We spend our lives communicating. In the last fifty years, we’ve zoomed through radically different forms of communication, from typewriters to tablet computers, text messages to tweets. We generate more and more words with each passing day. Hiding in that deluge of language are amazing insights into who we are, how we think, and what we feel.

In The Secret Life of Pronouns, social psychologist and language expert James W. Pennebaker uses his groundbreaking research in computational linguistics-in essence, counting the frequency of words we use-to show that our language carries secrets about our feelings, our self-concept, and our social intelligence. Our most forgettable words, such as pronouns and prepositions, can be the most revealing: their patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints.

Using innovative analytic techniques, Pennebaker X-rays everything from Craigslist advertisements to the Federalist Papers-or your own writing, in quizzes you can take yourself-to yield unexpected insights. Who would have predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that a world leader’s use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he led his country into war? You’ll learn why it’s bad when politicians use “we” instead of “I,” what Lady Gaga and William Butler Yeats have in common, and how Ebenezer Scrooge’s syntax hints at his self-deception and repressed emotion. Barack Obama, Sylvia Plath, and King Lear are among the figures who make cameo appearances in this sprightly, surprising tour of what our words are saying-whether we mean them to or not.

The Invention of Glass

Emmanuel Hocquard

Poetry. Translated from the French by Cole Swensen and Rod Smith.

This is a *narrative that tries to explain and to crystalize (the fourth state of water) a situation that has not yet been clarified. Under the guise of memory’s particular logic, its play of facets turns to fiction because its sense takes shape only as the series of grammatical phrases unfolds, fusing shadows and blind spots. And yet, like glass, which is a liquid, the poem is amorphous. It streams off in all directions, but reflects nothing. What is the meaning of blue? No one needs to interrogate the concept of blue to know what it means.*

Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: the Art of the Art Assignment, is a unique and wide-ranging anthology featuring essays, drawings, and assignments from over 100 contributors including: John Baldessari, William Pope.L, Mira Schor, Rochelle Feinstein, Bob Nickas, Chris Kraus, Liam Gillick, Amy Sillman, James Benning, and Michelle Grabner. Practical and quixotic in equal parts, the art assignment can resemble a riddle as much as a recipe, and often sounds more like a haiku, or even a joke, than a clear directive. From introductory exercises in perspective drawing to graduate-level experiments in societal transformation, the assignment coalesces ideas about what art is, how it should be taught, and what larger purpose it might, or might not, serve. The book is a written record of an evolving oral tradition. Bringing together hundreds of assignments, anti-assignments, and artworks from both teachers and students from a broad range of institutions, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed serves as an archive and an instigation, a teaching tool and a question mark, a critique and a tribute.

In Numbers

Clive Phillpot

In Numbers is the first volume to address an overlooked art form that is neither artist’s book nor ephemera, but is entirely its own unique entity: the artist’s serial publication. Across such groundswell moments as the small press boom of the 1960s, the correspondence art movement of the early 1970s and the DIY zine culture of the 1980s and early 1990s, artists have seized on magazine and postcard formats as forms in themselves. These are not publications that print criticism, manifestos or reproductions of artworks; rather, they are themselves artworks, in large part factured by younger artists operating at the peripheries of mainstream art cultures, or by established artists looking for an alternative to the marketplace. Dating from 1955 to the present, In Numbers begins with Wallace Berman’s Semina and continues through Joe Brainard’s C Comics, Situationist Times, Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots, File, Robert Heinecken’s modified periodicals, the Japanese group Provoke’s magazine, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, Fluxus, Art-Language, Raymond Pettibon’s Tripping Corpse, Maurizio Cattelan’s Permanent Food and contemporary examples such as North Drive Press, LTTR and Continuous Project. (Approximately 60 publications in total are surveyed.) Documenting the history of each publication-its inception, production, distribution and impact-together with a fully illustrated bibliography for each title, In Numbers is embellished with essays by Clive Phillpot, Nancy Princenthal, William S. Wilson and Neville Wakefield. An illustrated conversation between Collier Schorr and Gil Blank provides an overview.

The Brutal Language of Love: Stories

Alicia Erian

Alicia Erian’s characters are brave, disarming, affectionate, and deeply flawed. They inhabit the not-so-very-wide space between a good intention and a bad outcome. In “Alcatraz,” we meet a middle-school spelling champion who spends her afternoons taking baths with the boy next door. In “Almonds and Cherries,” a young woman turns an unexpectedly arousing bra-shopping experience into a short film, with ramifications for everyone around her. In “On the Occasion of My Ruination,” a college-bound student plots to lose her virginity to a pizza parlor waiter. The Brutal Language of Love challenges traditional notions of right and wrong with what has become Erian’s signature — an achingly stylish humor and a deep understanding of the brutal truth about human nature. These surprising, provocative, and deeply resonant stories marked the emergence of a major talent

The Master and Margarita (Penguin Classics)

Mikhail Bulgakov

Written during the darkest, most repressive period of Stalin’s reign, this novel gives substance to the notion of artistic and religious freedom. Although Bulgakov completed his masterpiece in 1940, it was not published until 1966, twenty-six years after his death, when the first section appeared in the magazine Moskva, which sold out within hours. Despite its devastating satire of Soviet life and its audacious portrayals of Christ and Satan, the manuscript had somehow eluded Russian censors, and the enthusiasm of its readers assured the novel immediate and enduring success. A brilliant blend of magical and realistic elements, grotesque situations, and major ethical issues, The Master and Margarita combines two distinct yet interwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancient Jerusalem. Brimming with historical references, religious imagery, storms, witchcraft, and romance, Bulgakov’s novel is impossible to categorize: Its story lies between parable and reality; its tone varies from satire to unguarded vulnerability. Its publication represents the triumph of imagination over politics. This new translation has been made from the complete and unabridged Russian text.

Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)

Jean Baudrillard

The Electric Information Age Book: Mcluhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback (Inventory Books)

Jeffrey Schnapp

The Electric Information Age Book explores the nine-year window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage players designers, graphic artists, editors stepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the “Electronic Information Age,” these small, inexpensive paperbacks aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses. Graphic designers such as Quentin Fiore (The Medium is the Massage, 1967) employed a variety of radical techniques verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics that were as important to the content as the text. The Electric Information Age Book is the first book-length history of this brief yet highly influential publishing phenomenon.

Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever

Ray Kurzweil