Originally published in 1981 as En breve cárcel,Certificate of Absence is the first novel of the Argentinian scholar-critic Sylvia Molloy. Innovative in its treatment of women's relationships and in its assertion of woman's right to author her own text, the novel has won wide approval in Latin America and the United States.

The novel centers around a woman writing in a small room. As she writes, remembering a past relationship and anticipating a future one, the room becomes a repository for nostalgia, violence, and desire, a space in which writing and remembering become life-sustaining ceremonies. The narrator reflects on the power of love to both shelter and destroy. She meditates on the act of writing, specifically on writing as a woman, in a voice that goes against the grain of established, canonical voices.

Latin American male writers are prone to self-portrayal in their texts. Certifcate of Absence is one of the few novels by Latin American women that successfully use this technique to open new windows on women's experiences.

Advancing asexuality studies in new, queer directions—beyond identity and beyond the human


We’ve all seen the page that states “this page intentionally left blank” or heard an authority figure declare “nothing to see here, folks,” and yet the so-called blank page has writing on it, and folks definitely have something to see. From the entry point of these and other paradoxical declarations of absence, KJ Cerankowski applies the aesthetics of asexuality to theorize silences, nothings, and emptiness. In the process, he explores new ways of making meaning out of the supposedly meaningless.

Throughout this investigation into absences, Cerankowski moves intuitively and idiosyncratically, taking readers along a series of waypoints that include Border, the acclaimed horror film about a customs officer who can smell fear; Jenny Hval’s discomfiting novel Paradise Rot; and disabled artist Finnegan Shannon’s iconic benches. Experimental in form as well as content, Nothing Wanting offers an innovative and mischievous reading experience that plays with structural elements like redaction, erasure, supertext, and repetition. With a deeply anticapitalist, anticolonial motivating ideology, it pushes to the limits of language, subverting commonplace notions of books, knowledge, and what it is to be human.

Moving beyond identity and representation, Nothing Wanting is playful, fascinating, and provocative as it conceives asexuality as additive and expansive rather than lacking. As it reveals the vibrant lifeworlds that hum in silences and thrum in stillnesses, Nothing Wanting pivots from the imposition of wanting nothing to the craving of nothing wanting: satisfied, yet always yearning for more worlds of thriving—for everything and everyone.

Officeholders in contemporary parliaments and cabinets are more likely than not to be male, wealthy, middle-aged or older, and from the dominant ethnicity, whereas young adults have an insufficient presence in political office. Young adults—those aged 35 years or under—comprise a mere ten percent of all parliamentarians globally, and three percent of all cabinet members. Compared to their presence in the world’s population, this age group faces an underrepresentation of one to three in parliament and one to ten in cabinet. In this book, Stockemer and Sundström provide a holistic account of youths’ marginalization in legislatures, cabinets, and candidacies for office through a comparative lens. They argue that youths’ underrepresentation in political office constitutes a democratic deficit and provide ample evidence for why they think that youth must be present in politics at much higher rates. They further embed this book within what they label a vicious cycle of political alienation, which involves the declining political sophistication of the young, their waning electoral participation, and their insufficient of representation in office. Empirically, the authors combine a global focus with in-depth studies, discussing the country-level, party-level, and individual-level factors that bar young adults’ entry to positions of political power. This is the first comprehensive book on youth representation and it has relevance for those broadly interested in issues of representation, democracy, inequality, and comparative politics.