{"title":"For the friend who wants to be Well Read...","description":"\u003cp\u003eOur holiday gift picks for the friend who wants to be Well Read, featuring our favourite independent publishers from near and far. \u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"a-strange-celestial-road","title":"A Strange Celestial Road","description":"In this captivating memoir, the first full-length account of life in the Arkestra by any of its members, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts two decades of traveling the spaceways with the inimitable composer, pianist, and big-band leader Sun Ra. Gigging everywhere from the legendary Bed-Stuy venue the East to the National Stadium in Lagos, Abdullah paints a vivid picture of the rise of loft jazz and the influence of Pan-Africanism on creative music, while capturing radical artistic and political developments across Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s. Richly illustrated with more than fifty pages of photographs and posters from Adger Cowans, Marilyn Nance, Val Wilmer, and others, A Strange Celestial Road interweaves the author’s own moving story—his battles with addiction, spiritual development, and life as a working class performer—with enthralling tales of tutelage under Cal Massey, collaborations with the likes of Ed Blackwell, Marion Brown, and Andrew Cyrille, and profound, occasionally confounding, mentorship by Sun Ra. Originally written in the 1990s with the help of Nuyorican poet Louis Reyes Rivera and published now for the first time, with a foreword by Salim Washington, A Strange Celestial Road is not only an autobiography, but a history of a remarkable and under-documented movement in music.","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50512544727370,"sku":"ref151","price":39.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/strange-celestial.jpg?v=1743692077"},{"product_id":"the-cricket-black-music-in-evolution","title":"The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution","description":"A rare document of the 1960s Black Arts Movement featuring Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and many more, The Cricket fostered critical and political dialogue for Black musicians and writers. Edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal between 1968 and 1969 and published by Baraka’s New Jersey–based Jihad productions shortly after the time of the Newark Riots, this experimental music magazine ran poetry, position papers, and gossip alongside concert and record reviews and essays on music and politics. Over four mimeographed issues, The Cricket laid out an anticommercial ideology and took aim at the conservative jazz press, providing a space for critics, poets, and journalists (including Stanley Crouch, Haki Madhubuti, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez and Keorapetse Kgositsile) and a range of musicians, from Mtume to Black Unity Trio, to devise new styles of music writing. The publication emerged from the heart of a political movement—“a proto-ideology, akin to but younger than the Garveyite movement and the separatism of Elijah Mohammed,” as Spellman writes in the book’s preface—and aimed to reunite advanced art with its community, “to provide Black Music with a powerful historical and critical tool” and to enable avant-garde Black musicians and writers “to finally make a way for themselves.” This publication gathers all issues of the magazine with an introduction by poet and scholar David Grundy, who argues that The Cricket “attempted something that was in many ways entirely new: creating a form of music writing which united politics, poetry, and aesthetics as part of a broader movement for change; resisting the entire apparatus through which music is produced, received, appreciated, distributed, and written about in the Western world; going well beyond the tried-and-tested journalistic route of description, evaluation, and narration.”","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50512544760138,"sku":"ref152","price":44.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/cricket-1.jpg?v=1743692117"},{"product_id":"blue-in-green","title":"Blue in Green","description":"Blue in Green is the latest work from the veteran novelist called “one hell of a writer” by James Baldwin, “wonderfully wry” by Donald Barthelme, and a “writer’s writer” by Ishmael Reed. Blue in Green narrates one evening in August 1959, when, only eight days after the release of his landmark album Kind of Blue, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of New York City Police Department outside of Birdland. In the aftermath of Davis’s brief stint in custody, we enter the strained relationship between Davis and the woman he will soon marry, Frances Taylor, whom he has recently pressured into ending her run as a performer on Broadway and retiring from modern dance and ballet altogether. Frances, who is increasingly subject to Davis’s temper—fueled by both his professional envy and substance abuse—reckons with her strict upbringing, and, through a fateful meeting with Lena Horne, the conflicting demands of motherhood and artistic vocation. Meanwhile, blowing off steam from his beating, Miles speeds across Manhattan in his Ferrari. Racing alongside him are recollections of a stony, young John Coltrane, a combative Charlie Parker, and the stilted world of the Black middle class he’s left behind.