An exploration of echoes and resonances across two millennia of visual culture, this book brings together weird, wondrous, and unforgettable imagery in one stunning volume. A remarkable collection of over five hundred images, Affinities is a carefully curated visual journey illuminating connections across more than two thousand years of image-making. Drawing on a decade of archival immersion at The Public Domain Review, an online journal and not-for- profit project dedicated to exploring curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas, this volume has been assembled from a vast array of sources: from manuscripts to museum catalogs, and ship logs to primers on Victorian magic. The images are arranged in a single captivating sequence that unfurls according to a dreamlike logic, through a play of visual echoes and evolving thematic threads—hatching eggs paired with early Burmese world maps, marbled endpapers meet tattooed stowaways, and fireworks explode beside deep sea coral. At once an art book, a sourcebook, and a kaleidoscopic visual poem, Affinities is a unique and enthralling publication that will offer something different on each visit. A compelling art object and visual experience in its own right, this collection provides a launchpad for further exploration and inventive engagement across all forms of visual culture and expression.

After becoming a part of the Tau, one of twenty-two large global network Affinities in the near future, young Adam Fisk thinks his life has improved for the better until the different Affinities begin to go to war with one another in a conflict that will change Adam's world forever.

In our rapidly-changing world of "social media", everyday people are more and more able to sort themselves into social groups based on finer and finer criteria. In the near future of Robert Charles Wilson's The Affinities, this process is supercharged by new analytic technologies--genetic, brain-mapping, behavioral. To join one of the twenty-two Affinities is to change one's life. It's like family, and more than family. Your fellow members aren't just like you, and they aren't just people who are likely to like you. They're also the people with whom you can best cooperate in all areas of life--creative, interpersonal, even financial. At loose ends both professional and personal, young Adam Fisk takes the suite of tests to see if he qualifies for any of the Affinities, and finds that he's a match for one of the largest, the one called Tau. It's utopian—at first. Problems in all areas of his life begin to simply sort themselves out, as he becomes part of a global network of people dedicated to helping one another—to helping him. But as the differing Affinities put their new powers to the test, they begin to rapidly chip away at the power of governments, of global corporations, of all the institutions of the old world. Then, with dreadful inevitability, the different Affinities begin to go to war--with one another. What happens next will change Adam, and his world, forever. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A meditation on the power and pleasures of the image, from paintings to photographs to migraine auras, by one of Britain's finest literary minds. In Affinities, Brian Dillon, who Joyce Carol Oates has said writes “fascinating prose . . . on virtually any subject,” explores images and artists he is drawn to and analyzes the attraction. What does it mean to claim affinity with a picture? What do feelings of affinity imply about the experience of art and of the world? Affinities is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or solidarity, but has aspects of all three. Approaching this subject via discrete examples, Dillon examines works by artists such as Dora Maar and Andy Warhol, Rinko Kawauchi and Susan Hiller, as well as scientific or vernacular images of sea creatures and migraine auras. Written as a series of linked essays, Affinities completes a trilogy, with Essayism and Suppose a Sentence, about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.