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In der bisherigen Forschung ist wiederholt die Frage aufgeworfen worden, ob die Paradiesgefilde des Ódáinsakr und der Glæsisvellir der mittelalterlichen isländischen Mythologie auf keltische Einflüsse zurückgehen, und wie genau diese Einflüsse zu fassen und sozial und historisch einzuordnen sind. Um diese Fragen zu beantworten, arbeitet das Buch die nordischen Zeugnisse vollständig auf; neben literarischen werden dabei auch folkloristische Quellen und archäologische Befunde berücksichtigt. Nach der Analyse dieses Materials wendet sich die Studie dem keltischen Vergleichsmaterial zu: der arthurischen Literatur, der irischen Literatur und antiken keltischen Zeugnissen. Die vergleichende Analyse dieses breit gestreuten Materials zeigt, dass der Ódáinsakr/Glæsisvellir-Komplex in der Tat von keltischen Überlieferungen nicht zu trennen ist. Die unmittelbare Quelle für die zugrundeliegenden Einflüsse ist dabei wohl nicht in der arthurischen Literatur oder gar der keltischen Antike, sondern in der volkssprachlichen Überlieferung des wikingerzeitlichen Irland zu suchen. Von dort scheint der Motivkomplex während der Landnahmezeit nach Island gelangt zu sein.

Avant Canada presents a rich collection of original essays and creative works on a representative array of avant-garde literary movements in Canada from the past fifty years. From the work of Leonard Cohen and bpNichol to that of Jordan Abel and Liz Howard, Avant Canada features twenty-eight of the best writers and critics in the field.


The book proposes four dominant modes of avant-garde production: “Concrete Poetics,” which accentuates the visual and material aspects of language; “Language Writing,” which challenges the interconnection between words and things; “Identity Writing,” which interrogates the self and its sociopolitical position; and “Copyleft Poetics,” which undermines our habitual assumptions about the ownership of expression. A fifth section commemorates the importance of the Centennial in the 1960s at a time when avant-garde cultures in Canada began to emerge.


Readers of this book will become familiar with some of the most challenging works of literature—and their creators—that this country has ever produced. From Concrete Poetry in the 1960s through to Indigenous Literature in the 2010s, Avant Canada offers the most sweeping study of the literary avant-garde in Canada to date.

The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet.

In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French that has always been steadfastly and unashamedly feminist and lesbian.

Avant Desire moves through Brossard’s body of work with a playful attentiveness to its ongoing lines of inquiry. Like her work, this reader moves beyond conventional textual material to include ephemera, interviews, marginalia, lectures, and more. Just as Brossard foregrounds collaboration, this book includes new translations alongside canonical ones and intertextual and responsive work from a variety of artist translators at various stages of their careers.

Through their selections, the editors trace Brossard’s fusion of lesbian feminist desire with innovation, experimentation, and activism, emphasizing the more overtly political nature of her early work and its transition into performative thinking.

Devotees of Brossard will be invigorated by the range of previously unavailable materials included here, while new readings will find a thread of inquiry that is more than a mere introduction to her complex body of work. Avant Desire situates Brossard’s thinking across her oeuvre as that of a writer whose sights are always cast toward the horizon.

The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet.

In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French that has always been steadfastly and unashamedly feminist and lesbian.

Avant Desire moves through Brossard’s body of work with a playful attentiveness to its ongoing lines of inquiry. Like her work, this reader moves beyond conventional textual material to include ephemera, interviews, marginalia, lectures, and more. Just as Brossard foregrounds collaboration, this book includes new translations alongside canonical ones and intertextual and responsive work from a variety of artist translators at various stages of their careers.

Through their selections, the editors trace Brossard’s fusion of lesbian feminist desire with innovation, experimentation, and activism, emphasizing the more overtly political nature of her early work and its transition into performative thinking.

Devotees of Brossard will be invigorated by the range of previously unavailable materials included here, while new readings will find a thread of inquiry that is more than a mere introduction to her complex body of work. Avant Desire situates Brossard’s thinking across her oeuvre as that of a writer whose sights are always cast toward the horizon.

They envisioned a brave new world, and what they got was fascism. As vibrant as its counterparts in Paris, Munich, and Milan, the avant-garde of Florence rose on a wave of artistic, political, and social idealism that swept the world with the arrival of the twentieth century. How the movement flourished in its first heady years, only to flounder in the bloody wake of World War I, is a fascinating story, told here for the first time. It is the history of a whole generation's extraordinary promise--and equally extraordinary failure.

The "decadentism" of D'Annunzio, the philosophical ideals of Croce and Gentile, the politics of Italian socialism: all these strains flowed together to buoy the emerging avant-garde in Florence. Walter Adamson shows us the young artists and writers caught up in the intellectual ferment of their time, among them the poet Giovanni Papini, the painter Ardengo Soffici, and the cultural critic Giuseppe Prezzolini. He depicts a generation rejecting provincialism, seeking spiritual freedom in Paris, and ultimately blending the modernist style found there with their own sense of toscanità or "being Tuscan."

In their journals--Leonardo, La Voce, Lacerba, and l'Italia futurista--and in their cafe life at the Giubbe Rosse, we see the avant-garde of Florence as citizens of an intellectual world peopled by the likes of Picasso, Bergson, Sorel, Unamuno, Pareto, Weininger, and William James. We witness their mounting commitment to the ideals of regenerative violence and watch their existence become increasingly frenzied as war approaches. Finally, Adamson shows us the ultimate betrayal of the movement's aspirations as its cultural politics help catapult Italy into war and prepare the way for Mussolini's rise to power.

The cultural liberalization of communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s produced many artistic accomplishments, not least the celebrated films of the Czech New Wave. This movement saw filmmakers use their new freedom to engage with traditions of the avant-garde, especially Surrealism. This book explores the avant-garde's influence over the New Wave and considers the political implications of that influence. The close analysis of selected films, ranging from the Oscar-winning Closely Observed Trains to the aesthetically challenging Daisies, is contextualized by an account of the Czech avant-garde and a discussion of the films' immediate cultural and political background.

The cultural liberalization of communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s produced many artistic accomplishments, not least the celebrated films of the Czech New Wave. This movement saw filmmakers use their new freedom to engage with traditions of the avant-garde, especially Surrealism. This book explores the avant-garde's influence over the New Wave and considers the political implications of that influence. The close analysis of selected films, ranging from the Oscar-winning Closely Observed Trains to the aesthetically challenging Daisies, is contextualized by an account of the Czech avant-garde and a discussion of the films' immediate cultural and political background.

