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The Lemoine Affair was inspired by the real-life French scandal involving Henri Lemoine, who claimed he could manufacture diamonds from coal and convinced numerous people — including officers of the De Beers diamond mine company and Proust himself — to invest in the scheme. In a series of pastiches — imitations written in the style of other writers — Proust tells the story of the embarrassment rippling across high society Paris in the wake of the scandal, poking fun at himself (in one story, a character declares that Marcel Proust is so embarrassed he’s suicidal) while lampooning some of France’s greatest writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, and Saint-Simon. Full of sophisticated wit and dazzling wordplay, and rife with allusions to his friend and fictional characters, many Proust scholars see the dead-on mimicry of The Lemoine Affair — written soon after Proust’s rejection of society life—as the work by which he honed his own unique, masterly voice.

With death looming, Jacques Derrida, the world's most famous philosopher sat down with journalist Jean Birnbaum of the French daily Le Monde. They revisited his life's work and his impending death in a long, surprisingly accessible, and moving final interview. The Derrida found in this book is open and engaging, reflecting on a long career challenging important tenets of European philosophy from Plato to Marx. The contemporary meaning of Derrida's work is also examined, including a discussion of his many political activities. But, as Derrida says, "To philosophize is to learn to die"; as such, this philosophical discussion turns to the realities of his imminent death — including life with a fatal cancer. In the end, this interview remains a touching final look at a long and distinguished career.

The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as "the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality." The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to "spread anarchy and live communism." Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the "war on terror." Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.

This great modernist masterpiece, which for many readers seems so intimidating, is one of the great books that can teach us how to live better lives. Declan Kiberd shows that Ulysses, far from being the epitome of elitism, was always intended as a book for the common people, rooted in their experience and offering a democratic and humane vision of a tolerant, decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the book’s hero, shows the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the streets of Dublin. In his apparently banal way he sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of Homer, Dante and the Bible - all sources that Joyce drew on in the writing of his book. Ulysses and Us can also be read as a guide to Joyce, his novel and its context in the history of Ireland, and of Dublin, where the action of Ulysses takes place over a single day. Ulysses continues to be one of the central books of the twentieth century and this is an audacious new take on it, designed to remove it from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Joyce industry and restore it to its shocking, democratic origins. Kiberd has written a moving and controversial book, free of literary-critical jargon and specialist concerns. With it he confirms his position as one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals.

In 1939, following her marriage, the poet Lynette Roberts went to live in a small village in Wales. This experience, both enriching and isolating, became the source of some of her extraordinary poetry. Her diary observes daily life in a Welsh village in wartime with a poetic intensity: communal harvest, the arrival of evacuees, a frozen water pump, the cadences of voices and the effects of light and rain. Seven haunting stories weave modernist myths of Wales, while her magazine articles explore Welsh life with an anthropologist's eye. Roberts's restless intelligence never limits itself to the local. She writes about Picasso and Le Corbusier, about a visit to Spain on the trail of Lorca, the solemn drama of afternoon tea with the Sitwells, the comic disaster of taking her young children to visit T.S. Eliot. Enquiring, unsentimental, wryly humorous, Roberts engages us with her speaking voice. The publication of Lynette Roberts's Collected Poems in 2005 restored her to her place in twentieth-century poetry. This collection of her prose writings, most published here for the first time, accompanied by evocative family photographs, discloses the world that she transformed into poetry.

Envy, irritation, paranoia - in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialised affect called "animatedness", and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called "stuplimity". She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-20th Century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.

The world is a very big place, so it is easy to take your eye off all of the ball and focus on just one tiny part. Whilst the media decides that at any particular moment our attention should be focussed on Iraq or Iran or North Korea lots of other things are, inevitably, going on in lots of other places. Whilst few of us have the time or energy or intellectual capability to be experts on the entire gamut of global foreign policy, we should at least be aware then when one particular country is nominated for attention as Public Enemy Number One that means that issues in the rest of the world are, simultaneously, being quite deliberately pushed off the news agenda. Whilst the world's attention has recently been focussed on the problems of the Middle East, the administration of George Bush II was building a worryingly substantial military presence in Africa. Ostensibly, this was to "combat the growth of Al-Qaeda in Somalia, Algeria and other countries on the continent." Jeremy Keenan shows, however, in his shocking and excellent book Dark Sahara: America's War on Terror in Africa, that it is a myth to suggest that Africa is a dangerous hot-bed of Islamist terrorism. According to Keenan, the American government -- along with the anti-Islamic government of Algeria -- "were responsible for hostage takings blamed on Islamic militants... allowing the US to establish military bases in the region and pursue multiple imperial objectives in the name of security." This is a disquieting book, but an essential one, showing that it is America's interference in the 'dark continent' that is making it such a dangerous place creating chaos that supports and advances America's own neo-imperialist agenda. Sadly, America is not the world's blameless white knight, and Africa-expert Jeremy Keenan is to be congratulated for showing just how far its actions diverge from its profoundly inaccurate self-image.

Adrift in Berlin and with no desire to return home to Mexico, Tatiana cultivates solitude while trying to distance herself from the city's past. Yet the phantoms of Berlin - seeping in through the floorboards of her apartment, lingering in the abandoned subterranea - are more alive to her than the people she passes on her daily walks. When she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive historian Doktor Weiss, her life in Berlin becomes more complex. Through Weiss, she meets Jonas, a meteorologist who, as a child in the GDR, took solace in the sky's constant shape-shifting, an antidote to his unyielding and grim reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds begin to change. Unfolding with the strange, charged logic of a dream, Book of Clouds is a haunting, beautifully drawn portrait of a city forever in flux, and of the myths we cling to in order to give shape to our lives. From a crowded U-Bahn where Hitler appears dressed as an old woman, to an underground Gestapo bowling alley whose walls bear score marks of games long settled, Chloe Aridjis guides us through Berlin with wit and compassion, showing why cities, like people, cannot outrun their pasts.

