Since the early 2000s, genealogy has become a lucrative business, an accelerating online industry, a massive data mining project, and fodder for reality television. But the fact remains that our contemporary fascination with family history cannot be understood independently of the powerful technological tools that aid and abet in the search for traces of blood, belonging, and difference.In The Genealogical Sublime, Julia Creet traces the histories of the largest, longest-r...

Memory plays an integral part in how individuals and societies construct their identity. While memory is usually considered in the context of a stable, unchanging environment, this collection of essays explores the effects of immigration, forced expulsions, exile, banishment, and war on individual and collective memory. The ways in which memory affects cultural representation and historical understanding across generations is examined through case studies and theoretical approaches that un...

Examines the place of Paris in French Jewish literary memory, a memory that, of necessity, grapples with the aftermath of the Holocaust.The essays in Shadows in the City of Light explore the significance of Paris in the writing of five influential French writers-Sarah Kofman, Patrick Modiano, George Perec, Henri Raczymow, and Irene Nemirovsky-whose novels and memoirs capture and probe the absences of deported Paris Jews. These writers move their readers th...

"A sophisticated, nuanced, and beautifully written account of the intersecting legacies of genocide and colonialism in postwar France." —Michael Rothberg, author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of DecolonizationSince World War II, French and Francophone literature and film have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma but rather to connect its memory with other memories of viol...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Nobody deals with challenging subjects more interestingly and compellingly than Adam Rutherford, and this may be his best book yet. This is a seriously important work' BILL BRYSON'A fascinating and timely refutation of the casual racism on the rise around the world. The ultimate anti-racism guide for data-lovers everywhere' CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ***Race is real because we ...

A New York Times Notable Book. A literary exploration that is "surely destined to become the quintessential companion to Camus's most enduring novel" ( PopMatters).The Stranger is a rite of passage for readers around the world. Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus's novel has been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. It's the rare novel that's as likely to be found in a teen's backpack as in a g...

"A fascinating exploration of the mysteries ignited by DNA genealogy testing—from the intensely personal and concrete to the existential and unsolvable." —Tana French, New York Times–bestselling authorYou swab your cheek or spit in a vial, then send it away to a lab somewhere. Weeks later you get a report that might tell you where your ancestors came from or if you carry certain genetic risks. Or, the report could reveal a long-buried family secret that upe...

An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era.Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes.This groundbreaking book by l...

Zizek argues that the physical violence we see is often generated by the systemic violence that sustains our political and economic systems. With the help of eminent philosophers like Marx, Engel and Lacan, as well as frequent references to popular culture, he examines the real causes of violent outbreaks like those seen in Israel and Palestine and in terrorist acts around the world. Ultimately, he warns, doing nothing is often the most violent course of action we can take.

There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. But if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times? In a major new analysis of our global situation, Zizek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal....

A woman's passion for the Nobel Prize winner yields "a rich hybrid of biography, literary criticism, intellectual history and memoir" ( The Washington Post).Elizabeth Hawes was a college sophomore in the 1950s when she became transfixed and transformed by Albert Camus. The author of such revered works as The Fall, The Plague, and The Stranger, he was best known for his contribution to twentieth-century literature. But who was he,...

**• A New York Times Notable Book •“The richest, freshest, most fun book on genetics in some time.” —The New York Times Book Review**We are doomed to repeat history if we fail to learn from it, but how are we affected by the forces that are invisible to us? In The Invisible History of the Human Race Christine Kenneally draws on cutting-edge research to reveal how both historical artifacts and DNA tell us where we come from and wh...