""The mannequins are here again. I can feel them throbbing in my ears. They're standing around in the kitchen, impassive as stone. But inside they're laughing. I'm not getting out of bed for them, not this time."" In the Dark Room is a surreal novella written and illustrated by James Knight, author of Head Traumas. The story is narrated by a bedridden man who finds himself besieged by memories, fantasies and the mannequins at the bottom of the stairs. Knight's combination of words and pictures invites us into a strange yet familiar world, governed by the logic of a dream. This special edition includes 40 full colour ""oneirographs,"" Knight's trademark dream pictures.
The Dark Room...it's the place fear comes from. For DI Andrew Hicks, solving a murder is logical: your first suspicions are usually right. So when the brutally beaten body of a young woman is found, his attention focuses closely on the ex-boyfriend. But then more bodies start appearing, all beaten beyond recognition, and there is no connection between any of the victims. Because this is a new type of killer, one who revels in chaos. To survive, Hicks must face not only a serial killer with no discernable motive, but the hidden darkness of his own past.
The last few decades have been among the most dynamic within recent British cultural history. Artists across all genres and media have developed and re-fashioned their practice against a radically changing social and cultural landscape – both national and global. This book takes a fresh look at some of the themes, ideas and directions which have informed British art since the later 1980s through to the first decade of the new millennium. In addition to discussing some iconic images and examples, it also looks more broadly at the contexts in which a new ‘post-conceptual’ generation of artists, those typically born since the late 1950s and 1960s have approached and developed aspects of their professional practice. Contemporary British Art is an ideal introduction to the field. To guide the reader, the book is organised around genres or related practices – painting; sculpture and installation; and film, video and performance. The first chapter explores aspects of the contemporary art market and some of the contexts within which art is made, supported and exhibited. The chapters that discuss various genres of art practice also mention books that may be useful to support further reading. Extensively illustrated with a wide range of work (both known, and less well-known) from artists such as Chris Ofili, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, Banksy, Anthony Gormley, Jack Vettriano, Sam Taylor-Wood, Steve McQueen and Tracey Emin, and many more.
“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
"In what kinds of spaces do we become most aware of the thoughts in our own heads? My Dark Room is a book about the intimate sites of inner experience in eighteenth-century England and their role in the rise both of interiority and the novel. Julie Park considers sites such as grottos, cottages, closets, and especially the camera obscura, that beguiling enclosure into which the outside world is projected through a lens. This type of "dark room" and the projections within it serve Park as a paradigm for the fleeting states of interiority that eighteenth-century figures felt compelled to generate and experience. Park integrates material analyses of these "interior" spaces with close readings of novelistic and proto-novelistic texts. Taken together, these case studies amount to a fresh narrative of the novel's development as a genre of interiority from 1650 to 1811. They include Andrew Marvell's country house poem, Upon Appleton House; Margaret Cavendish's loosely fictional letters about domestic life, Sociable Letters, and the utopian fantasy/critique of the new science, The Blazing World; and Alexander Pope's long poem, Eloisa to Abelard. Park's innovative method of "spatial formalism" reveals how physical settings enable psychic interiors to achieve vitality in fictive and real lives"--
Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity returns to and reflects on the spatial and architectural experience of childbirth, through both a critical history of maternity spaces and a creative exploration of those we use today. Where conventional architectural histories objectify buildings (in parallel with the objectification of the maternal body), the book—in the mode of creative practice research—presents a creative-critical autotheory of the architecture of lying-in. It uses feminist, subjective modes of thinking that travel across disciplines, registers and arguments. The book assesses the transformation of maternity spaces—from the female bedchamber of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century marital homes, to the lying-in hospitals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries purposely built by man-midwives, to the late twentieth-century spaces of home and the modern hospital maternity wing—and the parallel shifts in maternal practices. The spaces are not treated as mute or neutral backdrops to maternal history but as a series of vital, entangled atmospheres, materials, practices and objects that are produced by, and, in turn, produce particular social and political conditions, gendered structures and experiences. Moving across spaces, systems, protagonists and their subjectivities, the book shows how hospital design and protocol altered ordinary birth at home and continues to shape maternal spatial experience today. As such, it will be of interest to a wide range of readers, from architectural historians, theoreticians, designers and students to medical humanities historians, to English Literature, humanities and material studies scholars, as well as those interested in creative-critical writing.
R. K. Narayan (1906—2001) witnessed nearly a century of change in his native India and captured it in fiction of uncommon warmth and vibrancy. In The Dark Room, Narayan’s portrait of aggrieved domesticity, the docile and obedient Savitri, like many Malgudi women, is torn between submitting to her husband’s humiliations and trying to escape them. Written during British rule, this novel brings colonial India into intimate focus through the narrative gifts of this master of literary realism.
