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A vital reckoning with how we understand the basic categories of cultural expression in the digital era
 

Digital and social media have transformed how much and how fast we communicate, but they have also altered the palette of expressive strategies: the cultural forms that shape how citizens, activists, and artists speak and interact. Most familiar among these strategies are storytelling and representation. In A Theory of Assembly, Kyle Parry argues that one of the most powerful and pervasive cultural forms in the digital era is assembly.

Whether as subtle photographic sequences, satirical Venn diagrams, or networked archives, projects based in assembly do not so much narrate or represent the world as rearrange it. This work of rearranging can take place at any scale, from a simple pairing of images, undertaken by one person, to the entire history of internet memes, undertaken by millions. With examples ranging from GIFs and paintings to museum exhibitions and social movement hashtags, Parry shows how, in the internet age, assembly has come to equal narrative and representation in its reach and influence, particularly as a response to ecological and social violence. He also emphasizes the ambivalence of assembly—the way it can be both emancipatory and antidemocratic.

As the world becomes ever hotter, more connected, and more algorithmic, the need to map—and remake—assembly’s powers and perils becomes all the more pressing. Interdisciplinary, engaging, and experimental, A Theory of Assembly serves as a playbook of strategies and critical frameworks for artists, activists, and content creators committed to social and environmental justice, ultimately arguing for a collective reenvisioning of which cultural forms matter.

Cover alt text: Letters from the title appear in a jumble, each colored in a blue-orange gradient. Readable title and author sits below the jumble.

These lyric, unsparing poems stitch together a story of identity, belonging, and dissolution.

A Theory of Knots explores the loops of how identity and belonging are constructed, broken, resurrected, and dissolved. In sections, knots weave DNA and cords, memory and mythology, home and tongue; they draw on desire, Zoroastrian rituals, tradition and transgression, and the legacies of womanhood, asking what connects us, and at what cost.

As layers of identity are examined, Pervin Saket's poems return to language: heirloom, hazard, half-truth. Soon enough, language is both subject and suspect; having exposed the artificial nature of our truths, the poems confront the artificial nature of language itself. At the end, poetry reaches the wilderness of earth, collapses upon itself, dissolving on the page—untangling the final knot.

Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory presents Kate Bush as you have never seen her before. Encounter the polymorphously perverse Kate, the witchy Kate, the queer Kate; the Kate who moves beyond the mime.

Through in-depth readings of the often critically neglected works of Bush’s career (The Kick Inside, Lionheart, The Dreaming, The Red Shoes and her film The Line, the Cross and the Curve), Withers guides the reader through the complexity of Bush’s art and how it transformed popular culture. 

Not just another book about Kate Bush.

A powerful deconstruction of humanity’s most influential invention, from the acclaimed economists J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev.

Money is everywhere in our daily lives. It lurks in the swipe of a card at the grocery store, in looming student-loan debts, in the prices of things we want, and in our subconscious navigation of the modern world. Money is an invisible convenience that saves us, as a society, the hassle of bartering for goods and services—a reflection, in our pockets and on our phones, of the hard facts of scarcity and desire. Or is it something more?

In this revelatory book, economists J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev explain how and why money is so deeply misunderstood by the world it dominates—as well as the dangerous social implications of this misunderstanding. Against Money tackles the most dearly held “truths” of economics, arguing that the world of money has never been an impartial representation of the world of things. Instead, its existence in different forms—debt, capital, liquidity, and interest—increasingly shapes events in the real world rather than just reflecting them. Sometimes money enables new forms of cooperation; more oftenit facilitates domination. Human existence is not just facilitated by money but also governed by it.

In the tradition of works by Thomas Piketty and David Graeber, Against Money is an erudite, disruptive exposé of the illusions and tyrannies of money. Mason and Jayadev present a radically different way of thinking about money—imagining a hopeful future in which it no longer dictates the possibilities of our collective existence.

A powerful deconstruction of humanity’s most influential invention, from the acclaimed economists J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev.

