02.05.2023

“How Attention Works: Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction” by Stefan Van Der Stigchel

Magick Matters

"We are surrounded by a world rich with visual information, but we pay attention to very little of it, filtering out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we think we need to know. Advertisers, web designers, and other "attention architects" try hard to get our attention, promoting products with videos on huge outdoor screens, adding flashing banners to websites, and developing computer programs with blinking icons that tempt us to click. Often they succeed in distracting us from what we are supposed to be doing. In How Attention Works, Stefan Van der Stigchel explains the process of attention and what the implications are for our everyday lives. The visual attention system is...>>

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01.05.2023

“The King and the Corpse: Tales of the Soul’s Conquest of Evil” by Heinrich Zimmer and Joseph Campbell (2nd edition)

Magick Matters

"Drawing from Eastern and Western literatures, Heinrich Zimmer presents a selection of stories linked together by their common concern for the problem of our eternal conflict with the forces of evil. Beginning with a tale from the Arabian Nights, this theme unfolds in legends from Irish paganism, medieval Christianity, the Arthurian cycle, and early Hinduism. In the retelling of these tales, Zimmer discloses the meanings within their seemingly unrelated symbols and suggests the philosophical wholeness of this assortment of myth."...>>

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01.05.2023

“Buried Treasures: The Power of Political Fairy Tales” by Jack Zipes

Magick Matters

"Fascinating profiles of modern writers and artists who tapped the political potential of fairy tales Jack Zipes has spent decades as a "scholarly scavenger", discovering forgotten fairy tales in libraries, flea markets, used bookstores, and internet searches, and he has introduced countless readers to these remarkable works and their authors. In Buried Treasures, Zipes describes his special passion for uncovering political fairy tales of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offers fascinating profiles of more than a dozen of their writers and illustrators, and shows why they deserve greater attention and appreciation. These writers and artists used their remarkable talents to confront political oppression and economic exploitation by creating alternative, imaginative worlds that test the ethics and...>>

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01.05.2023

“Bride of the Corpse King: A Hades and Persephone Retelling” by Emily Shore

Magick Matters

"Flowers have followed Isla Adayra her whole life. Things are no different in the City of the Dead. After volunteering to be Bride of the Corpse King to save her family, Isla sets a course to woo the God of Death. From seducing him with her corpus roses to accepting his mark of Death, Isla must keep him from reaping her soul. With Death in his cursed form, the Corpse King, Allysteir, meets his match with Isla and her passion. It isn't long before his feeble heart falls for the girl who eats forbidden fruit and grows roses and thorns from her flesh. But could she truly tempt Death? And break their land's Curse? For fans of...>>

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30.04.2023

“The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century” by Joel F. Harrington

Magick Matters

"In a dusty German bookshop, the noted historian Joel F. Harrington stumbled upon a remarkable document: the journal of a sixteenth-century executioner. The journal gave an account of the 394 people Meister Frantz Schmidt executed, and the hundreds more he tortured, flogged, or disfigured for more than forty-five years in the city of Nuremberg. But the portrait of Schmidt that gradually emerged was not that of a monster. Could a man who practiced such cruelty also be insightful, compassionate―even progressive? In The Faithful Executioner, Harrington teases out the hidden meanings and drama of Schmidt's journal. Deemed an official outcast, Meister Frantz sought to prove himself worthy of honor and free his children from the stigma...>>

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