front cover of Jack London
Jack London
Kenneth K. Brandt
Reaktion Books, 2021
Jack London (1876–1916) lived a life of excess by conventional standards. Daring, outspoken, politically radical, amazingly imaginative, and emotionally complicated, the author of literary classics such as The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf emerges in Kenneth K. Brandt’s new biography as a vital and flawed embodiment of conflicting yearnings. London’s exuberant energies propelled him out of the working class to become a world-famous writer by the age of twenty-seven—after stints as a child laborer, an oyster pirate, a Pacific seaman, and a convict. He wrote extensively about his travels to Japan, the Yukon, the slums of London’s East End, Korea, Hawaii, and the South Seas. Swiftly paced, intellectually engaging, and richly dramatic, London’s writings—bolstered by their wildly clashing philosophical viewpoints derived from thinkers like Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin—continue to engross readers with their depictions of primal urges, raw sensations, and reformist politics.
[more]

front cover of Jam, Jelly and Marmalade
Jam, Jelly and Marmalade
A Global History
Sarah B. Hood
Reaktion Books, 2021
Whether they make it themselves or just enjoy it with breakfast, people are often passionate about their favorite jam, jelly, or marmalade. Award-winning jam-maker Sarah B. Hood looks at the history of these sweet treats from simple fruit preserves to staple commodities, gifts for royalty, global brands, wartime comforts, and valued delicacies. She traces connections between sweet preserves and the temperance movement, the Crusades, the prevention of scurvy, medieval banquets, Georgian dinner parties, Scottish breakfasts, Joan of Arc, and the adoption of tea-drinking in Europe. She explores the birth of unique local specialties and treasured regional customs, the rise and fall of international marmalade mavens, the mobilization of volunteer preserve-makers on a grand scale, and a jam-factory revolution.
[more]

front cover of James Joyce
James Joyce
Andrew Gibson
Reaktion Books, 2006
From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s writings rank among the most intimidating works of literature. Unfortunately, many of the books that purport to explain Joyce are equally difficult. The Critical Lives series comes to the rescue with this concise yet deep examination of Joyce’s life and literary accomplishments, an examination that centers on Joyce’s mythical and actual Ireland as the true nucleus of his work. 

Andrew Gibson argues here that the most important elements in Joyce’s novels are historically material and specific to Ireland—not, as is assumed, broadly modernist. Taking Joyce “local,” Gibson highlights the historical and political traditions within Joyce’s family and upbringing and then makes the case that Ireland must play a primary role in the study of Joyce. The fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, the collapse of political hope after the Irish nationalist upheavals, the early twentieth-century shift by Irish public activists from political to cultural concerns—all are crucial to Joyce’s literary evolution. Even the author’s move to mainland Europe, asserts Gibson, was actually the continuation of a centuries-old Irish legacy of emigration rather than an abandonment of his native land.

In the thousands, perhaps millions, of words written about Joyce, Ireland often takes a back seat to his formal experimentalism and the modernist project as a whole. Yet here Gibson challenges this conventional portrait of Joyce, demonstrating that the tightest focus—Joyce as an Irishman—yields the clearest picture.
[more]

front cover of James Watt
James Watt
Making the World Anew
Ben Russell
Reaktion Books, 2014
Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer James Watt (1736–1819) is best known for his pioneering work on the steam engine that became fundamental to the incredible changes and developments wrought by the Industrial Revolution. But in this new biography, Ben Russell tells a much bigger, richer story, peering over Watt’s shoulder to more fully explore the processes he used and how his ephemeral ideas were transformed into tangible artifacts. Over the course of the book, Russell reveals as much about the life of James Watt as he does a history of Britain’s early industrial transformation and the birth of professional engineering.
           
