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We all live online now, but what does that mean in IRL? How do strange subcultures on reddit affect our local shopping centres, what do night gyms owe to Twitter, and where can we really go to get some decent sleep? Our every move online is watched, but can we see ourselves? In these wide-ranging, witty essays, Roisin Kiberd offers immersive insight into the strange worlds, habits and people who have grown up with the internet, and shows the way our world is changing to fit the online fever-dream. Unsettling, clear-sighted and perversely fun, she traces the lines between Netflix and nap hotels, vaporwave music and camgirls, self-optimisation and insomnia, dating apps and a grand unified theory of Monster Energy Drinks. As well as holding up the zeitgeist for scrutiny, she turns an equally frank eye on her own life online, and asks what we have gained, what we have lost, and what we have given willingly away in exchange for this connected world.
Art-form, send-up, farce, ironic disarticulation, pastiche, propaganda, trololololol, mode of critique, mode of production, means of politicisation, even of subjectivation - memes are the inner currency of the internet's circulatory system. Independent of any one set value, memes are famously the mode of conveyance for the alt-right, the irony left, and the apoliticos alike, and they are impervious to many economic valuations: the attempts made in co-opting their discourse in advertising and big business have made little headway, and have usually been derailed by retaliative meming. POST MEMES: SEIZING THE MEMES OF PRODUCTION takes advantage of the meme's subversive adaptability and ripeness...
Time and the Tree is a philosophical drama that unfolds over the course of four seasons, set in a fairy-tale forest. Darkly funny and deceptively simple, it offers a unique perspective on the challenges contemporary life presents. It considers the passage of time and the quest for happiness, as an unlikely cast grapple with choices and grope towards self-knowledge in a world where compassion is interwoven with menace. Lyrical, and ultimately hopeful, it has the hallmark of a modern-day classic.
THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER Shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards 2021 'A great achievement . . . brilliant, engaging and essential' Colm Tóibín 'At once intimate and epic, this is a landmark book' Fintan O'Toole When Dubliner Derek Scally goes to Christmas Eve Mass on a visit home from Berlin, he finds more memories than congregants in the church where he was once an altar boy. Not for the first time, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland brings to mind the fall of another powerful ideology - East German communism. While Germans are engaging earnestly with their past, Scally sees nothing comparable going on in his native land. So he embarks on a quest to unravel the tight hold the ...
A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'This feels like a vision for the 21st-century novel... It made me happy' Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Benson and Mike are two young guys who have been together for a few years - good years - but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past, while back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted... Funny and profound, Memorial is about family in all its strange forms, becoming who you're supposed to be and the outer limits of love. NAMED A BOOK TO WATCH IN 2021 BY: SUNDAY TIMES | THE TIMES | DAILY MAIL | THE TELEGRAPH | RADIO 4 | IRISH TIMES
The much-anticipated follow-up novel from the wunderkind author of the widely-acclaimed Pink Mountain on Locust Island In Gunk Baby, we join narrator Leen just as she opens an ear-cleaning and massage salon at the Topic Heights Shopping Centre. She meets Huy, an engineering student, and Jean-Paul, a pharmacist, who are both obsessed with a cryptic, quasi-socialist online forum which seek the active disruption of the routines of capitalism on small scales. Leen finds herself involved in activities they call 'Resisting Acts', intended to be 'psychologically violent' to the people in power and the systems holding them up. Soon Leen starts to notice increasingly odd behaviour around her - and also it seems that managers of other stores in the centre are being murdered. In nonstop prose, Gunk Baby takes aim at capitalism and class, orientalism and the Zen movement, violence, fashion, minimalism and middle-class boredom. This novel is an Australian retort to the global literary industry from a voice younger and newer and more critical than most. Gunk Baby is a collage, playing with the sterility of modern suburbia and all the beige, neutral, ecru tones of aesthetic minimalism.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award National Book Award Finalist A new American classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead and Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson, one of the greatest novelists of our time, returns to the town of Gilead in an unforgettable story of a girlhood lived on the fringes of society in fear, awe, and wonder. Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church-the only available shelter from the rain-and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newf...
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An award-winning, popular actress in the porn industry describes her unusual life and discusses her views on women and sexuality as well as offering an inside look into the porn industry and her relationships with other actors, including her husband.
Chasing after a family secret--a curious silence surrounding a long-lost ancestor--led the author on a pilgrimage through the landscape, history and literature of Ireland. His journey of self-discovery, flavored by poems, stories, lore and legend, reflects his idea that literature may be the key that explains the past and reveals the present. Serving as part memoir and part journalistic chronicle, this work offers a unique look at how memory, literature and travel shape one's definition of oneself. Also serving as a love letter to Ireland with chapters on native born authors such as James Joyce, Frank O'Connor, Seamus Heaney and more, this book explores the deeper influences of what makes a man a writer, scholar, adventurer, husband and father.