and anxieties of a networked world? And how do we live in public with these recoded private lives? Laurence Scott—hailed as a "New Generation Thinker" by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC—shows how this four-dimensional life is dramatically changing us by redefining our social lives and extending the limits of our presence in the world. Blending tech-philosophy with insights on everything from Seinfeld to the fall of Gaddafi, Scott stands with a rising generation of social critics hoping to understand our new reality. His virtuosic debut is a revelatory and original exploration of life in the digital age.
Download or read book Picnic Lightning written by Billy Collins and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 1998-01-15 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 1999 Paterson Poetry Prize Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Annie Proulx admits, "I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours." John Updike proclaims his poems "consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides." This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate. Picnic, Lightning—one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation and popularity during the 1990s—combines humor and seriousness, wit and sublimity. His poems touch on a wide range of subjects, from jazz to death, from weather to sex, but share common ground where the mind and heart can meet. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this collector's edition is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."
Download or read book The Paris Letter written by Jon Robin Baitz and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 2006 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: Wall Street powerhouse Sandy Sonnenberg finds his personal and professional life threatened by the unraveling secrets of his past. A tragic game of financial and moral betrayal is played out over four decades and between two friends at t
Download or read book Modernism and Close Reading written by David James and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The kinship between modernism and close reading has long between taken for granted. But for that reason, it has also gone unexamined. As the archives, timeframes, and cultural contexts of global modernist studies proliferate, the field's rapport with close reading no longer appears self-evident or guaranteed—even though for countless students studying literary modernism still invariably means studying close reading. This authoritative collection of essays illuminates close reading's conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical genealogies as a means of examining its enduring potential. David James brings together a cast of world-renowned scholars to offer an account of some of the things we might otherwise know, and need to know, about the history of modernist theories of reading, before then providing a sense of how the futures for critical reading look different in light of the multiple ways in which modernism has been close read. Modernism and Close Reading responds to a contemporary climate of unprecedented reconstitution for the field: it takes stock of close reading's methodological possibilities in the wake of modernist studies' geographical, literary-historical, and interdisciplinary expansions; and it shows how the political, ethical, and aesthetic consequences of attending to matters of form complicate ideological preconceptions about the practice of formalism itself. By reassessing the intellectual commitments and institutional conditions that have shaped modernism in criticism as well as in the classroom, we are able to ask new questions about close reading that resonate across literary and cultural studies. Invigorating that critical venture, this volume enriches our vocabulary for addressing close reading's perpetual development and diversification.
Download or read book Lives of Houses written by Kate Kennedy and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notable writers—including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow—celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? In Lives of Houses, notable biographers, historians, critics, and poets explores these questions and more through fascinating essays on the houses of great writers, artists, composers, and politicians of the past. Editors Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee are joined by wide-ranging contributors, including Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, David Cannadine, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, Daisy Hay, Margaret MacMillan, Alexander Masters, and Jenny Uglow. We encounter W. H. Auden, living in joyful squalor in New York's St. Mark's Place, and W. B. Yeats in his flood-prone tower in the windswept West of Ireland. We meet Benjamin Disraeli, struggling to keep up appearances, and track the lost houses of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. We visit Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, England, and Jean Sibelius at Ainola, Finland. But Lives of Houses also considers those who are unhoused, unwilling or unable to establish a home—from the bewildered poet John Clare wandering the byways of England to the exiled Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera living on the streets of London. With more than forty illustrations, Lives of Houses illuminates what houses mean to us and how we use them to connect to and think about the past. The result is a fresh and engaging look at house and home. Featuring Alexandra Harris on moving house ● Susan Walker on Morocco's ancient Roman House of Venus ● Hermione Lee on biographical quests for writers’ houses ● Margaret MacMillan on her mother's Toronto house ● a poem by Maura Dooley, "Visiting Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts"—the house in which Louisa May Alcott wrote and set her novel Little Women ● Felicity James on William and Dorothy Wordsworth's Dove Cottage ● Robert Douglas-Fairhurst at home with Tennyson ● David Cannadine on Winston Churchill's dream house, Chartwell ● Jenny Uglow on Edward Lear at San Remo's Villa Emily ● Lucy Walker on Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh, England ● Seamus Perry on W. H. Auden at 77 St. Mark's Place, New York City ● Rebecca Bullard on Samuel Johnson's houses ● a poem by Simon Armitage, "The Manor" ● Daisy Hay at home with the Disraelis ● Laura Marcus on H. G. Wells at Uppark ● Alexander Masters on the fear of houses ● Elleke Boehmer on sites associated with Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera ● Kate Kennedy on the mental asylums where World War I poet Ivor Gurney spent the last years of his life ● a poem by Bernard O'Donoghue, "Safe Houses" ● Roy Foster on W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee ● Sandra Mayer on W. H. Auden's Austrian home ● Gillian Darley on John Soane and the autobiography of houses ● Julian Barnes on Jean Sibelius and Ainola
