Reading Sideways

A primer in visual intelligence and an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination is comprised of an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, trivia, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the limitless resources of the human mind.

Reading Sideways explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality in works of modern American literature. It tracks the crosswise circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction and argues that at stake in the aesthetic turn of these works was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience but also an engagement with political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and sexual expression. To track these engagements, its author, Dana Seitler, performs a method she calls “lateral reading,” a mode of interpretation that moves horizontally through various historical entanglements and across the fields of the arts to make sense of—and see in a new light—their connections, challenges, and productive frictions. Each chapter takes a different art form as its object: sculpture, portraiture, homecraft, and opera. These art forms appear in some of the major works of literature of the period central to negotiations of gender, race, and sexuality, including those by Henry James, Davis, Willa Cather, Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. But the literary texts that each chapter of this book takes as its motivation not only include a specific art form or object as central to its politics, they also build an alternative aesthetic vocabulary through which they seek to alter, challenge, or participate in the making of social and sexual life. By cultivating a counter-aesthetics of the unfinished, the uncertain, the small, the low, and the allusive, these fictions recognize other ways of knowing and being than those oriented toward reductively gendered accounts of beauty, classed imperatives established by the norms of taste, or apolitical treatises of sexual disinterestedness. And within them—and through “reading sideways”—we can witness the coming-into-legibility of a set of diffuse practices that provide a pivot point for engaging the political methods of minoritized subjects at the turn of the twentieth century.

European and American scholars from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries thought that all societies passed through the same developmental stages, from primitive to advanced. Implicit in this developmental paradigm—one that has affected generations of thought on societal development—was the assumption that one could "read history sideways." That is, one could see what the earlier stages of a modern Western society looked like by examining contemporaneous so-called primitive societies in other parts of the world. In Reading History Sideways, leading family scholar Arland Thornton demonstrates how this approach, though long since discredited, has permeated Western ideas and values about the family. Further, its domination of social science for centuries caused the misinterpretation of Western trends in family structure, marriage, fertility, and parent-child relations. Revisiting the "developmental fallacy," Thornton here traces its central role in changes in the Western world, from marriage to gender roles to adolescent sexuality. Through public policies, aid programs, and colonialism, it continues to reshape families in non-Western societies as well.

A raucous and surprising novel filled with wonderful details about wine, Rex Pickett's Sideways is also a thought-provoking and funny book about men, women, and human relationships. The basis for the 2004 comedy-drama road movie of the same name starring Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church. Sideways is the story of two friends-Miles and Jack-going away together for the last time to steep themselves in everything that makes it good to be young and single: pinot, putting, and prowling bars. In the week before Jack plans to marry, the pair heads out from Los Angeles to the Santa Ynez wine country. For Jack, the tasting tour is Seven Days to D-Day, his final stretch of freedom. For Miles--who has divorced his wife, is facing an uncertain career and has lost his passion for living-the trip is a week long opportunity to evaluate his past, his future and himself.

There has been a terrible mistake. Instead of having thirty classrooms side by side, Wayside School is thirty storeys high! (The builder said he was sorry.) Perhaps that's why all sorts of strange and unusual things keep happening – especially in Mrs Jewls's classroom on the very top floor. There's the terrifying Mrs Gorf, who gets an unusually fruity comeuppance; Terrible Todd, who always gets sent home early; and Mauricia, who has a strange ice-cream addiction. Meanwhile, John can only read upside down, and Leslie is determined to sell her own toes. From top to bottom, Wayside is packed with quirky and hilarious characters who are all brought to life in this new edition with delightful illustrations by Aleksei Bitskoff throughout. This is an unmissable, irrepressible story of mixed-up mayhem from Louis Sachar, the bestselling author of Holes.

You don't have to be disoriented by today's "sideways" stock markets, markets that have hit both a floor and a ceiling. This book shows you how to understand the basics of market realities -- from phases to trends to formations and cycles -- so you can profit from a financial reality that others are unsuccessfully fighting or fleeing.

A girl navigates the chaos of eighth grade while handling a family tragedy in this funny and honest novel by the author of Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie. Claire’s life is a joke . . . but she’s not laughing. While her friends seem to be leaping forward, she's dancing in the same place. The mean girls at school are living up to their mean name, and there’s a boy, Ryder, who’s just as bad, if not worse. And at home, nobody’s really listening to her—if anything, they seem to be more in on the joke than she is. Then into all of this (not-very-funny-to-Claire) comedy comes something intense and tragic—while her dad is talking to her at the kitchen table, he falls over with a medical emergency. Suddenly the joke has become very serious—and the only way Claire, her family, and her friends are going to get through it is if they can find a way to make it funny again. Praise for Falling Over Sideways “It’s a powerful and profound look at a family coping with unexpected change.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Authentic, funny, dramatic, fantastic.” —Kirkus Reviews “[Sonnenblick]does an exceedingly good job developing his adolescent characters . . . I would highly recommend this novel for any collection serving a middle school audience.” —School Library Journal

Finn Easton, sixteen and epileptic, struggles to feel like more than just a character in his father's cult-classic novels with the help of his best friend, Cade Hernandez, and first love, Julia, until Julia moves away.