Der Problemnexus zwischen Avantgarde und Faschismus, für Italien und Deutschland bereits größtenteils erforscht, wird in der vorliegenden Arbeit erstmals in bezug auf die spanische Literatur untersucht. Die Frage nach der reaktionären Moderne erschließt einen vergessenen Sektor der spanischen Erzählprosa, der, quer zur gängigen Epochengliederung, die Leerstelle zwischen Vorkriegsavantgarde und Nachkriegsrealismus füllt. Zunächst werden die weitgehend unbekannten Autoren präsentiert: Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1899-1988), Vordenker des Faschismus in Spanien, Tomás Borrás (1891-1976), Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval (1903-1978), Samuel Ros (1904-1945) und Antonio de Obregón (1909-1985). Ohne reduktionistische Thesenbildung verfolgt die Studie in unmittelbarer Auseinandersetzung mit den Texten den Prozeß der ideologischen Umwertung bzw. Funktionalisierung avantgardistischer Diskursformen und Stilelemente (Pirandellismus, Expressionismus, Ästhetik der Grausamkeit). Inhaltlich manifestiert sich die Entwicklung von der 'Vanguardia' zur präfaschistischen 'Avanzada' in der Darstellung von Identitätsproblematik und Gesellschaftsbezug. Ausführungen zu Aspekten der faschistischen 'Ästhetisierung' des Politischen (Walther Benjamin; Mission des Künstlers, Dandysmus, Stilbegriff) beschließen den Band.

Avantgarde und Avantgarde-Forschung befinden sich aufgrund der mit dem Begriff verbundenen Verzeitlichung und Verräumlichung in einer permanenten Erklärungs- und Rechtfertigungssituation. Von Beginn an für tot erklärt, „spukt“ das „Gespenst der Avantgarde“ durch Kunst und Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Es hat grundsätzliche Fragen gestellt, die dieser Band diskutiert. Dazu gehört das immer wieder behauptete „Scheitern“ der historischen Avantgarden, ihre Aufhebung in der Post-Avantgarde, gleichzeitig ihre (historische) Notwendigkeit, ihr Verhältnis zur Moderne und ihre zunehmende Vereinnahmung durch den Modernismus. Untersucht wird auch die Bedeutung der Avantgarde für und ihre Infragestellung durch Prozesse gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung und ihre aktuellen Möglichkeiten und Erscheinungsformen in Kunst und Gesellschaft. So kommt nicht nur die heutige Situation von Avantgarde und Avantgarde-Forschung in den Blick, es sollen auch neue Perspektiven auf Kunst und Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts entwickelt und eine Positionsbestimmung von „Avantgarde heute“ unternommen werden.

Avatar and Nature Spirituality explores the cultural and religious significance of James Cameron's film Avatar (2010), one of the most commercially successful motion pictures of all time. Its success was due in no small measure to the beauty of the Pandora landscape and the dramatic, heart-wrenching plight of its nature-venerating inhabitants. To some audience members, the film was inspirational, leading them to express affinity with the film's message of ecological interdependence and animistic spirituality. Some were moved to support the efforts of indigenous peoples, who were metaphorically and sympathetically depicted in the film, to protect their cultures and environments. To others, the film was politically, ethically, or spiritually dangerous. Indeed, the global reception to the film was intense, contested, and often confusing.

To illuminate the film and its reception, this book draws on an interdisciplinary team of scholars, experts in indigenous traditions, religious studies, anthropology, literature and film, and post-colonial studies. Readers will learn about the cultural and religious trends that gave rise to the film and the reasons these trends are feared, resisted, and criticized, enabling them to wrestle with their own views, not only about the film but about the controversy surrounding it. Like the film itself, Avatar and Nature Spirituality provides an opportunity for considering afresh the ongoing struggle to determine how we should live on our home planet, and what sorts of political, economic, and spiritual values and practices would best guide us.

The Arctic is not a barren, frigid landscape filled with only ice and snow. It is a complex ecosystem that contains many thriving habitats, each supported by dozens of ecological relationships between plants and animals.

From the many animals that live and hunt at the floe edge, to the hundreds of insects that abound on the summer tundra, this book gives a detailed bird's-eye view of the fascinating ways that animals, plants, and insects co-exist in the Arctic ecosystem.

Written by Mia Pelletier, a biologist and wilderness field researcher, and complete with a glossary to clearly explain biological terms to young readers, this book provides a sound informational basis to understanding the Arctic ecosystem in all its facets.

Aveline y su madre rentan una cabaña en el campo para pasar el verano. A pesar de que preferiría estar en una playa, hay una gran razón para visitar Norton Wick: las Piedras de las Brujas, unas antiguas ruinas de las que nadie sabe mucho… según Aveline. En ese lugar conoce a Hazel Browne, una chica increíblemente cool, pero algo misteriosa, vive en una mansión escondida en el bosque, sus padres nunca están por ningún lado y parece saber demasiado sobre brujería. Aunque es inevitable caer bajo su hechizo, a Aveline le encantan los misterios, por lo que no puede evitar sospechar de las intenciones de su nueva amiga y tratará de descubrir quién es realmente Hazel Browne.

Alex Morgan disappears into the underworld’s darkest corners.

INTREPID's top agent, Alex Morgan, faces his most formidable opponent yet: the Night Witch, the mastermind of a global human trafficking network. As Morgan pursues this shadowy figure across continents, he's drawn into a lethal web involving Chinese triads, corrupt officials and the Russian mafia.

When a mission to protect rookie agent Elizabeth Reigns goes sideways, Morgan finds himself in a race against time to unravel the Night Witch's complex network of power and deceit. But as he inches closer to his target, Morgan must confront a ghost from his past he thought long buried.

With lives hanging in the balance and enemies on all sides, Morgan pushes his skills to the limit.


If you like James Bond and Jason Bourne, you’ll love Alex Morgan.

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Praise for the Black Ops Intrepid series:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ If you are looking for an intelligent edge of your seat thrill ride then you need to read the Intrepid Series.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Five stars and then some.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ The action is fast-paced and non-stop.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ The scenario is seriously compelling as if taken from the front pages of the world's newspapers just yesterday!

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ A "couldn't put it down" book!

We are living in the age of the superhero and we cannot deny it. Avengers Assemble! is a vibrant and theoretically informed interrogation of one of the defining and most financially successful film franchises of the new millennium. In the first single-authored monograph on the topic of the Marvel cinematic universe, Terence McSweeney asks, "Why has the superhero genre reemerged so emphatically in recent years?" In an age where people have stopped going to the cinema as frequently as they used to, they returned to it in droves for the superhero film. What is it about these films that has resonated with audiences all around the globe? Are they just disposable pop culture artifacts or might they have something interesting to say about the fears and anxieties of the world we live in today?

Beginning with Iron Man in 2008, this study provocatively explores both the cinematic and the televisual branches of the series across ten dynamic and original chapters from a diverse range of critical perspectives which analyse their status as an embodiment of the changing industrial practices of the blockbuster film and their symbolic potency as affective cultural artifacts that are profoundly immersed in the turbulent political climate of their era.

