{"title":"Series: Critical Century","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eCritical Century\u003c\/em\u003e offers a compelling blend of genres that spans from profound historical fiction to enlightening arts and culture insights. This series invites readers to explore diverse narratives and knowledge, ranging from evocative poetry to innovative technology guides, each work distinct yet unified by a thoughtful examination of their subjects.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhether seeking inspiration, education, or imaginative storytelling, readers will find a rich tapestry of voices and perspectives. The collection bridges classic literature, contemporary memoirs, and even playful children’s tales, making \u003cem\u003eCritical Century\u003c\/em\u003e a versatile companion for curious minds.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"marginalia-on-casanova-by-miklos-szentkuthy-9781967751273","title":"Marginalia On Casanova","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA philosopher in the guise of a rake. In this wild, dazzling work of literary reinvention, Hungarian modernist Miklós Szentkuthy uses Casanova's memoirs as a springboard for something far stranger: a swirling meditation on eros, memory, disguise, vanity, and the metaphysics of seduction.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBlending fiction, philosophy, and improvisation, \u003cem\u003eMarginalia on Casanova\u003c\/em\u003e is less a commentary than an ecstatic interruption — part reverie, part performance, part private theatre of ideas. Szentkuthy's prose is electric, erratic, and baroque, drawing comparisons to Joyce, Borges, and Pater, but like nothing else in modern literature. First published in 1939, it launched a one-man avant-garde in Budapest and remains one of the most intoxicating debuts of the twentieth century.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46851870458092,"sku":"9781967751273","price":45.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/16551213482888.jpg?v=1759131064"},{"product_id":"paris-spleen-by-charles-baudelaire-9781967751259","title":"Paris Spleen","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eParis Spleen\u003c\/em\u003e is one of the first modern books—formally experimental, morally ambivalent, and relentlessly urban. Written in the 1850s, these fifty prose poems roam through the streets of Paris with unsparing detail and a deeply ambivalent gaze. Baudelaire captures daily life as something both intoxicating and absurd, filled with strange encounters, sudden violence, fleeting beauty, and constant noise.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis is not poetry in the usual sense, but something sharper and more elastic: compact narratives, snapshots, observations, and provocations. Baudelaire moves quickly between tones—satirical, melancholic, brutal, philosophical—without ever losing control. \u003cem\u003eParis Spleen\u003c\/em\u003e speaks in the voice of a man both of the city and estranged from it, and it remains one of the most influential works of the 19th century: vivid, darkly comic, and permanently contemporary.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46851904307436,"sku":"9781967751259","price":33.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/badbb14218b59d7f68f242f568e5086a.jpg?v=1759168549"},{"product_id":"the-divine-mimesis-by-pier-paolo-pasolini-9781967751235","title":"The Divine Mimesis","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eThe Divine Mimesis\u003c\/em\u003e, Pasolini reimagines Dante's descent into Hell not as allegory but as lived, historical reality—urban, political, and deeply personal. Written in the final years of his life, this unfinished and fiercely experimental work leads us through the wreckage of modern Italy: housing projects, consumer culture, political betrayal, the spiritual void left in the wake of fascism and capitalism alike.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe poet is no longer a pilgrim, but a witness—disillusioned, irreverent, obsessed with truth. And truth, here, is brutal. Pasolini tears into language, myth, and self with equal violence, creating a text that is part confession, part vision, part cultural autopsy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhat begins as a mimicry of Dante becomes something darker and stranger—a descent not into a metaphysical Hell, but the concrete one of the present. \u003cem\u003eThe Divine Mimesis\u003c\/em\u003e is not just a reckoning with a broken world, but with the broken idea of progress itself. Fragmented, volatile, and saturated with grief, this is Pasolini at his most unguarded and incendiary. A necessary document from one of the twentieth century's most fearless and singular minds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46851955785964,"sku":"9781967751235","price":33.