Human Ageing: A Unique Experience explores the biology of human ageing focusing on the individual. The book begins with the premature ageing disorder Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria syndrome and spins a web of interconnected biological domains involving lamins, telomeres, alternative splicing, genetics, epigenetics, and molecular clocks. The profound influence of culture is explored since cultural inheritance and genetic inheritance are the two intertwined processes driving human evolution. An...

Posing Sex: Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Art views the long and provocative tradition of representing the sexual act in Western art as an occasion for challenging assumptions about personhood.It is uncontroversial that what Singer dubs the “sex image,” the artist's posing of human figures in the act of coitus, is an enduring compositional armature for artists from antiquity to the present. Singer, however, makes the quite controversial claim that this...

Attending to the Literary: The Distinctiveness of Literature is a foray into current debates about the nature of the literary. What is literary? Is literarity a thing? Are there still aesthetic standards of taste? Is the category of literary aesthetics an obstacle to understanding the uses of literature? What does it mean to count the reading of literature as an experience in its own right? What would be the deficits to human experience without literature?Attendin...

Alan Singer’s riveting new novel, The Inquisitor’s Tongue, reimagines the Spanish Inquisition as a world in which spiritual horrors and acts of violence are the birth pangs of otherwise unimaginable identities.The novel is the intersection of two narratives. The confession of Osvaldo Alonzo de Zamora, a miraculously gifted converso wine taster, is read aloud by a duplicitous priest of the Inquisition as an admonitory lesson to a suspected sinner. The competing narrative is...

This one-of-a-kind collection of chapters takes the reader on a tour to explore innovative practices from classrooms, schools, districts, communities, and faraway places in the world. Each of the chapters-organized under six headings-tells an authentic, compelling story of a pioneering and successful initiative that breaks the traditional mold of instructional delivery and time-honored school organization. Breaking the Mold of School Instruction and Organization guides readers thr...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of The Untethered Soul and Living Untethered comes the astonishing true-life story about the spiritual harmony and personal happiness he found when he just let go.“With his hallmark precision and clarity Michael Singer reveals how everyday life, doing business in the world, and spiritual practice can be synchronized to carry us into the heart of life’s unimaginable perfection.”—Jack Canf...

Hailed by The New York Times as "a compelling dystopian look at paranoia from one of the most unique and perceptive writers of our time," this brief, captivating novel offers a cautionary tale.The book takes place at some unspecified future date when mankind has entered another dark age characterized by irrationality, collectivism, and socialistic thinking and economics. Technological advancement is now carefully planned (when it is allowed to occur at all) and the concept of indivi...

A collection of pivotal ideas about beauty from throughout history, with an introduction and critical headnotes.This collection of writings on beauty includes selections from twenty key philosophers and theoreticians spanning two millennia:Plato • Aristotle • Vitruvius • Alberti • Kant • Burke • Fiedler • Nietzsche • Wilde • Bergson • Bell • Scott • Benjamin • Bataille • Sontag • Jameson • Scarry • Nehamas • Zangwill • Freedberg and GalleseWith an i...

A man with no memory of his past and a struggling, blind street artist will face off against the will of the gods as the secrets of this stranger's past are revealed in the sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the debut novel of NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.In the city of Shadow, beneath the World Tree, alleyways shimmer with magic and godlings live hidden among mortalkind. Oree Shoth, a blind artist, takes in a strange homeless man on...

Gary Jennings's Aztec is the extraordinary story of the last and greatest native civilization of North America.Told in the words of one of the most robust and memorable characters in modern fiction, Mixtli-Dark Cloud, Aztec reveals the very depths of Aztec civilization from the peak and feather-banner splendor of the Aztec Capital of Tenochtitlan to the arrival of Hernán Cortás and his conquistadores, and their destruction of the Aztec empire. The...

If you are disturbed by the idea that to grow up is to learn to live with disillusionment, if you are fascinated by the perplexity of child-rearing, or if you fear you were more creative as a child, The Beast in the Nursery offers an illuminating and possibly life-changing experience.In four interrelated essays, Adam Phillips arrives at startling new insights into issues that preoccupied Freud, showing in the process that far from having lost its relevance, psychoanalysis is still o...

Anthem was written by Ayn Rand and first published in 1938. In Anthem, Rand examines a frightening future in which individuals have no name, no independence, and no values. Equality 7-2521 lives in the dark ages of the future where all decisions are made by committee, all people live in collectives, and all traces of individualism have been wiped out. Despite such a restrictive environment, the spark of individual thought and freedom still burns in him--a passion which he has been taught t...