We are living in the age of the superhero and we cannot deny it. Avengers Assemble! is a vibrant and theoretically informed interrogation of one of the defining and most financially successful film franchises of the new millennium. In the first single-authored monograph on the topic of the Marvel cinematic universe, Terence McSweeney asks, "Why has the superhero genre reemerged so emphatically in recent years?" In an age where people have stopped going to the cinema as frequently as they used to, they returned to it in droves for the superhero film. What is it about these films that has resonated with audiences all around the globe? Are they just disposable pop culture artifacts or might they have something interesting to say about the fears and anxieties of the world we live in today?

Beginning with Iron Man in 2008, this study provocatively explores both the cinematic and the televisual branches of the series across ten dynamic and original chapters from a diverse range of critical perspectives which analyse their status as an embodiment of the changing industrial practices of the blockbuster film and their symbolic potency as affective cultural artifacts that are profoundly immersed in the turbulent political climate of their era.

The twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Averroes sought to understand the divine in a way independent of religious theology, by turning to the philosophical works of Aristotle and, to a lesser extent, Plato. In doing so, he established standards of scientific inquiry into God that were and remain highly influential on Jewish and Christian thought. Averroes, however, does not provide much in the way of demonstrative knowledge of God, and most of his arguments remain dialectical, rhetorical, or political. This volume explores the various pathways towards attaining divine knowledge that we find in Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, and on Plato’s Republic, along with Averroes’ Epistle on Divine Knowledge, Decisive Treatise, and more.

One of Averroes' (Ibn Rushd) earliest works is dedicated to law. The work comprises a summary of al-Ghazali's work on legal theory called al-Mustasfa min 'ilm al-usul. This volume presents a new edition of the Arabic text accompanied by a French translation and commentary. The edition is preceded by a study that draws attention to the main points of difference between the two philosophers.

The introduction of Aristotelianism into the West created conflict, disruption, and turmoil. Not least, it confronted the Middle Ages with a serious problem concerning the possible conflict between reason and faith. In part, the controversy surrounding Aristotelianism in the Christian world came from the Islamic channels through which much of the Aristotelian philosophical heritage came to the West. The great turning point of Christian thought, the point at which Christian intellectual history began to be dominated by Aristotelian patterns, began when Christian scholars were exposed not only to the philosophy of Aristotle, but also to the commentaries of Averroes. The names of Averroes and Aristotle became inextricably linked by the middle of the thirteenth century.

A clear and careful analysis of the links between the thoughts of Averroes and Aristotle, an explication of the impact of Averroes' thought on Christian theology and on Aquinas in particular, this monograph is of crucial importance in the history of Christianity. It is emphatically apposite to the discussion of monistic and qualistic theological anthropologies. Further, the discussion throws light upon a topic which should be of much greater interest to scholars: the impact of Islam upon medieval Christian thought.

Mohammed centres specifically upon Averroes' doctrine of immortality—a doctrine that posited immortality for man as a being entire, not merely for his soul.

Best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein examines how to avoid worst-case scenarios

The world is increasingly confronted with new challenges related to climate change, globalization, disease, and technology. Governments are faced with having to decide how much risk is worth taking, how much destruction and death can be tolerated, and how much money should be invested in the hopes of avoiding catastrophe. Lacking full information, should decision-makers focus on avoiding the most catastrophic outcomes? When should extreme measures be taken to prevent as much destruction as possible?

Averting Catastrophe explores how governments ought to make decisions in times of imminent disaster. Cass R. Sunstein argues that using the “maximin rule,” which calls for choosing the approach that eliminates the worst of the worst-case scenarios, may be necessary when public officials lack important information, and when the worst-case scenario is too disastrous to contemplate. He underscores this argument by emphasizing the reality of “Knightian uncertainty,” found in circumstances in which it is not possible to assign probabilities to various outcomes. Sunstein brings foundational issues in decision theory in close contact with real problems in regulation, law, and daily life, and considers other potential future risks. At once an approachable introduction to decision-theory and a provocative argument for how governments ought to handle risk, Averting Catastrophe offers a definitive path forward in a world rife with uncertainty.

Best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein examines how to avoid worst-case scenarios

The world is increasingly confronted with new challenges related to climate change, globalization, disease, and technology. Governments are faced with having to decide how much risk is worth taking, how much destruction and death can be tolerated, and how much money should be invested in the hopes of avoiding catastrophe. Lacking full information, should decision-makers focus on avoiding the most catastrophic outcomes? When should extreme measures be taken to prevent as much destruction as possible?

Averting Catastrophe explores how governments ought to make decisions in times of imminent disaster. Cass R. Sunstein argues that using the “maximin rule,” which calls for choosing the approach that eliminates the worst of the worst-case scenarios, may be necessary when public officials lack important information, and when the worst-case scenario is too disastrous to contemplate. He underscores this argument by emphasizing the reality of “Knightian uncertainty,” found in circumstances in which it is not possible to assign probabilities to various outcomes. Sunstein brings foundational issues in decision theory in close contact with real problems in regulation, law, and daily life, and considers other potential future risks. At once an approachable introduction to decision-theory and a provocative argument for how governments ought to handle risk, Averting Catastrophe offers a definitive path forward in a world rife with uncertainty.

Averting Climate Catastrophe Together addresses the necessity of meeting the Paris Agreement temperature target and explores what framework could enable climate action in an effective, efficient and equitable manner that is consistent with that goal. It also looks at the contribution of technological change within the economic system, including the feasibility of a global energy transition. Whether humanity can avoid catastrophic climate change does not seem to depend on the availability of technological solutions, but rather on international cooperation and coordination.

Given the various sustainability issues, this book also considers if it is possible to derive a general approach to them. It argues that dealing with compatibility limits in complex systems requires a holistic change in the system structure. Therefore, systems science is discussed together with economics, technological change, and sustainable development.

This book targets scientists and experts from different disciplines due to the interdisciplinary topic, but especially from environmental economics and energy technology; policy makers, as policy recommendations are provided to address climate change; as well as the general public due to the pressing common challenge of climate change and comprehensive efforts for sustainable development.

• Provides evidence based on climate science research on the necessity of meeting the Paris Agreement temperature target
• Highlights the feasibility of the global energy transition as one major option to mitigate climate change, also going into detail about the process of technological change
• Brings together systems science with economics, technological change, and sustainable development
• Derives a framework to meet the Paris Agreement temperature target, enabling coordinated climate action in an effective and efficient manner while pursuing distributive justice

The Cuban missile crisis was the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War and the most perilous moment in human history. Sheldon M. Stern, longtime historian at the John F. Kennedy Library, here presents a comprehensive narrative account of the secret ExComm meetings, making the inside story of the missile crisis completely understandable to general readers for the first time. The author's narrative version of these discussions is entirely new; it provides readers with a running commentary on the issues and options discussed and enables them, as never before, to follow specific themes and the role of individual participants. The narrative highlights key moments of stress, doubt, decision, and resolution—and even humor—and makes the meetings comprehensible both to readers who lived through the crisis and to those too young to remember the Cold War. Stern demonstrates that JFK, a seasoned Cold Warrior who bore some of the responsibility for precipitating the crisis, consistently steered policy makers away from an apocalyptic nuclear conflict, which he called, with stark eloquence, "the final failure."

