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Paddle Whispers
Douglas Wood
University of Minnesota Press, 2005

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The Painted Desert
Land of Wind and Stone
Text by Scott Thybony; Photographs by David Edwards
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Most people who are familiar with the Painted Desert of northeastern Arizona know it only from having pulled off at the Petrified Forest exit on Interstate 40. If they happen to come by it at midday, as most do, they find a landscape drained of color and flattened under the direct sunlight.

But this remote pocket of the Arizona desert, sandwiched between the Little Colorado River on one side and bold escarpments on the other, is much more than most tourists ever experience. An ethereal landscape of sculpted rock, wind-fluted cliffs, and elegantly drifting sand, the Painted Desert is a rich storehouse of natural beauty, colorful history, and scientific wonders. Here the strongest winds in Arizona blow across extensive dunefields, where less than ten inches of rain falls each year and only a few desert-savvy Navajo are able to live.

Now, for the first time award-winning writer Scott Thybony and freelance photographer David Edwards offer an intimate look at a place that remains inhospitable and inaccessible to so many. They share insights about the geology, paleontology, anthropology, and human history of the region as well as personal stories that dispel the misconceptions and mysteries that surround this delicate and difficult landscape.

With fifteen stunning photographs gracing the text, this book offers a vibrant portrait of one of the Southwest’s most barren, and most colorful landscapes.
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Palace of Books
Roger Grenier
University of Chicago Press, 2014
For decades, French writer, editor, and publisher Roger Grenier has been enticing readers with compact, erudite books that draw elegant connections between the art of living and the work of art. Under Grenier’s wry gaze, clichés crumble, and offbeat anecdotes build to powerful insights.

With Palace of Books, he invites us to explore the domain of literature, its sweeping vistas and hidden recesses. Engaging such fundamental questions as why people feel the need to write, or what is involved in putting one’s self on the page, or how a writer knows she’s written her last sentence, Grenier marshals apposite passages from his favorite writers:  Chekhov, Baudelaire, Proust, James, Kafka, Mansfield and many others. Those writers mingle companionably with tales from Grenier’s half-century as an editor and friend to countless legendary figures, including Albert Camus, Romain Gary, Milan Kundera, and Brassai,.

Grenier offers here a series of observations and quotations that feel as spontaneous as good conversation, yet carry the lasting insights of a lifetime of reading and thinking. Palace of Books is rich with pleasures and surprises, the perfect accompaniment to old literary favorites, and the perfect introduction to new ones.
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The Paleobiological Revolution
Essays on the Growth of Modern Paleontology
Edited by David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse
University of Chicago Press, 2009
The Paleobiological Revolution chronicles the incredible ascendance of the once-maligned science of paleontology to the vanguard of a field. With the establishment of the modern synthesis in the 1940s and the pioneering work of George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as the subsequent efforts of Stephen Jay Gould, David Raup, and James Valentine, paleontology became embedded in biology and emerged as paleobiology, a first-rate discipline central to evolutionary studies. Pairing contributions from some of the leading actors of the transformation with overviews from historians and philosophers of science, the essays here capture the excitement of the seismic changes in the discipline. In so doing, David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse harness the energy of the past to call for further study of the conceptual development of modern paleobiology.
[more]

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Pandora’s Hope
Essays on the Reality of Science Studies
Bruno Latour
Harvard University Press, 1999

A scientist friend asked Bruno Latour point-blank: “Do you believe in reality?” Taken aback by this strange query, Latour offers his meticulous response in Pandora’s Hope. It is a remarkable argument for understanding the reality of science in practical terms.

In this book, Latour, identified by Richard Rorty as the new “bête noire of the science worshipers,” gives us his most philosophically informed book since Science in Action. Through case studies of scientists in the Amazon analyzing soil and in Pasteur’s lab studying the fermentation of lactic acid, he shows us the myriad steps by which events in the material world are transformed into items of scientific knowledge. Through many examples in the world of technology, we see how the material and human worlds come together and are reciprocally transformed in this process.

Why, Latour asks, did the idea of an independent reality, free of human interaction, emerge in the first place? His answer to this question, harking back to the debates between Might and Right narrated by Plato, points to the real stakes in the so-called science wars: the perplexed submission of ordinary people before the warring forces of claimants to the ultimate truth.

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Papa, PhD
Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy
Marotte, Mary Ruth
Rutgers University Press, 2010
It is not easy raising a family and balancing work and personal commitments in academia, regardless of gender. Parents endure the stress of making tenure with the demands of life with children. While women's careers are derailed more often than men's as a result of such competing pressures, fathers, too, experience conflicting feelings about work and home, making parenting ever more challenging.

In Papa, PhD, Mary Ruth Marotte, Paige Martin Reynolds, and Ralph James Savarese bring together a group contributors from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. They are white, black, South Asian, Asian, and Arab. They are gay and straight, married and divorced. They are tenured and untenured, at research-one universities and at community colleges. Some write at the beginning of their careers, others at the end. But, perhaps most important they do not look back-they look forward to new parental and professional synergies as they reflect on what it means to be a father in the academy.

The fathers writing in Papa, PhD seek to expand their children's horizons, giving them the gifts of better topic sentences and a cosmopolitan sensibility. They seriously consider the implications of gender theory and queer theory-even Marxist theory-and make relevant theoretical connections between their work and the less abstract, more pragmatic, world of fathering. What resonates is the astonishing range of forms that fatherhood can take as these dads challenge traditional norms by actively questioning the status quo.
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Paradise and Method
Poetry and Praxis
Bruce Andrews
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Paradise & Method: Poetics and Praxis collects nearly two decades of work on poetics by one of the pioneers of the "language poetry" movement.

Addressing poetics from a poet's perspective, Andrews focuses on the ways in which meaning is produced and challenged. His essays aim "to map out opportunities for making sense (or making noise)--both in reading and writing contemporary literature. At the center has been a desire to explore language, as up close as possible, as a material and social medium for restagings of meaning and power." Andrews analyzes poetics and the production of meaning; alternative traditions and canons; and innovative contemporary poetry, particularly its break with many of the premises and constraints of even the most forward-looking modernisms.
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Parenting on the Frontlines
Stories of Love, Loss, and Wonder
Kelly Cooper Paradis
Michigan Publishing Services, 2023

Each day of working parenthood is a rollercoaster of success and failure. My child ate a carrot! Then spit it out on the dog. I got to work on time! But there is a mystery stain on my dress shirt and this Tide stick is definitely making it worse. Also yes, that was “Baby Shark” I was humming while accidentally unmuted on the Zoom call, and no, I am not going to be able to sew an octopus costume from scratch by Friday. Please tell me there is something available at Target. 

As a parent, we live through levels of both joy and sorrow that we didn’t even know existed before. And we wonder—is it only me? Am I alone in this? In Parenting on the Frontlines, we explore both the lighter and heavier sides of working parenthood. The stories shared here are written by healthcare workers at Michigan Medicine, but all caregivers will find pieces to which they can relate. Most importantly, we want you to know that you are not alone on your journey, no matter where it takes you. 

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Paris-Amsterdam Underground
Essays on Cultural Resistance, Subversion, and Diversion
Edited by Christoph Lindner and Andrew Hussey
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
The postwar histories of Paris and Amsterdam have been significantly defined by the notion of the “underground” as both a material and metaphorical space. Examining the underground traffic between the two cities, this book interrogates the countercultural histories of Paris and Amsterdam in the mid to late-twentieth century. Shuttling between Paris and Amsterdam, as well as between postwar avant-gardism and twenty-first century global urbanism, this interdisciplinary book seeks to create a mirroring effect over the notion of the underground as a driving force in the making of the contemporary European city.

[more]

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Parting from Phantoms
Selected Writings, 1990-1994
Christa Wolf
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Parting from Phantoms is a window into the soul of the most prominent writer of the German Democratic Republic and its most famous export, Christa Wolf. The essays, diary entries, and letters in this book document four agonizing years in Wolf's personal history and paint a vivid portrait of the cultural and political situation in the former German Democratic Republic. This collection stands as an important testimony to the personal and cultural costs of German reunification.

"The works in this book constitute an essential document of the history of reunified Germany, and this alone recommends it to scholars and those interested in current European events."— Publishers Weekly

"Christa Wolf was arguably the most influential writer of a nation that no longer exists. . . . Parting from Phantoms traces the fever chart of her anguish. . . . In some ways, the rawness of the present volume is its greatest contribution, and its bona fides—testifying to the human cost of deception and self-deception."—Todd Gitlin, Nation

"A thrilling display of ideological soul-searching."—Ilan Stavans, Newsday, Favorite Books of 1997

[more]

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The Passionate Spectator
Essays on Art and Poetry
John Yau
University of Michigan Press, 2006
The Passionate Spectator collects essays, reviews, and art criticism by John Yau, an internationally lauded poet, critic, and curator. In this wide-ranging collection, Yau explores the intersection of art and poetry, dissolving boundaries between the artistic traditions and reimagining what it means to see and to write. Whether he is interpreting the poetic use of titles in Jessica Stockholder’s paintings, reviewing the collaborative book project between American poet Robert Creeley and German artist Georg Baselitz, or considering the significance of Frank O’Hara’s decision to have his portrait drawn wearing nothing but army boots, Yau is consistently daring, original, and contemporary.

Yau’s diverse critical sensibilities permeate The Passionate Spectator as he moves seamlessly between the visual and literary arts. Highlights of this collection include an essay on the poet as art critic, a study of the relationship between Kevin Young’s poetry and the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and an imaginative piece in which Yau speculates about what Jorge Luis Borges would have created had he been a visual artist. In the title essay, Yau lays out the duty of the spectator—a duty shared by viewer, reader, critic, and artist: “it is up to us to experience art, to engage and believe in its power.”
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Past Imperfect
Essays on History, Libraries, and the Humanities
Lawrence W. Towner
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Lawrence W. Towner was head of one of the country's largest independent research libraries. He was also an eloquent spokesman for the needs of scholars and institutions in the humanities. While at the Newberry Library, he built and focused its prestigious collections, pioneered in the preservation of books, and created major research centers. His efforts established the library as a community of scholars while encouraging its use by students and the general public.

Towner's essays and talks cover a broad range of topics of continuing relevance to scholarship and the humanities. His writings gathered in Past Imperfect are concerned with such issues as the role of independent research libraries and the politics of funding. A section of historical essays on the common people of New England reveal his concern with neglected fields of history, a theme that guided his career as a librarian. Spanning the range of his experience and expertise, this volume expresses Towner's coherent vision of the place of humanities, libraries, and scholarship in American life.

Lawrence W. Towner (1921-92) taught history at M.I.T., the College of William and Mary, and Northwestern University. In 1962 he was appointed librarian of the Newberry Library and directed the library for the next twenty-four years.
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The Past's Threshold
Essays on Photography
Siegfried Kracauer
Diaphanes, 2014
Siegfried Kracauer was a leading intellectual figure of the Weimar Republic and one of the foremost representatives of critical theory. Best known for a wealth of writings on sociology and film theory, his influence is felt in the work of many of the period’s preeminent thinkers, including his friends, the critic Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, who once claimed he owed more to Kracauer than any other contemporary.

This volume brings together for the first time all of Kracauer’s essays on photography that he wrote between 1927 and 1933 as a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, as well as an essay that appeared in the Magazine of Art after his exile in America, where he would spend the last twenty-five years of his life. The texts show Kracauer as a pioneering thinker of the photographic medium in addition to the important historian, and theorist, of film that he is acknowledged to have been. His writings here build a cohesive theory on the affinities between photography, memory and history.

With a foreword by Philippe Despoix offering insights into Kracauer’s theories and the historical context, and a Curriculum vitae in pictures, photographs from the Kracauer estate annotated by Maria Zinfert.    
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Pastures of the Empty Page
Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry
George Getschow, editor
University of Texas Press, 2023

A collection of essays that offers an intimate view of Larry McMurtry, America’s preeminent western novelist, through the eyes of a pantheon of writers he helped shape through his work over the course of his unparalleled literary life.