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/5a8259589d35ea705873f3047f2a0e4d.jpg?v=1759168450"},{"product_id":"the-stroller-of-paris-by-leon-paul-fargue-9781967751297","title":"The Stroller of Paris","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA masterwork of poetic urban observation, \u003cem\u003eThe Stroller of Paris\u003c\/em\u003e is Léon-Paul Fargue's luminous love letter to the city he wandered, savored, and immortalised in prose. Long unavailable in English, this book opens the door to a Paris now spectral and half-forgotten—where the boulevards echoed with café banter, jazz and politics collided in salons, and the ghosts of Baudelaire and Montmartre's bohemians still haunted the mist.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFargue was called \"the stroller of Paris\" not merely for his gait but for his gaze: intimate, encyclopaedic, and electric. From the hidden depths of La Chapelle to the glitter of the Champs-Élysées, he guides us through arrondissements like a flâneur-philosopher—equal parts Proust and Apollinaire—seeking the soul of a city in every reflection, every voice, every shifting light.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eTranslated with uncommon sensitivity by Rainer J. Hanshe, \u003cem\u003eThe Stroller of Paris\u003c\/em\u003e is not just a book about Paris—it is Paris, in all its bygone splendour and raw humanity. An essential rediscovery for lovers of literature, history, and the art of the dérive.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46851988750572,"sku":"9781967751297","price":33.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/16551453482888.jpg?v=1759137769"},{"product_id":"literature-and-politics-by-robert-musil-9781916809611","title":"Literature and Politics","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePolitics is will and not truth. A very primitive formulation, but rich in consequences.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eRobert Musil was keenly aware of literature's vulnerability to what he called \"the over-reach and encroachment of politics\", but he was also an acute observer of the ways in which literature and politics interact. \u003cem\u003eLiterature and Politics\u003c\/em\u003e presents Musil's writings on the relationship between literature and politics from World War I through World War II and elucidates his personal struggle to bear witness during the Age of Totalitarianism.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn essays, addresses, aphorisms, and unpublished notes on current events, Musil charted the increasing dangers posed to artists and intellectuals by projects of ideological conscription, as well as the broader threats posed by nationalism and other extreme forms of collectivism. His political thinking was unfailingly supple and nuanced, but at its heart was a passionate belief in the rich and irreducible nature of individual creative work as the bulwark of a free, ethical, and pluralistic society.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe main texts are translated by Genese Grill and Klaus Amann provides an invaluable introduction to Musil's political thought, while Philip Payne introduces Musil's \"On Stupidity\" (which he has also translated into English).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47486605787372,"sku":"9781916809611","price":56.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/3c77ce36175b2cbfba8dc21e60633f4e.jpg?v=1775779331"},{"product_id":"the-greek-music-drama-by-friedrich-nietzsche-9781916809635","title":"The Greek Music Drama","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe real obstacle to the development of modern art forms is erudition, conscious knowledge, and an excess of knowledge: all growth and development in the realm of art has to take place in the dead of night.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Greek Music Drama\u003c\/em\u003e marks a significant moment in the development of Nietzsche's thought. Delivered as a lecture in 1870, it was the first public articulation of the major themes of his later, philosophical work: the importance of aesthetic experience for culture, the primacy of the body and physiological drives, and the centrality of music to Greek tragedy. Nietzsche here repudiates abstract scholarly approaches to the art of classical antiquity, proposing instead that art demands of us the cultivation of distinctive emotional and intellectual capacities.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhile \u003cem\u003eThe Greek Music Drama\u003c\/em\u003e was written on the brink of the insights that inform \u003cem\u003eThe Birth of Tragedy\u003c\/em\u003e, it stands as a fascinating document in its own right. Paul Bishop's preface and informative critical notes and Jill Marsden's illuminating introduction serve to redress the comparative neglect that this seminal text—presented here in an elegant bilingual format—has suffered in Nietzsche studies. They also set in its original context a work that will prove essential to anyone interested in theatre, performance, and the art of tragedy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47487600722156,"sku":"9781916809635","price":33.