This work undertakes a first-ever corpus-based synchronic and diachronic study of the avertive and proximative in Romance languages while considering both Latin and Ancient Greek. It systematically charts and verifies new pathways of grammaticalization based on corpus linguistics.

This study was awarded the Elise Richter Preis of Deutscher Romanistenverband 2017 and the Prize of the Offermann-Hergarten-Stiftung 2020.

Winner of the 2022 Governor’s Arts Award
A 2022 Reading the West Award Finalist
A Refinery29 Best New Book to Read in 2021

From Deirdre McNamer, a masterful exploration of the rich and hidden facets of human character, as illuminated by the mysterious connections among the residents of a senior residence in Montana.

At the deteriorating Pheasant Run, the occupants keep their secrets and sadnesses locked tight behind closed apartment doors. Kind Leo Umberti, formerly an insurance agent, now quietly spends his days painting abstract landscapes and mourning a long-ago loss. Down the hall, retired professor Rydell Clovis tries desperately to stay fit enough to restart a career in academia. Cassie McMackin, on the same floor, has seemingly lost everything—her husband and only child dead within months of each other—leaving her loosely tethered to this world. And a few doors away, her friend, Viola Six, is convinced of a criminal conspiracy involving the building’s widely disliked manager, Herbie Bonebright. Cassie and Viola dream of leaving their unhappy lives behind, but one woman’s plan is interrupted—and the other’s unexpectedly set into motion—when a fire breaks out in Herbie’s apartment.

Called to investigate is the city’s chief fire inspector. With a gift and a passion for sorting out the mysteries of flame, Lander Maki finds the fire itself, and the circumstances around it, highly suspicious. Viola has disappeared. So has Herbie. And a troubled teen, Clayton Spooner, was glimpsed fleeing the scene. In trying to fit together the pieces of this complicated puzzle, Lander finds himself learning more than expected about human nature and about personal and corporate greed as it is visited upon the vulnerable.

Beautifully written and long awaited, from a writer “with extraordinary emotional acuity and with a keen sense of the small detail that says it all” (Chicago Tribune), Aviary weaves a compelling tapestry of crisis, grief, and the mysteries of memory and old age.

Ernst Bloch was one of the most significant twentieth-century German thinkers, yet he remains overshadowed by his Frankfurt School contemporaries. Known for his engagement with utopianism and religious thought, Bloch also wrote incisively about ontological questions. In his short masterpiece Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, Bloch gives a striking account of materialism that traces emancipatory elements of modern thought to medieval Islamic philosophers’ encounter with Aristotle.

Bloch argues that the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) planted the seeds of a radical materialism still relevant for critical theory today. He contrasts Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s interpretations of Aristotle on form and matter to argue that Avicenna’s reading democratizes power and undermines clerical and political authority. Bloch explores Avicenna’s world and metaphysics in detail, showing how even his most recondite theoretical concerns prove capable of pointing toward radical social transformation. He blazes an original path through the history of ideas, including Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Spinoza, and Marx as well as lesser-known figures. Here translated into English for the first time, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left is at once a succinct summation of Bloch’s own idiosyncratic materialism, a provocative reconstruction of the Western philosophical tradition in light of its exchanges with Islamic thought, and a vital resource for contemporary debates about materialism in critical theory.

Ernst Bloch was one of the most significant twentieth-century German thinkers, yet he remains overshadowed by his Frankfurt School contemporaries. Known for his engagement with utopianism and religious thought, Bloch also wrote incisively about ontological questions. In his short masterpiece Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, Bloch gives a striking account of materialism that traces emancipatory elements of modern thought to medieval Islamic philosophers’ encounter with Aristotle.

Bloch argues that the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) planted the seeds of a radical materialism still relevant for critical theory today. He contrasts Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s interpretations of Aristotle on form and matter to argue that Avicenna’s reading democratizes power and undermines clerical and political authority. Bloch explores Avicenna’s world and metaphysics in detail, showing how even his most recondite theoretical concerns prove capable of pointing toward radical social transformation. He blazes an original path through the history of ideas, including Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Spinoza, and Marx as well as lesser-known figures. Here translated into English for the first time, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left is at once a succinct summation of Bloch’s own idiosyncratic materialism, a provocative reconstruction of the Western philosophical tradition in light of its exchanges with Islamic thought, and a vital resource for contemporary debates about materialism in critical theory.

This study tracks the progress of Suhrawardī’s philosophy focusing on his critique of the axial doctrine of the categories and topics related to it: predication and hylomorphism. While it’s known that he rejected hylomorphism and reduced the categories into five, it’s not known how and in which context he has achieved his positions. This is a philosophical study with an eye on the history of concepts. Each chapter detects the historical development from Aristotle through his commentators to Avicenna and critical Avicennans, and then to Suhrawardī.

Suhrawardī discerns two diverging projects in the Categories: An ontological project of the ten highest genera of being, and a project of predication embodied in Aristotle’s predicative square. He discusses the latter in the Isagoge, whereas the former is discussed and reduced to five (substance, quality, quantity, relation, motion) in metaphysics. He also shifts hylomorphism from metaphysics – its Avicennan locus – to physics. Perhaps for this reason scholars never paid attention to his proper texts for the theory of body and confined themselves with the polemics of Ḥikmat al-išrāq. This is the first study of physics and general metaphysics of al-Talwīḥāt, al-Mašāriʿ, and al-Muqāwamāt.

Avicenna is the most influential figure in the intellectual history of the Islamic world. This book is the first comprehensive study of his theory of science, which profoundly shaped his philosophical method and indirectly influenced philosophers and theologians not only in the Islamic world but also throughout Christian Europe and the medieval Jewish tradition. 

A sophisticated interpreter of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Avicenna took on the ambitious task of reorganizing Aristotelian philosophy of science into an applicable model of scientific reasoning, striving to identify conditions of certainty for scientific assertions and conditions of adequacy for real definitions. Riccardo Strobino combines philosophical and textual analysis to explore the scope and nature of Avicenna’s contributions to the logic of scientific reasoning in his effort to recalibrate Aristotle’s model and overcome some of its internal limitations. Focusing on a broad array of philosophical innovations at the intersection of logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, this book casts light on an essential aspect of the thought of the preeminent philosopher and physician of the Islamic world.
 

Avicenna is the most influential figure in the intellectual history of the Islamic world. This book is the first comprehensive study of his theory of science, which profoundly shaped his philosophical method and indirectly influenced philosophers and theologians not only in the Islamic world but also throughout Christian Europe and the medieval Jewish tradition. 

A sophisticated interpreter of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Avicenna took on the ambitious task of reorganizing Aristotelian philosophy of science into an applicable model of scientific reasoning, striving to identify conditions of certainty for scientific assertions and conditions of adequacy for real definitions. Riccardo Strobino combines philosophical and textual analysis to explore the scope and nature of Avicenna’s contributions to the logic of scientific reasoning in his effort to recalibrate Aristotle’s model and overcome some of its internal limitations. Focusing on a broad array of philosophical innovations at the intersection of logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, this book casts light on an essential aspect of the thought of the preeminent philosopher and physician of the Islamic world.
 