When he died in 2021, Larry McMurtry was one of America’s most revered writers. The author of treasured novels such as Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show, and coauthor of the screenplays for Brokeback Mountain and Streets of Laredo, McMurtry created unforgettable characters and landscapes largely drawn from his life growing up on the family’s hardscrabble ranch outside his hometown of Archer City, Texas. Pastures of the Empty Page brings together fellow writers to honor the man and his impact on American letters.

Paulette Jiles, Stephen Harrigan, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and Lawrence Wright take up McMurtry’s piercing and poetic vision—an elegiac literature of place that demolished old myths of cowboy culture and created new ones. Screenwriting partner Diana Ossana reflects on their thirty-year book and screenwriting partnership; other contributors explore McMurtry’s reading habits and his passion for bookselling. And brother Charlie McMurtry shares memories of their childhood on the ranch. In contrast to his curmudgeonly persona, Larry McMurtry emerges as a trustworthy friend and supportive mentor. McMurtry was famously self-deprecating, but as his admirers attest, this self-described “minor regional writer” was an artist for the ages.

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Pathways to the Old Northwest
An Observance of the Bicentennial of the Northwest Ordinance
Lloyd A. Hunter, et al
Indiana Historical Society Press, 1988
In 1987 Franklin College of Indiana hosted an observance of the bicentennial of the Northwest Ordinance. Professional and amateur historians, folklorists, scholars in the arts, teachers, and students gathered to examine the provisions of that historic document and the governmental structure it created for the frontier lands north of the Ohio River. Pathways to the Old Northwest: An Observance of the Bicentennial of the Northwest Ordinance presents six of the lectures delivered at the conference. These lectures represent current knowledge about the early history of the Ohio River-Great Lakes area, the circumstances surrounding passage of the Ordinance, the beginnings of government and society, and the ethnic diversity of the region's people.
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Patient Listening
A Doctor's Guide
Loreen Herwaldt
University of Iowa Press, 2008
From the fictional portrayal of Dr. Gregory House to Jerome Groopman's bestseller How Doctors Think, both medical professionals and the general public recognize that there is more to the doctor's job than technical practice. Yet why do so many patients come away from their doctors' offices feeling dissatisfied with their interactions? In this welcome addition to the growing field of narrative medicine, physician Loreen Herwaldt uses the illness narratives of two dozen writer-patients to teach listening skills to medical students, residents, physicians, and other health care providers.

Herwaldt skillfully pares each narrative down to its most basic elements, rendering them into powerful found poems that she has used successfully in her role as a teacher and in her own practice. Drawing from narratives by writers who are both emerging and well known, including Oliver Sacks, Richard Selzer, and Mary Swander, each poem reveals the experience of illness and treatment from the patient's perspective. Patient Listening includes a detailed general introduction and a how-to guide that will prove invaluable in the classroom and in clinical practice.

This book will inspire thoughtfulness in everyone who reads it. It is also designed to foster discussions about all aspects of the patient experience from ethics to stigmatization to health insurance. Patient Listening is not just about bedside manner but also about how health care providers can gain the most from their interactions with patients and in turn offer more appropriate treatments, develop more cooperative and responsive relationships with their patients, and thus become better doctors.
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Pennsylvania Stories--Well Told
William Ecenbarger
Temple University Press, 2017
With a biting mix of wonder and pride, William Ecenbarger observes that in the quirky state of Pennsylvania, the town of Mauch Chunk changed its name to Jim Thorpe—even though the famous Indian athlete never set foot in it.
 
A former journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, and author of the bestseller Kids for Cash, Ecenbarger has collected a dozen of his fascinating articles showcasing the Keystone State in Pennsylvania StoriesWell Told. He provides a history of the pencil, and considers why the first day of Pennsylvania’s deer hunting season—the world’s largest participatory sporting event—is an unofficial state holiday, closing schools and state offices. Ecenbarger also profiles George “Boom Boom” Zambelli, the internationally renowned pyrotechnic king, and goes driving with Pennsylvania native John Updike in rural Berks County, PA.
 
Other fascinating tales unfold in Pennsylvania Stories, from an inspiring tale of Governor Bob Casey’s double organ transplant, to darker essays on the electric chair and the Ku Klux Klan, to a mile-by-mile appreciation of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
 
In these weird and wonderful stories, Ecenbarger highlights just what makes Pennsylvania both eccentric and great. His book is a delightfully intriguing read for natives and curious outsiders alike.

 
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The People’s Republic of China at 60
An International Assessment
William C. Kirby
Harvard University Press, 2011

In 2009, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies convened a major conference to discuss the health and longevity of China’s ruling system and to consider a fundamental question: After three decades of internal strife and turmoil, followed by an era of reform, entrepreneurialism, and internationalization, is the PRC here for the dynastic long haul?

Bringing together scholars and students of China from around the world, the gathering witnessed an energetic exchange of views on four interrelated themes: polities, social transformations, wealth and well-being, and culture, belief, and practice. Edited and expanded from the original conference papers, the wide-ranging essays in this bilingual volume remain true to the conference’s aim: to promote open discussion of the past, present, and future of the People’s Republic of China.

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Performing Brazil
Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Performing Arts
Edited by Severino J. Albuquerque and Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
A field-shaping anthology by top cultural critics and practitioners representing a wide range of disciplines and art forms, Performing Brazil is the first book to bring together studies of the many and varied manifestations of Brazilian performance in and beyond their country of origin. Arguing that diverse forms of performance are best understood when presented in tandem, it offers new takes on better-known forms, such as carnival and capoeira, as well as those studied less often, including gender acts, curatorial practice, political protest, and the performance of Brazil in the United States.
            The contributors to the volume are Maria José Somerlate Barbosa, Eric A. Galm, Annie McNeill Gibson, Ana Paula Höfling, Benjamin Legg, Bryan McCann, Simone Osthoff, Fernando de Sousa Rocha, Cristina F. Rosa, Alessandra Santos, and Lidia Santos.
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The Permit that Never Expires
Migrant Tales from the Ozark Hills and the Mexican Highlands
By Philip Garrison
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Philip Garrison keeps his eyes and ears open. And he also keeps an open mind. It helps that he’s bilingual, because a lot of his neighbors these days speak Spanish and he likes to know what’s on their minds. Like his epileptic friend Pera, who asks him to write a note in English to explain to her supervisor that she probably shouldn’t be cooking on a grill in case she has a seizure and falls into the flames. When Garrison asks her if she has a work permit, she replies,“Bueno. El que nunca vence.” The kind that never expires. That’s the sort of response he doesn’t forget.

There is a river, Garrison writes, that runs from Oaxaca to British Columbia. El flujo migratorio, he calls it. The migratory flow. But it isn’t a conventional sort of river. “It is made of neither rock nor water nor wind but only of motion, of momentum. And yet . . . it is the most compelling feature in the entire U.S. West,” he claims. Garrison has his feet planted firmly in the middle of this river of humanity, wondering why America is trying to build a wall along an actual river, the Rio Grande, to keep us separated from the mexicanos. All borders, he writes, exist mostly in the imagination—a point he proves decisively in this delightful book.

Garrison is an award-winning writer and this book shows why. Warm, witty, self-deprecating, and charming (the list could go on), this collection illuminates the lives of these migrants, whether at the local food bank in Ellensburg, Washington, in the streets of Michoacán, or everywhere in between.
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The Perspective of the Acting Person
Essays in the Renewal of Thomistic Moral Philosophy
Martin Rhonheimer
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
The Perspective of the Acting Person introduces readers to one of the most important and provocative thinkers in contemporary moral philosophy
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Phenomenal Reading
Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetics
Brian M. Reed
University of Alabama Press, 2012
The essays in Phenomenal Reading entice readers to cross accepted barriers, and highlight the work of poets who challenge language-as-usual in academia and the culture at large.
 
Phenomenal Reading is comprised of essays that are central to how best to read poetry. This book examines individually and collectively poets widely recognized as formal and linguistic innovators. Why do their words appear in unconventional orders? What end do these arrangements serve? Why are they striking? Brian Reed focuses on poetic form as a persistent puzzle, using historical fact and the views of other key critics to clarify how particular literary works are constructed and how those constructions lead to specific effects.
 
Understanding that explication and contextualization do not always sufficiently harness the power of poetry, Reed pursues phenomenological methods that take into account each reader’s unique perception of the world. This collection of twelve essays values narrative as a tool for conveying the intricacy, contingency, and richness of poetic experience.
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Phil Jasner "On the Case"
His Best Writing on the Sixers, the Dream Team, and Beyond
Andy Jasner
Temple University Press, 2017

Allen Iverson loved Philadelphia Daily News basketball beat reporter Phil Jasner, calling him “the best” in the world of sports journalism. From 1981 until his death in 2010, Jasner was always “on the case,” going to great lengths to track athletes down for a quote or a story. He was most known for covering the team’s famous players, including World B. Free and Bobby Jones, Julius Erving and Moses Malone, Charles Barkley, and, of course, Iverson. His tremendous output was beloved by players and fans alike, earning him many honors, including inductions into six Halls of Fame.

Phil Jasner “On the Case” collects the best of Jasner’s writing throughout his illustrious career. Jasner wrote about baseball, the Eagles, and the Philadelphia Atoms’ soccer with the same insight and aplomb he showed in his coverage of The Big 5, the 76ers’ championship season in 1983, and the Dream Team. Lovingly assembled—each chapter is introduced by some of the most prominent figures Jasner covered, from Vince Papale, Doug Collins, and Billy Cunningham to Iverson and Barkley—this collection recounts a distinguished sportswriter’s remarkable career.

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Philip Sparrow Tells All
Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist
Samuel Steward
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Samuel Steward (1909–93) was an English professor, a tattoo artist for the Hells Angels, a sexual adventurer who shared the considerable scope of his experiences with Alfred Kinsey, and a prolific writer whose publications ranged from scholarly articles to gay erotica (the latter appearing under the pen name Phil Andros). Perhaps his oddest authorial role was as a monthly contributor between 1944 and 1949 to the Illinois Dental Journal, an obscure trade publication for dentists, where writing as Philip Sparrow he produced a series of charming, richly allusive, and often quirky essays on a wildly eclectic assortment of topics.

In Philip Sparrow Tells All, Jeremy Mulderig has collected thirty of these engaging but forgotten columns, prefacing them with revealing introductions that relate the essays to people and events in Steward’s life and to the intellectual and cultural contexts in which he wrote during the 1940s. In these essays we encounter such famous friends of Steward as Gertrude Stein, André Gide, and Thornton Wilder. We hear of his stint as a holiday sales clerk at Marshall Field’s (where he met and seduced fellow employee Rock Hudson), of his roles as an opera and ballet extra in hilariously shoddy costumes, of his hoarding tendencies, his disappointment with the drabness of men’s fashions, and his dread of turning forty. We go along with him to a bodybuilding competition and a pet cemetery, and together we wander the boulevards of Paris and the alleys of Algiers. Throughout, Mulderig’s entertaining annotations explain the essays’ wide-ranging allusions and also highlight their gay subtext, which constituted a kind of private game that Steward played with his mostly oblivious audience of Midwestern dentists.

The first collection of any of Samuel Steward’s writings to be republished since his death in 1993, Philip Sparrow Tells All makes these lost essays available to a broad readership that Steward imagined but never actually enjoyed when he wrote them. In doing so, it takes a major step toward documenting his important place in twentieth-century gay literature and history.
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Philly Sports
Teams, Games, and Athletes from Rocky's Town
Ryan Swanson
University of Arkansas Press, 2016

Philadelphia sports—anchored by the Eagles, Flyers, Phillies, and 76ers—have a long, and sometimes tortured, history. Philly fans have booed more than their share and have earned a reputation as some of the most hostile in the country. They’ve been known, so the tales go, to jeer Santa Claus and cheer at the injury of an opposing player.

Strangely though, much of America’s perception of Philadelphia sports has been shaped by a fictional figure: Rocky. The series of Hollywood films named after their title character has told and retold the Cinderella story of an underdog boxer rising up against long odds. One could plausibly make the argument that Rocky is Philadelphia’s most famous athlete.

