"[Hillman's] work is fierce but loving, risk-taking, and beautiful." - Harvard ReviewAn iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry.

Happiness and connection prove fickle in this debut collection of eleven linked stories introducing Babbie and Donnie. She is a thrice-divorced former call girl, and he is a sobriety-challenged trucker turned yogi. Along with their community of exes, in-laws, and coworkers, Babbie and Donnie share a longing to re-forge their lives, a task easier said than done in Mobile, Alabama, which bears its own share of tainted history. Despite overwhelming challenges and the ever-looming specters of status, race, and class, the characters in It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories strive for versions of the American dream through modern and often unconventional means. Told with humor and honesty, these stories remind us not only about the fallibility of being human and the resistance of some to change but also about finding redemption in unlikely places.

In the year 2020, everything we used to think about our habits has been profoundly disrupted. Lockdown still represents an unprecedented experience for all those who went through it, radically affecting our freedom of movement and all those social interactions that used to make up our daily lives. Some people believe that once the pandemic ends, nothing will be the same. Others believe that once the virus becomes weaker or a vaccine is at our disposal and the fear is diminished, everything will go back to normal because the mechanism of habit is in many ways similar to the mechanisms of nature, reiterating the uniformity of its functioning. Which is correct? Both positions, perhaps. When philosophers addressed the issue of customs, namely collective habits, they have generally emphasized that caution us required when it comes to changing them - and indeed, if we look back at history… Could pandemics affect shared habits in specific territories, habits that were ultimately generated in reaction to other natural risks and threats?

The current volume brings together a collection of essays from the conference "The Postmodern Condition: Forty Years Later" held at University of Genova on December 2019. Taking advantage of the fortieth anniversay of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard, a book that initiated the cultural explosion of postmodern philosophy, in order to relaunch and further investigate the ongoing debate around the essential meaning of postmodernity, the end of postmodernism and the advent of new aesthetics, philosophy and social "structure of feelings" that have (or tried to) overcome the postmodern paradigm. The book thus brings together two interwoven but often separated themes: on the one hand, the analysis of the vitality, legacy, topicality and historicizing process of postmodernity and postmodernism; on the other, the analysis of the debate around the crisis of the postmodern paradigm and of the advent of new conceptual frameworks, often born out of a direct refusal of postmodern critical discourse and philosophy. Through the filters of different philosophical and aesthetic paradigms, the book thus offers a complex description of contemporary society from the 1980s down to the present moment, dwelling on crucial topics such as the relationship between humanity and technology, the digital revolution, the social role of representations, the dialectics between image and reality, and the vitality of postmodern stylistic features (quotation, metafiction, appropriation etc.).

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize was established in 1980 to encourage and support the writing and reading of short fiction, and first awarded in 1981, to David Bosworth for his collection The Death of Descartes. Over the past forty years judges such as Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Amy Hempel, Anne Patchett, and Michael Chabon have selected the best collections from the hundreds submitted annually by up-and-coming writers. 20 More features one story from each of the past twenty winners of the prize. It builds on the previously released collection 20: The Best of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, edited by John Edgar Wideman, that collects stories from the prize’s first twenty years. This book includes stories by: Joanna Pearson, Caroline Kim, Kate Wisel, Brad Felver, William Wall, Melissa Yancy, Leslie Pietrzyk, Kent Nelson, Anthony Wallace, Beth Bosworth, Shannon Cain, Tina May Hall, Anne Sanow, Anthony Varallo, Todd James Pierce, David Harris Ebenbach, Darrell Spencer, Suzanne Greenburg, John Blair, and Brett Ellen Bock.

This book intends to explore the atmospheric issue from an independent, architectural perspective. It is composed of two main sections. The first one introduces and analyzes the atmospheric concept inside the lexical scope of the architectural discipline, mapping the whole taxonomy of semantic declinations that are recognized by architecture, in addition to retracing the etymology of the term ‘atmosphere’ and its evolution. The second section studies the topic throughout the sensory-emotional filter of the perceiving subject located in the built environment, gleaning suggestions from neuroscientific knowledge. More recently, architecture and neuroscience have started to interact, both in the combination of their theories and through experiment-based investigations.