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/672c8d89d825731bd1268d71e7e57cd9.jpg?v=1775772754"},{"product_id":"phrases-by-jean-luc-godard-9781916809574","title":"Phrases","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhrases\u003c\/em\u003e presents the spoken language from six films by Jean-Luc Godard: \u003cem\u003eGermany Nine Zero\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eThe Kids Play Russian\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eJLG \/ JLG\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e2 x 50 Years of French Cinema\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eFor Ever Mozart\u003c\/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003eIn Praise of Love\u003c\/em\u003e. Completed between 1991 and 2001, during what has been called Godard's \"years of memory\", these films and videos were made alongside and in the shadow of his major work from that time, the monumental \u003cem\u003eHistoire(s) du cinema\u003c\/em\u003e, complementing and extending its themes. Like \u003cem\u003eHistoire(s)\u003c\/em\u003e, they offer meditations on, among other things, the tides of history, the fate of nations, the work of memory, the power of cinema, and the nature of love.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eGathered here, in written form, they are words without images: not exactly screenplays, not exactly poetry, but something else entirely. Godard himself described them enigmatically: \"Not books. Rather recollections of films, without the photos or the uninteresting details… Only the spoken phrases. They offer a little prolongation. One even discovers things that aren't in the films in them, which is rather powerful for a recollection. These books aren't literature or cinema. Traces of a film…\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn our era of ubiquitous video streaming, e-books, and social media, these traces of cinema raise compelling questions about the future of media—cinematic, literary, and otherwise.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47603075809516,"sku":"9781916809574","price":45.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781916809574-phrases.jpg?v=1778054962"},{"product_id":"writings-on-art-and-poetical-theory-by-fernando-pessoa-9781916809659","title":"Writings on Art and Poetical Theory","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSincerity is the one great artistic crime. 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Also included are essays on translation, the sensationist movement, and the history of English literature.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis edition, prepared by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza, provides a fascinating overview of Pessoa's writings on art and poetic theory—most of which are presented here for the first time to English readers—thereby opening the way for future studies on one of the most significant authors of Portuguese modernism.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47603366428908,"sku":"9781916809659","price":45.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781916809659-writings-on-art-and-poetical-theory.jpg?v=1778061318"},{"product_id":"i-killed-and-i-bled-by-blaise-cendrars-9781967751877","title":"I Killed and I Bled","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBlaise Cendrars (1887–1961) was already a comet in European letters when the First World War shattered his body and reordered his art. He enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in 1914, fought at the Somme and the Marne, and on 28 September 1915 lost the lower half of his right arm—his writing hand. From this unthinkable fact he forged a new method and a new music.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eI Killed\u003c\/em\u003e (1918) is Cendrars's first published account from the trenches: a lean, shocking \"prose\" (his word) whose rhythm mimics the ternary cadence of the barrage. The text refuses theatrics. It anatomizes dehumanization—the drift from \"we\" to \"I,\" the reduction of persons to numbers and parts, the obscene efficiency of industrial slaughter. Its famous closing scene, the knife-to-knife kill, is not a boast but an accusation: against the systems that turn a poet into \"an ape,\" and against the poet himself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eI Bled\u003c\/em\u003e (1938) looks back through hospitals and aftermaths. Where \u003cem\u003eI Killed\u003c\/em\u003e compresses the attack into a blaze of images, \u003cem\u003eI Bled\u003c\/em\u003e lingers: the Ford ambulances shimmying through craters; Sister Philomène’s startled piety; Nurse Adrienne’s ferocious competence; the little Landes shepherd with seventy-two shrapnel wounds; the trepanned artilleryman relearning speech. Cendrars's gift is to make each scene particular and mythic at once—balancing report with vision, memory with the raw present tense of pain.