Forthcoming from P-Wave Press: Pushing the Wave 2025
"I began this year's volume expecting to write about technology, about politics and about the noise of the world. I did, but I also found myself writing about what we carry with us: an old camera, an unlabelled mixtape, a grandmother's flapjacks. The news, it turns out, was always being filtered through the lens of what we choose to carry with us and what we choose to leave behind."
P-Wave Press is delighted to announce that Pushing the Wave 2025, the fourth volume in L.A. Davenport's series of illustrated essay collections, will be published on 17 November 2026, in both hardback and paperback.
Drawn from a year of weekly columns at pushingthewave.co.uk—revised, expanded and annotated for this edition—the collection ranges from the trillion-dollar frenzy of the AI bubble to the weaponisation of free speech online, from a Washington D.C. locked in government shutdown to the particular ache of returning to a Berlin that can no longer be found. Throughout, Davenport pursues the argument that has run through the series since its beginning: that the problem is never the machine, but the hand that guides it.
The book also contains two new essays written specially for this edition. In "Photography road", Davenport traces his decades-long relationship with the camera, from a sister's raffle-won compact to a battered 1950s Soviet rangefinder; "A London charter" accompanies the photographs that trace his long observation of the capital. In between those pieces, the usual companions of the series appear: recipes that become acts of remembrance, films weighed and compared, music rediscovered, and, closing the volume, the story of a mixtape given to a gauche young man in the dying days of a Knightsbridge menswear store, and of the borrowed "cool" it carried.
From a battered camera to an unlabelled cassette tape. Between them lies a year of trying to look more closely and to resist easy answers.
Pushing the Wave 2025 is available to preorder now:
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