This book offers a new edition, with English translation and commentary, of the Kitāb al-Madḫal, which opens Avicenna’s (d. 1037) most comprehensive summa of Peripatetic philosophy, namely the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ. For the first time, the text is established together with a stemma codicum showing the genealogical relations among 34 manuscripts, the twelfth-century Latin translation, and the literal quotations by Avicenna’s first and second-generation students. In this book, Avicenna’s reappraisal of Porphyry’s Isagoge is examined from both a historical and a philosophical point of view. The key-features of Avicenna’s theory of predicables are analyzed in the General Introduction and in the Commentary both in their own right and against the background of the Greek and Arabic exegetical tradition. Readers shall find in this book the first systematic study of the Madḫal which, in addition to being the only logical work of the Šifāʾ ever transmitted in its entirety both in Arabic and in Latin, is crucial for understanding Avicenna’s conception of universal predicables at the crossroads between logic and metaphysics.

The Islamic astronomical tradition greatly benefited from the many works produced in different ancient cultures, as well as the new empirical and theoretical approaches that led to advancements in various aspects of astronomy. Nevertheless, a significant portion of the history of this tradition, especially its formative period, was lost or remains undiscovered. Avicenna’s addendum to his recension of Ptolemy’s Almagest, which he incorporated into his main philosophical summa, Kitāb al-Shifāʾ, helps recover parts of this otherwise lost history. In the addendum, Avicenna took a historiographical approach and reported the developments in the science of astronomy that occurred from Ptolemy’s time until his own. As such, the treatise also sheds light on the sources that were possibly available to Avicenna. However, because Avicenna did not explicitly indicate his sources, and because the text’s structure is complex and language condensed, analyzing the treatise is a rather challenging task. The present monograph offers a critical edition of Avicenna’s addendum, complete with an English translation and commentary, to assist readers in better understanding and appreciating this valuable contribution to the history of Islamic astronomy.

Experience the story behind the songs—Avicii’s journey from Swedish prodigy to global icon of electronic music.

Step into the world of Avicii, the Swedish disc jockey and visionary artist who transformed techno music and electronic music worldwide. Avicii: The Life and Music of Tim Bergling by Annica Triberg is an intimate avicii biography that chronicles the rise of Tim Bergling, the creative force behind hits like Without You and The Days. Through captivating storytelling and stunning photography biography moments, discover how Avicii’s songs became the soundtrack of a generation and how his passion shaped music history.

Explore Avicii true stories from his early days in Sweden to international stardom, and delve into the making of the back-to-back anthems that defined his career. This book offers a rare look at the highs and lows of celebrity memoirs, the evolution of the backbeat in pop classics, and the legacy Avicii left in the world of music.

Inside, you’ll find:

• The stories behind Avicii’s most beloved songs, including “Avicii Without You” and “Avicii The Days.”
• Reflections on the Swedish music scene and Avicii’s impact on techno and electronic music.
• Exclusive photography biography capturing Avicii’s journey as a disc jockey and creative innovator.
• Insights into the pressures, triumphs, and artistry that made Avicii a legend.

If you enjoyed celebrity memoirs or music biographies like This Is What It Sounds Like, The Song Machine, or Daft Punk: A Trip Inside the Pyramid, you’ll love Avicii: The Life and Music of Tim Bergling. This heartfelt tribute brings together Avicii’s true stories, unforgettable songs, and the timeless influence he had on music history.

“How we should think about board games, and what do they do to us as we play them?”

Writer and critic Eric Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a board game enthusiast to explore the emotional and social rules that games create and reveal, telling a series of stories about a pastime that is also about relationships. From the outdated gender roles in Life and Mystery Date to the cutthroat, capitalist priorities of Monopoly and its socialist counterpart, Class Struggle, Thurm thinks through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and ponders the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies and relationships—from the familial to the geopolitical. Like sitting down at the table for family game night, Board Games is an engaging book of twists and turns, trivia, and nostalgia.

Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.

“How we should think about board games, and what do they do to us as we play them?”

Writer and critic Eric Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a board game enthusiast to explore the emotional and social rules that games create and reveal, telling a series of stories about a pastime that is also about relationships. From the outdated gender roles in Life and Mystery Date to the cutthroat, capitalist priorities of Monopoly and its socialist counterpart, Class Struggle, Thurm thinks through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and ponders the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies and relationships—from the familial to the geopolitical. Like sitting down at the table for family game night, Board Games is an engaging book of twists and turns, trivia, and nostalgia.

Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.

“How we should think about board games, and what do they do to us as we play them?”

Writer and critic Eric Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a board game enthusiast to explore the emotional and social rules that games create and reveal, telling a series of stories about a pastime that is also about relationships. From the outdated gender roles in Life and Mystery Date to the cutthroat, capitalist priorities of Monopoly and its socialist counterpart, Class Struggle, Thurm thinks through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and ponders the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies and relationships—from the familial to the geopolitical. Like sitting down at the table for family game night, Board Games is an engaging book of twists and turns, trivia, and nostalgia.

Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.

"My guilty pleasure wasn’t just reading low-brow fiction or even female-authored fiction, it was being femme itself."

What is it about ribald romance novels, luxurious interior design, and frothy wedding dresses that often make women feel their desires come with a shadow of shame? In Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures, Arielle Zibrak considers the specifically pleasurable forms of feminine guilt and desire stimulated by supposedly “lowbrow” aesthetic tendencies. She takes up the overwhelming preoccupation with the experience of being humiliated, dominated, or even abused that has pervaded the stories that make up women’s culture—from eighteenth-century epistolary novels to popular twentieth-century teen magazine features to present-day romantic comedies.

In three chapters—“Rough Sex,” “Expensive Sheets,” and “Saying Yes to the Dress”—that mirror the plot structures of feminine fictions themselves, this book tells the story of the desires that only the guiltiest of pleasures evoke. Zibrak reexamines documents of femme culture long dismissed as “trash” to reveal the surprisingly cathartic experiences produced by tales of domination, privilege, and the material trappings of the heteropatriarchy.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures reclaims women’s experiences for themselves.

"My guilty pleasure wasn’t just reading low-brow fiction or even female-authored fiction, it was being femme itself."

What is it about ribald romance novels, luxurious interior design, and frothy wedding dresses that often make women feel their desires come with a shadow of shame? In Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures, Arielle Zibrak considers the specifically pleasurable forms of feminine guilt and desire stimulated by supposedly “lowbrow” aesthetic tendencies. She takes up the overwhelming preoccupation with the experience of being humiliated, dominated, or even abused that has pervaded the stories that make up women’s culture—from eighteenth-century epistolary novels to popular twentieth-century teen magazine features to present-day romantic comedies.

