Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time – fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them – and still living them – today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman,...

Through a series of essays, photographs, and archival content, this book highlights the diverse young and old diaspora communities of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) around the world. Drawing on topics from the ten-year archive of Brownbook m...

From Leonardo da Vinci and John Dee to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledge. Nonetheless, in our current age of specialization, polymaths are often remembered for only one part of their varied achievements....

The bright yellow of a marigold and the cheerful red of a geranium, the evocative fragrance of a lotus or a saffron-infused paella – there is no end of reasons to love flowers. Ranging through the centuries and across the globe, Kasia Boddy looks at...

"We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard...

In this book, Sumanta Banerjee analyzes the development of the folk culture of Calcutta's urban poor following the establishment of the British colonial system in Bengal. Consisting primarily of traditional artisans who migrated from neighboring vill...

Literature has, from the start of the nineteenth century, cast the suburbs as dull, vulgar, and unimaginative margins where, by definition, nothing important takes place. Sarah Bilston argues that such attitudes were forged to undermine the cultural...

An award-winning scholar and author charts four hundred years of monsters and how they reflect the culture that created them Leo Braudy, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has won accolades for rev...

What is the place of materiality – the expression or condition of physical substance – in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In "Surface", cultural critic and theori...

For sale in CIS only! Britain is the windiest country in Europe. The devastating storms of the winter of 2013-4 saw houses collapse into the sea in Norfolk and, on the other side of England, the loss to ferocious waves of a stretch of the main rail...