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An invitation to rest in the mystery that there is no single route to fulfillment, but many—often contradictory, unpredictable, endlessly available.

Our lives are restless. Though we strive for meaning, we are often unfulfilled: our loves fail, our careers stall, and our purpose eludes us. We may temporarily ease our frustration by blaming our methods or embracing our limitations, and we may even embrace the self-defeating lie that we must discover the one, linear path for success in love, work, or life. In A Book of Consolation, Andrew Stark offers a liberating third way between self-abandonment and complacency, revealed through a simple mystery: for each road where someone found fulfillment, someone else walked the opposite path to the same end.

Drawing on literature, popular culture, philosophy, and more, A Book of Consolation invites us to appreciate, even marvel at, the possibility that the routes to love, success, and meaning are so various that even inverse lives can satisfy us. Stark holds up a series of opposing journeys for consideration—from the contradictory loves in modern romantic comedies, to the regrets of Dolly Parton and Ernest Hemingway, to the mindsets behind Tiger Woods and Richard Nixon’s success. In juxtaposing these lives, Stark expands our sense of what counts as fulfillment and what alternatives may be available when our own paths falter. Rich in possibility but without prescription, A Book of Consolation encourages us to navigate the frustrations of our finitude by cultivating a faith that the paths to fulfillment are far more pluralized—and often more contradictory—than we know.

Barbara Stafford is a pioneering art historian whose research has long helped to bridge the divide between the humanities and cognitive sciences. In A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field, she marshals a distinguished group of thinkers to forge a ground-breaking dialogue between the emerging brain sciences, the liberal arts, and social sciences.

Stafford’s book examines meaning and mental function from this dual experimental perspective. The wide-ranging essays included here—from Frank Echenhofer’s foray into shamanist hallucinogenic visions to David Bashwiner’s analysis of emotion and danceability—develop a common language for implementing programmatic and institutional change. Demonstrating how formerly divided fields are converging around shared issues, A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field maps a high-level, crossdisciplinary adventure from one of our leading figures in visual studies.

In After Life, Eugene Thacker clears the ground for a new philosophy of life by recovering the twists and turns in its philosophical history. Beginning with Aristotle’s originary formulation of a philosophy of life, Thacker examines the influence of Aristotle’s ideas in medieval and early modern thought, leading him to the work of Immanuel Kant, who notes the inherently contradictory nature of “life in itself.” Along the way, Thacker shows how early modern philosophy’s engagement with the problem of life affects thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, and Alain Badiou, as well as contemporary developments in the “speculative turn” in philosophy.

At a time when life is categorized, measured, and exploited in a variety of ways, After Life invites us to delve deeper into the contours and contradictions of the age-old question, “what is life?”