Download or read book The Haunting of Alma Fielding written by Kate Summerscale and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR • The Sunday Times • The New Statesman • The Times • The Spectator • The Telegraph Shortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection “Prepare not to see much broad daylight, literal or metaphorical, for days if you read this.... The atmosphere evoked is something I will never forget.”—The Times (London) London, 1938. In the suburbs of the city, a young housewife has become the eye in a storm of chaos. In Alma Fielding’s modest home, china flies off the shelves and eggs fly through the air; stolen jewelry appears on her fingers, white mice crawl out of her handbag, beetles appear from under her gloves; in the middle of a car journey, a turtle materializes on her lap. The culprit is incorporeal. As Alma cannot call the police, she calls the papers instead. After the sensational story headlines the news, Nandor Fodor, a Hungarian ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical Research, arrives to investigate the poltergeist. But when he embarks on his scrupulous investigation, he discovers that the case is even stranger than it seems. By unravelling Alma’s peculiar history, Fodor finds a different and darker type of haunting, a tale of trauma, alienation, loss and revenge. He comes to believe that Alma’s past has bled into her present, her mind into her body. There are no words for processing her experience, so it comes to possess her. As the threat of a world war looms, and as Fodor’s obsession with the case deepens, Alma becomes ever more disturbed. With characteristic rigor and insight, Kate Summerscale brilliantly captures the rich atmosphere of a haunting that transforms into a very modern battle between the supernatural and the subconscious.
Download or read book Happy written by Derren Brown and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-09-22 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sunday Times Bestseller 'Really brilliant and just crammed with wisdom and insight. It will genuinely make a difference to me and the way I think about myself.' Stephen Fry ___ Everyone says they want to be happy. But that's much more easily said than done. What does being happy actually mean? And how do you even know when you feel it? In Happy Derren Brown explores changing concepts of happiness - from the surprisingly modern wisdom of the Stoics and Epicureans in classical times right up until today, when the self-help industry has attempted to claim happiness as its own. He shows how many of self-help's suggested routes to happiness and success - such as positive thinking, self-belief and setting goals - can be disastrous to follow and, indeed, actually cause anxiety. Happy aims to reclaim happiness and to enable us to appreciate the good things in life, in all their transient glory. By taking control of the stories we tell ourselves, by remembering that 'everything's fine' even when it might not feel that way, we can allow ourselves to flourish and to live more happily. ___ What readers are saying: ***** 'Immensely positive and life-affirming' ***** 'This is the blue print to a good life' ***** 'Thought provoking and potentially life-changing.'
Download or read book Roadside Picnic written by Arkady Strugatsky and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a &“full empty,&” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he'll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems. First published in 1972, Roadside Picnic is still widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels, despite the fact that it has been out of print in the United States for almost thirty years. This authoritative new translation corrects many errors and omissions and has been supplemented with a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin and a new afterword by Boris Strugatsky explaining the strange history of the novel's publication in Russia.
Download or read book The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation written by Lester Kaufman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-04-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling workbook and grammar guide, revised and updated! Hailed as one of the best books around for teaching grammar, The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation includes easy-to-understand rules, abundant examples, dozens of reproducible quizzes, and pre- and post-tests to help teach grammar to middle and high schoolers, college students, ESL students, homeschoolers, and more. This concise, entertaining workbook makes learning English grammar and usage simple and fun. This updated 12th edition reflects the latest updates to English usage and grammar, and includes answers to all reproducible quizzes to facilitate self-assessment and learning. Clear and concise, with easy-to-follow explanations, offering "just the facts" on English grammar, punctuation, and usage Fully updated to reflect the latest rules, along with even more quizzes and pre- and post-tests to help teach grammar Ideal for students from seventh grade through adulthood in the US and abroad For anyone who wants to understand the major rules and subtle guidelines of English grammar and usage, The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation offers comprehensive, straightforward instruction.
