**“A marvelous book. It’s gossipy and personal and completely fascinating...cafe gossip with the footnotes left in.”— New York Times“A superbly engrossing adventure of ideas...this will surely be my philosophy book of the year.” —Sarah Bakewell, New York Times bestselling author of Humanly PossibleFrom leading critic and essayist Emily Eakin, a stylish personal history of French theory and its unlikely domination of American culture**When ...

**“A marvelous book. It’s gossipy and personal and completely fascinating...cafe gossip with the footnotes left in.”— New York Times“A superbly engrossing adventure of ideas...this will surely be my philosophy book of the year.” —Sarah Bakewell, New York Times bestselling author of Humanly PossibleFrom leading critic and essayist Emily Eakin, a stylish personal history of French theory and its unlikely domination of American culture**When ...

From one of cinema’s wisest and most penetrating observers, an arresting new perspective on the sweep of film history.David Thomson has been called “the greatest living writer on the movies.” Here is a career capstone of sorts—a one-volume history of film and screens as illuminating and provocative as his classic Biographical Dictionary of Film. In tracing the progress, from the Lumiere Brothers to the Coens, Thomson glories in the great movies, but admits...

A Pulitzer-finalist historian charts a 250-year-old intellectual and political tradition—the conviction that all Americans are NOT created equal.We think of the United States as a nation committed, at least on paper, to ideals of human equality, under God and/or under the law. But as robust as the notion of the "American dream" is a longstanding defense of social hierarchies, including vast gulfs between rich and poor.Drawing on forgotten characters and neg...

**A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR • SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZEIn this dazzling new biography, Richard Holmes, critically acclaimed author of The Age of Wonder, discovers in Young Tennyson an astonishingly magnetic and mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man haunted by the great intellectual and scientific issues of his time."[Holmes is a] master scholar-biographer. . . . In prose so lucid that you ...

**A New York Times Book Review Editors’ ChoiceAn extraordinary exposé of the industry flooding our world with plastic—and now ramping up to make more than ever“A compelling true-crime story.” —Zoë Schlanger, The New York Times Book Review“Deeply researched, sharply written, and totally compelling.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the The Sixth Extinction“It is impossible not to compare Beth Gardiner’s Plastic Inc. to Rachel ...

The son of Weather Underground radicals tells the story of a childhood on the run and a half-century of revolutionary struggle in America.Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground. His parents were fugitives after a decade fighting the US government; his mother was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. All his life, Dohrn's parents said his birth marked a clean break with violent revolutionary struggle, but in this explosive memoir, he discovers that story wasn't entirely...

Postmodernism has been a buzzword in contemporary society for the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler challenges and explores the key ideas of postmodernists, and their engagement with theory, literature, the visual arts, film, architecture, and music. He treats artists, intellectuals, critics, and social scientists 'as if they were all members of a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party' - a party which includes such memb...

In Žižek's long-awaited magnum opus, he theorizes the "parallax gap" in the ontological, the scientific, and the political—and rehabilitates dialectical materialism.The Parallax View is Slavoj Žižek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Žižek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Žižek is interested in the "parallax gap...

The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Ranci�re takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on ...

Newly published lectures by Foucault on madness, literature, and structuralism.Perceiving an enigmatic relationship between madness, language, and literature, French philosopher Michel Foucault developed ideas during the 1960s that are less explicit in his later, more well-known writings. Collected here, these previously unpublished texts reveal a Foucault who undertakes an analysis of language and experience detached from their historical constraints. Three issues...

Who was Jacques Derrida? For some, he is responsible, at least in part, for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to 'little more than an object of ridicule'. For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. In An Event Perhaps, Peter Salmon presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and ur...