Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A do-it-Ourselves Guide

by Scott Kellogg & Stacy Pettigrew, illustrated by Juan Martinez

Paperback $16.00

The tools you need to create self-sufficient, ecologically sustainable cities

“A surprisingly effective model for connecting people with dreams to the resources they need.” —Austin Chronicle

With more than half the world’s population now residing—and struggling to survive—in cities, we can no longer afford to think of sustainability as something that applies only to forests and fields. We need sustainable living right where so many of us are: in urban neighborhoods. But how do we do it?

That’s where Toolbox for Sustainable City Living comes in. In 2000 the dynamic Rhizome Collective transformed an abandoned warehouse in Austin, Texas, into a sustainability training center. Here, with their first book, Scott and Stacy, two of Rhizome’s founders, provide city dwellers—those who have never foraged or gardened along with those who dumpster-dive and belong to CSAs—with step-by- step instructions for producing our own food, collecting water, managing waste, reclaiming land, and generating energy. 

With vibrant illustrations created by Juan Martinez of the Beehive Collective and descriptive text based on years of experimentation, Stacy and Scott explain how to build and grow with cheap, salvaged, and recycled materials. More than a how-to manual, Toolbox is packed with accessible and relevant tools to help move our communities from envisioning a sustainable future toward living it.

The Death of Ivan Ilych

by Leo Tolstoy, Translated by Ian Dreiblatt

Paperback $10.00

A new translation of one of the most revered and exquisite novellas ever written: After a simple accident at home, a middle-aged man gradually realizes he’s dying. But is it too late to realize life’s meaning?

Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages

by Ammon Shea

Hardcover $21.95 - 10%

An obsessive word lover’s account of reading the Oxford English Dictionary cover to cover.

“I’m reading the OED so you don’t have to. If you are interested in vocabulary that is both spectacularly useful and beautifully useless, read on…”

So reports Ammon Shea, the tireless, word-obsessed, and more than slightly masochistic author of Reading the OED. The word lover’s Mount Everest, the OED has enthralled logophiles since its initial publication 80 years ago. Weighing in at 137 pounds, it is the dictionary to end all dictionaries.

In 26 chapters filled with sharp wit, sheer delight, and a documentarian’s keen eye, Shea shares his year inside the OED, delivering a hair-pulling, eye-crossing account of reading every word, and revealing the most obscure, hilarious, and wonderful gems he discovers along the way.

Telex from Cuba: A Novel

by Rachel KushnerHardcover $25.00 - 10%

Kushner’s colorful, character-driven debut succinctly captures the essence of life for a gilded circle of American expats in pre-Castro Cuba, chronicling a mélange of philandering spouses, privileged carousers and their rebellious children. K.C. Stites and Everly Lederer are raised among the American industrial strongholds of the United Fruit Company sugar plantation and the Nicaro nickel mines. As adolescents, they are confronted by the complexities of local warfare and backstabbing politics, while their parents remain ignorant of the impending revolution. Meanwhile, in Havana, burlesque dancer Rachel K and her former SS officer companion become entangled in Castro’s revolution. Toward the end of 1957, K.C.’s brother, Del, joins the rebels, and within a month the United Fruit Company’s cane fields are ablaze. Throughout the following year, the attacks on U.S.-operated businesses intensify; political and personal loyalties are shuffled and betrayed; and the violence between the rebels and Batista’s forces escalate. The action, while slowed at times by Kushner’s tendency to revisit plot points from multiple points of view, culminates in a riveting drama. Given the recent Cuba headlines, Kushner’s tale, passionately told and intensively researched, couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.

Lost Waterfront: The Decline and Rebirth of Manhattan’s Western Shore

by Shelley Seccombe

Paperback $21.95

For more than a century, the Hudson River piers in Greenwich Village bustled with the maritime commerce that made New York the greatest port in the country. By the 1960s, after years of economic decline, the great waterfront was disappearing. After the West Side Highway was closed in 1973, many of the piers, now abandoned, burned, while others collapsed into the river. By the 1990s, only ghosts were left.Yet there came a moment in time—fifteen years, perhaps—when the decaying piers supported a thriving other life. These ravaged iron structures became the Jones Beach of Manhattan; rotting wooden decks were now stages for musicians, dancers, and acrobats; fishermen trawled for eel and old tires; and the collapsing docks soon created a unique cityscape.In this evocative book, photographer Shelley Seccombe documents 30 years of decay, transformation, and rebirth along the waters of Manhattan’s west side Here are all 68 full color photographs in a unique record of a waterfront long since past—and a vibrant celebration of new city gem, Hudson River Park, opened in 2003. Where once tugs and freighters nosed into gritty docks, today there are green spaces where peoplecome to lie in the sun, listen to water, paddle kayaks, and wonder at the passing vessels. These unforgettable photographs capture a city in change, and the pioneering creation of a new urban space that once again gives the river back to New Yorkers.

