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Fist
Series: Object Lessons
Brief Description
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Our ability to make a fist is what distinguishes humans from every other species, including primates. The fist has played a crucial role in the birth of language and...
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Format: Paperback / softback
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December 2026
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Fist
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Explores the sexual, kinetic, and political power of our most overlooked tool, the fist.
Explores the sexual, kinetic, and political power of our most overlooked tool, the fist.
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Description
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Our ability to make a fist is what distinguishes humans from every other species, including primates. The fist has played a crucial role in the birth of language and appears in nearly every form of nonverbal communication. We use our fist to protest oppression, give pleasure, knock on doors, give daps, and (inaccurately) measure our heart. Yet the fist is also a sign of someone on the edge.
This book asks what happens when we lean over the edge of what a fist can do and symbolize. Fist uses historical moments and artifacts, interviews, and personal narratives to explore the fist's ambiguous and divisive nature. From boxing matches, the Black Power salute, Obama’s fist bumps, and fisting, the last sexual taboo, nelle mills uncovers what flexing our knuckles says, not just about us, but the world in which we live.
Series: Object Lessons
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Bicycle
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. These days the bicycle often appears as an interloper in a world constructed for cars. An almost miraculous 19th-century contraption, the bicycle promises to transform our lives and the world we live in, yet its time seems always yet-to-come or long-gone-by. Bicycle by...Paperback$2199Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Rust
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. It’s happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidised substance, showing how technology bleeds into biology and ecology. Jean-Michel Rabaté combines art, science, and autobiography to share his...Paperback$2199Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Bookshelf
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Every shelf is different, and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop, while another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Bookshelf by writer and historian Lydia Pyne explores these differences...Paperback$2199Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Burger
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The burger, long the All-American meal, is undergoing an identity crisis. From its shifting place in popular culture to efforts by investors such as Bill Gates to create the non-animal burger that can feed the world, the burger’s identity has become as malleable...Paperback$2199Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Cigarette Lighter
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Smokers, survivalists, teenagers, collectors… The cigarette lighter is a charged, complex, yet often entirely disposable object that moves across these various groups of people, acquiring and emitting different meanings while always supplying its primary function, that of ignition. While the lighter may seem...Paperback$2199Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Earth
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a “blue marble,” “a blue pale dot,” or, as Chaucer described it, “this litel spot of erthe,” the...Paperback$2499Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Egg
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This book is about a strange object—strange in part because it is something that we all have been, and that many of us eat. Nicole Walker's Egg relishes in sharp juxtapositions of seemingly fanciful or repellent topics, so that reproductive science and gustatory...Paperback$2199Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Eye Chart
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Desert nomads tested their vision by distinguishing a pair of stars. But we have since created more disquieting ways to test the strength of the eyes. Reading the eye chart is an exercise in failure, since it only gets interesting when you cannot...Paperback$2099Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
High Heel
Best Fifteen Books of March 2019, Refinery29Best Nonfiction Books of 2019, Paste Magazine Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Fetishized, demonized, celebrated, and outlawed, the high heel is central to the iconography of modern womanhood. But are high heels good? Are they feminist? What does it mean for a...Paperback$2199Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Hood
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, labourers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone who’s ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinney’s Hood explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of...Paperback$2199Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Jet Lag
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Jet lag is a momentary condition resulting from the human body and its inner clock being pitched against the time-leaping effects of modern aviation. But more than that, it is a situation that explains time, technology, and the human body. Jet lag epitomises...Paperback$2199Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Mushroom
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. They are the things we step on without noticing and the largest organisms on Earth. They are symbols of inexplicable growth and excruciating misery. They are grouped with plants, but they behave more like animals. In their inscrutability, mushrooms are wondrous organisms. The...Paperback$2199Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781501376634
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 26 November 2026
Country: United States
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 121.0mm
Height: 165.0mm
Weight: 0g
Pages: 160
About the Author
nelle mills is a freelance writer and playwright based in Philadelphia, USA. Their writing has appeared in Swing, Pelican Bomb, and the anthology Uncommon Bonds. They are the author of the play Alleged Lesbian Activities and an editor of Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism.
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