How does culture contribute to healing our planet? Is there anything we should learn from the pandemic? The book answers these questions, exploring the contribution of culture to the protection of the planet, comparing the Italian and the Brazilian contexts, the latter a true thermometer of world trends, from economic and financial to environmental and climatic, social and health. It emerges a reflection on the role of culture as a driving force for the restart and as a bridge to a new normal that awaits us after the pandemic.

New poems from the author of Imperial, and Blood Pages.

A Spanish translation of George Kiraz's popular New Syriac Primer. This fruitful integration of scholarly introduction and practical application provides a primer that is more than a simple grammar or syntactic introduction to the language. Written in a style designed for beginners, Kiraz avoids technical language and strives for a reader-friendly inductive approach.

Ishoʿdad of Merv’s (fl. 850 AD) Commentary on Daniel provides an important witness to East Syriac exegetical technique. In it Ishoʿdad typically emphasizes an historical reading of the Old Testament above any kind of allegorical, spiritual, or even Christological interpretation. Most notable is Ishoʿdad’s belief that the Maccabees fulfilled several of the visions described in the book of Daniel, even including the Heavenly Kingdom of Daniel chapters 2, 7, and 8, and the physical resurrection of Daniel 12. These interpretations dramatically depart from most eastern and western commentators who considered Daniel’s visions to portend the rise of the Roman Empire and the advent of Christ. Ishoʿdad’s commentary is translated here into English for the first time.

Shalom Sadik interrogates the nature of Maimonides’ religious philosophy through examination of secrets in the philosopher’s Guide for the Perplexed, the role of dialectic in his philosophy, the relationship between natural law and God’s commandments, and the question of free will.

In this relatively short book, Johns, in the style of Derrida, looks over the absence or spectre of the signifier “dialectic” in both Martin Heidegger and Graham Harman’s work, arguing that such a negation of the term turns out to be more of an intentional repression than any passive act of neglection. Johns insists that such repression finds its way into their writing as an alternative interpretation of their core concepts altogether. Less a Hegelian critique of such thinkers and more a Heideggerian and Harmanian resuscitation of the dialectic in Hegel as a realist method capable of integration into contemporary philosophy, this book will be invaluable to anyone interested in the crossroads of contemporary strands of idealism, materialism and realism and the place of the dialectical method today.

One hundred years after the birth of Pier Paolo Pasolini, his oeuvre might best be described as “une pensée”, as a meandering thought-provoking thought, to quote Jean-Luc Godard’s exceptional comment on Pasolini in Histoire(s) du cinéma. Pasolini scholarship has certainly increased in recent years, but mainly from the perspective of Italian Studies and with a particular focus on his poetry, prose and film. The proposed volume instead highlights the interest of his work for the history of twentieth-century philosophy. It therefore compiles key writings by philosophers who are relatively unknown even within the context of contemporary French and Italian thought. By collecting little known or newly translated essays from these philosophers, the volume aims to foster a contemporary discussion about the (in-)actuality of Pasolini’s work.

The tradition of Kant's critical philosophy developed the concept of imagination in a rigorous and productive way. It also allows us to develop an aesthetic approach suitable to explaining and understanding the relationship between sensitivity and technology. In this book, Montani defends the reasons to place this concept in a paleo-anthropological framework, linking it to the imaginative practices that preceded and prepared the advent of articulated discourse. This event involved a profound reorganization of the technical performances that can be traced back to imagination and related internalization processes. Furthermore, the emergence of an articulated language inaugurated a singular story, that of the relationship between word and image. In this study, that story is followed through particular attention to developments in cinema and digital image formats.

The present volume brings together translations of hitherto neglected texts from Asian philosophical traditions, along with critical essays dealing with the philosophical issues of translating these texts into Western languages. As the third volume in the "Asian Philosophical Texts" series, dedicated to making primary sources of Asian philosophies available to a wider audience in Western academia and beyond, this book includes a diverse range of primary sources written by a broad spectrum of thinkers from different historical periods and intellectual traditions, including India, China, Korea and Japan. The main theme of the volume is the concept of "discontents", focusing on the way different philosophical traditions of Asia enter into dialogue with each other, as well as their critical engagement with Western thought.

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.