O brave new world, that has such people in't. Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house. What does it mean? It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world. What would that actually be like? In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take? And what’s a horse got to do with any of this? Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.

A new collection of five novels by the unstoppably prolific Argentine eminence César Aira A newspaper vendor in Buenos Aires dreams that his favorite soccer team,Racing, wins the championship, and soon the cheerful humdrum of his work-a-day life is tangled in a plot involving impoverished young mothers, millions of embezzled pesos, a sofa-bed factory store, “intestinal architecture,” and (of course) cyber-nuns hell-bent on artificial procreation. A young princess lives in a fairy-tale castle in the tropics. She is rich, with a vast property and a host of servants at her beck and call. Yet work she for she is a translator of pulp novels for piratical Latin American publishers, and quantity is the order of the day. Deadlines, however, aren’t the only looming threat. General Winter and his sadistic sidekick, the Little Christmas Tree, have gathered a force to invade Princess Springtime’s kingdom and steal the season for themselves. Before going to sleep, a man plays a practical, private he takes one of his wife’s hormone pills. She never counts them, so she’ll never know, and neither will anyone but he will. As he chuckles himself to sleep over his masterful prank, his perceptions begin to expand, and soon it’s far from clear where the joke ends, and reality begins . . . At last, a hearty and delicious five-course feast by the incredible novelist César Aira, hailed as “the Duchamp of Latin America” (Natasha Wimmer) and“an exquisite miniaturist” (The Wall Street Journal). Five brings together the novels A Memory, The Dream, Musical Brushstrokes, and Princess Springtime, as well as a short story, “The Hormone Pill.” From thriller to distraction-catnip to conceptual memoir, the many facets of Aira’s multifarious genius are on full display, and in every one, Aira dazzles as he turns expectations inside-out and gleefully explodes genre conventions. Five is a must-have for fans and a fine introduction to the as-yet uninitiated.

O brave new world, that has such people in't. Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house. What does it mean? It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world. What would that actually be like? In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take? And what’s a horse got to do with any of this? Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.

Rippling with humor, warmth, and style, Lost Lambs is a new vision of the charms and pitfalls of family dysfunction. The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud's open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone—or something—is monitoring the town’s citizens. Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy—one that may just bring them closer together. Irreverent and addictive, pinging between the voices of the Flynn family and those of the panorama of characters around them, Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is a debut novel of quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness. With Lost Lambs, Cash has crafted a family saga for the twenty-first century, all held together with crazy glue.

Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism brings together work that explores, from many different perspectives, the multifaceted question of cookery. In this volume, a range of contributors -- scientists, philosophers, chefs, anthropologists, artists -- explore how philosophy and proto-scientific theory and experimental practice was linked at its outset to the culinary arts; and chart the consequences of the contemporary return of cookery to scientific precision, in the rarefied world of haute cuisine as in the world of mass-manufactured confections. Along the way we discover that the question of cookery is bound up with some profound and enduring issues in the history of philosophy, and can also suggest new approaches to contemporary philosophical problems.

A new collection of five novels by the unstoppably prolific Argentine eminence César Aira A newspaper vendor in Buenos Aires dreams that his favorite soccer team,Racing, wins the championship, and soon the cheerful humdrum of his work-a-day life is tangled in a plot involving impoverished young mothers, millions of embezzled pesos, a sofa-bed factory store, “intestinal architecture,” and (of course) cyber-nuns hell-bent on artificial procreation. A young princess lives in a fairy-tale castle in the tropics. She is rich, with a vast property and a host of servants at her beck and call. Yet work she for she is a translator of pulp novels for piratical Latin American publishers, and quantity is the order of the day. Deadlines, however, aren’t the only looming threat. General Winter and his sadistic sidekick, the Little Christmas Tree, have gathered a force to invade Princess Springtime’s kingdom and steal the season for themselves. Before going to sleep, a man plays a practical, private he takes one of his wife’s hormone pills. She never counts them, so she’ll never know, and neither will anyone but he will. As he chuckles himself to sleep over his masterful prank, his perceptions begin to expand, and soon it’s far from clear where the joke ends, and reality begins . . . At last, a hearty and delicious five-course feast by the incredible novelist César Aira, hailed as “the Duchamp of Latin America” (Natasha Wimmer) and“an exquisite miniaturist” (The Wall Street Journal). Five brings together the novels A Memory, The Dream, Musical Brushstrokes, and Princess Springtime, as well as a short story, “The Hormone Pill.” From thriller to distraction-catnip to conceptual memoir, the many facets of Aira’s multifarious genius are on full display, and in every one, Aira dazzles as he turns expectations inside-out and gleefully explodes genre conventions. Five is a must-have for fans and a fine introduction to the as-yet uninitiated.

The future of the image in the age of AI, by the celebrated artistWe once looked at pictures. Then, with the advent of computer vision and machine learning, pictures started looking back at us. Now, something even stranger is happening.Generative AI, adtech, recommendation algorithms, engagement economies, personalized search, and machine learning are inaugurating a new relationship between humans and media. Pictures are now looking at us looking at them, eliciting feedback and evolving. We’ve entered a protean, targeted visual culture that shows us what it believes we want to see, measures our reactions, then morphs itself to optimize for the reactions and actions it wants. New forms of media prod and persuade, modulate and manipulate, shaping worldviews and actions to induce us into believing what they want us to believe, and to extract value and exert influence.How did we get here?