Joshua Glenn

Rob Walker

100 EXTRAORDINARY STORIES ABOUT ORDINARY THINGS SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS: A Literary and Economic Experiment Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object? The Significant Objects project set out to answer that question once and for all, by recruiting a highly impressive crew of creative writers to invent stories about an unimpressive menagerie of items rescued from thrift stores and yard sales. That secondhand flotsam definitely becomes more valuable: sold on eBay, objects originally picked up for a buck or so sold for thousands of dollars in total — making the project a sensation in the literary blogosphere along the way. But something else happened, too: The stories created were astonishing, a cavalcade of surprising responses to the challenge of manufacturing significance. Who would have believed that random junk could inspire so much imagination? The founders of the Significant Objects project, that’s who. This book collects 100 of the finest tales from this unprecedented creative experiment; you’ll never look at a thrift-store curiosity the same way again. FEATURING ORIGINAL STORIES BY: Chris Adrian • Rob Agredo • Kurt Andersen • Rachel Axler • Rob Baedeker • Nicholson Baker • Rosecrans Baldwin • Matthew Battles • Charles Baxter • Kate Bernheimer • Susanna Breslin • Kevin Brockmeier • Matt Brown • Blake Butler • Meg Cabot • Tim Carvell • Patrick Cates • Dan Chaon • Susanna Daniel • Adam Davies • Kathryn Davis • Matthew De Abaitua • Stacey • D'Erasmo • Helen DeWitt • Doug Dorst • Mark Doty • Ben Ehrenreich • Mark Frauenfelder • Amy Fusselman • William Gibson • Myla Goldberg • Ben Greenman • Jason Grote • Jim Hanas • Jennifer Michael Hecht • Sheila Heti • Christine Hill • Dara Horn • Shelley Jackson • Heidi Julavits • Ben Katchor • Matt Klam • Wayne Koestenbaum • Josh Kramer • Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer • Neil LaBute • Victor LaValle • J. Robert Lennon • Jonathan Lethem • Todd Levin • Laura Lippman • Mimi Lipson • Robert Lopez • Joe Lyons • Sarah Manguso • Merrill Markoe • Tom McCarthy • Miranda Mellis • Lydia Millet • Maud Newton • Annie Nocenti • Stephen O’Connor • Stewart O’Nan • Jenny Offill • Gary Panter • Ed Park • James Parker • Benjamin Percy • Mark Jude Poirier • Padgett Powell • Bob Powers • Todd Pruzan • Dan Reines • Nathaniel Rich • Peter Rock • Lucinda Rosenfeld • Greg Rowland • Luc Sante • R.K. Scher • Toni Schlesinger • Matthew Sharpe • Jim Shepard • David Shields • Marisa Silver • Curtis Sittenfeld • Bruce Sterling • Scarlett Thomas • Jeff Turrentine • Deb Olin Unferth • Tom Vanderbilt • Matthew J. Wells • Joe Wenderoth • Margaret Wertheim • Colleen Werthmann • Colson Whitehead • Carl Wilson • Cintra Wilson • Sari Wilson • Douglas Wolk • John Wray

Significant Objects

Elizabeth Foy Larsen

Tony Leone

Heather Kasunick

Mister Reusch

"Unbored is the most original, entertaining, and instructive all-in-one book for kids ever published -jam-packed with information, ideas, and activities for children and their parents to share together. Vibrantly designed and illustrated, it's crammed with activities that are not only fun and doable, but get kids engaged in the wider world--and provides information to expand their worldviews, too, inspiring them to learn more. Right at the age where kids start to disappear into various screens, Unbored encourages them to use those tech skills in creative ways. Activities parents will remember from their childhoods are presented alongside bold new possibilities: science experiments, crafts and upcycling, board game hacking, code-cracking, geocaching, skateboard repair, yarn bombing, stop-action movie-making - plus tons of trivia, best-of lists, and forward-thinking ideas made accessible to kids. Unbored expertly walks the line between cool and constructive: parents will appreciate its wisdom and humor, its lessons in civic-mindedness and self-esteem, as well as its anti-perfectionist spirit. Kids will just think it's awesome"--

The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun

Unbored

More Voices from the Radium Age

Carol Hayes

Photographs and text explore the meaning, relevance, and significance of inanimate, ordinary objects that hold special value to the one who appreciates their unique and irreplaceable qualities.

