The volume tries to offer a comparison between two philosophers who belong to two different philosophical traditions and who have thus been rarely discussed together: Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Despite these thinkers’ many distinctions, the contributions to the current volume try to reconstruct not only how the ‘second’ Wittgenstein was influenced by the Marxist tradition, but also – and above all – the theoretical affinities between the two philosophers. In this way, the book underlines the potential that Marx’s political thought holds for philosophers of language as well as the social implications of Wittgenstein’s thought and the political potential of some of his central topics, such as his critique of the private language argument and his theory of language games.

The poems in Paul Hlava Ceballos’s debut collection banana [ ] reveal the extractive relationship the United States has with the Americas and its people through poetic portraits of migrants, family, and personal memories. At the heart of the book is a long poem that traces the history of bananas in Latin America using only found text from sources such as history books, declassified CIA documents, and commercials. The book includes collage, Ecuadorian decimas, a sonnet series in the voices of Incan royalty at the moment of colonization, and a long poem interspersed with photos and the author’s mother’s bilingual idioms. Traversing language and borders, history and story, traditional and invented forms, this book guides us beyond survival to love.

This study contends that the creation and consumption of fiction has not been looked at in a holistic way in terms of an overall process that takes us from author to consumer with all of the potential intermediate steps. It proposes and describes just such a process model, which begins with the author, who interacts with elements of his or her contemporary world and incorporates them into the imagined world of the novel. It describes how at each stage in the process other actors engage with the novel in various forms, and create artefacts such as critical reviews, filmed adaptations and tourist interpretations that comprise further imagined worlds that can be compared to the author’s original imagined world, and by extension, the original past world. Using a number of case studies of English novels of the period from 1800 to 1930, the study looks at what evidence of the process in action tells us about the ability of a novel to act as an adjunct to contemporary records in providing insights into that original real world. These studies incorporate analyses of the novels themselves, and of subsequent artefacts such as film and television adaptations, curated literary places and guidebooks, and reviews. The study concludes that fiction in its various forms, and especially in its adapted and interpreted forms, whilst not a pure historical document as such, can provide us with a vivid image of a past world. It contends that the process model could be used as an aid in the teaching of History or English Literature, or as an aid to the general reader, to help remove the layers of imagined worlds that potentially lie between us and a past historical world, thereby reducing the ability of that layering to create a misleading view of history.

Imperfect Present is a book for our current moment. By confronting the urgencies of daily life, from questions of identity to sexual abuse to racial unrest to the ubiquity of plastic, these poems investigate ways to sustain ourselves in our fraught public and private lives. With her characteristic linguistic play, Sharon Dolin illuminates some of the most personal concerns that resonate throughout our culture and in ourselves, such as error, despair, uncertainty, and doubt. In sections that deploy the lens of art, the “Oblique Strategies” of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, and meditations on dreams and spirituality, Imperfect Present provides a panoply of approaches that grapple with the complexity of now.

"In the beginning, the beginning of your story, this story that isn't yours, there was a single article…." These are the opening words: the location is Manhattan, the protagonist is Richard Schwan, journalist for the New York Times. There follows a newsroom, an airplane, more airplanes, an ocean, two oceans, then after New York there is Los Angeles, Istanbul, Baghdad, Rome and then the return to New York via Bamberg (Baveria), everything to cross over, suffer, enjoy, to be lived. And in this living there is a war, one of those wars that continues but is never declared, that springs up just like that, as if by accident. And Richard Schwan will be there, with his ideals of truth and freedom. And the research for truth and freedom will also be the search for life, the search for life will be a search for the self, for the soul. And so, with a soul laid bare, he will go out into the world. Beyond the peculiarities of contingency, including the elements of time and space, this novel pushes the reader to look beyond, pass over from non-being into being.

The book deals with the complex notion of process worked out by Alfred N. Whitehead, a notion that includes his deep revision of the concepts of time and space. Throughout his whole career, Whitehead emphasized the importance of process for the account of reality. The book discusses Whitehead's concept of process starting from his works in mathematics, logic and epistemology of the natural sciences, in order to pave the way for a better understanding of Whitehead's speculative philosophy. The focus is on the relationship between concrescence and transition, seen as deeply correlated and reciprocally determined. In this perspective, the book offers a reinterpretation of Whitehead's most enigmatic proposal: the event of subjectivity interpreted as a process of subjectivation. This poses the problem of the endurance of subjectivity. The book suggests that this problem is solved by Whitehead through is appropriation of Plato's notion of chora, seen as the "place" of a processual subject.

