Category: Books

  • Orbital

    Orbital

    by Samantha Harvey

    Buy on Bookshop.org

    From the publisher:

    A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts–from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan–have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.

    Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.

  • Maurice

    Maurice

    by E.M. Forster

    Buy on UK.Bookshop.org

    From the publisher:

    This illustrated young adult edition of a bold novel is one of defiance and bravery. As beautifully crafted as it is heartwrenching, this love story transcends time and generations.

    From curious schoolboy to studious scholar, Maurice Hall grows with all the confidence his privileged status allows. The path to success is measured and assured, as long as he follows the rules dictated by society. But things quickly change as he finds himself increasingly attracted to his own sex. First through Clive, a fellow student he meets at Cambridge, and then through Alec, the gamekeeper on Clive’s country estate, Maurice experiences a profound emotional and sexual awakening, one which his contemporaries cannot condone. 

    Maurice is widely considered a founding work of modern gay literature. Although completed in 1914, this groundbreaking novel could not be published in Forster’s lifetime. Fittingly, it acts as a piercing critique of the suffocating ideals that permeated British society at the time. Forster himself said: ‘I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.’

  • Monsters

    Monsters

    by Claire Dederer

    Buy on Bookshop.org

    Description from publisher:

    From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, Monsters is “part memoir, part treatise, and all treat” (The New York Times). This unflinching, deeply personal book expands on Claire Dederer’s instantly viral Paris Review essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” 
     
    Can we love the work of artists such as Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Miles Davis, Polanski, or Picasso? Should we? Dederer explores the audience’s relationship with artists from Michael Jackson to Virginia Woolf, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. Does genius deserve special dispensation? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? 
     
    Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.

  • Fully Automated Luxury Communism

    Fully Automated Luxury Communism

    by Aaron Bastani

    From the publisher:

    A revolutionary new kind of politics – beyond work, scarcity and capitalism.

    Fully Automated Luxury Communism promises a radically new left future for everyone. New technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. Solar power will deliver the energy that we need, while asteroid mining will deliver the necessary resources, allowing us to end the devastation of our environment. Innovations in AI, gene editing, food technology will leads us to new ways of living better lives. 

    In his first book, radical political commentator Aaron Bastani conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of nine billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society heralds the beginning of history.

    Buy on Verso

  • Everyday Utopia

    Everyday Utopia

    by Kristen R. Ghodsee

    Bookshop.org

    From the publisher:

    In the 6th century BCE, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras—a man remembered today more for his theorem about right-angled triangles than for his progressive politics—founded a commune in a seaside village in what’s now southern Italy. The men and women there shared their property, lived as equals, and dedicated themselves to the study of mathematics and the mysteries of the universe.

    Ever since, humans have been dreaming up better ways to organize how we live together, pool our resources, raise our children, and determine who’s part of our families. Some of these experiments burned brightly for only a brief while, but others carry on today: from the Danish cohousing communities that share chores and deepen neighborly bonds, to matriarchal Colombian ecovillages where residents grow their own food; and from Connecticut, where new laws make it easier for extra “alloparents” to help raise children not their own, to China where planned microdistricts ensure everything a busy household might need is nearby.

    One of those startlingly rare books that upends what you think is possible, Everyday Utopia provides a “powerful reminder that dreaming of better worlds is not just some fantastical project, but also a political one” (Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad). This “must-read” (Thomas Piketty, New York Times bestselling author of A Brief History of Equality) offers a radically hopeful vision for how to build more contented and connected societies, alongside a practical guide to what we all can do in the meantime to live the good life each and every day.