To record this fascinating narrative, Russell draws on a wide range of resources—from archival material to three-dimensional objects to scholarship in a diversity of fields from ceramics to antique machine-making. He explores Watt’s early years and interest in chemistry and examines Watt’s partnership with Matthew Boulton, with whom he would become a successful and wealthy man. In addition to discussing Watt’s work and incredible contributions that changed societies around the world, Russell looks at Britain’s early industrial transformation. Published in association with the Science Museum London, and with seventy illustrations, James Watt is not only an intriguing exploration of the engineer’s life, but also an illuminating journey into the broader practices of invention in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
 
Published in association with the Science Museum, London
[more]

front cover of Jan van Eyck
Jan van Eyck
The Play of Realism, Second Updated and Expanded Edition
Craig Harbison
Reaktion Books, 2012

The surviving work of Flemish painter Jan van Eyck (c. 1395–1441) consists of a series of painstakingly detailed oil paintings of astonishing verisimilitude. Most explanations of the meanings behind these paintings have been grounded in a disguised religious symbolism that critics have insisted is foremost. But in Jan van Eyck, Craig Harbison sets aside these explanations and turns instead to the neglected human dimension he finds clearly present in these works. Harbison investigates the personal histories of the true models and participants who sat for such masterpieces as the Virgin and Child and the Arnolfini Double Portrait.

This revised and expanded edition includes many illustrations and reveals how van Eyck presented his contemporaries with a more subtle and complex view of the value of appearances as a route to understanding the meaning of life.

[more]

front cover of Jan van Eyck within His Art
Jan van Eyck within His Art
Alfred Acres
Reaktion Books, 2023
A new assessment of the inventive and influential artist Jan van Eyck.
 
Jan van Eyck (1390–1441) was one of the most inventive and influential artists in the entire European tradition. The realism of his paintings continues to astound observers more than six centuries on, even though our world is saturated by high-resolution images. However, viewers today are as like to be absorbed by Van Eyck’s personality as his realism. While he sometimes directly painted himself into his works, he also suggested his presence through an array of inscriptions, signatures, and even a personal motto. Incorporating a wealth of new research and recent discoveries within a fresh exploration of the paintings themselves, this book reveals how profoundly Jan van Eyck transformed the very idea of what an artist could be.
[more]

front cover of Japan's Cuisines
Japan's Cuisines
Food, Place and Identity
Eric C. Rath
Reaktion Books, 2016
Cuisines in Japan have an ideological dimension that cannot be ignored. In 2013, ‘traditional Japanese dietary cultures’ (washoku) was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Washoku’s predecessor was “national people’s cuisine,” an attempt during World War II to create a uniform diet for all citizens.
Japan’s Cuisines reveals the great diversity of Japanese cuisine and explains how Japan’s modern food culture arose through the direction of private and public institutions. Readers discover how tea came to be portrayed as the origin of Japanese cuisine, how lunch became a gourmet meal, and how regions on Japan’s periphery are reasserting their distinct food cultures. From wartime foodstuffs to modern diets, this fascinating book shows how the cuisine from the land of the rising sun shapes national, local, and personal identity.
 
[more]

front cover of Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
James S. Williams
Reaktion Books, 2008
Despite Jean Cocteau’s renown as a leading figure in European cinema, his work and life have rarely been examined together. Evaluating Cocteau’s career and his fascinating personal life on equal terms, James Williams offers here a groundbreaking analysis that sets them both within highly revealing historical and artistic contexts.

Williams’s biographical investigation of this poet, dramatist, novelist, designer, and filmmaker centers around Cocteau’s constant self-questioning and how it permeated his work. From Cocteau’s work in fashion and photography to his formal experimentation to his extensive collaborations with male friends and lovers, the book charts the complex and unpredictable evolution of his work and aesthetic. Williams argues that Cocteau’s body of work is best viewed as an ethical, erotic project of aesthetics that carries important ramifications for our contemporary understanding of being and subjectivity.

