mstyslavity/zer0-books huggingface dataset:
10/40/70
by Nicholas Rombes

A bold experiment in film theory for the digital era.

In an era of rapid transformation from analog to digital, how can we write about cinema in ways that are as fresh, surprising, and challenging as the best films are? In 10/40/70 Nicholas Rombes proposes one bold possibility: pause a film at the 10, 40, and 70-minute mark and write about the frames at hand, no matter what they are. This method of constraint—by eliminating choice and foreclosing on authorial intention—allows the film itself to dictate the terms of its analysis freed from the tyranny of pre-determined interpretation. Inspired by Roland Barthes’s notion of the “third meaning” and its focus on the film frame as an image that is neither a photograph nor a moving image, Rombes assumes the role of image detective, searching the frames for clues not only about the films themselves—drawn from a wide range of genres and time periods—but the very conditions of their existence in the digital age.

Reviews:
For Nicholas Rombes, every film is an oracle. In 10/40/70, he proposes a new method of divination: stop the film at arbitrary points, and give a careful account of what you see. The result may be an intense formal analysis, or a new appreciation of narrative subtleties, or a kind of emotional weather report, or a dense train of subjective memories and associations. But in every case, Rombes uncovers unsuspected depths, and shows us cinema in a strange new light. ~ Steven Shaviro, Author of Post Cinematic Affect and Doom Patrols

With his 10/40/70 essays, Nicholas Rombes breaks the habitual cycles of film criticism, forcing himself to approach familiar films from odd angles. He delegates to chance the task of selecting a film’s defining images, and the results are a series of revealing observations about movies caught unawares; often, he finds new points of entry to films we all think we know inside out. 10/40/70 can find a film’s vulnerable spots, those moments we rarely notice, whose significance we only gather in freeze-framed close readings. Sometimes the images are well known fragments of the iconic scenes that comprise our shared film culture, but more frequently, they are the unsung or incidental pieces that hold a film together, unassuming but always ripe for re-examination. By bringing into focus these triptychs of framegrabs, Rombes finds fresh perspectives on well-known movies, and demonstrates that there may be riches buried in their every frame if we compel ourselves to look. ~ Dan North, Author of Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor

Rombes dives into the self-imposed constraints of his critical project with both feet, and the result is an innovative splash. Arguing that "digital desire" predated digital cinema, this experiment in film writing pushes readers to re-frame our critical practices and to embrace new cinematic experiences and interpretive acts. We need more books like this. ~ Julia Leyda, Sophia University, Japan
15 Years of Speculative Realism
by Charlie Johns

A definitive and invaluable re-assessment of the last decade of speculative realism.

More than 15 years have passed since the speculative realism conference at Goldsmiths College, London, hosted Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. Their dictum was simple: Reality is not what it seems.

15 Years of Speculative Realism begins with four chapters, each dedicated to the work of a speculative realism panellist. On one level, their respective projects engaged with the great philosophical systems of yesteryear: Cartesian dualism; the Platonist distinction between reality and appearance; and the Kantian revival of noumena. But there is much more at stake here, such as the repositioning of the subject as yet another object in the universe, and the radically egalitarian view that individual human thought is best described as a local manifestation of nature. Through these observations, we are also encouraged to ask: 'Could the laws of physics change at any moment?' and 'How does thought think the gradual extinction of itself as but another perishable phenomenon in the physical universe?'

Two further chapters offer wider context: the Analysis & Impact chapter evaluates speculative realism’s relevance to the wider domain of philosophy, as well as its achievements and shortcomings, with commentary by Slavoj Žižek, and the Interviews chapter has contributions from Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Goldsmiths College’s speculative realism conference coordinator, Alberto Toscano.

As we prophetically enter into a new epoch - characterized by artificial intelligence and a withering climate - we call the Anthropocene, it seems that many of the insights offered to us through the speculative realist lens have come to fruition. The objective, now, is to speculate upon how far this major shift in the humanities will ensue, and how different this reality will be from our preconceived notion of the real offered to us by previous tenets of realism.

This book charts the essential meaning of the movement in the wake of its spell as one of the most significant philosophical movements of the twenty-first century.

Reviews:
When the first speculative realism symposium was held in 2007, it caused a sensation both inside and outside philosophical circles. It seemed to portend a radical shift in our relation to, and in our understanding of, the world. But it is the fate of successful revolutions in thought to be assimilated into the very frameworks that they initially seemed determined to destroy. The essays in this volume show how speculative realist projects contribute to, and enrich our understandings of, many different philosophical questions. ~ Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University and author of The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism

A definitive and invaluable re-assessment of the last decade of speculative realism. ~ Thomas Nail, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of Matter and Motion: A Brief History of Kinetic Materialism
Advancing Conversations: Aubrey de Grey - advocate for an indefinite human lifespan
by Douglas Lain

Aubrey de Grey

A line of interview books documenting conversations with artists, authors, philosophers, economists, scientists, and activists whose works are aimed at the future and at progress.

