Fathom an AI system capable of making utterances like “I think therefore I am”. This inward gaze, arguably a hallmark of conscience, is absent in today’s intelligent machines. Yet, it is essential for the alignment of purpose of machine and human, an imperative that should turn the machine into an ally of human endeavor. Accordingly, this book implements conscience within an AI context, describing how an AI system for neural symbolic reasoning may be endowed with an introspective function....

From the streets of Britain to Canada’s vast unknown, their uncertain journey unfolds.Barnardo’s Homes first opened in East London, in 1867, to provide free shelter, meals, and education for poor and orphaned children. Despite their troubled pasts, these kids found family in each other. But over the decades, as demands grew and funding dwindled, Barnardo’s must look toward a different future for their charges. They must look toward Canada.This gripping novel, inspired by a ...

Cervantine Futures places the writings of Miguel de Cervantes into conversation with some of the most pressing issues in cultural studies, critical theory, and sociopolitical discourse of the last decade. Assembling a diverse range of prominent and emerging scholars in the field, this volume stakes a claim for Hispanism’s place in the growing scholarly movement to vindicate pre- and early modernity for its incisive and often singular perspective on race, gender, ability, the body,...

In the wake of the Great Blackout, faced with the near-extinction of humanity, a pair of lovers speak to each other. They parse, with precision, with familiarity, the endless aspects of their love. Out of their dialogues, piece by piece, a composite image of love takes form, one that moves outwards beyond the realm of relationships and into metaphysics, geology, linguistics, AI.Years previously, a writer and her husband, a Latin professor, stay in Venice while she works on a text. A...

The Earl’s Daughter is a first love, forbidden love, and coming of age novel set in Victorian England* Social divide.* Slow burn, closed door romance in an aristocratic home.* Injustice, secrets and sorrow.Thomas Fraser is a good man unjustly accused of wrongdoing and banished from his Scottish home to a bleak future in a foreign land... England.The earl’s eldest daughter, Lady Alice Aucourte, is angry. Her father has cancel...

In The Things We've Seen, his most ambitious and accomplished novel to date, Agustín Fernández Mallo captures the strangeness and interconnectedness of human existence in the twenty-first century. A writer travels to the small uninhabited island of San Simón, used as a Franquist concentration camp during the Spanish Civil War, and witnesses events which impel him on a wild goose chase across several continents. In Miami, an ageing Kurt Montana, the fourth astronaut who secretly ac...

Elites and the People in Global Power Relations challenges the conventional boundaries of international relations by introducing the differential accumulation of power (DAP) approach. At a time of systemic crisis and eroding democratic legitimacy, this book transcends traditional state-centric and economic paradigms to reveal how the strategic interplay between elite competition and populace mobilisation defines the contemporary global order and its persistent hierarchical structu...

A witty meditation revealing what our obsession with monsters says about wonder, reality, and narrative itselfWhat does the Loch Ness Monster tell us about belief, tourism, and the stories we need to survive? In this formally innovative essay, award-winning Spanish writer Laura Fernández travels to the Scottish Highlands to investigate the legend of Nessie and develops a perspective on humanity’s perpetual and sometimes destructive need to “discover.” From the 1933 sighting that la...

What We Read, and Why is for anyone who has wondered how to make sense of our bewildering, fast-changing world. How do we cope with the welter of information all around us? How do we tell fact from fiction, given the proliferation of misleading or fake news, videos, and content? The answer is simple: we must read and develop our ability to think critically. In this book, we will read from people who do so. In personal essays, business, political, media and community leaders, as well as par...

THE RISE OF THE UGLY LUNAA Shunned Wolf Shifter’s Dark Paranormal RomanceWhen the pack spits you out under a blood moon, you can either fade into the forest — or learn to burn.Palmer Riley was supposed to be invisible: a convenient mistake the pack could sweep away. Instead she becomes the one thing her enemies feared most — a pulse in the night, marked by moonfire and shaped by choice. This is a story about getting up when everything that ...

Josh Fernandez is a community college professor who finds himself under investigation for “soliciting students for potentially dangerous activities” after starting an antifascist club on campus.As Fernandez spends the year defending his job, he reflects on a life lived in protest of the status quo, swept up in chaos and rage, from his childhood in Boston dealing with a mentally ill father and a new family to growing up in Davis, California, in the basement shows of...

On a remote island in the south of Japan, Aoshima is nearly imperceptible among the sea waves. It was almost emptied, just over a kilometer long, due to the migrations undertaken in the 1940s at the war's end. At its peak, the island had a population of 900 people and a dock with significant fishing boat traffic. An invasion of rats forced the inhabitants to make an unusual decision: to release a group of cats to end the plague. Sixty years later, with a depleted population, cats outnumber...