In three chapters—“Rough Sex,” “Expensive Sheets,” and “Saying Yes to the Dress”—that mirror the plot structures of feminine fictions themselves, this book tells the story of the desires that only the guiltiest of pleasures evoke. Zibrak reexamines documents of femme culture long dismissed as “trash” to reveal the surprisingly cathartic experiences produced by tales of domination, privilege, and the material trappings of the heteropatriarchy.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures reclaims women’s experiences for themselves.

"My guilty pleasure wasn’t just reading low-brow fiction or even female-authored fiction, it was being femme itself."

What is it about ribald romance novels, luxurious interior design, and frothy wedding dresses that often make women feel their desires come with a shadow of shame? In Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures, Arielle Zibrak considers the specifically pleasurable forms of feminine guilt and desire stimulated by supposedly “lowbrow” aesthetic tendencies. She takes up the overwhelming preoccupation with the experience of being humiliated, dominated, or even abused that has pervaded the stories that make up women’s culture—from eighteenth-century epistolary novels to popular twentieth-century teen magazine features to present-day romantic comedies.

In three chapters—“Rough Sex,” “Expensive Sheets,” and “Saying Yes to the Dress”—that mirror the plot structures of feminine fictions themselves, this book tells the story of the desires that only the guiltiest of pleasures evoke. Zibrak reexamines documents of femme culture long dismissed as “trash” to reveal the surprisingly cathartic experiences produced by tales of domination, privilege, and the material trappings of the heteropatriarchy.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures reclaims women’s experiences for themselves.

“Here’s the thing with kissing: it matters intensely or not at all.”

Mid-kiss, do you ever wonder who you are, who you’re kissing, where it’s leading? It can feel luscious, libidinal, friendly, but are we trying to make out something through our kissing? For Kathryn Bond Stockton, making out is a prism through which to look at the cultural and political forces of our world: race, economics, childhood, books, and movies. Making Out is Stockton’s memoir about a non-binary childhood before that idea existed in her world. We think about kissing as we accompany Stockton to the bedroom, to the closet, to the playground, to the movies, and to solitary moments with a book, the ultimate source of pleasure.

Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.

“Here’s the thing with kissing: it matters intensely or not at all.”

Mid-kiss, do you ever wonder who you are, who you’re kissing, where it’s leading? It can feel luscious, libidinal, friendly, but are we trying to make out something through our kissing? For Kathryn Bond Stockton, making out is a prism through which to look at the cultural and political forces of our world: race, economics, childhood, books, and movies. Making Out is Stockton’s memoir about a non-binary childhood before that idea existed in her world. We think about kissing as we accompany Stockton to the bedroom, to the closet, to the playground, to the movies, and to solitary moments with a book, the ultimate source of pleasure.

Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.

“Here’s the thing with kissing: it matters intensely or not at all.”

Mid-kiss, do you ever wonder who you are, who you’re kissing, where it’s leading? It can feel luscious, libidinal, friendly, but are we trying to make out something through our kissing? For Kathryn Bond Stockton, making out is a prism through which to look at the cultural and political forces of our world: race, economics, childhood, books, and movies. Making Out is Stockton’s memoir about a non-binary childhood before that idea existed in her world. We think about kissing as we accompany Stockton to the bedroom, to the closet, to the playground, to the movies, and to solitary moments with a book, the ultimate source of pleasure.

Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.

“Opera is community, comfort, art, voice, breath, life. It’s hope.”

All art exists to make life more bearable. For Alison Kinney, it was the wild, fantastical world of opera that transformed her listening and her life. Whether we’re listening for the first time or revisiting the arias that first stole our hearts, Avidly Reads Opera welcomes readers and listeners to a community full of friendship, passion, critique—and, always, beautiful music.

In times of delirious, madcap fun and political turmoil, opera fans have expressed their passion by dispatching records into the cosmos, building fairy-tale castles, and singing together through the arduous work of social activism. Avidly Reads Opera is a love letter to the music and those who love it, complete with playlists, a crowdsourced tip sheet from ultra-fans to newbies, and stories of the turbulent, genre-busting, and often hilarious history of opera and its audiences.

Across five acts—and the requisite intermission—Alison Kinney takes us everywhere opera’s rich melodies are heard, from the cozy bedrooms of listeners at home, to exclusive music festivals, to protests, and even prisons.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Opera is an homage to the marvelous, sensational world of opera for the casual viewer.

“Opera is community, comfort, art, voice, breath, life. It’s hope.”

All art exists to make life more bearable. For Alison Kinney, it was the wild, fantastical world of opera that transformed her listening and her life. Whether we’re listening for the first time or revisiting the arias that first stole our hearts, Avidly Reads Opera welcomes readers and listeners to a community full of friendship, passion, critique—and, always, beautiful music.

In times of delirious, madcap fun and political turmoil, opera fans have expressed their passion by dispatching records into the cosmos, building fairy-tale castles, and singing together through the arduous work of social activism. Avidly Reads Opera is a love letter to the music and those who love it, complete with playlists, a crowdsourced tip sheet from ultra-fans to newbies, and stories of the turbulent, genre-busting, and often hilarious history of opera and its audiences.

Across five acts—and the requisite intermission—Alison Kinney takes us everywhere opera’s rich melodies are heard, from the cozy bedrooms of listeners at home, to exclusive music festivals, to protests, and even prisons.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Opera is an homage to the marvelous, sensational world of opera for the casual viewer.

“Opera is community, comfort, art, voice, breath, life. It’s hope.”

All art exists to make life more bearable. For Alison Kinney, it was the wild, fantastical world of opera that transformed her listening and her life. Whether we’re listening for the first time or revisiting the arias that first stole our hearts, Avidly Reads Opera welcomes readers and listeners to a community full of friendship, passion, critique—and, always, beautiful music.

In times of delirious, madcap fun and political turmoil, opera fans have expressed their passion by dispatching records into the cosmos, building fairy-tale castles, and singing together through the arduous work of social activism. Avidly Reads Opera is a love letter to the music and those who love it, complete with playlists, a crowdsourced tip sheet from ultra-fans to newbies, and stories of the turbulent, genre-busting, and often hilarious history of opera and its audiences.

Across five acts—and the requisite intermission—Alison Kinney takes us everywhere opera’s rich melodies are heard, from the cozy bedrooms of listeners at home, to exclusive music festivals, to protests, and even prisons.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Opera is an homage to the marvelous, sensational world of opera for the casual viewer.

"What is the value of Black life in America?"

