Creatures of Attention excavates the early modern prehistory of our late modern crises of attention. At the threshold of modernity, philosophers, scientists, and poets across Europe began to see attention as the key to autonomous agency and knowledge. Recovering the philosophical and literary works from eighteenth-century Germany in which "attention," "subject," and "aesthetics" developed their modern meanings, Johannes Wankhammer examines control over attention as the cultural technique underpinning the ideal of individual autonomy. Aesthetics, founded by Alexander Baumgarten as a science of sense perception, challenged this ideal by reframing art as a catalyst for alternative modes of selfhood and attention. While previous scholarship on the history of attention emphasized the erosion of subjectivity by industrial or technological modernization, Wankhammer asks how attention came to define subjectivity in the first place. When periodically recurring crises of attention threaten the coherence of the subject, the subject comes undone at the very seams that first sutured it together. Creatures of Attention offers the first systematic study of a foundational discourse on attention from 1650 to 1780. Presenting pre-Kantian aesthetics as a critique of the Enlightenment paradigm of strained attention, the book offers a fresh perspective on poetics and aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germany.

Set on the new magical world, Goma: Warrior Priestess is a story of a woman who finds herself reborn on another planet. This heroine--who would be known on this new planet as Goma--finds herself in the middle of a fierce war that has raged on between three kingdoms for centuries. It is not only the tale of how this war began and the legends that surround its beginnings but the tales of the various friends and adversaries that Goma encounters throughout her journey. This is her own account as well as those closest to her of their epic plight to combat dark forces that threaten everything that they hold dear.

“Attention reveals a fresh, vital literary voice as it covers seemingly every imaginable topic relating to modern life.”—Entertainment Weekly “Joshua Cohen may be America’s greatest living writer.”—The Washington Post NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, Joshua Cohen arrives with his first collection of nonfiction, the culmination of two decades of writing and thought about life in the digital age. In essays, memoir, criticism, diary entries, and letters—many appearing here for the first time—Cohen covers the full depth and breadth of modern life: politics, literature, art, music, travel, the media, and psychology, and subjects as diverse as Google, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, fictional animals, Gustav Mahler, Aretha Franklin, John Zorn, landscape photography, fake Caravaggios, Wikipedia, Gertrude Stein, Edward Snowden, Jonathan Franzen, Olympic women’s fencing, Atlantic City casinos, the closing of the Ringling Bros. circus, and Azerbaijan. Throughout ATTENTION, Cohen directs his sharp gaze at home and abroad, calling upon his extraordinary erudition and unrivaled ability to draw connections between seemingly unlike things to show us how to live without fear in a world overflowing with information. In each piece, he projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his, and a voice as witty, profound, and distinct as any in American letters. At this crucial juncture in history, ATTENTION is a guide for the perplexed—a handbook for anyone hoping to bring the wisdom of the past into the culture of the future. Praise for ATTENTION “Dazzling in its scope . . . If curiosity is a writer’s greatest innate gift, Joshua Cohen may be America’s greatest living writer.”—The Washington Post “Cause for celebration and close study . . . [Cohen] will hunt after neglected shards of the past, minor histories, and charge them with an immediacy in the present. . . . He is experimenting with the essay form much more, and more cleverly, than any major American writer today.”—The Wall Street Journal “In Attention, Joshua Cohen makes an eclectic argument for how to improve our lives. . . . [He] tackles a surprising range of subjects to underline distraction’s role in our fraught predicament and to argue that paying attention could help us get out of it. . . . When it comes to making sense of our times with verve and imagination, few authors are more rewarding.”—Financial Times

Reproduction of the original: Creatures of the Night by Alfred W. Rees

Do you find it difficult to share your faith with acquaintances who have tuned out the gospel message because of unpleasant past experiences with religious goofballs or church legalism? This collection of brief articles about God's love for us is conversationally written to introduce skeptics, agnostics, and the un-churched to the concept of a saving, personal relationship with Jesus Christ. ""Jesus Is Trying To Get Your Attention"" makes a great gift for anyone who hungers for the truth yet is turned off by organized religion and ""church-ianity.""

Poetry has long been thought of as a genre devoted to grand subjects, timeless themes, and sublime beauty. Why, then, have contemporary poets turned with such intensity to documenting and capturing the everyday and mundane? Drawing on insights about the nature of everyday life from philosophy, history, and critical theory, Andrew Epstein traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period as a reaction to the rapid, unsettling transformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction. Epstein demonstrates that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even a mode of resistance, to a culture suffering from an acute crisis of attention. In this timely and engaging study, Epstein examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades after modernism and why it has so often sparked genre-bending formal experimentation. With chapters devoted to illuminating readings of a diverse group of writers--including poets associated with influential movements like the New York School, language poetry, and conceptual writing--the book considers the variety of forms contemporary poetry of everyday life has taken, and analyzes how gender, race, and political forces all profoundly inflect the experience and the representation of the quotidian. By exploring the rise of experimental realism as a poetic mode and the turn to rule-governed "everyday-life projects," Attention Equals Life offers a new way of understanding a vital strain at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. It not only charts the evolution of a significant concept in cultural theory and poetry, but also reminds readers that the quest to pay attention to the everyday within today's frenetic world of and social media is an urgent and unending task.

Dan Fuller is a New York pizza delivery driver who has stalled out in life. His existence however is jolted into action when he accidently takes a drug that forces him to see demons. His eyes now open to the dark influence hell has over the world, he is invited to join a team of demon hunters that work to maintain a balance in a cold war between Heaven and Hell. A fragile peace is threatened by a new demon that only Dan can see. No longer able to be aided by the team of demon hunters and their angelic advisers, he must work through the dark cloud lain by the spawns of Hell before they bring about the end of the cold war, and the arrival of Armageddon.

To most modern readers the book of Ezekiel is a mystery. Few can handle Ezekiel's relentless denunciations, his unconventional antics, his repetitive style, and his bewildering array of topics. This excellent commentary by Daniel I. Block makes sense of this obscure and often misunderstood prophet and demonstrates the relevance of Ezekiel's message for the church today.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.

The Earth needs our attention--the best of our intellectual, ethical, and spiritual wisdom and action. In this collection, written in honor of Elizabeth A. Johnson, scholars from the United States and around the world contribute their insights on how theology today can and must turn to the world in new ways in light of contemporary science and our ecological crisis. The essays in this collection advance theological visions for the human task of healing our destructive relationship with the earth and envision hope for our planet's future. Contributors: Kevin Glauber Ahern, Erin Lothes Biviano, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Colleen Mary Carpenter, David Cloutier, Kathy Coffey, Carol J. Dempsey, OP, Denis Edwards, William French, Ivone Gebara, John F. Haught, Mary Catherine Hilkert, OP, Sallie McFague, Eric Daryl Meyer, Richard W. Miller, Jürgen Moltmann, Jeannette Rodriguez, Michele Saracino