Advancing Conversations is a line of interview books documenting conversations with artists, authors, philosophers, economists, scientists, and activists whose works are aimed at the future and at progress. The biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, as the world's pre-eminent longevity advocate, is nothing if not future oriented. De Grey is the founder of the SENS Research Foundation, an organization developing medical interventions to repair the damage the body does to itself over time. Stated more directly, Aubrey de Grey and his organization aim to defeat aging.

In 2005 a panel of scientists and doctors from MIT, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Microsoft, and the Venter Institute participated in a contest to judge whether de Grey's "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" were worthy of debate and verification or whether these ideas were wrong on their face. The panel found that de Grey's proposals for intervening in the aging process, while speculative, often "ran parallel to existing research" and were not "demonstrably wrong."

Reviews:
Advancing Conversations: Srećko Horvat - Subversion!
by Alfie Bown

Srećko Horvat

An interview with acclaimed European philosopher and political activist Srećko Horvat.

In a world dominated by capitalism which is dangerously sliding into a new kind of fascism, Srećko Horvat's new book explores the concept of subverting the dominant paradigm in politics, technology and love. Drawing from his own experience of participating in different protest movements all around the world, working closely with WikiLeaks and being one of the protagonists of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, Horvat resists the prevailing melancholy of the Left by offering new political imagination beyond traditional concepts. Instead of the tension between horizontal movements or vertical political parties, “Subversion!” opts for a radical dialectics of both methods as the only way out of our current deadlock. If there is a crack in everything, the way to use the light that gets in is constructive subversion.

Reviews:
History has only produced decency when good people infiltrated despotic institutions and succeeded in subverting them, often at a terrible cost to themselves. Horvat explains brilliantly subversion’s creative potential, in juxtaposition to isolationism and escapism which are the establishment’s best friends. ~ Yanis Varoufakis, Economist, former Finance Minister of Greece

Based on rich personal experience and participation in constructive subversion, along with wide reading from classics to the latest dreams of artificial intelligence, Horvat leads us on a whirlwind tour of the maladies and discontents of modern civilization and the many ways to right what is wrong and achieve a better future. ~ Noam Chomsky, MIT
Against Capitalist Education
by Nadim Anjum Bakhshov

The birth of a revolutionary art of world-creation.

Out there in the so-called real world the education system is being crushed by the demands of capitalism and, in turn, is crushing those who pass through it, reducing them, diminishing them. The dream of the economic functioning unit.

How do we break this? We need alternatives but not just one or two. We need the freedom and education to generate a trillion possibilities. An education system that is as broad as it is deep, that brings back a different type of thinking and a new use of fiction.

This book signals the return of the dialogue and the conversation as the ground out of which new realities are born, the root out of which new alternatives are nurtured and explored.

Reviews:
Somewhere in this book, amongst the flashes of insight and exchange, lie the seeds of a revolution in our modes of existence, our forms of value and meaning and fundamental ways of existing as humans within this fragile planetary ecology.

~ Baba Shree Vardi

It is only through developing reasoned and imaginative alternatives that we can generate the light to shine into the ever-fragmenting modern world and open up paths into new worlds - speculative fiction meets philosophy. ~ Ibn Aflatun, author of Distilling the Universal

Is the market and consumer logic the right way to manage our education systems? This book thinks not. This is conversation worth listening to. ~ Peter Lato, CEO of Shovian Analytics

It is like stumbling into a corner of the world we had forgotten. It is time for a revival. A revolution. ~ Karl F. Tullah

A fundamental challenge to those who argue the humanities have no place in the brave new world dominated by the technocrats. ~ Friedrich Faust, author of Gone With the Crowd

For me, this type of exchange touches issues that lie at the heart of existence, all the while remaining within the world. ~ Frank N. Steinisch, creator of the VOAT Generator
Age of Nixon, The
by Carl Freedman

applies Marxism and psychoanalysis to the study of American politics. In America, every age is the Age of Nixon.

The fundamental argument of this book is, first, that Richard Nixon, though not generally regarded as a charismatic or emotionally outgoing politician like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, did establish profound psychic connections with the American people, connections that can be detected both in the brilliant electoral success that he enjoyed for most of his career and in his ultimate defeat during the Watergate scandal; and, second and even more important, that these connections are symptomatic of many of the most important currents in American life. The book is not just a work of political history or political biography but a study of cultural power: that is, a study in the ways that culture shapes our politics and frames our sense of possibilities and values. In its application of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and other theoretical tools to the study of American electoral politics, and in a way designed for the general as well as for the academic reader, it is a new kind of book.

