Excess-The Factory is about factory work, about working class resistance to capitalism, about the 68 general strike in France.

The definitive history of America’s greatest incubator of innovation and the birthplace of some of the 20th century’s most influential technologies “Filled with colorful characters and inspiring lessons . . . The Idea Factory explores one of the most critical issues of our time: What causes innovation?” —Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review “Compelling . . . Gertner's book offers fascinating evidence for those seeking to understand how a society should best invest its research resources.” —The Wall Street Journal From its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, Bell Labs-officially, the research and development wing of AT&T-was the biggest, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been touched by Bell Labs. In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner traces the origins of some of the twentieth century's most important inventions and delivers a riveting and heretofore untold chapter of American history. At its heart this is a story about the life and work of a small group of brilliant and eccentric men-Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and Bill Baker-who spent their careers at Bell Labs. Today, when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offers us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Translated by Jeffrey Angles, Jen Crawford, Carol Hayes, Rina Kikuchi, You Sakai, Sawako Nakayaso. This first English-language volume from Japanese poet, performer and publisher Takako Arai collects engaging, rhythmically intense narrative poems set in the silk weaving factory where Arai grew up. FACTORY GIRLS depicts the secretive yet bold world of the women workers as well as the fate of these kinds of regional, feminine, collaborative spaces in a current-day Japan defined by such corporate and climate catastrophes as the rise of Uniqlo and the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.

Product Description: Carr, winner of the 2009 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, obsessively researches intimate terrorism, looking everywhere from Whitman and Dickinson to lists of phobias and weapon-store catalogs for answers. Do they lie in statistics, in statements by and about rapists and killers, in the capacity for cruelty that the poet herself admits to? This book is a dream-document both of light and innocence-babies and the urge to protect them-and of giving in to a wrenching darkness, where despair lies in the very fact that no single factor is to blame.

Author's second collection explores elements of chance and mystery that determine human identity and relationships.

'Their story is a vindication for every northern hooligan rock band out there. Happy Mondays sparked a British guitar pop renaissance.' Alan McGee In 1985, when the Happy Mondays exploded onto the Manchester music scene like a Molotov cocktail, no one had heard anything like them before. As they developed into the face of the Acid House ‘Madchester’ movement, critics ranked them alongside The Velvet Underground and the Sex Pistols as cultural lightning rods, and that was just for the music. The stories of their excesses are the stuff of rock ’n’ roll legend: the overdoses, fights on stage, the death threats, the gangsters, the stabbings and shootings in the studio. Yet this seemingly unhinged and uncontrollable band – encouraged by their equally crazed benefactors at Factory Records – transformed British music forever, leaving behind five infectious albums of unparalleled dirt and delight. Twenty-five years after their breakthrough appearance on Top of the Pops, in November 1989, Simon Spence, the acclaimed biographer of The Stone Roses: War and Peace, tells the story of how the Happy Mondays came to provide the soundtrack to Britain’s last great youth movement. Based on extensive interviews with the band and key associates, he reveals the truth behind the mythic stories that have ensured their outlaw reputation, and unravels the chaos that led to the group’s ultimate implosion and the tragic collapse of Factory Records. A riotous mix of pills, thrills and joyous chart hits, this is the untold story of Britain’s greatest rock ’n’ roll gang.

Poetry. 'It's still dark / Then, a door, ' begins Julie Carr's beautiful THINK TANK. We are invited to step through it, into a space both interstitial and marked, always, with the parts that don't adhere: 'streaks of water between panes of glass, ' 'shores... [like] garnets, as vital as they are coarse, ' a '[p]inching and elliptical grammar... slightly tipped at the horizon.' This is where pleasure lies--in its tilted reality and luminous curiosity that resembles, so much, childhood imaginaries of loss, landscape and becoming. In connecting to these other qualities of consciousness, Carr opens apertures and seams of different kinds, in a complex, delicate, durational writing that could be both things: the mouth that releases its load of blood when it opens to speak, or something else--a way to get to the next part of life. 'At the doorway: endlessness, ' Carr writes. And we follow her gaze until it breaks: 'glinting and wet.'--Bhanu Kapil