An engaging and wholly accessible account, Jean Cocteau is essential reading for all those fascinated by the man and his unforgettable films.
[more]

front cover of Jean Genet
Jean Genet
Stephen Barber
Reaktion Books, 2004
An engaging and challenging introduction to Jean Genet, this concise biography of the French writer and his work cuts directly to the intersection of thought and life that was essential to Genet's creativity. Arguing that Genet's life was an extraordinary spectacle in which the themes of his most revolutionary works were played out, Stephen Barber gives both the work and its singular inspiration in Genet's life their full due.

Abandoned, arrested, and repeatedly incarcerated, Genet, who died in 1986, led a life that could best be described as a tour of the underworld of the twentieth century.

Similarly, Genet's work is recognized by its nearly obsessive and often savage treatment of certain recurring themes. Sex, desire, death, oppression, domination-these ideas, central to Genet's artistic project, can be seen as preoccupations that arose directly from the artist's travels, imprisonments, sexual and emotional relationships, and political engagements and protests. This trenchant volume focuses directly on the moments in Genet's life in which those preoccupations are vividly projected in his novels, theater works, and film projects.

Genet's works have been hugely influential for a vast array of writers, filmmakers, choreographers, and directors, especially at moments of social crisis; thus Genet's life is not only at the root of his own work but also that of many important artists of the twentieth century. With its frank and illuminating introduction by Edmund White, Jean Genet gives readers access to this brilliant and brutal mind.
[more]

front cover of Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius
Life, Music, Silence
Daniel M. Grimley
Reaktion Books, 2021
An illuminating investigation into the interdisciplinary impact of the beloved modern classical composer.
 
Few composers have enjoyed such critical acclaim—or longevity—as Jean Sibelius, who died in 1957 aged ninety-one. Always more than simply a Finnish national figure, an “apparition from the woods” as he ironically described himself, Sibelius’s life spanned turbulent and tumultuous events, and his work is central to the story of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century music. This book situates Sibelius within a rich interdisciplinary environment, paying attention to his relationship with architecture, literature, politics, and the visual arts. Drawing on the latest developments in Sibelius research, it is intended as an accessible and rewarding introduction for the general reader, and it also offers a fresh and provocative interpretation for those more familiar with his music.
[more]

front cover of Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard
Kiff Bamford
Reaktion Books, 2017
Best known in the English-speaking world for his book The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard was one of the most important and complex French thinkers of the twentieth century. In this new critical biography, Kiff Bamford traces the multi-faceted, sometimes surprising, journey of Lyotard’s life and work.

Bamford’s book is the first to consider Lyotard’s work and ideas in the wider context of his life and times. He unravels the thrust of Lyotard’s main philosophical arguments, his struggle with thinking, and his confrontation with the task of writing and thinking differently about philosophy. Bamford takes care to situate each of these in their particular context: the Algerian war; the experimental university at Vincennes; and within Lyotard’s sustained engagement with the visual arts. The philosopher’s own suspicion of easy narratives and rejection of self-determination help to frame the book. It is only by following these prescribed cautions that Bamford is able to present a compelling portrait of a challenging subject.
[more]

front cover of Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Andrew Leak
Reaktion Books, 2006
“What I have just written is false. True. Neither true nor false, like everything one writes about madmen, about men.” With these sentences, Jean-Paul Sartre undermines the truthfulness of his own autobiography, Les Mots. Undeterred by such circumlocutions, Andrew Leak here cuts through Sartre’s own disavowals to unearth the man behind the literary and philosophical giant.       

This biographical study integrates Sartre’s works into his personal life, revealing the intimate contexts in which his philosophy developed. From Sartre’s beginnings as a bright and precocious student, Leak explores how he struggled against the repressive strictures of bourgeois expectations, endured cruelty at the hands of schoolmates, and forged his conflicted personality within a fragmented family life. The book probes his particularly influential relationships with a range of people—from Simone de Beauvoir to Gaston Gallimard—and how Sartre was transformed by historical events, in particular his service in World War II.

