9798682903832. New condition. Trade paperback. Language: English. Pages: 164. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 164 p.
Schism Press brings you the 20th Anniversary Edition of Eugene Thacker's "anti-novel" An Ideal for Living. In an unnamed city in the not-so-distant future, individuals spend their time in isolation, enclosed in high-tech "pods," arrayed in symbiotic megastructures, connected to vast networks of neurological and biochemical data.
An Ideal for Living is a glimpse into this world, presented not as a story but as a documentary-style "dossier" of data streams, research articles, and automated activity logs. Originally published in 2000,
An Ideal for Living evokes a dark poetics of bodies and technologies; at once a look back to cyberpunk science fiction and a look forward to the "new weird."
"As today's strategies of conceptual writing have become legitimized and clich�d, Thacker's text reminds us of how radical and potent these gestures once were, treading a fine line between the mechanical and the authorial. This is an important book...these pages take cues from Burroughs and Gibson, while at the same time presciently pointing to the web-based path writing would take over the next decade. It's a joy to see this back in print."--
Kenneth Goldsmith, author of
Soliloquy,
Day, and
Uncreative Writing, founder of Ubuweb
