Virginia Woolf’s novel famously begins – ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’ Of course she would: why would anyone surrender the best part of the day to someone else? Flowers grace our lives at moments of celebration and despair. ‘We eat, drink, sing, dance, and flirt with them’, writes Kakuzo Okakura. Flowers brighten our homes, our parties, and our rituals with incomparable notes of natural beauty, but the ‘nature’ in these displays is tamed and conscribed. This book a...

Why do we travel? What are we doing – and what do we imagine we are doing – when we leave the house, get on a plane and thereby step into globalism? The Importance of Elsewhere is a collection of essays, rooted in Randy Malamud’s own lifetime of travel, that addresses those questions and more. Setting today’s tourism in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiences of travel and travel writing, he uncovers motives and appreciations of movement, difference and novel...

CRASH! explores the fascinating, revealing, and surprising cultural impact of plane crashes across art, literature, music, media, and creative nonfiction.Plane crashes are covered extensively but they are not analyzed very deeply, beyond rote media reports and forensic accident investigations. This is despite the voluminous, diverse, and fascinating cultural materials - poems and novels, songs, films, art, TV series, and on and on - that emerge in the wake...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Sometime in the mid-1990s we began, often with some trepidation, to enroll for a service that promised to connect us--electronically and efficiently--to our friends and lovers, our bosses and clients. If it seemed at first like simply a change in scale (our mail would be faster, cheaper, more easily distributed to large groups), we now realize that email entails a more fundamen...

Metamorphoses of the Zoo: Animal Encounter After Noah is a volume dedicated to radically transformative approaches to spaces set aside as zoological parks or gardens. Historically, these establishments served as symbols of power and venues for entertainment, but today, they have taken to portraying themselves as flagships of environmental education, scientific research, and wildlife conservation. Along with the past century's turn in exhibition design toward increasingly naturalis...