Telling anecdotes, personal correspondence, and archival photographs expose how Sartre’s own challenges emerged as predominant themes in his works—such as the  often blurred delineation between the real and imaginary, and his preoccupation with definitions of “madness” in the individual. Leak’s astute and provocative examination of Sartre himself challenges the philosopher’s assertion about the limits of knowledge of the other.
[more]

front cover of Jellyfish
Jellyfish
Peter Williams
Reaktion Books, 2020
Jellyfish are, like the mythical Medusa, both beautiful and potentially dangerous. Found from pole to tropic, these mesmeric creatures form an important part of the sea’s plankton and vary in size from the gigantic to the minute. Perceived as almost alien creatures and seen as best avoided, jellyfish nevertheless have the power to fascinate: with the sheer beauty of their translucent bells and long, trailing tentacles, with a mouth that doubles as an anus, and without a head or brain. Drawing upon myth and historical sources as well as modern scientific advances, this book examines our ambiguous relationship with these ancient and yet ill-understood animals, describing their surprisingly complex anatomy, weaponry, and habits, and their vital contributions to the ocean’s ecosystems.
[more]

front cover of The Jewish Self-Image
The Jewish Self-Image
American and British Perspectives, 1881-1939
Michael Berkowitz
Reaktion Books, 2000
This text explores the ways in which Jews visualized themselves as a political entity betwen 1881 and 1939. Keen to assimilate into the Western societies of which they were a part, Jews also sought to preserve and re-invent forms of solidarity for themselves. Their efforts of self-assertion in the face of conflicting impulses came to be embodied in such personalities as Theodor Herzl and Rebecca Sieff.
[more]

front cover of Jim Jarmusch
Jim Jarmusch
Music, Words and Noise
Sara Piazza
Reaktion Books, 2015
Jim Jarmusch: Music, Words and Noise is the first book to examine the films of Jim Jarmusch from a sound-oriented perspective. The three essential acoustic elements that structure a film— music, words and noise—propel this book’s fascinating journey through his work. Exploring the director’s extensive back catalogue, including Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Dead Man, and Only Lovers Left Alive, Sara Piazza’s unique reading reveals how Jarmusch created a form of “sound democracy” in film, in which all acoustic layers are capable of infiltrating each other and in which sound is not subordinate to the visual. In his cultural melting pot, hierarchies are irrelevant: Schubert and Japanese noise-bands, Marlowe and Betty Boop, can coexist easily side-by-side. Developing the innovative idea of a “silent-sound film,” Piazza identifies prefiguring elements from pre-sound-era film in Jarmusch’s work.

Highlighting the importance of Jarmusch’s treatment of sound, Piazza investigates how the director’s distinctive reputation consolidated itself over the course of a thirty-year career. Based in New York, Jarmusch was able to develop a fiercely personal vision far from the commercial pressures of Hollywood. The book uses wide-ranging examples from music, film, literature, and visual art, and features interviews with many prominent figures, including Ennio Morricone, Luc Sante, Roberto Benigni, John Lurie, and Jarmusch himself.

An innovative account of a much-admired body of work, Jim Jarmusch will appeal not only to the many fans of the director but all those interested in the connections between sound and film.

Visit the author's page for this book: 
http://jimjarmusch-musicwordsandnoise.com
[more]

front cover of Jimi Hendrix
Jimi Hendrix
Soundscapes
Marie-Paule Macdonald
Reaktion Books, 2015
Jimi Hendrix, one of the great instrumentalists in rock history, pioneered amplified sound that extended the scope of the guitar into the urban landscape. In this book, Marie-Paule Macdonald situates Hendrix’s trajectory through the places he made music, translating an innovative sense of space into his songs.
           
