A brilliant approach to the queerness of one of Taiwan’s greatest auteurs

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films.

Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation.

Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.

International terrorism expert Roland Jacquard’s In the Name of Osama bin Laden presents a dramatic portrait of the world's most wanted terrorist and his extensive brotherhood--the network of people who operate “in his name.” Published originally in France the very week of September 11, as events in the United States shook the world, the book has become an international bestseller.
Jacquard details how bin Laden became an international emblem of fundamentalist, pan-Islamic, anti-U.S. fervor and the leader of a brotherhood so passionate that devotees who have never met him will act autonomously in his name. The author explains the global character of bin Laden’s organization, elaborating the extent of his sphere of influence in Europe and Asia. Jacquard reveals the construction of bin Laden’s networks—including a profile of his inner circle—and their collaboration with overlapping webs of banking, drug trafficking, religious, and terrorist organizations. He considers the brotherhood’s access to biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons and warns that, with or without bin Laden, this global terrorist force will remain a threat.
Now in English, this edition has been substantially updated in light of recent world events and expanded to include previously unpublished materials, featuring a new introduction and afterword. New documents include an April 2001 interview by the author with bin Laden; a September 24 proclamation by bin Laden to Muslims in Pakistan; and a key page from Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s book justifying eternal jihad, which was smuggled out of Afghanistan in October 2001.

Prior praise for Martín Espada:

"Political poetry at its finest…with his soaring lyrics, Espada broadens our appreciation not only of poetry but of resistance itself."
---The Progressive

 "(Espada) writes beautiful poems about terrible realities."
---San Francisco Chronicle

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

This collection of essays on poetry and politics comes from the man the New York Times predicted would become "the Latino poet of his generation" and whom Sandra Cisneros called "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors."

Martín Espada defends what Walt Whitman called, "the rights of them the others are down upon." He invokes the spirit of poet-advocates such as Whitman and Edgar Lee Masters to explore his own history as a poet and tenant lawyer in Boston's Latino community. He celebrates the poets of Puerto Rico, imprisoned for espousing the cause of independence, and the poets of the Bronx, writing bilingual poems in the voices of the dead.

Espada writes of forgotten places and reminds us of the poet's responsibility to remember, as Pablo Neruda remembers the anonymous builders of Machu Picchu or Sterling Brown remembers the slave uprising of Nat Turner. He argues that poets should embrace the role of Shelley's "unacknowledged legislator" in their work as writers and in their lives as citizens. He challenges the conventional wisdom that poetry and politics are mutually exclusive, and rejects the poetics of self-marginalization, in keeping with Adrian Mitchell's dictum that, "most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."

Martín Espada has published seventeen books as a poet, editor, and translator. The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems, received a Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Imagine the Angels of Bread won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award. Espada is a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.