Reviews:
Richard Nixon was real, for all that he seems like a fictional character concocted in the course of some strange literary collaboration between Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Theodore Dreiser, and J. G. Ballard. And Nixon continues to fascinate us, and to haunt our dreams, even these many years after his death. Carl Freedman's compelling book takes the full measure of Nixon the man, Nixon the media image, Nixon the myth, and even Nixon the ideal type, the quintessential expression, and the most capacious representative of the political and economic system under which we continue to live today.

~ Steven Shaviro, author of CONNECTED, WITHOUT CRITERIA, and POST-CINEMATIC AFFECT

This is a wonderfully informed and enlightening exercise in cultural and political analysis, in which Freedman tackles the problem, just what was this man who was vice president, then a two-term president of the United States. It examines how Nixon's flaws--and his considerable strengths--fitted into, reflected, and finally illuminate philosophy, novels, and films, to produce, what, for better or for worse, can reasonably be called the Age of Nixon. Given the U.S.'s recent turn toward the conservative, it's amazingly timely and informative about the nature of such forces.

~ Samuel R. Delany, author of DHALGREN, DARK REFLECTIONS, and TIMES SQUARE RED/TIMES SQUARE BLUE
Airplane Reading
by Christopher Schaberg

Mark Yakich

Re-examining the strange and ordinary world of air travel, one flight at a time.

In Airplane Reading, Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich bring together a range of essays about air travel. Discerning and full of wonder, this prismatic collection features perspectives from a variety of writers, airline workers, and everyday travelers. At turns irreverent, philosophical, and earnest, each essay is a veritable journey in and of itself. And together, they illuminate the at once strange and ordinary world of flight.

Contributors:

Lisa Kay Adam • Sarah Allison • Jane Armstrong • Thomas Beller • Ian Bogost • Alicia Catt • Laura Cayouette • Kim Chinquee • Lucy Corin • Douglas R. Dechow • Nicoletta-Laura Dobrescu • Tony D’Souza • Jeani Elbaum • Pia Z. Ehrhardt • Roxane Gay • Thomas Gibbs • Aaron Gilbreath • Anne Gisleson • Anya Groner • Julian Hanna • Rebecca Renee Hess • Susan Hodara • Pam Houston • Harold Jaffe • Chelsey Johnson • Nina Katchadourian • Alethea Kehas • Greg Keeler • Alison Kinney • Anna Leahy • Allyson Goldin Loomis • Jason Harrington • Kevin Haworth • Randy Malamud • Dustin Michael • Ander Monson • Timothy Morton • Peter Olson • Christiana Z. Peppard • Amanda Pleva • Arthur Plotnik • Neal Pollack • Connie Porter • Stephen Rea • Hugo Reinert • Jack Saux • Roger Sedarat • Nicole Sheets • Stewart Sinclair • Hal Sirowitz • Jess Stoner • Anca L. Szilágyi • Priscila Uppal • Matthew Vollmer • Joanna Walsh • Tarn Wilson

Reviews:
A marvelous story round-up exploring and explaining what air travel does to us—and makes us do. Buy it now, but save it to read on your next cross-country flight. ~ Harriet Baskas, travel writer for USAToday.com, author of Stuck at the Airport

An insightful exploration into the airplane journey that is both existential and humorous. This collection uncovers the surreal capacity of air travel to transport across tremendous distance but only after imposing a million grating indignities along the way. ~ Rafia Zakaria, author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan
Allegories of the End of Capitalism
by Milo Sweedler

How contemporary films transcode popular discontent with global capitalism.

In Allegories of the End of Capitalism, Milo Sweedler examines how filmmakers from six different countries, across four continents, give narrative and audio-visual form to the frustration and anger that burst into public view in 2011, the ongoing class war between the super-rich and the rest of the world's population, and the insurrection that it yet to come. Films examined include Melancholia, Cosmopolis, Suffragette, Django Unchained, Elysium and Snowpiercer.

"Allegories of the End of Capitalism ventures beyond the typical ambit of Hollywood Left productions to provide astute readings of six films from around the globe that agitate for revolution.' - Kirk Boyle, co-editor of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television

Reviews:
Sweedler's book deserves to be widely read. Its subject is of vital importance. ~ Daniel Lindvall, Film International

Milo Sweedler’s book is an unfailingly interesting and indeed fun read from start to finish. Focusing on six films which conjure with various images of revolt against capitalism and even with capitalism’s demise, Sweedler offers accessible and intelligent decodings of the films, contextualised by reference to key cultural thinkers and political scientists.... The detailed micro-attention to and sophistication of his reading of film form are two of the book’s many strengths. ~ Mike Wayne, Culture Matters

It has often been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Milo Sweedler’s highly readable and continually engaging book focuses on several recent films responsive in widely different ways to this lament. From considerations of the end of the world by celestial body to the creative destruction of financial markets, in both senses of the phrase, Sweedler places six “cinematic expressions of popular discontent” in a rich historical, theoretical, and aesthetic context, and demonstrates that, even in the bleakest circumstances, the hope of creating a better world survives. ~ Jeff Kinkle, co-author of Cartographies of the Absolute

