'These days, watching television is like sitting in the back of Travis Bickle's taxicab, staring through the window at a world of relentless, churning shod ... 'Cruel, acerbic, impassioned, gleeful, frequently outrageous and always hilarious, Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn collects the best of the much-loved Guardian Guide columns into one easy-to-read-on-the-toilet package.Sit back and roar as Brooker rips mercilessly into Simon Cowell, Big Brother, Trinny and Susannah, Casualty, Davina McCall, Michael Parkinson ... and almost everything elso on television.This book will make practically anyone laugh out loud.
Would you like to eat whatever you want and still lose weight? Who wouldn't? Keep dreaming, imbecile. In the meantime, if you'd like to read something that alternates between laugh-out-loud-funny and apocalyptically angry, keep holding this book. Steal it if necessary. In his latest collection of rants, raves, hastily spluttered articles and scarcely literate scrawl, Charlie Brooker proves that there is almost nothing in this universe, big or small, that can't reduce a human being to a state of pure blind hatred. It won't help you lose weight, feel smarter, sleep more soundly, or feel happier about yourself. It WILL provide you with literally hours of distraction and merriment. It can also be used to stun an intruder, if you hit him with it correctly (hint: strike hard, using the spine, on the bridge of the nose). ONLY A PRICK WOULDN'T BUY THIS BOOK. DON'T BE THAT PRICK.
Polite, pensive, mature, reserved ...Charlie Brooker is none of these things and less. Picking up where his hilarious Screen Burn left off, Dawn of the Dumb collects the best of Charlie Brooker's recent TV writing, together with uproarious spleen-venting diatribes on a range of non-televisual subjects - tackling everything from David Cameron to human hair. Rude, unhinged, outrageous, and above all funny, Dawn of the Dumb is essential reading for anyone with a brain and a spinal cord. And hands for turning the pages.
Brooker on the BNP Party Political Broadcast: 'Nick Griffin's first line is "Don't turn it off!", which in terms of opening gambits is about as enticing as hearing someone shout "Try not to be sick!" immediately prior to intercourse.' Brooker on Philip from The Apprentice: 'If it were legal or even possible to do so, he'd probably marry himself, then conduct a long-term affair with himself behind himself's back, eventually fathering nine children with himself, all of whom would walk and talk like him. And then he'd lock those mini-hims in a secret underground dungeon to have his sick way with his selves, undetected, for decades.' Brooker on Royal Ascot: 'Every year it's the same thing: a 200-year-old countess you've never heard of, who closely resembles a Cruella De Vil mannequin assembled entirely from heavily wrinkled scrotal tissue that's been soaked in tea for the past eight decades, attempts to draw attention away from her sagging neck - a droopy curtain of skin that hangs so low she has to repeatedly kick it out of her path as she crosses the royal compound - by balancing the millinery equivalent of Bilbao's Guggenheim museum on her head.'
With a foreword by Richard Dawkins, and based on the BAFTA award-winning Channel 4 TV series, Inside Nature’s Giants gets under the skin of the largest animals on the planet. See them as you've never seen them before – from the inside out.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).
This erudite volume examines the moral universe of the hit Netflix show Black Mirror. It brings together scholars in media studies, cultural studies, anthropology, literature, philosophy, psychology, theatre and game studies to analyse the significance and reverberations of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian universe with our present-day technologically mediated life world. Brooker’s ground-breaking Black Mirror anthology generates often disturbing and sometimes amusing future imaginaries of the dark side of ubiquitous screen life, as it unleashes the power of the uncanny. This book takes the psychoanalytic idea of the uncanny into a moral framework befitting Black Mirror’s dystopian visions. The volume suggests that the Black Mirror anthology doesn’t just make the viewer feel, on the surface, a strange recognition of closeness to some of its dystopian scenarios, but also makes us realise how very fragile, wavering, fractured, and uncertain is the human moral compass.
First book devoted to the diagnosis and treatment of sexual pain in women Female Sexual Pain Disorders is a remarkable fusion of clinical and scientific knowledge that will empower women’s healthcare professionals to help their patients in overcoming this common debilitating disorder. Based on the highest level research, it provides state-of-the-art practical guidance that will help you to: Evaluate and distinguish the causes of sexual pain in women Differentiate the many forms of sexual pain Implement multidisciplinary treatments Distilling the experience of world leaders across many clinical, therapeutic and scientific disciplines, with an array of algorithms and diagnostic tools, Female Sexual Pain Disorders is your ideal companion for treating the many millions of women who suffer from this disorder worldwide. All proceeds from this book are being donated to the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health (ISSWSH).
This new and topical book, written by editors of the international journal Gender and Education, and aimed at educational professionals, draws together the findings and arguments from the wealth of material available on gender and achievement.
How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.
