Melville House Publishing strana 2 z 2

Set in the 1880s, the story follows Ovid Vesper, a former Union soldier who has been having enigmatic visions after an explosion at the Battle of Antietam. As he travels across the country following those visions, he finds himself in stranger and increasingly more dangerous encounters with other worlds hidden in the spaces of his own. Ovid brings his steady calm and compassion as he helps the people of a broken country, rapidly changing but still reeling and wounded from its Civil War two decades earlier. He assists with matters of all sorts, from odd jobs around the house, to guiding children back to their own universe, to hunting down unnatural creatures that stalk the night - all the while seeking his own personal resolution and peace from his visions and the war that changed his life. This epic journey across the American West with Ovid and a surprising cast of characters blends elements of the classic Western with historical fantasy in a way like no other.

Outspoken critic Jessa Crispin delivers a searing rejection of contemporary feminism . . . and a bracing manifesto for revolution. Are you a feminist? Do you believe women are human beings and that they deserve to be treated as such? That women deserve all the same rights and liberties bestowed upon men? If so, then you are a feminist . . . or so the feminists keep insisting. But somewhere along the way, the movement for female liberation sacrificed meaning for acceptance, and left us with a banal, polite, ineffectual pose that barely challenges the status quo. In this bracing, fiercely intelligent manifesto, Jessa Crispin demands more. Why I Am Not A Feminist is a radical, fearless call for revolution. It accuses the feminist movement of obliviousness, irrelevance, and cowardice--and demands nothing less than the total dismantling of a system of oppression. Praise for Jessa Crispin, and The Dead Ladies Project "I'd follow Jessa Crispin to the ends of the earth." --Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex "Read with caution . . . Crispin is funny, sexy, self-lacerating, and politically attuned, with unique slants on literary criticism, travel writing, and female journeys. No one crosses genres, borders, and proprieties with more panache." --Laura Kipnis, author of Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation "Very, very funny. . . . The whole book is packed with delightfully offbeat prose . . . as raw as it is sophisticated, as quirky as it is intense." --The Chicago Tribune

One of the country's leading activist curators explores how corporations and governments have used art and culture to mystify and manipulate us. The production of culture was once the domain of artists, but beginning in the early 1900s, the emerging fields of public relations, advertising and marketing transformed the way the powerful communicate with the rest of us. A century later, the tools are more sophisticated than ever, the onslaught more relentless. In Culture as Weapon, acclaimed curator and critic Nato Thompson reveals how institutions use art and culture to ensure profits and constrain dissent--and shows us that there are alternatives. An eye-opening account of the way advertising, media, and politics work today, Culture as Weapon offers a radically new way of looking at our world.

Americans weren t supposed to drink at all during Prohibition, but that s not how things worked out: just as Congress amended the Constitution to make their countrymen dry (while a bootlegger known as The Man in the Green Hat helped keep wet bars well-stocked on Capitol Hill), cocktail culture as we know it was born. The Bloody Mary, sleek chrome cocktail shakers, hip flasks and streamlined bar carts, craft mixology, and hundreds of other essentials of modern drinking life owe their origins to the dark days and boozy nights of the Dry Years. Rich with history, political intrigue, and cultural curiosities, in "Contraband Cocktails "Paul Dickson pours us an intoxicating narrative of how Americans drank during Prohibition. But "Contraband Cocktails" isn t just a wild ride with bootleggers and bartenders, rumrunners and mobsters, it also brims with literary lore: from when the word cocktail first appeared in print in D. H. Lawrence s "Lady Chatterly s Lover," to Daisy pouring Tom a mint julep at the Plaza Hotel in "The Great Gatsby," to recipes (some of them shockingly, comically undrinkable!) for what Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, and many others were drinking when they ordered just the usual, this small, heavily annotated mixology brings readers out of our 21st century take on the speakeasy and straight into a chair at the Algonquin Roundtable. We also visit the dimly lit nightclubs that displaced legal cabarets and gave a backdrop to the Jazz Age, a hedge outside the White House where bootleggers stashed bottles of booze in a burlap bag, and even the bathtub where the great chef and food writer James Beard spent Sunday afternoons concocting homemade gin. Chock-full of scandalous history, delicious anecdotes, dozens of recipes, and a glossary of terms that could surprise even the most seasoned bartender, Paul Dickson s "Contraband Cocktails "is the perfect companion to any reader s Cocktail Hour."

From the author of the international bestseller "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber one of our most important and provocative thinkers traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing even romantic about bureaucracy." " Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, "The Utopia of Rules" is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, "The Utopia of Rules"is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves."

Now in paperback: David Graeber's `fresh . . . fascinating . . . thought-provoking . . . and exceedingly timely` (`Financial Times`) history of debt Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods--that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like `guilt,` `sin,` and `redemption`) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.