My First Kafka


Book Description

Runaway children who meet up with monsters. A giant talking bug. A secret world of mouse-people. The stories of Franz Kafka are wondrous and nightmarish, miraculous and scary. In My First Kafka, storyteller Matthue Roth and artist Rohan Daniel Eason adapt three Kafka stories into startling, creepy, fun stories for all ages. With My First Kafka, the master storyteller takes his rightful place alongside Maurice Sendak, Edward Gorey, and Lemony Snicket as a literary giant for all ages.




Playing with the Book


Book Description

A beautifully illustrated exploration of how Victorian novelty picture books reshape the ways children read and interact with texts The Victorian era saw an explosion of novelty picture books with flaps to lift and tabs to pull, pages that could fold out, pop-up scenes, and even mechanical toys mounted on pages. Analyzing books for young children published between 1835 and 1914, Playing with the Book studies how these elaborately designed works raise questions not just about what books should look like but also about what reading is, particularly in relation to children’s literature and child readers. Novelty books promised (or threatened) to make reading a physical as well as intellectual activity, requiring the child to pull a tab or lift a flap to continue the story. These books changed the relationship between pictures, words, and format in both productive and troubling ways. Hannah Field considers these aspects of children’s reading through case studies of different formats of novelty and movable books and intensive examination of editions that have survived from the nineteenth century. She discovers that children ripped, tore, and colored in their novelty books—despite these books’ explicit instructions against such behaviors. Richly illustrated with images of these ingenious constructions, Playing with the Book argues that novelty books construct a process of reading that involves touch as well as sight, thus reconfiguring our understanding of the phenomenology of reading.




Flutter Bye


Book Description




Changing Faces


Book Description

Perception is fragile and easily manipulated. A painting or drawing that is flipped, flopped or stared at long enough can somehow be transformed from one image to another.In this engaging collection of paintings, drawings, cartoons, masks, toys and other work, there are optical illusions from the Renaissance, Enlightenment-era political cartoons and Victorian toys that start off as one thing and end up as another. Sometimes these mutations were made for fun, sometimes for profit or to score a political point, but the results are always an intriguing pleasure to view.Even the most jaded readers will find their frowns turned upside down after they pick up this delightful volume.




Weird Bugs


Book Description

Tabs, flaps, flip books and pop-ups depict insects in their habitat, including termites, ants, and dung beetles.




Metamorphoses


Book Description

Now available for the first time in an annotated edition, Rolfe Humphriess legendary translation captures the spirit of Ovid's swift and conversational language, bringing the wit and sophistication of the Roman poet to modern readers. These are some of the most famous Roman myths as youve never read them before--sensuous, dangerously witty, audacious.




Tales from Ovid


Book Description

A powerful version of the Latin classic by England's late Poet Laureate, now in paperback.When it was published in 1997, Tales from Ovid was immediately recognized as a classic in its own right, as the best rering of Ovid in generations, and as a major book in Ted Hughes's oeuvre. The Metamorphoses of Ovid stands with the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton as a classic of world poetry; Hughes translated twenty-four of its stories with great power and directness. The result is the liveliest twentieth-century version of the classic, at once a delight for the Latinist and an appealing introduction to Ovid for the general reader.




The Gas Station in America


Book Description

"The first architect-designed gas station - a Pittsburgh Gulf station in 1913 - was also the first to offer free road maps; the familiar Shell name and logo date from 1907, when a British mother-of-pearl importer expanded its line to include the newly discovered oil of the Dutch East Indies; the first enclosed gas stations were built only after the first enclosed cars made motoring a year-round activity - and operating a service station was no longer a "seasonal" job; the system of "octane" rating was introduced by Sun Oil as a marketing gimmick (74 for premium in 1931)." "As the number of "true" gas stations continues its steady decline - from 239,000 in 1969 to fewer than 100,000 today - the words and images of this book bear witness to an economic and cultural phenomenon that was perhaps more uniquely American than any other of this century."--Jacket.




Crossing the Event Horizon


Book Description

Crossing the Event Horizon provides evidence that we are, both individually and collectively, hurtling toward an evolutionary event horizon. Using the tools of Jungian psychology, the nature of the singularity is defined by its myriad manifestations emerging from the collective unconscious. These include dreams, motifs and themes found in art, science fiction and fantasy literature and films, religious cults, and the paranormal, especially near-death experiences and UFO encounters. Key aspects of the Singularity Archetype include: "Logos Beheld" (visually comprehended linguistic intent often associated with a collective telepathic network), Homo gestalt (a new species where individuality is conserved but also telepathically networked), and a parallelism between the individual event horizon of death and eschaton (the collective event horizon of the species). Apocalypticism is analyzed as an example of the Singularity Archetype pathologizing. A study of the Heaven's Gate saucer/suicide cult illustrates what can happen when people become possessed by the Singularity Archetype and are driven by it into delusory projections. The Singularity Archetype is viewed apocalyptically by the ego, and as a transcendent evolutionary event by the Self, and the duality of these views is explored in many examples. The evolutionary origins of the ego and its metamorphosis as it approaches the event horizon are explored. Evolutionary theory, which relates to the Singularity Archetype through a number of dynamic paradoxes, is discussed. Many popular books and movies are analyzed as permutations of the Singularity Archetype, including: Avatar, Childhood's End, Village of the Damned, Powder, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.The Singularity Archetype is a primordial image of human evolutionary metamorphosis which emerges from the collective unconscious. How the Archetype Manifests (a Composite Picture)A rupture-of-plane event occurs, usually threatening the survival of the individual and/or species.The event is a shock that disrupts the equilibrium of body/physical world and also individual/collective psyche. It is an ontological shock that will be viewed as the worst thing possible by individual/ collective ego. There is another rupture of plane that may actually be the same rupture as above but seen from a cosmic rather than a personal view. The shock is revealed to be a transcendent evolutionary event. The revelation of the transcendent aspect will often involve spiral motifs and unusual lights. Consciousness and communication metamorphose and with them core aspects---ego, individuality, connection to linear time, corporeality, gender identification, social order, etc.---fundamentally transform. There is a vision or actualization of release from some or all limits of corporeal incarnation and the emergence of "glorified bodies," which have enhanced powers and various degrees of etherialization. More visual and telepathic modes of consciousness and communication emerge, and this is part of a transformation of individuality into "Homo gestalt"---a new species where individual psyches are networked telepathically. The Singularity Archetype may be experienced and even actualized to various degrees by an individual through transcendent and/or anomalous experiences such as near-death experiences (NDEs), UFO/abduction/close encounter experiences, kundalini and psychotropic episodes.As with encounters with all archetypes, individuals and groups attach idiosyncratic material to it, such as particular end dates and scenarios. Another way of defining the Singularity Archetype (in its collective form) is as a resonance, flowing backward through time, of an approaching Singularity at the end of human history. The Singularity Archetype relates to both the evolutionary event horizon of the species and, for the individual, the event horizon of death.




The Bookseller


Book Description