Contradicting the assumption that popular film inculcates the masses with reactionary ruling-class ideologies, Sweedler argues that the motion picture industry cannot sell its wares if it ignores the real-world struggles of its viewing audience. If those struggles have become anti-capitalistic, so be it: films will find ways—at times direct, at times coded—to reflect the widespread discontent with global capitalism’s failure to deliver on its promises. Allegories of the End of Capitalism ventures beyond the typical ambit of Hollywood Left productions to provide astute readings of six films from around the globe that agitate for revolution. ~ Kirk Boyle, co-editor of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-First-Century Bust Culture
Almighty Machine, The
by Pekka Vahvanen

Mark Jones (Translator)

Read this book and re-evaluate your relationship with digital tech – is it making you unhappy?

The hymn of Digitalization is nothing new: We must encourage the creation of new apps. We must develop AI in order to prevail among international competition. Technology's advance will halt climate change and let robots do the dumb stuff for us. Our faith in technology is powerful because it has saved us in the past.

The Almighty Machine shows us technology’s flip side. The things that once powered us toward a brighter tomorrow are already undermining our quality of life. The data stream has shattered our concentration, human relationships have been reduced to a menu of emojis, constant surveillance has nullified much of our privacy, and the development of AI could be the beginning of the end for us. We are becoming the casualties of our own success.

Pekka Vahvanen's bristling and timely critique, deftly translated by Mark Jones, throws doubt on the necessity of technological development in a world saturated in tech. The Almighty Machine presents an important question: Does progress no longer make us happier?

Reviews:
Technological advancements are always necessary to keep up in the world, but here within The Almighty Machine, author Pekka Vahvanen shows us technology’s flip side.

Within this book and the eight chapters therein are a series of dedicated, expertly thought out, concise and at their crux, deeply worrying theories that are both pondered and expanded on by Vahvanen. ~ Anne Carlini, Exclusive Magazine
Alphonso Lingis and Existential Genealogy
by Alexander E. Hooke

The first book-length study of the work of Alphonso Lingis' philosophical works.

What is philosophy? Is philosophy an academic discipline that produces arguments and theories, or is philosophy also about understanding the world through stories, metaphors, analogies, ambience, and even through feelings?

Alphonso Lingis approaches philosophy the way a travel writer approaches a strange new land, with his eyes open and with a conscious desire for experience. Using the genealogical approach of Nietzsche and Foucault, his work continues the phenomenological tradition.

Alexander E. Hooke's Alphonso Lingis and Existential Genealogy is the first book-length study of Lingis' philosophical works.

Reviews:
Alphonso Lingis has been so far ahead of the intellectual curve that he has received less than his share of attention in orthodox philosophy. Alex Hooke closes that temporal deficit. This is a compelling and absorbing book that will more than repay the time it takes to dwell in and with it. A timely and exceptional study. ~ William E. Connolly, author of Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and The Politics of Swarming

Professor Hooke’s existential genealogy expands Alphonso Lingis’s doctrine of the motility of thought, imperatively deepening Husserl’s battle cry - ”back to the things themselves” - to “back to the sensations themselves,” which move and affect our thought. With his own teleological insights into collaboration that extend Lingis’s theme of symbiosis, Hooke offers us a compelling collaboration with Lingis throughout. ~ Randolph Wheeler, editor of Passion in Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Alphonso Lingis

Alexander Hooke has given us a quite personal introduction to Alphonso Lingis’s vast body of work. Drawing on decades of familiarity and time spent in the Lingis corpus, Hooke leads the reader directly into Lingis’s milieu like only a close companion can. He never leaves readers to wander on their own, however. Just the opposite. Under the rubric of “existential genealogy,” Hooke has provided readers with a roadmap with which to navigate the output of one of the most engaging and original interdisciplinary thinkers of the last half century. ~ Tom Sparrow, editor of The Lingis Reader
America and Other Fictions
by Ed Simon

If America or God didn't exist it would be necessary to invent them. Let's start.

At a moment of cultural and political crisis, with forces of reaction seemingly ascendant throughout the West, it's fair to ask what use does anyone have for America, God, or any other similar fictions? What use does theological language have for the radical facing the apocalypse? Among the subjects considered: the need for an Augustinian left, legacies of American violence, speaking in tongues, the humanities facing climate change, the maturity of realizing that you will die, how to sail towards Utopia, and witches.

'Ed Simon’s essays help readers to understand how we got to this complicated moment in American religious history. Deft, thoughtful, and creatively told.'

Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture

Reviews:
In this book you'll rediscover America, the enchanted and cursed. For an age haunted with reactionary nostalgia, Ed Simon haunts readers with an American greatness that is both lovely and perverse, through masterfully told tales that look their subjects' original sins straight in the eye. His America is more than a country, more than an idea or a history or a code of laws; it's a system of worship, hitherto little-known as such to its own devotees. ~ Nathan Schneider, author of God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet

Ed Simon's powerful, searching essays are conversant with a startling range of subject matter: Augustine and Whitman, Bob Dylan and Thomas Paine, Catholicism and Cathars, Cotton Mather and Martin Luther. Simon's mind goes, quite simply, everywhere. His goal as an essayist is a kind of secular reenchantment of the old, dead creeds—to acknowledge, and cherish, truths that go deeper than mere belief. Most remarkable of all is how often he succeeds. ~ Tom Bissell, author of The Disaster Artist and Apostle

From dusty reliquaries to Walt Whitman’s odes, from Tomas Paine to Thomas Moore and all across the persistently stubborn landscape of the American religious imagination, Ed Simon’s essays help readers to understand how we got to this complicated moment in American religious history. Deft, thoughtful, and creatively told, this book reaches across the divides between left and right, popular and academic, into something greater and more significant: the American imagination. ~ Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture and Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Catholic Church
Animatic Apparatus, The
by Deborah Levitt

How the transition from analogue to digital, and the rise of animation and simulation transform our concepts of life in contemporary culture.

Unprecedented kinds of experience, and new modes of life, are now produced by simulations, from the CGI of Hollywood blockbusters to animal cloning to increasingly sophisticated military training software, while animation has become an increasingly powerful pop-cultural form. Today, the extraordinary new practices and radical objects of simulation and animation are transforming our neoliberal-biopolitical “culture of life”. The Animatic Apparatus offers a genealogy for the animatic regime and imagines its alternative futures, countering the conservative-neoliberal notion of life’s sacred inviolability with a new concept and ethics of animatic life.

Reviews:
At once theoretically dazzling and fearless, The Animatic Apparatus shows how the production of life in animation deconstructs ontology as such: “There is no death in animation, because there is no being, no existence, to begin with.” But an-ontology is not the end of living. Instead, carefully tracing how the medium of animation has come to operate as a supermedium, Levitt finds animation to be the key not only to modelling the contemporary condition but also to formulating an ethical relation to it. Animation offers nothing less than a toolkit for new assembling of lives upon the active void of contemporary media. ~ Thomas Lamarre, Author of The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Professor of East Asian Studies and Communication Studies, McGill University

With subtlety and élan, Levitt compellingly animates an historical journey with dolls, puppets, automata, replicants and artificial life to secure the case for “an-ontology.” Media, in the form of novels, films, images, cartoons, screens, robots, and other automata are recursively part of the “human" condition such that distinctions between life and artificial life or intelligence and AI are ultimately unsustainable. Levitt’s inspired pursuit of a mediology of technology and metaphysics demonstrates that whatever we are, our emergence is bound up with the simulacrum, and that animation is at least as real as the real itself. What’s more, our ethics and our politics must come from that condition. ~ Jonathan Beller, Author of The Cinematic Mode of Production, Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Critical and Visual Studies, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY

What if Mamoru Oshi's 2004 anime Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is not just a midnight cult film, but the secret template for nearly all of 21st century technoculture? In The Animatic Apparatus, Deborah Levitt convincingly argues that this is actually the case. "Images possess their own forms of vitality," ones that cannot be easily distinguished from our own. ~ Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University, author of Connected: Or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society
Anti-Hero
by A.J. Lozier

One man’s journey into, and out of, the movement that foreshadowed the modern-day “Antifa.”

A memoir of one man’s journey into, and out of, the movement that foreshadowed the modern-day “Antifa.”

Between 1999-2005, as the nation convulsed with uncertainty over a contested election and the Sept. 11 attacks, A.J. Lozier attended and helped organize protests across the United States, as an active participant in the anarchist "black bloc," predecessor to the modern-day "Antifa." He was charged, tackled, swung at, shot at with rubber bullets, punched and, once, arrested. He did his fair of shoving too, all in the name of Anarchy, which he believed to be the only hope for a more peaceful and equitable society, in which capitalism was a thing of the past.

This is no "behind the mask" exposé, but nor is it a work of unselfconscious propaganda. It is first and foremost a story, but one that charts how a pure-intentioned desire for peace and justice morphed into a mechanism for justifying any behavior. It is a story that foreshadows the Antifa we see today.

Reviews:
In what is told via a compelling narrative from start to finish, Anti-Hero: Memories of a Black Bloc Anarchist is a book for the ages; a refreshing take, an exposed side of a raging argument of a distorted viewpoint that now gets its day in the sun through Lozier. ~ Anne Carlini, Exclusive Magazine

Lozier's book is a cocktail that mixes passion with politics, direct action with drunkenness, and self-deception with longing in his quest for belonging inside the alienating features of modern society. In doing so, he delivers a love letter to anyone curious enough to listen. ~ David Redmon, Award-Winning Director of Mardi Gras: Made in China

In "Anti-hero", Lozier reminds us that Antifa activists and others on the radical Left are not as one-dimensional as political talking heads would like you to believe. And ultimately, if we want to overcome hatred and build a better society, we need to remember the simple truth that we are all more alike than different as human beings. ~ Gabriel Nadales, Author of Behind the Black Mask, My Time as an Antifa Activist
Anti-Matter
by Ben Jeffery

An interrogation of art's ability to face unpleasant truths.