Beyond the major sports franchises and Rocky, lesser-known athletic competition in Philadelphia offers much to the interested observer. The city’s boxing culture, influence on Negro Leagues baseball, role in establishing interscholastic sport, and leadership in the rise of cricket all deserve and receive close investigation in this new collection.  Philly Sports combines primary research and personal experiences—playing in the Palestra, scouting out the tombstones of the city’s best athletes, enjoying the fervor of a Philadelphia night with a local team in pursuit of a championship title. The essence of Philadelphia sport, and to a certain extent the city itself, is distilled here.

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Philosophical Legacies
Essays on the Thought of Kant, Hegel, and Their Contemporaries (Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, Volume 50)
Daniel O. Dahlstrom
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
The essays trace carefully the histories of the influences of earlier thinkers and their legacies upon later thinkers.
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Philosophical Problems of the Internal and External Worlds
Essays on the Philosophy of Adolf Grünbaum
John Earman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994
The inaugural volume of the Pitt-Konstanz series, devoted to the work of philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, encompasses the philosophical problems of space, time, and cosmology, the nature of scientific methodology, and the foundations of psychoanalysis.
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Philosophical Topics 44.1
Essays on the Philosophy of Frederick Stoutland
Martin Gustafsson
University of Arkansas Press, 2016

Contents:

Introduction – Martin Gustafsson
Self-Awareness and Cognitive Agency in Descartes’s Meditations – Lilli Alanen
Why an Aristotelian Account of Truth Is (More or Less) All We Need – Jeff Malpas
The Social Aspects of Aristotle’s Theory of Action – Dorothea Frede
Voluntarism, Intellectualism, and Anselm on Motivation – Tomas Ekenberg
Why Kant is not a Kantian – James Conant
“A Contrast between Two Pictures”: The Case of Perception – Jennifer Hornsby
On What Is in Front of Your Nose – Anton Ford
Expression and Self-Consciousness – Stina Bäckström
Bodily Movement and Its Significance – Will Small
Anscombe’s Bird, Wittgenstein’s Cat: Intention, Expression, and Convention – Martin Gustafsson
Film Noir and Weakly Intentional Actions: An Anscombian Analysis – Elinor Hållén
Theory, Interpretation, and Law: Some Worries about Dworkin’s Account of Their Relation – Lisa Van Alstyne
Stoutland vs. Metaphysics – Lars Hertzberg

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Philosophy in an Age of Science
Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism
Hilary Putnam
Harvard University Press, 2012

Hilary Putnam’s unceasing self-criticism has led to the frequent changes of mind he is famous for, but his thinking is also marked by considerable continuity. A simultaneous interest in science and ethics—unusual in the current climate of contention—has long characterized his thought. In Philosophy in an Age of Science, Putnam collects his papers for publication—his first volume in almost two decades.

Mario De Caro and David Macarthur’s introduction identifies central themes to help the reader negotiate between Putnam past and Putnam present: his critique of logical positivism; his enduring aspiration to be realist about rational normativity; his anti-essentialism about a range of central philosophical notions; his reconciliation of the scientific worldview and the humanistic tradition; and his movement from reductive scientific naturalism to liberal naturalism. Putnam returns here to some of his first enthusiasms in philosophy, such as logic, mathematics, and quantum mechanics. The reader is given a glimpse, too, of ideas currently in development on the subject of perception.

Putnam’s work, contributing to a broad range of philosophical inquiry, has been said to represent a “history of recent philosophy in outline.” Here it also delineates a possible future.

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A Philosophy of Hope
Lars Svendsen
Reaktion Books, 2024
From a leading popular philosopher, an uplifting meditation on the nature and power of optimism.
 
In this book Lars Svendsen embarks on a profound exploration of the nature of hope, asking what exactly hope is and how it differs from related phenomena such as wishful thinking. He argues that hope is rooted in the ability to shape one’s future, crucial for a society built on freedom instead of fear. Svendsen highlights hope’s vital role in giving life meaning, and its intimate connection to identity. He shows that, while hope cannot magically transform the world, it can empower individuals to focus on achievable goals rather than pressing challenges.
 
Ultimately, A Philosophy of Hope demonstrates the capacity of hope to propel both individuals and the world in a positive direction.
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Photographic Memories
Selected Essays, Playlets, and Stories
Willy Conley
Gallaudet University Press, 2023
Photographic Memories is an anthology of essays, playlets, and short fiction by writer and photographer Willy Conley. The pieces in this collection are grounded in Deaf experiences, a hallmark of Conley’s work. Written from the unique perspective of a Deaf artist who navigates between the Deaf and hearing worlds, Conley depicts a variety of topics, settings, and characters: a day in the life of a traveling Deaf theater company, a nail salon, a baseball player trying to go pro. Conley also addresses critical issues at the heart of his Deaf identity, such as creating professional opportunities for Deaf theater artists, the need for better standards in sign language interpreting, and ableism.

Original photographs taken by the author accompany his writings and invite the reader to contemplate the often-blurred lines between reality and memory.
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Photography At The Dock
Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

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Picasso
Selected Essays
Leo Steinberg
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The fourth volume in the Essays by Leo Steinberg series, focusing on the artist Pablo Picasso.
 
Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures ranging from old masters to modern art, he combined scholarly erudition with eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His writings, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading. Steinberg’s perceptions evolved from long, hard looking at his objects of study. Almost everything he wrote included passages of formal analysis but always put into the service of interpretation.
 
This volume brings together Steinberg’s essays on Pablo Picasso, many of which have been studied and debated for decades, such as “The Philosophical Brothel,” as well as unpublished lectures, including “The Intelligence of Picasso,” a wide-ranging look at Picasso’s enduring ambition to stretch the agenda of representation, from childhood drawings to his last self-portrait. An introduction by art historian Richard Shiff contextualizes these works and illuminates Steinberg’s lifelong dedication to refining the expository, interpretive, and rhetorical features of his writing.
 
Picasso is the fourth volume in a series that presents Steinberg’s writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.
 
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Pick Up the Pieces
Excursions in Seventies Music
John Corbett
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Unless you lived through the 1970s, it seems impossible to understand it at all. Drug delirium, groovy fashion, religious cults, mega corporations, glitzy glam, hard rock, global unrest—from our 2018 perspective, the seventies are often remembered as a bizarre blur of bohemianism and disco. With Pick Up the Pieces, John Corbett transports us back in time to this thrillingly tumultuous era through a playful exploration of its music. Song by song, album by album, he draws our imaginations back into one of the wildest decades in history.
 
Rock. Disco. Pop. Soul. Jazz. Folk. Funk. The music scene of the 1970s was as varied as it was exhilarating, but the decade’s diversity of sound has never been captured in one book before now. Pick Up the Pieces gives a panoramic view of the era’s music and culture through seventy-eight essays that allow readers to dip in and out of the decade at random or immerse themselves completely in Corbett’s chronological journey.
 
An inviting mix of skilled music criticism and cultural observation, Pick Up the Pieces is also a coming-of-age story, tracking the author’s absorption in music as he grows from age seven to seventeen. Along with entertaining personal observations and stories, Corbett includes little-known insights into musicians from Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, James Brown, and Fleetwood Mac to the Residents, Devo, Gal Costa, and Julius Hemphill.
 
A master DJ on the page, Corbett takes us through the curated playlist that is Pick Up the Pieces with captivating melody of language and powerful enthusiasm for the era. This funny, energetic book will have readers longing nostalgically for a decade long past.
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Picture Theory
Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation
W. J. T. Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 1994
What precisely, W. J. T. Mitchell asks, are pictures (and theories of pictures) doing now, in the late twentieth century, when the power of the visual is said to be greater than ever before, and the "pictorial turn" supplants the "linguistic turn" in the study of culture? This book by one of America's leading theorists of visual representation offers a rich account of the interplay between the visible and the readable across culture, from literature to visual art to the mass media.
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Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions
Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology
Robert Sokolowski
Catholic University of America Press, 2022
One of the major contributions of Husserl’s phenomenology has been to show that things present themselves to us in strikingly different ways. There are various kinds of presentations and something like logical structures in them that allow the truth of things to appear. Being pictured is different from being named, and also different from being distinguished from something else. The fourteen essays in this volume provide concrete and colorful examples of strategic forms of presentation, and they also shed light on us as persons who exercise our intelligence when we let things appear in these various ways. Even our moral conduct takes place because something appears to us as to be done or to be avoided in a situation that calls for action. When we quote what someone has said, for example, we express things as they have been expressed by someone else, and we invoke the authority of that other speaker. In measurement, we either bring external units, such as inches or yards, to determine the “how much” of things; or we engage in “internal measurement” and use one part of the object to determine the size of the whole. In moral action, the deep core of what we do involves either benevolence or malevolence, and in such conduct we shape or confirm ourselves as good or bad. Even the timing of things, the measurement of their motions and the determination of their before and after, in both clock and calendar time, cannot take place without the involvement of the person’s own interwoven perceptions, remembrances, and anticipations, all held together by the underlying flow of personal as well as worldly temporality. The essays in this book are an attempt to blend the philosophical approaches of Aristotle and Husserl, the classical and the modern, to help us appreciate what Aristotle called “being as the true,” and to show how the human person is involved in this enterprise.
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Pigeon River Country
A Michigan Forest
Dale Clarke Franz
University of Michigan Press, 2007

The long awaited new edition of a classic offers memories, myths, and meanings of the largest contiguous piece of wild land in Michigan's Lower Peninsula.

This updated edition explores more deeply why and how the outdoors moves and compels us. It’s a book about mice who sing, elk who wear collars, deer who kiss, and birds who could dictate their compositions to Mozart. It's about the human species interacting in generous and sometimes misguided ways with the rest of life. It's about men trying to ripen pinecones into pineapples and women taking better aim with a revolver than expected. It's about poetry—from Mary Oliver, Lao Tzu, and Theodore Roethke—and seeing hawks dive in a night sky or feeling oil geologists shake the earth below. It's about finding fish dead in the river by the thousands and crouching behind a stump to watch beaver build a dwelling. While this book considers life beyond the boundaries of Pigeon River Country, it is steeped in the specifics of a place that lives mostly on its own, instead of human, terms.

The Pigeon River Country is a remote northern forest, ecologically distinct from most of the United States. Laced with waterways, it has a storied past. Dale Clarke Franz has collected personal accounts from various people intrigued with the Pigeon River Country—including loggers, conservationists, mill workers, campers, even the young Ernest Hemingway, who said he loved the forest "better than anything in the world." There are comprehensive discussions of the area's flora and fauna, guides to trails and camping sites, and photos showcasing the changing face of this hidden national treasure.

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Pioneers and Caretakers
A Study of Nine American Women Novelists
Louis Auchincloss
University of Minnesota Press, 1965
Pioneers and Caretakers was first published in 1965.In a series of stimulating and highly readable essays, Mr. Auchincloss discusses the work of nine American women novelists in whom he finds a unity of common tradition. As the title of the book implies, Mr. Auchincloss regards these novelists as caretakers of our culture and, at the same time, as literary pioneers. The writers he discusses are Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford, Carson McCullers, and Mary McCarthy.In explaining his thesis Mr. Auchincloss writes: “In the migrations of tribes the women were responsible for the packing and preservation of the household goods. They have always been the true conservatives, the caretakers of the culture. But because in our nation we have to go back so few decades to get to the Indians, the functions of the caretaker and of the pioneer have become curiously blended. To preserve a bit of the American tradition, one has to preserve a bit of the frontier.“A notable thing about our women writers is that they have struck a more affirmative note than the men. Their darkness is not as dark as that of Dreiser or Lewis or Faulkner or O’Neill, which is not to say that they see America less clearly, but that they see it more discriminatingly. They have a sharper sense of their stake in the national heritage, and they are always at work to preserve it. They never destroy; they never want the clean sweep. They are conservatives who are always trying to conserve.”
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Pirkei Avot
A Social Justice Commentary
Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2018

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Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition
Toward a 21st Century Poetics
Rigoberto González
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition gathers Rigoberto González’s most important essays and book reviews, many of which consider the work of emerging poets whose identities and political positions are transforming what readers expect from contemporary poetry. A number of these voices represent intersectional communities, such as queer writers of color like Natalie Díaz, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Eduardo C. Corral, and many writers, such as Carmen Giménez Smith and David Tomás Martínez, have deep connections to their Latino communities. Collectively, these writers are enriching American poetry to reflect a more diverse, panoramic, and socially conscious literary landscape. Also featured are essays on the poets’ literary ancestors—including Juan Felipe Herrera, Alurista, and Francisco X. Alarcón—and speeches that address the need to leverage poetry as agency.

