The Unnamable Present

The Unnamable Present PDF Author: Roberto Calasso
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141988029
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
Tourists, terrorists, secularists, hackers, fundamentalists, transhumanists, algorithmicians: in this book Roberto Calasso considers the tribes that inhabit and inform the world today. A world that feels more elusive than ever before. This book, the ninth part of a work in progress, is a meditation on the obscure and ubiquitous process of transformation happening in societies today, where distant echoes of Auden's The Age of Anxiety give way to something altogether more unsettling.

The Unnamable Present

The Unnamable Present PDF Author: Roberto Calasso
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141988029
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Get Book Here

Book Description
Tourists, terrorists, secularists, hackers, fundamentalists, transhumanists, algorithmicians: in this book Roberto Calasso considers the tribes that inhabit and inform the world today. A world that feels more elusive than ever before. This book, the ninth part of a work in progress, is a meditation on the obscure and ubiquitous process of transformation happening in societies today, where distant echoes of Auden's The Age of Anxiety give way to something altogether more unsettling.

The Ruin of Kasch

The Ruin of Kasch PDF Author: Roberto Calasso
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674780262
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
A historical novel about the ruin of an imaginary country called Kasch, set in the context of true events.

Ardor

Ardor PDF Author: Roberto Calasso
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141971819
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
In this revelatory volume, Roberto Calasso, whom the Paris Review has called 'a literary institution', explores the ancient texts known as the Vedas. Little is known about the Vedic people who lived more than three thousand years ago in northern India: they left behind almost no objects, images, ruins. They created no empires. Even the hallucinogenic plant, the soma, which appears at the centre of some of their rituals, has not been identified with any certainty. Only a 'Parthenon of words' remains: verses and formulations suggesting a daring understanding of life. 'If the Vedic people had been asked why they did not build cities,' writes Calasso, 'they could have replied: we did not seek power, but rapture.' This is the ardor of the Vedic world, a burning intensity that is always present, both in the mind and in the cosmos. With his signature erudition and profound sense of the past, Calasso explores the enigmatic web of ritual and myth that define the Vedas. Often at odds with modern thought, he shows how these texts illuminate the nature of consciousness more than neuroscientists have been able to offer us up to now. Following the 'hundred paths' of the Satapatha Brahmana, an impressive exegesis of Vedic ritual, Ardor indicates that it may be possible to reach what is closest by passing through that which is most remote, as 'the whole of Vedic India was an attempt to think further'.

Tiepolo Pink

Tiepolo Pink PDF Author: Roberto Calasso
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409076520
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him - but though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to understand him. Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting these etchings as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, female satyrs, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all, including Punchinello and Death, within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, numerous angels, Cleopatra and Beatrice of Burgundy - a motley, gypsyish company always on the go. Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

The Tablet of Destinies

The Tablet of Destinies PDF Author: Roberto Calasso
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374605025
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description
Roberto Calasso, "a literary institution of one" (The Paris Review), tells the story of the eternal life of Utnapishtim, the savior of man, in the eleventh part of his great literary project. A long time ago, the gods grew tired of humans, who were making too much noise and disturbing their sleep, and they decided to send a Flood to destroy them. But Ea, the god of fresh underground water, didn’t agree and advised one of his favorite mortals, Utnapishtim, to build a quadrangular boat to house humans and animals. So Utnapishtim saved living creatures from the Flood. Rather than punish Utnapishtim, Enlil, king of the gods, granted him eternal life and banished him to the island of Dilmun. Thousands of years later, Sindbad the Sailor is shipwrecked on that very same island, and the two begin a conversation about courage, loss, salvation, and sacrifice. What Utnapishtim tells Sindbad is the subject of this book, the eleventh part of Roberto Calasso’s great opus that began in 1983 with The Ruin of Kasch. The Tablet of Destinies, a continuous narrative from beginning to end, delves into our earliest mythologies and records the origin stories of human civilization.

Literature and the Gods

Literature and the Gods PDF Author: Roberto Calasso
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307537730
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Brilliant, inspired, and gloriously erudite, Literature and the Gods is the culmination of Roberto Calasso’s lifelong study of the gods in the human imagination. By uncovering the divine whisper that lies behind the best poetry and prose from across the centuries, Calasso gives us a renewed sense of the mystery and enchantment of great literature. From the banishment of the classical divinities during the Age of Reason to their emancipation by the Romantics and their place in the literature of our own time, the history of the gods can also be read as a ciphered and splendid history of literary inspiration. Rewriting that story, Calasso carves out a sacred space for literature where the presence of the gods is discernible. His inquiry into the nature of “absolute literature” transports us to the realms of Dionysus and Orpheus, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and prompts a lucid and impassioned defense of poetic form, even when apparently severed from any social function. Lyrical and assured, Literature and the Gods is an intensely engaging work of literary affirmation that deserves to be read alongside the masterpieces it celebrates.

The Unnameables

The Unnameables PDF Author: Ellen Booraem
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0152063684
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
A boy and a goatman defy the establishment in a whimsical fantasy about belonging, the dangers of forgetting history, the Usefulness of art, and the importance of wind control.

Ka

Ka PDF Author: Roberto Calasso
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679775471
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
In "the very best book about Hindu mythology that anyone has ever written" (The New Republic) Calasso plunges Western readers into the mind of ancient India. He begins with a mystery: Why is the most important god in the Rg Veda, the oldest of India's sacred texts, known by a secret name—"Ka," or Who? What ensues is not an explanation, but an unveiling. Here are the stories of the creation of mind and matter; of the origin of Death, of the first sexual union and the first parricide. We learn why Siva must carry his father's skull, why snakes have forked tongues, and why, as part of a certain sacrifice, the king's wife must copulate with a dead horse. A tour de force of scholarship and seduction, Ka is irresistible.

La Folie Baudelaire

La Folie Baudelaire PDF Author: Roberto Calasso
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374183341
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Looks at the life, influence, and work of the French writer and founder of modernism.

The Celestial Hunter

The Celestial Hunter PDF Author: Roberto Calasso
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780241296752
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'When hunting began, it was not a man who chased an animal. It was a being that chased another being. No one could say with certainty who each of them were.' Connecting Greek and Egyptian myth, the stories of poets, shamans and gods, Roberto Calasso takes us on a spellbinding voyage that traces the beginnings of our detachment from the animal world; from the landmark evolutionary moment in which humans became the hunter rather than the prey. Roaming through time and across cultures - from the Palaeolithic era to Turing's Machine - The Celestial Hunter delves into the crucible of all our stories- the source of human grief, guilt, resilience and redemption with which we have wrestled throughout history.