Clearance Books

Aesop was a slave and fantastic storyteller who lived in ancient Greece around 620-564 BC. No writings by him exist (if they ever existed at all), yet his tales have survived and been shared through oral tradition around the world. In many stories, he uses animals as the main characters to convey deeper meanings and morals that still ring true today.

A Novel Journal: Aesop's Fables infuses new life into these classic tales by inviting writers to pen their own stories and ideas between the lines of the fables. In a type so tiny as to nearly disappear, the entire text of Aesop's Fables forms the lines of this journal. Perfect for daily journaling or drafting the next classic, this homage to Aesop's work adds an element of excitement to any writing project.

Packaged with a Svepa cover, brilliant endpapers, colored edges, and matching elastic band to close pages tight, this book is a great gift or collectible for anyone who loves fables. And the compact size makes this journal easy to slip into a purse, briefcase, or backpack so you can record and revisit your thoughts on the go.

Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery--in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms--continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III's seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness.

Combining precise philosophy with a torrent of memories, Wilderson presents the tenets of an increasingly prominent intellectual movement that sees Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Drawing on works of philosophy, literature, film, and critical theory, he shows that the social construct of slavery, as seen through pervasive anti-Black subjugation and violence, is hardly a relic of the past but the very engine that powers our civilization, and that without this master-slave dynamic, the calculus bolstering world civilization would collapse. Unlike any other disenfranchised group, Wilderson argues, Blacks alone will remain essentially slaves in the larger Human world, where they can never be truly regarded as Human beings, where, "at every scale of abstraction, violence saturates Black life."

And while Afropessimism delivers a formidable philosophical account of being Black, it is also interwoven with dramatic set pieces, autobiographical stories that juxtapose Wilderson's seemingly idyllic upbringing in mid-century Minneapolis with the abject racism he later encounters--whether in late 1960s Berkeley or in apartheid South Africa, where he joins forces with the African National Congress. Afropessimism provides no restorative solution to the hatred that abounds; rather, Wilderson believes that acknowledging these historical and social conditions will result in personal enlightenment about the reality of our inherently racialized existence.

Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of lyrical prose, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. It positions Wilderson as a paradigmatic thinker and as a twenty-first-century inheritor of many of the African American literary traditions established in centuries past.

Vivid explorations of cryogenics, lion baiting, iDollators, dodo birds, SpaceX, and more populate The Art of Perpetuation, a poignant new collection of lyric essays from Alison Powell that troubles the boundaries between human and animal, living and dead, man and woman, adult and child. These nine whip-smart essays juxtapose personal narrative-memories of the author's childhood growing up in southern Indiana and experiences as a mother of two-with scientific, historical, and cultural narrative. Throughout the collection, Powell seeks to unearth, to peel back, to lay bare: "To pry something out of someone, the meat of a walnut from its enamel-like shell, is an excavation-to uncover a lie, an infidelity." Dizzying, fragmentary, and provocative, Powell's lyrical investigations dig in deep, coming up for air only to expose the meaningless of naming in a world obsessed with self-perpetuation. "To say a poem is like a body is to say one's self is a machine. To say a body is erasable is to say extinction is a temperate clicking.... And like that, with one hand on the glass and one gloved hand inside the mouth of the woolly rhino, you have done it."

New York Times Bestselling Author of The Invention of Murder

Humming merrily until she learns that his partner has just been found dead in their gallery, slumped over his desk with a gun in his hand. Could anything be worse? Oh yes, the police investigation is being led by Detective-Inspector Jake Field, who just happens to be Sam's new boyfriend. And Aidan, who just happens to be Sam's ex-boyfriend, wants her help.

Armed with nothing more than her trusty weapons of satire, cynicism, and a stock of irrelevant information culled from novels, Sam races to find a killer who is determined to find her first in this fast-paced, uproarious novel.