Faces in Stone: Architectural Sculpture in New York City

by Robert Arthur King

Hardcover $20.00 - 10%

An architectural impulse book, gift-sized and -priced, for those who love finding unknown corners of New York City. This collection of one hundred architectural details features brief introductions and contextual photographs to show the buildings on which the ornaments appear, the addresses, and transportation information. 322 duotone photographs.

The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

by Benjamin Blech & Roy Doliner

Hardcover $26.95 - 10%

The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order

by Joan Wickersham

Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

Le Corbusier Le Grand

by The Editors of Phaidon

Hardcover $200.00 - 10%

Le Corbusier Le Grand is an enormous and enormously appealing monograph on one of the greatest and most controversial visionaries of the twentieth century: Le Corbusier (1887-1965). Publisher Phaidon’s super-sized volume features thousands of stunning photographs of the seminal architect, his buildings and plans, writings, and related documents (sketchbooks, personal snapshots, even postcards). With the turn of each page, readers can follow Corbusier’s trajectory from revolutionary young artist and prolific writer to globe-trotting, celebrity-crusader for modern architecture and urban planning. Esteemed architectural historian and Corbusier expert Jean-Louis Cohen provides an elegant introductory essay to this veritable archive of images. We learn that although the Swiss-born Le Corbusier hailed from a small town in a small country under the modest name Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, he was destined for greatness-largely of his own design. A prime mover behind the International Style (perhaps the first truly global architectural-design language), Corbusier brought modern design principles and their promise of improved living standards to the world stage. Futuristic high rise apartment complexes, office towers, highly functional streamlined interiors and furniture made primarily of industrial materials may all be attributed in part to him and his controversial utopian mission to transform our daily lives into a highly functional and beautiful system. Le Corbusier Le Grand is an extravagant, yet essential tome for libraries, those interested in modernism, city planning, and especially those with a really big coffee table.

Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalarian State

by Steven Heller

Hardcover $90.00 - 10%

It was just over 60 years ago that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, two of the world’s most powerfully imposing leaders, died and their regimes crumbled. One of the most illuminating facts about this dark era of history is the way in which these tyrants, and others like them, used graphic design as an instrument of power. But how did these regimes succeed in influencing the minds of millions? It is in the visual language the imagery, the typeface, the color palette that the answers truly take shape.

Phaidon Press is pleased to announce the publication of Iron Fists: Branding the 20th Century Totalitarian State by Steven Heller, the first illustrated survey of the propaganda art, graphics, and artifacts created by the totalitarian governments of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Communist regimes of the USSR and China. The book sets the disturbingly powerful graphic devices in historical context.

The infamous symbols produced by these regimes are recognized universally: the swastika and gothic typography of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s streamlined Futurist posters and Black Shirt uniforms, the stolid Social Realism of Stalin’s USSR and Mao s Little Red Book. Author Steven Heller, a world-renowned design historian, who has long collected two-and-three-dimensional examples from this period, reveals how these symbols were used in a wide variety of propaganda, from posters, magazines and advertisements to uniforms, flags and figurines.

In addition to using logos and symbols, all of the leaders researched in this book deliberately cultivated certain personal characteristics (Hitler’s mustache, Mussolini’s baldness, Lenin’s goatee, Mao’s smile), in an attempt to transform their corporeal selves into icons. These regime personalities were blanketed across public venues, from monuments to postage stamps. The Nazis, for example, installed an intricate graphic program that featured Hitler s face as a ”logo,” a system remarkably similar to modern corporate identity creations.

By integrating color images of artifacts with archival black and white photographs, Iron Fists offers unique insight into how these regimes were effective in using graphic design to further their causes. In the section on Fascist Italy, for example, there are numerous reproductions of stylized posters, magazines and handbooks designed to excite impressionable youth. Heller then connects this printed propaganda with historic photographs of Italian children dressed as men prepared for battle stoic and serious their small hands clutching guns instead of toys.

