An Ideal for Living (20th Anniversary Edition)

Schism Press brings you the 20th Anniversary Edition of Eugene Thacker's "anti-novel" An Ideal for Living. In an unnamed city in the not-so-distant future, individuals spend their time in isolation, enclosed in high-tech "pods," arrayed in symbiotic megastructures, connected to vast networks of neurological and biochemical data. An Ideal for Living is a glimpse into this world, presented not as a story but as a documentary-style "dossier" of data streams, research articles, and automated activity logs. Originally published in 2000, An Ideal for Living evokes a dark poetics of bodies and technologies; at once a look back to cyberpunk science fiction and a look forward to the "new weird." "As today's strategies of conceptual writing have become legitimized and clichéd, Thacker's text reminds us of how radical and potent these gestures once were, treading a fine line between the mechanical and the authorial. This is an important book...these pages take cues from Burroughs and Gibson, while at the same time presciently pointing to the web-based path writing would take over the next decade. It's a joy to see this back in print."-- Kenneth Goldsmith, author of Soliloquy, Day, and Uncreative Writing, founder of Ubuweb