\nBlank Forms’s release of Blue in Green continues the contemporary reengagement with Brown’s work which began with last year’s new McSweeney’s reprint of Tragic Magic, the author’s first novel. Published in 1978 and edited by Toni Morrison, Tragic Magic concerns Melvin Ellington, a man jailed for protesting the Vietnam War; Brown began work on the novel while himself incarcerated on the same charges. In 1992, the author wrote Life During Wartime, a play about the death of street artist Michael Stewart, a victim of police brutality who died in custody. Blue in Green again interrogates detention’s personal, political, and cultural consequences. \nA historical novel much like his 1994 volume Darktown Strutters, the story of a minstrel performer, Blue in Green takes up the voices of a multitude of twentieth-century entertainers at a pivotal moment in American culture and race relations. Staging the conversations of not only Davis, Taylor, Horne, Parker, and Coltrane but also Eartha Kitt, Billie Holiday, and Bill Evans, Brown engages facts to explore relationships between artists of different generations, races, and genders, all of whom must negotiate their positions in what Davis irreverently calls “the business’ known as show.”","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50512544792906,"sku":"ref153","price":30.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/4442A00B-4659-4D64-BB24-E8ACDE80F8D4.jpg?v=1766240342"},{"product_id":"machine-decision-is-not-final","title":"Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence","description":"Visions of the contested future of AI veer between common planetary goals and a new Cold War as culturally-specific models of intelligence, speculative traditions, and thought experiments come up against the emergence of novel forms of cognition that cannot be reduced to any historical cultural tradition.\nThis uniquely-positioned volume provides expert insight into this tension, using China as a touchstone for rethinking ‘artificiality’ and ‘intelligence’ as sites of difference in a way that is already present in the difficulty of precisely translating the Chinese term 人工智能.\nSpanning borders between different worlds, histories, futures, and foundational models, Machine Decision is Not Final is not only a timely reappraisal of the stakes of AI development, but a toolbox for constructing more global imaginaries for the future of AI.\nMoving beyond the clichés that still dominate the contemporary debate, this interdisciplinary, cross-cultural collection decenters familiar narratives to provide a fresh perspective on what artificial intelligence is today, and what it might become.\nContributors: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, An Bo, Benjamin Bratton, Chen Qiufan, Gabriele de Seta, Shuang L. Frost, Vincent Garton, Steve Goodman, Yvette Granata, Anna Greenspan, Amy Ireland, Bogna Konior, Vincent Lê, Lawrence Lek, Lukáš Likavčan, Suzanne Livingston, Iris Long, Bingchun Meng, Reza Negarestani, Wang Hongzhe, Regina Kanyu Wang, Xin Wang, Xia Jia, You Mi","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53330301354314,"sku":"ref1137","price":35.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/6A2BEBEA-9FA2-41EF-8A09-FD1787FBF450.jpg?v=1765810183"},{"product_id":"cute-accelerationism","title":"Cute Accelerationism","description":"Involuntarily sucked into the forcefield of Cute, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic decided to let go, give in, let the demon ride them, and make an accelerationism out of it—only to realise that Cute opens a microcosmic gate onto the transcendental process of acceleration itself.\nJoining the swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETS, anons, and otaku who rescued accelerationism from the double pincers of media panic and academic buzzkill by introducing it to big eyes, fluffy ears, programming socks, and silly memes, they discover that the objects of cute culture are just spinoffs of an accelerative process booping us from the future, rendering us all submissive, breedable, helpless, and cute in our turn. Cute comes tomorrow, and only anastrophe can make sense of what it will have been doing to us.\nEvading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces, Cute Accelerationism embraces every detail of the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, joyfully burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has soft-soaped its way into human culture.\nTraversing tangents on natural and unnatural selection, runaway supernormalisation, the collective self-transformation of genderswarming cuties, the hyperstitional cultures of shojo and otaku, denpa and 2D love, and the cute subworlds of aegyo and meng, moé and flatmaxxing, catboys and dogon eggs, bobbles and gummies, vore machines and partial objects, BwOs and UwUs…glomping, snuggling, smooshing and squeeeeing their way toward the event horizon of Cute, donning cat ears and popping bubbles as they go, in this untimely philosophical intensification of an omnipresent phenomenon, having surrendered to the squishiest demonic possession, like, ever, two bffs set out in search of the transcendental shape of cuteness only to realise that, even though it is all around us, we do not yet know what Cute can do.\nSeriously superficial and bafflingly coherent, half erudite philosophical treatise, half dariacore mashup, 100 percent cutagion, this compact lil’ textual machine is a meltdown and a glow up, as well as a twizzled homage to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Welcome to the kawaiizome: nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53330301813066,"sku":"ref1138","price":25.