In Requiem for Communism Charity Scribner examines the politics of memory in post-industrial literature and art. Writers and artists from Europe's second world have responded to the last socialist crisis with works that range from sober description to melancholic fixation. This book is the first survey of this cultural field. For many writers and artists on the left, the fallout of the last century's socialist crisis calls for an elegy. This regret has prompted a proliferation of literary texts and artworks, as well as a boom in museum exhibitions that race to curate the wreckage of socialism and its industrial remnants. The best of these works do not take us back to the factory. Rather they look for something to take out of it: the intractable moments of solidarity among men and women that did not square with the market or the plan. Requiem for Communism explores a selection of signal works. They include John Berger's narrative trilogy Into Their Labors; Documenta, the German platform for contemporary art and ideas; Krzysztof Kieslowski's cinema of mourning and Andrzej Wajda's filmed chronicles of the Solidarity movement; the art of Joseph Beuys and Rachel Whiteread; the novels of Christa Wolf; and Leslie Kaplan's antinostalgic memoir of women's material labour in France. Sorting among the ruins of the second world, the critical minds of contemporary Europe aim to salvage both the remains of socialist ideals and the latent feminist potential that attended them.

When it was first published in 1927, The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets was intended by its compiler, Sir John Collings Squire, to complement the well-known poetry anthologies of Francis Turner Palgrave and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Squire began the task of assembling his anthology by deliberately omitting over one hundred greater poets, giving precedence to Nicholas Breton and John Clare in the place of Shakespeare and Tennyson. Although some familiar names such as Thomas Dekker, John Bunyan, Washington Irving, and Herman Melville appear in the collection, the focus remains on those who lack prominence in the canon, including many medieval poets whose identities are unknown. Drawing together a considerable number of first-rate and undervalued poets, The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets is an essential supplement to the traditional anthologies of English verse of the past.

While his old furniture rots in storage, Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris, with little but a library reader's card to distinguish him from the city's untouchables. Every person he sees seems to carry their death with them, and he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which only he remains. The only novel by one of the greatest writers of poetry in German, the semi-autobiographical Notebooks is an uneasy, compelling and poetic book that anticipated Sartre and is full of passages of lyrical brilliance. Michael Hulse's new translation perfectly conveys the unsettling beauty of the original and is accompanied by an introduction on Rilke's life and the biographical and literary influences on the Notebooks. This edition also includes suggested further reading, a chronology and notes.

A translation of the Book of Genesis, which attempts to recover the meanings of the ancient Hebrew and convey them in modern English prose. It is accompanied by a commentary and annotations, and aims to illuminate the original work without any touch of the fake antique by the noted Biblical scholar Robert Alter, the Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. James Wood declared it a "remarkable translation... a monument of scholarship... Alter brings a kind of sensitivity to bear on moment after moment of his translation..."

Terry Eagleton's witty and polemical Reason, Faith, and Revolution is bound to cause a stir among scientists, theologians, people of faith and people of no faith, as well as general readers eager to understand the God Debate. On the one hand, Eagleton demolishes what he calls the 'superstitious' view of God held by most atheists and agnostics, and offers in its place a revolutionary account of the Christian Gospel. On the other hand, he launches a stinging assault on the betrayal of this revolution by institutional Christianity.There is little joy here, then, either for the anti-God brigade -- Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in particular -- nor for many conventional believers. Instead, Eagleton offers his own vibrant account of religion and politics in a book that ranges from the Holy Spirit to the recent history of the Middle East, from Thomas Aquinas to the Twin Towers.

One of the most important jobs that history can do is to make what we think is familiar strange again. When we become estranged from engrained patterns of thinking we can then begin to think more clearly about a subject. We think we know how Britain was in the Seventies; and we think we know it was rubbish! Rubbish fashion, rubbish politics, rubbish industrial relations and rubbish not being collected because the binmen were on strike because of the rubbish industrial relations again! But Alwyn W. Turner's Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s reminds us there was far more to the Seventies than flares and flock wallpaper. In many ways, the Seventies was a golden decade: it was when much that was started in the vaunted Sixties actually happened. For instance, wealth inequality was "at a record low" and, key for Turner's narrative, it was when popular culture really began to dominate the mainstream. The fascist National Front might have been on the march, inflation might have been on the rise, and power cuts might have been on everyone's mind, but Morecambe & Wise was on the telly, Get Carter was on at the pictures, and glam rock was giving way to the energy and DIY radicalism of punk. Turner never pretends that, for instance, the Troubles in Northern Ireland weren't tragic nor that that shameful racism of an Enoch Powell wasn't unforgiveably troubling, but he does remind us that, for many in Britain, the Seventies was a decade we could do well to remember properly and that means seeing past the cliche that it has become and understanding the past for what it really was.

Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston's critical biography of the Romanian-born French philosopher E.M. Cioran focuses on his crucial formative years as a mystical revolutionary attracted to right-wing nationalist politics in interwar Romania, his writings of this period, and his self-imposed exile to France in 1937. This move led to his transformation into one of the most famous French moralists of the 20th century. As an enthusiast of the anti-rationalist philosophies widely popular in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century, Cioran became an advocate of the fascistic Iron Guard.In her quest to understand how Cioran and other brilliant young intellectuals could have been attracted to such passionate national revival movements, Zarifopol-Johnston, herself a Romanian emigre, sought out the aging philosopher in Paris in the early 1990s and retraced his steps from his home village of Rasinari and youthful years in Sibiu, through his student years in Bucharest and Berlin, to his early residence in France. Her portrait of Cioran is complemented by an engaging autobiographical account of her rediscovery of her own Romanian past.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was the most original and inspiring writer and philosopher of our time. In a series of distinctive essays that are at once self-contained and intricately linked, Royle explores the legacies of Derrida's thinking in the context of philosophy, language, globalisation, war, terrorism, justice, the democracy to come, poetry, literature, memory, mourning, the gift, friendship and dreams. Lucid, inventive and at times funny, Royle allows us to appreciate how much Derrida's work has altered the ways we read and think. Autobiography, children's literature, the Gothic and modernist fiction, for example, figure together with philosophy, queer studies, speech act theory and psychoanalysis. The writings of Horace Walpole, Herman Melville, E.M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, Joe Brainard and David McKee are illuminatingly put in play alongside Shakespeare. Royle's book suggests that one of Derrida's most profound legacies has to do with the combination of responsibility and freedom his work inspires for both reading and writing. In Memory of Jacques Derrida offers an exceptionally clear overview of Derrida's work, while also tracing directions in which it might productively be read in the future.

Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon make headline news. However, while the general public has no trouble embracing avant garde and experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant garde and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under similar circumstances - and despite the fact that from Schoenberg and Kandinsky onwards, musicians and artists have made repeated efforts to establish a "synaesthesia" between their two media. This book examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find answers to the question: Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?

The moose, or 'elk' in Europe, is generally found in the temperate to subarctic forests of the Northern Hemisphere. In North America, that includes almost all of Canada, most of central and western Alaska, much of New England, the upper Rocky Mountains, Northeastern Minnesota, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Isle Royale in Lake Superior. Small but present moose populations have been verified as far south as the mountains of Colorado. Moose have been hunted for food since the Stone Age, are considered the national animal of Sweden and Norway, and the moose occurs frequently in the popular culture of the Northern Hemisphere, from the logo of Abercrombie and Fitch to Bullwinkle, of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Kevin Jackson's Moose describes and discusses moose evolution, diet, behaviour and environment, as well as every major aspect of the interactions between man and moose, from Julius Caesar's first mention of 'alces' in his history of the Gallic Wars to the planned construction of a 45-metre-high wooden moose in Sweden. Among the leading human figures in this story are Thomas Jefferson and Buffon, the great English painter George Stubbs, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Roosevelt and his Bull moose party and the poets Ted Hughes and Anne Sexton.The book also includes much colourful moose lore, such as the belief that moose hoof could cure epilepsy; an explanation of why Roosevelt called his breakaway political movement the Bull Moose Party; a fascinating digression on the Enlightenment controversy over moose and the Irish Elk; and why the moose is really an elk, and the elk is really a wapiti. Containing many illustrations of moose from nature and culture, and full of little-known fact and anecdote about this familiar and much-loved animal, Moose will appeal to cultural historians, literati, moose lovers, naturalists, zoologists and eccentrics everywhere.

This book is a defence of Modernism against its defenders. In readings of modern design, film and especially architecture, it attempts to reclaim a revolutionary modernism against its absorption into the heritage industry and the aesthetics of the luxury flat. Militant Modernism argues for a Modernism of everyday life, immersed in questions of socialism, sexual politics and technology. It features new readings of some familiar names - Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, Vladimir Mayakovsky - and much more on the lesser known, quotidian modernists of the 20th century. The chapters range from a study of industrial and brutalist aesthetics in Britain, Russian Constructivism in architecture, the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich in film and design, and the alienation effects of Brecht and Hanns Eisler on record and on screen. Against the world of 'there is no alternative', this book tries to excavate Modernism’s other futures.

Friedrich Engels is one of the most attractive and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous mercantile family in west Germany, he spent his career working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable, middle-class life of a Victorian gentleman. Yet Engels was also the co-founder of international communism - the philosophy which in the 20th century came to control one third of the human race. He was the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless party tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so Karl Marx could write Das Kapital. Tristram Hunt relishes the diversity and exuberance of Engels' era: how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his raucous personal life with this uncompromising political philosophy.Set against the backdrop of revolutionary Europe and industrializing England - of Manchester mills, Paris barricades, and East End strikes - it is a story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal.

The French resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II was a struggle in which ordinary people fought for their liberty, despite terrible odds and horrifying repression. Hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and women carried out an armed struggle against the Nazis, producing underground anti-fascist publications and supplying the Allies with vital intelligence. Based on hundreds of French eye-witness accounts and including recently-released archival material, The Resistance uses dramatic personal stories to take the reader on one of the great adventures of the 20th century. The tale begins with the catastrophic Fall of France in 1940, and shatters the myth of a unified Resistance created by General de Gaulle. In fact, De Gaulle never understood the Resistance, and sought to use, dominate and channel it to his own ends. Brave men and women set up organisations, only to be betrayed or hunted down by the Nazis, and to die in front of the firing squad or in the concentration camps. Over time, the true story of the Resistance got blurred and distorted, its heroes and conflicts were forgotten as the movement became a myth. By turns exciting, tragic and insightful, The Resistance reveals how one of the most powerful modern myths came to be forged and provides a gripping account of one of the most striking events in the 20th century.

