Results by title

When the lines between reality and fantasy blur, what counts as ethical? Who decides?

The Nether, a daring examination of moral responsibility in virtual worlds, opens with a familiar interrogation scene given a technological twist. As Detective Morris, an online investigator, questions Mr. Sims about his activities in a role-playing realm so realistic it could be life, she finds herself on slippery ethical ground. Sims argues for the freedom to explore even the most deviant corners of our imagination. Morris holds that we cannot flesh out our malign fantasies without consequence. Their clash of wills leads to a consequence neither could have imagined. Suspenseful, ingeniously constructed, and fiercely intelligent, Haley’s play forces us to confront deeply disturbing questions about the boundaries of reality.

An insightful and intimate look at aging and masculinity that includes interviews and portraits of men from around the world.

What do men really think? From a taxi driver to a prince, a fishmonger to a professional boxer, The Other Half reveals the inner thoughts of men over fifty from different nationalities and different walks of life in their own words, illuminated by their portraits. Author and photojournalist Ellen Warner traveled the world to find out what men really think about love, work, and aging, speaking with well-known figures like film director James Ivory and journalist Bill Keller, as well as a philosopher, a chess grandmaster, a hair stylist, a financier, and more. Interviewing men from Colombia, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Sweden, and everywhere in between, Warner assembles a moving portrait of their reflections, insights, challenges, and hard-won triumphs.

A companion to The Second Half: Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty, Warner’s latest book shares the diverse, vibrant experiences of men over fifty.

Widely regarded as perhaps America's greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards still suffers the stereotype of hellfire preacher obsessed with God's wrath. In this anthology, Gerald McDermott and Ronald Story seek to correct that common view by showing that Edwards was also a compassionate, socially conscious minister of the first order. 

Through a selection of sermons and primary writings, McDermott and Story reveal an Edwards who preached love toward all humanity regardless of belief or appearance; who demanded private and public charity to the poor; who criticized hard-hearted business dealings as impious and socially destructive; and who condemned envy and status-seeking as anti-Christian and anti-community. This “other” Jonathan Edwards preached about grace and the love of God but also about responsive constitutional government, the iniquities of hypocrisy and corruption, and the nature of wise leadership. He acknowledged the need for national defense but left room for popular revolt from tyranny. He anticipated a millennial age of peace and prosperity and believed that people should live in the world as they would live through grace in heaven. 

Jonathan Edwards was, in sum, a worldly as well as spiritual reformer who resisted the materialistic, acquisitive, and individualistic currents of American culture. For these reasons, McDermott and Story think he may have lessons to teach us today.

These poems wrestle with the inherited myths of their particular time and place. Often set in a small corner of western Kentucky, they explore moments when an individual life becomes implicated in a larger scheme—the realm of Cold War politics, the mysteries of religious faith, the codes and rituals of romantic love. Max Garland shows a lyrical determination to deal with history through the lives, minds, and emotions of ordinary people “stricken with time.”

In poems about baptism, bowling, Greek goddesses, and the hydrogen bomb, Garland seems to say that knowledge and even revelation might come from anywhere. The book ends with the image of the empty space Michelangelo left between the hands of Adam and God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; that tension between what lasts and what passes away, comprises the territory of these poems.

The Right to Remain Violets is an electrifying poetry collection that reimagines the language of policing, public education, and state surveillance to illuminate the lived realities of Black and Brown youth in East Palo Alto—a city shaped by redlining, freeway expansion, and decades of over-policing. Blending documentary poetics with hip-hop cadence and Catholic liturgy, Antonio De Jesús López transforms transcripts, municipal documents, and legal language into a powerful form of witness. These poems trace how children are drafted into systems of surveillance and criminalization, even as they search for joy and solidarity amid Silicon Valley’s contrasts of wealth and dispossession.

Inventive and emotionally resonant, the collection spans sonnets, sestinas, hip-hop, and prayer, insisting that language can both indict and heal. López brings his experiences as an award-winning poet, scholar, and former mayor of East Palo Alto to each poem. At once elegy and refusal, The Right to Remain Violets speaks to readers of documentary poetics, social justice literature, and those who believe in the radical importance of protecting childhood in an America reckoning with itself.

The first English translation of a Romanian poet’s celebrated and devastating 2012 collection.

In 1997, when he was nineteen, Radu Vancu discovered the body of his father, who had hanged himself in the family home. In the dark years that followed, Vancu turned to literature and self-medication. By 2009, after a decade of “Schopenhauer and vodka” and the publication of seven influential volumes of poetry and essays, Vancu was married, newly sober, and expecting his first child. With these themes in mind—bereavement, love, fatherhood, and poetry—he began writing Frânghia înflorită, or The Rope in Bloom, a poem of Dantesque ambition and scope. Through twenty-four cantos interwoven with prose vignettes, Vancu revisits the scene of the suicide and speaks with the lost soul of his father, who guides and advises him. Each canto begins with the same lines: 

What your dead one, what the best-

beloved of your dead loved ones says to you

when you have the heart to dream of him: 

Vancu’s verse depicts a nightmare underworld, at once terrible and banal, containing both rivers of blood and family movie nights. Prose vignettes punctuating the book narrate tender years in the early life of a new family. Here, the poet appears in everyday moments, watching cartoons with his son and seeing his wife off to work. Together, the cantos and prose accumulate into a charged collection, where the loss of a father looms over the joy of becoming one.

This volume is the first full-length English translation of Vancu’s work, marking a long-overdue introduction of the poet to anglophone audiences.

The Sagebrush Ocean, the essential introduction to the ecology and spirit of the Great Basin Desert, returns in this richly updated 35th anniversary edition. Winner of the Ansel Adams Award for Photography and Conservation, Stephen Trimble’s authoritative voice and evocative photographs illuminate this landscape of sun-struck playas, surprising wetlands, remote canyons, and wind-swept tundra.

Today, the once-vast “sagebrush ocean” is an endangered sea, as environmental changes and human development have diminished it by half. This heartbreaking decline drives Trimble’s updated text, but he blends loss with reverence for what remains—and urgent insight into what’s at stake. Striking color photographs, many newly added, illuminate some of the continent’s most spectacular but little known scenery. For anyone curious about the Great Basin or concerned for its future, this timely edition is indispensable.

A frank, honest, and insightful look into the lives of women over fifty. 
 
The Second Half explores, in photographic portraits and interviews, how the second half of life is experienced by women from many different cultures. From a French actress to a British novelist, from an Algerian nomad to a Saudi Arabian doctor, and an American politician, Ellen Warner traveled all over the world to interview women about their lives.  She asked them what they learned in the first half that was helpful in the second, and what advice they would give to younger women. Their revealing and inspiring stories are enlightening for all readers, and are illustrated by Warner’s stunning portraits which tell their own story.

The Selfie Machine offers novel insight into personalized communication practices in the digital age through the medium of the selfie. While the selfie has achieved notoriety due to pop-psychology accounts of Narcissism-related selfie "disorders," this book examines the selfie as a mode of meaning making and self-presentation that includes not just still images, but also short videos, hashtag practices and economies of liking and following. In taking India as the starting point of its investigation, The Selfie Machine inverts the "West-then-the-rest" model of understanding global digital media practices. The book considers selfie culture’s impact on personal and public digital practices and trends—ranging from cellphone markets, to influencer entrepreneurship and microcelebrity, to the conduct of politics and protest. In doing so, it not only offers an expanded definition of selfies in digital media culture, but also demonstrates how “global” digital media (including selfies) cannot be understood as a monolith.

The latest collection from award-winning poet Vievee Francis, The Shared World imagines the ideas and ideals and spaces of the Black woman. The book delves into inherited memories and restrictions between families, lovers, and strangers and the perception and inconvenient truth of Black woman as mother—with or without child. Francis challenges the ways in which Black women are often dismissed while expected to be nurturing. This raw assemblage of poetic narratives stares down the oppressors from within and writes a new language in the art of taking back the body and the memory. These poetic narratives are brutal in their lyrical blows but tender with the bruised history left behind. “You can’t stop this / song,” she writes. “More hands than yours have closed / around my throat.”

Francis’s lyric gifts are on full display as she probes self-discovery, history, intimacy, and violence. Her voice encompasses humor and gravity, enigma and revelation. What emerges is a realm of intertwined experiences. “The secret to knowing the secret is to speak,” she concludes, “but we too often tell / the stories of no matter and avoid the one story that does matter. / In truth, we are bound by one story, so you’d think by now / we’d tell it, at least to each other.”

Superior Achievement, Illinois State Historical Society, 2013

In The State of Southern Illinois: An Illustrated History, Herbert K. Russell offers fresh interpretations of a number of important aspects of Southern Illinois history. Focusing on the area known as “Egypt,” the region  south of U.S. Route 50 from Salem south to Cairo, he begins his book with the earliest geologic formations and  follows Southern Illinois’s history into the twenty-first century. The volume is richly illustrated with maps and photographs, mostly in color, that highlight the informative and straightforward text.

Perhaps most notable is the author’s use of dozens of heretofore neglected sources to dispel the myth that Southern Illinois is merely an extension of Dixie. He corrects the popular impressions that slavery was introduced by early settlers from the South and that a majority of Southern Illinoisans wished to secede. Furthermore, he presents the first in-depth discussion of twelve pre–Civil War, free black communities located in the region. He also identifies the roles coal mining, labor violence, gangsters, and the media played in  establishing the area’s image. He concludes optimistically, unveiling a twenty-first-century Southern Illinois filled with myriad attractions and opportunities for citizens and tourists alike.

The State of Southern Illinois is the most accurate all-encompassing volume of history on this unique area that often regards itself as a state within a state. It offers an entirely new perspective on race relations, provides insightful information on the cultural divide between north and south in Illinois, and pays tribute to an often neglected and misunderstood region of this multidimensional state, all against a stunning visual backdrop.