Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow

A leading exponent of punk-based, DIY art, Smith here presents his most ambitious project to date — an art book exactly as long as the work it’s interpreting: 760 drawings, paintings, photos, and less definable images in 760 pages. Extraordinary tableaux of the detritus of war — a burned-out Königstiger tank, a melted machine gun — coexist alongside such phantasmagoric Pynchon inventions as the “stumbling bird” and “Girgori the octopus.” Smith has stated his aim to be “as literal as possible” in interpreting Gravity’s Rainbow, but his images are as imaginative and powerfully unique as the prose they honor.
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The Art of Seduction

1. Choose the right victim; 2. Create a false sense of security - approach indirectly; 3. Send mixed signals; 4. Appear to be an object of desire - create triangles. 5. Create a need - stir anxiety and discontent; 6. Master the art of insinuation; 7. Enter their spirit; 8. Create temptation; 9. Keep them in suspense; 10. Use the demonic power of words to sow confusion; 11. Pay attention to detail; 12. Poeticize your presence; 13. Disarm through strategies of weakness and vulnerability; 14. Confuse desire and reality - the perfect illusion; 15. Isolate the victim; 16. Prove yourself; 17. Effect a regression; 18. Stir up the transgressive and taboo; 19. Use spiritual lures; 20. Mix pleasure with pain; 21. Give them space to fall; 22. Use physical lures; 23. Master the art of the bold move; 24. Beware the aftereffects.
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The 48 Laws of Power

Law 7: Get others to do the Work for you, but Always Take the Credit; Law 8: Make other People come to you – use Bait if Necessary; Law 9: Win through your Actions, Never through Argument; Law 11: Learn to Keep People Dependent on You; Law 14: Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy; Law 17: Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability; Law 38: Think as you like but Behave like others; Law 44: Disarm and Infuriate with the Mirror Effect; Law 48: Assume Formlessness.
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Astonish Yourself: 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life

Droit's strange and delightful little volume explores some of the biggest questions in philosophy with exercises instead of terminology-laden tracts, by encouraging readers to discover the ways in which small or familiar acts--fasting, prowling, playing--can become "the starting point for that astonishment which gives rise to philosophy." There are exercises to calm, to disorient, to humanize, to displace; for instance, listening to shortwave radio at night, Droit writes, will help readers realize that "perpetually around you, woven into the air...are these hundreds of voices murmuring, in dozens of unknown or unrecognizable languages, of which you know nothing, expect that they spread an obscure and changing human crust, unendingly, over everything." Other exercises include: telephoning at random; drinking while urinating; looking at people from a moving car; contemplating a dead bird; turning off the sound on the TV; looking for blue food; considering humanity to be an error; smiling at a stranger.
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