Macdonald follows Hendrix from the Pacific Northwest to the California coast to New York City, from his musical beginnings as a youth in Seattle to his launch, touring career, and up until his last weeks in London. She charts the surroundings of a genuine inner-city dweller, a nighthawk and wanderer who roamed the streets and alleys of everyday neighborhoods and haunted seedy basement bars and intimate clubs—as performer or audience member. She explores how the rumble, uproar, babble, and discord of urban life inspired Hendrix to incorporate noise into his powerful repertoire. Tracking the variety of places where Hendrix played—from open-air stages to dilapidated ballrooms—she shows how space eventually became a process, as Hendrix would eventually commission an architect and sound engineer to build an urban recording studio that would capture the reverberation, bounce, sustain, and echo that he heard and played.
           
Crackling with the electrifying sound of explosive creativity, Jimi Hendrix explores place and space to offer fascinating new insight into Hendrix’s resounding talent. 
[more]

logo for Reaktion Books
J.-K. Huysmans
Ruth Antosh
Reaktion Books
A critical biography of a major novelist and art critic from the late nineteenth-century French decadent movement.

J.-K. Huysmans (1848–1907) is often hailed as a forerunner of modernist letters. While his novel À rebours / Against Nature remains infamous for its reclusive protagonist retreating into a realm of artifice and dreams, Huysmans’s literary contributions are far-reaching. Ruth Antosh explores Huysmans’s life and work, illustrating how both reflect an uneasy era of profound social and artistic change. In this context, Huysmans’s correspondence, early fiction, art criticism, and surrealist novel En rade / Stranded demand greater critical attention. Antosh argues that Huysmans’s life should be understood as an unwavering quest for spiritual and aesthetic fulfillment.
[more]

front cover of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Jeremy Adler
Reaktion Books, 2020
This new critical biography provides a complete picture of German novelist, playwright, and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Offering fresh, thought-provoking interpretations of all Goethe’s major works, including novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Elective Affinities, plays such as Egmont and Iphigenia in Tauris, and Goethe’s greatest work, Faust, Jeremy Adler also provides many original readings of Goethe’s poetry, beginning with the poems written in his early youth. Alongside Goethe’s work, Adler analyzes the incidents of his life, including his love affairs and his meetings with the luminaries of his age, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. Uniquely, Adler also shows how Goethe’s encyclopedic interest in literature, science, philosophy, law, and many other fields became important for a wide range of later scientists and thinkers. Among the figures he influenced were Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim and Susan Sontag. Goethe has often been called the last Renaissance man. This biography shows that Goethe was in fact the first of the moderns—a maker of modernity.
[more]

front cover of John Ashbery
John Ashbery
Jess Cotton
Reaktion Books, 2023
A critical biography of America’s most influential postmodern poet.
 
Mysterious, esoteric, and baffling, John Ashbery is notorious for the seeming difficulty of his work. But Ashbery is also entertaining, humorous, even charming, and ever responsive to his shifting social and political contexts. This biography charts Ashbery’s rise from a minor avant-garde figure to the most important poet of his generation. Jess Cotton provides a legible and accessible roadmap to Ashbery’s work that draws connections between his poetry, New York artists, and mid-century politics. Cotton paints an image of a more approachable and socially engaged Ashbery that will appeal to anyone interested in American poetry, queer lives, and twentieth-century American history.
 
[more]

front cover of John Berger
John Berger
Andy Merrifield
Reaktion Books, 2012
With a career in literature and art spanning more than sixty years, John Berger is characterized by an independent and anti-institutional approach to creativity. Working in a range of media including novels, painting, essays and scriptwriting, Berger's voice has resounded through mainstream and alternative culture alike. He is perhaps best known for his seminal book of art criticism Ways of Seeing, published in 1972. Tied directly into a four-part BBC television series, the book presented a radical new interpretation of Western cultural aesthetics. In the same year, Berger's experimental novel G. was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, cementing his reputation as a boundary-pushing writer and thinker. In this concise yet detailed study of Berger's life and work, the first for decades, Andy Merrifield sheds light on Berger the man, the artist, and the concerned citizen. Merrifield shows Berger to be a figure who constantly strives to open up new horizons, and also reveals the depth of feeling that infuses even his most intellectual work. In this sense, Berger is a creator who feels reality like the irrationalist Rousseau, yet is also a meticulous realist, probing objects critically and rationally like Spinoza. John Berger stitches together art, literature, biography and politics into a lucid, coherent whole. The result is a reader-friendly, freewheeling narrative, which gives fascinating insight into one of the most influential thinkers of our times. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of art, literature and twentieth-century culture.
[more]

