Acute Misfortune

In 2008, the artist Adam Cullen invited journalist Erik Jensen to stay in his spare room and write his biography. What followed were four years of intense honesty and a relationship that became increasingly claustrophobic. At one point Cullen shot Jensen, in part to see how committed he was to the book. At another, he threw Jensen from a speeding motorbike. The book contract Cullen used to convince Jensen to stay with him never existed. Acute Misfortune is a riveting account of the life and death of one of Australia’s most celebrated artists, the man behind the Archibald Prize–winning portrait of David Wenham. Jensen follows Cullen through drug deals and periods of deep self-reflection, onwards into his court appearance for weapons possession and finally his death in 2012 at the age of forty-six. After much critical acclaim, Acute Misfortune was developed into a feature film, winning The Age Critics Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2018. The story is by turns tender and horrifying: a spare tale of art, sex, drugs and childhood, told at close quarters and without judgement. Winner of the 2015 Nib Waverley Library Award for Literature Shortlisted in the 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and for the 2015 Walkley Book Award ‘Erik Jensen is a Boswell or Vasari for our baffled, fractured, fucked-up times. Acute Misfortune is the most intimate, revealing, and original take on an artist’s life I know of.’ —Sebastian Smee ‘Erik Jensen gives us that ingenious place where biography is also art.’ —Jennifer Clement ‘This is supposed to be about an artist, a wild man, his lifetime, and it is; but Jensen has written such a beautiful window that all art and life is shining through. I'm supposed to be an artist but I cannot put this down.’ —DBC Pierre

Pulitzer Prize Finalist | New York Times Bestseller | A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick | A New York Times Book Review Notable Book | TIME Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post; O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Refinery29, and Buzzfeed From Ann Patchett, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth, comes a powerful, richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are. At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures. Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.

"A fragmentary account of life and its complexities, I said the sea was folded charts the first three years of Erik Jensen's relationship with his partner, Evelyn Ida Morris. These are love poems, written against the difficulty of understanding another person" -- back cover.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Crazy Rich Asians meets Love & Gelato in this hilarious, quirky novel about a Chinese-American teen who is thrust into the decadent world of Beijing high society when she is sent away to spend the summer in China. Iris Wang is having a bit of a rough start to her summer: Her boyfriend cheated on her, she didn’t get into any colleges, and she has no idea who she is or what she wants to do with her life. She’s always felt torn about being Chinese-American, feeling neither Chinese nor American enough to claim either identity. She’s just a sad pizza combo from Domino’s, as far as she’s concerned. In an attempt to snap her out of her funk, Iris’s parents send her away to visit family in Beijing, with the hopes that Iris would “reconnect with her culture” and “find herself.” Iris resents the condescension, but even she admits that this might be a good opportunity to hit the reset button on the apocalyptic disaster that has become her life. With this trip, Iris expects to eat a few dumplings, meet some family, and visit a tourist hotspot or two. Instead, she gets swept up in the ridiculous, opulent world of Beijing’s wealthy elite, leading her to unexpected and extraordinary discoveries about her family, her future, and herself.

How insurgencies—enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere—have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age: government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public is now available in an updated edition, which includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit. The book concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.

The present volume offers the first critical edition of the Hebrew text of the two versions of Ibn Ezra s Book of the World, accompanied by an English translation and a commentary. These twin treatises represent the first Hebrew work, unique in medieval Jewish science, to discuss the theories and techniques of historical and meteorological astrology that had accumulated from Antiquity to Ibn Ezra s time, on the basis of Greek, Hindu, Persian, and Arabic sources. This volume also incorporates the first critical edition, translated and annotated, of M sh Þall h s Book on Eclipses, a work dealing with mundane astrology whose Hebrew translation was ascribed to Ibn Ezra, as well as a study of three brief texts in which Ibn Ezra conveyed his own opinion about mundane astrology.

The poet-herdsmen of Vergil's 'Eclogues' employ differing strategies for coping with acute loss, whether external or internal. The interplay of ideas latent in several of their songs is typically framed in terms of Epicurean concepts.