These linked essays of personal and cultural critique include meditations on home and childhood, love and sex, art and literature, parenting and self-destruction, on the city and on death. Walton constantly slips through and between memory's tenuous folds: "that never happened, exactly, but it's certainly not a lie." Witty, candid, defying category, dogma, and expectation, Unsavory Thoughts is a bold self-portrait in an inscrutable landscape: lyric, profound, tragic, hilarious, ab...

Stacey Davenport fights back against a regime that is quickly reducing women to concubinage in dystopian Kansas. Even as a motorcycle gang, deputized as religious police, rounds up the designated women, Stacey starts a political campaign to overthrow the regime. But Stacey's initial victory does not really change the status quo on the ground in certain parts of Kansas. Now, while Stacey fights in the legislature for the legal right to keep her unborn baby girl, her sister must risk her lif...

The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious and talented young artist from the provinces who has come to conquer Paris and is conquered by the flaws in his own genius. While his boyhood friend Pierre Sandoz becomes a successful novelist, Claude's originality is mocked at the Salon and turns gradually into a doomed obsession with one great canvas. Life - in the form of his model and wife Christine and their deformed child Jacques - is sacrificed on the altar...

In the early days of video games, spatial awareness was limited to exactly what was on the screen. If an enemy was off-screen, it didn't exist until it killed you. Then, arcade classics like 'Defender' introduced a revolutionary concept: a crude, glowing radar at the top of the screen. This tiny UI element, which evolved into the modern mini-map, fundamentally changed how human beings process virtual space and navigate digital worlds. This deep dive into game design architecture explores t...

Kevin Mallory is a Customer Assistance Representative for a cable company. He keeps his customers on hold, his supervisor on the run and his female nemesis on ice, but a new friend just might change his perspective.Lilly has supported herself since high school with just a little help from her only living relative, her alcoholic older brother. She runs a small non-profit housing agency while McFadden, her supervisor and director of the agency, travels around the cou...

Corporate Creativity is the ultimate guide for executives and managers looking to increase creativity and innovation in their companies. This anthology of provocative essays, drawn from the pages of Design Management Review and Design Management Journal, explores personal, team, and organizational creativity, and it is packed with insights from the most respected names in the industry: Jeffrey Mauzy, Robert Rassmussen, Leonard Glick, Gerald Nadler, Stefano Marzano, and many others. These e...

How can design be used to solve business problems? That's the question answered, in many innovative ways, by Building Design Strategy. Mark Dziersk, EunSool Kwon, Arnold Levin, Laura Weiss, and many more top-name contributors share their experience and insights. Topics explore the full range of issues today, including thinking ahead; adapting to challenges; developing tangible strategies; using design to convey ideas; choosing worthwhile projects to help growth; using design to cr...

Still mourning the baby she gave away a year before – and feeling rejected by the same church people who had so cheerfully arranged that adoption – sixteen-year-old Diane seems to find a supportive friend in her gynecologist, Dr. Zeus. Diane is intelligent and bold but often leaps before she looks, and now she questions why he has to examine her so often, and why he prescribes her so many drugs.The state medical board also has suspicions about Dr. Zeus, but the official inquiry inc...

In part one a cat-loving married couple are asked for advice on how to rid a feral colony of cats from under a storage trailer at a resort hotel. They decide to take on the task themselves. They spend the next three months on a quest which results in them capturing 23 cats and finding homes for 20 of them. To help understand their desire to undertake the quest, part two retraces the experiences they had with their own “fur persons” during a 40-year marriage. Stories range from the tale of ...

In Change by Design, Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, the celebrated innovation and design firm, shows how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change by Design is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders who seek to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.Learn the proven, human-centered process for sparking true innovation:...

This thought-provoking and inspirational book covers such topics as: developing a solid creative process through Visual Reflection Notebooks” and Bring Play to Work”; understanding the artist’s unique identity in relation to the larger culture; building systems of support and collaboration; explaining how an artist’s needs and passions can lead to innovation and authenticity; using language to inspire visual creativity; responding to the Internet and changing concepts of what is public a...

New tools for managing complexityDoes your organization manage complexity by making things more complicated? If so, you are not alone.According to The Boston Consulting Group’s fascinating Complexity Index, business complexity has increased sixfold during the past sixty years. And, all the while, organizational complicatedness-that is, the number of structures, processes, committees, decision-making forums, and systems-has increased by a whopping f...