front cover of John Cage
John Cage
Rob Haskins
Reaktion Books, 2012

American writer, composer, artist, and philosopher John Cage (1912–92) is best known for his experimental composition 4’33,” a musical score in which the performer does not play an instrument during the duration of the piece. The purpose, Cage said, was for the audience to listen to the sounds of the environment around them while the piece was performed. Groundbreaking pieces such as 4’33”, as well as Sonatas and Interludes not only established Cage as a leading figure in the postwar avant-garde movement, but also cemented the enduring controversy surrounding his work.

In this new biography, Rob Haskins explores Cage’s radical approach to art and aesthetics and his belief that everyday life and art are one and the same. Scrutinizing Cage’s emphasis on chance over intention, which rejected traditional artistic methods and caused an uproar among his peers, Haskins elucidates the ideas that lay behind these pillars of Cage’s work. Haskins also demystifies the influence of Eastern cultures, particularly Zen Buddhism, on Cage, including his use of the Chinese text I Ching as his standard composition tool in all his work after 1951. Adding to our understanding of the art, music, and ideas of the twentieth century, this book provides an engaging look at a man who continues to challenge and inspire artists worldwide.
[more]

front cover of John Donne
John Donne
In the Shadow of Religion
Andrew Hadfield
Reaktion Books, 2021
John Donne: In the Shadow of Religion explores the life of one of the most significant figures of the English Renaissance. The book not only provides an overview of Donne’s life and work, but connects his writing and thinking to the ideas, institutions, and networks that influenced him. The book shows how Donne’s faith underpinned his career, from aspirational courtier to phenomenally successful clergyman and preacher, when he became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Donne emerges as a figure obsessed with himself, tormented by the fear that his transgressions may have condemned him to eternal damnation. This fine new account uses Donne’s correspondence, writing, and poetry to give a rounded portrait of a bold, experimental thinker, who was never afraid of taking risks that few others would have countenanced.
[more]

front cover of John Evelyn
John Evelyn
A Life of Domesticity
John Dixon Hunt
Reaktion Books, 2018
The great English writer and gardener John Evelyn (1620–1706) kept a diary all his life. Today, this diary is considered an invaluable source of information on more than fifty years of social, cultural, religious, and political life in seventeenth-century England. Evelyn’s work is often overshadowed by the literary contributions of his contemporary and friend, Samuel Pepys. This new biography changes that.

John Dixon Hunt takes a fresh look at the life and work of one of England’s greatest diarists, focusing particularly on Evelyn’s “domesticity.” The book explores Evelyn’s life at home, and perhaps even more importantly, his domestication of foreign ideas and practices in England. During the English Civil Wars, Evelyn traveled extensively throughout Europe, taking in ideas on the management of estate design while abroad to apply them in England. Evelyn’s greatest accomplishment was the import of European garden art to the UK, a feat Hunt puts into context alongside a range of Evelyn’s social and ethical thinking. Illustrated with visual material from Evelyn’s time and from his own pen, the book is an ideal introduction to a hugely important figure in the shaping of early modern Britain.
[more]

front cover of John Ruskin
John Ruskin
Andrew Ballantyne
Reaktion Books, 2015
John Ruskin (1819–1900) was the most prominent art and architecture critic of his time. Yet his reputation has been overshadowed by his personal life, especially his failed marriage to Effie Gray, which has cast him in the history books as little more than a Victorian prude. In this book, Andrew Ballantyne rescues Ruskin from the dustbin of history’s trifles to reveal a deeply attuned thinker, one whose copious writings had tremendous influence on all classes of society, from roadmenders to royalty.
           