Michel Houellebecq, author of five novels including Atomised and Platform, has become possibly the world’s most famous literary pessimist. His work declares that life is painful and disappointing, death is terrifying, and the human condition is a nasty sort of joke. He has been wildly successful – translated into over 25 different languages and hailed as the voice of a generation.

Beginning with Houellebecq’s novels, this book explores the concept of ‘Depressive Realism’ in literature and philosophy – the proposition that the facts of life are bleak and unkind. Ranging over work by David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag, Fredric Jameson and Margaret Atwood, Anti-Matter surveys the case for pessimism, asks how a mass culture rooted in sentimentality and trivialisation manages to produce so much cynicism and apathy, and hunts for the space that remains for serious, life-affirming art.

Reviews:
Anti-Matter is an example of the kind of rigorous and refined criticism that one rarely stumbles across these days. ~ Jacques Testard, Times Literary Supplement

Ben Jeffery's Anti-Matter is the kind of intelligent, sophisticated response to provocative work that affirms criticism's value as art in itself. ... A more rigorous, less stylized version of the kind of long critical essay usually associated with writers like Geoff Dyer and Pierre Bayard, Anti-Matter is a work of criticism that honors—and occasionally exceeds—its source. ~ Scott Esposito , Book Forum

Ben Jeffery has produced not only an excellent critical assessment of Houellebecq’s writings, but a fantastic think-piece in and of itself, refining the intentions of his subject, as well as opening up this erudite discussion of art to the act of living in the world.

~ Emmet O'Cuana , abookadaytillicanstay

A searching and eloquent consideration of one of the definitive bodies of work of our time, Anti-Matter is also a vital essay on the more general difficulties of meaning-making for contemporary novelists and/or human beings. ~ Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision and co-editor of n+1 magazine
Awkwardness
by Adam Kotsko

Argues that the awkwardness of our age is a key to understanding human experience.

Awkwardness has been one of the defining traits of the awkwardly unnamed first decade of our young century dominating comedy on both the big and small screens. Could this trend point toward something deeper? In Awkwardness Adam Kotsko answers that question with a resounding yes. Drawing on key insights of cultural theory he argues that awkwardness is a structuring principle of human experience something that the particular conditions of our time allow us to see with greater clarity than ever before. In an analysis that begins with the difference between the US and UK versions of Ricky Gervais's The Office then passes through the films of Judd Apatow and culminates in the apotheosis of awkwardness Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm Kotsko looks at the ways we cope with our awkwardness and the unexpected opportunities awkwardness opens up when we stop resisting it and learn to enjoy it.

Reviews:
Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness is the kind of criticism — pertinent, witty, sophisticated but without sophistry — in which one can glimpse a culture that doesn’t quite exist. As with the other essays adapted from blogs and published by Zero Books. Awkwardness, in a different America, would supplant the dumbed-down pop and self-help schlock atop the nonfiction best-seller lists. Kotsko’s greatest achievement might be this slim volume’s readability.

~ Malcolm Harris, The New Inquiry

Awkwardness , like others in publisher Zero’s O line, is a short (a mere 90 pages) accessible philosophical/cultural examination of the phenomenon of awkwardness aimed at an popular audience. A Th This This is a great short work of criticism, intelligent without being unnecessarily jargony, often insightful and a pleasure to read.

~ Emmy Manuel, globulcomment.com

Awkwardness is just what a work of philosophy should be. Its subject is relevant and its thesis is audacious: awkwardness is more than a funny feeling—it tells us about ourselves, and it might even be the basis of a utopian practice, “an awkwardness that is so awkward it becomes its own kind of grace.”

~ Tony Cuttenham, Oxonian Review

It is easy to write a deep book on a big crucial concept like anxiety love or evil but it takes a true master to do for awkwardness what Heidegger in his Sein und Zeit did for anxiety and this is what Kotsko does. In his book which combines philosophical stringency with references to popular culture awkwardness is elevated into a universal singularity: a prismatic knot in which our entire historical moment is reflected. If this will not become an instant classic then we really live in awkward times.

~ Slavoj Zizek, Slovenian continental philosopher & Professor at the European Graduate School
Beyond Capitalism?
by Simon Hardy

Luke Cooper

An in-depth examination into the social nature of the austerity crisis and how we can move "Beyond Capitalism".