In the summer of 2008, Kenneth Steven moved house, leaving behind the small square of ground that had been his garden for many years: a place of solitude, contemplation, observance and simple relaxation - a place for the mind to wander as the seasons pass. In Making the Known World New, this small oasis inspires reflections full of wonder at the variety, beauty, determination and sheer audacity of nature in a confined space. Acting as a microcosm, the garden also kindles thoughts of the wider world and the threat it faces. Each chapter is accompanied by poetry, complimenting and contextualizing the prose, making the know world new...

Critics have often focused on interiority in Beckett's works, privileging the mind over the body. In this new approach, the first sustained analysis of embodiment in Beckett's prose, drama and media works, Ulrika Maude argues that physical and sensory experience is in fact central to the understanding of Beckett's writing. In innovative readings of sight, hearing, touch and movement in the full range of Beckett's works, Ulrika Maude uncovers the author's effort to shed light on embodied experience, paying attention to Beckett’s interests in medicine and body-altering technologies such as prostheses. Through these material, bodily, concerns Beckett explores wider themes of subjectivity and experience, interiority and exteriority, foregrounding the inextricable relationship between the body, the senses and the self. This important new study offers a novel approach to Beckett, one in which the body takes its rightful place alongside the mind.

Through three intertwined histories Jane Austen's Textual Lives offers a new way of approaching and reading a very familiar author. One is a history of the transmission and transformation of Jane Austen through manuscripts, critical editions, biographies, and adaptations; a second provides a conspectus of the development of English Studies as a discipline in which the original and primary place of textual criticism is recovered; and a third reviews the role of Oxford University Press in shaping a canon of English texts in the twentieth century. Jane Austen can be discovered in all three. Since her rise to celebrity status at the end of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen has occupied a position within English-speaking culture that is both popular and canonical, accessible and complexly inaccessible, fixed and certain yet wonderfully amenable to shifts of sensibility and cultural assumptions. The implied contradiction was represented in the early twentieth century by, on the one hand, the Austen family's continued management, censorship, and sentimental marketing of the sweet lady novelist of the Hampshire countryside; and on the other, by R. W. Chapman's 1923 Clarendon Press edition of the Novels of Jane Austen, which subjected her texts to the kind of scholarly probing reserved till then for classical Greek and Roman authors obscured by centuries of attrition. It was to be almost fifty years before the Clarendon Press considered it necessary to recalibrate the reputation of another popular English novelist in this way. Beginning with specific encounters with three kinds of textual work and the problems, clues, or challenges to interpretation they continue to present, Kathryn Sutherland goes on to consider the absence of a satisfactory critical theory of biography that can help us address the partial life, and ends with a discussion of the screen adaptations through which the texts continue to live on. Throughout, Jane Austen's textual identities provide a means to explore the wider issue of what text is and to argue the importance of understanding textual space as itself a powerful agent established only by recourse to further interpretations and fictions.

Timekeeping is an essential activity in the modern world, and we take it for granted that our lives are shaped by the hours of the day. Yet what seems so ordinary today is actually the extraordinary outcome of centuries of technical innovation and circulation of ideas about time. Shaping the Day is a pathbreaking study of the practice of timekeeping in England and Wales between 1300 and 1800. Drawing on many unique historical sources, ranging from personal diaries to housekeeping manuals, Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift illustrate how a particular kind of common sense about time came into being, and how it developed during this period. Many remarkable figures make their appearance, ranging from the well-known, such as Edmund Halley, Samuel Pepys, and John Harrison, who solved the problem of longitude, to less familiar characters, including sailors, gamblers, and burglars. Overturning many common perceptions of the past-for example, that clock time and the industrial revolution were intimately related-this unique historical study will engage all readers interested in how 'telling the time' has come to dominate our way of life.

Quoting King Solomon's famous prayer to God at the Temple in Jerusalem, "Behold, the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded," Alicia Suskin Ostriker posits a God who cannot be contained by dogma and doctrine. Troubled by the way the Bible has become identified in our culture with a monolithic authoritarianism, Ostriker focuses instead on the extraordinary variability of Biblical writing. For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book is a provocative and inspiring re-interpretation of six essential Biblical texts: The Song of Songs, the Book of Ruth, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Jonah, and Job. In prose that is personal and probing, analytically acute and compellingly readable, Ostriker sees these writings as "counter-texts," deviating from convention yet deepening and enriching the Bible, our images of God, and our own potential spiritual lives. Attempting to understand "some of the wildest, strangest, most splendid writing in Western tradition," she shows how the Bible embraces sexuality and skepticism, boundary crossing and challenges to authority, how it illuminates the human psyche and mirrors our own violent times, and how it asks us to make difficult choices in the quest for justice. For better or worse, our society is wedded to the Bible. But according to Talmud, "There is always another interpretation." Ostriker demonstrates that the Bible, unlike its reputation, offers a plenitude of surprises.

Paul Sturgis is a retired banker manager who lives alone in a dark little flat. He walks alone and dines alone, seeking out and taking pleasure in small exchanges with strangers: the cheerful Australian girl who cuts his hair, the lady at the drycleaners. His only relative, and only acquaintance, is a widowed cousin by marriage - herself a virtual stranger - to whom he pays ritualistic visits on a Sunday afternoon. Trying to make sense of his current solitary state, and fearing that his destiny may be to die among strangers, Sturgis trawls through memories of his failed relationships and finds himself longing for companionship, or at the very least a conversation. But then a chance encounter with a stranger - a recently divorced and demanding younger woman - shakes up his routine and when an old girlfriend appears on the scene, Sturgis is forced to make a decision about how (and with whom) he wants to spend the rest of his days...

Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, a celebrated fifteenth-century Tuscan fresco in which the Virgin gestures to her partially open dress and her pregnant womb, is highly unusual in its iconography. Hubert Damisch undertakes an anthropological and historical analysis of an artwork he constructs as a childhood dream of one of humanity’s oldest preoccupations, the mysteries of our origins, of our conception and birth. At once parodying and paying homage to Freud’s seminal essay on Leonardo da Vinci, Damisch uses Piero’s enigmatic painting to narrate our archaic memories. He shows that we must return to Freud because work in psychoanalysis and art has not solved the problem of what is being analyzed: in the triangle of author, work, and audience, where is the psychoanalytic component located?

Romanticism After Auschwitz reveals how post-Holocaust testimony remains romantic, and shows why romanticism must therefore be rethought. The book argues that what literary historians have traditionally called “romanticism,” and characterized as a literary movement stretching roughly between 1785 and 1832, should be redescribed in light of two circumstances. The first is the specific inadequacy of literary-historical models before “romantic” works. The second is the particular function that these unsettling aspects of “romantic” works have after Auschwitz. The book demonstrates that certain figures (of speech, writing, and argument) central to normative accounts of “romanticism,” serve in their most radical—most genuinely “romantic”—form as vehicles for posing a conception of life (and death) revealed in the camps. In these pages, Agamben meets Wordsworth, Shakespeare meets Celan, film meets lyric poetry, survivors’ accounts meet fiction, de Man encounters Nancy. The book offers new readings of highly canonical works—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog—and introduces unfamiliar texts. It elaborates a fascinating account of the rhetoric of ethical dispositions and gives its readers an attentive, moving way of understanding the condition of human survival after the Holocaust.

The culmination of a lifetime's fascination with humour in all its forms, this book is the first in any language to embrace such an impressive span of authors and such a broad range of topics in French literary humour. In nine wide-ranging chapters Walter Redfern considers diverse writers and topics, including: Diderot, viewed as a laughing philosopher, mainly through his fiction (Les Bijoux indiscrets, Le Neeu de Rameau, and Jacques le fataliste); humourlessness, corraling Rousseau, Sade, the Christian God, and Jean-Pierre Brisset; the aesthete Huysmans, in both his avatars, Symbolist and Naturalist (A Rebours, Sac au dos, and other texts); the dramatic use of parrots by Flaubert, Queneau, and Beckett; Vallès and la blague; exaggeration in Vallès and Céline (Mort à credit and L'Enfant); the fiction, plays, and autobiography of Sartre; bad jokes in Beckett; wordplay in Tournier's fiction (especially Roi des aulnes and Les Météores). Five interleaved 'riffs' on laughter, dreams, black humour, politics, and taste, carry the enquiry into questions of humour outside of the purely French context, enhancing a book that impresses as much with its vivacity of style as with the breadth and depth of its scholarship.

Sixteen of Mexico’s finest fiction writers born after 1945 are collected in this compelling bilingual anthology, offering a glimpse of the rich tapestry of Mexican fiction, from small-town dramas to tales of urban savagery. Many of these writers, and most of these stories, have never before appeared in English. Readers will meet an embalmed man positioned in front of the TV, a mariachi singer suffering from mediocrity, a man’s lifelong imaginary friend, and the town prostitute whose funeral draws a crowd from the highest rungs of the social ladder. The writers that Mexican editor Álvaro Uribe selected for this volume are deeply engaged in the literary life of Mexico and include prominent editors, translators, columnists, professors, and even the young founder of a new publishing collective. Between them they have received dozens of prizes, from the Xavier Villaurrutia prize to Guggenheim fellowships and other international awards.

Antimatter explores a strange mirror world, where particles have identical yet opposite properties to those that make up the familiar matter we encounter everyday; where left becomes right, positive becomes negative; and where, should matter and antimatter meet, the two annihilate in a blinding flash of energy that makes even thermonuclear explosions look feeble by comparison. It is an idea long beloved of science-fiction stories - but here, renowned science writer Frank Close shows that the reality of antimatter is even more fascinating than the fiction itself. We know that once, antimatter and matter existed in perfect counterbalance, and that antimatter then perpetrated a vanishing act on a cosmic scale that remains one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. Today, antimatter does not exist normally, at least on Earth, but we know that it is real for scientists are now able to make small pieces of it in particle accelerators, such as that at CERN in Geneva. Looking at the remarkable prediction of antimatter and how it grew from the meeting point of relativity and quantum theory in the early 20th century, at the discovery of the first antiparticles, at cosmic rays, annihilation, antimatter bombs, and antiworlds, Close separates the facts from the fiction about antimatter, and explains how its existence can give us profound clues about the origins and structure of the universe.

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionate defense of Victorian literature's enduring impact and importance for readers interested in the relationship between literature and life, reading and thinking. This title explores the prominence of Victorian literature for contemporary readers and academics, through the author's unique insight into why it is still important today. It provides new frames of interpretation for key Victorian works of literature and close reading of important texts. It argues for a new engagement with Victorian literature, from general readers and scholars alike. It seeks to remove Victorian literature from an entrenched set of values, traditions and perspectives - demonstrating how vital and resonant it is for modern literary and cultural analysis.

Aleksandar is Comrade-in-Chief of fishing, the best magician in the non-aligned States and painter of unfinished things. He knows the first chapter of Marx's Das Kapital by heart but spends most of his time playing football in the Bosnian town of Visegrad on the banks of the river Drina. When his grandfather, a master storyteller, dies of the fastest heart attack in the world while watching Carl Lewis's record, Aleksandar promises to carry on the tradition. However when the shadow of war spreads to Visegrad, the world as he knows it stops. Suddenly it is not important how heavy a spider's life weighs, or why Marko's horse is related to Superman. Suddenly it is important to have the right name and to pretend that the little Muslim girl Asija is his sister. Then Aleksandar's parents decide to flee to Germany and he must leave his new friend behind.

Isak Lovenstad is a pioneering obstetrician - and a powerful, charismatic womanizer. Every summer he gathers his three daughters by different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarso. Here Erika, Molly and Laura know, if only for the season, what it is to be a family, and here, in the society of other children, each undergoes the rites of growing up. Though many alliances form and dissolve, none is comparable to Erika's bond with Ragnar, a rebellious misfit whose intensity makes them inseparable. But when they turn fourteen, and their relationship threatens to relegate Erika to Ragnar's outcast state, she turns away suddenly - a common enough teenage betrayal that nonetheless precipitates an incident of such senseless cruelty as to alter forever each sister's life. Twenty-five years later, returning to Hammarso to see their father - now eighty-four and in year-round exile there - the three women confront, finally, the spectre of that awful summer whose mark each has since carried.

A portrait of an artist capturing the late, great Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman at a crucial moment in his life, in 1961 when he was making the second film in his celebrated faith trilogy, Winter Light. Fighting to finish his film about a priest who loses his religion (which nobody wanted him to make), and struggling with his stern Lutheran minister father (who wanted his son to enter the church), Bergman is presented in a complex if not flattering light; he initially praised the book and subsequently damned it shortly before he died. If Alexander Ahndoril’s psychological portrait isn’t black and white, his evocation of time and place is. Careful employment of his spare prose style — "[he] walks through a shadow the size of himself" — recreates the bleak, eerie world of Bergman’s monochromatic films.

The binary opposition of Jacobin and Anti-Jacobin by scholars has led to mischaracterization of 1790s novels and this book advances new scholarship to correct this. Conversion and Reform analyzes the work of those British reformists writing in the 1790s who reshaped the conventions of fiction to reposition the novel as a progressive political tool. It includes new readings of key figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Holcroft.

Daniel Defoe had an eventful and adventurous life as a merchant, politician, spy and literary hack. He is one of the eighteenth century’s most lively, innovative and important authors, famous not only for his novels, including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, but for his extensive work in journalism, political polemic and conduct guides, and for his pioneering 'Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain'. This volume surveys the wide range of Defoe's fiction and non-fiction, and assesses his importance as writer and thinker. Leading scholars discuss key issues in Defoe's novels, and show how the man who was once pilloried for his writings emerges now as a key figure in the literature and culture of the early eighteenth century.

The centuries just after the Norman Conquest are the forgotten period of English literary history. In fact, the years 1066-1300 witnessed an unparalleled ingenuity in the creation of written forms, for this was a time when almost every writer was unaware of the existence of other English writing. In a series of detailed readings of the more important early Middle English works, Cannon shows how the many and varied texts of the period laid the foundations for the project of English literature. This richness is for the first time given credit in these readings by means of an innovative theory of literary form that accepts every written shape as itself a unique contribution to the history of ideas. This theory also suggests that the impoverished understanding of literature we now commonly employ is itself a legacy of this early period, an attribute of the single form we have learned to call 'romance'. A number of reading methods have lately taught us to be more generous in our understandings of what literature might be, but this book shows us that the very variety we now strive to embrace anew actually formed the grounds of English literature - a richness we only lost when we forgot how to recognize it.

This new study of the origins of the English novel argues that the novel emerged from historical writing. Examining historical writers and forms frequently neglected by earlier scholars, Robert Mayer shows that in the seventeenth century historical discourse embraced not only ‘history’ in its modern sense, but also fiction, polemic, gossip, and marvels. Mayer thus explains why Defoe’s narratives were initially read as history. It is the acceptance of the claims to historicity, the study argues, that differentiates Defoe’s fictions from those of writers like Thomas Deloney and Aphra Behn, important writers who nevertheless have figured less prominently than Defoe in discussions of the novel. Mayer ends by exploring the theoretical implications of the history-fiction connection. His study makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the emergence of what we now call the novel in Britain in the eighteenth century.

The Cult of Statistical Significance shows, field by field, how "statistical significance," a technique that dominates many sciences, has been a huge mistake. The authors find that researchers in a broad spectrum of fields, from agronomy to zoology, employ "testing" that doesn't test and "estimating" that doesn't estimate. The facts will startle the outside reader: how could a group of brilliant scientists wander so far from scientific magnitudes? This study will encourage scientists who want to know how to get the statistical sciences back on track and fulfill their quantitative promise. The book shows for the first time how wide the disaster is, and how bad for science, and it traces the problem to its historical, sociological, and philosophical roots.

“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s Experience, to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.

This is the first history of the book in Britain from the Norman Conquest until the early fifteenth century. The twenty-six expert contributors to this volume discuss the manuscript book from a variety of angles: as physical object (manufacture, format, writing and decoration); its purpose and readership (books for monasteries, for the Church's liturgy, for elementary and advanced instruction, for courtly entertainment); and as the vehicle for particular types of text (history, sermons, medical treatises, law and administration, music). In all of this, the broader, changing social and cultural context is kept in mind, and so are the various connections with continental Europe. The volume includes a full bibliography and 80 black and white plates.

