Explore some of our most anticipated new releases for January 2025
This month: an exploration of how Taiwan rose to global prominence in high tech manufacturing; a critical study on the history of photography and film from Los Angeles; an investigation of how digital social reading apps are changing the way we read; and more. Discover these books and a selection of our other new and soon-to-be-released titles below.
Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry by Honghong Tinn
How did Taiwan, a former Japanese colony and the last fortress of the defeated Chinese Nationalists, ascend to such heights in high-tech manufacturing? In Island Tinkerers, Honghong Tinn tells the critical history of how hobbyists and enthusiasts in Taiwan, including engineers, technologists, technocrats, computer users, and engineers-turned-entrepreneurs, helped transform the country with their hands-on engagement with computers. Rather than engaging in wholesale imitation of US sources, she explains, these technologists tinkered with imported computing technology and experimented with manufacturing their own versions, resulting in their own brand of successful innovation.
You might also like Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation by Peter Krapp
Lost Days, Endless Nights: Photography and Film from Los Angeles by Andrew Witt
Lost Days, Endless Nights tells a history from below—an account of the lives of the forgotten and dispossessed of Los Angeles: the unemployed, the precariously employed, the evicted, the alienated, the unhoused, the anxious, the exhausted. Through an analysis of abandoned archival works, experimental films, and other projects, Andrew Witt offers an expansive account of the artists who have lived or worked in Los Angeles, delving into the region’s history and geography, highlighting its racial, gender, and class conflicts. Presented as a series of nine case studies, Witt explores how artists as diverse as Agnès Varda, Dana Lixenberg, Allan Sekula, Catherine Opie, John Divola, Gregory Halpern, Paul Sepuya, and Guadalupe Rosales have reimagined and reshaped our understanding of contemporary Los Angeles.
You might also like The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century by Federico Pianzola
Conventional wisdom would have us believe that digital technology is a threat to reading, but in Digital Social Reading, Federico Pianzola argues that reading socially through digital media can help people grow a passion for reading and, in some cases, even enhance text comprehension. Digital social reading (DSR) is a term that encompasses a wide variety of practices related to the activity of reading and using digital technologies and platforms (websites, social media, mobile apps) to share thoughts and impressions about books with others. This book is the first systematization of DSR practices, drawing on case studies from Wattpad, AO3, and Goodreads on a worldwide scale.
You might also like Writers in the Secret Garden: Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring by Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis
The Hero of Doubt: Selected Writings by Ernesto Nathan Rogers edited by Roberta Marcaccio
The first English anthology of the writings of the British-Italian architect, editor, critic, and educator Ernesto Rogers (1909–1969), The Hero of Doubt showcases the intellectual power and scope of one of the most influential yet, paradoxically, unrecognized exponents of the modern movement in Europe. These essays, edited by Roberta Marcaccio and newly translated from the Italian, reveal how, more than any other architect of the twentieth century, Rogers positioned himself as a mediator between the heroic generation of the modern masters and the younger intellectuals who went on to shape the contextualist turns of architectural postmodernism in the 1970s.
You might also like Graph Vision: Digital Architecture’s Skeletons by Theodora Vardouli
David Hammons edited by Kellie Jones
David Hammons is a collection of essays on the one of the most important living Black artists of our time, David Hammons (b. 1943). Documenting five decades of visual practice from 1982 to the present, the book features contributions from scholars, artists, and cultural workers, and includes numerous images of the artist and his work that are not widely available. Contributions include essays from cultural critics including Guy Trebay and Greg Tate; artists Coco Fusco and Glenn Ligon; and scholars such as Robert Farris Thompson, Alex Alberro, and Manthia Diawara.
You might also like Kara Walker edited by Vanina Géré
On Arrows: Essays in British Architecture and Its Environments by Laurent Stalder
In the 1950s, the figure of the arrow had a strange kind of ubiquity in architectural drawings, publications, and advertisements, symbolizing everything from the circulation of cold and warm air in a kitchen fridge to the flow of traffic in assorted New Towns. Twenty-five years earlier there were barely any arrows within architectural publications, and 15 years later they had all but disappeared. In On Arrows, Laurent Stalder looks back at the near past to trace the idea of performance in architecture by following this pervasive yet relatively unnoticed figure within the history of British architecture.
You might also like Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin by Alfredo Thiermann Riesco
The Pointillistic City: How Microspatial Inequities Affect Well-Being in Our Communities, and What We Can Do about It by Daniel T. O’Brien
The Pointillistic City explores the multilayer geography of our daily lives—specifically, how we simultaneously live at the scales of addresses, streets, and neighborhoods and how each can be relevant for our well-being. Not unlike the way in which we look at a pointillistic painting, which depicts a full scene through the detailed organization of multiple objects, Daniel T. O’Brien considers the three scales together and the comprehensive understanding of the city they offer. The pointillistic approach to the city contrasts with decades of focus on neighborhoods. As such, it surfaces microspatial inequities, or disparities in experiences between people living in the same neighborhood, even right around the corner from each other. Microspatial inequities have gone largely unnoticed to date, and their recognition offers a new approach to understanding and supporting the diverse population of the city.
You might also like Cities Made Differently by David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky
Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France by Richard Taws
In Time Machines, Richard Taws examines the relationship between art and telegraphy in the decades following the French Revolution. The optical telegraph was a novel form of visual communication developed in the 1790s that remained in use until the mid-1850s. This pre-electric telegraph, based on a semaphore code, irrevocably changed the media landscape of nineteenth-century France. Although now largely forgotten, in its day it covered vast distances and changed the way people thought about time. It also shaped, and was shaped by, a proliferating world of images. What happens, Taws asks, if we think about art telegraphically?
You might also like Narrating the Globe: The Emergence of World Histories of Architecture edited by Petra Brouwer, Martin Bressani and Christopher Drew Armstrong