75 Objects with Unexpected Significance

Taking Things Seriously

Lost Objects

Arthur Conan Doyle

Conor Reid

And the Poison Belt

Lost World

Mark Kingwell

Seth

Adventurer's Glossary

From old-fashioned classics to new high-tech varieties, this comprehensive guide to playing games and creating fun includes intricate clapping games, bike rodeo and Google Earth challenges in this follow up to Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun.

Serious Fun for Everyone

UNBORED Games

The same intrepid adventurers, led by Professor Challenger, who trekked through The Lost World to discover dinosaurs still alive gather together to watch the end of the world as Earth is overtaken by poisonous ether cloud from outer space. Original.

The Poison Belt

UNBORED Adventure has all the smarts, innovation, and free-wheeling spirit of the original UNBORED and its 2014 spinoff, UNBORED Games, but with a fresh focus on encouraging kids to break out of their techno-passivity and explore the world around them--whether that's a backyard, a downtown, or a forest. Combining old-fashioned favorites with today's high-tech possibilities, the book offers a goldmine of creative, constructive activities that kids can do on their own or with their families. From camouflage techniques, survival skills, and cloudspotting advice to instructions on how to build an upcycled kite or raft, to using apps to navigate and explore, it's all here--along with comics that dive into the secret history of everything from bicycling to women explorers. A fun corrective to our over-anxious parenting culture, UNBORED Adventure encourages kids to become more independent and resilient, to solve problems and ask questions, and to engage with both their community and natural environment. The original UNBORED is already a much beloved, distinctly contemporary family brand. Along with UNBORED Games, UNBORED Adventure extends the franchise in a handy, flexibound format so that the whole family can enjoy themselves indoors, outdoors, online, and offline. *Los Angeles Magazine

70 Seriously Fun Activities for Kids and Their Families

UNBORED Adventure

An essential collection of proto–science fiction stories that reveals the diverse literary milieu out of which the sci fi genre emerged. A planetary escape pod, an alien body-snatcher, an underground Alaskan city, and a war between the sexes in Atlantis! These are just a few of the outré elements you’ll find in More Voices from the Radium Age, a showcase of proto–science fiction edited and introduced by Joshua Glenn. This volume brings together well-known and lesser-known writers in an inclusive collection that features E. Nesbit and May Sinclair, two of the genre’s first female writers. More Voices from the Radium Age also introduces readers to writers who have fallen into obscurity, including proto–sf pioneer George C. Wallis, the Russian Symbolist Valery Bryusov, and “weird” horror master Algernon Blackwood. It also includes H.G. Wells, who continued to make startling predictions in the early 20th century, and Abraham Merritt and George Allan England, two of the biggest names in the era of the pulp scientific romance. An essential collection for any sci fi fan, More Voices from the Radium Age is a wild and darkly cathartic ride through the anxieties, fantasies, and nightmares that ultimately shaped the genre we now know as science fiction.

Adventure is always escapist and often utopian, yet we find solidarity with others and Kafkaesque existential rabbit holes within the words we use to celebrate high-flying escapades. Even when adventures are small in the cosmic scope, the terminology of thrilling exploits promotes a life lived at a high pitch. This go-to glossary for the philosophical explorer delves into these contradictions and insights through more than five hundred terms, from A-OK to zoom. Semiotician Joshua Glenn sourced terms from Shakespeare, military and biker jargon, hip hop and surfer slang, survivalist and gamer subcultures, comic books, extreme sports, and beyond to ask questions about meaning and selfhood. This diverting survey, paired with copious illustrations by the acclaimed cartoonist Seth, is introduced by Mark Kingwell in a thought-provoking essay. The Adventurer’s Glossary extends the entertaining and incisive critique found in the trio’s previous books, The Idler’s Glossary and The Wage Slave’s Glossary. This third instalment turns its lens to the language of risk, excitement, and journeying into the unknown, taking readers on their own semantic adventure.

