By: Cappello, Mary
Hardcover | $29.00 | 9780226356068
2016 Staff Favorite
My only proof that Life Breaks In was written with an audience in mind is in Cappello's play with language. Depression, for instance, used to be known as "the exactingly physical, 'jaw fall'; or the bluntly negating 'unlust.'" Otherwise, Cappello's most circuitous and literate account of our moods' what and wherabouts is fluctuant and unconcerned as mood itself. "Depression," it turns out, "is not so much a mood as it is a refusal to give oneself over to mood's unpredictable changeability." Nuance and amorphism are key, not just to figuring out who we are, but that we are. Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" plays an important role, as well. Life Breaks In does what the essay claims to do: it tries, before it knows, and in doing so instills in us desire to try, too. To try what, exactly? That's up to you.
-Colin
Some books start at point A, take you by the hand, and carefully walk you to point B, and on and on.
This is not one of those books. This book is about mood, and how it works in and with us as complicated, imperfectly self-knowing beings existing in a world that impinges and infringes on us,...
By: Murdoch, Iris; Horner, Avril (
Hardcover | $39.95 | 9780691170565
For the first time, novelist Iris Murdoch's life in her own words, from girlhood to her last years
Iris Murdoch was an acclaimed novelist and groundbreaking philosopher whose life reflected her unconventional beliefs and values. But what has been missing from biographical accounts has...
By: Kaplan, Alice
Hardcover | $26.00 | 9780226241678
The Stranger is a rite of passage for readers around the world. Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus's novel has been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. It's the rare novel that's as at likely to be found in a teen's backpack as in a graduate...
By: Foldenyi, Laszlo
Hardcover | $35.00 | 9780300167481
A leading European intellectual reflects on the changing concept of melancholy throughout history Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer László Földényi as "one of the most brilliant essayists of our time." Földényi's extraordinary
Melancholy, with its profusion of literary...
By: Manginis, George
Hardcover | $22.95 | 9781910376508
A mountain peak above Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt, Mount Sinai is best known as the site where Moses received the Ten Commandments in the biblical Book of Exodus. Mount Sinai brings this rich history to light, exploring the ways in which the landscape of Mount Sinai's summit has...
By: Murray, Albert; Devlin, Paul (
Hardcover | $25.95 | 9780816699551
The year 2016 will mark the centennial of the birth of Albert Murray (1916-2013), who in thirteen books was by turns a lyrical novelist, a keen and iconoclastic social critic, and a formidable interpreter of jazz and blues. Not only did his prizewinning study Stomping the Blues (1976)...
By: Ruefle, Mary
Hardcover | $25.00 | 9781940696386
Author of Madness, Rack, and Honey (One of the wisest books I've read in years, according to the New York Times) and Trances of the Blast, Mary Ruefle continues to be one of the most dazzling poets in America. My Private Property, comprised of short prose pieces, is a...
By: Putnam, Hilary
Hardcover | $54.50 | 9780674659698
Hilary Putnam's ever-evolving philosophical oeuvre has been called "the history of recent philosophy in outline"--an intellectual achievement, nearly seventy years in the making, that has shaped disciplinary fields from epistemology to ethics, metaphysics to the philosophy of physics, the...
By: Jagoda, Patrick
Paperback | $30.00 | 9780226346519
The term "network" is now applied to everything from the Internet to terrorist-cell systems. But the word's ubiquity has also made it a cliché, a concept at once recognizable yet hard to explain. Network Aesthetics, in exploring how popular culture mediates our experience with interconnected...
By: Parini, Jay
Hardcover | $27.95 | 9780807030134
A new book, the first in over a decade, from acclaimed poet Jay Parini This volume revolves around his deep connection to nature and underlines his concerns about the impacts of pollution and climate change. In these beautiful, haunting poems, Parini writes about the landscapes of mining...
By: Nguyen, Viet Thanh
Hardcover | $29.00 | 9780674660342
All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War--a conflict that...
By: Moore, Marianne
Paperback | $17.00 | 9780374226862
Marianne Moore's Observations stands with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's early Cantos, and Wallace Stevens's Harmonium as a landmark of modern poetry. But to the chagrin of many admirers, Moore eliminated a third of its contents from her subsequent poetry...
By: Nehamas, Alexander
Hardcover | $30.00 | 9780465082926
2016 Staff Favorite
A thought-provoking, wide-ranging, philosophical consideration of the joys and perils of friendship by a tremendous stylist.
-Jeff
An eminent philosopher reflects on the nature of friendship, past and present Friends are a constant feature of our lives, yet friendship itself is difficult to define. Even Michel de Montaigne, author of the seminal essay "Of Friendship," found it nearly impossible to account for the...
By: Rowe, C. Kavin
Hardcover | $40.00 | 9780300180121
In this groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary work of philosophy and biblical studies, New Testament scholar C. Kavin Rowe explores the promise and problems inherent in engaging rival philosophical claims to what is true. Juxtaposing the Roman Stoics Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius with the...
By: Pinder, Kymberly N.
Paperback | $29.95 | 9780252081439
Innovative and lavishly illustrated, Painting the Gospel offers an indispensable contribution to conversations about African American art, theology, politics, and identity in Chicago. Kymberly N. Pinder escorts readers on an eye-opening odyssey to the murals, stained glass, and sculptures...
By: Goldsworthy, Adrian
Hardcover | $32.50 | 9780300178821
A groundbreaking and comprehensive history of the Roman Peace from one of the leading historians of the ancient world Best-selling author Adrian Goldsworthy turns his attention to the Pax Romana, the famous peace and prosperity brought by the Roman Empire at its height in the first and...
By: Adamson, Peter
Hardcover | $39.95 | 9780199577491
The latest in the series based on the popular History of Philosophy podcast, this volume presents the first full history of philosophy in the Islamic world for a broad readership. It takes an approach unprecedented among introductions to this subject, by providing full coverage of Jewish and
...
By: Belknap, Robert L.
Hardcover | $30.00 | 9780231177825
Robert L. Belknap's theory of plot illustrates the active and passive roles literature plays in creating its own dynamic reading experience. Literary narrative enchants us through its development of plot, but plot tells its own story about the making of narrative, revealing through its structures,...
By: Heidegger, Martin
Hardcover | $60.00 | 9780253020673
Ponderings II-VI begins the much-anticipated English translation of Martin Heidegger's "Black Notebooks." In a series of small notebooks with black covers, Heidegger confided sundry personal observations and ideas over the course of 40 years. The five notebooks in...
By: Wordsworth, William; Engell, J
Hardcover | $50.00 | 9781567925715
"An outsize, gorgeous book, replete with paintings and drawings--landscapes, houses, portraits--contemporaneous with the poem. At last we have a worthy visual counterpart to one of the timeless monuments of English verse."--The Wall Street Journal
The Prelude,...
