Whodunit?
On a bleak, rainy night, a strange dinner party is held at a gloomy mansion. The guests don’t know each other. They don’t even know their host. Why have they been called together? Who is the mysterious Mr. Boddy? No one has the answers, but before the evening is over, six people have been killed. Who is the murderer? Is it Miss Scarlet? Professor Plum? Mrs. White? Mr. Green? Mrs. Peacock? Colonel Mustard? Or did the butler do it?
This mystery isn’t like any other, because it has four solutions, so read carefully, follow the clues to CLUE, and choose the ending you like best.
“If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.”
This is the moment we’ve been waiting for, explains award-winning media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, but we don’t seem to have any time in which to live it. Instead we remain poised and frozen, overwhelmed by an always-on, live-streamed reality that our human bodies and minds can never truly inhabit. And our failure to do so has had wide-ranging effects on every aspect of our lives.
People spent the twentieth century obsessed with the future. We created technologies that would help connect us faster, gather news, map the planet, compile knowledge, and connect with anyone, at anytime. We strove for an instantaneous network where time and space could be compressed.
Well, the future’s arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this now is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies has thrown us into a new state of anxiety: present shock.
Rushkoff weaves together seemingly disparate events and trends into a rich, nuanced portrait of how life in the eternal present has affected our biology, behavior, politics, and culture. He explains how the rise of zombie apocalypse fiction signals our intense desire for an ending; how the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street form two sides of the same post-narrative coin; how corporate investing in the future has been replaced by futile efforts to game the stock market in real time; why social networks make people anxious and email can feel like an assault. He examines how the tragedy of 9/11 disconnected an entire generation from a sense of history, and delves into why conspiracy theories actually comfort us.
As both individuals and communities, we have a choice. We can struggle through the onslaught of information and play an eternal game of catch-up. Or we can choose to live in the present: favor eye contact over texting; quality over speed; and human quirks over digital perfection. Rushkoff offers hope for anyone seeking to transcend the false now.
Absorbing and thought-provoking, Present Shock is a wide-ranging, deeply thought meditation on what it means to be human in real-time.
First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Darren Burrows reflects on his life and time on the show Northern Exposure.
In the last two decades, both the conception and the practice of participatory culture have been transformed by the new affordances enabled by digital, networked, and mobile technologies. This exciting new book explores that transformation by bringing together three leading figures in conversation. Jenkins, Ito and boyd examine the ways in which our personal and professional lives are shaped by experiences interacting with and around emerging media.
Stressing the social and cultural contexts of participation, the authors describe the process of diversification and mainstreaming that has transformed participatory culture. They advocate a move beyond individualized personal expression and argue for an ethos of “doing it together” in addition to “doing it yourself.”
Participatory Culture in a Networked Era will interest students and scholars of digital media and their impact on society and will engage readers in a broader dialogue and conversation about their own participatory practices in this digital age.
What is the relationship between emerging technology and the future structure of our economy? Is contemporary capitalism unwittingly breeding the technologies that will herald its own downfall? In this cutting-edge new book, rising star of the accelerationist movement Nick Srnicek addresses these questions, showing how contemporary innovations in automation, cybernetics and manufacturing represent a theoretical and practical challenge to the very economic system that bred them.
Historically, thinkers on the left demanded reduced work hours, economic democracy, and freely available abundance. Paradoxically, just as such demands seem as elusive as ever at a political level, they are becoming encoded into the very technological foundations of neoliberalism. Srnicek examines technologies such as automated logistics, cybernetic planning, and additive manufacturing in order to re-interpret older debates about worker control over the means of production, the ‘fetters’ of capitalist development, and situationist concepts of détournement. In so doing, the foundations and future of neoliberalism are brought under intense scrutiny.
Digital is physical. Digital is not green. Digital costs the Earth. Every time I download an email I contribute to global warming. Every time I tweet, do a search, check a webpage, I create pollution. Digital is physical. Those data centers are not in the Cloud. They’re on land in massive physical buildings packed full of computers hungry for energy. It seems invisible. It seems cheap and free. It’s not. Digital costs the Earth.
In booming postwar Brooklyn, the Nowak Piano Company is an American success story. There is just one problem: the Nowak’s only son, David. A handsome kid and shy like his mother, David struggles with neuroses. If not for his only friend, Marianne, David’s life would be intolerable. When David inherits the piano company at just 18 and Marianne breaks things off, David sells the company and travels around the world. In Taiwan, his life changes when he meets the daughter of a local madame — the sharp-tongued, intelligent Daisy. Returning to the United States, the couple (and newborn son) buy an isolated country house in Northern California’s Polk Valley. As David’s health deteriorates, he has a brief affair with Marianne, producing a daughter.
