A novel concerned with the lives of four interconnected people, Charles, Eleanor, Jason and Clover who each, in turn, tell their story of love - selfless, possessive, calculating, passionate - and trust - both broken and honoured.

Trust (Penguin Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Flanagan, Mary

Contemporary

Penguin Books Canada, Limited

A strict Catholic upbringing in a small Maine factory town leads Rose to develop a self-destructive sense of reason, which she carries with her throughout her life, until a devastating relationship finally helps her to believe in herself.

Rose Reason

United States

Harcourt

Bad Girls

British & Irish

JONATHAN CAPE.

A striking analysis of popular board games’ roots in imperialist reasoning—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it.\nBoard games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative board games centered around resource management and strategic play. Yet in Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism.\nThrough this lens, the commercialized version of Snakes and Ladders takes shape as the British Empire’s distortion of Gyan Chaupar (an Indian game of spiritual knowledge), and early twentieth-century “trading games” that fêted French colonialism are exposed for how they conveniently sanitized its brutality while also relying on crudely racist imagery. These games’ most explicitly abhorrent features may no longer be visible, but their legacy still lingers in the contemporary Eurogame tendency to exalt (and incentivize) cycles of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination.\nAn essential addition to any player’s bookshelf, Playing Oppression deftly analyzes this insidious violence and proposes a path forward with board games that challenge colonialist thinking and embrace a much broader cultural imagination.

Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games

Humor & Entertainment

Jakobsson, Mikael

Puzzles & Games

The MIT Press

An examination of subversive games--games designed for political, aesthetic, and social critique.

Critical Play: Radical Game Design

Computers & Technology

Games & Strategy Guides

Mit Pr

An examination of subversive games―games designed for political, aesthetic, and social critique.
For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games―games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry―and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture. 
Flanagan provides a lively historical context for critical play through twentieth-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art: her examples of “playing house” include Dadaist puppet shows and The Sims. She looks at artists' alternative computer-based games and explores games for change, considering the way activist concerns―including worldwide poverty and AIDS―can be incorporated into game design.
Arguing that this kind of conscious practice―which now constitutes the avant-garde of the computer game medium―can inspire new working methods for designers, Flanagan offers a model for designing that will encourage the subversion of popular gaming tropes through new styles of game making, and proposes a theory of alternate game design that focuses on the reworking of contemporary popular game practices.

Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Mit Press)

MIT Press]

A theoretical and practical guide to integrating human values into the conception and design of digital games.
All games express and embody human values, providing a compelling arena in which we play out beliefs and ideas. “Big ideas” such as justice, equity, honesty, and cooperation―as well as other kinds of ideas, including violence, exploitation, and greed―may emerge in games whether designers intend them or not. In this book, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum present Values at Play, a theoretical and practical framework for identifying socially recognized moral and political values in digital games. Values at Play can also serve as a guide to designers who seek to implement values in the conception and design of their games. 
After developing a theoretical foundation for their proposal, Flanagan and Nissenbaum provide detailed examinations of selected games, demonstrating the many ways in which values are embedded in them. They introduce the Values at Play heuristic, a systematic approach for incorporating values into the game design process. Interspersed among the book's chapters are texts by designers who have put Values at Play into practice by accepting values as a design constraint like any other, offering a real-world perspective on the design challenges involved.

Values at Play in Digital Games

Nissenbaum, Helen

Reload offers an alternative picture of cyberspace as a complex and contradictory place where there is oppression as well as liberation. It shows how cyberpunk's revolutionary claims conceal its ultimate conservatism on matters of class, gender, and race.

Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture

Booth, Austin

Religion & Spirituality

A collection of short stories filled with magic and mayhem works its way through the stages of being a woman--with dramatic twists--on subjects ranging from childhood violence to romantic ruin in a retirement home

The Blue Woman: And Other Stories

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Adèle: A Novel

The mystery of Adele infuses this erotic novel, which starts in decadent 1930s Paris and ends in today's brash London. Celia Pippet, founder of a feminist magazine, impulsively steals a bizarre artifact from the British Museum. Joined by her friend Martin, a filmmaker, and American academic Tamara, she flees to Bez in southern France to escape detection and to pursue the trail of the beguiling Adele. Fifty years before, Adele had been rescued from Bez by Dr. Jonas Sylvester. He brought her to Paris where she captured the city's attention with her alluring beauty and air of secrecy. When Sylvester brings over sister Blanche to look after Adele, he is not prepared for the love between them nor their escape from him. He takes his revenge. Moving between Blanche's life with Adele and Celia's search for clues into that life, the stories converge in Bez where the three friends discover Blanche's existence and Adele's true, if unbelievable, identity. The effects of the revelation are shattering―Adele's erotic power extends beyond the grave, melding past and present into a single reality. A provocative and original novel by an accomplished literary writer who steps beyond the boundaries of what we know as male and female.

W.W.Norton&Company

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