Ballantyne examines a crucial aspect of Ruskin’s thinking: the notion that art and architecture have moral value. Telling the story of Ruskin’s childhood and enduring devotion to his parents—who fostered his career as a writer on art and architecture—he explores the circumstances that led to Ruskin’s greatest works, such as Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, and Unto This Last. He follows Ruskin through his altruistic ventures with the urban poor, to whom he taught drawing, motivated by a profound conviction that art held the key to living a worthwhile life. Ultimately, Ballantyne weaves Ruskin’s story into a larger one about Victorian society, a time when the first great industrial cities took shape and when art could finally reach beyond the wealthy elite and touch the lives of everyday people. 
[more]

front cover of Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jason Wilson
Reaktion Books, 2006

“Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.”

These words, inseparably marrying Jorge Luis Borges's life and work, encapsulate how he interwove the two throughout his legendary career. But the Borges of popular imagination is the blind, lauded librarian and man of letters; few biographers have explored his tumultuous early life in the streets and cafes of Buenos Aires, a young man searching for his path in the world.  In Jorge Luis Borges, Jason Wilson uncovers the young poet who wrote, loved, and lost with adventurous passion, and he considers the later work and life of the writer who claimed he never created a character other than himself. As Borges declared, “It’s always me, subtly disguised.”

Born in Buenos Aires in 1899, Borges was a voracious reader from childhood, perhaps in part because he knew he lived under an inescapable sentence of adult-onset blindness inherited from his father. Wilson chronicles Borges’s life as he raced against time and his fated blindness, charting the literary friendships, love affairs, and polemical writings that formed the foundation of his youth. Illuminating the connections running between the biography and fictions of Borges, Wilson traces the outline of this self-effacing literary figure.

Though in his later writings Borges would subjugate emotion to the wild play of ideas, this bracing book reminds us that his works always recreated his life in subtle and delicate ways. Restoring Borges to his Argentine roots, Jorge Luis Borges will be an invaluable resource for all those who treasure this modern master.

[more]

front cover of Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Claudia Mesch
Reaktion Books, 2017
Joseph Beuys is one of the most important and controversial German artists of the late twentieth century, an artist whose persona and art is so tightly interwoven with Germany’s fascist past—Beuys was, after all, a former soldier in the Third Reich—that he has been a problematic figure for postwar and post-reunification Germany. In illuminating the centrality of trauma and the sustained investigation of the notion of art as the two defining threads in Beuys's life and art, this book offers a critical biography that deepens our understanding of his many works and their contribution. 
           
Claudia Mesch analyzes the aspects of Beuys’s works that have most offended audiences, especially the self-woven legend of redemption that many have felt was a dubious and inappropriate fantasy for a former Nazi soldier to engage. As she argues, however, Beuys’s self-mythology confronted post-traumatic life head on, foregrounding a struggle for psychic recovery. Following Beuys’s exhibitions in the 1970s, she traces how he both expanded the art world beyond the established regional centers and paved the way for future artists interested in activism-as-art. Exploring Beuys’s expansive conceptions of what art is and following him into the realms of science, politics, and spirituality, Mesch ultimately demonstrates the ways that his own myth-making acted as a positive force in the Germany’s postwar reckoning with its past.
[more]

front cover of Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Robert Hampson
Reaktion Books, 2021
Joseph Conrad is widely recognized as one of the greatest writers of the early twentieth century. Robert Hampson traces Conrad’s life from his childhood in a Russian penal colony, through his early manhood in Marseille and his years in the British Merchant Navy, to his career as a novelist. This critical biography describes how these experiences inspired Conrad’s work, from his early Malay novels to his best-known work, Heart of Darkness. Hampson also discusses Conrad’s important relations with other writers, in particular Ford Madox Ford, as well as his late-life political engagements and his relationships with women. Featuring new interpretations of all of Conrad’s major works, this is an original interpretation of Conrad’s life of writing.
[more]