How to move 'beyond capitalism' and whether indeed it is possible to do so, has become a question of general interest, rather than simply the preserve of left-literary discussion, since the credit crisis of 2008. This book examines the social nature of the austerity crisis, and whether an anticapitalist message can successfully intersect and create a new virtuous dynamic for the radical left after decades of retreat.

Intended as a contribution to debates around fundamental social change which have emerged in the wake of Occupy and the Arab revolutions, Beyond Capitalism is a book which combines 'historical sociology' with the politics of social emancipation. The question these movements have posed is how can the radical left marshal its often meagre forces to create a new counter hegemony to the ethos and culture of capitalism?

Reviews:
Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy's vivid and invigorating Beyond Capitalism builds upon the analysis of leftist paralysis I started to develop in Capitalist Realism. Writing from the perspective of experienced activists, Cooper and Hardy offer an incisive and clear-eyed explanation of why the left has so far failed to take advantage of the current major crisis of capitalism. But this analysis is not just another jeremiad; it is a contribution to a leftist renewal which Cooper and Hardy believe is within our grasp. The future is ours for the reclaiming, and Beyond Capitalism outlines some concrete strategies for how we can win it back. ~ Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism

John McDonnell, the new Shadow Chancellor, made this comment on Beyond Capitalism in 2013: "A superb analysis of where the Left has got to and why, this book offers an insightful agenda to be addressed by the anti capitalist movement."

~ John McDonnell , Email
Beyond the Left
by Stephen Harper

Attacking the cherished assumptions of liberal media criticism, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.

The ideological distortions of the conservative media, from Fox News to the Daily Mail, are widely acknowledged and often denounced among contemporary critics and commentators. But what if The Guardian newspaper and BBC news, in fact, constitute the most insidious forms of capitalist propaganda? In a wide-ranging and erudite polemic, Beyond the Left analyses capitalist news and current affairs media from a radical perspective. The book rejects the liberal and pluralist paradigms that often underpin critiques of the media, showing how media texts reflect and reinforce the material interests of the ruling class and arguing that the principal ideological menace today is posed not by the right wing, but by the left-liberal media, as it co-opts and obscures radical political positions and reinforces a range of mystifications, from anti-fascism and humanitarian war to green politics. Drawing on the work of radical media critics as well as the writings of revolutionary communist groups and considering the recent reporting of war, industrial action, immigration and the environment, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.

Reviews:
Even if you find yourself disagreeing with certain portions of this book -- as I have -- you will find much in it that is well reasoned and historically informed, a valuable critique of how the mainstream media serves the capitalist plutocracy.

~ Michael Parenti, author of The Face of Imperialism and Contrary Notions.

Stephen Harper cuts through mystifying accounts of the media with a steady hand, placing a real left politics firmly at the centre of any productive understanding of the daily circulation of casual idiocies and pernicious ideologies.

~ Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Roehampton University

In an accessible and robust polemic Harper shows why we must go beyond the left and embrace a communist critique of both the capitalist media’s news agenda which disempowers and disinforms and the un-reformable system that shapes its ideological universe – the capitalist system itself. In this sense Harper’s book is vulgar, unrealistic and deeply unfashionable: it is in short essential reading in an increasingly insane world.

~ Mike Wayne, Professor of Screen Studies, Brunel University
BioShock
by Robert Jackson

A historical, critical look at the famous videogame franchise BioShock.

A historical, critical look at the famous videogame franchise BioShock, understanding it through philosophical, ideological and computational interpretations of systems, decisions and 'propaganda'.

Reviews:
One interesting aspect of the New Materialism is the use of digital cultural artifacts such as video games as things to think with philosophically. A good example of this is Bioshock: Decision, Forced Choice and Propaganda by Robert Jackson. In this short book Jackson takes the game franchise Bioshock as a means with which to think about questions of choice, causality and decision both within and outwith the playing of such a game. ~ Charlie Gere, Oxford University Press Journals: Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, vol 23, no 1, 2015

Robert Jackson avoids the dilettantism that normally accompanies studies of the aesthetic and cultural accomplishment of videogames, and instead offers a thoroughgoing critique of the ideology of decision in contemporary society: it is not a capacity of the individual, but of systems and collectives. ~ Ian Bogost: Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology., Author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames and How To Do Things with Videogames

Don't be mistaken to think this is a book about a computer game franchise. It is about the world of forces and forced choice, of decision over choice and the complex nested structurations that define our contemporary political moment. It shows how any question of the so-called self is by necessity already decided outside it. Decisions are automated, algorithmic and systemic. A constant cascade of decisions. Robert Jackson's extremely smart book elaborates this moment through BioShock in a provocative way. ~ Jussi Parikka: Reader in Media & Design, at University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art., Author of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses, Insect Media and What is Media Archaeology?
Blood-Stained Poppy, The
by Kevin Rooney

James Heartfield

The Poppy is a symbol of British militarism, not a badge of peace.

