mlx-community/zer0-books huggingface dataset:
Furnace of this World
by Ed Simon

A fragmentary, digressive, impressionistic account of what the radical implications of goodness could possibly be in late capitalism.

In the tradition of Roland Barthes' Mythologies and Walter Benjamin's aphoristic Theses on the Philosophy of History, Ed Simon's Furnace of this World is a fragmentary, digressive, impressionistic account of what the radical implications of goodness could possibly be in late capitalism. Furnace of this World interrogates the concept of goodness, while arguing that it's always more interesting and radical than its opposite. With neither hubris nor reductionism, Furnace of this World speaks of what it means to pursue justice in a fallen world.

Reviews:
Imagine you stop to listen to a street corner preacher calling out to no one and everyone. Imagine that, like a subway musician who hits a lick that catches your year, he piques your interest with a vision that is like an impossible mashup of William James and George Carlin. Reading Ed Simon's ruthless Furnace of this World is like pausing for hour, ninety minutes tops, to listen to a wise stranger who is equal parts poet, prophet, and philosopher. You will be quiet, you will be rapt, and you will never be the same. ~ J.C. Hallman, author of B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal
Against the assumption that to look for and find goodness in today's world is either dangerous, or naive, or both, comes Ed Simon's Ruthless Furnace of This World. This exuberant and erudite collection insists on the paradoxical power of good to exist where we least expect it. The book is the rare one that demonstrates what it describes - that we can amplify goodness with our own compassion, humility, and heart. Like William Blake writing The Lives of the Saints or Nietzsche drawing a map to Utopia, Simon succeeds on his own impossible terms. Embracing both Broadway and Bonhoeffer, AA and Augustine in its expansive geography of goodness, Simon's work is profound, often heartbreaking, yet surprisingly cheering. ~ Brook Wilensky-Lanford, author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden
Between the struggle for religious certitude and stick-in-the-mud atheism is Ed Simon's honest and authentic exploration of the language of morality. Opting for story over the tired debate of "does God exist," Simon presents narratives of faith and doubt from across literature to instruct the reader that literalism in any form will never bring us as close to a well-lived life as the simple and quiet search for the good. ~ Peter Bebergal, author of Strange Frequencies
Ed Simon's writing is perfectly suited to his theme, and reflects his preoccupations as a deep, wide-ranging and generous reader and thinker who applies his skills to address the fundamental question of human goodness. ~ Lydia Kiesling, editor at The Millions, and author of The Golden State
Gathering of Promises, A
by Ben Graham

The neglected story of how Texan musicians pioneered and explored psychedelic rock, and the too-high price they often paid.

A Gathering of Promises is a history of acid rock and psychedelic music in and from the state of Texas, focusing largely on its mid-1960s origins with the 13th Floor Elevators and contemporaries such as the Golden Dawn, the Red Crayola and Bubble Puppy, and following its development to the present day and the popularity of the annual Austin Psych Fest.

Grounded in a strong social, cultural and historical context, the book asks how Texas produced some of the most extreme and influential psych of any era despite a prevailing social ethos of Christian conservatism and the strictest drug laws of any American state. It looks at how this environment shaped and affected the music, alongside the Texan frontier spirit and its championing of expansion, freedom and individualism.

Reviews:
... masterful, thoroughly wrought, vivid and exciting to read.The writing is both deep and wide. There is... much truth and insight about our lives. You are a very fine writer indeed. ~ Clementine Hall (13th Floor Elevators)
Congratulations on putting together the most accurate, comprehensive account of those times that I have ever encountered. Great job. I want to add that you have provided a very insightful review of my lyrics. Thanks for taking time to give the songs a sincere, meaningful interpretation. ~ George Kinney (The Golden Dawn)
Give Them an Argument
by Ben Burgis

The left must learn to argue.

Many serious leftists have learned to distrust talk of logic and logical fallacies, associated with right-wing "logicbros". This is a serious mistake. Unlike the neoliberal technocrats, who can point to social problems and tell people "trust us", the serious Left must learn how to argue and persuade. In Give Them an Argument, Ben Burgis arms his reader with the essential knowledge of formal logic and informal fallacies.