Antonio Negri has inspired anti-empire movements around the world through his writings and personal example. Born in 1933, he was imprisoned in Italy in 1979 and convicted, nearly five years later, on questionable charges of “association and insurrection against the state,” whereupon he left the country to teach in France. In 1997, he voluntarily returned to Italy to serve out his seventeen-year prison sentence. He was freed in 2003. In Praise of the Common, which began as a conversation between Negri and literary critic Cesare Casarino, is the most complete review of the philosopher’s work ever published. It includes five exchanges in which the two intellectuals discuss Negri’s evolution as a thinker from 1950 to the present, detailing for the first time the genealogy of his concepts. In Praise of the Common contains two essays by Casarino that expand Negri’s most recent work by relating it to the work of other prominent thinkers. This is at once a book by Negri and on Negri. It presents, for the first time in English, a major essay by Negri on the “monster” as a political figure in the history of Western thought, engaging with discourses of biopolitics, eugenics, and genetic engineering. More candid and self-critical than ever before, Negri provides his wide audience with a rich and revelatory assessment of his controversial, highly influential thought.

Siegfried Sassoon praised Isaac Rosenberg's 'genius' and T.S. Eliot called him the 'most extraordinary' of the Great War poets. Yet it is over thirty years since there has been a full-length biography of Isaac Rosenberg. This major reappraisal of his life and work by one of the First World War literature's leading authorities, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, is long overdue. Rosenberg dies on the Western Front in 1918 aged only twenty-seven, his tragic early death resembling that of many other well-known poets of that conflict. But he differed from the majority of Great War poets in almost every other respect - race, class, education, upbringing, experience and technique. He was a skilled painter as well as a brilliant poet. The son of impoverished immigrant Russian Jews, he served as a private in the army and his perspective on the trenches is quite different from the other mainly officer-poets, allowing the voice of the "poor bloody Tommy" to be eloquently heard. Jean Moorcroft Wilson focuses on the relationship between Rosenberg's life and work - his childhood in Bristol and the Jewish East End of London; his time at the Slade School of Art and friendship with David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer; his visit to Cape Town, where he was staying when war broke out in August 1914 and where he fell in love with the divorced wife of South Africa's future Prime Minister; and his harrowing life as a private in the British Army. This monumental new life is published to mark the 90th anniversary of his death. Based on all known Rosenberg material and a mass of important new discoveries, Dr Wilson's biography has been authorised by Rosenberg's family and written with their blessing and help. It is also beautifully illustrated, including some hitherto unseen self-portraits, bringing together for the first time all that is known of this outstanding poet-painter.

This volume presents all of the surviving writings of Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918): poetry, plays, prose works, and letters. The book also provides a commentary giving details of the composition and publication of the poems and plays and throws light on the people, places, and incidents described in both these and the letters. An introduction places the collection in context and a chronological table describes the main events of his life. There are also examples of his paintings and drawings. Although best known as a war poet, most of Rosenberg's work pre-dates the war. The son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, he grew up in London's East End. Financially impoverished, he nevertheless lived in a society that valued artistic creativity - among his friends were Mark Gertler and David Bomberg. He was a painter as well as a poet, and studied at the Slade School of Art. He knew many of the leading poets of the day, and his letters, in particular those to Edward Marsh and Gordon Bottomley, throw fascinating light on his own poetic creativitiy and the response to his work of those around him. In both his letters and prose works we find an insightful commentator on both poetry and painting. Though never a member of any movement, he was aware of the issues that preoccupied the artistic circles of his day. His artistic independence gives both power and insight to his work.

Jean-Luc Godard is one the most influential film-makers of the last fifty years. Scorsese, Tarantino, Wong Kar-Wai and Lars von Trier are but a few of the directors who have fallen under the spell of his free-wheeling style. In his 1960s heyday Godard - always in dark shades, cigarette in hand - epitomised European cool. But he subsequently grew into one of the most formidable artists the cinema has produced. Writer and film-maker Richard Brody, one of the few to have interviewed Godard in his Swiss retreat, here offers an accessible account of this extraordinary and fascinating artist.

Tranquility is a living seismograph of the internal quakes and ruptures of a mother and son trapped within an Oedipal nightmare amidst the suffocating totalitarian embrace of Communist Hungary. Andor Weér, a thirty-six-year-old writer, lives in a small apartment with his shut-in mother, Rebeka, who was once among the most celebrated stage actresses in Budapest. Unable to withstand her maniacal tyranny but afraid to leave her alone, their bitter interdependence spirals into a Sartrian hell of hatred, lies, and appeasement. Then Andor meets the beautiful and nurturing Eszter, a woman who seems to have no past, and they fall wildly in love at first sight. With a fulfilling life seemingly within reach for the first time, Andor decides that he is ready to bring Eszter home to meet Mother. Though Bartis’s characters are unrepentantly neurotic and dressed in the blackest humor, his empathy for them is profound. A political farce of the highest ironic order, concluding that “freedom is a condition unsuited to humans,” Tranquility is ultimately, at its splanchnic core, a complex psychodrama turned inside out, revealing with visceral splendor the grotesque ideal that there’s nothing funnier than unhappiness.