This book fills a glaring gap in existing poetry scholarship by focusing exclusively on writers of color, and particularly on Latino poetry. González makes important observations about the relevance, urgency, and exquisite craft of the work coming from writers who represent marginalized communities. His insightful connections between the Latino, African American, Asian American, and Native American literatures persuasively position them as a collective movement critiquing, challenging, and reorienting the direction of American poetry with their nuanced and politicized verse. González’s inclusive vision covers a wide landscape of writers, opening literary doors for sexual and ethnic minorities.


 
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Place and Replace
Essays on Western Canada
Adele Perry
University of Manitoba Press, 2013

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A Place Called Grand Canyon
Contested Geographies
Barbara J. Morehouse
University of Arizona Press, 1996
For most people, "Grand Canyon" signifies that place of scenic wonder identified with Grand Canyon National Park. Beyond the boundaries of the park, however, extends the greater Grand Canyon, a region that includes five Indian reservations, numerous human settlements, and lands managed by three federal agencies and by the states of Arizona and Utah. Many people have sought to etch their values, economic practices, and physical presence on this vast expanse. Ultimately, all have had to come to terms with the limits imposed by the physical environment and the constraints posed by others seeking to carve out a place for themselves. A Place Called Grand Canyon is an unprecedented survey of how the lands and resources of the greater Grand Canyon have come to be divided in many different ways and for many different reasons. It chronicles the ebb and flow of power --changes in who controls the land and gives it meaning. The book begins with an exploration of the geographies of the native peoples, then examines how the westward expansion of the United States affected their lives and lands. It traces the century of contest and negotiation over the land and its resources that began in the 1880s and concludes with an assessment of contemporary efforts to redefine the region. Along the way, it explores how the spaces of the greater Grand Canyon area came to be defined and used, and how those spaces in turn influenced later contests among the ranchers, loggers, miners, recreationists, preservationists, Native Americans, and others claiming a piece--or all--of the area for their own ends. The story exposes how dynamic the geographical boundaries of the region really are, regardless of the indelibility of the ink with which they were drawn. With visitation to Grand Canyon National Park approaching five million people per year, pressures on resources are intensifying. When the greater Grand Canyon area is considered, environmental management is further complicated by the often-conflicting demands of business, recreation, ecological preservation, and human settlement. Morehouse invites us to look beyond boundaries drawn on maps to discover what Grand Canyon means to different people, and to think more deeply about what living in harmony with the land really entails. Her insights will be of interest to geographers and other social scientists--including anthropologists and environmental historians--and to all who seek a counterpoint to conventional natural histories of the region.
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A Place Of Sense
Essays In Search Of Midwest
Michael Martone
University of Iowa Press, 1988
Collected here are essays by Louise Erdrich, Michael Rosen, Gary Comstock, Mary Swander and Jane Staw, David Hamilton, Janet Kauffman, Douglas Bauer, and Michael Martone. Sixteen black-and-white photographs by David Plowden illustrate the sweeping territory covered in the essays. Together they bring a new understanding of the moods, emotions, people, and places that form the Midwest, proving it to be as complex and unordinarily beautiful as it is modest.
 
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The Place of the Symbolic
Essays on Art and Politics
Reiner Schürmann
Diaphanes, 2021
This book weaves together Reiner Schürmann’s work on art and politics, drawing on a range of the most important thinkers and poets of the twentieth century and beyond.

The Place of the Symbolic gathers Reiner Schürmann’s essays on the nexus of art and politics. In keeping with his translation of the destruction of metaphysics into an an-archic philosophy of practice, Schürmann develops a radical theory of the place of symbols, irreducible either to idealist theories of symbols or structuralist accounts of the symbolic. Symbols, Schürmann argues, may provide a bridge between ontological difference and politics. They resist being grasped metaphysically, in terms of representation. Instead, their understanding requires a specific way of existence: attending to the coming-to-presence of phenomena. As such, the understanding of symbols discloses a form of praxis that abandons ultimate grounds and opens onto the manifold.

Alongside Schürmann’s theory of symbols, the collection includes essays on the relation between metaphysics, tragedy, and technology; on the “there is” in poetry; as well as on judgment. Throughout these characteristically lucid interventions, Schürmann’s most urgent concern remains a consideration of singular and finite practices that enact a release from universal principles. Art and politics appear here as the unworking of ultimate grounds; that is, as practices attuned to a truly groundless form of life.
 
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Places and Purposes of Popular Music Education
Perspectives from the Field
Edited by Bryan Powell and Gareth Dylan Smith
Intellect Books, 2022
An array of diverse perspectives regarding the what and the why of popular music education.

This book provides a variety of perspectives on popular music education. With a mixture of rants, manifestos, and punchy position pieces, the volume moves from scholarly essays replete with citations and references to descriptions of practice and straight-talking polemics. The writing is approachable in tone, and the chapters are intended to whet appetites, prime pumps, open eyes, and keep cogs turning for academics of all ages and stages.

The book will appeal to those working in popular music studies, communication studies, and education research. It also holds relevance for researchers of the music industry and music ecosystems around the world. International in reach and scope and edited by recognized voices at the vanguard of progressive music education, this is an eye-opening exploration of education in and through the widespread cultural phenomenon of popular music.
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Placing the Academy
Essays on Landscape, Work, and Identity
edited by Jennifer Sinor and Rona Kaufman
Utah State University Press, 2007
A set of creative writers here responds to the call for literature that addresses who we are by understanding where we are—where, for each of them, being somehow part of the academy. Their personal essays delineate the diverse, sometimes unexpected roles of place in shaping them, as writers and teachers in varied environments, through unique experiences and distinctive worldviews—in reconfiguring their conjunctions of identity and setting, here, there, everywhere, and in between.
 
Offering creative comments on place, identity, and academic work are authors Charles Bergman, Mary Clearman Blew, Jayne Brim Box, Jeffrey M. Buchanan, Norma Elia Cantú, Katherine Fischer, Kathryn T. Flannery, Diana Garcia, Janice M. Gould, Seán W. Henne, Rona Kaufman, Deborah A. Miranda, Erin E. Moore, Kathleen Dean Moore, Robert Michael Pyle, Jennifer Sinor, Scott Slovic, Michael Sowder, Lee Torda, Charles Waugh, and Mitsuye Yamada.
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Plaintext
Essays
Nancy Mairs
University of Arizona Press, 1986
Plaintext has won critical acclaim and a wide audience for author Nancy Mairs’s unapologetic views on agoraphobia, multiple sclerosis, and the challenges of being a woman in a patriarchal world. The provocative collection includes the widely anthologized essays “On Being a Cripple” and “On Not Liking Sex.”
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Planting Paradise
Cultivating the Garden, 1501-1900
Stephen Harris
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011

Beautifully illustrated, Planting Paradise charts the evolution of thinking about the cultivation of gardens from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In this age of discovery, when the world was being explored as never before, gardening itself took on new dimensions. The Renaissance belief in direct observation of nature offered an alternative way of thinking and inspired the scientific approach of the Enlightenment, and soon gardens were no longer just places of beauty, but also laboratories for scientific investigation.

            Planting Paradise reveals how the botanic gardens of early modern Europe were largely viewed as a means of supplying surgeons with medicines but by the seventeenth and eighteenth century the interest in gardens and cultivating exotic plants had spread to all levels of society. As global exploration took Europeans all over the world, gardens became a tapestry of many diverse botanical histories—some plants were native, some were introduced from foreign lands, and others were bred in the garden. Planting Paradise shows how the garden became a symbol of human interactions within the botanical world.

            A lovely gift book for garden lovers, Planting Paradise showcases the superb collection of botanical illustrations in the Plant Sciences Department and Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and presents a handsome and fascinating look at the history of the garden from the picturesque to the practical and back again.

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Playa Works
The Myth of the Empty
William L. Fox
University of Nevada Press, 2024

In eight brilliant essays, Fox explores many of the major playas of the American West , examining locations as diverse as Nellis Air Force Base and Frenchman Flat, where the federal government has tested experimental aircraft and atomic weaponry; the Great Salt Lake Desert, where land-speed records have been broken; and the Black Rock Desert of Northern Nevada, site of the colorful Burning Man arts festival. He analyzes the geological and climatological conditions that created the playas and the historical role that playas played in the exploration and settlement of the West. And he offers lucid and keenly perceptive discussions of the ways that artists have responded to the playas, from the ancient makers of geoglyphs to the work of contemporary artists who have found inspiration in these enigmatic spaces, including earthworks builder Michael Heizer, photographer Richard Misrach, and painter Michael Moore. The ensemble is a compelling combination of natural history, philosophy, and art criticism, a thoughtful meditation on humankind's aversion to and fascination with the void.

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Playback
By Richard "Cactus" Pryor
University of Texas Press, 1995

From the town that brought you Molly Ivins, Liz Carpenter, John Henry Faulk, and Greater Tuna, here's Cactus Pryor. For decades, Cactus' wit and wisdom have delighted radio listeners, as well as the many social, political, business, and philanthropic groups throughout the United States whose functions have been enlivened by this accomplished master of ceremonies and after-dinner speaker.

Now the University of Texas Press takes great pleasure in bringing you this quintessential Texas humorist. Playback gathers over forty of Cactus Pryor's favorite radio essays, translating "ear words into eye words," as he puts it. In these pieces, Cactus paints vivid word pictures of people and places, offering readers the same "you are there" immediacy that makes his radio broadcasts so popular. In them, you'll take a sentimental journey with Cactus and his wife to the Maui grave site of Charles Lindbergh—discover how legendary University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal faced the agony of defeat with humor—meet unsung heroes like the 104-year-old who's teaching himself to read and write—get acquainted with the notable folks Cactus has known, including Lady Bird Johnson, John Wayne, Jane Fonda, and James Michener—and, of course, share Cactus' love of family, friends, and the Texas coast.

As Bailey White's essays on National Public Radio have introduced listeners across the country to the lifeways of the Deep South, so Cactus Pryor offers a humorous, revealing look at how we Texans view ourselves, our neighbors, and the world. Read Playback now, and see what you've been missing.

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Players, Teams, and Stadium Ghosts
Bob Hunter on Sports
Bob Hunter
Ohio University Press, 2019

In Players, Teams, and Stadium Ghosts, sportswriter Bob Hunter has assembled a Hall of Fame collection of his best writing from the Columbus Dispatch. Fans will encounter some of the biggest names in sports and relive great moments from games played by amateurs and pros. They’ll encounter forgotten players and teams that struggled.

Hunter shows us LeBron James when he was a 15-year-old high school freshman, already capturing the world’s attention; 20-year-old Derek Jeter’s meteoric rise through the minors, including the Columbus Clippers; a strange encounter with Pete Rose hustling frozen pizzas; and the excitement of watching future WNBA star Katie Smith dominate a Columbus Quest championship game. The common thread is the personal touch that Hunter consistently uses to take readers beyond the final scores and the dazzle of lights. These are the people behind the athletes. They’re remembered for how they played, but Hunter reminds us who they were.

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Playing God in the Meadow
How I Learned to Admire My Weeds
Martha Leb Molnar
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

After decades of fantasizing and saving, of working multiple jobs and embracing frugality in the midst of Manhattan, Martha Leb Molnar and her husband had found their parcel of land. Determined to turn an overgrown and unproductive Vermont apple orchard into a thriving and beautiful landscape, they decided to restore this patch of land to a pristine meadow and build a safe haven for their family and nearby wildlife.