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/988B0CFE-BB5E-429F-9990-B8CDE01E6BE8.jpg?v=1765811084"},{"product_id":"sonic-faction","title":"Sonic Faction","description":"Sonic Faction presents extended lines of thought prompted by two Urbanomic events which explored the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought.\nThree recent pieces provide the catalyst for a discussion of the potential of the ‘audio essay’ as medium and method, a machine for intensifying listening and unsettling the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, audiobook, field recording, radio play….\nKode9’s Astro-Darien (2022) is a sonic fiction about simulation, presenting an alternative history of the Scottish Space Programme, haunted by the ghosts of the British Empire. Justin Barton and Mark Fisher’s On Vanishing Land (2006) is a dreamlike account of a coastal walk that expands into questions of modernity, capitalism, fiction, and the micropolitics of escape. Robin Mackay’s By the North Sea (2021) is a meditation on time, disappearance, and loss as heard through the fictions of Lovecraft, Ccru, and the spectre of Dunwich, the city that vanished beneath the waves.\nAlongside photographic documentation of the events and edited transcripts of the artists’ discussions, Sonic Faction brings together contributors with diverse perspectives to address the question of the audio essay and to imagine its future.\nCONTRIBUTORSLawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Justin Barton, Ben Borthwick, Angus Carlyle, Matt Colquhoun, Jessica Edwards, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Ayesha Hameed, Eleni Ikoniadou, Lawrence Lek, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, Emily Pethick, Iain Sinclair, Shelley Trower","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53330301944138,"sku":"ref1139","price":25.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/7672464D-EC26-4050-89BC-0B5F9B1EC9F2.jpg?v=1765810936"},{"product_id":"structure-and-synthesis","title":"Structure and Synthesis","description":"This extensive anthology brings together diverse materials charting the development of pioneering artist Mark Fell’s defiantly unorthodox practice.\nAn amalgam of workbook and manifesto, Structure and Synthesis interweaves diagrammatic sketches, procedural systems, drawings, and photographs with philosophical essays, cutting polemics, instructional texts, and fragments from the artist’s personal notebooks, offering multithreaded perspectives on time, technology and aesthetics.\nDesigner Joe Gilmore, a long-term collaborator, creates a striking graphic context for Fell’s evolving thinking, and the methods and structures developed over his many solo and collaborative works.\nAn accompanying playlist is available on the Urbanomic YouTube channel, featuring tracks mentioned and discussed in the book.","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53330302632266,"sku":"ref1140","price":45.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/227396F6-53E1-407A-B015-73D51E4BD2A6.jpg?v=1765810741"},{"product_id":"proof-of-work","title":"Proof of Work","description":"DAO? BTC? NFT? ETH? ART? WTF? HODL as OG crypto artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain.\nNow an acknowledged pioneer whose work has graced the auction room at Sotheby’s, Myers embarked on her first art projects focusing on blockchain tech in 2011, making her one of the first artists to enter into creative, speculative and conceptual engagement with ‘the new internet’.\nThis anthology brings together annotated presentations of Myers’s blockchain artworks with essays, reviews, and fictions—a sustained critical encounter between the cultures and histories of the artworld and crypto-utopianism, technically accomplished but always generously demystifying and often mischievous.\nHer deep understanding of the technical history and debates around blockchain technology is complemented by a broader sense of the crypto movement and the artistic and political sensibilities that accompanied its ascendancy.\nRemodelling the tropes of conceptual art and net art to explore what blockchain technology reveals about our concepts of value, culture and currency, Myers’s work has become required viewing for anyone interested in the future of art, consensus, law, and collectivity.","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53330303385930,"sku":"ref1141","price":40.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/2066282B-BF04-4E68-B38E-F0F7E6E9BCC8.jpg?v=1765811196"},{"product_id":"i-love-shopping","title":"I Love Shopping","description":"Chickens have a collective soul. Heaven is full of the skateboarders you kissed in middle school. If the algorithm is its own hell, Lauren Cook, author of the critically (and uncritically) acclaimed Sex Goblin, stands in front of it fully armored. I Love Shopping invites its readers to inhabit a world just like ours, reflected through a big, benevolent funhouse mirror.\nFirst published in a limited edition, this will be the first trade edition of the cult classic.","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53330316984650,"sku":"ref1166","price":16.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/5E9F9F0D-6B60-4C35-8615-B5C34AB21E36.jpg?v=1765988707"},{"product_id":"kissing-other-people-or-the-house-of-fame","title":"Kissing Other People or the House of Fame","description":"Kissing Other People or the House of Fame calls the bluff on Chaucer’s boast, expressed in his poem “The House of Fame,” to have dreamt the best. Composed out of a year of the author’s dream journal, the title poem puts its perverse syntax to work in a maximalist jaunt of surprising collisions, cunning errors, nightly displacements, work, parties, plays, and repressed—which is to say, permissive—speech. Ingest your theory with Advil and water, Gabriel says, or did her dreams say it for her? Kissing Other People is an experiment in mouthing collective language, on the premise that what seems irretrievably personal is in fact most social and most shared.","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53330318197066,"sku":"ref1167","price":21.