mlx-community/zer0-books huggingface dataset:
This Space of Writing
by Stephen Mitchelmore

A renewed appreciation of the mystery and promise of writing.

What does 'literature' mean in our time? While names like Proust, Kafka and Woolf still stand for something, what that something actually is has become obscured by the claims of commerce and journalism. Perhaps a new form of attention is required. Stephen Mitchelmore began writing online in 1996 and became Britain's first book blogger soon after, developing the form so that it can respond in kind to the singular space opened by writing. Across 44 essays, he discusses among many others the novels of Richard Ford, Jeanette Winterson and Karl Ove Knausgaard, the significance for modern writers of cave paintings and the moai of Easter Island, and the enduring fallacy of 'Reality Hunger', all the while maintaining a focus on the strange nature of literary space. By listening to the echoes and resonances of writing, this book enables a unique encounter with literature that many critics habitually ignore. With an introduction by the acclaimed novelist Lars Iyer, This Space of Writing offers a renewed appreciation of the mystery and promise of writing.

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Stephen Mitchelmore has, over the years, in his blog, This Space, shown himself to be one of the acutest critics of contemporary writing anywhere. I do not always agree with him, but his work always makes me think and often helps me to understand.

~ Gabriel Josipovici, author and critic
Stephen Mitchelmore was the first literary-critical blogger, and has remained the best. His blog, This Space, ten years in existence, and commanding a wide readership, contains exquisite long-form meditations on literary fiction of the kind only the blogosphere can allow. Gathered here, Mitchemore’s essays show a cumulative power, developing a philosophy of literature in a manner that recalls Blanchot’s The Space of Literature.

~ Lars Iyer, author of Spurious and Wittgenstein Jr
It would be fulsome praise indeed to announce that This Space contains some of the very best writing in the literary blogosphere, but it would be more true to say that it contains some of the very finest writing on literature I've ever read anywhere.

~ Mark Thwaite, Head of Online at Foyles and editor of Ready Steady Book
This Space of Writing is such a lovely, luminous thing in my reading life.

~ Jen Craig, author of Panthers and the Museum of Fire
I've been an avid reader of Stephen Mitchelmore's posts on This Space for well over a decade. He not only shows us what to read, but new ways to read. His insights and analysis always leave me inspired. This new collection is a reason to celebrate.

~ Todd Colby, author of Splash State
Stephen Mitchelmore is one of the best minds of my generation and an inspiration. ~ Lee Rourke, author of The Canal
For many years, Steve Mitchelmore has been a source of both inspiration and envy: introducing me not only to new writers but also to new ways of thinking. ~ John Self, blogger at the Asylum
Thoughts on an Index Not Freely Given
by John Roberts

In this unprecedented ‘fictive’ construction of the work of five imaginary artists from the 1980s, John Roberts produces an exhilarating theoretical encounter between futures past and futures present.

In this ambitious theoretical encounter with five imaginary artists from the 1980s, John Roberts produces a set of richly constructed artistic thought experiments. But in creating the work on the page these thought experiments are not thereby novelistic fictions. On the contrary, the fictiveness of each artist’s work and biography is formed from Roberts’s critical engagement with the historical and theoretical determinates of the work he has created - artwork and its theoretical engagement forming an interdependent whole.

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Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art
by Tony McKenna

From the genesis of Islam as a social movement, to an account of Goya's art in the context of feudal absolutism and the Napoleonic wars, to The Da Vinci Code, and much more besides.

Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art is a diverse, colourful and eclectic set of essays of historical and cultural analyses. From the genesis of Islam as a social movement, to an account of Goya's art in the context of feudal absolutism and the Napoleonic wars, to The Da Vinci Code, and much more besides.

McKenna is a classical Marxist not shy of addressing popular culture, past and present, works often ignored by other Marxist critics increasingly confined to Academia and its high-brow concerns.

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Praise for Tony McKenna: '...informative, intelligent, thought-provoking, and always highly readable.' ~ Sean Sayers, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Kent
Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures
by Graham Harman

These writings chart Harman's rise from Chicago sportswriter to co founder of one of Europe's most promising philosophical movements: Speculative Realism.

