In the neon-drenched Spired City, where artists wield brushes like swords and melodies are weapons of light, a shadow whispers. The Muse, manipulator of minds and weaver of despair, has retreated, but its melody still lingers, a discordant echo in the city's triumphant symphony. Eleanor, the conductor of this luminous defiance, faces a new challenge. Cracks have appeared in the city's once-united front, whispers of doubt slithering through alleyways and studios. Can she rekindle the spark of creativity in each artist's soul, forging a melody of resilience stronger than ever before? Meanwhile, beyond the city's vibrant walls, an enigmatic figure emerges from the shadows. A stranger with eyes like molten gold and a touch that breathes life into forgotten dreams. Is she an ally, drawn by the city's defiant symphony, or something more sinister, a pawn in the Muse's insidious game? Will you venture deeper into the heart of the city, where artists grapple with self-doubt and rediscover their creative fire? Or will you join the enigmatic stranger on a perilous journey into the Muse's domain, unraveling the secrets of its power and facing the darkness head-on? The next movement of the waltz awaits, a thrilling collision of light and shadow, defiance and despair. Choose your path, dear reader, and let the symphony of your imagination guide you forward.

The Shadow and Its Shadow is a classic collection of writings by the Surrealists on their mad love of moviegoing. The forty-odd theoretical, polemical, and poetical re-visions of the seventh art in this anthology document Surrealism's scandalous and nonreductive take on film. Writing between 1918 and 1977, the essayists include such names as Andréeacute; Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Salvador Dalíiacute;, Luis Buñntilde;uel, and man Ray, as well as many of the less famous though equally fascinating figures of the movement. Paul Hammond's introduction limns the history of Surrealist cinemania, highlighting how these revolutionary poets, artists, and philosophers sifted the silt of commercial-often Hollywood-cinema for the odd fleck of gold, the windfall movie that, somehow slipping past the censor, questioned the dominant order. Such prospecting pivoted around the notion of lyrical behavior-as depicted on the screen and as lived in the movie house. The representation of such behavior led the Surrealists to valorize the manifest content of such denigrated genres as silent and sound comedy, romantic melodrama, film noir, horror movies. As to lived experience, moviegoing Surrealists looked to the spectacle's latent meaning, reading films as the unwitting providers of redemptive sequences that could be mentally clipped out of their narrative context and inserted into daily life-there, to provoke new adventures. "Hammond's book is a reminder of the wealth and range of surrealist writings on the cinema. . . . [T]he work represented here is still challenging and genuinely eccentric, locating itself in an 'ethic' of love, reverie and revolt." --Sight & Sound "Hammond, who is the author of the invaluable anthology The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writing on the Cinema (1978), writes about cinema independently of the changing academic and cultural fashions of film theory and abhors the dogmas of contemporary border-patrol thought. His magnetically appealing free-wheeling form of erudite film-critical writing is recognisable for its iconoclastic humour, non-authoritarian verve and playful witty discursivity." --John Conomos, Senses of Cinema Paul Hammond is a writer, editor, and translator living in Barcelona. He is the author of Constellations of Miróoacute;, Breton which was published by City Lights.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

A director reveals the original inspirations for his films, their history, his methods of work, and the problems of visual creativity

“This country's leading hell-raiser" (The Nation) shares his impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.” First published in 1971 and written in the midst of radical political developments whose direction Alinsky was one of the first to question, this volume exhibits his style at its best. Like Thomas Paine before him, Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.

Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."

A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transformation into a society that is shaped by technology—from the acclaimed author of Amusing Ourselves to Death. "A provocative book ... A tool for fighting back against the tools that run our lives." —Dallas Morning News The story of our society's transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it—with radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth.