Steven Connor

For centuries, flies have been seen as mankind's enemy, blamed for plagues, subject to public excommunication in the Middle Ages and campaigns of extermination during the early years of the twentieth century. Fly tracks the representation of the fly in myth, literature, poetry, film, painting, theology, and biology. There are chapters on artificial flies, the demonic fly, the erotics of...

Dreamwork is a book about the ideas, dreams, dreads, and ideals we have regarding work. Its central argument is that, although we depend on the idea of work for our identity as humans, we feel we must disguise from ourselves the fact that we do not know what work is. There is no example of work that nobody might under...

This is the first English biography of Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher who bridged the worlds of science and imagination. Raised in rural France, Bachelard served in the First World War, worked for the post office, and pursued degrees in science and philosophy while teaching in his local school. His journey led to a professorship at the Sorbonne, where he influenced...