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A literary tour de force through the symbolic landscapes of recent cultural history, Lookalikes is a text in which everything is as it seems and nothing is as it is.

Thomas Meinecke’s lookalikes resemble many people––Marlon Brando, Shakira, Justin Timberlake, or Josephine Baker to name a few––but never themselves. Illusion is their capital; imitation is their business. They stroll through Düsseldorf's posh Königsallee, reading, quoting, and plagiarizing their way through the history of pop culture and philosophy, exploring categories of realness in parallel worlds and digital chat forums. At the same time, yet another Thomas wanders Brazil in disguise, tracing the journey of Hubert Fichte and his doppelgänger Jäcki. In this endless play of similarities, all identity is lost. 

Between literary and sexual genres, mimesis and authenticity, fiction and reality, these lookalikes only ever find the Other, just as Meinecke’s text duplicates itself in the furor of allusions and reference systems, constantly branching out anew, never remaining the same, always changing these so-called original signs.

When Losing Control was first published a decade ago it was years ahead of its time. Its argument was simple - the real causes of global insecurity were the widening socio-economic divide, global marginalisation and environmental limitations, especially climate change and conflict over energy resources.

Paul Rogers, one of the most original thinkers on international security, pointed to a world in which irregular warfare from the margins would prevent powerful states from maintaining their position. He even predicted accurately how the United States would respond to a catastrophic attack.

The new edition brings the whole analysis right up to date, arguing persuasively that the world’s elite cannot maintain control and that a far more emancipatory and sustainable approach to global security has to be developed.

An astounding collection of photographs from a renowned poet

Created during the tumultuous years of 2020 and 2021, Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices: Street Portraits and Poems intersects the lens of accomplished poet and photographer Marcus Jackson with his words. The focus: the Black experience and existence. Amid isolation, protest, and survival, Jackson is the aperture and scribe giving visual consciousness and breath to these human portraits. His camera strips the view of endless cycles of social and moral injustices, presenting a resonant collection of photographs that make space for the moments and the people whose beings represent the ongoing interplay between history, society, and the individual soul.

After World War II, Europe witnessed the massive redrawing of national borders and the efforts to make the population fit those new borders. As a consequence of these forced changes, both Lviv and Wrocław went through cataclysmic changes in population and culture. Assertively Polish prewar Lwów became Soviet Lvov, and then, after 1991, it became assertively Ukrainian Lviv. Breslau, the third largest city in Germany before 1945, was in turn "recovered" by communist Poland as Wrocław. Practically the entire population of Breslau was replaced, and Lwów's demography too was dramatically restructured: many Polish inhabitants migrated to Wrocław and most Jews perished or went into exile. The forced migration of these groups incorporated new myths and the construction of official memory projects.

The chapters in this edited book compare the two cities by focusing on lived experiences and "bottom-up" historical processes. Their sources and methods are those of micro-history and include oral testimonies, memoirs, direct observation and questionnaires, examples of popular culture, and media pieces. The essays explore many manifestations of the two sides of the same coin—loss on the one hand, gain on the other—in two cities that, as a result of the political reality of the time, are complementary.