Once they cleared the gnarled and dying trees away, Molnar was forced to wage war on the invasive species that had sprung up around the property. Propelled by the heated debates surrounding non-native species and her own complicated family history and migration, she was driven to research the Vermont landscape, turning to scientific literature, experts in botany and environmental science, and locals who have long tended the land in search of answers. At turns funny, thoughtful, and conversational, Playing God in the Meadow follows this big city transplant as she learns to make peace with rural life and an evolving landscape that she cannot entirely control.

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Playing in Time
Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories
Carlo Rotella
University of Chicago Press, 2012
From jazz fantasy camp to running a movie studio; from a fight between an old guy and a fat guy to a fear of clowns—Carlo Rotella’s Playing in Time delivers good stories full of vivid characters, all told with the unique voice and humor that have garnered Rotella many devoted readers in the New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, and Washington Post Magazine, among others. The two dozen essays in Playing in Time, some of which have never before been published, revolve around the themes and obsessions that have characterized Rotella’s writing from the start: boxing, music, writers, and cities. What holds them together is Rotella’s unique focus on people, craft, and what floats outside the mainstream. “Playing in time” refers to how people make beauty and meaning while working within the constraints and limits forced on them by life, and in his writing Rotella transforms the craft and beauty he so admires in others into an art of his own.

Rotella is best known for his writings on boxing, and his essays here do not disappoint. It’s a topic that he turns to for its colorful characters, compelling settings, and formidable life lessons both in and out of the ring. He gives us tales of an older boxer who keeps unretiring and a welterweight who is “about as rich and famous as a 147-pound fighter can get these days,” and a hilarious rumination on why Muhammad Ali’s phrase “I am the greatest” began appearing (in the mouth of Epeus) in translations of The Iliad around 1987. His essays on blues, crime and science fiction writers, and urban spaces are equally and deftly engaging, combining an artist’s eye for detail with a scholar’s sense of research, whether taking us to visit detective writer George Pelecanos or to dance with the proprietress of the Baby Doll Polka Club next to Midway Airport in Chicago.

Rotella’s essays are always smart, frequently funny, and consistently surprising. This collection will be welcomed by his many fans and will bring his inimitable style and approach to an even wider audience.

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Playing with Fish and Other Lessons from the North
Robert J. Wolfe
University of Arizona Press, 2006
According to the Yup’ik Eskimo of Alaska, fish are not to be played with. It’s an adage instilled in children that’s as basic as looking both ways before crossing the street, but at its heart lies a concern for nature. Yup’ik traditions are tested each generation by this people’s struggle for survival, the admonition not to play with fish has been further tested by the arrival of sport fishing from the south. Worlds are colliding—whose will emerge unscathed? Robert J. Wolfe, a cultural anthropologist from California, spent twenty years in Alaska documenting the traditional hunting and fishing practices of Alaska Natives. During that northern sojourn he discovered much about sustainable relationships between people and nature and about the basis of meaningful communities. In Playing with Fish he has crafted a series of thought-provoking essays on nature, culture, and the human condition that convey unsuspected lessons from the North. In contrasting California and Alaska—worlds far apart yet connected by peoples, cultural traditions, and ecology—Wolfe not only draws distinctions between compass points, he also conveys memorable stories about nature and life. He depicts bears and humans as both neighbors and ancient adversaries, and how cultural views about bears can destroy or preserve those relationships. He shows us Alaskan villages where security is found not in locks but in neighbors, unlike electronically sealed suburban California homes, their lawns studded with security signs. And he describes the peaceful resolution of conflict between California bird hunters and Eskimos of the Bering Sea coast over declining geese numbers, where small humanizing acts tipped the balance in favor of cooperation. Blending insights into subjects as diverse as music and chaos theory, Wolfe challenges readers to reflect on their own personal conduct within nature and within our multicultural world. Playing with Fish is a delightful and insightful collection of modern parables that offer a new way of looking at cultural and ecological issues, reminding us that the road between two worlds is always a two-way street.
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Playing with Memories
Essays on Guy Maddin
David Church
University of Manitoba Press, 2009
Playing with Memories is the first collection of scholarly essays on the work of internationally acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. It offers extensive perspectives on his career to date, from the early experimentation of The Dead Father (1986) to the intensely intimate revelations of My Winnipeg (2007). Featuring new and updated essays from American, Canadian, and Australian scholars, collaborators, and critics, as well as an in-depth interview with Maddin, this collection explores the aesthetics and politics behind Maddin’s work, firmly situating his films within ongoing cultural debates about postmodernism, genre, and national identity.
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The Pocket Epicurean
John Sellars
University of Chicago Press, 2021
A short, smart guide to living the good life through the teachings of Epicurus.

As long as there has been human life, we’ve searched for what it means to be happy. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Epicurus came to his own conclusion: all we really want in life is pleasure. Though today we tend to associate the word “Epicurean” with indulgence in the form of food and wine, the philosophy of Epicurus was about a life well lived even in the hardest of times. As John Sellars shows in this concise, approachable guide, the ideal life envisioned by Epicurus and his followers was a life much more concerned with mental pleasures and the avoidance of pain. Their goal, in short, was a life of tranquility or contentment.
 
In The Pocket Epicurean Sellars walks us through the history of Epicureanism, starting with the private garden on the edge of ancient Athens where Epicurus and his students lived in the fourth century BC, and where women were as welcome as men. Sellars then moves on to ancient Rome, where Epicurean influence flourished thanks to the poet Lucretius and his cohort. Throughout the book, Sellars draws on the ideas of Epicurus to offer a constructive way of thinking about the pleasures of friendship and our place in the world.

 
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Poe Abroad
Influence Reputation Affinities
Lois Davis Vines
University of Iowa Press, 1999
Perhaps no one would be more shocked at the steady rise of his literary reputation—on a truly global scale—Than Edgar Allan Poe himself. Poe's literary reputation has climbed steadily since his death in 1849.

In Poe Abroad, Lois Vines has brought together a collection of essays that document the American writer's influence on the diverse literatures—and writers—of the world. Over twenty scholars demonstrate how and why Poe has significantly influenced many of the major literary figures of the last 150 years.

Part One includes studies of Poe's popularity among general readers, his influence on literary movements, and his reputation as a poet, fiction writer, and literary critic. Part Two presents analyses of the role Poe played in the literary development of specific writers representing many different cultures.

Poe Abroad commemorates the 150th anniversary of Poe's death and celebrates his worldwide impact, beginning with the first literal translation of Poe into a foreign language, “The Gold-Bug”into French in 1845. Charles Baudelaire translated another Poe tale in 1848 and four years later wrote an essay that would make Poe a well-known author in Europe even before he achieved recognition in America.

Poe died knowing only that some of his stories had been translated into French. He probably never would have imagined that his work would be admired and imitated as far away as Japan, China, and India or would have a lasting influence on writers such as Baudelaire, August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Tanizaki Junichiro.

As we approach the sesquicentennial of his death, Poe Abroad brings together a timely one-volume assessment of Poe's influence throughout the world.
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Poetic License
Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric
Marjorie Perloff
Northwestern University Press, 1990
In Poetic License, Marjorie Perloff insists that despite the recent interest in "opening up the canon," our understanding of poetry and poetics is all too often rutted in conventional notions of the lyric that shed little light on what poets and artists are actually doing today. On topics ranging from general problems of canonicity to the critical evaluation of such poets as Plath, Ginsberg, and others, Perloff introduces nonconventional ideas of the nature of poetic texts and reframes the discussion of postmodern "paratexts." Her discussion reformulates basic presuppositions of what poetry is and what it can do and leads us to see the great possibilities still open to lyric poetry at a time when, as Yeats predicted, "the center cannot hold."
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Poetics in a New Key
Interviews and Essays
Marjorie Perloff
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Marjorie Perloff writes in her preface to Poetics in a New Key that when she learned David Jonathan Y. Bayot wanted to publish a collection of her interviews and essays, she was “at once honored and mystified.”  But to Perloff’s surprise and her readers’ delight, the resulting assembly not only presents an accessible and provocative introduction to Perloff’s critical thought, but also highlights the wide range of her interests, and the energetic reassessments and new takes that have marked her academic career. 

The fourteen interviews in Poetics in a New Key—conducted by scholars, poets, and critics from the United States, Denmark, Norway, France, and Poland, including Charles Bernstein, Hélène Aji, and Peter Nicholls—cover a broad spectrum of topics in the study of poetry: its nature as a literary genre, its current state, and its relationship to art, politics, language, theory, and technology. Also featured in the collection are three pieces by Perloff herself: an academic memoir, an exploration of poetry pedagogy, and an essay on twenty-first-century intellectuals. But across all the interviews and essays, Perloff’s distinctive personality and approach to reading and talking resound, making this new collection an inspiring resource for scholars both of poetry and writing.
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The Poetics of Indeterminacy
Rimbaud to Cage
Marjorie Perloff
Northwestern University Press, 1999
In her seminal study, first published in 1981, Marjorie Perloff argues that the map of Modernist poetry needs to be redrawn to include a central tradition which cannot properly be situated within the Romantic-Symbolist tradition dominating the early twentieth century.
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The Poetics of Natural History
Christoph Irmscher
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Winner of the 2000 American Studies Network Prize and the Literature and Language Award from the Association of American Publishers, Inc.

Early American naturalists assembled dazzling collections of native flora and fauna, from John Bartram’s botanical garden in Philadelphia and the artful display of animals in Charles Willson Peale’s museum to P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, infamously characterized by Henry James as “halls of humbug.” Yet physical collections were only one of the myriad ways that these naturalists captured, catalogued, and commemorated America’s rich biodiversity. They also turned to writing and art, from John Edward Holbrook’s forays into the fascinating world of herpetology to John James Audubon’s masterful portraits of American birds.
 
In this groundbreaking, now classic book, Christoph Irmscher argues that early American natural historians developed a distinctly poetic sensibility that allowed them to imagine themselves as part of, and not apart from, their environment. He also demonstrates what happens to such inclusiveness in the hands of Harvard scientist-turned Amazonian explorer Louis Agassiz, whose racist pseudoscience appalled his student William James. 
 
This expanded, full-color edition of The Poetics of Natural History features a preface and art from award-winning artist Rosamond Purcell and invites the reader to be fully immersed in an era when the boundaries between literature, art, and science became fluid.
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Poetry On and Off the Page
Essays for Emergent Occasions
Marjorie Perloff
Northwestern University Press, 1998
The fourteen essays that make up this collection have as their common theme a reconsideration of the role historical and cultural change has played in the evolution of twentieth-century poetry and poetics. Committed to the notion that, in John Ashbery's words, "You can't say it that way anymore," Poetry On & Off the Page describes the formations and transformations of literary and artistic discourses, and traces these discourses as they have evolved in their dialogue with history, culture, and society. The volume is testimony to the important role that contemporary artistic practice will continue to play as we move into the twenty-first century.
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Poet's Work, Poet's Play
Essays on the Practice and the Art
Edited by Daniel Tobin and Pimone Triplett
University of Michigan Press, 2008

A follow-up to the highly praised Poets Teaching Poets, Daniel Tobin and Pimone Triplett's Poet's Work, Poet's Play gathers together essays by some of the most important voices in contemporary poetry: Carl Dennis, Stephen Dobyns, Tony Hoagland, Heather McHugh, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Eleanor Wilner, Dean Young, and the late Larry Levis and Agha Shahid Ali.

Lively, accessible, and erudite, the pieces range from discussions on syntax and the syllable to an exploration of the complexities of canon formation under the shadow of imperialism, race, and history. Exploring the work of John Donne, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, Charles Olsen, Ezra Pound, Anne Carson, Robert Herrick, Harryette Mullen, and many others, Poet's Work, Poet's Play---like its predecessor volume---will be an invaluable tool for teachers, students, and poets at every level.