Reviews:
In "Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left", Burgis arms his reader with the essential knowledge of formal logic and informal fallacies that will be required for any political discussion in this polarized times. Critique: Informative, thoughtful, exceptionally well organized and presented, "Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left" is an exceptionally effective tutorial. While very highly recommended for both community and academic library Contemporary Political Science collections, it should be noted for the personal reading lists of students, academia, political activists, politicians, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject. ~ James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, Mid West Book Review
Ben Burgis understands that in order to persuade people to join a political movement, you have to master the techniques of rigorous argumentation. He masterfully exposes the cheap sophistry of right-wing 'philosophy' and shows why there's still a place for logic and reason in political discourse. This is a crucial handbook for those who want to 'crush' and 'destroy' the Ben Shapiros of the world. ~ Nathan Robinson, Editor, Current Affairs
Going Nowhere, Slow
by Mikkel Krause Frantzen

An unique analysis of four cultural works of depression and what they say about our society and our time.

Using examples from art and literature, Frantzen explores the social, political and economic implications of both real and imagined depression. Is feeling blue a symptom of the death of progress? Was the suicide of David Foster Wallace a proverbial canary in a coal mine?

Margaret Thatcher once declared that there is no alternative to the social order that we now reside within. Have we accepted her slogan as a fact, and is that why so many are on Prozac and other anti-depressants?

Frantzen examines the works of Michel Houellebecq, Claire Fontaine and David Foster Wallace as he seeks out an answer and a way to formulate a new future oriented left movement.

Reviews:
...............Going Nowhere, Slow is a compelling read for anyone interested in conceptualization and representations of depression, or the relation between contemporary culture and mental illness more generally. Frantzen’s writing is high-paced, erudite and at times humorous. Despite the subject matter, the author never romanticizes depression or succumbs to pessimism or fatalism. Instead, he uses the artworks discussed to establish a possible way out of the perceived dualism between escapism and maintaining the status quo. Whether it is Wallace’s insistence on empathy, Claire Fontaine’s call for collective action or Von Trier’s depiction of eschatological salvation, Frantzen’s message is that there is hope amidst hopelessness. Deeply critical and sharply written, Going Nowhere, Slow is an inspired and inspiring work. ~ Ward Huetink, Radboud University Nijmegen.
In this groundbreaking book, Mikkel Krause Frantzen takes depression as something that does not simply have connection with the subject’s past and alienation from others, but also to the idea of future and too much closeness. As a result, Frantzen finds in depression glimmers of optimism and hope. This book is essential reading for anyone who has questioned what depression is all about and why so many well-known novelists have created their best works trying to come to grips with it. ~ Renata Salecl, author of Tyranny of Choice
In this sharp and poetic book, Mikkel Krause Frantzen brilliantly illustrates the horror of depression. But he doesn’t leave us there, in despair, but opens up new hopeful ways of thinking about the spirit of our time. ~ Carl Cederström, author of The Happiness Fantasy, co-author of Dead Man Working
Why are we all so depressed? Today, depression is less an individual malady, than it is a structure of feeling that pervades Western neoliberal society. In this book, Mikkel Krause Frantzen digs deeply into this situation, reading a number of works (novels, movies, visual art) that not only give expression to our depressive condition, but offer clues as to why and how we feel this way. ~ Steven Shaviro, author of Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society
Good Day Today
by Daniel Neofetou

This book argues that the films of David Lynch pose a radical challenge to conservative and absolutist ideologies.

In his speech following the 2011nationwide riots in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron spoke out against people “being too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong” and proclaimed “this relativism – it’s not going to cut it anymore”. He was, then, presumably laying the foundation for one-size-fits-all absolutist authoritarianism and, worryingly, the moral outrage induced by the riots means a large proportion of the British public might not oppose such measures.

When such a mindset is on the verge of becoming pandemic, where do we turn? This book suggests that the work of another David, born 20 years before and 3,000 miles away from Cameron, might engender a mode of thinking which does not apprehend the world in terms of such easy distinctions. In David Lynch, we find a director whose films – by utilising the tropes of the Hollywood movie, but subverting their accepted meanings - profoundly destablise spectators, and lead them to consider things not in terms of prescribed binaries, but as complex and multi-faceted.

Reviews:
Neofetou on Lynch is an original on an original. This book is a learned and lucid work in which Neofetou demonstrates how Lynch’s deeply entrancing filmmaking greatly destabilises the viewer into seeing and feeling outside the norm. ~ Jose Arroyo, Lecturer, University of Warwick Department of Film & Television Studies
Graham Harman Reader, The
by Graham Harman

The essential compendium of shorter works by one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century. Written in Harman’s typical clear and witty style, the Reader is an essential resource for veteran readers of Harman and newcomers alike.

