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Stupid History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions Throughout the Ages
If it would shock you to learn that Benjamin Franklin didn't discover electricity, you'll appreciate this take on hundreds of historical legends and debacles Historians and humorists alike may be surprised to learn that: Samuel Prescott made the famous horseback ride into Concord, not Paul Revere. As a member of Parliament, Isaac Newton spoke only once. He asked for an open window. On April 24, 1898, Spain declared war on the U.S., thus starting the Spanish-American War. The U.S. declared war the very next day, but not wanting to be outdone, had the date on the declaration changed from April 25 to April 21.With these and many other stories, leading humorist Leland Gregory once again highlights both the strange and the funny side of humankind..
Price: $4.95
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Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness (Kodansha Globe)
A SCIENTIST LOOKS AT ECCENTRICS-AND THE ODDITIES THAT KEEP THEM SANE After years of research, a practicing psychotherapist has proof that eccentrics are usually healthier than the rest of us-as well as more creative, more idealistic, more opinionated, and much more fun to read about. Dr. David Weeks fills his hook with fascinating case studies, including Joshua Abraham Norton, who once proclaimed himself Emperor of America and even convinced many people to consider themselves his subjects: Dr. Patch Adams, founder of the Gesundheit Institute and a physician who believes that humor fosters healing and dresses as a clown to treat his patients; and Florence Foster Jenkins, a would-be diva whose love of music was exceeded only by her lack of talent, but whose wealth enabled her to stage a recital at Carnegie Hall, Entertaining, funny, and thought provoking, Eccentrics introduces a series of extraordinary men and women-and encourages us to enjoy our own healthy eccentricities as well..
Price: $8.53
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Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness
You hold in your hands a cornucopia of modern cutting-edge fantasy The first volume of this extraordinary new annual anthology series of fantastic literature explodes on the scene with works that sidestep expectations in beautiful and unsettling ways, that surprise with their settings and startle with the manner in which they cross genre boundaries, that aren't afraid to experiment with storytelling techniques, and yet seamlessly blend form with meaningful function. The delectable offerings found within these pages come from some of today's most distinguished contemporary fantasists and brilliant rising newcomers. Whether it's a touch of literary erudition, playful whimsy, extravagant style, or mind-blowing philosophical speculation and insight, the reader will be led into unfamiliar territory, there to find shock and delight. Introducing CLOCKWORK PHOENIX. "Author and editor Allen (Mythic) has compiled a neatly packaged set of short stories that flow cleverly and seamlessly from one inspiration to another.... Lush descriptions and exotic imagery startle, engross, chill and electrify the reader, and all 19 stories have a strong and delicious taste of weird."
-- Publishers Weekly.
Price: $9.85
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Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary
Marjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously Wittgenstein's remark that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry," Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the "poet." What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal. "This book has the lucidity and the intelligence we have come to expect from Marjorie Perloff.—Linda Munk, American Literature"[Perloff] has brilliantly adapted Wittgenstein's conception of meaning and use to an analysis of contemporary language poetry."—Linda Voris, Boston Review" Wittgenstein's Ladder offers significant insights into the current state of poetry, literature, and literary study. Perloff emphasizes the vitality of reading and thinking about poetry, and the absolute necessity of pushing against the boundaries that define and limit our worlds."—David Clippinger, Chicago Review"Majorie Perloff has done more to illuminate our understanding of twentieth century poetic language than perhaps any other critic. . . . Entertaining, witty, and above all highly original."—Willard Bohn, Sub-Stance.
Price: $9.96
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Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)
This book is the companion to Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Stanford University Press, 2000), which dealt with the psychoanalytic clinical problem of resistance to interpretation The key to this resistance is the unconscious registration and repudiation (disavowal) of the reality of difference. The surprising generality of this resistance intersects with Nietzsche's, Heidegger's, and Derrida's understanding of how and why difference is in general the “unthought of metaphysics.” All three see metaphysics engaged with a “registration and repudiation of difference,” and all three rethink interpretation in relation to this question. The synthesis of these theories of interpretation and difference provides the philosophical foundations for a new thinking of how interpretation functions, and is a critical intersection of deconstruction and psychoanalysis. .
Price: $18.59
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A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1839-1945
Literary critics have traditionally suggested that the invention of photography led to the rise of the realist novel, which is believed to imitate the detail and accuracy of the photographic image. Instead, says Stuart Burrows, photography's influence on American fiction had less to do with any formal similarity between the two media than with the capacity of photography to render American identity and history homogeneous and reproducible. The camera, according to Burrows, provoked a representational crisis, one broadly modernist in character. Since the photograph is not only a copy of its subject but a physical product of it, the camera can be seen as actually challenging mimetic or realistic theories of representation, which depend on a recognizable gap between original and reproduction. Burrows argues for the centrality of photography to a set of writers commonly thought of as hostile to the camera--including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston. The photographic metaphors and allusions to the medium that appear throughout these writers' work demonstrate the ways in which one representational form actually influences another--by changing how artists conceive of identity, history, and art itself. A Familiar Strangeness thus challenges the notion of an absolute break between nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century modernism, a break that typically centers precisely on the two movements' supposedly differing relation to the camera. Just as modernist fiction interrupts and questions the link between visuality and knowledge, so American realist fiction can be understood as making the world less knowable precisely by making it more visible..
Price: $27.96
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