A nationwide survey conducted by an institute for philosophical research has determined that nihilists, on the whole, have good intentions. In An Unspecific Dog, Joshua Rothes collects 150 short texts as fables for our time, a veritable catalog of agnotology, a series of situations and propositions that revel in the dark irony at the root of our early-twenty-first-century existence. A man reads…
Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Adventure is the second in a series of three novellas emerging from a writing practice that taps the cusp of consciousness between dreaming and waking. A storyline, or genealogy, tinted a shade of RGB red, is fashioned by thinking through the felt unthought of this between space — a fabulation, an anarchive of what passes through. Lucid dreaming of this type…
The Jews is an anti-historical thriller in the form of a Talmudic tragicomedy, taking place sometime during the Second World War. Stalin and his Minister of Security Beria are worried about the political developments in Germany, where Martin Heidegger has replaced Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of the Third Reich. Suspecting that the Frankfurt School, headed by Vice-Chancellor Walter Benjamin, has …
In Divisible Cities takes Italo Calvino’s classic re-imagining of Venice, viewed in the mind’s eye from many different metaphysical angles, and projects it on to the world at large. Where the Italian saw his favorite city as an impossible metropolis of many moods, shades, and ways of being, this unauthorized sequel unpacks the Escheresque streets in unexpected directions. In Divisible Citie…
"Conceived as a companion volume to the well-received Simple Forms: Essays on Medieval English Popular Literature (2015), Make We Merry More and Less is a comprehensive anthology of popular medieval literature from the twelfth century onwards. Uniquely, the book is divided by genre, allowing readers to make connections between texts usually presented individually. This anthology offers a fruitf…
"Friedrich Hölderlin’s only novel, Hyperion (1797–99), is a fictional epistolary autobiography that juxtaposes narration with critical reflection. Returning to Greece after German exile, following his part in the abortive uprising against the occupying Turks (1770), and his failure as both a lover and a revolutionary, Hyperion assumes a hermitic existence, during which he writes his letter…
The only one of Scott's novels set in the 19th century, St. Ronan's Well is the 12th book in Waverley series. The story tells of the conflict between two men, Valentine and his half-brother Francis who both wish to marry Clara Mowbray.
Nuclear Reactions analyzes how nuclear weapons change the calculations states make in their foreign policies, why they do so, and why nuclear weapons have such different effects on the foreign policies of different countries. Mark S. Bell argues that nuclear weapons are useful for more than deterrence. They are leveraged to pursue a wide range of goals in international politics, and the nati…
In the summer of 1974, twenty-four year old Anna DeVoss finds herself widowed and alone in the unfamiliar country of the North Carolina mountains. The body of her husband, a navy pilot missing in action for six years, has just been returned home from Vietnam. Following his funeral her mother in law persuades her to spend some time alone at the family’s summer home in Watauga County, North Car…
This anthology of Appalachian literature is designed for high school students, containing fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, ballads, and examples of mountain speech and song.