After researching the life of a British Special Operation Executive agent, Oliver Churchill, who operated over the summer of 1944, Andrea Cominini found that his brother, Peter, had also been an SOE agent operating in France during WWII. Peter carried out four missions, spending 225 days in enemy territory. Finally captured, he spent over two years in captivity. After the war he wrote four novels based on his wartime experiences. Reviewing his second book, The Daily Herald wrote: "Now Peter Churchill wrote one of the best spy books of all time". The author describes the different literary genres in which Churchill's works can be situated and – through a subsequent analysis of the novels – how they provide a clear and historical representation of everyday life of a British secret agent during WWII. Peter Churchill’s works are then compared to those of pther novelists of his time, uncovering a range of connections with other related authors and literary genres. After the war, Churchill was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Croix de Guerre; his wife Odette, who worked with him as an underground courier during the war, was the first woman to receive the George Cross.

In 1956, together with his research group, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson published a theory that was to revolutionize the way of conceiving mental illness. Over the years, the central concept of this theory, the double bind, proved effective in an increasing number of fields of knowledge: from the theory of communication to epistemology, from sociology to pedagogy, from literature to philosophy. Through an examination of the inception and development of this concept, the book retraces the main themes, connections and critical points that mark the whole of Bateson’s multifaceted research: from the early ethnographic surveys in New Guinea through to the ecological ideas of his later years, including the cybernetic reflections, his studies of human and animal communication, his work in the psychiatric field. This analysis of the double bind theory, originally formulated as a hypothesis to explain schizophrenia, is not only a guide to the work of one of the most unpredictable and original thinkers of the last century, but also gives access to essential theoretical tools for bringing into focus a number of increasingly persistent contemporary problems.

In Lapis, poet Kerri Webster writes into the vast space left by the deaths of three women: her mother, a mentor, and a friend. Using a wide array of lyric forms and meditations, Webster explores matrilineages both familial and poetic, weaving together death, spirituality, women, and a sense of the shifting earth into one "doctrine of Non-linear Revelation."

Writing in the ancient Mediterranean existed against a backdrop of very high levels of interaction and contact. In the societies around its shores, writing was a dynamic practice that could serve many purposes – from a tool used by elites to control resources and establish their power bases to a symbol of local identity and a means of conveying complex information and ideas. This volume brings together contributions by members of the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) research team and visiting fellows, offering a range of different perspectives and approaches to problems of writing in the ancient Mediterranean. Their focus is on practices, viewing writing as something that people do within a wider social and cultural context, and on adaptations, considering the ways in which writing changed and was changed by the people using it.

Belly to the Brutal sings a corrido of the love between mothers and daughters, confronting the learned complicity with patriarchal violence passed down from generation to generation. This poetry edges into the borderlands, touching the realm of chora - humming, screaming, rhythm - transporting the words outside of patriarchal and racist constructs. Drawing from curanderisma and a revived wave of feminist brujería, Jennifer Givhan creates a healing space for Brown women and mothers. Each poem finds its own form, interweaving beauty and devastation to create a pathway out of the systems that have for too long oppressed women. The poems dwell in the thick language of "motherfear," "where love grows too / in the shining center of the wound." This poetry of invocation moves toward a transformation of violence that is ultimately redemptive.

This volume offers a valuable resource by compiling and interpreting high-resolution satellite images of all Old and Middle Kingdom pyramid sites in Egypt. The sites included in this Atlas represent to a large degree the principal sites of the third- through the thirteenth-Dynasty. Their particular characteristics mirror the specific periods of Egyptian history, providing a fascinating window into the incredible story of ancient Egypt. Sites covered include (starting in the north): Abu Rawash, Giza, Zawiyet el-Aryan, Abusir, Saqqara, Dahshur, Mazghuna, Lisht, Meidum, Lahun, Hawara and Abydos. Also featured is the site of Abu Ghurob, with the two sun temples of Userkaf and Nyuserra of the fifth-Dynasty and the so-called minor step pyramids dating from the late third- to the early fourth-Dynasty. These start in Seila at the northeastern edge of the Faiyum Oasis and include – proceeding those of Zawyet Sultan – Nubt (Naqada), Abydos (Sinki), Hierakonpolis (el-Kula), Edfu (Ghonemeia) and Elephantine. The individual sites are characterised on the background of their local topography and changing nature of their development over time as reflected by the position of individual monuments, including the principal pyramids of the Old and Middle Kingdom. Each each site provides a different story in terms of its structure and content, reflecting the simple fact that every site developed under different conditions, in different local setting, had its own internal logics, its pace and its genuine characteristics. Each site also reflects a specific historical situation and tells a different story of its development and rediscovery. Most pyramid fields are increasingly more intensively endangered by modern development and locally-dominated neglect of the need for their preservation. It is strongly believed that the latest technological advances, including the satellite imaging in Egyptology, will ultimately translate into their systematic use in sites’ protection and management, site and landscape analysis and long-term strategies for both ongoing and future excavation and survey projects in Egypt.