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/8203BA85-449D-4869-8AC7-58004B652C80.jpg?v=1765988239"},{"product_id":"memories-that-smell-like-gasoline","title":"Memories That Smell Like Gasoline","description":"Here are David Wojnarowicz’s most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections—”Into the Drift and Sway,” “Doing Time in a Disposable Body,” “Spiral,” and “Memories that Smell like Gasoline”—are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.\nThe new and revised edition features a foreword by Ocean Vuong and a note from the editor, Amy Scholder.","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53330318229834,"sku":"ref1168","price":25.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/49C19C12-C883-4CA7-9D93-9599E39B4E16.jpg?v=1765988446"},{"product_id":"monk-fruit","title":"Monk Fruit","description":"Edward Salem is a poet who knows the void but refuses its totalizing darkness, choosing instead to light matches in its depths. Salem reveals, then expands, worlds with each poem. From Detroit to Gaza, the Big Bang to whatever calamity comes next, he reports from far ahead of the curve, beyond the current cosmic crunch with “poise and peculiarity” (Ottessa Moshfegh). A thrilling debut collection and punk treatise, Monk Fruit bypasses ideology, finds a side door, and rearranges the furniture.","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53330318262602,"sku":"ref1169","price":23.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/360D0749-B639-47A3-A9D8-108138AA8851.jpg?v=1765988201"},{"product_id":"nova-scotia-house","title":"Nova Scotia House","description":"In this profound meditation on grief, Johnny looks back at his relationship with his life partner, Jerry, after his AIDS-related death. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s flat: 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today—but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew. \nIntimate, visionary, and profoundly original—as well as raw, hot, and hilarious—Nova Scotia House marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction.","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53330318393674,"sku":"ref1170","price":23.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/A5AC1427-5A80-426E-B104-B2E85D873E3E.jpg?v=1765987858"},{"product_id":"padam-padam-the-collected-poems","title":"Padam Padam: The Collected Poems","description":"Kevin Killian—the puckish poet, playwright, novelist, scholar, and impresario of the Bay Area arts community—channeled the charisma of the pop stars. Pulled from his legendary corpus, and long out of print, the work collected here is the record of Killian’s life as a radical littérateur. In Argento Series, Killian conjures the horror, suspense, and cinematic imagery of director Dario Argento as he documents the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. In Action Kylie, he revels in queer identity and the universal love of fandom. In Tweaky Village and Tony Greene Era, Killian elevates artists and friends to legendary status within his personal pantheon. And Elements, Killian’s wink at the periodic table, makes its U.S. debut.\nThe collection features an introduction by Kay Gabriel, who writes of Killian’s “fabulous, permissive body of work, charming, filthy and smarmy at turns, with its retchable milk enemas and its devilish twists.”","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53330319606090,"sku":"ref1171","price":30.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/9394910D-3543-436D-B886-46CA009CF16B.jpg?v=1765987736"},{"product_id":"sun-of-consciousness","title":"Sun of Consciousness","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eSoleil de la Conscience\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e (\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eSun of Consciousness\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e), Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s first published essay, is characterized by its exploratory, intimate character, and introduces Glissant’s concerns with creolization, worldliness (as opposed to globalization), and opacity, inscribing his work within a refusal of colonialism and inverted exoticism. By positioning himself as both different and same, Glissant opens a space for the writing of a(nother) history: that of the Caribbean.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53330319835466,"sku":"ref1175","price":18.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/F5CAFE98-1005-4375-B2DB-A48BEF2CFD8F.jpg?v=1765988397"},{"product_id":"blank-forms-n-10-eliane-radigue-alien-roots","title":"Blank Forms n° 10 - Eliane Radigue - Alien Roots","description":"","brand":"Well Read","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53633153204554,"sku":"ref1394","price":29.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/6496\/0842\/files\/80478207-4495-4283-95AC-955403CFEB81.jpg?v=1768752210"}],"url":"https:\/\/wellread.pt\/collections\/for-the-friend-who-wants-to-be-well-read.oembed?page=2","provider":"Well Read","version":"1.0","type":"link"}