Darkness changes what we notice. It softens the edges of the familiar, expands the imagination, and pulls our eyes upward. After Dark explores what becomes visible when the lights go out.
About Curiosity Collective
Step beyond the ordinary with Curiosity Collective, where adults gather for thoughtful conversations in venues across Denver—from bookstores and cafés to bars and cultural spaces. Each event brings together speakers from very different backgrounds to explore a single theme from unexpected perspectives. Talks are short, engaging, and rooted in personal experience or professional insight. After both talks, the audience submits questions, votes on what to explore further, and joins a collective conversation. See upcoming events in our calendar.
Revered for his magnificent works of fiction, Jorge Luis Borges thought of himself primarily as a poet. Poems of the Night is a moving collection of the great literary visionary's poetic meditations on nighttime, darkness, and the crepuscular world of visions and dreams, themes that speak implicitly to the blindness that overtook Borges late in life-and yet the poems here are drawn from the full span of Borges's career. Featuring such poems as "History of the Night" and "In Praise of Darkness" and more than fifty others in luminous translations by an array of distinguished translators-among them W.S. Merwin, Christopher Maurer, Alan Trueblood, and Alastair Reid-this volume brings to light many poems that have never appeared in English, presenting them en face with their Spanish originals.
A night sky is not an absence of light; it is the presence of the universe. In The Wild Dark, master storyteller Craig Childs embarks on a quest to bike from the blinding lights of the Las Vegas Strip to one of the darkest spots in North America. Childs is a fearless explorer of both the natural world and the human imagination, making him the perfect guide to help us rediscover the heavens and to ask: "What does it do to us to not see the night sky?" In a book that is at once an adventure story, a field guide, and a celebration of wonder, Childs invites us to look up and to look inward, eyes wide and sparkling with stars.
Explore the star-studded cosmos with this fully updated, user-friendly skywatcher's guide, filled with charts, graphics, photographs, and expert tips for viewing -- and understanding -- the wonders of space. Stargazing's too much fun to leave to astronomers. In these inviting pages, "Night Sky Guy" Andrew Fazekas takes an expert but easygoing approach that will delight would-be astronomers of all levels. Essential information, organized logically, brings the solar system, stars, and planets to life in your own backyard. Start with the easiest constellations and then "star-hop" across the night sky to find others nearby. Learn about the dark side of the moon, how to pick Mars out of a planetary lineup, and which kinds of stars twinkle in your favorite constellations. Hands-on tips and techniques for observing with the naked eye, binoculars, or a telescope help make the most out of sightings and astronomical phenomena such as eclipses and meteor showers. Photographs and graphics present key facts in an easy-to-understand format, explaining heavenly phenomena such as black holes, solar flares, and supernovas. Revised to make skywatching even easier for the whole family, this indispensable guide shines light on the night sky--truly one of the greatest shows on Earth!
Follow the journey of two young adults, Joshua and Claire, each individually shaped by the day the sky went dark, but drawn to each other because of it. Coming of age in this new landscape, they will be forced to confront and challenge notions of identity, guilt, and survival as the darkness grows around them. When fear threatens to envelop all hope they have left, the two discover that love, family, and finding the true light in a world seemingly robbed of any, will guide their way forward.
From Annette Giesecke, bestselling author of Classical Mythology A to Z, this is the only book for adults that tells the stories of the myths and legends that underpin all 88 named constellations in the night sky--from Andromeda to Orion to Virgo. Includes star maps of the northern and southern hemispheres.
A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in twenty-four hours. A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots a day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space-not toward the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts-from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan-have left their lives behind to travel at warp speed as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live.
A wise and subtle work from one of Germany's greatest living authors on the refractive power of memory, art, and how we live in the lives of others.
I see something out there, in the woods. It does not have a face. They call it the King's Breakfast. One bite and you can understand the full scope of the universe; one bite and you can commune with forgotten gods beyond human comprehension. And it only grows deep in the Pamogo forest, where the trees crowd so tight that the forest floor is pitch black day and night, where rumors of disappearing hikers and strange cults that worship the divine feminine abound. Sarah is a trans woman who makes her living growing mushrooms. When a bad harvest leaves her in a desperate fix, the lure of the King's Breakfast has her journeying into those vast uncharted woods. But as she descends deeper, she realizes she's not alone. Something in the forest is waking up. It's hungry -- and it wants her.
With Opening to Darkness, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel explores darkness as a cosmic landscape for transformation within unsettling times, rooting her teachings in indigenous earth-based wisdom, her Buddhist practice, and her lived experience. For Manuel, darkness is both a universal concept and embodied experience-and she's witnessed firsthand how our cultural rejections of darkness can have painful, real-world effects. Here, we're asked to confront the questions: What has been lost in our pursuit of the light? And what has or has not been born into ourselves and our world because we fear, oppress, and misunderstand the dark? Here, Manuel introduces eight deities who guide us through gateways into different aspects of darkness, providing reflective inquiry, blessings, and meditations through the essence of Buddha's Eightfold Path: Haitian Mama Dantor helps us face childhood fears of the dark, West African Mami Wata embraces us while dwelling in darkness, and forest-dweller Mama Black Panther senses the truth of what lies in the shadows. Opening to Darkness is a profound invitation to explore our collective and personal relationship with darkness and blackness, so that we are skilled, intuitive, and awake in the absence of light.
In Neil deGrasse Tyson's delightful journey through the cosmos, his fictional character Merlin responds to popular questions asked by adults and children alike. Merlin, a timeless visitor from Planet Omniscia in the Andromeda Galaxy, has observed firsthand many of the major scientific events of Earth's history. Merlin's friends include the most important scientific figures and explorers of all time--da Vinci, Magellan, Newton, Einstein, and Hubble. While Merlin occasionally recounts playful conversations with these luminaries, all questions are answered with authentic science, infused with wit, wisdom, and an occasional rhyme. With the help of intermittent humorous cartoons, Merlin clarifies the details of familiar phenomena like gravity, light, space, and time, and travels to distant stars and galaxies to describe what makes them tick, rotate, explode, and collapse. Merlin's Tour of the Universe is perfect for anyone who harbors burning questions on how the cosmos works.