Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name means a trial, effort or attempt. An ancient form with an eye on the future, a genre poised between tradition and experiment. The essay wants above all to wander, but also to arrive at symmetry and wholeness; it nurses competing urges to integrity and disarray, perfection and fragmentation, confession and invention.How to write about essays and essayists while staying true to these contradictions? Essayism is a perso...

Blackstone's Emergency Planning, Crisis, and Disaster Management is a practical guide for those involved in all aspects of emergency preparedness, resilience, and response. Primarily focused on the requirements of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, it has been developed from the highly regarded Emergency Planning Officers' Handbook. The complete toolkit for anyone involved in emergency planning, business continuity, and resilience management, this must-have guide offers a...

Boldly combining the highly personal with the brilliantly scholarly, In the Dark Room explores the question of how memory works emotionally and culturally. It is narrated through the prism of the author's experience of losing both his parents, his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was on the cusp of adulthood and of trying, after a breakdown some years later, to piece things together. Drawing on the lessons of centuries of literature, philosophy and visual art, Dillon...

Charlotte Brontë found in her illnesses, real and imaginary, an escape from familial and social duties and the perfect conditions for writing. The German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber believed his body was being colonized and transformed at the hand of God and doctors alike. Andy Warhol was terrified by disease and by the idea of disease. Glenn Gould claimed a friendly pat on his shoulder had destroyed his ability to play piano. And we all know someone who has, in solitude, trawled the Inter...

When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. While he courted exam failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at last he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia live up to the hopes and dreams he had invested in it? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. Ambivalence e...

A witty and thought-provoking collection of visual poems constructed from stacks of books.Delighting in the look and feel of books, conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian's playful photographic series proves that books' covers—or more specifically, their spines—can speak volumes. Over the past two decades, Katchadourian has perused libraries across the globe, selecting, stacking, and photographing groupings of two, three, four, or five books so that their titles can ...

"Fast-paced, gritty, and laced with impressive jolts of dark humor, Leon's "Havoc Rising" successfully turns the genre on its head by taking familiar mythological figures and steering them into uncharted waters." Michael Meyerhofer, Award Winning Author of The Dragonkin Trilogy"Havoc Rising is in the top three first books in a series I have read in the last year. I'm eager to read the second!" GalleywampusEternal life. Eternal battle.Steve—Diomedes ...

The COVID-19 pandemic was not a great ‘equaliser’, but rather an event whose impact intersected with pre-existing inequalities affecting different people, places, and geographic scales. Nowhere is this more apparent than in housing.Written by an international group of experts, this book casts light on how the virus has impacted the experience of home and housing through the lens of wider urban processes around transportation, land use, planning policy, racism, and inequality. Case ...

Sheed & Ward, in partnership with Commonweal magazine, presents the second of two volumes in the groundbreaking series, American Catholics in the Public Square, a project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Essays by scholars, journalists, lawyers, business and labor leaders, church administrators and lobbyists, novelists, activists, policy makers and politicians address the most critical issues facing the Catholic Church in the United States. Volume 2, American Catholics, American Cultur...

A coming-of-age memoir set in late-twentieth-century Dublin, recounting writer and critic Brian Dillon's first encounters with pivotal writers in his life—Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, and others—and in the process arguing for the transformative power of art, literature, and learning.When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died, and he stopped caring about school. While he courted failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, m...

When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. While he courted exam failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at last he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia live up to the hopes and dreams he had invested in it? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. Ambivalence explores w...

"An intriguing, suavely written blend of medical history and literary criticism . . .adds to the growing . . . field of pathological biography." —Heller McAlpin, Los Angeles TimesCharlotte Brontë found in her illnesses, real and imagined, an escape from familial and social duties, and the perfect conditions for writing. The German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber believed his body was being colonized and transformed at the hands of God and doc...