The 8 best literary machines 2019
Finding the best literary machines suitable for your needs isnt easy. With hundreds of choices can distract you. Knowing whats bad and whats good can be something of a minefield. In this article, weve done the hard work for you.
Best literary machines
1. Literary Machines
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Ted Nelson's visionary 1980 book, which defined the term "hypertext" and foretold the Worldwide Web. A rare and historic book.2. Literary Machines
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Theodor Holm Nelson: Literary Machines. The report on, and of, Project Xanadu concerning word processing, electronic publishing, hypertext, thinkertoys, tomorrow's intellectual revolution, and certain other topics including knowledge, education and freedom.Dedicated to George Orwell and Doug Engelbart.
Themes: The commercial product Xanadu, the ideas about the new electronic publishing world. The Vision: Access to all world's publishings (books and media) for viewing, linking and self-publishing links. Automatic Royalty System.
Quoted from the cover: This book describes the legendary and daring PROJECT XANADU, an initiative toward an instantaneous electronic literature; the most audacious and specific plan for knowledge, freedom and a better world yet to come out of computerdom; the original (perhaps the ultimate) HYPERTEXT SYSTEM.
DO NOT CONFUSE IT WITH ANY OTHER COMPUTER BOOK.
The very last two paragraphs of the book (epilogue): We bring banners. We have held to ideals created long ago, in different times and places, the very best ideals we could find. We have carried these banners unstained to this new place, we now plant them and hope to see them floating in the wind. But it is dark and quiet and lonely here, and not yet dawn.
Now it is for you the reader to examine this place and say where, if anywhere, you would rather be. We hope you share our sense of urgency and of history. The choices are fewer than you might have thought, and perhaps they need to be made quickly. Good luck to you, and to us all.
3. The Time Machine, Literary Touchstone Classic
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Used Book in Good ConditionDescription
This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic of The Time Machine includes a glossary and reader's notes to help the modern reader contend with Wells' vision of the future.As he approached the turn of the twentieth century, H.G. Wells explored the implications of the rising tide of Socialism and Darwin's theory of evolution to envision a future, 800,000 years from his own day, in which suffering, death, and human labor seem to have been replaced by beauty, peace, and innocent play. What Wells' unnamed Time Traveller ultimately comes to discover, however, are the horrific truths of a new Humanity, split and evolved into two separate races living in a false Paradise that actually fosters idiocy, weakness, and mortal terror.
Originally written in 1898, The Time Machine examines the age-old questions of humankind's ultimate destiny and the role we play in shaping it.
4. Writing Machines (Mediaworks Pamphlets)
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A pseudo-autobiographical exploration of the artistic and cultural impact of the transformation of the print book to its electronic incarnations.
Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N. Katherine Hayles uses the autobiographical persona of Kaye to explore how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts.
Weaving together Kaye's pseudo-autobiographical narrative with a theorization of contemporary literature in media-specific terms, Hayles examines the ways in which literary texts in every genre and period mutate as they are reconceived and rewritten for electronic formats. As electronic documents become more pervasive, print appears not as the sea in which we swim, transparent because we are so accustomed to its conventions, but rather as a medium with its own assumptions, specificities, and inscription practices. Hayles explores works that focus on the very inscription technologies that produce them, examining three writing machines in depth: Talan Memmott's groundbreaking electronic work Lexia to Perplexia, Mark Z. Danielewski's cult postprint novel House of Leaves, and Tom Phillips's artist's book A Humument. Hayles concludes by speculating on how technotexts affect the development of contemporary subjectivity.
Writing Machines is the second volume in the Mediawork Pamphlets series.
5. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
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For over four decades, Leo Marx's work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped to define--and continues to give depth to--the area of American studies concerned with the links between scientific and technological advances, and the way society and culture both determine these links. The Machine in the Garden fully examines the difference between the "pastoral" and "progressive" ideals which characterized early 19th-century American culture, and which ultimately evolved into the basis for much of the environmental and nuclear debates of contemporary society.This new edition is appearing in celebration of the 35th anniversary of Marx's classic text. It features a new afterword by the author on the process of writing this pioneering book, a work that all but founded the discipline now called American Studies.
6. Tell the Machine Goodnight: A Novel
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FINALIST FOR 2018 KIRKUS PRIZENAMED ONE OF THE "BEST LITERARY FICTION OF 2018' BY KIRKUS REVIEWS
"Sci-fi in its most perfect expressionReading it is like having a lucid dream of six years from next week, filled with people you don't know, but will." NPR
"[Williamss] wit is sharp, but her touch is light, and her novel is a winner." San Francisco Chronicle
"Between seasons of Black Mirror, look to Katie Williams' debut novel."Refinery29
Smart and inventive, a page-turner that considers the elusive definition of happiness.
Pearl's job is to make people happy. As a technician for the Apricity Corporation, with its patented happiness machine, she provides customers with personalized recommendations for greater contentment. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her, successful. But how does one measure an emotion?
Meanwhile, there's Pearl's teenage son, Rhett. A sensitive kid who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence, Rhett seems to find greater satisfaction in being unhappy. The very rejection of joy is his own kind of "pursuit of happiness." As his mother, Pearl wants nothing more than to help Rhett--but is it for his sake or for hers? Certainly it would make Pearl happier. Regardless, her son is one person whose emotional life does not fall under the parameters of her job--not as happiness technician, and not as mother, either.
Told from an alternating cast of endearing characters from within Pearl and Rhett's world, Tell the Machine Goodnight delivers a smartly moving and entertaining story about the advance of technology and the ways that it can most surprise and define us. Along the way, Katie Williams playfully illuminates our national obsession with positive psychology, our reliance on quick fixes. What happens when these obsessions begin to overlap? With warmth, humor, and a clever touch, Williams taps into our collective unease about the modern world and allows us see it a little more clearly.
7. Machines Like Me: A Novel
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New from Ian McEwan, Booker Prize winner and international bestselling author of Atonement and The Children ActMachines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding.
Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he co-designs Adam's personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong, and clevera love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma.
Ian McEwan's subversive and entertaining new novel poses fundamental questions: What makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns against the power to invent things beyond our control.
8. Outside in the Teaching Machine (Routledge Classics) (Volume 140)
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RoutledgeDescription
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the most pre-eminent postcolonial theorists writing today and a scholar of genuinely global reputation. This collection, first published in 1993, presents some of Spivaks most engaging essays on works of literature such asSalman Rushdie's controversial Satanic Verses, and twentieth century thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Karl Marx. Spivak relentlessly questions and deconstructs power structures where ever they operate. In doing so, she provides a voice for those who can not speak, proving that the true work of resistance takes place in the margins, Outside in the Teaching Machine.
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