The Adventurer's Glossary

When The Idler's Glossary was released in October 2008 the world was on the cusp of experiencing its greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression. Depending on your sense of irony, this was either foolhardy or prescient. The Wage Slave's Glossary, a second volume of anti-economic etymology, comes as we climb out of recession, and continues to explore and challenge the interconnected world of work and leisure and labor and how the language we use continues to keep us in chains.

The Wage Slave's Glossary

Unbored is the book every modern child needs. Brilliantly walking the line between cool and constructive, it's crammed with activities that are not only fun and doable but that also get kids standing on their own two feet. If you're a kid, you can: -- Build a tipi or an igloo -- Learn to knit -- Take stuff apart and fix it -- Find out how to be constructively critical -- Film a stop-action movie or edit your own music -- Do parkour like James Bond -- Make a little house for a mouse from lollipop sticks -- Be independent! Catch a bus solo or cook yourself lunch -- Make a fake exhaust for your bike so it sounds like you're revving up a motorcycle -- Design a board game -- Go camping (or glamping) -- Plan a road trip -- Get proactive and support the causes you care about -- Develop your taste and decorate your own room -- Make a rocket from a coke bottle -- Play farting games There are gross facts and fascinating stories, reports on what stuff is like (home schooling, working in an office...), Q&As with inspiring grown-ups, extracts from classic novels, lists of useful resources and best ever lists like the top clean rap songs, stop-motion movies or books about rebellion. Just as kids begin to disappear into their screens, here is a book that encourages them to use those tech skills to be creative, try new things and change the world. And it gets parents to join in. Unbored is fully illustrated, easy to use and appealing to young and old, girl and boy. Parents will be comforted by its anti-perfectionist spirit and humour. Kids will just think it's brilliant.

"A collection of important science fiction works from the early 20th century"--

Voices from the Radium Age

A collection of science fiction stories from the early twentieth century by authors ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle to W. E. B. Du Bois. This collection of science fiction stories from the early twentieth century features work by the famous (Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes), the no-longer famous (“weird fiction pioneer” William Hope Hodgson), and the should-be-more famous (Bengali feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain). It offers stories by writers known for concerns other than science fiction (W. E. Du Bois, author of The Souls of Black Folk) and by writers known only for pulp science fiction (the prolific Neil R. Jones). These stories represent what volume and series editor Joshua Glenn has dubbed “the Radium Age”—the period when science fiction as we know it emerged as a genre. The collection shows that nascent science fiction from this era was prescient, provocative, and well written. Readers will discover, among other delights, a feminist utopia predating Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland by a decade in Hossain’s story, “Sultana’s Dream”; a world in which the human population has retreated underground, in E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”; an early entry in the Afrofuturist subgenre in Du Bois’s last-man-on-Earth tale, “The Comet”; and the first appearance of Jones’s cryopreserved Professor Jameson, who despairs at Earth’s wreckage but perseveres—in a metal body—to appear in thirty-odd more stories.

"Dawdler." "Layabout." "Shit-heel." "Loser." For as long as mankind has had to work for a living, which is to say ever since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, people who work have disparaged those who prefer not to. Mark Kingwell's introductory essay offers a playful defence of the idler as homo superior, while Joshua Glenn's glossary playfully explores the etymology and history of hundreds of idler-specific terms and phrases, while offering both a corrective to popular misconceptions about idling and a foundation for a new mode of thinking about working and not working. The Idler's Glossary is destined to become The Devil's Dictionary for the idling classes, necessary reading for any and all who wish to introduce more truly "free" time into their daily lives.

Joshua Glenn

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