Divided into four sections by regime, Heller also explores the color systems (each dictatorship had a distinctive palette), typefaces, and slogans used to both rally and terrorize the populace. In result, he demonstrates how these elements were used to ”sell” the totalitarian message. The first extensively illustrated book on the subject, Iron Fists will have an obvious appeal to graphic designers but will also be an important contribution to the study of the history of the totalitarian state.

Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005

by J. M. Coetzee, intro by Derek Attridge
Paperback $16.00

In his second volume of literary essays, following Stranger Shores (2001), Nobel laureate Coetzee conducts deep readings primarily of major twentieth-century European and American writers. Cosmopolitan in range and erudite in texture, Coetzee’s biocritical explications delve into the art, times, and humanity of, among others, Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Paul Celan, Gunter Grass, Graham Greene, and W. G. Sebald. As a South African expat, Coetzee is attuned to literature under pressure as writers write in lands other than home, contending with language gaps and facing a world in violent upheaval. In his American essays, Coetzee brings an unusual perspective to Walt Whitman’s eroticism, Faulkner’s vision of the South, Philip Roth’s Plot against America, and Arthur Miller’s screenplay for The Misfits. In each case, Coetzee tells a story as much as he interprets the work, riding in the slipstream of his subject’s life and writings as he parses matters personal, technical, aesthetic, moral, and political with both subtlety and vigor. Coetzee’s profound fascination with the clarity and mystery of literature reaffirms its significance.

Apples: A Novel
by Richard Milward

Paperback $15.00

Apples, an unassuming debut novel plucked from the imagination of a remarkable new twenty-one-year-old talent, and published to rave reviews in London, is a surprising, affecting, ingeniously crafted little coming-of age novel that has critics calling Richard Milward the voice of the MySpace generation.

As a distraction from sleazy male admirers, spiteful classmates, and her mother’s progressing cancer, Eve’s adolescent eyes are opened to a multicolored life of fumbling one-night stands, drug-fuelled clubs, endless varieties of candy-flavored cheap booze, and banal consumerist choices. She barely has time to notice Adam. Adam, however, notices Eve. While contending with sexual frustration, an asshole father, and increasingly compulsive behavior, is Adam too busy furtively reading porn in his bedroom to make his move on Eve?

A paean to the scattershot difficulties of growing up, the complications of friendship, and the consequences of hormones in overdrive, Apples is a deliciously pitch-perfect debut.

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
by Chuck Palahniuk

Paperback $13.95

Buster “Rant” Casey just may be the most efficient serial killer of our time. A high school rebel, Rant Casey escapes from his small town home for the big city where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. With hilarity, horror, and blazing insight, Rant is a mind-bending vision of the future, as only Chuck Palahniuk could ever imagine.

Netherland: A Novel
by Joseph O’Neill

Hardcover $23.95 - 10%

In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans-a banker originally from the Netherlands-finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an “other” New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. Hans is alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck’s particular brand of naivete and chutzpah-by his ability to a hold fast to a sense of American and human possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith.

Netherland gives us both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an outsider’s vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and the particular dreamers. Most immediately, though, it is the story of one man-of a marriage foundering and recuperating in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and depths of male friendship, of mourning and memory. Joseph O’Neill’s prose, in its conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the struggle for meaning that governs any single life.

A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World
by Japan Foundation

Paperback $16.95

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s best-selling books, including Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore, have been translated into over forty languages, and his dreamlike prose delights readers across borders and datelines. What lies behind this phenomenal international appeal? The Japan Foundation asked novelists, translators, artists, and critics from around the world to answer this question. A Wild Haruki Chase presents their intriguing findings. Neuroscience, revolution, a secret Chinese connection . . . you’ll never read Murakami the same way again.

Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History
by Ted Sorensen

Hardcover $27.95 - 10%

In January 1953 the newly-elected Senator John F. Kennedy hired a young Nebraskan lawyer named Theodore Sorensen as his legislative assistant. Sorensen quickly rose up the ranks in JFK’s senate office, from research aide to speechwriter to campaigner and advisor, eventually working closely with JFK on his speeches and books, including Profiles in Courage, and encouraging JFK’s interest in the vice presidential nomination. Though JFK’s pursuit of that nomination fell short at the 1956 Democratic Convention, he had emerged as a prominent national figure; and JFK and Sorensen traveled over the next three years to all fifty states exploring his prospects for the presidential nomination in 1960. Upon his election, Kennedy appointed Sorensen as his Special Counsel-a role that allowed him to seve as the President’s own lawyer, speechwriter, and trusted confidante.