These writings chart Harman's rise from Chicago sportswriter to co founder of one of Europe's most promising philosophical movements: Speculative Realism. In 1997 Graham Harman was an obscure graduate student covering Chicago sporting events for a California website. Unpublished in philosophy at the time he was already a popular conference speaker on Heidegger and related themes. A decade later he is the author of highly visible books on continental philosophy is Associate Vice Provost for Research at the American University in Cairo and a key member of the Speculative Realist movement along with Ray Brassier Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux. This fascinating collection of eleven essays and lectures from 1997 to 2009 anchored by Harman's rebellious transformation of Heideggerian philosophy show the evolution of his object oriented metaphysics from its early days into an increasingly developed philosophical position. Each chapter is preceded by Harman's witty scene setting commentary.

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The style of Harman often evokes that of a William James joined to the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft. ~ Olivier Surel,in Actu Philosophia
In his letter to the young Beatrice [Chapter 9], Graham Harman offers the clearest exposition of object-oriented philosophy to date. With grace, wit, and a remarkable inventiveness Harman invites us to return to basic philosophical questions. Whether or not one agrees with Harman's conclusions his work will be an inspiration for many. ~ Martin HÃ¤gglund, Harvard University, author of Radical Atheism
This wonderfully engaging book asks the most important metaphysical and epistemological questions of our time. What does it mean to be human? How do objects relate to each other? How might our understandings of object relations change if we take the cosmos into account? In a series of beautifully written chapters, Harman carefully builds his pathbreaking argument that objects relate through vicarious asymmetrical causation. Harman transforms complex ideas into digestible form, at the same time that he provides a refreshingly honest account of how his theory has developed over time, and the reactions it has garnered within the academy. This is a must-read for scholars interested in metaphysics, philosophy or science studies, and for students who want invaluable insights into how scholars theory-build. ~ Myra Hird, Queen's University, Canada. Author of The Origins of Sociable Life .
Traces of Modernity
by Dan Smith

A collection of critical encounters with the material remains of the past as living and dynamic influences upon the present.

This book offers critical engagements with four objects from the nineteenth century: The ruins of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham and the dinosaurs that remain, the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum and the short novel by H.G. Wells – The Time Machine. These provide very different forms of encounter, but are bound by the shadow of the Great Exhibition of 1851. This immense spectacle helped forge our understanding of display, surveillance and commodity. This legacy can be detected in the development of the modern museum and gallery as well as the shaping of spaces and structures of trade, commerce and political display, denying any possibility of conceptually separating these sites. Linked by a cumulative narrative that binds the mid nineteenth century to the early twenty first, these four objects are identified as formative traces of the past within the present. They provide models for critical thought and suggest answers to the problematic conditions that they present as ideologically specific relics from a previous age.

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Translating Anarchy
by Mark Bray

An insider's account of the anarchists who ignited Occupy Wall Street.

Translating Anarchy tells the story of the anti-capitalist anti-authoritarians of Occupy Wall Street who strategically communicated their revolutionary politics to the public in a way that was both accessible and revolutionary. By “translating” their ideas into everyday concepts like community empowerment and collective needs, these anarchists sparked the most dynamic American social movement in decades.

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This is a remarkable book and, of all the "insider" stories of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the most compelling. ~ Paul Buhle, author of Marxism in the United States, truthout
Translating Anarchy is an impressive example of movement analysis, one of the most important books about anarchism of its time, and a must read for anyone studying contemporary anarchism and its implications, challenges, and possibilities. ~ Gabriel Kuhn, editor of Gustav Landauer: Revolution and Other Writings and Erich Mühsam: Liberating Society from the State and Other Writings, Alpine Anarchist Productions
Bray's meticulous, rich insider account of Occupy Wall Street demonstrates the central influence of anarchism on its core militants, but refuses to shy away from drawing hard lessons from its limitations. Anarchism, he convincingly argues, must position itself as an everyday movement of the 'ordinary' folks who alone can change the world - this requires a positive, practical programme and message, self-reflective and accountable politics, solid organisation, and clear tactics and strategy. ~ Lucien van der Walt (Rhodes University), co-author of Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism
In Translating Anarchy Mark Bray provides unique insight into the inner workings and politics of OWS and its interactions with the press and the public. The book not only describes how OWS "strategically articulated our politics" to the press and public, but provides an inside narrative of key OWS events; delineates the strands of anarchist and other thought that contributed to its political orientation; and draws lessons regarding key but controversial OWS approaches to the role of demands, the process of consensus, violence and non-violence, and other critical questions for future radical organizing.