It’s Daisy’s solution for the future of her two children, inspired by the old Chinese tradition of raising girls as sisterly wives for adoptive brothers, that exposes Daisy’s traumatic life, and the terrible inheritance her children must receive. Framed by two suicide attempts, The Border of Paradise is told from multiple perspectives, culminating in heartrending fashion as the young heirs to the Nowak fortune confront their past and their isolation.
Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs (first published under the French title L’Homme qui Rit in April 1869) is a sad and sordid tale — not the sort of tale of the moment Hugo was known for. It starts on the night of January 29, 1690, a ten-year-old boy abandoned — the stern men who’ve kept him since infancy have wearied of him. The boy wanders, barefoot and starving, through a snowstorm to reach a gibbet bearing the corpse of a hanged criminal. Beneath the gibbet is a ragged woman, frozen to death. The boy is about to move onward when he hears a sound within the woman’s garments: He discovers an infant girl, barely alive, clutching the woman’s breast. A single drop of frozen milk, resembling a pearl, is on the woman’s lifeless breast…
Home to generations of humans, the starship Argonos has wandered aimlessly throughout the galaxy for hundreds of years, desperately searching for other signs of life. Now an unidentified transmission lures them toward a nearby planet-and into the dark heart of an alien mystery.
Janet Burroway’s bestselling Imaginative Writng: The Elements of Craft explores the craft of creative writing in four genres: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Creative Nonfiction. A trade author as well as a professor of creative writing, Burroway brings her years of teaching and writing to this book. “Try-This” exercises appear throughout each chapter. Provocative and fun, these exercises help writers develop the specific writing skills discussed within the text. “Working toward a draft” exercises encourage writers to develop their ideas into complete drafts. In response to reviewer requests, the preface “Invitation to the Writer” has been expanded into a full chapter. This new chapter introduces writers to important skills such as reading like a writer, journaling, and participating in the writer’s workshop. This book offers lots of ideas and encouragement at a great price!
The Robinsons leave their home in Switzerland planning to settle half a world away. But things do not turn out as they had expected. The sole survivors of a terrible shipwreck, they wash ashore to learn that the danger has only begun. Their new world will test their courage, cleverness, endurance, and faith as they struggle to survive and create a civilization of their own in the wilderness.
Note: This Townsend Library classic has been carefully edited to be more accessible to today’s students. It includes a brief author’s biography and an afterword that provides important context about the work.
From a former New York Times science writer, this urgent call to action will empower you to stand up to climate change and environmental pollution by making simple but impactful everyday choices.With urgency and wit, Tatiana Schlossberg explains that far from being only a distant problem of the natural world created by the fossil fuel industry, climate change is all around us, all the time, lurking everywhere in our convenience-driven society, all without our realizing it.
By examining the unseen and unconscious environmental impacts in four areas-the Internet and technology, food, fashion, and fuel – Schlossberg helps readers better understand why climate change is such a complicated issue, and how it connects all of us: How streaming a movie on Netflix in New York burns coal in Virginia; how eating a hamburger in California might contribute to pollution in the Gulf of Mexico; how buying an inexpensive cashmere sweater in Chicago expands the Mongolian desert; how destroying forests from North Carolina is necessary to generate electricity in England.
Cataloging the complexities and frustrations of our carbon-intensive society with a dry sense of humor, Schlossberg makes the climate crisis and its solutions interesting and relevant to everyone who cares, even a little, about the planet. She empowers readers to think about their stuff and the environment in a new way, helping them make more informed choices when it comes to the future of our world.
Most importantly, this is a book about the power we have as voters and consumers to make sure that the fight against climate change includes all of us and all of our stuff, not just industry groups and politicians. If we have any hope of solving the problem, we all have to do it together.
Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk the Green Mile, keeping a date with “Old Sparky,” Cold Mountain’s electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working the Mile. But he’s never seen anyone like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence and shocking in its depravity. In this place of ultimate retribution, Edgecombe is about to discover the terrible, wondrous truth about Coffey, a truth that will challenge his most cherished beliefs… and yours.
Many hundreds of years ago, the city of Ember was created by the Builders to contain everything needed for human survival. It worked…but now the storerooms are almost out of food, crops are blighted, corruption is spreading through the city and worst of all—the lights are failing. Soon Ember could be engulfed by darkness…
But when two children, Lina and Doon, discover fragments of an ancient parchment, they begin to wonder if there could be a way out of Ember. Can they decipher the words from long ago and find a new future for everyone? Will the people of Ember listen to them?
Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy’s “Golden Age”―spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s―when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond. Best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin illustrates how American colonists at first supported these outrageous pirates in an early display of solidarity against the Crown, and then violently opposed them. Through engrossing episodes of roguish glamour and extreme brutality, Dolin depicts the star pirates of this period, among them towering Blackbeard, ill-fated Captain Kidd, and sadistic Edward Low, who delighted in torturing his prey. Also brilliantly detailed are the pirates’ manifold enemies, including colonial governor John Winthrop, evangelist Cotton Mather, and young Benjamin Franklin. Upending popular misconceptions and cartoonish stereotypes, Dolin provides this wholly original account of the seafaring outlaws whose raids reflect the precarious nature of American colonial life.
More than a decade after his death, alienated, awkward, heavily eye-lined Kurt Cobain continues to sit front and center in the arena of popular culture, as the subject of books, music, fashion, gossip, and inspiration for major motion pictures and documentaries. Together with flannelsporting, music-obsessed communities emerging (in the late 1980s and early 1990s) from the chilly Pacific Northwest, Nirvana, Sound Garden, and Pearl Jam changed the scene with wild aggressive sounds and truly alternative records.
Author Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth)—who introduced Kurt Cobain t David Geffen (Geffen Records), a meeting that resulted in Nirvana’s first major debut, Nevermind, in September 1991, which by December was selling 400,000 copies a week—writes about the discovery of Seattle punk youth, the seminal bands that defined the movement, the exploitation of the subculture, and the backlash of grunge, as well as the death of his longtime collaborator and intimate Cobain.
Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.
Since the 1934 publication of Mary Poppins, stories of this magical nanny have delighted children and adults the world over. In honor of the book’s 80th anniversary comes this lush collection that includes the first four tales by P. L. Travers, illustrated by Mary Shepard: Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins Comes Back, Mary Poppins Opens the Door, and Mary Poppins in the Park. Featuring a gilded cover, a foreword by Gregory Maguire, and an essay by P. L. Travers about the writing of Mary Poppins, this handsome volume will make a lovely gift for fans new and old. Travel on the east wind to Cherry Tree Lane with Mary in these stories that inspired the classic film, the stage show, and young imaginations the world over.
Twenty years after the release of Nirvana’s landmark album Nevermind comes Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, the definitive word on the grunge era, straight from the mouths of those at the center of it all.
In 1986, fledgling Seattle label C/Z Records released Deep Six, a compilation featuring a half-dozen local bands: Soundgarden, Green River, Melvins, Malfunkshun, the U-Men and Skin Yard. Though it sold miserably, the record made music history by documenting a burgeoning regional sound, the raw fusion of heavy metal and punk rock that we now know as grunge. But it wasn’t until five years later, with the seemingly overnight success of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” that grunge became a household word and Seattle ground zero for the nineties alternative-rock explosion.
Everybody Loves Our Town captures the grunge era in the words of the musicians, producers, managers, record executives, video directors, photographers, journalists, publicists, club owners, roadies, scenesters and hangers-on who lived through it. The book tells the whole story: from the founding of the Deep Six bands to the worldwide success of grunge’s big four (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains); from the rise of Seattle’s cash-poor, hype-rich indie label Sub Pop to the major-label feeding frenzy that overtook the Pacific Northwest; from the simple joys of making noise at basement parties and tiny rock clubs to the tragic, lonely deaths of superstars Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley.
Drawn from more than 250 new interviews—with members of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees, Hole, Melvins, Mudhoney, Green River, Mother Love Bone, Temple of the Dog, Mad Season, L7, Babes in Toyland, 7 Year Bitch, TAD, the U-Men, Candlebox and many more—and featuring previously untold stories and never-before-published photographs, Everybody Loves Our Town is at once a moving, funny, lurid, and hugely insightful portrait of an extraordinary musical era.
From Daniel M. Lavery comes a collection of darkly mischievous stories based on classic fairy tales. Adapted from his beloved “Children’s Stories Made Horrific” series, The Merry Spinster takes up the trademark wit that endeared Lavery to readers of both The Toast and his best-selling debut Texts from Jane Eyre. The feature become among the most popular on the site, with each entry bringing in tens of thousands of views, as the stories proved a perfect vehicle for Lavery’s eye for deconstruction and destabilization. Sinister and inviting, familiar and alien all at the same time, The Merry Spinster updates traditional children’s stories and fairy tales with elements of psychological horror, emotional clarity, and a keen sense of feminist mischief.
Readers of The Toast will instantly recognize Lavery’s boisterous good humor and uber-nerd swagger: those new to Lavery’s oeuvre will delight in his unique spin on fiction, where something a bit mischievous and unsettling is always at work just beneath the surface.