In Avidly Reads Passages, Michelle D. Commander plies four freighted modes of travel—the slave ship, train, automobile, and bus—to map the mobility of her ancestors over the past five centuries. In the process, she refreshes the conventional American travel narrative by telling an urgent story about how history shapes what moves us, as well as what prevents so many Black Americans from moving or being moved. Anchored in her maternal kin’s long history on and alongside plantations in rural South Carolina, Commander explores her family members’ ability and inability to navigate safely through space, time, and emotion, detailing how Black lives were shaped by the actual vehicles that promised an escape from the confines of American racism, yet nearly always failed to deliver on those promises. Using personal and public archives, Avidly Reads Passages unfolds distinct histories of transatlantic slavery ships, the possibilities presented by rail lines in the Reconstruction South, the fateful legacies of school busing, and the ways that Black Americans attempted to negotiate their automobility, including through the use of road and travel compendiums such as Travelguide and The Negro Motorist Green Book.

In order to understand the intricacies of slavery and its aftermath, Commander began her exploration with the hope of engaging with the difficult evidences and stubborn gaps in her family’s genealogy; what she produced is a biting and elegiac reflection on working-class life in the Black South. Commander demonstrates that the forms of intimidation, brutality, surveillance, and restriction used to control Black mobility have merely evolved since slavery, marking Black life writ large in America, with neither the passage of time nor the passage of laws assuring true and adequate racial progress. Despite this bleak observation, Commander catalogs and celebrates, through affecting stories about her beloved South Carolina community, the compelling strivings of Southern Black people to survive by holding on firmly to family, and their faith that new worlds could be imagined, created, and traveled to someday.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Passages offers a unique lens through which to capture the intricacies of Black life.

"What is the value of Black life in America?"

In Avidly Reads Passages, Michelle D. Commander plies four freighted modes of travel—the slave ship, train, automobile, and bus—to map the mobility of her ancestors over the past five centuries. In the process, she refreshes the conventional American travel narrative by telling an urgent story about how history shapes what moves us, as well as what prevents so many Black Americans from moving or being moved. Anchored in her maternal kin’s long history on and alongside plantations in rural South Carolina, Commander explores her family members’ ability and inability to navigate safely through space, time, and emotion, detailing how Black lives were shaped by the actual vehicles that promised an escape from the confines of American racism, yet nearly always failed to deliver on those promises. Using personal and public archives, Avidly Reads Passages unfolds distinct histories of transatlantic slavery ships, the possibilities presented by rail lines in the Reconstruction South, the fateful legacies of school busing, and the ways that Black Americans attempted to negotiate their automobility, including through the use of road and travel compendiums such as Travelguide and The Negro Motorist Green Book.

In order to understand the intricacies of slavery and its aftermath, Commander began her exploration with the hope of engaging with the difficult evidences and stubborn gaps in her family’s genealogy; what she produced is a biting and elegiac reflection on working-class life in the Black South. Commander demonstrates that the forms of intimidation, brutality, surveillance, and restriction used to control Black mobility have merely evolved since slavery, marking Black life writ large in America, with neither the passage of time nor the passage of laws assuring true and adequate racial progress. Despite this bleak observation, Commander catalogs and celebrates, through affecting stories about her beloved South Carolina community, the compelling strivings of Southern Black people to survive by holding on firmly to family, and their faith that new worlds could be imagined, created, and traveled to someday.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Passages offers a unique lens through which to capture the intricacies of Black life.

"What is the value of Black life in America?"

In Avidly Reads Passages, Michelle D. Commander plies four freighted modes of travel—the slave ship, train, automobile, and bus—to map the mobility of her ancestors over the past five centuries. In the process, she refreshes the conventional American travel narrative by telling an urgent story about how history shapes what moves us, as well as what prevents so many Black Americans from moving or being moved. Anchored in her maternal kin’s long history on and alongside plantations in rural South Carolina, Commander explores her family members’ ability and inability to navigate safely through space, time, and emotion, detailing how Black lives were shaped by the actual vehicles that promised an escape from the confines of American racism, yet nearly always failed to deliver on those promises. Using personal and public archives, Avidly Reads Passages unfolds distinct histories of transatlantic slavery ships, the possibilities presented by rail lines in the Reconstruction South, the fateful legacies of school busing, and the ways that Black Americans attempted to negotiate their automobility, including through the use of road and travel compendiums such as Travelguide and The Negro Motorist Green Book.

In order to understand the intricacies of slavery and its aftermath, Commander began her exploration with the hope of engaging with the difficult evidences and stubborn gaps in her family’s genealogy; what she produced is a biting and elegiac reflection on working-class life in the Black South. Commander demonstrates that the forms of intimidation, brutality, surveillance, and restriction used to control Black mobility have merely evolved since slavery, marking Black life writ large in America, with neither the passage of time nor the passage of laws assuring true and adequate racial progress. Despite this bleak observation, Commander catalogs and celebrates, through affecting stories about her beloved South Carolina community, the compelling strivings of Southern Black people to survive by holding on firmly to family, and their faith that new worlds could be imagined, created, and traveled to someday.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Passages offers a unique lens through which to capture the intricacies of Black life.

“Poetry has leapt out of its world and into the world”

Poetry is everywhere. From Amanda Gorman performing “The Hill We Climb” before the nation at Joe Biden’s Presidential inauguration, to poems regularly going viral on Instagram and Twitter, more Americans are reading and interacting with poetry than ever before. Avidly Reads Poetry is an ode to poetry and the worlds that come into play around the different ways it is written and shared.

Mixing literary and cultural criticism with the author’s personal and often intimate relationship with poetry, Avidly Reads Poetry breathes life into poems of every genre—from alphabet poems and Shakespeare’s sonnets to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Rupi Kaur’s Instapoetry—and asks: How do poems come to us? How do they make us feel and think and act when they do? Who and what is poetry for? Who does poetry include and exclude, and what can we learn from it?

Each section links a reason why we might read poetry with a type of poem to help us think about how poems are embedded in our lives, in our loves, our educations, our politics, and our social media, sometimes in spite of, and sometimes very much because of, the nation we live in.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Poetry shatters the wall between poetry and “the rest of us.”

“Poetry has leapt out of its world and into the world”

Poetry is everywhere. From Amanda Gorman performing “The Hill We Climb” before the nation at Joe Biden’s Presidential inauguration, to poems regularly going viral on Instagram and Twitter, more Americans are reading and interacting with poetry than ever before. Avidly Reads Poetry is an ode to poetry and the worlds that come into play around the different ways it is written and shared.

Mixing literary and cultural criticism with the author’s personal and often intimate relationship with poetry, Avidly Reads Poetry breathes life into poems of every genre—from alphabet poems and Shakespeare’s sonnets to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Rupi Kaur’s Instapoetry—and asks: How do poems come to us? How do they make us feel and think and act when they do? Who and what is poetry for? Who does poetry include and exclude, and what can we learn from it?

Each section links a reason why we might read poetry with a type of poem to help us think about how poems are embedded in our lives, in our loves, our educations, our politics, and our social media, sometimes in spite of, and sometimes very much because of, the nation we live in.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Poetry shatters the wall between poetry and “the rest of us.”

“Poetry has leapt out of its world and into the world”

Poetry is everywhere. From Amanda Gorman performing “The Hill We Climb” before the nation at Joe Biden’s Presidential inauguration, to poems regularly going viral on Instagram and Twitter, more Americans are reading and interacting with poetry than ever before. Avidly Reads Poetry is an ode to poetry and the worlds that come into play around the different ways it is written and shared.