For a century the war dead have been honoured with Red Poppies on Remembrance Day. The Poppy is part of a cult of death that celebrates the slaughter of the 'Great War' of 1914-18. The Poppy and the Remembrance Day ceremony turn grief to sanctify war.

Here we expose the truth about the First World War, and about the century of militarism that followed. The war was not fought to make the world safe, but out of hatred and imperial greed. In the hundred years since the end of the First World War, Britain's military ventures have continued to wreak havoc across the world.

The Poppy is a symbol of British militarism, not a badge of peace.

Reviews:
Praise for Rooney and Heartfield's previous work from Zero Books, Who's Afraid of the Easter Rising? 1916-2016: 'A penetrating reflection on the controversies surrounding the Dublin revolt of 1916.' ~ Michael Fitzpatrick, Spiked Online
Blowing the Lid
by Stuart Feather

The queer fight for Gay Liberation; authentic identities and modern roles for lesbians and gays that enhanced British society.

The Gay Liberation Front founded in 1970 urged gay men and gay women to unite around a simple set of demands among which were calls for an end to discrimination against homosexuals in employment, in sex education, in the age of consent and in being treated as sick by the medical establishment.

GLF saw itself as a people’s movement for gays, socialist by virtue of its demand for social change, and revolutionary in recognizing the rights of other oppressed minorities to determine the fight for their own demands.

All history is personal. The author of this political memoir is the first participant of the Front to write a history of the lesbians and gay men who joined Gay Liberation and through a process of Coming Out and radicalization initiated an anarchic campaign that permanently changed the face of this country.

Reviews:
'This is a wonderfully rich and evocative account of an important moment in gay history. Stuart Feather has "brought it all back" in a marvellous narrative that is a great gift to posterity.' Ken Plummer, University of Essex. ~

Hegel is a Drag: Thesis: scores of Wests, Garlands, and boas (and I don't mean Franz). Antithesis: gay, feminist - leftist boos to anything that hobbles in heals. Synthesis? With a vengeance, in a viciously modern attack on sex roles, liberation prudery, and boredom in the orchestra. It's proof that rhinestones and politics can live together, but that they must. ~ Weinstein, Village Voice

Invaluable as well as entertaining first hand radical testimony from the period, essential for anyone who wants to understand how this country has changed and who wants to think about how it could be changed more. ~ Neil Bartlett, author and playwright

I think Feather provides an interesting lens to understand the movement’s internal debates, divisions and problems. This is a very rich understanding of how a social movement emerges and works through internal differences. So I have no doubt that this work will contribute to a lot of discussions on civil society and social movements. ~ Dr. Hakan Seckinelgin, Gender Institute, London School of Economics
Blue in the Air, The
by Marcello Carlin

A retrieved man tells how music, from Patrick Cargill to Jay-Z, retained the power to change the world in 2008.

A former widower whose life was saved by writing about music spends a year waiting for his new wife to fly over from Toronto and join him in London. While he waits he observes that the world is subtly changing and that music has played a key part in these changes. A galaxy of characters, ranging from Marty Wilde to Jay-Z via Glenn Gould, Dorothy Squires, Britney Spears, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Patrick Cargill, Orson Welles and many forgotten others, conspire to alter his perspective, leading to a climax where he is finally united with his wife and the world chooses a new and better leader.

The Blue in the Air is a gesture of defiance from a tiny but meaningful tugboat of resistance. At a time when we are repeatedly encouraged for reasons of demographic convenience to believe that music can change nothing and mean nothing, this writer demonstrates comprehensively that for those who stay awake, alert and alive, music still retains the power to change the fabric of the air we choose to breathe.

Reviews:
Why not just let the song speak for itself? Here are some answers.â€ ~ Mark Sinker

Marcello Carlin lures or impels us through an astonishing maze of music, much of it very likely unfamiliar with, from radical free improv to one off novelty pop, via every imaginable sheeptrack or rat run or scenic bus ride.

~ Mark Sinker
Brad Pitt's Dog
by Johan Kugelberg

A Punch and Judy show of intellectual diaspora making mincemeat of some pop culture sacred cows

The first book of essays by a long-time renowned chronicler of underground culture. Johan Kugelberg's book on the early history of hip hop won the NYPL books for the teen age award 2008 and his book on the Velvet Underground won the Foreword silver medal for music 2010. The way this book mashes up lo-bro and hi-bro is readable, funny and thought-provoking, and also downright provoking. Johan Kugelberg's essays on punk, style and pop culture have entertained readers of international publications including Dazed and Confused, Another Man, Ugly Things, Perfect Sound Forever, Spin, Raygun and Fact over the last couple of decades.

Reviews:
I laughed out loud five times. ~ Bob Stanley

An eclectic assembly of perspectives from one of our more singular sockets, it may increase the readers bandwidth in quite unexpected ways.

~ William Gibson