Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. X-rays are powerful, moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a tryptic of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a transparent world and the belief that transparency conveys truth. It stands to reason then that our relationship with X-rays would be a complicated one of fear and fascination, acceptance and resistance, confusion and curiosity. X-ray reveals the paradox of living in an age that relies on X-rays to expose hidden threats to our health and security and fears X-rays for that exposure. Nicole Lobdell explores when, where, and how we use X-rays, what meanings we give them, what metaphors we make out of them, and why, despite our fears, we’re still fascinated with them. In doing so, she draws from a variety of fields, including the history of medicine, science and technology studies, literature, art, material culture, film, comics, gender studies, architecture, and industrial design. In the 125 years since their discovery, X-rays haven’t changed, but we have. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 is an edited anthology that seeks to explain just how rock and roll is a Romantic phenomenon that sheds light, retrospectively, on what literary Romanticism was at its different points of origin and on what it has become in the present. This anthology allows Byron and Wollstonecraft to speak back to contemporary theories of Romanticism through Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Relying on Loewy and Sayre's Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, it explores how hostility, loss, and longing for unity are particularly appropriate terms for classic rock as well as the origins of these emotions. In essays ranging from Bob Dylan to Blackberry Smoke, this work examines how rock and roll expands, interprets, restates, interrogates, and conflicts with literary Romanticism, all the while understanding that as a term "rock and roll" in reference to popular music from the late 1940s through the early 2000s is every bit as contradictory and difficult to define as the word Romanticism itself.

The Invisible Man stands out as possessing one of the most complicated heroes, or perhaps anti-heroes, inliterature. Griffin is not a naive dreamer such as Moreau's Pendick or a hapless victim of circumstanceslike the unnamed narrator of The War of the Worlds. He is a man of great genius and great faults. Perhapsclosest in character to the time traveler, the invisible man wants to the change the world through hisinvention. Griffin's genius, however, is selfish-no one profits from his experiments, not even himself. Athoroughly unlikeable character defined by impulsiveness, arrogance, rudeness, and, at times, violence,Griffin is a man of the late-nineteenth century-he is a man of the future. The Invisible Man is not only acommentary on the great spirit of invention that elevated the nineteenth century but also a warning againstthe eugenic and self-interested policies that almost destroyed the twentieth century.

Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 is an edited anthology that seeks to explain just how rock and roll is a Romantic phenomenon that sheds light, retrospectively, on what literary Romanticism was at its different points of origin and on what it has become in the present. This anthology allows Byron and Wollstonecraft to speak back to contemporary theories of Romanticism through Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Relying on Loewy and Sayre's Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, it explores how hostility, loss, and longing for unity are particularly appropriate terms for classic rock as well as the origins of these emotions. In essays ranging from Bob Dylan to Blackberry Smoke, this work examines how rock and roll expands, interprets, restates, interrogates, and conflicts with literary Romanticism, all the while understanding that as a term "rock and roll" in reference to popular music from the late 1940s through the early 2000s is every bit as contradictory and difficult to define as the word Romanticism itself.