Seven Rooms brings together highlights from Hotel, a magazine for new approaches to fiction, non-fiction & poetry which, since its inception in 2016, provided a space for experimental reflection on literature's status as art & cultural mediator. Co-published by Tenement Press and Prototype, this anthology captures, refracts, and reflects a vital moment in independent publishing in the UK, and is built on the shared values of openness, collaboration, and total creative freedom.

Take a walk around 1920s Berlin with one of its greatest luminaries.

In this timeless guide, originally published in Germany in 1929, Franz Hessel invites his readers to join him on a stroll through Weimar-era Berlin, taking in some of the most fascinating sights the city has to offer, many of which still exist in some form today.

From the Alexanderplatz to Kreuzberg, his record of them has become priceless; as has his fascinating commentary on the seismic shifts shaking German culture at the time.

Superbly written, and as fresh today as when it first appeared, this is a book to be savoured.

Everything can be exhibited: trinkets from the Second French Empire, a collection of photographs, a boudoir from beyond the grave, a heroine famous for her beauty, her extravagance and her pitiful end. Everything can be exposed: a woman for another woman... , the fear of one's own body, a way of entering a scene, the thrill of seduction, abandonment, the reassurance of objects, a ruin. Over the course of four decades, the Countess Virginia Oldoini returned to the same Paris studio to be photographed, posing in different tableaux to mark the moments of her life, real and imagined. A fascination with 'La Castiglione' led Nathalie Leger to weave together this imaginative proto-biography. Mysterious yet over-exposed, adored and despised for her beauty in equal measure, Castiglione was a flamboyant aristocrat, mistress of Napoleon III and a rumoured spy. Examining the myths around icons past and present, Leger meditates on the half-truths of portrait photography, reframing her own family history in the process.

One of today's most widely read philosophers considers the shift in violence from visible to invisible, from negativity to excess of positivity. Some things never disappear-violence, for example. Violence is ubiquitous and incessant but protean, varying its outward form according to the social constellation at hand. In Topology of Violence, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han considers the shift in violence from the visible to the invisible, from the frontal to the viral to the self-inflicted, from brute force to mediated force, from the real to the virtual. Violence, Han tells us, has gone from the negative-explosive, massive, and martial-to the positive, wielded without enmity or domination. This, he says, creates the false impression that violence has disappeared. Anonymized, desubjectified, systemic, violence conceals itself because it has become one with society. Han first investigates the macro-physical manifestations of violence, which take the form of negativity-developing from the tension between self and other, interior and exterior, friend and enemy. These manifestations include the archaic violence of sacrifice and blood, the mythical violence of jealous and vengeful gods, the deadly violence of the sovereign, the merciless violence of torture, the bloodless violence of the gas chamber, the viral violence of terrorism, and the verbal violence of hurtful language. He then examines the violence of positivity-the expression of an excess of positivity-which manifests itself as over-achievement, over-production, over-communication, hyper-attention, and hyperactivity. The violence of positivity, Han warns, could be even more disastrous than that of negativity. Infection, invasion, and infiltration have given way to infarction.

What happens to the relationship between business and literature when storytelling becomes a privileged form of communication for organizations. Corporations love a good story. Microsoft employs a chief storyteller, who heads a team of twenty-five corporate storytellers. IBM, Coca-Cola, and the World Bank are among other organizations that have worked with storytelling methods. And, of course, Steve Jobs was famous for his storytelling. Today, narrative is a privileged form of communication for organizations. In Portrait of the Manager as a Young Author, Philipp Schoenthaler explains this unlikely alliance between business and storytelling. The contradictions are immediately apparent. If, as the philosopher Hans Blumenberg writes, stories are told to pass the time, managers would seem to have little time to spare. And yet, Schoenthaler reports, stories are useful in handling complexity. When digital information flows too quickly and exceeds the capacity of the human brain, narrative can provide communicative efficiency and effectiveness. Words and numbers both vouch for truth, are both instrumentalized by management, and are inextricably interdependent. What happens, if narrative becomes ubiquitous? Does the commercialization of narratives have an effect on literature? Through the lens of storytelling, Schoenthaler explores the relationship between economics and literature and describes a form of writing that takes place in their shared spheres. Most books on storytelling in the corporate world are written by business writers; this book offers the perspective of an award-winning literary author, who considers both the impact of storytelling on business and the impact of business on literature.

In this important new book, Daniel Loick argues that in order to become sensible to the violence imbedded in our political routines, philosophy must question the current forms of political community - the ways in which it organizes and executes its decisions, in which it creates and interprets its laws - much more radically than before. It must become a critical theory of sovereignty and in doing so eliminate coercion from the law. The book opens with a historical reconstruction of the concept of sovereignty in Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. Loick applies Adorno and Horkheimer's notion of a 'dialectic of Enlightenment' to the political sphere, demonstrating that whenever humanity deemed itself progressing from chaos and despotism, it at the same time prolonged exactly the violent forms of interaction it wanted to rid itself from. He goes on to assemble critical theories of sovereignty, using Walter Benjamin's distinction between 'law-positing' and 'law-preserving' violence as a terminological source, engaging with Marx, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben and Derrida, and adding several other dimensions of violence in order to draw a more complete picture. Finally, Loick proposes the idea of non-coercive law as a consequence of a critical theory of sovereignty. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International - Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Boersenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publisher & Booksellers Association)

In this important new book, Daniel Loick argues that in order to become sensible to the violence imbedded in our political routines, philosophy must question the current forms of political community - the ways in which it organizes and executes its decisions, in which it creates and interprets its laws - much more radically than before. It must become a critical theory of sovereignty and in doing so eliminate coercion from the law. The book opens with a historical reconstruction of the concept of sovereignty in Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. Loick applies Adorno and Horkheimer's notion of a 'dialectic of Enlightenment' to the political sphere, demonstrating that whenever humanity deemed itself progressing from chaos and despotism, it at the same time prolonged exactly the violent forms of interaction it wanted to rid itself from. He goes on to assemble critical theories of sovereignty, using Walter Benjamin's distinction between 'law-positing' and 'law-preserving' violence as a terminological source, engaging with Marx, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben and Derrida, and adding several other dimensions of violence in order to draw a more complete picture. Finally, Loick proposes the idea of non-coercive law as a consequence of a critical theory of sovereignty. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International - Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Boersenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publisher & Booksellers Association)

On Facebook and fake news, selfies and self-consciousness, selling our souls to the Internet, and other aspects of the digital revolution. With these engaging and provocative essays, Roberto Simanowski considers what new media has done to us. Why is digital privacy being eroded and why does society seem not to care? Why do we escape from living and loving the present into capturing, sharing and liking it? And how did we arrive at a selfie society without self-consciousness? Simanowski, who has been studying the Internet and social media since the 1990s, goes deeper than the conventional wisdom. For example, on the question of Facebook's responsibility for the election of Donald Trump, he argues that the problem is not the "fake news" but the creation of conditions that make people susceptible to fake news. The hallmark of the Internet is its instantaneousness, but, Simanowski cautions, speed is the enemy of depth. On social media, he says, "complex arguments are jettisoned in favor of simple slogans, text in favor of images, laborious explorations at understanding the world and the self in favor of amusing banalities, deep engagement in favor of the click." Simanowski wonders if we have sold our soul to Silicon Valley, as Faust sold his to the Devil; credits Edward Snowden for making privacy a news story; looks back at 1984, 1984, and Apple's famous sledgehammer commercial; and considers the shitstorm, mapping waves of Internet indignation-including one shitstorm that somehow held Adidas responsible for the killing of dogs in Ukraine. "Whatever gets you through the night," sang John Lennon in 1974. Now, Simanowski says, it's Facebook that gets us through the night; and we have yet to grasp the implications of this.

Meditations, aphorisms, maxims, notes, and comments construct a philosophy of thought congruent with the inconsistency of our reality. Those who continue to think never return to their point of departure. -Inconsistencies These 130 short texts-aphoristic, interlacing, and sometimes perplexing-target a perennial philosophical problem: Our consciousness and our experience of reality are inconsistent, fragmentary, and unstable; God is dead, and our identity as subjects discordant. How can we establish a new mode of thought that does not cling to new gods or the false security of rationality? Marcus Steinweg, as he did in his earlier book The Terror of Evidence, constructs a philosophical position from fragments, maxims, meditations, and notes, formulating a philosophy of thought that expresses and enacts the inconsistency of our reality. Steinweg considers, among other topics, life as a game ("To think is to play because no thought is firmly grounded"); sexuality ("wasteful, contradictory, and contingent"); desire ("Desire has a thousand names; It's earned none of them"); reality ("overdetermined and excessively complex"); and world ("a nonconcept"). He disposes of philosophy in one sentence ("Philosophy is a continual process of its own redefinition.") but spends multiple pages on "A Tear in Immanence," invoking Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and others. He describes "Wandering with Foucault" ("Thought entails wandering as well as straying into madness") and brings together Derrida and Debord. He poses a question: "Why should a cat be more mysterious than a dog?" and later answers one: "Beauty is truth because truth is beauty." By the end, we have accompanied Steinweg on converging trains of thought. "Thinking means continuing to think," he writes, adding "But thinking can only pose questions by answering others." The question of inconsistency? Asked and answered, and asked.

Meditations, maxims, aphorisms, notes, and comments address topics that range from pathos and genius to careerism and club sandwiches. Marcus Steinweg's capacity to implicate the other is beautiful, bright, precise, and logical, grounded in everyday questions, which to him are always big questions. -from the foreword by Thomas Hirschhorn The houses of philosophy need not be palaces. -Marcus Steinweg, "House," The Terror of Evidence This is the first book by the prolific German philosopher Marcus Steinweg to be available in English translation. The Terror of Evidence offers meditations, maxims, aphorisms, notes, and comments-191 texts ranging in length from three words to three pages-the deceptive simplicity of which challenges the reader to think. "Thinking means getting lost again and again," Steinweg observes. Reality is the ever-broken promise of consistency; "the terror of evidence" arises from the inconsistency before our eyes. Thinking is a means of coping with that inconsistency. Steinweg is known for his collaborations with Thomas Hirschhorn and the lectures and texts he has provided for many of Hirschhorn's projects. This translation of The Terror of Evidence includes a foreword by Hirschhorn written especially for the MIT Press edition. The subjects of these short texts vary widely. ("The table of contents is in itself excessive and ambitious," writes Hirschhorn.) They include pathos, passivity, genius, resentment, love, horror, catastrophe, and racism. And club sandwiches (specifically, Foucault's love for this American specialty), blow jobs, and dance. Also: "Two Kinds of Obscurantism," "Putting Words in Spinoza's Mouth," "Note on Rorty," and "Doubting Doubt." The Terror of Evidence can be considered a guidebook to thinking: the daily journey of exploration, the incessant questioning of reality that Steinweg sees as the task of philosophy.