Only the immortal Dr. Israel St. James can collect and keep safe history's most powerful artifacts. With Archimedes' Insight, he can detect the magic lurking beneath the surface of our mundane world. A potent nexus in history or a rare super-genius can manifest magical power within an object. These supernatural Relics are Israel St. James' specialty. As the keeper of Archimedes' Apothecary, he employs multi-dimensional tools to find and collect antiquities of the most abnormal kind. Some h...

Explores the implications of chance and uncertainty in social theory and offers a new interpretation of the sociological canon.Since the founding of the discipline, sociologists have endeavored to understand the structures of groups, organizations, and societies, and how these entities condition our behavior. While some of the foundational theorists saw these processes as largely deterministic, sociological theory has increasingly insisted on the importance of cult...

Spontaneous Combustion is the classic "play-in-a-day" theater exercise in literary event form. We gather writers together, provide three story prompts, and give them 24 hours to compose a unique piece of pulp fiction. Our favorites are invited back to prose-slam their short stories for a public audience. In the end, everyone casts a vote and the people-chosen "Top Tales" are bound in the next volume. Awaiting you in Vol. II of this explosive literary tradition is a powderkeg of short ficti...

"Not only an astute diagnosis of the confusions and contradictions of contemporary thought; it also offers compelling alternatives." —Rita Felski, author of Hooked: Art and AttachmentFor decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the po...

Eugene W. Holland provides an excellent introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus which is widely recognized as one of the most influential texts in philosophy to have appeared in the last thirty years.He lucidly presents the theoretical concerns behind Anti-Oedipus and explores with clarity the diverse influences of Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Kant on the development of Deleuze & Guattari's thinking. He also examines the wider implications o...

What are systems? What is society? What happens to human beings in a hypermodern world? This book is an introduction to Niklas Luhmann's social system theory which explains specific functions like economy and mass media from a cybernetic perspective. Integrating various schools of thought including sociology, philosophy and biology Luhmann Explained results in an overall analysis of "world society". Special attention is given to the present-day relevance of Luhmann's theory with respect to...

"Told with brains and heart" —Michelle Gable, New York Times bestselling author of A Paris Apartment"Bristles with charm and curiosity" —Winston Groom, New York Times bestselling author of Forrest Gump"A wholly original and superbly crafted work of art, Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance is a masterpiece of the imagination." —Lori Nelson Spielman, New York Times bestselling author of The Life List and Swee...

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the...

The depth and breadth of what science fiction and fantasy fiction is changes with every passing year. The two dozen stories chosen for this book by award-winning anthologist Jonathan Strahan carefully maps this evolution, giving readers a captivating and always-entertaining look at the very best the genre has to offer.

All too often in contemporary discourse, we hear about science overstepping its proper limits—about its brazenness, arrogance, and intellectual imperialism. The problem, critics say, is scientism: the privileging of science over all other ways of knowing. Science, they warn, cannot do or explain everything, no matter what some enthusiasts believe. In Science Unlimited?, noted philosophers of science Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci gather a diverse group of scientists, science...

The science fiction and fantasy fields continue to evolve, setting new marks with each passing year. For the sixth year in a row, master anthologist Jonathan Strahan has collected stories to captivate, entertain, and showcase the very best the genre has to offer. Critically acclaimed, and with a reputation for including award-winning speculative fiction, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year is the only major “best of” anthology to collect both fantasy and science fiction under ...

Time and the Other is a classic work that critically reexamined the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects and reoriented the approach literary critics, philosophers, and historians took to the study of humankind. Johannes Fabian challenges the assumption that anthropologists live in the "here and now," that their subjects live in the "there and then," and that the "other" exists in a time not contemporary with our own. He also pinpoints the emergence, transformat...