Alex's Favourites

1. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey

 

Description: "Essays redefining the psychogeographical nooks of autonomy. Recipes for poetic terror, anarcho-black magic, post-situ psychotropic surgery, denunciations of spiritual addictions to vapid infotainment cults—this is the bastard classic, the watermark impressed upon our minds. Where conscience informs praxis, and action infects consciousness, T.A.Z. continues to worm its way into above-ground culture. Second edition, with a new introductory essay by the author and additional appendical materials."

2. The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau

 

Description: "The Practice of Everyday Life, published in 1974 and now the first of his books available in English translation, offers ample evidence why we should pay heed to de Certeau and why more of us have not done so. For one, the work all but defies definition. History, sociology, economics, literature and literary criticism, philosophy, and anthropology all come within de Certeau's ken. . . The Practice of Everyday Life marks a turning point in studies of culture away from the producer (writer, scientist, city planner) and the product (book, discourse, city street) to the consumer (reader, pedestrian). . . . In sum, de Certeau acts very much like his own ordinary hero, manipulating, elaborating, and inventing on the scientific authority that he both denies and requires."

3. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

 

Description: "This uncensored translation of Bulgakov's posthumously published masterpiece of black magic and black humor restores its sliest digs and sharpest jabs at Stalin's regime, which suppressed it. Writing in a punning, soaring prose thick with contemporary historical references and political irony, Bulgakov (1891-1940) did not make things easy for future translators. The story itself is demanding: the arrival of the Devil and his entourage in Stalin's Moscow frames a Faustian tale of a suppressed writer (the Master) and his devoted lover (his Margarita), set against a realistic narrative?the Master's rejected manuscript?of Pontius Pilate's police state in Jerusalem. An immediate contemporary classic when it was first serialized in Moscow in censored form in 1967-68, the novel suffered in its previous English translations, which were either incomplete or stylistically loose. This new translation, with its accuracy and depth, finally does justice to the politically and verbally outrageous qualities of the original. Careful footnotes explain and contextualize Bulgakov's dense allusions to, and in-jokes about, life under Stalin."

4. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

 

Description: "Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the same hour and the same moment, we millions of us get up as one. At the same hour, in million-headed unison, we start work; and in million-headed unison we end it. And, fused into a single million-handed body, at the same second, designated by the Table, we lift our spoons to our mouths."

5. The Iron Wall by Avi Shlaim

 

Description: "Shlaim (War and Peace in the Middle East, etc.) is a leader among revisionist historians who are challenging Israel's most cherished myths about itself: that it has been a peaceful nation forced into war by bellicose Arab neighbors incapable of accepting its existence. A professor of history at Oxford, he covers relations between Israel and the Arabs from Israel's 1948 War of Independence to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's electoral defeat this past May. Rarely have as many fresh details been presented together about Israel's inner political scene and the Jewish state's contacts with the Arab world in its early years."

 

 

 

 

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1. List some of your're favourite books and a description (or take a description from Amazon i did!)

 


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