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Stranger Faces

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Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell explores the concept of the face as a cornerstone of human identity and society. This collection of speculative essays challenges the traditional ideal face by examining the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, and the face of the dead. Serpell offers a thoughtful investigation into how faces shape our understanding of humanity, truth, beauty, and empathy, proposing a new ethics that embraces the fluidity and mutability of faces.
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Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book will appeal to readers interested in arts and culture, philosophy, social theory, and identity studies. It is suitable for those who enjoy intellectually rich, thought-provoking essays that challenge conventional ideas about human identity and appearance.

Book Hero thinking about your next read

Speculative essays that probe the mythology of the face by the author of The Old Drift

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

A New Yorker Best Book of 2020

"Wise, warm, witty and dizzyingly wide-ranging."—The New York Times

"Serpell's vital treatise is one readers will find themselves returning to again and again."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

If evolutionary biologists, ethical philosophers, and social media gurus are to be believed, the face is the basis for what we call "humanity." The face is considered the source of identity, truth, beauty, authenticity, and empathy. It underlies our ideas about what constitutes a human, how we relate emotionally, what is pleasing to the eye, and how we ought to treat each other. But all of this rests on a specific image of the face. We might call it the ideal face.

What about the strange face, the stranger's face, the face that thwarts recognition? What do we make of the face that rides the line of legibility? In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces—the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the dead—Namwali Serpell probes our contemporary mythology of the face. Stranger Faces imagines a new ethics based on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781945492433

Publisher: Transit Books

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 03 December 2020

Country: United States

Imprint: Transit Books

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 127.0mm

Height: 177.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 196

About the Author

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and Professor of English at Harvard University. She's a recipient of a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction and the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her first novel, The Old Drift (Hogarth, 2019), won the 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book prize for fiction and the 2020 L.A. Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2019.

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