Mixing literary and cultural criticism with the author’s personal and often intimate relationship with poetry, Avidly Reads Poetry breathes life into poems of every genre—from alphabet poems and Shakespeare’s sonnets to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Rupi Kaur’s Instapoetry—and asks: How do poems come to us? How do they make us feel and think and act when they do? Who and what is poetry for? Who does poetry include and exclude, and what can we learn from it?

Each section links a reason why we might read poetry with a type of poem to help us think about how poems are embedded in our lives, in our loves, our educations, our politics, and our social media, sometimes in spite of, and sometimes very much because of, the nation we live in.

Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Poetry shatters the wall between poetry and “the rest of us.”

What happens when screen time is all the time?

In the early 1990s, the phrase “screen time” emerged to scare parents about the dangers of too much TV for kids. Screen time was something to fret over, police, and judge in a low-grade moral panic. Now, “screen time” has become a metric not only for good parenting, but for our adult lives as well. There’s even an app for it! In the streaming era—and with streaming made nearly ubiquitous during COVID-19—almost every aspect of our day is mediated by these bright surfaces. Whether it was ever the real villain in the first place, or merely a convenient proxy for unaddressed familial, social, and institutional failures, screen time is now all the time.

Avidly Reads Screen Time is a funny, insightful work of cultural criticism and history about how we define screens, and how they now define us. From Mad Men to iCarly, Vine to FaceTime, binge-watching to doom-scrolling, Phillip Maciak leads us on a sometimes heartwarming, sometimes harrowing tour of the media that brings us together and tears us apart.

What happens when screen time is all the time?

In the early 1990s, the phrase “screen time” emerged to scare parents about the dangers of too much TV for kids. Screen time was something to fret over, police, and judge in a low-grade moral panic. Now, “screen time” has become a metric not only for good parenting, but for our adult lives as well. There’s even an app for it! In the streaming era—and with streaming made nearly ubiquitous during COVID-19—almost every aspect of our day is mediated by these bright surfaces. Whether it was ever the real villain in the first place, or merely a convenient proxy for unaddressed familial, social, and institutional failures, screen time is now all the time.

Avidly Reads Screen Time is a funny, insightful work of cultural criticism and history about how we define screens, and how they now define us. From Mad Men to iCarly, Vine to FaceTime, binge-watching to doom-scrolling, Phillip Maciak leads us on a sometimes heartwarming, sometimes harrowing tour of the media that brings us together and tears us apart.

What happens when screen time is all the time?

In the early 1990s, the phrase “screen time” emerged to scare parents about the dangers of too much TV for kids. Screen time was something to fret over, police, and judge in a low-grade moral panic. Now, “screen time” has become a metric not only for good parenting, but for our adult lives as well. There’s even an app for it! In the streaming era—and with streaming made nearly ubiquitous during COVID-19—almost every aspect of our day is mediated by these bright surfaces. Whether it was ever the real villain in the first place, or merely a convenient proxy for unaddressed familial, social, and institutional failures, screen time is now all the time.

Avidly Reads Screen Time is a funny, insightful work of cultural criticism and history about how we define screens, and how they now define us. From Mad Men to iCarly, Vine to FaceTime, binge-watching to doom-scrolling, Phillip Maciak leads us on a sometimes heartwarming, sometimes harrowing tour of the media that brings us together and tears us apart.

“Theory offered us a way of understanding the world that, like so many youthful exuberances, was both vital and ridiculous.”

As an avowed “theory head,” Jordan Alexander Stein confronts a contradiction: that the abstract, and often frustrating rigors of theory also produced a sense of pride and identity for him and his friends: an idea of how to be and a way to live. Although Stein explains what theory is, this is not an introduction or a how-to. Organized around five ways that theory makes us feel—silly, stupid, sexy, seething and stuck—Stein travels back to the late nineties to tell a story of coming of age at a particular moment and to measure how that moment lives on now.

Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life. This is a story about the emotional lives of ideas.

“Theory offered us a way of understanding the world that, like so many youthful exuberances, was both vital and ridiculous.”

As an avowed “theory head,” Jordan Alexander Stein confronts a contradiction: that the abstract, and often frustrating rigors of theory also produced a sense of pride and identity for him and his friends: an idea of how to be and a way to live. Although Stein explains what theory is, this is not an introduction or a how-to. Organized around five ways that theory makes us feel—silly, stupid, sexy, seething and stuck—Stein travels back to the late nineties to tell a story of coming of age at a particular moment and to measure how that moment lives on now.

Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life. This is a story about the emotional lives of ideas.

“Theory offered us a way of understanding the world that, like so many youthful exuberances, was both vital and ridiculous.”

As an avowed “theory head,” Jordan Alexander Stein confronts a contradiction: that the abstract, and often frustrating rigors of theory also produced a sense of pride and identity for him and his friends: an idea of how to be and a way to live. Although Stein explains what theory is, this is not an introduction or a how-to. Organized around five ways that theory makes us feel—silly, stupid, sexy, seething and stuck—Stein travels back to the late nineties to tell a story of coming of age at a particular moment and to measure how that moment lives on now.

Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life. This is a story about the emotional lives of ideas.

The poems in this collection emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries: Sri Lanka, the UK and the USA. Sensuous, droll, yearning, they consider otherwise forgotten (ignored, repressed, erased) events. 

In 2017, Vidyan Ravinthiran travelled to the north of Sri Lanka where his parents grew up – it finally felt safe – visiting war-torn Tamil areas overwritten by a tourist focus on the sun-spoiled South. In 2020, he, his wife and their one-year-old moved from Britain to the United States, months before the pandemic hit and the travel ban separated them for almost two years from family overseas. 

Avidya is a political and a spiritual collection, whose multiple poetic forms, open and closed, are shaped by myth and philosophy, and by Sri Lankan as well as global crises. It is also a book about the forms of both strength and fear that parents pass on to their children.

From 19 June until 8 September 2019, the Benaki Museum presented the first-ever exhibition in Greece devoted to Avigdor Arikha, a modern master of figurative painting. The exhibition showcased more than fifty of his works gathered from the artist’s own collection (now part of private collections and the artist’s estate), as well as deportation childhood drawings, and a selection of pages from some of the artist’s sketch books. This impeccably produced three-volume slipcased edition chronicles the exhibition and its contents in painstaking detail.

Take in the range of Arikha's achievement In this thoroughly illustrated catalog, alongside his art the book includes six of his essays on art, which are in equal measure perceptive, erudite, and forceful. These are accompanied by valuable critical commentaries and essays on Arikha and his work by, amongst others, Jean Clair, Monica Ferrando, and Michael Peppiatt. The catalogue closes with a wealth of illuminating reference material documenting the artist’s life and career, as well as rarely before seen archival photographs of Arikha himself.