Straightforward and non-academic but in fact scholarly and historically informed, it provides an often witty good read. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the OWS phenomenon or who may ever interpret social movements for the public and the media. ~ Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike! and Save the Humans?
Trav
by Taylor Burns

There is the day it happens, and then there is everything after.

Trav, thirteen, is trying to come to terms with the death of his father.

Jay, Trav’s best friend, is tasked with going through a decade’s worth of writing that Trav wrote after finding his father dead.

Stella, Trav’s mother, is trying to keep it together for her son while dealing with irreparable fallout in her adopted family.

Together, they try to make sense of grief and its druggy comedown, and what happens when cursed destinies intersect.

Powered by the prose — the rhythm and technique — of accent, sociolect, and place, this novel is working-class but not council-estate chic, grim but not grey, and blessed with a slangy Birmingham vernacular not readily found in modern fiction.

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Trav is told with appropriate bravado. The prose blazes across the page, alive with pinpoint imagery. It had me from the start, with its close attention to detail, its touches of comedy, and the way it follows how relationships between family members alter over the years. I could feel the generosity behind the laser-eyed vision, the longing for a better way of doing things. A very strong, heartfelt, deeply affecting debut. I'm looking forward to more from Burns. ~ Alan Beard, author of Afternoon Drinking
A voice that dazzles as much as it devastates. This is a raw, luminous portrait of growing up, grief and the fragile armour of masculinity. Unsentimental yet unexpectedly full of grace, every page thrums with truth, humour and heartbreak. A phenomenal achievement. ~ Ashley Hickson-Lovence, author of About to Fall Apart
With maximum verve and energy, the world of Travis Barnes is rendered with authenticity and a glorious specificity. Taylor Burns writes with exceptional heart, intelligence, and fearlessness. ~ Wendy Erskine, author of The Benefactors
A moving, memorable exploration of masculinity, class and family, Trav fizzes with life. Taylor Burns navigates these prickly themes with an unflinching eye and brio; there is verve in every sentence. ~ Nicolas Padamsee, author of England is Mine
Trav is funny as fuck and fragile as glass. Rarely do you enter through the eyes and into the heart of a character with such unfiltered access, such vulnerability. But Travis Barnes — the novel's troubled but truthful anti-hero — is all the things that make us the brilliant, brutal, soft and stupid humans we are. Burns' writing, the kind I am endlessly, fruitlessly, in search of, is generous, but don't expect to come out unscathed, unshaken, unmoved. It is THE novel of New Birmingham, a place you think you know but probably, almost certainly do not. You will be closer after reading this. A working-class masterwork from one of the most stylish writers around. ~ Clive Judd, author of Here
Trump's Counter-Revolution
by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

A radical Marxist analysis of Trump which finds Trump to be a preventive counter-revolutionary derailment of the coming-into-being of a new world.

In Trump's Counter-Revolution, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen looks behind the craziness of Donald Trump to decipher the formation of a new kind of fascism, late-capitalist fascism, that is intent on preventing any kind of real social change. Trump projects an image of America as threatened, but capable of re-creating itself as a united, white and patriarchal community: "Make America great again". After forty years of extreme, uneven development in the US, Trump's late-capitalist fascism fuses popular culture and ultra-nationalism in an attempt to renew the old alliance between the white working class and the capitalist class, preventing the coming into being of an anti-capitalist alliance between Occupy and Black Lives Matter.

'A lucid, clear-eyed analysis of the morbid spectacle of Trump's racist counterrevolution. Mikkel Bolt proposes to add to the rubble of the neoliberal order by demolishing the political form of capitalism - democracy itself - as it slides into fascism. Welcome to life in the postcolony.'

Iain Boal, co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War

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A lucid, clear-eyed analysis of the morbid spectacle of Trump's racist counterrevolution. Mikkel Bolt proposes to add to the rubble of the neoliberal order by demolishing the political form of capitalism - democracy itself - as it slides into fascism. Welcome to life in the postcolony. ~ Iain Boal, co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
The rise of Donald Trump and his regime has produced an abundance of analysis, much of it merely ideological. But Marx cautioned us that it is not the job of a worker's movement to inquire into the thinking of capitalists, but to inquire into their power. Mikkel Bolt takes up this challenge with this important inquiry into what W.E.B. Dubois anticipated in his concept of 'democratic despotism' - a cross-class white alliance, allied with ethnocentric fascism around the globe. Bolt asks us to consider the potentiality of an emergent communist counter-power - the very one that provoked this fascist turn. ~ Stefano Harney, co-author of The Undercommons
Trump is the symptom – but of what? Mikkel Bolt’s provocative answer is “of democracy,” that is, of democracy under conditions of capitalism and white supremacy. With this original intervention, Bolt rejects the conventional wisdom that makes democracy the cure for all that ails it. He challenges any and all concerned about the politics of Trump to consider what his victory tells us about democracy. ~ Jodi Dean, author of The Communist Horizon
TWICE: A Novel
by Susanna Kleeman

It's not true. It never was.

TWICE is a speculative thriller about false fronts and coercive control on a global and personal scale. It tells the story of Nim, who discovers that her childhood games taught her dangerous secrets she must now keep from her first love - and his doubles.

Nim's ex-love returns from Silicon Valley, wanting a book from their childhood. She chucks him out. Moments later, he's back again, one fingertip missing, claiming he's the real Chris and that Nim's first visitor was an imposter. Nim doesn't believe him, so he abducts her, forcing her on a journey where nothing is as it seems.

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A Novel keeps the reader guessing with its twists and turns. A woman named Nim finds herself at the center of an intrigue between Chris, a man she used to love, and his doubles. The man who claims to be the real Chris forces her to come with him on a trip where illusion and reality overlap. Nim must figure out who and what she can trust - including among her own memories! An absorbing page-turner that balances psychological suspense, duplicity, and the human need for trust, TWICE is highly recommended ~ James Cox, Midwest Book Review
Wryly hilarious and utterly bonkers, TWICE is like nothing I've encountered. Imagine David Cronenberg making a horror film after binge-watching Fleabag, and you'll have a general idea of the kind of roller-coaster ride that awaits in Kleeman's delightful horror. ~ Dan Chaon , author of ILL WILL
Dark and dazzling, with mesmeric twists and much to say about where we are today. ~ Anna Minton, Ground Control, Big Capital
Drawn breathlessly into a nightmare world in which the usual conventions do not apply, there is no reprieve until one insecurely draws near to the conclusion. Written with skilful pace and polished art, we are presented with a first rate fantasy and something that is more than mere fantasy. Here is a dextrously woven tale with deftly drawn characters that will cause as much intellectual stimulus as it does readership enjoyment. One is left gasping. ~ Peter Tremayne, Sister Fidelma Mysteries
Ultrablack of Music
by Claire Elise Herzberg, Achim Szepanski

Anonymous, hidden, encrypted, incomprehensible - these are the forces and sounds that tell us the unheard in music.

Iconic Frankfurt techno and experimental label -Mille Plateaux- returns with a new anthology of texts written by a collective of voices who assembled around the resurrection of the label, taking Ultrablack as its organising principle.

This volume features various forms of writing with and through - as opposed to about - music, including essays on quantum aesthetics, mythology, semiotics, experimental glitch literature, and macabre philofictions.

