Utterly riveting, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavia’s most important literary award) for being “a masterpiece of its time.” Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her ...(展开全部)

"The Story of the Stone (c. 1760)", also known by the title of "The Dream of the Red Chamber", is the great novel of manners in Chinese literature. Divided into five volumes, of which "The Warning Voice" is the third, it charts the glory and decline of the illustrious Jia family (a story which closely accords with the fortunes of the author's own family). The two main character...(展开全部)

We’re a little more than halfway through Balle’s hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle’s riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara’s world—fellow travelers within Novembe...(展开全部)

The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this new, muscular, intervention Fredric Jameson, perhaps the most influential and persuasive theorist of postmodernity explores these notions in a fresh and illuminating manner. The extraordinary revival of discussions of modernit...(展开全部)

The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this new, muscular, intervention Fredric Jameson—perhaps the most influential and persuasive theorist of postmodernity—explores these notions in a fresh and illuminating manner. The extraordinary revival of discussions of...(展开全部)

Understanding “what something is” is a project that has long occupied philosophers. Perhaps no thinker in the Western tradition has had more influence on how we approach this question than Aristotle, whose Metaphysics remains the locus classicus of rigorous examinations into the nature of being. Now, in an elegantly argued new study, Aryeh Kosman reinterprets Aristotle’s ontolo...(展开全部)

A history both musically and culturally, of the Chinese lute

Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago the Greek thinker Heraclitus supposedly uttered the cryptic words 'Phusis kruptesthai philei.' How the aphorism, usually translated as 'Nature loves to hide,' has haunted Western culture ever since is the subject of this engaging study by Pierre Hadot. Taking the allegorical figure of the veiled goddess Isis as a guide, and drawing on the wo...(展开全部)