"Much more than a set of essays on poetic craft or aesthetic understandings, this collection takes on two of the most prevalent anxieties about writing poetry in our time: the place of subjectivity in poetry, and how to make a significant shape in language while both affirming and interrogating the poetic I's authority. This is a book for anyone who wants to write better poems, who wants to read with greater passion, and who believes that poetry is an independent category of human consciousness that can be as capaciousness as the world, and as nuanced."
---Tom Sleigh, author of Space Walk and Far Side of the Earth

"Gathering together essays by unquestionably important poets, Poet's Work, Poet's Play has immense pedagogical value in the way it demonstrates how to discover in poetry resources of language and structure often overlooked in first, and ensuing, readings of complex texts."
---Laurence Goldstein, Professor of English, University of Michigan, and Editor, Michigan Quarterly Review

"A valuable document illuminating critical aspects of the contemporary American poetry scene."
---John Koethe, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and author of Sally's Hair: Poems

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PO.EX
Essays from Portugal on Cyberliterature and Intermedia
Rui Torres
West Virginia University Press, 2013
Po.Ex: Essays from Portugal on Cyberliterature and Intermedia is a crucial addition to the bookshelf for scholars and students of new media, digital literature, and experimental writing. Available for the first time outside of Portuguese, these essays are crucial primary texts of experimental literature. Po.Ex shows a long history of procedural composition and expressive intermedial writing, leading directly to the latest computer and network-based artworks. Collecting essays by Pedro Barbosa, Ana Hatherly, and E. M. de Melo e Castro, along with framing essays by the editors and extensive bibliographical materials,this book situates today’s digital and online texts in a rich tradition of European literature. New forms of writing appear in the encounter of literature and digital media, just as old forms are renewed. Po.Ex is an archive of the past, present, and future of cyberliterature and intermedia writing.     
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Political Fictions
Jean-Paul Sartre
Seagull Books, 2021
A collection of pieces on politically engaged fiction of Sartre’s day, including works by André Gorz and Paul Nizan.

Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions.
 
Political Fictions includes Sartre’s long foreword to André Gorz’s The Traitor, which has often been called the most intimate and profound book to emerge from the existentialist movement. Sartre also presents a detailed portrait of his friend and fellow writer Paul Nizan (1905–1940), once a committed communist, who died fighting the Nazis at the Battle of Dunkirk. Also featured here is Sartre’s famous foreword to Nizan’s novel The Conspiracy, which made the novel famous on its republication in the 1960s, when it was adopted as an iconic text during the events of May ’68.
 
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Political Political Theory
Essays on Institutions
Jeremy Waldron
Harvard University Press, 2016

Political institutions are the main subject of political theory—or they ought to be. Making the case with his trademark forcefulness and intellectual aplomb, Jeremy Waldron argues in favor of reorienting the theory of politics toward the institutions and institutional principles of modern democracy and the mechanisms through which democratic ideals are achieved.

Too many political theorists are preoccupied with analyzing the nature and importance of justice, liberty, and equality, at the cost of ignoring the governmental institutions needed to achieve them. By contrast, political scientists have kept institutions in view, but they deploy a meager set of value-conceptions in evaluating them. Reflecting on an array of issues about constitutional structure, Waldron considers the uses and abuses of diverse institutions and traditions, from separation of powers and bicameralism to judicial review of legislation, the principle of loyal opposition, the nature of representation, political accountability, and the rule of law. He refines his well-known argument about the undemocratic character of judicial review, providing a capacious perspective on the proper role of courts in a constitutional democracy, and he offers an illuminating critique of the contrasting political philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin.

Even if political theorists remain fixated on expounding the philosophical foundations of democracy, they need to complement their work with a firmer grasp of the structures through which democracy is realized. This is what political political theory means: theory addressing itself to the way political institutions frame political disagreements and orchestrate resolutions to our disputes over social ideals.

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Political Writings
Jean-Francois Lyotard
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

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Politics by Humans
Research on American Leadership
James David Barber
Duke University Press
James David Barber's research on leadership, particularly the phenomenon of the American presidency, has become legendary for both its insight and wit. Politics by Humans presents some of this most original and seminal products of his scholarship.
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Politics, Language, and Time
Essays on Political Thought and History
J. G. A. Pocock
University of Chicago Press, 1989
In his first essay, "Languages and Their Implications," J. G. A. Pocock announces the emergence of the history of political thought as a discipline apart from political philosophy. Traditionally, "history" of political thought has meant a chronological ordering of intellectual systems without attention to political languages; but it is through the study of those languages and of their changes, Pocock claims, that political thought will at last be studied historically.

Pocock argues that the solution has already been approached by, first, the linguistic philosophers, with their emphasis on the importance of language study to understanding human thought, and, second, by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with its notion of controlling intellectual paradigms. Those paradigms within and through which the scientist organizes his intellectual enterprise may well be seen as analogous to the worlds of political discourse in which political problems are posed and political solutions are proffered. Using this notion of successive paradigms, Pocock demonstrates its effectiveness by analyzing a wide range of subjects, from ancient Chinese philosophy to Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Burke.
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Politics, Metaphysics, and Death
Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sace
Andrew Norris, ed.
Duke University Press, 2005
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is having an increasingly significant impact on Anglo-American political theory. His most prominent intervention to date is the powerful reassessment of sovereignty and the politics of life and death laid out in his multivolume Homo Sacer project. Agamben argues that in both the modern world and the ancient, politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camps—in which some inmates are reduced to a form of living death—are not a political aberration but instead the place where this essential political decision about life most clearly reveals itself. Engaging specifically with Homo Sacer, the essays in this collection draw out and contend with the wide-ranging implications of Agamben’s radical and controversial interpretation of modern political life.

The contributors analyze Agamben’s thought from the perspectives of political theory, philosophy, jurisprudence, and the history of law. They consider his work not only in relation to that of his major interlocutors—Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger—but also in relation to the thought of Plato, Pindar, Heraclitus, Descartes, Kafka, Bataille, and Derrida. The essayists’ approaches are varied, as are their ultimate evaluations of the cogency and accuracy of Agamben’s arguments. This volume also includes an original essay by Agamben in which he considers the relation of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to Schmitt’s Political Theology. Politics, Metaphysics, and Death is a necessary, multifaceted exposition and evaluation of the thought of one of today’s most important political theorists.

Contributors: Giorgio Agamben, Andrew Benjamin, Peter Fitzpatrick, Anselm Haverkamp, Paul Hegarty, Andreas Kalyvas, Rainer Maria Kiesow , Catherine Mills, Andrew Norris, Adam Thurschwell, Erik Vogt, Thomas Carl Wall

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The Politics of Bitcoin
Software as Right-Wing Extremism
David Golumbia
University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right political thought. The Politics of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and political thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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The Politics of Imagining Asia
Wang Hui
Harvard University Press, 2011

In this bold, provocative collection, Wang Hui confronts some of the major issues concerning modern China and the status quo of contemporary Chinese thought.

The book’s overarching theme is the possibility of an alternative modernity that does not rely on imported conceptions of Chinese history and its legacy. Wang Hui argues that current models, based largely on Western notions of empire and the nation-state, fail to account for the richness and diversity of pre-modern Chinese historical practice. At the same time, he refrains from offering an exclusively Chinese perspective and placing China in an intellectual ghetto. Navigating terrain on regional language and politics, he draws on China’s unique past to expose the inadequacies of European-born standards for assessing modern China’s evolution. He takes issue particularly with the way in which nation-state logic has dominated politically charged concerns like Chinese language standardization and “The Tibetan Question.” His stance is critical—and often controversial—but he locates hope in the kinds of complex, multifaceted arrangements that defined China and much of Asia for centuries.

The Politics of Imagining Asia challenges us not only to re-examine our theories of “Asia” but to reconsider what “Europe” means as well. As Theodore Huters writes in his introduction, “Wang Hui’s concerns extend beyond China and Asia to an ambition to rethink world history as a whole.”

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The Politics of the Artificial
Essays on Design and Design Studies
Victor Margolin
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Emerging from the world of commercial art and product styling, design has now become completely integrated into human life. Its marks are all around us, from the chairs we sit on to the Web sites on our computer screens.

One of the pioneers of design studies and still one of its most distinguished practitioners, Victor Margolin here offers a timely meditation on design and its study at the turn of the millennium and charts new directions for the future development of both fields. Divided into sections on the practice and study of design, the essays in The Politics of the Artificial cover such topics as design history, design research, design as a political tool, sustainable design, and the problems of design's relation to advanced technologies. Margolin also examines the work of key practitioners such as the matrix designer Ken Isaacs. Throughout the book Margolin demonstrates the underlying connections between the many ways of reflecting on and practicing design. He argues for the creation of an international, interdisciplinary field of design research and proposes a new ethical agenda for designers and researchers that encompasses the responsibility to users, the problems of sustainability, and the complicated questions of how to set boundaries for applying advanced technology to solve the problems of human life.

Opinionated and erudite, Victor Margolin's The Politics of the Artificial breaks fresh ground in its call for a new approach to design research and practice. Designers, engineers, architects, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians will all benefit from its insights.
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The Politics of Vibration
Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice
Marcus Boon
Duke University Press, 2022
In The Politics of Vibration Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration. Focusing on the work of three contemporary musicians—Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philosopher Catherine Christer Hennix, and Houston-based hip-hop musician DJ Screw—Boon outlines how music constructs a vibrational space of individual and collective transformation. Contributing to a new interdisciplinary field of vibration studies, he understands vibration as a mathematical and a physical concept, as a religious or ontological force, and as a psychological determinant of subjectivity. Boon contends that music, as a shaping of vibration, needs to be recognized as a cosmopolitical practice—in the sense introduced by Isabelle Stengers—in which what music is within a society depends on what kinds of access to vibration are permitted, and to whom. This politics of vibration constitutes the hidden ontology of contemporary music because the organization of vibration shapes individual music scenes as well as the ethical choices that participants in these scenes make about how they want to live in the world.
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Poltava 1709
The Battle and the Myth
Serhii Plokhy
Harvard University Press, 2012

The Battle of Poltava has long been recognized as a crucial event in the geopolitical history of Europe and a decisive point in the Great Northern War between Sweden and the Russian Empire. The Russian victory at Poltava contributed to the decline of Sweden as a Great Power and was a major setback to Ukrainian independence. Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who joined forces with the Swedish king Charles XII against Tsar Peter I, remains a controversial figure even today.

In 2009, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute gathered scholars from around the globe and from many fields of study—history, military affairs, philology, linguistics, literature, art history, music—to mark the 300th anniversary of the battle. This book is a collection of their papers on such topics as the international, Russian, and Ukrainian contexts of the battle; Mazepa in European culture; the language and literature of the period; art and architecture; history and memory; and fact, fiction, and the literary imagination. Mazepa himself is the focus of many of the articles—a hero to Ukrainians but a treacherous figure to Russians. This book provides a fresh look at this watershed event and sheds new light on the legacies of the battle’s major players.

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Popular Eugenics
National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s
Susan Currell
Ohio University Press, 2006
The motto “Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution” was part of the logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held in 1921. However, by the 1930s, the disturbing legacy of this motto had started to reveal itself in the construction of national identities in countries throughout the world. Popular Eugenics is a fascinating look at how such tendencies emerged within the rhetoric, ideology, and visual aesthetics of U.S. mass culture during the 1930s, offering detailed analysis of the way that eugenics appeared within popular culture and images of modernity, particularly during the Depression era.

The essays in this generously illustrated collection demonstrate how, after the scientific foundations of the eugenics movement had been weakened in the 1930s, eugenic beliefs spread into the popular media, including newspapers, movies, museum exhibits, plays, and novels, and even fashion shows and comic strips.

Popular Eugenics shows that eugenic thought persisted in science and culture as well as in social policy and goes a long way toward explaining the durability of eugenic thinking and its effects on social policy in the United States.  Popular Eugenics will be of interest to scholars and students in a broad range of disciplines, especially American literature and history, popular culture, media studies, and the history of science.
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Popular Music in Leeds
Histories, Heritage, People and Places
Edited by Brett Lashua, Karl Spracklen, and Kitty Ross
Intellect Books, 2023
A groundbreaking study of music and musical history in Leeds.

This is the first scholarly volume to focus on popular music in Leeds. It delves into the rich musical history of Leeds and its long tradition of vibrant venues, nightclubs, dance halls, pubs, and other sites of musical entertainment. The contributors use the popular music of Leeds to exemplify and inform understandings of broader cultural and urban changes, the social and historical significance of music as mass media; music and migration; music, racialization, and social equity; and industrial decline, deindustrialization, neoliberalism, and the rise of the twenty-four-hour city. Charting moments of stark musical politicization and de-politicization, while also tracing arguments about heritagizing popular music within discussions about music’s place in museums and in the urban economy, this book contributes to debates about why music matters, has mattered, and continues to matter in Leeds and beyond. 
 