As the primordial Ultrablack Noise fluctuates in intensity, it ruptures into sound and silence. Noise intensifies until it bursts over a limit; it erupts into our World through our ears. Silence comes after Noise, and only then can we arrive at Sound. What was that Noise? It was a Sound, a moment of Noise. Once you have two Sounds, you can have Rhythm. Once you have Rhythm, you have Code. Ultrablack is the Noise which escapes these dualisms: Noise/Silence, Noise/Sound, Noise/Rhythm, Noise/Code. It is the Noise that continuously exceeds the limits of its own sign, the Noise which keeps breaking until a Rhythm emerges from breaks - a break-beat - on-off, tick-tock. There is no positive, only double-negative, as Noise creates gaps within itself. Only where there is no sound, and no silence, can you hear the music of this infinite meta-rhythm, this rhythm-without-rhythm, this Noise-beyond-Noise.

Featuring works from: Achim Szepanski, Eugene Thacker, Gary Shipley, Eldritch Priest, Frédéric Neyrat, Jens Schröter, Obsolete Capitalism, Alessandro Sbordoni, Lain Iwakura, Giorgi Vachnadze, Palais Sinclaire, Darko Vukić, Stefan Paulus, Alberto Ricca, Holger Schulze, Jan Heintz, Luigi Monteanni & Gabriele de Seta, Kenji Siratori, Ross Birdwise, and Andrea Taeggi.

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Under Foreign Eyes
by James King

This book is about an important sub-genre: the sixty Western films set in post World War II.

This book is about the perception of Japan in the sixty films set there by gaijin (foreigners) —outsiders who almost always do not speak or read Japanese. This book discusses films depicting post World War II Japan and the Japanese, and, in many cases, films showing how foreigners in the same time frame respond to Japan. Why have a substantial number of films been set there by strangers? As a body of work, what do they tell us about contemporary Japan and about cinema? These films certainly provide a new cultural history of the West and its reaction to Japan, but, even more, they are constructions that demonstrate how the West gazes at Japan. As such, more information can often be derived about the onlookers as on those looked-upon.

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Unf*cking Work
by Neil Usher

A bold, fearless, uncompromising and yet practical advocacy for a more humane, honest and open world of work.

Every journey starts with the realization that we don’t have to take any more of this crap.

The world of work – and all that’s wrong with it – is dominated by 12 statements. We hear them every day. We utter them at will. But they’re all garbage.

What if we said – no more?

This is the business book for everyone who can’t bear to read business books. Which is most of us. It considers that in being part of the problem – an uncomfortable admission – we may also be the creators of the solution. In uncompromising, engaging and humorous fashion, it dismantles each statement and sets us on the path to a better world of work.

You can read each essay between meetings you’d rather not be at, after which, your working life will never be the same again.

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The reality is it’s far easier to convince yourself you’re good at HR or management through platitudes than it is to actually hold a mirror up to yourself and really understand what needs to change. That’s what I got from this book - a call to forget everything you learned and re-frame what work is for, and where work is.

It takes the inscrutable understanding of work and through Socratic questioning leads you to better understand work - and your role in it. ~ Gethin Nadin | Author of A World of Good
I wanted to stand and applaud all the way through. It just flows perfectly. ~ Khurshed Dehnugara | Co-founder and co-owner, Relume
Insanely smart, funny and insightful. ~ Amelia Saberwal | Founder and owner, Kinesthetica Coaching
Uninhabited
by Ben Woodard

A fresh view on sci-fi and colonialism.

Is it inhabited? This question makes the shared stakes of science fiction and colonialism obvious, wherein the wide imaginaries of empire and what counts as life - scientifically, ethically, politically - and the moral and technological possibilities of terraforming and the impulse for exploration are all fused. Science fiction, and the genres that preceded and grounded it, such as scientific romance and tales of lost civilizations, emerged alongside the birth of industrialized global trade and imperial rushes for new resources. If the scientific romance dramatized the effects of new technologies on history and forms of life, then lost civilization stories dealt with themes of the alien, the forgetting of history, and more explicitly, with episodes of war and oppression.

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