This book is a bifurcated journey through fifteen years of the architecture practice OODA, designed as a "dream state" inner dialogue between Some Kind of Romance and Any Kind of Existence: mirrored reflections of past and future projects that reflects the practice's work and exploring path from Porto to the world. Read together, these two parts are less about buildings than about a way of being in the world, offering an open narrative where architecture is presented as if in a chronicle, ...

In Blood Bound: Unlacing Secret Ties, costume historian Geoffroy Le Hideux recognizes the coat of arms of Madame de Pompadour on a blood-stained dress found hidden in the walls of the Élysée Palace. In a genealogical investigation taking her from Montreal to Paris, Lou Ashby, a successful communications agent at a television station called La Chaîne, meets Geoffroy. Together they will expose a secret that alters what was considered historical fact: Madame de Pompadour did not have...

Going travelling is one of the few things we undertake in a direct attempt to make ourselves happy - and frequently, in fascinating ways, we fail. We get bored, cross, anxious or lonely. It isn't surprising our societies act as if going travelling were simple, just a case of handing over the right sum of money. But a satisfying journey isn't something we can simply buy: it's the result of an art that has to be learnt.This is the guide: not to any one destination but to travel in ge...

What is a meaningful life? What does it mean to flourish?Antonia Case, the co-founder of New Philosopher and Womankind magazines, quits her corporate job in the city and, with her partner, travels across the world in search of meaning. In a quest to find answers, she turns off the soundtrack of the media, rids herself of technology, and with little more than books as carry-on luggage, she journeys from Buenos Aires to Paris, from Barcelona to Byro...

Here is Jon Krakauer’s portrait of the iconoclastic architect Christopher Alexander, whose revolutionary human-centered approach has shaken the foundations of modern architecture.Krakauer delves into Alexander’s life and career, from his theories on a timeless “pattern language” that could be used to create buildings and towns that were simultaneously more livable and more beautiful, to his belief that architecture is correctly viewed as a powerful social instrumen...

"A warm and expansive portrait of a woman’s mind that feels at once singular and universal," this collection of essays interweaves commentary on modern life, feminism, art, and sex with the author's own experiences of obsession, heartbreak, and vulnerability (BuzzFeed).Like a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go.Pop Song is a book about love and about f...

In The Things We've Seen, his most ambitious and accomplished novel to date, Agustín Fernández Mallo captures the strangeness and interconnectedness of human existence in the twenty-first century. A writer travels to the small uninhabited island of San Simón, used as a Franquist concentration camp during the Spanish Civil War, and witnesses events which impel him on a wild goose chase across several continents. In Miami, an ageing Kurt Montana, the fourth astronaut who secretly ac...

In the wake of the Great Blackout, faced with the near-extinction of humanity, a pair of lovers speak to each other. They parse, with precision, with familiarity, the endless aspects of their love. Out of their dialogues, piece by piece, a composite image of love takes form, one that moves outwards beyond the realm of relationships and into metaphysics, geology, linguistics, AI.Years previously, a writer and her husband, a Latin professor, stay in Venice while she works on a text. A...

Our towns and cities are saturated with the imagery of commerce and advertising, but alongside it a new creative phenomenon is demanding our attention: art, on the street, available for everyone to see. Banksy, Blek le Rat, Os Gêmeos and JR are just some of the major practitioners whose works are showcased in this book. From huge murals to exquisite miniature art that can easily be missed, the examples here are powerful expressions of what it is to be a modern human living in an urban land...

Everyone knows that the best things in life are free . . but it's easy to forget in a world of constant advertising and competitive consumerism. 102 Free Things to Do is a warm, wise and witty reminder that almost everything that really matters can be done on less than a shoestring.Beautifully illustrated, always entertaining and full of surprising nuggets of advice and information, this is one of those rare books that might just change your life. Or at least make you feel a bit mor...

In the vein of The Creative Habit and The Artist’s Way, a new manifesto on the creative process from a master of the impossible.Since well before his epic 1974 walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, Philippe Petit had become an artist who answered first and foremost to the demands of his craft—not only on the high wire, but also as a magician, street juggler, visual artist, builder, and writer. A born rebel like many creative peop...