An Ideal for Living (20th Anniversary Edition)

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 clichéd, 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 UbuwebEugene Thacker is the author of several books, including In the Dust of This Planet and Infinite Resignation.

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