A study from the American perspective of modern spiritualism, which flourished in the mid-19th century, and of surrealism, a movement that produced a major following between the two World Wars.

“The Cold War . . . was a fight to the death,” notes Thomas C. Reed, “fought with bayonets, napalm, and high-tech weaponry of every sort—save one. It was not fought with nuclear weapons.” With global powers now engaged in cataclysmic encounters, there is no more important time for this essential, epic account of the past half century, the tense years when the world trembled At the Abyss. Written by an author who rose from military officer to administration insider, this is a vivid, unvarnished view of America’s fight against Communism, from the end of WWII to the closing of the Strategic Air Command, a work as full of human interest as history, rich characters as bloody conflict. Among the unforgettable figures who devised weaponry, dictated policy, or deviously spied and subverted: Whittaker Chambers—the translator whose book, Witness, started the hunt for bigger game: Communists in our government; Lavrenti Beria—the head of the Soviet nuclear weapons program who apparently killed Joseph Stalin; Col. Ed Hall—the leader of America’s advanced missile system, whose own brother was a Soviet spy; Adm. James Stockwell—the prisoner of war and eventual vice presidential candidate who kept his terrible secret from the Vietnamese for eight long years; Nancy Reagan—the “Queen of Hearts,” who was both loving wife and instigator of palace intrigue in her husband’s White House. From Eisenhower’s decision to beat the Russians at their own game, to the “Missile Gap” of the Kennedy Era, to Reagan’s vow to “lean on the Soviets until they go broke”—all the pivotal events of the period are portrayed in new and stunning detail with information only someone on the front lines and in backrooms could know. Yet At the Abyss is more than a riveting and comprehensive recounting. It is a cautionary tale for our time, a revelation of how, “those years . . . came to be known as the Cold War, not World War III.”

Eighteen-year-old Cas Leung struggles with her morality and her romantic relationship with fellow pirate Swift as she and the Minnow crew work to take down wild sea monsters, dubbed Hellbeasts, who are attacking ships and destroying the ocean ecosystem.

An essay by philosopher Slavoj Zizek, with an English translation of Schelling's beautiful and evocative Ages of the World, second draft

Cassandra Leung’s been a sea monster trainer ever since she could walk, raising genetically engineered beast to defend ships crossing the NeoPacific ... until pirates snatch her from the blood-stained decks.

This is the heart-rending tale of thirteen-year-old Meena, who due to an unfortunate turn of events ends up in one of the brothels of Bombay, India. Her mother, Devi, is tricked into selling her into prostitution slavery by a well-known doctor of a Nepali village community. Meena remains locked up there for four years. At first she refuses the business but Chowla Bai, the Madame of the brothel and her goons subject her to the worst torture, humiliation and rapes. These finally break her resistance. In the brothel she develops a strong and deep friendship with another girl, Pooja, who later dies of AIDS. After Pooja's death, Meena conceives and gives birth to a daughter, whom she murders in desperation. She is also harassed by one particular client, Sahib, who causes her extreme emotional hurt and anxiety. While in the brothel she witnesses a brutal murder and also the escape of two girls, Rani and Nanni. She herself is rescued by a foreign agency and returns to Nepal to face a myriad of social problems. She falls in love, but must make a bitter decision.

A passionate meditation on the consolations and disappointments of religion and poetry

A study from the American perspective of modern spiritualism, which flourished in the mid-19th century, and of surrealism, a movement that produced a major following between the two World Wars.

A reevaluation of Édouard Glissant that centers on the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and creates deep, original theories of trauma and Caribbeanness While philosophy has undertaken the work of accounting for Europe’s traumatic history, the field has not shown the same attention to the catastrophe known as the Middle Passage. It is a history that requires its own ideas that emerge organically from the societies that experienced the Middle Passage and its consequences firsthand. Glissant and the Middle Passage offers a new, important approach to this neglected calamity by examining the thought of Édouard Glissant, particularly his development of Caribbeanness as a critical concept rooted in the experience of the slave trade and its aftermath in colonialism. In dialogue with key theorists of catastrophe and trauma—including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Derek Walcott, as well as key figures in Holocaust studies—Glissant and the Middle Passage hones a sharp sense of the specifically Caribbean varieties of loss, developing them into a transformative philosophical idea. Using the Plantation as a critical concept, John E. Drabinski creolizes notions of rhizome and nomad, examining what kinds of aesthetics grow from these roots and offering reconsiderations of what constitutes intellectual work and cultural production. Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Glissant’s proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage.

Courting the Abyss updates the philosophy of free expression for a world that is very different from the one in which it originated. The notion that a free society should allow Klansmen, neo-Nazis, sundry extremists, and pornographers to spread their doctrines as freely as everyone else has come increasingly under fire. At the same time, in the wake of 9/11, the Right and the Left continue to wage war over the utility of an absolute vision of free speech in a time of increased national security. Courting the Abyss revisits the tangled history of free speech, finding resolutions to these debates hidden at the very roots of the liberal tradition. A mesmerizing account of the role of public communication in the Anglo-American world, Courting the Abyss shows that liberty's earliest advocates recognized its fraternal relationship with wickedness and evil. While we understand freedom of expression to mean "anything goes," John Durham Peters asks why its advocates so often celebrate a sojourn in hell and the overcoming of suffering. He directs us to such well-known sources as the prose and poetry of John Milton and the political and philosophical theory of John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., as well as lesser-known sources such as the theology of Paul of Tarsus. In various ways they all, he shows, envisioned an attitude of self-mastery or self-transcendence as a response to the inevitable dangers of free speech, a troubled legacy that continues to inform ruling norms about knowledge, ethical responsibility, and democracy today. A world of gigabytes, undiminished religious passion, and relentless scientific discovery calls for a fresh account of liberty that recognizes its risk and its splendor. Instead of celebrating noxious doctrine as proof of society's robustness, Courting the Abyss invites us to rethink public communication today by looking more deeply into the unfathomable mystery of liberty and evil.