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The Population Ahead
Roy G. Francis, Editor
University of Minnesota Press, 1958

The Population Ahead was first published in 1958. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume brings together the thinking and viewpoints of specialists from various pertinent fields for a discussion of factors bearing on the quality of future populations of the world. The discussions center around three fundamental questions: Is the human population growing at a rate which threatens the standards of living to which most of tits individuals aspire? Is the genetic composition of the population tending in directions which are harmful to the common good? What can and should be done, if the answer to either of the foregoing questions is yes?

The chapters, by nine different contributors, are based on the papers given at a conference on population problems held at the University of Minnesota in 1957. In addition, discussion and comments by six other participants in the conference are included.

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Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living
Essays in Memory of David Herlihy
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. and Steven A. Epstein, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1996
This volume--a collection of essays dedicated to one of this century's most distinguished medieval historians, David Herlihy--introduces the general reader to the new social history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The essays address three themes: sex and the family, power and patronage in local history, and society in town and countryside. The authors use current research to illustrate how Herlihy's ideas continue to shape work about the lives of powerful and ordinary people in this long and important period of Western history.
Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living opens with Herlihy's final summary of his views on family history, followed by a reminiscence by his most important collaborator, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. The first group of essays takes us inside specific familial settings, using recent methods in anthropological, legal, and women's studies to uncover new dimensions of medieval and Renaissance family life. A second group of studies focuses on the question of authority in medieval society and advances new theses about politics and society in Florence and other local settings. The final group of authors considers the special circumstances of town and countryside in Italy, England, and Spain and draws insightful generalizations across territorial and national boundaries.
Like Herlihy's own work, these essays present innovative and challenging hypotheses about significant problems in the history of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Important new material on Florence, family history, religion, the Inquisition, and taxation is presented for the first time, but the essays are not simply technical exercises focused on small or isolated pieces of research. Thus the volume will go beyond the interest of specialists in medieval and Renaissance social history and will attract a wide audience of students and scholars.
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., is Professor of History, Brandeis University. Steven Epstein is Professor of History, University of Colorado.
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The Possibility Machine
Music and Myth in Las Vegas
Edited by Jake Johnson
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Singular and star-studded writings on America’s neon-lit playground

At once a Technicolor wonderland and the embodiment of American mythology, Las Vegas exists at the Ground Zero of a reverence for risk-taking and the transformative power of a winning hand. Jake Johnson edits a collection of short essays and flash ideas that probes how music-making and soundscapes shape the City of Second Chances. Treating topics ranging from Cher to Cirque de Soleil, the contributors delve into how music and musicians factored in the early development of Vegas’s image; the role of local communities of musicians and Strip mainstays in sustaining tensions between belief and disbelief; the ways aging showroom stars provide a sense of timelessness that inoculates visitors against the outside world; the link connecting fantasies of sexual prowess and democracy with the musical values of Liberace and others; considerations of how musicians and establishments gambled with identity and opened the door for audience members to explore Sin City–only versions of themselves; and the echoes and energy generated by the idea of Las Vegas as it travels across the country.

Contributors: Celine Ayala, Kirstin Bews, Laura Dallman, Joanna Dee Das, James Deaville, Robert Fink, Pheaross Graham, Jessica A. Holmes, Maddie House-Tuck, Jake Johnson, Kelly Kessler, Michael Kinney, Carlo Lanfossi, Jason Leddington, Janis McKay, Sam Murray, Louis Niebur, Lynda Paul, Arianne Johnson Quinn, Michael M. Reinhard, Laura Risk, Cassaundra Rodriguez, Arreanna Rostosky, and Brian F. Wright

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Postphenomenology
Essays in the Postmodern Context
Don Ihde
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Postphenomenology is a fascinating investigation of the relationships between global culture and technology. The impressive range of subjects to which Don Ihde applies his skill as a phenomenologist is unified by what he describes as "a concern which arises with respect to one of the now major trends of Euro-American philosophy--its textism." He adds, "I show my worries to be less about the loss of subjects or authors, than I do about [there] not being bodies or perceivers."
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Postures of the Mind
Essays on Mind and Morals
Annette Baier
University of Minnesota Press, 1975

Postures of the Mind was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Annette Baier develops, in these essays, a posture in philosophy of mind and in ethics that grows out of her reading of Hume and the later Wittgenstein, and that challenges several Kantian or analytic articles of faith. She questions the assumption that intellect has authority over all human feelings and traditions; that to recognize order we must recognize universal laws—descriptive or prescriptive; that the essential mental activity is representing; and that mental acts can be analyzed into discrete basic elements, combined according to statable rules of synthesis.

In the first group of essays—"Varieties of Mental Postures"—Baier evaluates the positions taken by philosophers ranging from Descartes to Dennett and Davidson. Among her topics are remembering, intending, realizing, caring, representing, changing one's mind, justifying one's actions and feelings, and having conflicting reasons for them. The second group of essays—"Varieties of Moral Postures" - explores the sort of morality we get when all of these capacities become reflective and self-corrective. Some deal with particular moral issues—our treatment of animals, our policies regarding risk to human life, our contractual obligations; others, with more general questions on the role of moral philosophers and the place of moral theory. These essays respond to the theories of Hobbes, Kant, Rawls, and MacIntyre, but Baier's most positive reaction is to David Hume; Postures of the Mind affirms and cultivates his version of a moral reflection that employs feeling and tradition as well as reason.

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Poultry Science, Chicken Culture
A Partial Alphabet
Squier, Susan M
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Poultry Science, Chicken Culture is a collection of engrossing, witty, and thought-provoking essays about the chicken-the familiar domestic bird that has played an intimate part in our cultural, scientific, social, economic, legal, and medical practices and concerns since ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Organized as a primer, the book reaches beyond narrow disciplines to discover why individuals are so fascinated with the humble, funny, overlooked, and omnipresent chicken.

          Spanning fascinating and diverse fields, Susan Merrill Squier assesses the chicken as the focus of film, photography, and visual art in many media; details some of the roles played by chickens and eggs in the development of embryology, biology, and regenerative medicine; traces the iconic figure of the chicken (and the chicken thief) in political discourse during the 2008 presidential election; demonstrates the types of knowledge that have been lost as food production moved from small-scale farming to industrial agriculture; investigates the connection between women and chickens; analyzes the fears and risks behind the panic around avian flu; and scrutinizes the role of chicken farming in international development. A combination of personal passion and surprising scholarly information, Poultry Science, Chicken Culture will change forever the way you think about chickens.
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Power and Possibility
Essays, Reviews, and Interviews
Elizabeth Alexander
University of Michigan Press, 2007

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.

Elizabeth Alexander is considered one of the country's most gifted contemporary poets, and the publication of her essays in The Black Interior in 2004 established her as an astute critic and cultural commentator as well. Arnold Rampersad has called Alexander "one of the brightest stars in our literary sky . . . a superb, invaluable commentator on the American scene." In this new collection of her essays, reviews, and interviews, Alexander again focuses on African American artistic production, particularly poetry, and the cultural contexts in which it is created and experienced.

The book's first section, "Black Arts 101," takes up the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sterling Brown, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Rita Dove (among others); artist Romare Bearden; dancer Bill T. Jones; and dramatist August Wilson. A second section, "Black Feminist Thinking," provides engaging meditations ranging from "My Grandmother's Hair" and "A Very Short History of Black Women and Food" to essays on the legacies of Toni Cade, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan. The collection's final section, "Talking," includes interviews, a commencement address---"Black Graduation"---and the essay "Africa and the World."

Elizabeth Alexander received a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She has published four books of poems: The Venus Hottentot (1990); Body of Life (1996); Antebellum Dream Book (2001); and, most recently, American Sublime (2005), which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her play, Diva Studies, was produced at the Yale School of Drama. She is presently Professor of American and African American Studies at Yale University.

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Power, Culture and Place
Essays on New York City
John H. Mollenkopf
Russell Sage Foundation, 1988
With a population and budget exceeding that of many nations, a central position in the world's cultural and corporate networks, and enormous concentrations off wealth and poverty, New York City intensifies interactions among social forces that elsewhere may be hidden or safely separated. The essays in Power, Culture, and Place represent the first comprehensive program of research on this city in a quarter century. Focusing on three historical transformations—the mercantile, industrial, and postindustrial—several contributors explore economic growth and change and the social conflicts that accompanied them. Other papers suggest how popular culture, public space, and street life served as sources of order amidst conflict and disorder. Essays on politics and pluralism offer further reflections on how social tensions are harnessed in the framework of political participation. By examining the intersection of economics, culture, and politics in a shared spatial context, these multidisciplinary essays not only illuminate the City's fascinating and complex development, but also highlight the significance of a sense of "place" for social research. It has been said that cities gave birth to the social sciences, exemplifying and propagating dramatic social changes and proving ideal laboratories for the study of social patterns and their evolution. As John Mollenkopf and his colleagues argue, New York City remains the quintessential case in point.
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Power, Trust, and Meaning
Essays in Sociological Theory and Analysis
S. N. Eisenstadt
University of Chicago Press, 1995
S. N. Eisenstadt is well known for his wide-ranging investigations of modernization, social stratification, revolution, comparative civilization, and political development. This collection of twelve major theoretical essays spans more than forty years of research, to explore systematically the bases of human action and society.

Framed by a new introduction and an extensive epilogue, which are themselves important statements about processes of institutional formations and cultural creativity, the essays trace the major developments of contemporary sociological theory and analysis. Examining themes of trust and solidarity among immigrants, youth groups, and generations, and in friendships, kinships, and patron-client relationships, Eisenstadt explores larger questions of social structure and agency, conflict and change, and the reconstitution of the social order. He looks also at political and religious systems, paying particular attention to great historical empires and the major civilizations.

United by what they reveal about three major dimensions of social life—power, trust, and meaning—these essays offer a vision of culture as both a preserving and a transforming aspect of social life, thus providing a new perspective on the relations between culture and social structure.
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Pragmatism as a Way of Life
The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey
Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam; edited by David Macarthur
Harvard University Press, 2017

Throughout his diverse and highly influential career, Hilary Putnam was famous for changing his mind. As a pragmatist he treated philosophical “positions” as experiments in deliberate living. His aim was not to fix on one position but to attempt to do justice to the depth and complexity of reality. In this new collection, he and Ruth Anna Putnam argue that key elements of the classical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey provide a framework for the most progressive and forward-looking forms of philosophy in contemporary thought. The Putnams present a compelling defense of the radical originality of the philosophical ideas of James and Dewey and their usefulness in confronting the urgent social, political, and moral problems of the twenty-first century.

Pragmatism as a Way of Life brings together almost all of the Putnams’ pragmatist writings—essays they wrote as individuals and as coauthors. The pragmatism they endorse, though respectful of the sciences, is an open experience-based philosophy of our everyday lives that trenchantly criticizes the fact/value dualism running through contemporary culture. Hilary Putnam argues that all facts are dependent on cognitive values, while Ruth Anna Putnam turns the problem around, illuminating the factual basis of moral principles. Together, they offer a shared vision which, in Hilary’s words, “could serve as a manifesto for what the two of us would like philosophy to look like in the twenty-first century and beyond.”