The Graham Harman Reader is the essential compendium of shorter works by one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century. The writings in this volume are split into seven chapters. The first concerns Harman’s resistance to both downward and upward reductionism. The second chapter contains works that develop the specific fourfold structure of Object-Oriented Ontology. In the third, we find Harman’s novel arguments for why causal relations between two entities can only be indirect. The fourth chapter discusses why aesthetics deserves to be called first philosophy. The fifth chapter contains Harman’s underrated contributions to ethics and politics, and the sixth deals with epistemology, mind, and science. A concluding seventh chapter contains several previously unpublished writings not available anywhere else. Written in Harman’s typical clear and witty style, the /Reader/ is an essential resource for veteran readers of Harman and newcomers alike.

Reviews:
Overcoming the war of religion between analytics and continentals with a brand-new metaphysical insight, Graham Harman has restored to philosophy its greatness and value. ~ Maurizio Ferraris, Italian continental philosopher and author of the Manifesto of New Realism
I don't read a lot of metaphysics, but 'The Graham Harman Reader' is metaphysics that I read. ~ Bruce Sterling, science fiction author
Hearing the Cloud
by Emile Frankel

How do platform technologies change the way we listen, and can music help reimagine the future?

Can music be a curse? Here is an alternate history of online politics and new technology from the perspective of listening, typing, composing, and shared hearing.

Emile Frankel presents a rigorous account of a world felt to be in crisis. The aesthetic and tonal ramifications for such feelings are twisted within the oppressive online structures mediating new music. The legacies of Silicon Valley digitalism, 4chan, Less Wrong, and Chaos Magic are compared to the magical thinking which underlies stochastic composition, and the aesthetics of deconstructed club music. Despite a pessimistic account of Accelerationism and reactionary philosophy, Frankel's spirited writing is full of hope. Hearing the Cloud considers the communal online conversations we engage in daily as profound acts of defiance. Sweet, lithe, oily, and honest music is shown to be an important source of togetherness.

Reviews:
Hearing the Cloud guides us through the soundscapes of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, from chillstep to nightcore, and recaptures the possibilities of collective listening embedded within these musical forms. Emile Frankel traces a pattern recognition of our moment, poised between dystopian nihilism and the receding possibilities of utopia. Against irony, fragmentation, and chaos, Hearing the Cloud helps us hear the material presence of sound in our lives and the whispers of a better future. ~ Benjamin Noys, author of Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism
Henry, Henry
by Brian Willems

A brilliantly conceived, wild and thought-provoking tale of composer Henry Purcell and his unscholarly contemporary biographers.

Henry, Henry is a brilliantly conceived experimental novel comprising two alternating stories: a factually inaccurate pseudo-biography of 17th-century composer Henry Purcell and the mid-20th-century story of the people writing the biography.

In the 17th-century narrative, the young Henry is repeatedly imprisoned, has an affair with the choirmaster's wife, and is afflicted with an unusual fondness for nice clothes. Falsely accused of stealing all of the cornets from the royal stock of instruments, Henry is banished to a town infested with the plague. There he starts an affair with another woman, Cathleen. Upon his return to London, Henry is confronted with the complexities of his love life.

The 20th-century narrative tells of faux-scholar Mr Austen who has taken up residence in a small coastal town to get on with his work. There he befriends the Purcell family: mother and young son Henry.

At once wild, philosophical and thought-provoking, Henry, Henry is a novella that will stay with you.

Reviews:
Inventive. I love anything that manages to be experimental without being pretentious. This book pulls it off. ~ Jennifer Williams (librarian), GoodReads
Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future
by Justin Barton

The future is alongside us, sometimes closer, sometimes further away.

The future is alongside us, sometimes closer, sometimes further away.

Hidden Valleys starts from the perception that the human world is an eerie place, particularly in relation to its stories and dreams. It also starts from events that took place in North Yorkshire, in 1978. A work of philosophy, an account of experiences, and a biography of a year, it is simultaneously a challenging cultural analysis, drawing on novels, songs and films. It argues for lucidity over reason, becomings over conventional gender and familialism, groups over state politics, and for an escape to wider realities in place of the delusions of religion. Most centrally it breaks open a view of a futural dimension that coexists with the present, and which intrinsically involves a heightened awareness and evaluation of the planet, of women, and of the abstract. Inseparably it is also a detective investigation into the causes of the eerie human predicament. The book reaches the planetary by starting from a singular place, it reaches reality by starting from dreams, and it reaches the future by finding a doorway in the past.

Reviews:
From an article about On Vanishing Land

"At its most intense this audio-essay hollows out reality - the two artists are "a dream within a dream, the planet is a dream within a dream" - even as it viscerally conjures material presences from a land of disjunctive temporalities." ~ T.J..Demos, ART FORUM Sept 2013
Hidden Valleys is an extraordinary and unique work. Amongst many other things, it is a philosophical autobiography, a vivid account of a place and a time, and a series of stunning new readings of cultural texts. Ultimately, it amounts to nothing less than a challenge to encounter the world more lucidly, more intensely, than consensual reality customarily permits.

~ Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism and Ghosts Of My Life
Ostensibly an inquiry into the eerie arcadia of modernism Hidden Valleys takes the reader on a journey through a life and through the promises of the future. The reader will find themselves in the presence of a genuine writer, a becoming-writer, who has gifts of poetic and philosophical insight to offer, and to share into our haunted existences, with recollections of sublime moments in popular music and culture alongside meditations on North Yorkshire and New Zealand and innovative deployments of Deleuzian philosophy. This book shows that there is poetry in philosophy and philosophy in poetry...it is a rare book of tremendous power and beauty. ~ Professor Keith Ansell-Pearson, author of Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze
Hontology
by Mark Payne

Is shame the route by which we access the capabilities for living that are abrogated in modernity?

Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx has had an enormous influence on recent thought about the fate of human capabilities in late capitalism, especially in Europe. Hontology explores a road not taken in Specters of Marx - the idea that shame is the route by which we access the capabilities for living that are abrogated in modernity. More particularly still, the book considers the loss of the New World as an horizon in which these abrogated capabilities were still in play, and the inhabitants of the New World as presenting forms of life before which Europeans felt shame in comparison with their own. Finally, the book discusses what might take the place of the New World now that its productive horizon of shame has receded from view.

Reviews:
Horror of Philosophy
by Eugene Thacker

Eugene Thacker’s three cult-classic volumes of supernatural horror come together in this new Zer0 Books omnibus, revised with updated material, offering an essential resource for thinking about the unthinkable world.

Zer0 Books presents a new, omnibus edition of a cult classic: all three volumes of Eugene Thacker’s Horror of Philosophy trilogy, revised and expanded by the author. Across the three volumes of the series Thacker adopts a unique approach, reading works of horror as if they were philosophy, and works of philosophy as if they were horror, leading to far-reaching questions: Could it be that the more we know about the world, the less we understand it? Could it be that, while everything has been explained, nothing has meaning? At the center of Thacker’s project is the idea of the 'world without us,' an increasingly unthinkable world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live - not a philosophy of horror, but a horror of philosophy.

Reviews:
Praise for In the Dust of This Planet: Thacker’s discourse on the intersection of horror and philosophy is utterly original and utterly captivating...In the Dust of This Planet is an encyclopedic grimoire instructing us in the varieties of esoteric thought and infernal diversions that exist for the reader’s further investigation, treating us to a delightful stroll down a midway of accursed attractions that alone are worth the ticket of this volume. ~ Thomas Ligotti, author of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Hothouse Utopia
by Ryan Gunderson

What is to be done when the future's already ablaze?

What is to be done when the future's already ablaze?

With the international spread of right-wing "populism," widening inequalities, precarious forms of labor becoming normative, surveillance capitalism, and a worsening ecological crisis, the future is bleak. One issue in particular, the likelihood of catastrophic climate change, coupled with the lack of a global movement with the organization and vision to effectively challenge our suicidal social order, yields the crushing awareness that future generations will be trapped in prehistory, one in which humanity continues to be dominated by its own creations instead of shaping the historical process in line with reason.

Expanding upon the ideas of Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Lucien Goldmann, and others, Ryan Gunderson examines the modes of action and thought through which we react to the likelihood of a catastrophic future in ways that reproduce instead of challenge the status quo, and how we can, instead, productively sustain the search for a better world against all odds.

Reviews:
“The passage from radical theory to transformative practice may seem today more strewn with obstacles and bereft of guideposts than ever before. And yet, as Ryan Gunderson urges in his unsentimental account of ‘hothouse utopianism,’ the challenges we face in pursuing it should not lead us down the opposite path to quiescence and resignation. There are still genuine possibilities for transcending the status quo worth our efforts, despite everything, to realize their promise.”

- Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (2016) and Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations (2020) ~
"The possibility of dialectical thought has never been more hopeless, the need for it never more pressing. Revisiting the negative utopias of the Frankfurt School in the blood-red light of global ecological catastrophe, Gunderson works critical theory against the grain in a careful, painstaking effort to save philosophy from nihilism, hope from fatuity, and pessimism from despair. Hothouse Utopia is a timely, useful, and important contribution to the impossible yet necessary project of thinking a human future in the Anthropocene."

- Roy Scranton, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the University of Notre Dame, and author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) and We’re Doomed. Now What? (2018) ~