Here are 100 books that The Conspiracy Against The Human Race fans have personally recommended if you like
The Conspiracy Against The Human Race.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’m a human being who struggles with feeling human. When I was 17, I got my brain pretty shaken up after a traumatic event, causing a swathe of memory loss and mental health problems. How do you regain a sense of yourself when chunks of your childhood memories, your skills, and your sense of self have disappeared? Here are some books that grapple with that question, and others.
I believe this book is one of the classic staples of surreal fiction. Its disjointed, spiraling narrative and sprawling non-linear plot lines challenge the definition of what a ‘book’ is. It uses everything from footnotes to text alignment to color schemes to make the act of reading itself increasingly difficult, which matches the house’s influence on the narrators’ memories and interests.
Reading it for me was like learning Latin or watching Casablanca–it gave context to decades of experimental media inspired by it, from TV shows to DOOM game mods. Love it or hate it, it’s a solid tool for any inhuman’s toolkit.
“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Growing up in theatre, I was completely immersed in plays, which tend to be deep dives of the human psyche, and I latched on to those examinations like a dog with a bone. I’ve always loved the complexities of the human mind, specifically how we so desperately want to believe that anything beautiful, expensive, or exclusive must mean that the person, place, or thing is of more value. But if we pull back the curtain, and really take a raw look, we see that nothing is exempt from smudges of ugliness. It’s the ugliness, especially in regard to human character, that I find most fascinating.
For me, insight into the extravagant celebrity status-like lives of the characters in this movie is akin to the guilty pleasure of watching reality TV. This book brings out the voyeur in me, giving me permission to explore a perfect example of rich kids gone wild and the horrific consequences of unchecked actions.
I grew up in a lower economic class family surrounded by very wealthy, undisciplined friends, and so many of the characters and decisions hit close to home. I won’t lie; I felt a little better about myself and my own life after I finished reading. Yet, I’ll also admit that I didn’t want the train wreck to end.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The timeless classic from the acclaimed author of American Psycho about the lost generation of 1980s Los Angeles who experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age. • The basis for the cult-classic film "Possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality." —The New York Times They live in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a place devoid of feeling or hope. When Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college, he re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches,…
I am the author of over a dozen LGBT novels. I wrote my college thesis on queer criminal coding in Victorian London novels vs. 20th-century American literature. I was a teenage fan of Leopold and Loeb fiction before I added to the canon myself. I chose these books for a queer murder compendium because each offers something unique to the genre. Challenge yourself by asking: do you have sympathy for these murderers? Is it dangerous when queer characters are criminals? Is it fair representation, since homosexuality is illegal to act on, identify with, or speak of in many places? Read these stories, and let their implications disturb you.
What if queer American cannibal killer Jeffery Dahmer met his British equivalent, Dennis Nilsen?
This novel is a fictionalized answer to that question, pairing serial murderers Jay and Andrew in a psychosexual tear through lush New Orleans.
However, my favorites are the other central characters: Luke and Tran, two ex-lovers who are living with HIV, homelessness, and the emotional scars of their bad romance. There is subtle, skillful storytelling showcased in the relationship you only get in retrospect between these two.
It’s so unique that I once taught it to a Master’s degree writing class as an example of rule-breaking and genre-bending to aspire towards.
There are also alluring literary parallels to explore between venereal disease and violent death stalking the unsuspecting gay men of the bayou. Overall, it’s a delightfully depraved masterpiece.
From the author of Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, and Wormwood comes a thrilling and chilling novel that bestselling author Peter Straub says serves as a “guidebook to hell.”
To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the sole ambition of bringing his “art” to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires, and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his “art” to limits…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I have always liked antiheroes and characters that are in some way doomed. To me, there’s something romantic about them. And over time I have come to replace the fictional protagonists of noir and horror with antiheroes from real life. With miserable authors who wrote about their own lives, where instead of gangsters or monsters, they waged battle against themselves, against their own demons and despair. Books like these have kept me company during some of the darkest periods of my life, and their unflinching honesty has inspired me to become a writer. Perhaps they can do the same for you.
Told with unflinching honesty, this dark Japanese classic is often considered a kind of suicide note by its author, who killed himself shortly before its publication.
Whilst I cannot say that I’ve necessarily gone through some of the extreme experiences of its protagonist, I can nevertheless say that I’ve experienced a very similar sense of alienation, which has at times made me feel less than human, making this one of the most relatable books that I have ever read.
Considering its contents, I should probably not tell that to my psychiatrist. I'm just kidding; I don’t have one. However, considering the book’s classic status, it seems that I am far from the only one who relates to its author’s struggles.
Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.
I’m an author, visual artist, and film producer. I’m originally from Mexico but studied fine art in London at Central St Martins School of art with a scholarship. I’ve had a wild career of writing, packaging, developing, and publishing books for more than a decade. You can see some of my visual art in galleries, museums, and my Instagram @leopoldoleopoldo or in my most recent illustrated novel Monarca. My forthcoming novel, Piñata, is a supernatural possession story driven by the real horrors of colonialism in my native Mexico. I wrote it as an outlet for a simultaneous love and rage at the world, history, my country, and current events.
It may be odd of me to include a book of academic lectures in a list like this, but I think Calvino’s Six Memos are accessible and valuable to anyone who appreciates literature and its “family tree.”
Its forward-thinking nature is sourced from Calvino’s deep knowledge and love for literature’s history and growth over time.
He pulls on so many different threads throughout and I love it as a reminder, a memo, from a genius like Calvino that the fabric of future great works are woven from those long threads stretching back to great works of the past.
It showed me in very simple concepts in literature, such as Lightness, Exactitude, Quickness, Visibility, and Multiplicity, echoed with me also in visual art. It’s one of those books I keep re-reading…
Italo Calvino's brilliant reflection on what makes great literature, from the classics to more contemporary works, punctuated with personal details about Calvino's own writing processes.
At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued, and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature, but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself.
I’m a law professor who has been teaching and writing in the area of intellectual property for 20 years. As my career went along, I came to realize how important it is to not just mechanically apply the legal rules but to think about why they are there. Intellectual property law—a 7 trillion-dollar legal regime governing one-third of the U.S. economy—continually guesses as to how the minds of artists and audiences work. The more I read about neuroscientific advances, the more I realized that these guesses are often wrong and need to be updated for a new technological age.
The lion’s share of commentary about the influence of neuroscience on our system of laws has focused on criminal law. What does it mean to punish people for actions that are really the product of biology rather than conscious choice? Alces grapples with what this means for criminal law and its concepts of moral responsibility and builds a thoughtful and compelling argument. But what I really liked was his equally sharp analysis of what this different conception of human agency means when it comes to tort and contract law—legal regimes that we are much more likely to confront in our daily lives.
Law relies on a conception of human agency, the idea that humans are capable of making their own choices and are morally responsible for the consequences. But what if that is not the case? Over the past half century, the story of the law has been one of increased acuity concerning the human condition, especially the workings of the brain. The law already considers select cognitive realities in evaluating questions of agency and responsibility, such as age, sanity, and emotional distress. As new neuroscientific research comprehensively calls into question the very idea of free will, how should the law respond…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
Kevin Davis is the author of three non-fiction books about the criminal
justice system, The Wrong Man,Defending the Damned and The Brain Defense. Davis has also authored eight
nonfiction children’s books. He’s an award-winning journalist and magazine
writer based in Chicago.
This was a much-needed cautionary examination of the increasing hype
about neuroscience. Following a period in which neuroscience suddenly
became a pop culture phenomenon, Brainwashed aims to tamp things down. The book
takes issue with how mainstream media trumpeted studies that supposedly show
how the brain “lights up” when we kiss, listen to music or engage in other
activities. Satel and Lilienfied explain what brain scans and neuroscientific
reports really reveal and don’t reveal.
What can't neuroscience tell us about ourselves? Since fMRI,functional magnetic resonance imaging,was introduced in the early 1990s, brain scans have been used to help politicians understand and manipulate voters, determine guilt in court cases, and make sense of everything from musical aptitude to romantic love. But although brain scans and other neurotechnologies have provided ground-breaking insights into the workings of the human brain, the increasingly fashionable idea that they are the most important means of answering the enduring mysteries of psychology is misguided,and potentially dangerous.In Brainwashed , psychiatrist and AEI scholar Sally Satel and psychologist Scott O. Lilienfeld reveal how…
I’m a historian of the senses. When I first traveled to the United States, I was fascinated and overwhelmed by the smell and sound of the streets entirely different from my hometown in Japan. Since then, every time I go abroad, I enjoy various sensory experiences in each country. The first thing I always notice is the smell of the airport which is different from country to country. We all have the senses, but we sense things differently—and these differences are cultural. I wondered if they are also historical. That was the beginning of my inquiry into how our sensory experience has been constructed and changed over time.
I like the smell of rain. But I can’t explain what it actually smells like. Afterall, olfactory sensation is the “mute sense”—the one without words. To describe a certain smell, you are most likely using a metaphor like rosy smell or vanilla-like smell. Not only does smell have few words to describe it, but it is also a sensation with still a lot unknown. Barwich’s Smellosophyis a fascinating combination of science, philosophy, and history to explore the importance of this mysterious sensation in our society. While digging into philosophical and historical questions to explore how people in the past thought about the perception of smell, Barwich also interviews neuroscientists, perfumers, and chemists to explore how the modern science, as well as industry, is trying to figure out what the nose tells the brain and how the brain understands it.
"Offers rich discussions of olfactory perception, the conscious and subconscious impacts of smell on behavior and emotion." -Science
Decades of cognition research have shown that external stimuli "spark" neural patterns in particular regions of the brain. We think of the brain as a space we can map: here it responds to faces, there it perceives a sensation. But the sense of smell-only recently attracting broader attention in neuroscience-doesn't work this way. So what does the nose tell the brain, and how does the brain understand it?
My professional background is in working with children, my career began as an NNEB nursery nurse and I did many jobs (nanny, childminder, preschool, reception class, after school club, primary school, special school, and in learning support). I then trained as a teacher of adults and went on to be a college lecturer. I am now a senior university lecturer, but my heart has always been in the early years. I am passionate about highlighting the incredible work that is going on in the early years and in schools and have a strength-based, empowering, and optimistic view, which I try to instill in my students. Working with young children is a privilege and a joy.
This book is changing the way we view children’s development. It explains brain development in a really easy-to-understand way and it gives a completely child-centred view.
Reading this book will help you to understand children and their behaviour and it will ultimately make you a better practitioner. It is a ‘must’ for anyone working with children.
Highly Commended: Nursery World Awards 2017 Professional Book of the Year
Early Childhood and Neuroscience is a practical guide to understanding the complex and challenging subject of neuroscience and its use (and misapplication) in early childhood policy and practice.
The author begins by introducing the definition and history of neuroscience. The reader is then led through structured chapters discussing questions such as: Why should practitioners know about neuroscience? How can neuroscience help practitioners better provide for babies and children? and Is it relevant? Topics covered include the nature vs. nurture debate through the lens of neuroscience, epigenetics, the first 1001…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I am a professor of philosophy, specializing in the philosophy of art at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. When I was a practicing critic, notably of cinema, I backed into philosophy insofar as being a practitioner forced me to ask abstract questions about what I was doing. I have written over fifteen books as well as five documentaries. I am also a former Guggenheim fellow.
This book was instrumental in introducing the English-speaking world to Modern Art. As criticism, it taught readers how to appreciate Neo-Impressionism. But it was also a seminal contribution to Anglo-American philosophy. By demanding an answer to the question “What is Art?” Bell set the agenda for subsequent philosophers who sought to develop a definition of art in response. Bell’s own answer is that something is art if and only if it possesses significant form which itself is the cause of aesthetic emotions. Bell’s emphasis on significant form earned him a reputation as one of the foremost Philosophical Formalists.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been…
