Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.

Virginia Woolf

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Danielle Keats Citron

'Devastating and urgent, this book could not be more timely' Caroline Criado Perez, award-winning and bestselling author of Invisible Women 
 
Danielle Citron takes the conversation about technology and privacy out of the boardrooms and op-eds to reach readers where we are - in our bathrooms and bedrooms; with our families and our lovers; in all the parts of our lives we assume are untouchable - and shows us that privacy, as we think we know it, is largely already gone. 
 
The boundary that once protected our intimate lives from outside interests is an artefact of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first, we have embraced a vast array of technology that enables constant access and surveillance of the most private aspects of our lives. From non-consensual pornography, to online extortion, to the sale of our data for profit, we are vulnerable to abuse -- and our laws have failed miserably to keep up. 
 
With vivid examples drawn from interviews with victims, activists and lawmakers from around the world, The Fight for Privacy reveals the threat we face and argues urgently and forcefully for a reassessment of privacy as a human right. As a legal scholar and expert, Danielle Citron is the perfect person to show us the way to a happier, better protected future.

The Fight for Privacy

Protecting Dignity, Identity and Love in the Digital Age

Cory Arcangel

What does it feel like to try and create something new? How is it possible to find a space for the demands of writing a novel in a world of instant communication? 
 
Working on My Novel is about the act of creation and the gap between the different ways we express ourselves today. Exploring the extremes of making art, from satisfaction and even euphoria to those days or nights when nothing will come, it's the story of what it means to be a creative person, and why we keep on trying.

Working On My Novel

Jeanette Winterson

'Joins the dots in a neglected narrative of female scientists, visionaries and code-breakers' Observer 
 
How is artificial intelligence changing the way we live and love? Now with a new chapter, this is the eye-opening new book from Sunday Times bestselling author Jeanette Winterson. 
 
Drawing on her years of thinking and reading about AI, Jeanette Winterson looks to history, religion, myth, literature, politics and, of course, computer science to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are happening now. 
 
With wit, compassion and curiosity, Winterson tackles AI's most interesting talking points - from the weirdness of backing up your brain and the connections between humans and non-human helpers to whether it's time to leave planet Earth. 
 
'Very funny... A kind of comparative mythology, where the hype and ideology of cutting-edge tech is read through the lens of far older stories' Spectator 
 
'Refreshingly optimistic' Guardian 
 
A 'Books of 2021' Pick in the Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard

12 Bytes

How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love

Naomi Klein

What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired a double? Someone almost like you, and yet not you at all? 
 
When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn't. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity - all we have to meet the world - so unstable? 
 
To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting 'the children'). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister. 
 
This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It's for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.

Doppelganger

A Trip Into the Mirror World

Rana el Kaliouby

A captivating memoir that chronicles one woman's mission to humanise technology and what she learns about humanity along the way. 
 
Now more than ever, we find ourselves unable to express our true feelings through technology. Rana el Kaliouby discovered this when she left Cairo, a newly-married, Muslim woman, to take up her place at Cambridge University to study computer science. Many thousands of miles from home, she began to develop systems to help her better connect with her family. She started to pioneer the new field of Emotional Intelligence (EI). She now runs her company, Affectiva (the industry-leader in this emerging field) that builds EI into our technology and develops systems that understand humans the way we understand one another. This is the fascinating story of her mission to humanise technology and what she learns about humanity along the way.

Girl Decoded

My Quest to Make Technology Emotionally Intelligent – and Change the Way We Interact Forever

Cade Metz

'This colourful page-turner puts artificial intelligence into a human perspective . . . Metz explains this transformative technology and makes the quest thrilling.' Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs 
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This is the inside story of a small group of mavericks, eccentrics and geniuses who turned Artificial Intelligence from a fringe enthusiasm into a transformative technology. It's the story of how that technology became big business, creating vast fortunes and sparking intense rivalries. And it's the story of breakneck advances that will shape our lives for many decades to come - both for good and for ill. 
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'One day soon, when computers are safely driving our roads and speaking to us in complete sentences, we'll look back at Cade Metz's elegant, sweeping Genius Makers as their birth story - the Genesis for an age of sentient machines.' Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and The Upstarts 
 
'A ringside seat at what may turn out to be the pivotal episode in human history . . . easy and fun to read . . . undeniably charming.' Forbes

Genius Makers

The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

Gretchen McCulloch

THE ACCLAIMED NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. 
 
