Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Darwin called the Galápagos archipelago “a little world within itself,” unaffected by humans and set on its own evolutionary path – strange, diverse, and unique. Islands are repositories of unique cultures and ways of living, seed banks built up in relative isolation. Island is an archipelago of ideas, drawing from research and first-hand experience living, working, and traveling to islands as far afield as Madeira and Cape Verde, Orkney and Svalbard, the Aran Islands and the Gulf Islands, Hong Kong and Manhattan. Islands have long been viewed as both paradise and prison – we project onto them our deepest desires for freedom and escape, but also our greatest fears of forced isolation. This book asks: what can islands teach us about living sustainably, being alone or coexisting with others, coping with uncertainty, and making do? Island explores these and other questions and ideas, but is constructed above all from the stories and experiences gathered during a lifetime of island hopping. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic. “An eloquent, thoughtful and thought-provoking read ... unreservedly recommended.” ― MBR Bookwatch “a poignant account of islands and island-ness” ― Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place (2023) “Julian Hanna explores islands in concept and experience through erudite, witty and often moving reflections on a life spent archipelago-hopping. He moves nimbly from seemingly unrelated themes - modernist literature, the attractions of British post-punk to Vancouver Island teenagers in the 1980s, sustainable energy, and the problems of exile and return - in narrative that ultimately reveals the distinctive ways that islands bring people together.” ― Alixe Bovey, Executive Dean and Deputy Director, The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK “Smart, witty, and poignant, Island playfully sends us Julian Hanna's chapters as messages in a bottle from a series of islands, including Vancouver Island, Eday, Hong Kong, Madeira, São Vicente, and Spitsbergen. Inventively mixing criticism, travel writing, and memoir, this sparkling lyrical book reveals islands to be fascinating and fragile spaces that connect and separate, serving as place and metaphor, exile and sanctuary, journey and destination. Island gives us object lessons not just about islands, but also about love and grief and what makes us human. Reading it in Vancouver Island, in one exhilarating sitting, I couldn't put it down.” ― Alison Chapman FRSC, Professor of English, University of Victoria, Canada “Each essay, rich with philosophical allusions, some poetry, occasional jokes, offers a little world unto itself (just like, hey, an island), but there's a charming recurring motif: every piece is metaphorically delivered to the reader as a message in a bottle, as if being cast upon the sea.” ― Perceptive Travel Julian Hanna teaches Culture Studies at Tilburg University, Netherlands, where his research focuses on critical intersections between culture, politics, and technology. His books include Island (Bloomsbury, 2024) in the Object Lessons series, The Manifesto Handbook: 95 Theses on an Incendiary Form (2020), and Key Concepts in Modernist Literature (2008). Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016). Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.