Money is everywhere in our daily lives. It lurks in the swipe of a card at the grocery store, in looming student-loan debts, in the prices of things we want, and in our subconscious navigation of the modern world. Money is an invisible convenience that saves us, as a society, the hassle of bartering for goods and services—a reflection, in our pockets and on our phones, of the hard facts of scarcity and desire. Or is it something more?

In this revelatory book, economists J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev explain how and why money is so deeply misunderstood by the world it dominates—as well as the dangerous social implications of this misunderstanding. Against Money tackles the most dearly held “truths” of economics, arguing that the world of money has never been an impartial representation of the world of things. Instead, its existence in different forms—debt, capital, liquidity, and interest—increasingly shapes events in the real world rather than just reflecting them. Sometimes money enables new forms of cooperation; more oftenit facilitates domination. Human existence is not just facilitated by money but also governed by it.

In the tradition of works by Thomas Piketty and David Graeber, Against Money is an erudite, disruptive exposé of the illusions and tyrannies of money. Mason and Jayadev present a radically different way of thinking about money—imagining a hopeful future in which it no longer dictates the possibilities of our collective existence.

The book that made the modern world, reissued in its definitive scholarly form and featuring a new foreword from Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen.

First published in 1776, Adam Smith’s masterwork The Wealth of Nations formalized the first unified theory of modern economies—how human nature, public institutions, and private interests can coalesce in a society greater than the sum of its parts. More than 250 years later, it remains one of humanity’s most defining and lasting literary works.

This definitive edition includes Edwin Cannan’s famous annotations of the original text, accounting for both Smith’s early drafts and his lectures at the University of Glasgow, where he originated the book’s concepts. The result is the most complete edition of the work to date, maintaining unprecedented fidelity to Smith’s ideas and packaging them in fluent and elevating terms.

In a new foreword, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen offers context and contemporary incision for twenty-first-century readers, discussing the uses—and occasional misuses—of Smith’s ideas for the advancement of political agendas. The Wealth of Nations, Sen makes clear, is a book about societies, not just economies. “Smith’s economics accommodated his values,” he writes. As readers of The Wealth of Nations will discover and rediscover, those values prioritized the lives of everyday working people above all else.

Anarchist politics are at the heart of today’s most vibrant and radical social movements. From squatted social centres and community gardens to acts of sabotage and raucous summit blockades, anarchist groups and networks are spreading an ethos of direct action, non-hierarchical organizing and self-liberation that has redefined revolutionary struggle for the 21st century.

Anarchy Alive! is a fascinating, in-depth look at the practice and theory of contemporary anarchism. Uri Gordon draws on his activist experience and on interviews, discussions and a vast selection of recent literature to explore the activities, cultures and agendas shaping today’s explosive anti-authoritarian revival. Anarchy Alive! also addresses some of the most tense debates in the contemporary movement, using a theory based on practice to provocatively reshape anarchist discussions of leadership, violence, technology and nationalism.

This is the ideal book for anyone looking for a fresh, informed and critical engagement with anarchism, as a mature and dynamic political force in the age of globalisation.

What does a life with art offer that a life without art does not? Art and Freedom asserts that the fundamental point of the enterprise of art is the creation and delivery of values that are not singularly available in the nonart world.

E. E. Sleinis discusses visual art, literature, music, theater, and other art forms, arguing that as art both liberates and provides new points of focus and awareness, the art enterprise depends on a positive freeing from the nonart world, rather than on mere addition to it.

Art and Freedom introduces a novel classificatory system for representation, expression, and formalist theories of art. Sleinis argues that a characteristic defect of contemporary theories of art is their neglect of the issue of value. Challenging these reductive, formalist notions of art, he emphasizes the potential, and the need, for art to evolve and make progress in ways comparable to the sciences, albeit on a very different model.

A smart blend of incisive commentary and illuminating philosophy, Art and Freedom provides a useful context for transforming a sometimes baffling medium into a means of fostering personal growth and creating and sharing values.