The fourteen stories in Every Human Love redefine our sense of reality. Set seemingly in the quotidian, these tales veer into the unexpected, the uncomfortable, occasionally the eerie, thrusting characters in crisis into still greater quandaries, where the world of weddings and work, of frustrated hopes and mundane dissatisfactions, collides with a realm of legend, of fairy tale, of nightmare.
Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, Love As Human Freedom sees love as a practice that changes over time through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, Paul A. Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives. Through keen interpretations of the best known philosophical and literary depictions of its topic—including Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Ovid, Flaubert, and Tolstoy—his book treats love as a fundamental way that we humans make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life.
The Instant New York Times Bestseller and TikTok Sensation! As seen on THE VIEW! A BuzzFeed Best Summer Read of 2021 When a fake relationship between scientists meets the irresistible force of attraction, it throws one woman's carefully calculated theories on love into chaos. As a third-year Ph.D. candidate, Olive Smith doesn't believe in lasting romantic relationships--but her best friend does, and that's what got her into this situation. Convincing Anh that Olive is dating and well on her way to a happily ever after was always going to take more than hand-wavy Jedi mind tricks: Scientists require proof. So, like any self-respecting biologist, Olive panics and kisses the first man she sees. That man is none other than Adam Carlsen, a young hotshot professor--and well-known ass. Which is why Olive is positively floored when Stanford's reigning lab tyrant agrees to keep her charade a secret and be her fake boyfriend. But when a big science conference goes haywire, putting Olive's career on the Bunsen burner, Adam surprises her again with his unyielding support and even more unyielding...six-pack abs. Suddenly their little experiment feels dangerously close to combustion. And Olive discovers that the only thing more complicated than a hypothesis on love is putting her own heart under the microscope.
A New York Times bestseller and enduring classic, All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' "Love Song to the Nation" trilogy. All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces. “The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love. As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the “100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.” All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.
In her most personal book to date, Yayoi Kusama brings us into her private world through poetic recollections, giving insight into her creative process and the essential role language plays in her paintings, sculptures, and daily life. With a new focus on Yayoi Kusama’s use of language, this book features an impressive overview of her poetry, which the artist creates alongside her work in other mediums. Highlighting the importance of words to the artist, the book draws special attention to the captivating, poetic titles of her paintings, such as in I WOULD LIKE TO SHOW YOU THE INFINITE SPLENDOR OF STARDUST IN THE UNIVERSE and FIGURE OF THE MIDNIGHT DARKNESS OF THE UNIVERSE THAT I DEDICATED ALL MY HEART. These visionary titles are a quintessential part of Kusama’s eye-catching artworks, but also hold their own as unique aphorisms and appealing statements of cosmic spirituality. The poetry also collected here touches on Kusama’s personal trials, her human ideals, and her heroic pursuit of art above all else. Centered around EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, Kusama’s acclaimed exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, the book features more than 300 pages of new paintings, sculptures, and Infinity Mirror Rooms. It also includes photographs of Kusama over time, offering a unique visual timeline of this iconic artist.
A thoughtful, illuminating exploration of modern Japanese politics and culture through the eyes of an investigative reporter Dreux Richard presents post-Fukushima Japan in three illustrative parts. He follows members of Japan’s Nigerian community, whose struggles with a hostile immigration system lead to the death of a Nigerian immigrant in a Japanese detention center, investigated here for the first time. In Japan’s northernmost city, Richard goes door to door with the region’s youngest census employee, meeting the city’s elderly residents and documenting the stories that comprise the nation’s record-breaking population decline. Finally, he takes us into the offices of energy executives and nuclear regulators, as they fight to determine whether reactors threatened by earthquake faults will be permitted to restart after the Fukushima disaster, a conflict that brings the entire regulatory system to the brink of collapse. Six years in the making, Richard’s perceptive and probing account establishes him as an authority on his subjects, but he remains aware of his status as an outsider and interpreter for his readers. His long-term engagement with the personal lives of his sources revives the expatriate literary tradition of Lafcadio Hearn and Donald Richie, bringing its best qualities into a century where forensic investigation of wrongdoing and compassionate observation of its consequences are equally crucial. Through an exceptional range of approaches to an exceptionally complex society, Every Human Intention provides an understanding of today’s Japan that goes far beyond politics, truisms, and sensational arguments.
Yayoi Kusama: Give Me Love documents the artist's most recent exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, which marked the US debut of The Obliteration Room, an all-white, domestic interior that viewers are invited to cover with dot stickers of various sizes and colors. Widely recognized as one of the most popular artists in the world, Yayoi Kusama has shaped her own narrative of postwar and contemporary art. Minimalism and Pop art, abstraction and conceptualism coincide in her practice, which spans painting, sculpture, performance, room-sized and outdoor installation, the written word, films, fashion, design, and architectural interventions. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Yayoi Kusama briefly studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York City in the late 1950s. In the mid-1960s, she established herself in New York as an important avant-garde artist by staging groundbreaking happenings, events, and exhibitions. Now in her late 80s, Kusama is entering one of the richest creative periods of her life. Immersed in her studio six days a week, Kusama has spoken of her renewed dedication to creating art over the past years: “[N]ew ideas come welling up every day….Now I am more keenly aware of the time that remains and more in awe of the vast scope of art.” Taking The Obliteration Room as its centerpiece, this catalogue reveals, in vivid large-scale plates, the transformation of the space from a clean white interior to a stunningly saturated room, with ceilings, walls, and furniture covered in myriad multicolored stickers put there by viewers over the course of the exhibition. The catalogue also includes beautiful reproductions of Kusama's new large-format paintings from My Eternal Soul series. Ranging from bright and densely pixelated forms, to umber figures with darker blues and muted oranges, these paintings demonstrate the artist's striking command of color, and her exceptional control over balance and contrast. Bold brushstrokes hover between figuration and abstraction; vibrant, animated, and intense, these paintings introduce their own powerful pictorial logic, at once contemporary and universal. The catalogue continues with a selection of new, large Pumpkin sculptures, a form that Kusama has been exploring since her studies in Japan in the 1950s, and which gained prominence in the 1980s, continuing to remain an essential part of her practice. Made of shiny stainless steel and featuring painted dots or dot-shaped perforations that recall The Obliteration Room, these immersive works seem created on human scale, with the tallest measuring 70 inches (178 cm). Vibrant plates capture how color, shape, size, and surface merge in these sculptures and mesmerize the viewer. Texts include a "Hymn to Yayoi Kusama" by art critic and poet Akira Tatehata and a poem by the artist herself.
New York Times Bestseller "There is no writer quite like Dolly Alderton working today and very soon the world will know it.” —Lisa Taddeo, author of #1 New York Times bestseller Three Women “Dolly Alderton has always been a sparkling Roman candle of talent. She is funny, smart, and explosively engaged in the wonders and weirdness of the world. But what makes this memoir more than mere entertainment is the mature and sophisticated evolution that Alderton describes in these pages. It’s a beautifully told journey and a thoughtful, important book. I loved it.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and City of Girls The wildly funny, occasionally heartbreaking internationally bestselling memoir about growing up, growing older, and learning to navigate friendships, jobs, loss, and love along the ride When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else— realizing that you are enough. Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones’ Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.
