Approaching Oblivion


Book Description

“Ellison’s stories punch where it hurts . . .and span from baroque far future speculations to near future warnings” (Science Fiction Ruminations). Over the course of his legendary career, Harlan Ellison has defied—and sometimes defined—modern fantasy literature, all while refusing to allow any genre to claim him. A Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, as well as winner of countless awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, Edgar, and Bram Stoker, Ellison is as unpredictable as he is unique, irrepressible as he is infuriating. Over thirty titles in Ellison’s brilliant catalog are now available in an elegant new package featuring Ellison himself. Genius never felt so combustible. The New York Times called him “relentlessly honest” and then used him as the subject of its famous Sunday Acrostic. People said there was no one like him, then cursed him for preventing easy sleep. But in these stories, Harlan Ellison outdoes himself, rampaging like a mad thing through love (“Cold Friend,” “Kiss of Fire,” “Paulie Charmed the Sleeping Woman”), hate (“Knox,” “Silent in Gehenna”), sex (“Catman,” “Erotophobia”), lost childhood (“One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty”), and into such bizarre subjects as the problems of blue‐skinned, eleven‐armed Yiddish aliens, what it is like to witness the end of the world, and what happens on the day the planet Earth swallows Barbra Streisand. Oh yeah, this one is a doozy!




Approaching Oblivion


Book Description

The New York Times called him "relentlessly honest" and then used him as the subject of its famous Sunday Acrostic. People Magizine said there was no one like him, then cursed him for preventing easy sleep. But in these stories Harlan Ellison outdoes himself, rampaging like a mad thing through love ("Cold Friend," "Kiss of Fire," "Paulie Charmed the Sleeping Woman"), hate ("Knox," "Silent in Gehenna"), sex ("Catman," "Erotophobia"), lost childhood ("One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty") and into such bizarre subjects as the problems of blue-skinned, eleven-armed Yiddish aliens, what it's like to witness the end of the world and what happens on the day the planet Earth swallows Barbra Streisand. Oh yeah, this one's a doozy!




Oblivion


Book Description

This acclaimed twenty-first–century Russian novel is “a Dantean descent” into the abandoned Soviet gulags, written “with a clear poetic sensibility” (The Wall Street Journal). In Sergei Lebedev’s debut novel, an unnamed young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a mysterious neighbor who once saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where man and machine work in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today’s Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel is an epic literary act of bearing witness, attempting to rescue history from the brink of oblivion. A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Novel of the Year “Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn has Russia had a writer as obsessed as Sergei Lebedev with that country’s history or the traces it has left on the collective consciousness . . . The best of Russia’s younger generation of writers.” ―The New York Review of Books




Utopia or Oblivion


Book Description

Utopia or Oblivion is a provocative blueprint for the future. This comprehensive volume is composed of essays derived from the lectures he gave all over the world during the 1960’s. Fuller’s thesis is that humanity – for the first time in its history – has the opportunity to create a world where the needs of 100% of humanity are met. “This is what man tends to call utopia. It’s a fairly small word, but inadequate to describe the extraordinary new freedom of man in a new relationship to universe — the alternative of which is oblivion.” R. Buckminster Fuller. Description by Lars Muller Publishers, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller




Harlan Ellison


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'Essenced to Language'


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Rosenberg was more than just a war poet. A general failure to take this into consideration has contributed to the belated recognition of the distinctions of his work. A working-class London Jew, he schooled himself, long before the Great War, to respond to issues of class, culture, art and poetry; a combination of dependency and self-sufficiency which sustains his mature work, and which gave him a sense of himself as an Anglo-Jewish poet. To illuminate Rosenberg, Nayef Al-Joulan considers the conditions of the Jewish community in the East End of London at the turn of the century and examines the writer's attitudes to the Zionism in vogue. He also investigates striking echoes of Freudian psychology in Rosenberg's work. Tracing Rosenberg's working-class literary heritage, Al-Joulan underlines a modern Jewish insight that has parallels with Marx and Freud and therefore uncovers the role class and race played in the critical marginalising of Rosenberg. The book concludes by examining Rosenberg's cognitive ekphrasis, his idea of language as a vehicle for mental essence, a perception rooted into the painter's mind.




Approaching Oblivion


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A Primer for Forgetting


Book Description

“One of our true superstars of nonfiction” (David Foster Wallace), Lewis Hyde offers a playful and inspiring defense of forgetfulness by exploring the healing effect it can have on the human psyche. We live in a culture that prizes memory—how much we can store, the quality of what’s preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear—be it in the form of illness or simple absentmindedness—but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to peace and rebirth? A Primer for Forgetting is a remarkable experiment in scholarship, autobiography, and social criticism by the author of the classics The Gift and Trickster Makes This World. It forges a new vision of forgetfulness by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern, weighing the potential boons forgetfulness might offer the present moment as a creative and political force. It also turns inward, using the author’s own life and memory as a canvas upon which to extol the virtues of a concept too long taken as an evil. Drawing material from Hesiod to Jorge Luis Borges to Elizabeth Bishop to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from myths and legends to very real and recent traumas both personal and historical, A Primer for Forgetting is a unique and remarkable synthesis that only Lewis Hyde could have produced.




Northern Antiquities


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