Curtis White

Stanley Elkin

"A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Mr. Ellerbee - until he is senselessly killed during a liquor-store holdup - is a good husband, a good boss, and an overall good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings. After a whirlwind tour of the afterlife, Ellerbee finds himself in Hell for a litany of minor offenses, including taking the Lord's name in vain, keeping his store open on the Sabbath, and thinking that Heaven looks like a theme park. And so begins Elkin's hilarious, imaginative vision of life after death."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Living End

In the tradition of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, a rousing, sharply argued—and, yes, inspiring!—reckoning with our blind faith in technology Can technology solve all our problems? Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many of our most famous journalists, pundits, and economists seem to think so. According to them, “intelligent machines” and big data will free us from work, educate our children, transform our environment, and even make religion more user-friendly. This is the story they’re telling us: that we should stop worrying and love our robot future. But just because you tell a story over and over again doesn’t make it true. Curtis White, one of our most brilliant and perceptive social critics, knows all about the danger of a seductive story, and in We, Robots, he tangles with the so-called thinkers who are convinced that the future is rose-colored and robotically enhanced. With tremendous erudition and a punchy wit, White argues that we must be skeptical of anyone who tries to sell us on technological inevitability. And he gives us an alternative set of stories: taking inspiration from artists as disparate as Sufjan Stevens, Lars von Trier, and François Rabelais, White shows us that by looking to art, we can imagine a different kind of future. No robots required.

Staying Human in the Age of Big Data

We, Robots

asking the big questions in a culture of easy answers

The science delusion

“This is a book about counterculture, and that’s a problem . . . “ So begins Curtis White’s thrilling call for the revitalization of counterculture today. The problem, White argues, is twofold: first, most of us think of counterculture as a phenomenon stuck in the 1960s, and, second, what passes as counterculture today . . . simply isn’t. Nevertheless, a reimagined counterculture is our best hope to save the planet, bypass social antagonisms, and create the world we actually want to live in. Now. White—“the most inspiringly wicked social critic of the moment" (Will Blythe, Elle)—shows how the products of our so-called resistance, from Ken Burns to Black Panther, rarely offer a meaningful challenge to power, and how our loyalty to the “American Lifestyle” is self-defeating and keeps us from making any real social change. The result is an inspiring case for practicing civil disobedience as a way of life, and a clear vision for a better world—full of play, caring, and human connection.

Reimagining Counterculture Today

Living in a World that Can't Be Fixed

In Monstrous Possibility Curtis White provides a unique collection of essays written in styles ranging from the criti-fictional to the deeply theoretical. These essays are often funny, usually polemical, and always urgent. White creates in these essays a lucid perspective on what it means to be a writer and a human being in the so-called postmodern moment.

An Invitation to Literary Politics

Monstrous Possibility

"Includes letters-to-the-editor, an e-mail correspondence with a porn queen, scenes from the lives of classical musicians, and retellings of biblical stories. In the process, White charts the rise and fall of the Human from the Bible (pre-human), to the Enlightenment (the invention of the human), to the digital age (post-human), to the Enlightenment (the invention of the human), to the digital age (post-human)."--Back cover.

Requiem

Portrays a relationship between a father and son against the backdrop of the television shows they shared

A Novel

Memories of My Father Watching TV

One of our most brilliant social critics—author of the bestselling The Middle Mind—presents a scathing critique of the “delusions” of science alongside a rousing defense of the tradition of Romanticism and the “big” questions. With the rise of religion critics such as Richard Dawkins, and of pseudo-science advocates such as Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer, you’re likely to become a subject of ridicule if you wonder “Why is there something instead of nothing?” or “What is our purpose on earth?” Instead, at universities around the world, and in the general cultural milieu, we’re all being taught that science can resolve all questions without the help of philosophy, politics, or the humanities. In short, the rich philosophical debates of the 19th century have been nearly totally abandoned, argues critic Curtis White. An atheist himself, White nonetheless calls this new turn “scientism”—and fears what it will do to our culture if allowed to flourish without challenge. In fact, in “scientism” White sees a new religion with many unexamined assumptions. In this brilliant multi-part critique, he aims at a TED talk by a distinguished neuroscientist in which we are told that human thought is merely the product of our “connectome,” a map of neural connections in the brain that is yet to be fully understood. . . . He whips a widely respected physicist who argues that our new understanding of the origins of the universe obviates any philosophical inquiry . . . and ends with a learned defense of the tradition of Romanticism, which White believes our technology and science-obsessed world desperately needs to rediscover. It’s the only way, he argues, that we can see our world clearly. . . and change it.

Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers

The Science Delusion

Curtis White's long-awaited return to fiction reminds us that the founder of one of American literature's most vibrant and innovative movements is still the King of "transcendental buffoonery." The story begins when a masked man appears in the night at the door of the Marquis, proclaiming a matter of life and death: "I stand falsely accused of an atrocity!" Except he's not, really; he's just trying to get the attention of the Marquis (a video game-playing burnout) to help him enroll in some community college vocational classes. And so the exchange gets badly botched, and our masked man is soon lost in a maddening America, encountering its absurdities at every turn, and cursing his cruel fate. In a time with the crisis du jour, White asks us to remember what it's like to laugh--to be a little silly even--in order to reclaim what used to be fundamental to us: the strength to create our own worlds.

Lacking Character

Acclaimed social critic Curtis White describes an all-encompassing and little-noticed force taking over our culture and our lives that he calls the Middle Mind: the current failure of the American imagination in the media, politics, education, art, technology, and religion. Irreverent, provocative, and far-reaching, White presents a clear vision of this dangerous mindset that threatens America's intellectual and cultural freedoms, concluding with an imperative to reawaken and unleash the once powerful American imagination. The Middle Mind is pragmatic, plainspoken, populist, contemptuous of the Right's narrowness, and incredulous before the Left's convolutions. It wants to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has bought an SUV with the intent of visiting it. It even understands in some indistinct way how that very SUV spells the Arctic's doom.

Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves

The Middle Mind

O analista da sociedade norte-americana Curtis White descreve a já instituída - e pouco percebida - força que tem tomado conta da cultura e da vida dos americanos. E a chama de Mente Mediana - a atual decadência da imaginação não só na mídia em geral, mas também na política, educação, arte, tecnologia e religião. A mente mediana está presente em toda a sociedade, sem discriminação. O perigo não é um ponto de vista específico, mas antes como essa mentalidade nos conduz à vala comum da mediocridade inquestionável.

por que deixamos de pensar por nós mesmos

A mente mediana

Smart, funny, and fresh, The Barbaric Heart argues that the present environmental crisis will not be resolved by the same forms of crony capitalism and managerial technocracy that created the crisis in the first place. With his trademark wit, White argues that the solution might very well come from an unexpected quarter: the arts, religion, and the realm of the moral imagination.

Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature

Barbaric Heart

A contemporary version of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Curtis White's novel begins with Mann's "unassuming young man," Hans Castorp, visiting his cousin at a health retreat. In this version though, the retreat is a spa for recovering alcoholics, unlike all other rehab centers. Rather than encouraging their patients to free themselves of their addiction, the directors of The Elixir believe that sobriety isn't for everyone, that you must let alcohol work its way on you. Filled with many compelling and comic voices, White's novel is a strange and unlikely world that, nevertheless, is quite recognizable as our own.

Curtis White

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