Join us in-store with Clear Mind Press to celebrate their 3rd birthday with a Kitschmas event! New books, conversations, song and cake!

Books to be launched include:

Unmasking a Marriage by Patricia May

The 21st Century Self by Robert Saltzman

The Great Kitschification by Suzanne Visser

About the books:

Unmasking a Marriage by Patricia May

Sal finds herself feeling unexpectedly content during her stay in hospital. The care and attention she receives make it feel like a luxurious holiday, and she's reluctant to leave. As she starts to wonder what would happen if she never went home, the novel takes a haunting turn.

This exquisite exploration of contrast delves into the complexities of identity, purpose, and the meaning of home. As Sal navigates her way through her own desires and the expectations of others, readers will be entranced by this emotionally resonant story.

The 21st Century Self by Robert Saltzman

In The 21st Century Self, Robert Saltzman draws readers into a series of radical reflections on consciousness, illusion, and the construction of meaning in an age shaped by artificial intelligence. Moving between memoir, philosophy, cultural critique, and psychological insight, Saltzman writes with a lucidity that cuts through spiritual platitudes and intellectual posturing. Each essay in this volume is an invitation to confront the machinery behind selfhood—its loops, projections, and mirages—with unflinching clarity.

Written in Saltzman's singular style—raw, intimate, poetic—these pieces return again and again to a simple, unsettling premise: the self is a story, and the story no longer holds. Whether exploring AI as the new mirror of human delusion, dissecting spiritual bypass and techno-messianism, or speaking from the aching honesty of lived experience, Saltzman refuses false consolation. What remains is presence, contact, compassion, and the flicker of awareness in a world that no longer guarantees meaning.

This is not a guidebook. It is not a map. It is the weather itself.

The Great Kitschification by Suzanne Visser

The essays gathered in The Great Kitschification are an aesthetic diagnosis, surgically precise and intellectually generous, of true art versus the simulation of art called kitsch.

Suzanne Visser ties together the sensibilities of artists who could never be mistaken for kitsch to extract from their work something elemental: the stubborn trace of a human at risk.

They are the ground of Suzanne's claim: that art is not reducible to output, but emerges from a condition of attention no machine can replicate.

Visser shows how easily an aesthetic of abundance-instant variation, infinite remix-can flood the eye while starving the soul. What is lost, she argues, is not originality per se, but orientation: the slow attunement that links gesture to meaning and maker to world.

These essays invite, with uncommon clarity, a form of looking that resists the quick reward. The defense of authenticity here is not moralistic. It is procedural. Visser asks: How was this made? By whom? Under what constraints? These questions are not barriers to appreciation, but its preconditions.

Why does this matter now? Because we stand at a moment when the apparatus of imitation is accelerating faster than our ability to discern what is being lost. Visser's book argues for human specificity. For the value of friction. For the slowness of bodies and hands, and the imperfect echo of memory in material. What is offered here is not a doctrine, but a form of resistance-not anti-AI, but pro-art.

Contact the host of Clear Mind Press presents a Kitschmas event!

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