Unfalteringly faithful to its beloved source material, The Merry Spinster also illuminates the unsuspected, and frequently, alarming emotional complexities at play in the stories we tell ourselves, and each other, as we tuck ourselves in for the night.
Bedtime will never be the same.
When a mysterious explosion destroys the bridge of His Majesty’s Airship Daedalus, Lt. Commander Malcolm Robertson, Chief Engineer, finds himself thrust into the role of Captain on a secretive mission to Russia.
With an Airship full of British and Russian scientists whose intelligence is matched only by their egos, spies watching his every move, and a real saboteur on board, Malcolm must find a way to complete his mission and bring his crew home safely.
With The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe raised the Gothic romance to a new level and inspired a long line of imitators. Portraying her heroine’s inner life, creating a thick atmosphere of fear, and providing a gripping plot that continues to thrill readers today, The Mysteries of Udolpho is the story of orphan Emily St. Aubert, who finds herself separated from the man she loves and confined within the medieval castle of her aunt’s new husband, Montoni. Inside the castle, she must cope with an unwanted suitor, Montoni’s threats, and the wild imaginings and terrors that threaten to overwhelm her.
Between 1975 and 1988 New York City spawned an incredible and wild array of artistic communities that overlapped and interbred with scant heed for generic “purity” (let alone posterity): every musician, it seemed, was also an artist, every artist a filmmaker and every filmmaker was in a band. These heady years saw the births of Punk at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, of Hip Hop in the Bronx, the emerging art music activities of Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, Free Jazz and the No Wave art/rock scene around James Chance, Lydia Lunch and Mars. “New York Noise” is Paula Court’s photographic tour of these colliding worlds. From her arrival in New York City in 1978, Court diligently photographed the likes of Glenn Branca, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, David Byrne, Rhys Chatham, Lou Reed, James Chance, Patti Smith, Afrika Bambaata, John Cage, Robert Longo, Jim Jarmusch, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, as well as bands like DNA, Suicide, Bush Tetras, ESG and the Rock Steady Crew. Also captured in these pages are nascent musicians and actors such as Michael Stipe, Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe and Madonna, who came into artistic maturity amid these diverse scenes. With over 400 images, many of them previously unpublished, “New York Noise” follows Soul Jazz Records’ critically acclaimed CD series, providing an unprecedented visual record of one of New York’s liveliest cultural eras.
Southern California—sunny days, blue skies, neighbors on flying bicycles…ghostly submarines…mermen off the Catalina coast…and a vast underground sea stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Inland Empire where Chinese junks ply an illicit trade and enormous creatures from ages past still survive. It is a place of wonder…and dark conspiracies. A place rife with adventure—if one knows where to look for it. Two such seekers are the teenagers Jim Hastings and his friend, Giles Peach. Giles was born with a wonderful set of gills along his neck and insatiable appetite for reading. Drawing inspiration from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Giles is determined to build a Digging Leviathan. Will he reach the center of the earth? or destroy it in the process?
Supersonic presents over 300 striking pages of today’s best-designed music products with a focus on Independent and Alternative Rock as well as Electronica. In addition to abundant visuals, the book features portraits of selected designers and companies, who are creating outstanding work in these musical fields. With its stunning images from today’s most exciting music, Supersonic is a source of inspiration for all music insiders, graphic artists creating music packaging and anyone interested in cutting-edge visuals.
When the Manic Street Preachers burst onto the music scene in 1990 with their working-class provocations and androgynous punk rantings, they intrigued and outraged both the music press and their fans, and have continued to do so ever since. In this lively, comprehensive biography, Martin Clarke conjures a vivid portrait of the band, from their formative years as a tight-knit gang in South Wales through their daring and ridiculous intellectualism and ascendancy to the world stage to the tragic loss of Richey Edwards. Perhaps more than any other contemporary British group, the Manics have always been surrounded by myth, even before Edwards mysteriously vanished in 1995. Clarke cuts through the swath of rumor and hearsay with a perceptive and factual look at a complex, multi-layered, and frequently self-contradictory band whose compelling music makes them one of modern rock’s most remarkable stories.
Set in England’s Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of very special creatures on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of friends, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society.
He is a record collector — a connoisseur of vinyl, hunting out rare and elusive LPs. His business card describes him as the “Vinyl Detective” and some people take this more literally than others.
Like the beautiful, mysterious woman who wants to pay him a large sum of money to find a priceless lost recording — on behalf of an extremely wealthy (and rather sinister) shadowy client.
Given that he’s just about to run out of cat biscuits, this gets our hero’s full attention. So begins a painful and dangerous odyssey in search of the rarest jazz record of them all…