Upper West Side Philosophers Inc : 27 books

Winner of the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Award for Creative Non-Fiction. In a sequence of rivetingly personal essays, Europe's premier contemporary poet and essayist, Durs Grünbein, reflects on his own evolution as an artist and on the meaning and importance of poetry for life in general. "What...

Graced with lyricism, PASSING TIME is a thoughtful and wide-ranging meditation on the ways in which human beings are compelled — and choose — to mark time, from earliest childhood to the final moments of life. This is an unsparing, yet often poetic, essay on the ordeals and pleasures inherent in the universal experience of waiting.

In three beautifully wrought meditations on the import of René Descartes’ legacy from a poet’s perspective, Durs Grünbein presents us with a Descartes whom we haven’t met before: not the notorious perpetrator of the mind-body-dualism, the arch-villain of Rationalism but the inspired and courageous...

Arguably the most significant modern Hungarian poet, Lajos Walder was born in 1913 and died in 1945 in the Gunskirchen concentration camp, on the day it was liberated by the Allied forces. Exuberant and witty, poignant and severe, trenchant yet light-hearted, Lajos Walder's poems cut to the quick...

Set in a remote radio outpost in northern Quebec in 1942, "Below Zero" is a study in obsession, duplicity, aversion, infidelity, and psychological abuse to the point of murder ... people stuck together with no escape ... Written in early 1940s in Hungary, Below Zero is arguably the prototypical existential drama, anticipating Jean-Paul "Sartre’s No Exit "(1944), among other works.

If parenthood were a function of biology, adoptive parents, for instance, ought not to be considered parents — which is absurd. Thus, it follows that biology cannot be an essential component of parenthood.  Concomitantly, if parenthood were merely a function of law, all those who have parented...

Winner of the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award. In this penetrating, thought-provoking, and deeply personal philosophical meditation on the death of the beloved other and the turmoil into which it throws those who were close to him, philosopher Kathrin Stengel opens hitherto unseen vistas...

Published in 1923, On Dialogic Speech is the first study devoted entirely to the forms of speech in their concrete, social and inter-subjective manifestations. It is also the first study addressing the linguistic, psycho-physiological, pragmatic, semantic and socio-political aspects of dialogue and dialogic interaction.

Brimming with insights and startling perspectives on the most diverse aspects of contemporary life – from marriage and parenting to love, friendship, and the logic of the everyday – this exquisite collection of aphorisms and essays, is bound to make its readers stop and reevaluate many a truth and commonplace we live by. Now available as an ebook in its second, expanded edition.

Winner of the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award for Self Help & Finalist for the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Self Help. Is not being happy really so bad? In HIGH ON LOW: HARNESSING THE POWER OF UNHAPPINESS, bestselling author Wilhelm Schmid persuasively argues that far from preventing...

Acclaimed poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes a fresh, sobering look at our faith in statistics, our desire to predict the future, and our dependence on fortuitousness. Tracing the interface between chance and probability in medical diagnostics, risk models, economics, and the fluctuations...

Winner of the 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Social Change. This remarkable book takes the reader through the many layers of meaning that accompany the word ‘prejudice’. By critically confronting the ways in which we think and speak about prejudice, Michael Eskin clears the path...

"Philosopher Schmid (High on Low) instructs readers on the art of aging gracefully and contentedly by embracing gelassenheit, a German concept denoting a relaxed attitude. Schmid provides 10 steps toward 'experiencing life's plenitude and accepting its temporal limits', including cultivating...

In this new collection of poems—his most philosophically probing and poetically revealing to date—Durs Grünbein takes us on a spiritual journey through the labyrinthine cosmos of the human soul and its manifold embodiments across the ages. Addressing us in his own voice as well as through the...