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A working library

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A working library is a project about work, reading & technology by mandy brown

Author
mandy brown
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Copyright 2008–2026 mandy brown
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davewiner/blogroll
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We

In a glass-walled city ruled by the totalitarian One State, citizens have no privacy, no identity, no freedom, and no names: they each bear only a number.

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Reformed

A trained secret police is still the secret police.

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The Salt Eaters

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”

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Designed to be specialists

What kind of people are we designing now?

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The Waves

Six children—three girls and three boys—play in a garden by the sea.

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Pseudo-culture

Trust your own eyes.

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A Strategy for Labor

“A system that makes people work like zombies to produce useless, destructive, or self-destructive things has outlived its usefulness.”

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Patient urgency

“Psychological experiences require patience while so much in the world demands urgency.”

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The Cancer Journals

Between 1978 and 1980, Audre Lorde wrote about her experience with breast cancer and mastectomy, connecting her trials and treatment to her own work and to the collective effort of liberation for all women.

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Loss of an ideal

From phenomena to pathology.

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Burnout

Hannah Proctor visits the concept of burnout as the experience of political defeat—the disappointment, despair, and grief that emerges when one becomes aware that the political project they have committed themselves to may not succeed.

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Sisters of the Yam

bell hooks approaches notions of self-care among communities of Black women, locating it within the work of grief, testimony, and reconciliation.

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Tyrannies and servilities

The tyranny of government is the tyranny of the workplace is the tyranny of the home.

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Annals of the Western Shore

In these three short novels, Le Guin takes us to the Western Shore, where people of magic and people of war and people of books all try to make their lives together.

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What books are for

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

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Searoad

This collection of interlocking stories tells of the people who live in a small town on the Oregon coast.

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Live at enmity with unreality

“What is meant by ‘reality’?” asks Virginia Woolf.

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Mitz

In the summer of 1934, Leonard and Virginia Woolf adopted a marmoset named Mitz.

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Where there is a wall

“Are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war?”

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A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas

This pair of essays from Virginia Woolf attends to women’s exclusion from educational institutions and economic independence on two fronts.

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Thingness

A politics of refusal must be more than a closed door.

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Psychology of craft

“Shaping, handling, and doing something with the psychic stuff.”

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Undersense

Knowledge that you can feel in your bones.

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The Empusium

In 1913, a young Pole arrives at a health resort in the Silesian mountains, a place known to be free of consumption due to the still, damp air.

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An imaginative activity

“We should dissociate ‘work’ from the Herculean labor and return the idea of work to the example of the dream.”

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The Dream and the Underworld

“When we wrong the dream, we wrong the soul.”

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We were angry

To heal a wound is to account for the wounding.

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Beyond credibility

To believe in supremacy is to refuse to see what’s right in front of you, over and over and over again.

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Trauma and Recovery

Herman’s canonical work focuses on the necessity of understanding trauma within a social and political context.

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Hurry-up-quick!

The purpose of haste is to prevent any semblance of rest.