Notes on the Underground, new edition

Notes on the Underground, new edition

Author: Rosalind Williams

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2008-04-11

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0262731908

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Real and imagined undergrounds in the late nineteenth century viewed as offering a prophetic look at life in today's technology-dominated world. The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical historical moment, giving equal coverage to actual and imaginary undergrounds. She looks at the real-life invasions of the underground that occurred as modern urban infrastructures of sewers and subways were laid, and at the simultaneous archaeological excavations that were unearthing both human history and the planet's deep past. She also examines the subterranean stories of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and other writers who proposed alternative visions of the coming technological civilization. Williams argues that these imagined and real underground environments provide models of human life in a world dominated by human presence and offer a prophetic look at today's technology-dominated society. In a new essay written for this edition, Williams points out that her book traces the emergence in the nineteenth century of what we would now call an environmental consciousness—an awareness that there will be consequences when humans live in a sealed, finite environment. Today we are more aware than ever of our limited biosphere and how vulnerable it is. Notes on the Underground, now even more than when it first appeared, offers a guide to the human, cultural, and technical consequences of what Williams calls “the human empire on earth.”


The Red Laugh and The Abyss

The Red Laugh and The Abyss

Author: Leonid Andreyev

Publisher: Broadview Press

Published: 2020-12-29

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 1770488049

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Leonid Andreyev’s The Red Laugh is an experimental depiction of war and its psychological effects, both on those who participate in the fighting and on those who hear of its atrocities from afar. Translated into English for the first time since 1905, it is here paired with a fresh translation of Andreyev’s earlier story “The Abyss,” which caused scandal upon its first publication. This edition provides an illuminating introduction by translator Kirsten Lodge as well as a range of background materials that help set the novel in its historical, literary, and artistic contexts.


The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad

Author: Colson Whitehead

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2018-01-30

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0345804325

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. • The basis for the acclaimed original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!


Notes from the Underground and Other Stories

Notes from the Underground and Other Stories

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

Published: 2015-05-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781840225778

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A collection of Dostoevsky's short stories, including Notes From The Underground which is considered to be one of the first works of existential literature.


Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground

Author: Stephen Duncombe

Publisher: Verso

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9781859841587

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Slug & Lettuce, Pathetic Life, I Hate Brenda, Dishwasher, Punk and Destroy, Sweet Jesus, Scrambled Eggs, Maximunrocknroll—these are among the thousands of publications which circulate in a subterranean world rarely illuminated by the searchlights of mainstream media commentary. In this multifarious underground, Pynchonesque misfits rant and rave, fans eulogize, hobbyists obsess. Together they form a low-tech publishing network of extraordinary richness and variety. Welcome to the realm of zines. In this, the first comprehensive study of zine publishing, Stephen Duncombe describes their origins in early-twentieth-century science fiction cults, their more proximate roots in 60s counter-culture and their rapid proliferation in the wake of punk rock. While Notes from Underground pays full due to the political importance of zines as a vital web of popular culture, it also notes the shortcomings of their utopian and escapist outlook in achieving fundamental social change. Duncombe's book raises the larger questionof whether it is possible to rebel culturally within a consumer society that eats up cultural rebellion. Packed with extracts and illustrations from a wide array of publications, past and present, Notes from Underground is the first book to explore the full range of zine culture and provides a definitive portrait of the contemporary underground in all its splendor and misery.


Notes from the Underground

Notes from the Underground

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 3748119321

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The author of the diary and the diary itself are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed. I have tried to expose to the view of the public more distinctly than is commonly done, one of the characters of the recent past. He is one of the representatives of a generation still living. In this fragment, entitled "Underground," this person introduces himself and his views, and, as it were, tries to explain the causes owing to which he has made his appearance and was bound to make his appearance in our midst. In the second fragment there are added the actual notes of this person concerning certain events in his life.


The Underground

The Underground

Author: Hamid Ismailov

Publisher: Restless Books

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0989983242

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“I am Moscow’s underground son, the result of one too many nights on the town,” says Mbobo, the precocious twelve-year-old narrator of Hamid Ismailov’s The Underground. Born from a Siberian woman and an African athlete competing in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Mbobo navigates the complexities of being a fatherless, mixed-raced boy in the Soviet Union in the years before its collapse, guided only by the Moscow subway system. Named one of the "ten best Russian novels of the 21st Century" (Continent Magazine), The Underground is Ismailov’s haunting tour of the Soviet capital, on the surface and beneath. Though deeply engaged with great Russian authors of the past—Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, and, above all, Pushkin—Ismailov is an emerging master of Russian writing that reflects the country’s diversity today. Reviews "Hamid Ismailov has the capacity of Salman Rushdie at his best to show the grotesque realization of history on the ground." —Literary Review "The dream of grandeur is more than justified by the artfulness of The Underground, which...create[s] the motifs of blackness, subterranean movement, and isolation that are the novel’s strongest effects." —Transitions Online Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek journalist, writer, and translator who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 for the United Kingdom, where he now works for the BBC World Service. His works are still banned in Uzbekistan. His writing has been published in Uzbek, Russian, French, English, and other languages. He is the author of novels including Sobranie Utonchyonnyh, Le Vagabond Flamboyant, Two Lost to Life, The Railway, The Underground, A Poet and Bin-Laden and The Dead Lake; poetry collections including Sad (Garden) and Pustynya (Desert); and books of visual poetry Post Faustum and Kniga Otsutstvi. Carol Ermakova studied German and Russian language and literature and holds an MA in translation from Bath University. She first visited Russia in 1991. More recently, Ermakova spent two years in Moscow working as a teacher and translator. Carol currently lives in the North Pennines and works as a freelance translator.


Notes from Underground, the Double, and Other Stories

Notes from Underground, the Double, and Other Stories

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 9781420947106

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Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky is best known for his psychological works of fiction. His characters and plots all carry psychosomatic troubles and problems that help make the stories more relatable to the reader. "Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories" combines some of Dostoyevsky's shorter works, though they certainly do not lack for depth. "Notes from Underground" is widely known as the first existential novel because of the raving, maniacal, and incoherent ramblings of its demented narrator. At the time, the Soviets despised the novel because of its critical nature toward a utopian society. This criticism was pointed at the government's attempts to create a Marxist society. Dostoyevsky believed that humans, even if they had perfection, would never be happy; this thought inspired many Western philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche. The other stories included in the collection all follow the same style: "The Double," "White Nights," "The Meek Ones," and "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" all follow loners in St. Petersburg as they slowly grow insane from isolation. These men fear rejection from their peers and contemporaries, so they distance themselves to the point of madness. However, these men are also ashamed of themselves for their inability to function within Russian society. The collection "Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories" is a must-read for anyone interested in psychological fiction or in the history of Russian literature.