Recommendations based on "Orientalism"

How do we see the world around us? "The Penguin on Design" series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.

Published to worldwide critical acclaim, with more than one million copies already in print, this is the lush, wondrous story of an unrequited love that survives half a century and more than 600 distractions.

'A groundbreaking work . . .Federici has become a crucial figurefor . . .a new generation of feminists' Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars RoomA cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It Is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood.'Rewarding . . . allows us to better understand the intimate relationship between modern patriarchy, the rise of the nation state and the transition from feudalism to capitalism' Guardian

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, film (Children Of Men, Jason Bourne, Supernanny), fiction (Le Guin and Kafka), work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colors all areas of contemporary experience, is anything but realistic and asks how capitalism and its inconsistencies can be challenged. It is a sharp analysis of the post-ideological malaise that suggests that the economics and politics of free market neo-liberalism are givens rather than constructions.New Edition includes: Forward by Zoe Fisher, Mark’s wife, talking about Mark as a person Introduction by Alex Niven, his friend and colleague, talking about the political significance of the book thirteen years after it was written Afterword by Tariq Goddard, the original editor and publisher, describing the writing and editing of the book, its original reception, and Mark’s own view of it"A quick and entertaining read." Socialist Standard"A provocative and necessary read...for anyone wanting to talk seriously about the politics of education today. " Times Higher Educational Supplement

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ landmark text that continues to influence and provoke debate on capitalism and class, now in a stunning clothbound edition designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels's revolutionary summons to the working classes, is one of the most important and influential political theories ever formulated. After four years of collaboration, the authors produced this incisive declaration of their idea of Communism, in which they envisage a society without classes, private property or a state. They argue that increasing exploitation of industrial workers will eventually lead to a revolution in which Capitalism is overthrown. This vision provided the theoretical basis of political systems in Russia, China, Cuba and Eastern Europe, affecting the lives of millions.Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

Susan Sontag's celebrated essays on cancer and AIDS now available in one volume.In 1978, Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is--just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed.Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

Midnight's Children is a loose allegory for events in India both before and, primarily, after the independence and partition of India, which took place at midnight on 15 August 1947. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Saleem Sinai, a telepath with an extraordinary nose. The first section details both the peculiar roots of the Sinai family and the earlier events leading up to India's Independence and Partition, connecting the two both lines literally and allegorically. Saleem is born at the exact moment that India becomes independent. From that point on, Saleem Sinai feels the pressure of his chronology and invests his life and narrative into describing the zeitgeist of his child- and adulthood

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogues his every feeling and sensation about the world and people around him. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which "spread at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time, the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain." Roquentin's efforts to try and come to terms with his life, his philosophical and psychological struggles, give Sartre the opportunity to dramatize the tenets of his Existentialist creed.

A collectible hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf’s pioneering work of feminism, “probably the most influential piece of non-fictional writing by a woman in [the twentieth] century” (Hermione Lee), featuring a new introduction by Xochitl Gonzalez, Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming and Anita de Monte Laughs LastA Penguin Vitae EditionIn October 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered two lectures to the women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge, arguing with inimitable wit and rhetorical mastery that an income and a room of one’s own are essential to a woman’s creative freedom. These lectures became the basis for A Room of One’s Own, a landmark in feminist thought, in which Woolf imagines the fictional Judith Shakespeare, sister to William and equally gifted but lost to history. How much genius has gone unexpressed, Woolf wonders, because women are not afforded the same privileges as men? A hundred years later, her brilliant polemic reverberates into our own time.In this edition, Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and bestselling novelist Xochitl Gonzalez contributes an introductory essay that extends the argument to Woolf’s housekeeper, breaking down divides of not only gender but also race and class in order to include all women in Woolf’s profoundly inspiring call to realize their creative potential.Penguin Vitae—loosely translated as “Penguin of one’s life”—is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.