Have you ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message? Wondered where memes came from? Fret no more: Because Internet is the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. 
 
'McCulloch is such a disarming writer - lucid, friendly, unequivocally excited about her subject - that I began to marvel at the flexibility of the online language she describes, with its numerous shades of subtlety.' New York Times

Because Internet

Understanding how language is changing

Evan S Connell

Evan S. Connell explores the quixotic obsession with the new, the hidden, the unattainable that burns in an individual's soul. 
 
Each essay is an extraordinary account of passionate pursuit by legendary explorers, visionaries, and seekers compelled by a singular desire. Here we find Marco Polo, El Dorado, Paracelsus, Columbus, the thousands of children in the Innocents' Crusade, Magellan, Mary Kingsley (a Victorian naturalist, ethnologist, sailor, scholar, and guest of cannibals, and Ibn Batuta (an indefatigable explorer of the fourteenth century whose travels in the Arab world and beyond made 'the journey of Marco Polo look like a stroll around the block'). 
 
'There's no end to the list, of course,' Connell adds, 'because gradually it descends from such legendary individuals to ourselves when, as children, obsessed by that same urge, we got permission to sleep in the backyard.'

El Dorado And Other Pursuits

Elizabeth Emens

This book will give you many hours of your life back. 
 
Scheduling doctor's appointments. Planning a party. Buying a present. Filling out paperwork. These are the kind of secretarial and managerial tasks necessary to run a life and a household. Elizabeth Emens was a working mother with two young children, swamped like so many of us, when she realised that 'life admin' was consuming her. Desperate to survive and to help others along the way, she gathered favourite tips and tricks, admin confessions, and the secrets of admin-happy households. 
 
Drawing on her research and writing in a wholly original manner, she shows how admin affects our lives; how we might reduce, redistribute and even prevent it; what 'admin personalities' we might have; and how to deal with it in relationships. The Art of Life Admin teaches us all how to do less of it, and to do it better.

The Art of Life Admin

How To Do Less, Do It Better, and Live More

Paul Kingsnorth

In Against the Machine, “furiously gifted” (The Washington Post) novelist, poet, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth presents a wholly original—and terrifying—account of the technological-cultural matrix enveloping all of us. With insight into the spiritual and economic roots of techno-capitalism, Kingsnorth reveals how the Machine, in the name of progress, has choked Western civilization, is destroying the Earth itself, and is reshaping us in its image. From the First Industrial Revolution to the rise of artificial intelligence, he shows how the hollowing out of humanity has been a long game—and how your very soul is at stake. 
 
It takes effort to remain truly human in the age of the Machine. Here Kingsnorth reminds us what humanity requires: a healthy suspicion of entrenched power; connection to land, nature and heritage; and a deep attention to matters of the spirit. Prophetic and poetic, Against the Machine is a spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age.

Against the Machine

On the Unmaking of Humanity

Dina Torkia

“I defy any woman to flick through Modestly, through Dina’s musings on bullying, eating disorders, maternity wear, contouring and feminism, and not find something they can relate to” – METRO 
 
‘This is the story of my life. It’s about me as a Muslim Brit embracing dual identities, surviving the turbulent teens and transitioning from self-doubt to self-belief. There is a little bit of drama, lots of laughs, plenty of practical advice and a shedload of bold statements. You can’t get a Muslim woman in a hijab with no opinion, am I right?!' 
Dina x 
 
 Guys, get ready. YouTuber and social media sensation Dina Torkia is giving you a never-seen-before look into her world. From advice on fashion, beauty and style, to frank opinions on family, career and faith, this is everything that Dina has ever wanted to share with you. 
 
So let Dina tell you how it really is, living and loving life as a modern Muslim Brit. 
 
@dinatokio

Modestly

Emma Gannon

Emma Gannon was born in 1989, the year the World Wide Web was conceived, so she’s literally grown up alongside the Internet. There’ve been late night chat room experiments, sexting from a Nokia and dubious webcam exchanges. And let’s not forget catfishing, MSN, digital friendships and #feminism. She was basically social networking way before it was a thing – and she’s even made a successful career from it. 
 
Ctrl Alt Delete is Emma’s painfully funny and timely memoir, in which she aims to bring a little hope to anybody who has played out a significant part of their life online. Her confessions, revelations and honesty may even make you log off social media (at least for an hour).

Ctrl, Alt; Delete

How I Grew Up Online

George Dyson

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 
 
How did we end up in a world where humans coexist with technologies we can no longer fully control or understand? 
 
George Dyson plots an unexpected course through the past 300 years to reveal the hidden connections that underpin our digital age, ending with a premonition of what lies ahead. 
 
From an eighteenth-century Russian voyage across the North Pacific, to the mirror signals that heralded the age of digital telecommunications and the invention of the vacuum tube, Analogia interweaves historical adventure with scientific insight in a deeply personal story that frames the pursuit - and cost - of the digital revolution in a captivating new light.

Analogia

The Entangled Destinies of Nature, Human Beings and Machines

George Dyson's fascinating account of the early years of computers: Turing's Cathedral is the story behind how the PC, ipod, smartphone and almost every aspect of modern life came into being. 
 
In 1945 a small group of brilliant engineers and mathematicians gathered at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, determined to build a computer that would make Alan Turing's theory of a 'universal machine' reality. Led by the polymath émigré John von Neumann, they created the numerical framework that underpins almost all modern computing - and ensured that the world would never be the same again. 
 
George Dyson is a historian of technology whose interests include the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak. He is the author of Baidarka; Project Orion; and Darwin Among the Machines. 
 
'Unusual, wonderful, visionary' Francis Spufford, Guardian 
 
'Fascinating . . . the story Dyson tells is intensely human . . . a gripping account of ideas and inventionFascinating . . . the story Dyson tells is intensely human . . . a gripping account of ideas and invention' Jenny Uglow 
 
'Glorious . . . as much a story of the personalities involved as of the discoveries they made, and you do not need any knowledge of computers or mathematics to enjoy the ride . . . a ripping yarn' John Gribbin, Literary Review

Turing's Cathedral

The Origins of the Digital Universe

'Full of historical anecdotes . . . but this is much more than a history book. [George Dyson] weaves his threads together for a purpose. Using voices of the past and present, he describes a fresh and sometimes startling viewpoint of the emerging relationship between nature and machines. From vignettes about Olaf Stapledon, George Boole, John von Neumann, and Samuel Butler, a larger story develops in which the twin processes of intelligence and evolution are inseparably intertwined' Danny Hillis, Wired

Darwin Among the Machines

Bob Burg

John David Mann

The Go-Giver tells the story of an ambitious young man named Joe who yearns for success. Joe is a true go-getter, though sometimes he feels as if the harder and faster he works, the further away his goals seem to be. 
 
One day, desparate to land a key sale at the end of a bad quarter, he seeks advice from the enigmatic Pindar, a legendary consultant referred to by many devotees sinply as the Chairman. Over the next week, Pindar introduces Joe to a series of successful 'go-givers' who teach him how to open himself up to the power of giving.

The Go-Giver

A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea

Anne Boden

After a lengthy career at the top of some of Britain's leading Banks, Anne Boden had become disillusioned with the status quo - the financial crash had broken trust in the whole sector and there seemed to be little appetite to make most of emerging technologies to revolutionise customer experience. Increasingly frustrated with the inertia, she decided to do something radical - she set up her own bank, Starling. 
 
In BANKING ON IT, Anne reveals the awe-inspiring story of how she broke through bureaucracy, tackled prejudice and successfully countered widespread suspicion to realise her vision for the future of consumer banking and, in doing so, trigger a new movement that would revolutionise the entire banking industry.

Banking On It

How I Disrupted an Industry and Changed the Way We Manage our Money Forever

How I Disrupted an Industry

Matthew Jockers

Jodie Archer

'If you're someone who dreams of penning a bestseller, read this book' The Week 
 
'What if the success of E.L.James and Dan Brown was not so random? What if there were an algorithm that could pick out the bestseller DNA concealed within these books before they're published? This is the audacious claim made by Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers ... Smart, savvy and full of ideas' Fiona Wilson, The Times 
 
Girl on the Train. Fifty Shades. The Goldfinch. Why do some books capture the whole world's attention? In The Bestseller Code, Archer and Jockers boldly claim that not only can mega-hits be explained and identified - but they've built the algorithm to prove it. Using cutting-edge text mining techniques, they have developed a model that analyses theme, plot, style and character to explain why some books resonate more than others with readers. Provocative, entertaining, and ground-breaking, The Bestseller Code explores the hidden patterns at work in the biggest hits and, more importantly, the real reasons we love to read. 
 
'Non-formulaic, eye-opening, deeply-researched - and really worth your time' GQ 
 
 'When a story captures the imagination of millions, that's magic. Can you qualify magic? Archer and Jockers just may have done so' Sylvia Day, no.1 bestselling author 
 
'The claims are eye-grabbing . . . and also highly plausible' Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Spectator 
 
'Thought-provoking and interesting ... Here is a book worth reading' David Bond, Financial Times

The Bestseller Code

Lilly Singh

From actress, comedian and YouTube sensation Lilly Singh (a.k.a Superwoman) comes the definitive guide to being a BAWSE - a person who exudes confidence, reaches goals, gets hurt efficiently, and smiles genuinely because they've fought through it all and made it out the other side. 
Told in her hilarious, bold voice that's inspired over 9 million fans, and using stories from her own life to illustrate her message, Lilly proves that there are no short-cuts to success. 
 
WARNING: This book does not include hopeful thoughts, lucky charms, and cute quotes. That's because success, happiness and everything else you want in life needs to be fought for - not wished for. In Lilly's world, there are no escalators. Only stairs.

How to Be a Bawse

A Guide to Conquering Life

Scott Patterson

Dark Pools is the pacy, revealing, and profoundly chilling tale of how global markets have been hijacked by trading robots – many so self-directed that humans can’t predict what they’ll do next.It’s the story of the blisteringly intelligent computer programmers behind the rise of these ‘bots’. And it’s a timely warning that as artificial intelligence gradually takes over, we could be on the verge of global meltdown. 
 
‘Scott Patterson has the ability to see things you and I don’t notice.’ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, New York Times bestselling author of Antifragile, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan

Dark Pools

The rise of A.I. trading machines and the looming threat to Wall Street

Darren McGarvey

*The new book from the Orwell Prize-Winning author of Poverty Safari and The Social Distance Between Us* 
 
Today, trauma permeates media, from music and television to films and books – my own included. While the increasing openness is welcome, I’ve observed that this rise has been accompanied by a parallel explosion of disinformation and sometimes harmful guidance about how to deal with personal trauma. 
 
In Trauma Industrial Complex, I ask the question: How did we get here? And are the stories we’re telling ourselves liberating us or keeping us trapped? In this revealing and deeply personal book, I’ll pull back the curtain, sharing the hard-won wisdom I’ve gained from the events brought on by telling my own story. 
 
Praise for Darren McGarvey: 
 
‘An Orwell for today's poor’ – The Times 
‘The standout, authentic voice of a generation’ – Herald 
‘McGarvey is a rarity: a working-class writer who has fought to make the middle-class world hear what he has to say’ – Nick Cohen, Guardian

Trauma Industrial Complex

How Oversharing Became a Product in a Digital World

Kyla Scanlon

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
"Few people can communicate how the economy actually works better than Kyla Scanlon." -Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money 
 
The stuff you really need to know about how the economy works? It's pretty simple. Yes, even if you were bored to tears in economics class, or if you're cross-eyed from reading painfully convoluted-or straight-up misguided-financial commentary. In this particularly disorienting era, Kyla Scanlon is the Tim Harford of the disaffected and disillusioned Gen Z looking for answers. 
 
This is the definitive, approachable guide to the key concepts and mechanics of economics and the most common myths and fallacies to steer clear of. Through Kyla's trademark blend of creative analogies, clever illustrations, refreshingly lucid language-and even quotes from poetry, literature, and philosophy-she answers questions such as: 
 
- Is our national debt really a threat? 
- What is a "mild" recession, exactly? 
- What's really happening in the employment market, and how do we improve it for workers? 
 
At a time when experts overcomplicate simple things loudly, choosing to generate smoke rather than clearing the air, In This Economy? shows that understanding the markets-and the systems they operate in-is easier than you think. 
 
Whether you're worried about your mortgage rate, job security, bank account balance, or the health of the broader economy, this concise and witty guide will give you the confidence to make smarter financial decisions-no matter what the headlines say.

In This Economy?

How Money and Markets Really Work

Astra Taylor

The far right is on the march again – but this time it’s different from anything we’ve seen before. A new, apocalyptic alliance of religious fundamentalists, billionaire Silicon Valley tech kings and ethno-nationalists is on the move. They’re united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, and they welcome a future of shocks, scarcity and collapse, convinced they’ll be among the saved on the other side. 
This is the world of End Times Fascism. 
 
In this blistering reckoning with our age, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor take us deep into this man-made Armageddon complex – and show us how to resist it. Around the globe, they investigate how those who are making our world unliveable through climate chaos and job-consuming AI are preparing to protect themselves from the fallout, whether it’s by repairing to luxurious private islands for the super-rich, rocketing off to Mars or bunkering nations against a dehumanized ‘other’. 
 
But, Klein and Taylor reveal, the new supremacist survivalists are far from impregnable. They have no vision of a shared future. All they offer are remixes of a bygone past: the nihilistic, sadistic pleasures of domination. If we’re to meet this critical moment and defend what’s left of democracy before it’s smashed up beyond repair, we must break the doom loop, and find a new way of living together, rooted in our existence on this earth, in the here and now. A story not of end times – but of better times. This book shows us how.

End Times Fascism

And the Fight for the Living World

Rachel Maddow

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Oil. 
 
Corrupt? Yes. 
 
 Unimaginably lucrative? Of course. 
 
 But, the enemy of democracy? 
 
 Blowout is the oil and gas industry as we've never seen it before, as told by America's most incisive political journalist, Rachel Maddow. A blackly comic journey from Washington to Siberia, to deep within the earth's crust and the icy Arctic seas, it reveals is not just the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas but why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. 
 
 This is our final wake-up call: to stop subsidizing oil and gas, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world's most destructive industry before it destroys our democracy 
 
 'It takes enormous talent to balance brutal honesty with scorching wit. Rachel Maddow has it in spades... Each page in Blowout is a revelation into the depth of corruption and greed that is infused into the international economy' David Lammy, MP

Blowout

Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth

Martin Amis

Back in a facsimile edition is Martin Amis’s closet passion project, first published in 1982: a compulsive gamer’s guide to arcades and beating your younger self’s high score 
 
In this offbeat book, introduced by Stephen Spielberg, acclaimed author Martin Amis explores how 1980s video games took a generation by storm. Delving into the electric atmosphere of the arcades where he misspent his youth, he asks: Why did Space Invaders invade our hearts and minds? How much time, loose change and sex appeal did they cost us? And most importantly, which secret cheats and tactics must we master to reach the next level? 
 
Part cautionary tale, part celebration of a lifelong addiction, this is an essential manual for many a self-confessed cyber geek, computer nerd and joystick junkie.

Invasion of the Space Invaders

An Addict's Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines

Jessie Hartland

Enter the world of Steve Jobs -- disrupter, icon, hero -- and be inspired by his fascinating life presented here as a graphic novel. 
 
This fast-paced and entertaining biography is a perfect complement to text-heavy books on Steve Jobs like Walter Isaacson’s biography. Steve Jobs is the subject of a major movie project this Autumn, and this graphic telling of his life-story presents him as the ultimate American entrepreneur, who brought us Apple Computer, Pixar, Macs, iPods, iPhones and more. It's a unique and stylish book, sure to appeal to the legions of readers who live and breathe the perfect blend of technology and design that Jobs created. 
 
Jobs’s remarkable life reads like a history of the personal technology industry. He started Apple Computer in his parents’ garage and eventually became the tastemaker of a generation, creating products we can’t live without. Through it all, he was an overbearing and demanding perfectionist, both impossible and inspiring. 
 
Capturing his unparalleled brilliance, as well as his many demons, Jessie Hartland’s engaging biography illuminates the meteoric successes, devastating setbacks, and myriad contradictions that make up the extraordinary life and legacy of the insanely great Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs: Insanely Great

Robert Skidelsky

A sweeping history of and meditation on humanity's relationship with machines, showing how we got here and what happens next 
 
Faith in technological fixes for our problems is waning. Automation, which promised relief from toil, has reactivated the long-standing fear of job redundancy. Information technology, meant to liberate us from traditional authority, is placing unprecedented powers of surveillance and control in the hands of a purely secular Big Brother. And for the first time, artificial intelligence threatens anthropogenic disaster – disaster caused by our own activities. Scientists join imaginative writers in warning us of the fate of Icarus, whose wings melted because he flew too close to the sun. 
 
This book tells the story of our fractured relationship with machines from humanity’s first tools down to the present and into the future. It raises the crucial question of why some parts of the world developed a ‘machine civilisation’ and not others, and traces the interactions between capitalism and technology, and between science and religion, in the making of the modern world. 
 
Taking in the peaks of philosophy and triumphs of science, the foundation of economics and speculations of fiction, Robert Skidelsky embarks on a bold intellectual journey through the evolution of our understanding of technology and what this means for our lives and politics. ‘Unless we understand technology as a system of ideas rather than as a necessity,’ he writes, ‘we will be powerless to choose which technology is best suited to our needs and purposes.’

The Machine Age

An Idea, a History, a Warning

Dominique Chen

In Future Words, Dominique Chen invites readers into a life shaped by multiple languages, cultures and disciplines. Born in Tokyo, Chen grew up moving between Japan, France and the United States, speaking several languages in overlapping ways. Here his journey – from learning his first French sentences in a Tokyo classroom, to competitive kendo in Paris, to programming early video games, to raising a multilingual daughter – becomes a meditation on how language forms the architecture of our world. 
 
Chen reflects on the 'bugs' that appear in both human speech and computer code, on the impossibility and beauty of translation, and on how untranslatable words – like the Japanese hakanai or the French éphémère – carry entire worlds within them. He draws on philosophy from Deleuze to Sapir and Whorf, and on design, anthropology, and cognitive science, to explore the Umwelt: the unique sensory and conceptual world each being inhabits. By moving between memoir and theory, intimate domestic moments and global cultural history, Chen reveals language as a living environment – something we adapt and co-create. 
 
Erudite and witty, this book will make you hear language differently and see life as part of an unfolding conversation with the future. 
 
Translated from Japanese by Shi-Lin Loh.

Future Words

Language, Technology, Design

Will Darbyshire

Have you ever wanted to write something to a partner or ex? What is the best and worst message you’ve received on a dating app? What would you say to your last hook up? 
 
Following ten years after the publication of This Modern Love, Will Darbyshire - now in his thirties - looks at how modern love has changed with This Modern Love Now. 
 
Receiving thousands of submissions from men and women around the world, from hopeless romantics to OnlyFans stars, Will delves into the enduring themes that continue to shape modern dating. These include the evolving political landscape regarding cisgendered men and women, the rise of dating apps and the prevalence of ‘situationships’, and the ever-changing dynamics of queer romances. 
 
Amidst the unprecedented connectivity we enjoy in the digital age, paradoxically, we also experience a profound sense of loneliness. Equally, messages left on read and the dreaded 'ghosting' being pitfalls of the modern dating age, the making of this book has invited the public to share those letters and messages left unsent. 
 
This Modern Love Now is a time capsule of the present. Of how our expectations and reality diverge when it comes to matters of the heart…and the occasional one-night stand.

This Modern Love Now

Naomi Alderman

What’s the most useful thing you could know about your own life?In this era-defining book, developed from her groundbreaking Radio 4 essay series, Naomi Alderman turns her boundless curiosity and incisive thinking to a question that affects us all: how do we understand, and navigate, the epoch we’re living through? She calls this epoch the Information Crisis. 
 
The internet has flooded us with more knowledge, opinions, ideas, opportunities, as well as verbal attacks and misinformation, than ever before. It lets us learn more quickly and also spread falsehood more quickly, it brings us together and also divides us in new ways, it is now the lens through which we perceive and understand the world. There is no going back. But we have been here before. In fact, this is humanity’s third information crisis. 
 
The first, the invention of writing 5,000 years ago, and the second, the invention of the printing press 600 years ago, drastically reshaped our perceptions, interactions and mental landscapes in ways that feel acutely familiar. Overwhelmed by information, people become afraid and angry, unsettled and distressed, as well as more knowledgeable, educated and curious. By looking at those previous information crises, both the turmoil and the advances, Alderman asks what we can learn from the past to better understand our present, and prepare for our future. 
 
Drawing on the work of philosophers and historians, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today explores how new technology opens up new ways of being and helps us chart a way forward (once again), through the turbulent seas of information overload.

Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today

(and other lessons from history about living through an information crisis)

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