front cover of Joseph Cornell's Vision of Spiritual Order
Joseph Cornell's Vision of Spiritual Order
Lindsay Blair
Reaktion Books, 1998
The "boxes" and collages constructed by Joseph Cornell (1903–72) are among the most intriguing and beguiling works of art made this century. Old toys, photos, magazine illustrations, bits of electrical wiring – anything in fact more usually left to molder in lumber rooms or junkshops – were hoarded by him as the elemental materials he needed for his constructions. The finished works are visually entrancing, but the intensely personal webs of reverie and association that determined their content make these boxes at once both oddly familiar yet ineluctably strange.

Drawing on the widest range possible of primary material – virtually all Cornell's scrapbooks and source files, as well as correspondence and diaries – supplemented by further details gathered during more than fifty interviews undertaken with the artist's family and acquaintances, including Robert Motherwell and Susan Sontag, Lindsay Blair gives us the most detailed picture yet of an artist who hid so much of his life from the world. Her conclusion, wholly convincing in the light of the evidence she provides, is that Cornell's ultimate subject was the mind itself.
[more]

front cover of The Joy of Sets
The Joy of Sets
A Short History of the Television
Chris Horrocks
Reaktion Books, 2017
It is a modern activity, one of the primary ways we consume information and entertainment, something we’ll do over dinner, at a bar, or even standing on the street peering into a store window—watch TV. Many of us spend countless hours in front of the tube, and even those of us who have proudly eliminated it from our lives can probably still rattle off the names of today’s most popular shows. But for as crucial as television viewing is in modern culture, the television set itself, as a ubiquitous object in our environment, rarely captures our attention—turn one off and it seems to all but disappear. In this book, Chris Horrocks tells the story of the television set, exploring its contradictory presence in our lives as both a material object and a conveyor of illusory images.
      
Horrocks begins in the nineteenth century and television’s prehistory as a fantastic, futuristic concept. He follows the television’s journey from its strange roots in spiritualism, imperialism, and Victorian experiments in electro-magnetism to the contested accounts of its actual invention, looking at the work of engineering pioneers such as Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird. Unboxing sets all across the world, he details how it arrived as an essential consumer product and began to play an extraordinary role as a bridge between public and private life. Horrocks describes how the console and cabinet themselves expressed status and good taste and how their designs drew on cultural phenomena such as the space race and the avant-garde. He discusses how we have both loved it for what it can provide and reviled it as a sinister object literally controlling our thoughts, and he shows how it has figured in other cultural realms, such as the work of artists like Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik. Finally, Horrocks laments the death of the cathode ray tube and the emergence of the flat-screen, which has reduced the presence of the television as a significant material object. Altogether, The Joy of Sets brings this most elusive object into crystal-clear critical and historical focus.
 
[more]

front cover of Jupiter
Jupiter
William Sheehan and Thomas Hockey
Reaktion Books, 2018
Now in paperback, an accessible and engaging introduction to planetary science that will deepen our knowledge both of this magnificent planet and of our own place in the solar system.

Majestic and untwinkling, Jupiter is the grandest of all planets. It is the largest planet in our solar system and among the brightest objects in the night sky. It shines with a noble, steady luster, and its calming presence has inspired humans for centuries. Jupiter was the “beloved star” of the first serious observers of the planets, the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, and has inspired poetic utterances from eminent writers such as William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman. It also continues to inspire contemporary astronomers and stargazers, and this beautifully illustrated volume brings our understanding of Jupiter right up to date.

The scientific study of Jupiter is at a watershed: NASA’s Juno space probe has entered orbit about Jupiter to investigate the planet, while information gleaned from improved telescopes and other robotic explorers in space continues to improve our understanding of the planet’s origin, evolution, and composition. Jupiter provides a concise and expert overview of the history of our observations of this largest of planetary spheres, as well as reports on the much-anticipated initial findings from the Juno space probe. 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter