Here are 100 books that The Life of Insects fans have personally recommended if you like
The Life of Insects.
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I have researched and observed attempts to map, enhance, and control biological human bodies since I was a teenager. I was always interested in how people described and related to themselves as biological creatures. As part of that, I was fascinated by attempts to talk about the human body with other words than the strict biological, both by poets, artists and by, entrepreneurs, and scientists. As a researcher in cultural studies, I concentrate on different ways to understand ourselves as biological creatures and on imaginaries about (bio)technology and how these dreams about what technology can do affect our self-understanding.
The book is better than the movie, and the movie is amazing. I love how the author manages to create a dense feeling of female suffocation, gaslighting, hallucination, panic, satanism, conspiracies, deception, and paranoia while simultaneously describing the ordered and neat lives of New York City's emerging glitterati through detailed descriptions of the housewife’s sphere of choosing the right material of towels and the right hue of wallpaper when nesting.
Rosemary’s personal limits and borders, both physical and psychological, are challenged as she becomes a vessel of something unknown, but only unknown to her. An amazingly dense yet easily accessible book.
'The Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel' Stephen King
Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling actor-husband, Guy, move into the Bramford, an old New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and only elderly residents. Neighbours Roman and Minnie Castavet soon come nosing around to welcome them; despite Rosemary's reservations about their eccentricity and the weird noises that she keeps hearing, her husband starts spending time with them. Shortly after Guy lands a plum Broadway role, Rosemary becomes pregnant, and the Castavets start taking a special interest in her welfare.
As the sickened Rosemary becomes increasingly isolated, she begins to…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
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 grew up with and write horror stories, so it’s very difficult for a book to unnerve me; this is one of the only books I can think of that earns the honor. It is half an ecological text and half a horror story, with its romantic prose balanced by intense natural research to create a surreal, unnerving description of the natural world.
This book made me hyper-aware of everything from the grass outside my window to the cells that make up my body, and I love how it uses both existential horror and the real, biological horror of being a living creature to leave a lasting unease. Are you aware you’re breathing? Can you feel your tongue in your mouth? Your heart’s nonstop beating? You can, now.
THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY - NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC
For thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border - an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.
The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic.
I have researched and observed attempts to map, enhance, and control biological human bodies since I was a teenager. I was always interested in how people described and related to themselves as biological creatures. As part of that, I was fascinated by attempts to talk about the human body with other words than the strict biological, both by poets, artists and by, entrepreneurs, and scientists. As a researcher in cultural studies, I concentrate on different ways to understand ourselves as biological creatures and on imaginaries about (bio)technology and how these dreams about what technology can do affect our self-understanding.
When you finish the book, you may feel a bit unsure whether this was a magical tale or an account of reality. However, it is actually a rather detailed account of the period (1953–1970) in scientific history when the information age found its way into biology. This was a time when metaphors migrated from the realm of computing to descriptions of the human biological body.
Conducting new research requires new languages to test novel ideas and explore new perspectives. This fascinating subject is described in great detail in this book without ever becoming dry. As a researcher, I can attest that this is not easy to achieve.
This is a detailed history of one of the most important and dramatic episodes in modern science, recounted from the novel vantage point of the dawn of the information age and its impact on representations of nature, heredity, and society. Drawing on archives, published sources, and interviews, the author situates work on the genetic code (1953-70) within the history of life science, the rise of communication technosciences (cybernetics, information theory, and computers), the intersection of molecular biology with cryptanalysis and linguistics, and the social history of postwar Europe and the United States.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I have researched and observed attempts to map, enhance, and control biological human bodies since I was a teenager. I was always interested in how people described and related to themselves as biological creatures. As part of that, I was fascinated by attempts to talk about the human body with other words than the strict biological, both by poets, artists and by, entrepreneurs, and scientists. As a researcher in cultural studies, I concentrate on different ways to understand ourselves as biological creatures and on imaginaries about (bio)technology and how these dreams about what technology can do affect our self-understanding.
If you want to keep abreast of the complex developments within recent biotechnology and especially synthetic biology, this is a very good read. In a comprehensive, informative, and yet personal manner, the authors give a recap and a diagnosis of the current status of this field and the emerging biotech market that they predict will be the next big business. And I agree.
The question is not if this will happen but how. This book comprehensively highlights some of the significant challenges that market-driven biological tinkering and data gathering will pose to humanity in terms of equality, ethics, human rights, and more.
As humans in 2025, we should all be aware of what is written in this book to have a chance to shape our lives as we wish or in order to understand the dilemmas our children will face.
Synthetic biology is the technique that enables us not just to read and edit but also write DNA to program living biological structures as though they were tiny computers. Unlike cloning Dolly the sheep-which cut and copied existing genetic material-the future of synthetic biology might be something like an app store, where you could download and add new capabilities into any cell, microbe, plant, or animal.
This breakthrough science has the potential to mitigate, perhaps solve, humanity's immediate and longer-term existential challenges: climate change; the feeding, clothing, housing, and caring for billions of humans; fighting the next viral outbreak before…
I spent the first half of my life in England and the second half in the United States, or more specifically in Venice, California, a unique and unusual community. While working for London University I made several research trips to the US. Eventually, I immigrated to the States, where I taught at several universities in Southern California. Once I stopped teaching full-time, I surprised myself by writing two suspense novels (a genre I had spent most of my life analyzing), Money Matters and Dangerous Conjectures. The second novel was written during the pandemic and takes place during the early rise of the virus.
By 2020 the boundary between fantasy and reality had become virtually erased. Confined to home, we all found ourselves the targets of conspiracy theories. Even the president scoffed at the dangers of the coronavirus. Rushdie’s spoof of Cervantes’ Don Quixote features an updated avatar of Quixote whose reality has been formed by tv soap operas. He is “deranged by reality television,” and in love with a talk show celebrity. Driving across America to reach her he encounters “the pollution of the real by the unreal.” In fact, he himself turns out to be the fictional creation of another major character, an author who is soon exposed to be no less fictional. But this is Rushdie in whose ludic novels the material unreal is the imaginative real.
Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age.
Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television, who falls in impossible love with the TV star Salman R. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where 'Anything-Can-Happen'. Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of…
When writing about sexuality it is important to me to write about true intimacy. Especially for those who have broken their wedding vows and for those who have been betrayed, who still long for real intimacy with spiritual and sexual maturity. My book, False Intimacy: Understanding the Struggle of Sexual Addiction (1992), was the first Christian book published on the subject of sexual addiction.I have for over thirty years counseled 1000s of sexually broken people from all across the U.S. who came to see me for a week of intensive counseling. I have taught on the subject of sexuality in all fifty states as well as over twenty foreign countries. No subject is more important to our spiritual maturity and sexual maturity.
This is one of the best critiques of our postmodern culture that you can find from a writer who can make an analysis from both a theological and historical perspective. He also gives an analysis of the evangelical church and how it has been captured by that culture. David Wells points out that there is a conflict within the church today between the plague of postmodernism and the Christian gospel. We must get this sorted out, and this book not only helped me do that, but helped me guide others in accomplishing that goal. So relevant and valuable was the information in this book, I simply could not put it down until I had read it cover to cover.
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…
The sixty books I’ve written wander in and out of existential thought, as that breakthrough thinking, where man was told to take personal responsibility for his life and stop looking up or elsewhere for purpose and meaning, has informed everything I do and write about. Over the years, I’ve been a family therapist, a creativity coach, an existential wellness coach, and an advocate for critical psychology and critical psychiatry, points of view that dispute the current pseudo-medical “mental disorder” paradigm.
Apart from the existential fiction that I love (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, etc.), this is one of my favorite books of all time. The editor, Walter Truett Anderson, gathered together the best collection ever of essays on the topics of postmodernism, deconstruction (and reconstruction), the wobbly nature of truth in the twentieth century (and now, the twenty-first century), and how we might go about reconstructing the truth now that we have so beautifully and mercilessly deconstructed it.
Authors included are Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, Bell Hooks, and a ton of other great thinkers on the subject of our postmodern malaise and the difficulties of belief … in anything. If you don’t know this book, you will really, really want to get to know it.
I love cities and I teach about them. I was born in the capital of Sofia, Bulgaria, and landed in the US (mostly by chance) in 1993. Spent most of my professional life in US academia (Michigan, Virginia Tech, Harvard, Maryland, and now Georgia). I never stopped wondering how cities change and why American cities look and function so differently than European cities. So, I wrote a few books about cities, includingIron Curtains; Gates, Suburbs and Privatization of Space, which is about changes in East European Cities after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
A sweeping study and critique of modern culture! If you are looking for a comprehensive and passionate analysis of time and space in the “late capitalist era,” this is the one to read. Nobody has written more authoritatively on modern and post-modern “time-space compression” (you have to read the book to see what this means). Harvey’s intellectual breadth and depth are astonishing. No wonder he is one of the most cited scholars of our time.
In this new book, David Harvey seeks to determine what is meant by the term in its different contexts and to identify how accurate and useful it is as a description of contemporary experience.
Understanding the world is important for everyone. For me, it takes the form of analyzing colorful images and artifacts in the built environment. In the broad traditions of the global northwest, color is regarded as deceptive and unreliable. For centuries now, and throughout disparate media and technical systems, color has had to maintain this secondary, subordinate status as “other,” linked to falsity, manipulation, and deceit or, to quote David Batchelor, “some ‘foreign’ body". In my work, I argue that we have all inherited this tradition in the global northwest, fetishizing color as both excessive and yet indispensable in its capacity to retroactively confirm the sanctity of what it is not.
Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism was one of the first accounts of “postmodern aesthetics” and why it continues to matter today.
Circa 1990, Jameson showed how a new age of high-tech and transnational corporations fundamentally transformed how we create and experience art, design, and aesthetics.
Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson's most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of "postmodernism". Jameson's inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from "high" art to "low" from market ideology to architecture, from painting to "punk" film, from video art to literature.
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…
As a graduate student during the late 1970s, my mentor, Martin Jay, generously introduced me to two members of the Frankfurt School: Herbert Marcuse and Leo Lowenthal. These memorable personal encounters inspired me to write a dissertation on Walter Benjamin, who was closely allied with the Frankfurt School. The completed dissertation, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, became the first book on Benjamin in English and is still in print. The Frankfurt School thinkers published a series of pioneering socio-psychological treatises on political authoritarianism: The Authoritarian Personality, Prophets of Deceit, and One-Dimensional Man. These studies continue to provide an indispensable conceptual framework for understanding the contemporary reemergence of fascist political forms.
During the early 1990s, I had the good fortune to participate in Habermas’ legendary Monday night philosophy colloquium at the University of Frankfurt.
The experience transformed my understanding of the raison d’être of Critical Theory.The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is not a book about fascism per se. Instead, it tells the story of how, after the war, the titans of interwar German Kulturpessimismus– Nietzsche (albeit, posthumously), Carl Schmitt, and Heidegger – were canonized by the leading advocates of “French Theory” as the newmaîtres à penseror “master thinkers.”
Yet, the canonization of German philosophy came at a high cost. After all, historically speaking, the philosophies in question stood in close proximity to fascist ideology.
Hence, the question arises: to what extent did such pro-fascist “ideologemes” infiltrate and inform the basic tenets of French poststructuralism?
This critique of French philosophy and the history of German philosophy is a tour de force that has the immediacy and accessibility of the lecture form and the excitement of an encounter across national cultural boundaries as Habermas takes up the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason in contemporary French postmodernism.
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is a tour de force that has the immediacy and accessibility of the lecture form and the excitement of an encounter across, national cultural boundaries. Habermas takes up the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason in contemporary French poststructuralism. Tracing…