Download or read book Goldilocks written by Laura Lam and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping science fiction thriller where five women task themselves with ensuring the survival of the human race—if you mixed ". . .The Martian and The Handmaid's Tale, this sci-fi novel would be the incredible result" (Book Riot). “Best of 2020” –Library Journal “Best of 2020” –Kirkus “Best of 2020 – runner up” –Polygon “Our favorite books of 2020” –GeekDad Despite increasing restrictions on the freedoms of women on Earth, Valerie Black is spearheading the first all-female mission to a planet in the Goldilocks Zone, where conditions are just right for human habitation. It's humanity's last hope for survival, and Naomi, Valerie's surrogate daughter and the ship's botanist, has been waiting her whole life for an opportunity like this - to step out of Valerie's shadow and really make a difference. But when things start going wrong on the ship, Naomi begins to suspect that someone on board is concealing a terrible secret - and realizes time for life on Earth may be running out faster than they feared . . . "Goldilocks is a thrilling, character-driven space opera", perfect for readers of The Martian, The Power, and Station Eleven (Shelf Awareness).
Download or read book Deeper Water written by Robert Whitlow and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2008-06-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tides of Truth novels follow one lawyer's passionate pursuit of truth in matters of life and the law. In the murky waters of Savannah's shoreline, a young law student is under fire as she tries her first case at a prominent and established law firm. A complex mix of betrayal and deception quickly weaves its way through the case and her life, as she uncovers dark and confusing secrets about the man she's defending--and the senior partners of the firm. How deep will the conspiracy run? Will she have to abandon her true self to fulfill a higher calling? And how far will she have to go to discover the truth behind a tragic cold case?
Download or read book A Line Made by Walking written by Sara Baume and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-02-16 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'When I finished Sara Baume's new novel I immediately felt sad that I could not send it in the post to the late John Berger. He, too, would have loved it and found great joy in its honesty, its agility, its beauty, its invention. Baume is a writer of outstanding grace and style. She writes beyond the time we live in.' Colum McCann Struggling to cope with urban life - and with life in general - Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to the rural bungalow on 'turbine hill' that has been vacant since her grandmother's death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by nature, that she hopes to regain her footing in art and life. She spends her days pretending to read, half-listening to the radio, failing to muster the energy needed to leave the safety of her haven. Her family come and go, until they don't and she is left alone to contemplate the path that led her here, and the smell of the carpet that started it all. Finding little comfort in human interaction, Frankie turns her camera lens on the natural world and its reassuring cycle of life and death. What emerges is a profound meditation on the interconnectedness of wilderness, art and individual experience, and a powerful exploration of human frailty.
Download or read book The Story book of Science written by Jean-Henri Fabre and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book about metals, plants, animals, and planets.
Download or read book I Am Dynamite written by Sue Prideaux and published by Tim Duggan Books. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES Editors’ Choice • THE TIMES BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR • WINNER OF THE HAWTHORNDEN PRIZE A groundbreaking new biography of philosophy’s greatest iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most enigmatic figures in philosophy, and his concepts—the Übermensch, the will to power, slave morality—have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the human condition. But what do most people really know of Nietzsche—beyond the mustache, the scowl, and the lingering association with nihilism and fascism? Where do we place a thinker who was equally beloved by Albert Camus, Ayn Rand, Martin Buber, and Adolf Hitler? Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings readers into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. From his placid, devoutly Christian upbringing—overshadowed by the mysterious death of his father—through his teaching career, lonely philosophizing on high mountains, and heart-breaking descent into madness, Prideaux documents Nietzsche’s intellectual and emotional life with a novelist’s insight and sensitivity. She also produces unforgettable portraits of the people who were most important to him, including Richard and Cosima Wagner, Lou Salomé, the femme fatale who broke his heart; and his sister Elizabeth, a rabid German nationalist and anti-Semite who manipulated his texts and turned the Nietzsche archive into a destination for Nazi ideologues. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