Sorensen recounts in thrilling detail his experience advising JFK through some of the most dramatic moments in American history, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, when JFK requested that Sorensen draft a letter to Khrushchev at the most critical point of the world’s first nuclear confrontation. Sorensen was immersed in everything from civil rights to the decision to go to the moon, and he also had a hand in JFK’s most important speeches.

Illuminating, revelatory, and utterly compelling, Counselor is the brilliant long-awaited memoir from a man who shaped the presidency and legacy of JFK as no one else could.

Philosophical Tales
by Martin Cohen, Illustrated by Raul, III Gonzalez

Paperback $19.95

Was Socrates really the saintly figure he became for later philosophy? Why is it doubtful that Descartes ever really uttered, “I think, therefore I am”? And what did Sartre ever have against waiters, anyway? The history of philosophy is filled with great tales - many of them fictions, misrepresentations, falsehoods, lies and fibs. Or are they just misstatements, prevarications, and narratives not entirely based on fact? In the true spirit of a broad philosophical debate, Philosophical Tales dips a toe into the great sea of philosophy to collect, deconstruct, and relate many of history’s great - and not so great - philosophical tales.

Enlightening and entertaining, Philosophical Tales examines a few of the fascinating biographical details of history’s greatest philosophers (alas, mostly men) and highlights their contributions to the field. By applying the true philosophical approach to philosophy itself, the text provides us with a refreshing “alternative history” of philosophy.

But why should someone want to know that Kant rolled himself three times in his sheets each night before sleeping, that Schopenhauer pushed a poor old lady down the stairs, or Marx spent as much time on beer and women as he did in the British Library? By examining the seeming trivialities of philosophers’ lives - and skewering a few cherished myths along the way - Philosophical Tales provides us with illuminating insights that will encourage a more active, critical way of thinking. Blaise Pascal may have put it best when he said, “To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.”
The Last Summer (of You and Me)
by Ann Brashares

Paperback $14.00

Riley and Alice, two sisters now in their twenties, and as fiercely different as they are loyal, have spent every summer at their parents’ modest beach house on New York’s Fire Island. Each year, they return to the house and community they have known since they were children—and to Paul, the boy next door. But this summer marks a season of change: budding love and sexual interest, an illness, and a deep secret force all three to confront the increasing complexities of their lives and friendships.

On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine
by Nicolas Rasmussen

Hardcover $29.95 - 10%

Rasmussen documents America’s eighty year love affair with amphetamine and its various permutations. Monumental in scope and research, the book traces the history of this seductive drugs uses for a myriad of illnesses when the true sickness may be inherent to our unique American society. Given our current extraordinary use of this drug, On Speed is an urgent and necessary read. -Lawrence Diller, M.D., author of Running on Ritalin

Sock Monkey
by Arne Svenson & Ron Warren

Hardcover $19.95

McSweeney’s Issue 27

Plunging straight into the grayish, faintly understood area of the art world that involves oddly drawn objects coupled with uncertainly spelled text, McSweeney’s 27 brings together a previously uncategorized cadre of pithy draftsmen, genius doodlers, and fine-artistic cartoonists, and buffets them with essays examining just what it is that these people are doing and why the world should know about it. With work by Art Spiegelman, David Shrigley, Tucker Nichols, and many others, and stories by a wide variety of excellent writers.

1000 Dogs
by Taschen

Paperback $14.99

BIDOUN MAGAZINE ISSUE 14

Magazine $15.00

Esopus 10 (Spring 2008)
Magazine $10.00

ARTIST’S PROJECT: BEREND STRIK
“Untitled, 2008″ (removable insert)

ARTIST’S PROJECT: YVONNE JACQUETTE
“Untitled, 2008″

50 FRAMES: PETER HUTTON’S AT SEA (2007)
Introduction and interview by Scott MacDonald

DAILY REMINDERS
Letters by Robert Guest

ARTIST’S PROJECT: DULCE PINZÓN
“The Real Story of the Superheroes”

NEW VOICES: “PLATE TECTONICS”
By Lesley Clayton

DOUG McNAMARA’S BIODIVERSIONS
Interview by Tod Lippy

THE DESERT
By Jen Bervin

MODERN ARTIFACTS 4: DRAWING COMPARISONS
Introduction by Michelle Elligott

1929 IN RETROSPECT
By Angus Trumble

GUARDED OPINIONS 3
By Berhanu Taffa. Edited by Paul VanDeCarr.