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Vertigo
Vertigo
“With wry humor and profound sensitivity, Walsh takes what is mundane and transforms it into something otherworldly with sentences that can make your heart stop. A feat of language.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Joanna Walsh's haunting and unforgettable stories enact a literal vertigo—the feeling that if I fall I will fall not toward the earth but into space—by probing the spaces between things. Waiting for news in a children's hospital, pondering her husband's multiple online flirtations or observing the tourists and locals at a third-world archeological site, her narrator approaches the suppressed state of panic coursing beneath things that are normally tamed by our blunted perceptions of ordinary life. Vertigo is an original and breathtaking book.” (Chris Kraus)
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Hotel
Hotel
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy...hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies-the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
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Break.up
Break.up
A novel in essays that locates a “romance” within the mesh of electronic communication. So I didn't call you: instead I posted a new avatar of myself without my habitual dark glasses. I have learned: an image, any image, is a blind. All avatars give different information, illusions of contact called Telepresence, none of them the real thing. You texted me, 3 am, from some station … As though it made any difference. But it did. —from Break.up In this “novel in essays,” Joanna Walsh simultaneously flees and pursues an ambiguous partner in an affair conducted mostly online. Traversing Europe, she awaits emails and texts and PMs, awash in her dreams, offering succinct meditations on connection and communication. If Marguerite Duras situated the telephone as the twentieth century's preferred hopeless form of connection, Walsh pinpoints the nodal points of a “romance” within today's mesh of electronic communication. As Deborah Levy observed recently, “Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers.” Her 2015 book Hotel, an investigation of transience conducted through hotel reviews, was described by The Paris Review as “a slim, sharp meditation on hotels and desires. [Walsh is] funny throughout, even as she documents the dissolution of her marriage and the peculiar brand of alienation on offer in lavish places.” Praise for Joanna Walsh “Walsh's writing has intellectual rigor and bags of formal bravery.” —The Financial Times “Hotel feels like something you want to endlessly quote: sharp, knowing, casually erudite … there is power and an affecting gravitas in what Walsh does with detail.” —Sydney Review of Books “Walsh is a sublimely elegant writer … artful and intelligent.” —The New Statesman
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On Screens
A Radical History of the Internet as a place of creativity: where aesthetics has become a currency and the cost is being online. Amateurs! is the story of how YOU created internet culture and why it matters. Web 2.0 invited users to create: blogs, vlogs, tweets, memes and more. For the first time in history, art became *the* fundamental form of communication. What started as fun became a currency--vital for finding friends, work and love--then, as meatspace job security eroded, work. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge for use, selling our creations back to us. Whatever we're making online, it isn't amateur any more. If creative acts online have facilitated AI's environmental impact, alt-right politics, neoliberal economics, they are also at the heart of effective activism, community-building, political solidarities. What we make online is political, not only in content but because it's here in this public forum, because so much of it comes from people who never had a voice in any public forum before. An aesthetic revolution as big as modernism, internet amateurism has changed how we think, talk about and see our world. It asks us to re-evaluate not only what art, and what an artist is, but the divide between the amateur and professional itself.
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Girl Online
Girl Online
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl. The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as “girls online,” vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil’s bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with “accounts” of personal “experience.” Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
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I Love Dad
I Love Dad
Show Dad how much you care with this warm story of parent appreciation from the creators of The Perfect Hug and The Biggest Kiss, which School Library Journal called “a wonderful cuddle-up-and-read choice.” When the clock ticks around to a bright new day, I know today will be filled with fun things to do with dad. From his stubbly kisses to his sky-high piggyback rides to his bedtime stories, no one is quite like dad. This charming picture book is a celebration of fathers everywhere!
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ON SCREENS.
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The Perfect Hug
The Perfect Hug
Everyone loves hugs, and there are all sorts in this book... There are hugs for wrigglers and hugs for gigglers, hugs that are tickly and hugs that are prickly. But will you find the perfect hug? Of course! Because as this book shows, there's a perfect hug right under your nose!
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Lucifer Over London
Lucifer Over London
London, a city of constant transition, transaction, translation. London does not exist; London is a language without a place and it is the aphasic city; it's the mother of all languages. Lucifer Over London is a new anthology nine narrative essays written by a host of international prize-winning authors including Chloe Aridjis, Viola di Grado, Xiaolu Guo, Joanna Walsh and Zinovy Zinik. First published in Italy by Humboldt Books, Lucifer Over London is now appearing in English for the first time. This is a version of London as seen from the immigrants of recent migrations, of deportations to come, from those who create London even as they contradict it.
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