Back in Reykjavik after a vacation in London, Emil Halldorsson is waiting for a call from a beautiful girl, Greta, that he met on the plane ride home, and he’s just put on a pot of coffee when an unexpected visitor knocks on the door. Peeking through a window, Emil spies an erstwhile friend—Havard Knutsson, his one-time roommate and current resident of a Swedish mental institution—on his doorstep, and he panics, taking refuge under his bed and hoping the frightful nuisance will simply go away. Havard won’t be so easily put off, however, and he breaks into Emil’s apartment and decides to wait for his return—Emil couldn’t have gone far; the pot of coffee is still warming on the stove. While Emil hides under his bed, increasingly unable to show himself with each passing moment, Havard discovers the booze, and he ends up hosting a bizarre party for Emil's friends, and Greta. An alternately dark and hilarious story of cowardice, comeuppance, an assumed identity, the breezy and straightforward style of The Pets belies its narrative depth, and disguises a complexity that grows with every page.

For the past forty years Noam Chomsky’s writings on politics and language have established him as a preeminent public intellectual and as one of the most original and wide-ranging political and social critics of our time. Among the seminal figures in linguistic theory over the past century, since the 1960s Chomsky has also secured a place as perhaps the leading dissident voice in the United States. Chomsky’s many bestselling works — including Manufacturing Consent, Hegemony or Survival, Understanding Power, and Failed States — have served as essential touchstones for dissidents, activists, scholars, and concerned citizens on subjects ranging from the media to human rights to intellectual freedom. In particular, Chomsky’s scathing critiques of the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Central America, and the Middle East have furnished a widely accepted intellectual inspiration for antiwar movements over nearly four decades. The Essential Chomsky assembles the core of his most important writings, including excerpts from his most influential texts over the past forty years. Here is an unprecedented, comprehensive overview of Chomsky’s thought.

In Working Knowledge, over the course of one hundred brief and evanescent texts, Kràl brings together, as his compatriot Milan Kundera writes in his introduction, “this strange and beautiful existential encyclopaedia of the everyday”. Whether describing twilight, a toothpick, the ritual of shaving or the act of going upstairs, his gaze is ingenuous, humble, amazed. Mute objects, fleeting gestures, changeless passions: Kràl forces us to look at them anew. Each limpid, graceful essay is a brief voyage of discovery in which lowly objects and everyday actions, so often unobserved, are transfigured. Petr Kràl has the unerring ability to perceive, to catch the commonplace by surprise and with the unsettling clarity see beyond the everyday to the fabric of life beneath. Translated from the French by prize winning translator Frank Wynne.

Tarkovsky provides a collection of accessible academic essays by leading film studies professionals. A challenging, broadly illustrated book that fully captures the essence of this cinematic pioneer. The book pays tribute to the substantial legacy of Andrei Tarkovsky, the most important Soviet filmmaker of the post-war era, and one of the world’s most renowned cinematic geniuses. His reputation has grown significantly since his death twenty years ago in Paris. Tarkovsky created spiritual, existential films of incredible beauty, repeatedly returning to themes of memory, dreams, childhood and Christianity. Hugely influential on directors such as David Lynch, Steven Soderburgh and Lars Von Trier, he is particularly known for his re-imagining of the science fiction genre in films such as Solaris and Stalker. All aspects of Tarkovsky's films are explored including their sociological and psychological dimensions, their cinematic language and their rich symbolism. Contributions include the first ever English translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous essay on the film Ivan’s Childhood, along with pieces by Harvard professor Stephanie Sandler, film critic and curator James Quandt and Evgeny Tsymbal, assistant director to Tarkovsky on Stalker. Illustrated with original stills along with studio shots, lobby cards, posters and other rare ephemera and containing a wealth of previously unseen material from Soviet archives, Tarkovsky is the definitive text on Tarkovsky’s singularly complex body of work.

Vivian Gornick tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love. In this new collection, she turns her attention to another large theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. Great literature, she believes, is not the record of the achievement, but of the effort. Gornick, who emerged as a major writer during the second-wave feminist movement, came to realize that "ideology alone could not purge one of the pathological self-doubt that seemed every woman's bitter birthright." Or, as Anton Chekhov put it so memorably: "Others made me a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop." Perhaps surprisingly, Gornick found particular inspiration for this challenge in the work of male writers — talented, but locked in perpetual rage, self-doubt, or social exile. From these men—who had infinitely more permission to do and be than women had ever known — she learned what it really meant to wrestle with demons. In the essays collected here, she explores the work of V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H.G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Throughout the book, Gornick is at her best: interpreting the intimate interrelationship of emotional damage, social history, and great literature.

Recent neuroscience, in replacing the old model of the brain as a single centralized source of control, has emphasized “plasticity,” the quality by which our brains develop and change throughout the course of our lives. Our brains exist as historical products, developing in interaction with themselves and with their surroundings. Hence there is a thin line between the organization of the nervous system and the political and social organization that both conditions and is conditioned by human experience. Looking carefully at contemporary neuroscience, it is hard not to notice that the new way of talking about the brain mirrors the management discourse of the neo-liberal capitalist world in which we now live, with its talk of decentralization, networks, and flexibility. Consciously or unconsciously, science cannot but echo the world in which it takes place. In the neo-liberal world, “plasticity” can be equated with “flexibility”—a term that has become a buzzword in economics and management theory. The plastic brain would thus represent just another style of power, which, although less centralized, is still a means of control. In this book, Catherine Malabou develops a second, more radical meaning for plasticity. Not only does plasticity allow our brains to adapt to existing circumstances, it opens a margin of freedom to intervene, to change those very circumstances. Such an understanding opens up a newly transformative aspect of the neurosciences. In insisting on this proximity between the neurosciences and the social sciences, Malabou applies to the brain Marx’s well-known phrase about history: people make their own brains, but they do not know it. This book is a summons to such knowledge.