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFramed here with a concise preface and notes, \u003cem\u003eI Killed \u0026amp; I Bled\u003c\/em\u003e remains modernist, unsentimental, scorching. It is war writing that neither flatters nor absolves—language held, against extinction, like Orion over a blacked-out city.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47934092771564,"sku":"9781967751877","price":62.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781967751877-i-killed-and-i-bled.jpg?v=1783894855"},{"product_id":"eternity-by-the-stars-by-louis-auguste-blanqui-9781971559353","title":"Eternity By the Stars","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn a century of revolutions, final emancipations, and eschatological dreams, the shadowy figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui—the perpetual insurgent—composed \u003cem\u003eEternity By the Stars\u003c\/em\u003e in 1871, imprisoned in the sea fortress of Fort du Taureau. From within his cell, Blanqui arrives at a stark and devastating proposition: given infinite time and a finite number of possible configurations, every event must recur, again and again, without end. Each life is lived an infinity of times across the expanse of the universe; nothing is ever concluded, nothing ever redeemed. History itself becomes a vast mechanism of repetition, indifferent to hope or despair.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAt once lucid and vertiginous, scientific and hallucinatory, Blanqui's text stands as one of the strangest cosmological speculations of the nineteenth century—and one of its most haunting. This critical edition presents the work in a new English translation, with an extended introduction by Frank Chouraqui, situating Blanqui within a wider constellation of thought from Friedrich Nietzsche to Walter Benjamin and Jorge Luis Borges, and tracing the afterlife of a text that continues to unsettle our understanding of time, action, and the modern condition.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48038267584748,"sku":"9781971559353","price":88.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781971559353-eternity-by-the-stars.jpg?v=1785391569"},{"product_id":"negative-capability-by-walter-jackson-bate-9781971559384","title":"Negative Capability","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst published in 1939, Walter Jackson Bate's seminal study of John Keats's \u003cem\u003enegative capability\u003c\/em\u003e remains the definitive account of one of the central ideas of Romantic poetics. At once genealogical and analytical, Bate traces the concept across a wide intellectual field—linking it to William Hazlitt's notion of \"gusto,\" to William Shakespeare's dramatic impersonality, and forward to Henri Bergson's distinction between intellect and intuition.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn Bate's formulation, \u003cem\u003enegative capability\u003c\/em\u003e emerges as a discipline of disinterestedness and imaginative sympathy: the capacity to relinquish the self and enter fully into the reality of another. Against the egotism and epistemic certainties of his age, Keats proposed instead a poetics grounded in openness—to \"uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBate's study restores the full force of that challenge, revealing \u003cem\u003enegative capability\u003c\/em\u003e not as a passing remark but as a rigorous and enduring principle of artistic creation. This edition returns a foundational work to print, with a new introduction by the Italian poet and critic Maura Del Serra—and renews the truth of T. S. Eliot's judgment: that there is scarcely a statement Keats made about poetry that has not proved true.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48038377226476,"sku":"9781971559384","price":70.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781971559384-negative-capability.jpg?v=1785392442"},{"product_id":"laughter-by-henri-bergson-9781967751846","title":"Laughter","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhy do we laugh? What does comedy reveal about human nature, society, and the mind's strange elasticity?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn this classic 1900 essay, philosopher Henri Bergson anatomises the comic impulse with surgical clarity and lyrical wit. For Bergson, laughter is no mere reflex. It is a social gesture, a corrective, a way for life itself to defend its supple intelligence against rigidity and habit. From pratfalls to irony, from the mechanical in the living to the absurd in the everyday, his argument ranges effortlessly between metaphysics and vaudeville.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWith a new introduction by Simon Critchley, \u003cem\u003eLaughter\u003c\/em\u003e emerges as both a foundational text in aesthetics and a startlingly modern theory of humour—anticipating Freud, Chaplin, and memes alike.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAn appended essay by Wyndham Lewis offers a bracing counterpoint: a modernist's rejoinder to Bergson's genial philosophy. 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