What can we learn from the way artists live and operate in the world? This is one of the questions that Nietzsche asks himself throughout the course of his work, although it is not one for which he is most famous. In its answer, the question functions as a swinging incessant movement that oscillates between a highly critical analysis of dogmas and prejudices of the Western philosophical tradition and an equally profound recognition of how important it is for each of us to cling to a system of certainties and truths that are but illusions necessary to life. Art speaks to us of this perpetual transit from the brutality of the real to the enchantment of an invented world and teaches us how to move between both extremes. Beyond stereotypes and false myths, the crucial nodes of Nietzsche’s thought are shown in a different light, demonstrating once again the complexity of a philosophy that resists all simplifications.

James Still left eastern Kentucky for Europe in 1941 after enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War II, leaving behind a recently published, semiautobiographical work of fiction, On Troublesome Creek. Even as he developed a broader worldview, his work continued to draw from the agrarian and regional sources of life in the Cumberland Plateau that supported the American war effort. Like the riverbeds and creeks he so often evoked, Still reminds readers of the local and regional founts that they were fighting for in the century's second great war. The "Dean of Appalachian Literature," James Still grew up in Alabama before settling down in Knott County, Kentucky in the early 1930s. In On Troublesome Creek, he describes the ebbs and flows of Appalachian living while celebrating the culture defined by family, self-sufficiency, and hard work. The colloquial dialogue brings to life a community attached to the land on which they had lived for generations and the victuals and rituals that kept their world in motion amidst uncertainty.

Twice torpedoed during the Battle of the Atlantic, LT. Tony Colombo USNR, a former merchant marine officer, is appointed to command a new Navy ship, PC-450, a 173 foot, steel-hulled and much advanced submarine chaser carrying five officers and sixty-five men. After a period of escorting convoys up and down the Atlantic coast, Tony suddenly finds himself escorting ships loaded with Marine Corps equipment all the way to Wellington, New Zealand and then to Brisbane, Australia. Once arrived, he is instantly ordered to begin escorting small convoys up and down the Australian coast. Some weeks later, Tony and PC-450 engage in battle with a dangerous Japanese midget submarine which is attempting to penetrate Brisbane Harbour. In the summer of 1942, as PC-450 begins to escort numerous convoys from Australia to Noumea in New Caledonia, the United States suddenly invades Guadalcanal with the result that Tony begins guiding convoys north in support of the invasion while fending off the multiple day and night air raids that the Japanese throw down The Slot. Subsequently, following the hard fought victory on Guadalcanal, PC-450 participates in the invasion of the Russell Islands and then, during the grinding fight for New Georgia, PC-450 not only helps to fend off Japanese air attacks on the fleet but twice engages in surface actions when the Japanese attempt to infiltrate troops onto the island. Wounded in a sudden air attack that radar could not detect in advance, Tony finds himself back in Australian territory awaiting new orders. Reviews for Splinter on the Tide, also by Phillip E. Parotti: "A deftly crafted novel of naval combat in World War II" – Midwest Book Review "People won't forget the visceral impact of these real-life characters. Ordinary people, pushed to extraordinary ends, surviving the true horrors of war accurately portrayed. A military, naval, novel you won’t want to put down." – Ron Lealos, author of Pashtun: A Military Thriller and 'Don't Mean Nuthin' "A page-turning historical portrayal of love, war, hardship and discovery of the true cost for sailors’ survival. Those who were at sea in any war time will savor every page." – Maria Riva, best-selling author of Marlene Dietrich: The Life