The stock market has developed a reputation among the people of the world as a mystical entity. It has become a realm with the top closed in on Wall Street with a circle of seemingly impenetrable suits even though the reality is that anyone can become an investor. Although the average Joe might be at an immediate disadvantage in terms of safety funds and insider knowledge on the best deals and short term fluctuations of a stock, there are most definitely options such as mutual funds like i...

Borrowed Time, Borrowed Road is a literary short story collection set in Mississippi and the American South. These fictional stories explore memory, race, violence, faith, loss, and moral consequence through characters shaped by personal history, regional culture, and the burdens of the past.Across courtrooms, rural backroads, farms, cafés, and fading small towns, the collection moves through brutal confrontations, quiet reckonings, dark humor, and moments of philosophical...

"In his studies of borrowing from distant poetic traditions, Serrano aims to uncover the heterogenity of influences and intentions in the most canonical of texts: ""Mallarme"" (1842-98), ""Segalen"" (1878-1919), ""Wang Wei"" (701-61), the ""Classic of Poetry"" (8th century BCE), ""Buhturi"" (821-97), and the ""Qur'an"" (7th century CE). Arguing, among other things that Mallarme was really a Chinese poet, that ancient Chinese poets discovered the workings of film imagery, and that the Qur'a...

The credit crisis has pushed the whole world so far into the red that the gigantic sums involved defy understanding. On a human level, what does such an enormous degree of debt and insolvency mean? In this timely book, cultural critic Richard Dienst considers the financial crisis, global poverty, media politics and radical theory to parse the various implications of a world where man is born free but everywhere is in debt.Written with humor and verve, Bonds of Debt ranges ...

The definitive account of the trillion-dollar payment card industry.The payment card business has evolved from its inception in the 1950s as a way to handle payment for expense-account lunches (the Diners Club card) into today's complex, sprawling industry that drives trillions of dollars in transaction volume each year. Paying with Plastic is the definitive source on an industry that has revolutionized the way we borrow and spend. More than a history book...

The English language that is spoken by one billion people around the world is a linguistic mongrel, its vocabulary a diverse mix resulting from centuries of borrowing from other tongues.From the Celtic languages of pre-Roman Britain to Norman French; from the Vikings' Old Scandinavian to Persian, Sanskrit, Algonquian, Cantonese and Hawaiian – amongst a host of others – we have enriched our modern language with such words as tulip, slogan, doolally, avocado, moccasin, ketchup and uk...