Shelfology Book Pairing

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Osamu Dazai

The classic Japanese novel of alienation and the search for meaning and connection in the modern world, in a brilliant new translation—for fans of Salinger, Camus, Sartre, Hesse, and the hit anime series Bungo Stray Dogs and No Longer Allowed in Another World, both of which feature a character based on No Longer Human’s author, Osamu Dazai A Penguin Classics Graphic Deluxe Edition, with flaps, deckle-edged paper, and specially commissioned cover art by award-winning illustrator Yuko Shimizu featuring neon pink ink! Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo’s attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a “clown” to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness. Semi-autobiographical, No Longer Human is the final completed work of one of Japan’s most important writers. It has come to “echo the sentiments of youth” (The Mainichi Daily News) from postwar Japan to the postmodern society of technology. Still one of the ten bestselling books in Japan, No Longer Human is a powerful exploration of an individual’s alienation from society.

Collected Writings 1987-2007

by Nick Land

A dizzying trip through the mind(s) of the provocative and influential thinker Nick Land. During the 1990s British philosopher Nick Land's unique work, variously described as “rabid nihilism,” “mad black deleuzianism,” and “cybergothic,” developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of “continental philosophy” —a route that was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land's work has continued to exert an influence, both through the British “speculative realist” philosophers who studied with him, and through the many cultural producers—writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers—who have been invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision. Beginning with Land's early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s—long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)—in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids. Fanged Noumena gives a dizzying perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker's work, and has introduced his unique voice to a new generation of readers.