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Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
Richard Rorty
Harvard University Press, 2021

“Provocative and engaging…The array of urgent questions and crises facing our democracy makes one miss Richard Rorty’s voice: insistent, relentlessly questioning, and dedicated to the proposition that we can’t afford to let our democracy fail.”
—Chris Lehmann, New Republic

“Richard Rorty was the most iconoclastic and dramatic philosopher of the last half-century. In this final book, his unique literary style, singular intellectual zest, and demythologizing defiance of official philosophy are on full display.”
—Cornel West

“Coherent, often brilliant, and it presents a clear and timely case for political pragmatism.”
—Jonathan Rée, Prospect

“Today, there are few philosophers left whose thoughts are inspired by a unifying vision; there are even fewer who can articulate such a view in terms of such a ravishing flow of provocative, but sharp and differentiated, arguments.”
—Jürgen Habermas

Richard Rorty’s final masterwork offers his culminating thoughts on the influential version of pragmatism he began to articulate decades ago in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. He identifies anti-authoritarianism as the principal impulse and virtue of pragmatism. Anti-authoritarianism, in this view, means acknowledging that our cultural inheritance is always open to revision because no authority exists to ascertain the truth, once and for all. If we cannot rely on the unshakable certainties of God or nature, then all we have left to go on—and argue with—are the opinions and ideas of our fellow humans. The test of these ideas, Rorty suggests, is relatively simple: Do they work? Do they produce the peace, freedom, and happiness we desire? To achieve this enlightened pragmatism is not easy, though. Pragmatism demands trust. It demands that we think and care about what others think and care about, and that we account for their doubts of and objections to our own beliefs.

No book offers a more accessible account of pragmatism, just as no philosopher has more eloquently challenged the hidebound traditions arrayed against the goals of social justice.

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Precision and Soul
Essays and Addresses
Robert Musil
University of Chicago Press, 1990
"We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little precision in matters of the soul."—Robert Musil

Best known as author of the novel The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil wrote these essays in Vienna and Berlin between 1911 and 1937. Offering a perspective on modern society and intellectual life, they are concerned with the crisis of modern culture as it manifests itself in science and mathematics, capitalism and nationalism, the changing roles of women and writers, and more. Writing to find his way in a world where moral systems everywhere were seemingly in decay, Musil strives to reconcile the ongoing conflict between functional relativism and the passionate search for ethical values.

Robert Musil was born in 1880 and died in 1942. His first novel, Young Törless, is available in English. A new two-volume translation by Burton Pike and Sophie Wilkins of The Man without Qualities is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf.

"Now we have these thirty-one invaluable and entertaining pieces, from an article on 'The Obscene and Pathological in Art' to the equally provocative talk 'On Stupidity,' which, with a new translation of The Man without Qualities forthcoming . . . amount to a literary event for the reader of English comparable to Constance Garnett's massive translation of Chekhov's stories."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune

"Musil is one of the few great moderns, one of the handful who ventured to confront the issues that shape and define our time. . . . He has a range and a striking capacity every bit as great as that of Mann, Joyce, or Beckett."—Boston Review

"These essays are crucial in understanding a writer and critic whose lifelong task was an attempt to resolve the dichotomy between the precision of scientific form and the soul—the matter of life and art."—Choice
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Predecessors, Et Cetera
Essays
Amy Clampitt
University of Michigan Press, 1991
Predecessors, Et Cetera collects Amy Clampitt’s reflections on her predecessors (the poets Donne, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, and Marianne Moore as well as the novelists Henry James and Edith Wharton) and her contemporaries (including James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, Howard Moss, Thomas McGrath, John Berryman, Stevie Smith, and Seamus Heaney) and reveals the intricate connections inherent in their art. Other essays include “Purloined Sincerity,” which examines the fate of the personal letter in these days of electronic communication, and “The Long, Long Wait,” which looks at the epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians. Along the way she offers ruminations on the poet’s craft, the vagaries of reputation, and the perennial question of what makes a poet – or any writer – tick.
 
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Predicting Politics
Essays in Empirical Public Choice
W. Mark Crain and Robert D. Tollison, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1990
Predicting Politics: Essays in Empirical Public Choice explores politics in an empirical spirit. The topics covered are novel and important, including the impact of campaign finance on the size of government, the economics of gerrymandering, constitutional change, and budgetary politics. The approach is to formulate and to test interesting hypotheses about political behavior. The essential idea is to illustrate the power of public choice theory in explaining actual politics. The volume brings together the work of Crain and Tollison and other scholars who have worked in this public choice tradition, and shows the power of empirical approaches in explaining the origin and inner working of political institutions and processes.
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Prefaces to Shakespeare
Tony Tanner
Harvard University Press, 2010

When Tony Tanner died in 1998, the world lost a critic who was as sensitive a reader of Jane Austen as he was of Thomas Pynchon, and who wrote with a warmth and clarity that belied his fluency in literary theory.

In the final ten years of his life Tanner tackled the largest project any critic in English can take on—writing a preface to each of Shakespeare’s plays. This collection serves as a comprehensive introduction for the general reader, the greatest and perhaps the last in the line of great introductions to Shakespeare written by such luminaries as Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tanner brings Shakespeare to life, explicating everything from big-picture issues such as the implications of shifts in Elizabethan culture to close readings of Shakespeare’s deployment of complex words in his plays.

Although these prefaces are written for a general audience, there is much value for the scholar as well. Tanner introduces some of the most significant recent and historical scholarship on Shakespeare to show the reader how certain critics frame large issues in a useful way. This scholarly generosity permits Johnson, Hazlitt, Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin, Pater, and many others to enter into conversation. The Independent said of the project, “All of Tanner’s life and education had prepared him for this task and the results are magnificent—both accessible and erudite.”

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Premises
Essays on Philosophy from Kant to Celan
Werner Hamacher
Harvard University Press, 1996

"Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself," wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general. "Subject position" is widely invoked today, yet Hamacher is the first to thoroughly investigate the premises for this invocation. He demonstrates that the promise of a subject position is not only unavoidable--and thus produces more and more fundamentalisms--but is also unattainable and therefore always open to innovation, revision, and unexpected transformation. In a book that is both philosophical and literary, Hamacher gives us the fullest account of the vast disruption in the very nature of our understanding that was first unleashed by Kant's critique of human subjectivity.

In light of the double nature of every premise--that it is promised but never attainable--Hamacher gives us nine decisive themes, topics, and texts of modernity: the hermeneutic circle in Schleiermacher and Heidegger, the structure of ethical commands in Kant, Nietzsche's genealogy of moral terms and his exploration of the aporias of singularity, the irony of reading in de Man, the parabasis of language in Schlegel, Kleist's disruption of narrative representation, the gesture of naming in Benjamin and Kafka, and the incisive caesura that Paul Celan inserts into temporal and linguistic reversals.

There is no book that so fully brings the issues of both critical philosophy and critical literature into reach.

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Presence and Desire
Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance
Jill Dolan
University of Michigan Press, 1994
Explores current controversies and significant concerns in feminist theater and performance
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Presenting the Past
Essays on History and the Public
Roy Rosenzweig
Temple University Press, 1986

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Pressing the Fight
Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War
Greg Barnhisel
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Although often framed as an economic, military, and diplomatic confrontation, the Cold War was above all a conflict of ideas. In official pronouncements and publications as well as via radio broadcasts, television, and film, the United States and the Soviet Union both sought to extend their global reach as much through the power of persuasion as by the use of force. Yet of all the means each side employed to press its ideological case, none proved more reliable or successful than print.

In this volume, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the myriad ways print was used in the Cold War. Looking at materials ranging from textbooks and cookbooks to art catalogs, newspaper comics, and travel guides, they analyze not only the content of printed matter but also the material circumstances of its production, the people and institutions that disseminated it, and the audiences that consumed it. Among the topics discussed are the infiltration of book publishing by propagandists East and West; the distribution of pro-American printed matter in postwar Japan through libraries, schools, and consulates; and the collaboration of foundations, academia, and the government in the promotion of high culture as evidence of the superiority of Western values.

At the same time, many of the qualities that made print the preferred medium of official propaganda also made it an effective instrument for challenging Cold War orthodoxies at home and abroad. Because printed materials were relatively easy to transport, to copy, and to share, they could just as well be used to bridge differences among people and cultures as to exploit them. They also provided a vehicle for disseminating satire and other expressions of dissent.

In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Ed Brunner, Russell Cobb, Laura Jane Gifford, Patricia Hills, Christian Kanig, Scott Laderman, Amanda Laugesen, Martin Manning, Kristin Matthews, Hiromi Ochi, Amy Reddinger, and James Smith. Together their essays move beyond traditional Cold War narratives to gauge the role of a crucial cultural medium in the ideological battle between the superpowers and their surrogates.
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Pre-Text/Text/Context
Essays on 19th-Century French Literature
Robert L. Mitchell
The Ohio State University Press, 1900

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The Pride of Jacob
Essays on Jacob Katz and His Work
Jay M. Harris
Harvard University Press, 2002

Jacob Katz (1904–1998) was one of the greatest Jewish historians of the twentieth century. A pioneer of new foci and methods, Katz brought extraordinary insights to many aspects of Jewish life and its surrounding contexts.

With a keen eye for both “forests” and “trees,” Katz transformed our understanding of many areas of Jewish history, among them: Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages, the social-historical significance of Jewish law, the rise of Orthodoxy in Germany and Hungary, and the emergence of modern anti-Semitism. In this volume, ten leading scholars critically discuss Katz’s work with an appreciation for Katz’s importance in reshaping the way Jewish history is studied.

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A Primer for Health Care Ethics
Essays for a Pluralistic Society, Second Edition
Kevin D. O'Rourke, OP
Georgetown University Press, 2000

From Harry and Louise through the McCaughey septuplets, this book explains stories and issues in health care ethics that have appeared in the news media. Written for the general reader in a pluralistic society, it outlines and applies principles of justice from the Catholic tradition to contemporary problems that increasingly affect us all.

This second edition contains extensive new material and new topics, including physician-assisted suicide, managed care, organ donation, genetic testing, cloning, and the question of futility. Aimed at a wide audience, this book will also be useful for introductory ethics courses in colleges and high schools.

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Primitivism and Identity in Latin America
Essays on Art, Literature, and Culture
Erik Camayd-Freixas
University of Arizona Press, 2000

Although primitivism has received renewed attention in recent years, studies linking it with Latin America have been rare. This volume examines primitivism and its implications for contemporary debates on Latin American culture, literature, and arts, showing how Latin American subjects employ a Western construct to "return the gaze" of the outside world and redefine themselves in relation to modernity.

Examining such subjects as Julio Cortázar and Frida Kahlo and such topics as folk art and cinema, the volume brings together for the first time the views of scholars who are currently engaging the task of cultural studies from the standpoint of primitivism. These varied contributions include analyses of Latin American art in relation to social issues, popular culture, and official cultural policy; essays in cultural criticism touching on ethnic identity, racial politics, women's issues, and conflictive modernity; and analytical studies of primitivism's impact on narrative theory and practice, film, theater, and poetry.

This collection contributes offers a new perspective on a variety of significant debates in Latin American cultural studies and shows that the term primitive does not apply to these cultures as much as to our understanding of them.

CONTENTS
Paradise Subverted: The Invention of the Mexican Character / Roger Bartra
Between Sade and the Savage: Octavio Paz’s Aztecs / Amaryll Chanady
Under the Shadow of God: Roots of Primitivism in Early Colonial Mexico / Delia Annunziata Cosentino
Of Alebrijes and Ocumichos: Some Myths about Folk Art and Mexican Identity / Eli Bartra
Primitive Borders: Cultural Identity and Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic / Fernando Valerio-Holguín
Dialectics of Archaism and Modernity: Technique and Primitivism in Angel Rama’s Transculturación narrativa en América Latina / José Eduardo González
Narrative Primitivism: Theory and Practice in Latin America / Erik Camayd-Freixas
Narrating the Other: Julio Cortázar’s "Axolotl" as Ethnographic Allegory / R. Lane Kauffmann
Jungle Fever: Primitivism in Environmentalism; Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima and the Romance of the Jungle / Jorge Marcone
Primitivism and Cultural Production: Future’s Memory; Native Peoples’ Voices in Latin American Society / Ivete Lara Camargos Walty
Primitive Bodies in Latin American Cinema: Nicolás Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca / Luis Fernando Restrepo
Subliminal Body: Shamanism, Ancient Theater, and Ethnodrama / Gabriel Weisz
Primitivist Construction of Identity in the Work of Frida Kahlo / Wendy B. Faris
Mi andina y dulce Rita: Women, Indigenism, and the Avant-Garde in César Vallejo / Tace Megan Hedrick
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