Sambo Diallo is unable to identify with the soulless material civilization he finds in France, where he is sent to learn the secrets of the white man's power.

The celebrated classic by a groundbreaking figure in African literature addresses a critical contemporary issue—the collision of Islamic African values and Western culture. Hailed by Chinua Achebe as one of the greatest African novels ever written, this long-unavailable classic tells the tale of young Samba Diallo, a devout pupil in a Koranic school in Senegal whose parents send him to Paris to study philosophy. But unknown to Samba, it is a desperate attempt by his parents to better understand the French colonial forces transforming their traditional way of life. Instead, for Samba, it seems an exciting adventure, and once in France he excels at his new studies and is delighted by his new "marvelous comprehension and total communion" with the Western world. Soon, though, he finds himself torn between the materialistic secularism and isolation of French civilization and the deeper spiritual influences of his homeland. As Samba puts it: "I have become the two." Written in an elegant, lyrical prose, Ambiguous Adventure is a masterful expression of the immigrant experience and the repercussions of colonialism, and a great work of literature about the uneasy relationship between Islamic Africa and the West—a relationship more important today than ever before.

How do we begin to cope with loss that cannot be resolved? The COVID-19 pandemic has left many of us haunted by feelings of anxiety, despair, and even anger. In this book, pioneering therapist Pauline Boss identifies these vague feelings of distress as caused by ambiguous loss, losses that remain unclear and hard to pin down, and thus have no closure. Collectively the world is grieving as the pandemic continues to change our everyday lives. With a loss of trust in the world as a safe place, a loss of certainty about health care, education, employment, lingering anxieties plague many of us, even as parts of the world are opening back up again. Yet after so much loss, our search must be for a sense of meaning, and not something as elusive and impossible as "closure." This book provides many strategies for coping: encouraging us to increase our tolerance of ambiguity and acknowledging our resilience as we express a normal grief, and still look to the future with hope and possibility.

A Man Escaped is one of the most extraordinary escape stories to come out of World War II, a record of ingenuity and endurance that rivals the best of the genre.

While taking a class on infinity at Stanford in the late 1980s, Ravi Kapoor discovers that he is confronting the same mathematical and philosophical dilemmas that his mathematician grandfather had faced many decades earlier--and that had landed him in jail. Charged under an obscure blasphemy law in a small New Jersey town in 1919, Vijay Sahni is challenged by a skeptical judge to defend his belief that the certainty of mathematics can be extended to all human knowledge--including religion. Together, the two men discover the power--and the fallibility--of what has long been considered the pinnacle of human certainty, Euclidean geometry. As grandfather and grandson struggle with the question of whether there can ever be absolute certainty in mathematics or life, they are forced to reconsider their fundamental beliefs and choices. Their stories hinge on their explorations of parallel developments in the study of geometry and infinity--and the mathematics throughout is as rigorous and fascinating as the narrative and characters are compelling and complex. Moving and enlightening, A Certain Ambiguity is a story about what it means to face the extent--and the limits--of human knowledge.

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “A gripping historical narrative exploring both the bounds of slavery and what it means to be truly free.” —Vanity Fair Eleven-year-old George Washington Black—or Wash—a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is initially terrified when he is chosen as the manservant of his master’s brother. To his surprise, however, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning, and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human. But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash’s head, they must abandon everything and flee together. Over the course of their travels, what brings Wash and Christopher together will tear them apart, propelling Wash ever farther across the globe in search of his true self. Spanning the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, London to Morocco, Washington Black is a story of self-invention and betrayal, of love and redemption, and of a world destroyed and made whole again.

Utopian Generations develops a powerful interpretive matrix for understanding world literature--one that renders modernism and postcolonial African literature comprehensible in a single framework, within which neither will ever look the same. African literature has commonly been seen as representationally naïve vis-à-vis modernism, and canonical modernism as reactionary vis-à-vis postcolonial literature. What brings these two bodies of work together, argues Nicholas Brown, is their disposition toward Utopia or "the horizon of a radical reconfiguration of social relations.? Grounded in a profound rethinking of the Hegelian Marxist tradition, this fluently written book takes as its point of departure the partial displacement during the twentieth century of capitalism's "internal limit" (classically conceived as the conflict between labor and capital) onto a geographic division of labor and wealth. Dispensing with whole genres of commonplace contemporary pieties, Brown examines works from both sides of this division to create a dialectical mapping of different modes of Utopian aesthetic practice. The theory of world literature developed in the introduction grounds the subtle and powerful readings at the heart of the book--focusing on works by James Joyce, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ford Madox Ford, Chinua Achebe, Wyndham Lewis, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Pepetela. A final chapter, arguing that this literary dialectic has reached a point of exhaustion, suggests that a radically reconceived notion of musical practice may be required to discern the Utopian desire immanent in the products of contemporary culture.

Have you ever wished you could go back and change the past?Joshua Jones has many times. He's spent the last five years trying to forget one tragic day - the day his best friend died in a car crash. Fate has not been kind to Josh, in all of his seventeen years he has never really had any luck. He's not a bad kid; bad things just seem to happen to him. That is until the day he breaks into the house of the local eccentric, the Colonel, and discovers that he's a watchman for the Oblivion Order, a secret organisation of time travellers. Anachronist follows Josh's journey through the untrodden paths of history as he learns more about his abilities. The colonel teaches him how to use historical artefacts to reach key points in the past, and introduces him to other members of his Order. He meets Caitlin and her friends, their mission to maintain the time continuum - and the dark forces that exist beyond it. However, just as Josh begins to feel like he belongs, his past comes back to haunt him and he is forced to face the personal demons that he has buried for so long...The first book in The Infinity Engine Series, Anachronist explores the strange and unusual world of the Oblivion Order.

Examines seven types of ambiguity, providing examples of it in the writings of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot.

Paired informal and scholarly essays show how everyday events reveal fundamental concepts of data, including its creation, aggregation, management, and use. Whether questioning numbers on a scale, laughing at a misspelling of one’s name, or finding ourselves confused in a foreign supermarket, we are engaging with data. The only way to handle data responsibly, says Melanie Feinberg in this incisive work, is to take into account its human character. Though the data she discusses may seem familiar, close scrutiny shows it to be ambiguous, complicated, and uncertain: unruly. Drawing on the tools of information science, she uses everyday events such as deciding between Blender A and Blender B on Amazon to demonstrate a practical, critical, and generative mode of thinking about data: its creation, management, aggregation, and use. Each chapter pairs a self-contained main essay (an adventure) with a scholarly companion essay (the reflection). The adventure begins with an anecdote—visiting the library, running out of butter, cooking rice on a different stove. Feinberg argues that to understand the power and pitfalls of data science, we must attend to the data itself, not merely the algorithms that manipulate it. As she reflects on the implications of commonplace events, Feinberg explicates fundamental concepts of data that reveal the many tiny design decisions—which may not even seem like design at all—that shape how data comes to be. Through the themes of serendipity, objectivity, equivalence, interoperability, taxonomy, labels, and locality, she illuminates the surprisingly pervasive role of data in our daily thoughts and lives.