Culture & Ideas
By Tate
By Tate
Our selection of new books and recommendations in Culture and Ideas, for curious eyes and questioning minds, seeking to understanding our present moment.
This list was selected by: Simon (Tate Modern & Tate Britain).
Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
James Bridle
£12.99 £12.34
On Lying And Politics: A Library of America Special Publication
Hannah Arendt and David Bromwich
£11.99 £11.39
Fighting in a World on Fire: The Next Generation's Guide to Protecting the Climate and Saving Our Future
Andreas Malm
£10.99 £10.44
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals
Saidiya Hartman
£11.99 £11.39
Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism
Roy Christopher and Ytasha L. Womack
£19.99 £18.99
Taking A Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time
VIVIAN GORNICK
£16.99 £16.14
Radical Attention
Julia Bell
£6.00 £5.70It's time to pay attention to our distractions. In today's online economy, attention has been commodified. We exchange our attention for information and entertainment, but at what cost? Julia Bell's essay glows with insights and offers pathways to reclaim our attention.
Out of Nowhere Into Nothing
Caryl Pagel
£19.49A perfect, mellow and thoughtful read this one. Fine company for lockdown. If you are missing hanging out and having those odd, meandering conversations about everything and nothing, or even just missing the possibility of doing that, thats basically what this book provides in haagen dazsian scoopfulls - a mash up of Pagel’s personal experiences, her research, and her observations that tease out connections between the visual and the invisible. She’s an Everyday magic seeker. A stream of random, enigmatic tales about a housemate that borrowed a car then disappeared, a football coach who faked his own death, a great piece on photography in Chicago, and a history of ‘sane hallucinations’ in the late 19th century. Much like our lockdown days, this book drifts, pauses, considers little everyday incidents and investigates seemingly ordinary things. Nothing is mundane or dull if you stay open and let it it in.
Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution
Maurizio Lazzarato and Robert Hurley
£14.99 £14.24Sociologist Maurice Lazzarato points to a stark choice emerging from today's world events. As booksellers we have long understood Capitalism to be the enemy of true commerce, because its purpose is to prevent widespread prosperity, rather than create it.
Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures
Mark Fisher
£12.99 £12.34When we try to understand what is happening in the world, it can all seem such a muddled and cloudy picture. Then along came the unique and gifted Mark Fisher, who was able to look around at culture, music, politics and society as if looking through glass, then write about it with clarity, insight and wit. Fisher is tragically lost to us now, but his work endures and is of far greater value than the price of this book!
Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman
Rebecca Tamas
£12.99 £12.34Where the human and the non-human overlap, and why these fragile relationships may be the most important connections we have.
The Superrationals
Stephanie LaCava
£14.99 £14.24A dark, comic novel about female friendship and the entangled relationship between the counterculture and the art industry.
Against Amazon: and Other Essays
Jorge Carrion
£12.99 £12.34Against Amazon and Other Essays explores the increasing pressures of Amazon and other new technologies on bookshops and libraries. In essays on these vital social, cultural, and intellectual spaces, Jorge Carrión travels from London to Geneva, from Miami’s Little Havana to Argentina, from his own well-loved childhood library to the rosewood shelves of Jules Verne’s Nautilus and the innovative spaces that characterize South Korea’s bookshop renaissance. Including interviews with writers and librarians―including Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara, and Han Kang, among others―Against Amazon is equal parts a celebration of books and bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love letter―and, most urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive influence of late capitalism.
Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art and Making It Happen
£12.99 £12.34
Celebrating the work of thirty-one leading working class writers in Britain. Featuring writing, lyrics and images from Wiley, Maxine Peake, Riz Ahmed and many more. Packed with insights, advice and motivation from those who made it through the door but didn't forget to hold it open for others.
Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World
Leslie Kern
£9.99 £9.49Most stuff in the world has been designed by men for men using research data from men. Men even own the terminology: “Man-Made”. You see it everywhere in culture and commerce, but it is no less true of architecture, urban design and planning. To read this book is to understand that our public spaces need a more considered and inclusive approach. Public spaces rarely factor in women, especially mothers with children or women walking alone. The smarter future of urban living starts here.
Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City
Joy White
£10.99 £10.44An uncompromising wake-up call. Joy White tells uncomfortable truths and blows apart our understanding of racism, crime and policing in our inner-cities.
The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions
Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta
£12.99 £12.34The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is a beloved queer utopian text written by Larry Mitchell with illustrations by Ned Asta, originally published by Calamus Press in 1977. Part-fable, part-manifesto, the book takes place in Ramrod, an empire in decline, and introduces us to the communities of the faggots, the women, the queens, the queer men, and the women who love women who are surviving the ways and world of men. Cherished by many over the four decades since its publication, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions offers a trenchant critique of capitalism, assimilation, and patriarchy that is deeply relevant today. This new edition features essays from performance artist Morgan Bassichis.
Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power
Lola Olufemi
£12.99 £12.34An outstanding book that reclaims feminism from consumerism and commodification and shows that the struggle for gendered liberation is a struggle for justice that can transform the world for everyone.
Footprints
David Farrier
£16.99A profound meditation on climate change and what the world will look like in ten thousand, or ten million years time. By travelling forward and looking at the fossils of the future, we can better understand what is happening in the world today.
How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division: The powerful, pocket-sized manifesto
Elif Shafak
£5.99 £5.69We were already in an age of contagious anxiety before Covid-19, now we are even more likely to be overwhelmed by the events around us, by injustice, by suffering, and by an endless feeling of crisis. How can we nurture the parts of ourselves that hope, trust and believe in something better? Highly recommended book from the Booker-Prize nominated novelist Elif Shafak.
Automation and the Future of Work
Aaron Benanav
£12.99 £12.34Does the much-discussed rise of the robots really explain the jobs crisis that awaits us on the other side of the coronavirus? In Automation and the Future of Work, Aaron Benanav uncovers the structural economic trends that will shape our working lives far into the future. What social movements, he asks, are required to propel us into post-scarcity, if technological innovation alone can't deliver it?
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
Ursula Le Guin and Lee Bul
£7.99 £7.59What if technology was a bag, to carry culture and ideas in, rather than a weapon of domination? Le Guin's classic essay is republished here with an introduction by Donna Haraway, and it's no exaggeration to say this will open you up to the possibilities of human experience, knowledge and seeing the world anew.
Retreat: How the Counterculture invented Wellness
Matthew Ingram
£14.99 £14.24The counterculture of the Sixties and the Seventies and it's influence on health and wellness is explored in this illuminating cultural history. Matthew Ingram connects the dots between the beats, yoga, meditation, psychedelics, psychoanalysis, Eastern philosophy, sex, and veganism, showing how the hippies still have a lot to teach us about our wellbeing.
The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography.
Andy Sharp
£12.99 £12.34Andy Sharp delivers a visionary field report based on fifteen years of research expeditions to England's strangest landscapes. Tapping into the resurgent interest in horror, folk customs and witchcraft and exploring occult connections in art and literature across the British Isles.
On Nostalgia
Berry
£10.99 £10.44From Mad Men to MAGA: how nostalgia came to be and why we are so eager to indulge it. From movies to politics, social media posts to the targeted ads between them, nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has come become a quintessentially modern condition. Cultural critic David Berry examines how the relentless search for self and overwhelming presence of mass media stokes the fires of nostalgia, making it as inescapable as it is hard to pin down. Holding fast against the pull of the past while trying to understand what makes the fundamental impossibility of return so appealing, On Nostalgia explores what it means to remember, how the universal yearning is used by us and against us, and it considers a future where the past is more readily available and easier to lose track of than ever before.
In Praise of Walking: The new science of how we walk and why it's good for us
Shane O'Mara
£9.99 £9.49
Influencers and Revolutionaries: How Innovative Trailblazers, Trends and Catalysts Are Transforming Business
Sean Pillot de Chenecey
£16.99 £16.14
The Post-Truth Business: How to Rebuild Brand Authenticity in a Distrusting World
Sean Pillot de Chenecey
£15.99 £15.19
Our House is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis
Svante Thunberg, Malena Ernman, et al.
£16.99 £16.14
Image: Sheba Chhachhi Urvashi - Staged Portrait, Gulmohar Park, Delhi 1990
On Display in Free Displays "Artist and Society", Tate Modern.