This psychoanalytic study reads Jewish apocalypses as texts of mourning for the destruction of Jerusalem, arguing that the seers' experiences of traumatic loss, then visions of healing and recovery, all work to achieve the apocalyptic cure for ancient Jewish society.

Having traced a dimensional rift to Jerusalem in 583 B.C.E., DARPA, a government agency, forces thirteen-year-old Eli and his friends into the past to try to prevent the unraveling of history and the spread of the deadly slow pox. Reprint.

Fiction. In OUR COLONY BEYOND THE CITY OF RUINS, an insomniac will do anything for sleep, crones released from a buried heart take over a town, a woman chooses to live her last days in a cave overlooking the sea, earthquake survivors establish a colony in a remote forest. With unwavering imagination and heart, Janalyn Guo delivers a cast of characters who find their own unusual ways to endure. "These stories take the gestures of new wave fabulism and make it newer and even more wavy, by being genuinely international. Here's a book that shivers with possibility and wonder and surprise, where plants grow from people's bodies, where ghosts exist even before someone is dead. Guo isn't afraid to take on even the thoroughly weird in the most delightful way. This is what it's like to see a genre revivified."--Brian Evenson "OUR COLONY BEYOND THE CITY OF RUINS is an absolute delight, a wild collection that unsettles as much as it entertains. Guo shows an impressive range and deep emotional intelligence--this is a rare book of both strangeness and heart."--Kelly Luce

Boss, a loner, loved to dive into derelict spacecraft adrift in the blackness of space... But one day, she found a ship that would change everything—an ancient Dignity Vessel—and aboard the ship, the mysterious and dangerous Stealth Tech. Now, years after discovering that first ship, Boss has put together a large company that finds Dignity Vessels and finds "loose" Stealth Technology. Following a hunch, Boss and her team come to investigate the city of Vaycehn, where fourteen archeologists have died exploring the endless caves below the city. Mysterious "death holes" explode into the city itself for no apparent reason, and Boss believes Stealth Tech is involved. As Boss searches for the answer to the mystery of the death holes, she will uncover the answer to her Dignity Vessel quest as well—and one more thing, something so important that it will change her life—and the universe—forever. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in The Conquest of Ruins, what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginations isn’t that empire’s glory but its fall—and the haunting monuments left in its wake. Hell examines centuries of European empire-building—from Charles V in the sixteenth century and Napoleon’s campaigns of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the atrocities of Mussolini and the Third Reich in the 1930s and ’40s—and sees a similar fascination with recreating the Roman past in the contemporary image. In every case—particularly that of the Nazi regime—the ruins of Rome seem to represent a mystery to be solved: how could an empire so powerful be brought so low? Hell argues that this fascination with the ruins of greatness expresses a need on the part of would-be conquerors to find something to ward off a similar demise for their particular empire.

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Science Friday A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them. In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.

The Dead City unearths meanings from such depictions of ruination and decay, looking at representations of both thriving cities and ones which are struggling, abandoned or simply in transition. It reveals that ruination presents a complex opportunity to envision new futures for a city, whether that is by rewriting its past or throwing off old assumptions and proposing radical change. Seen in a certain light, for example, urban ruin and decay are a challenge to capitalist narratives of unbounded progress. They can equally imply that power structures thought to be deeply ingrained are temporary, contingent and even fragile. Examining ruins in Chernobyl, Detroit, London, Manchester and Varosha, this book demonstrates that how we discuss and depict urban decline is intimately connected to the histories, economic forces, power structures and communities of a given city, as well as to conflicting visions for its future.

Drawing on literature, legal texts, epigraphic evidence, and the narratives embodied in monuments and painting, Broken Cities is an expansive and nuanced study that holds great significance for the field of historiography.

“Oddný Eir is an authentic author, philosopher and mystic. She weaves together diaries and fiction. She is the writer I feel can best express the female psyche of now and has bridged the gap between rural Iceland and Western philosophy. A true pioneer!!!!!!!!” —Björk The winner of the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize in 2012, Land of Love and Ruins is the debut novel by a daring new voice in international fiction: Oddný Eir. Written in the form of a diary but with fantastical linguistic verve, the narrator sets out on a universal quest: to find a place to belong—and a way of being in the world. Paradoxically, her longing to settle down drives her to embark on all kinds of journeys, physical and mental, through time and space, in order to find answers to questions that concern not only her personally, but also the whole of humankind. She explores various modes of living, ponders different types of relationships and contemplates her bond with her family, land and nation; trying to find a balance between companionship and independence, movement and stability, past, present, and future. An enchanting blend of autobiography, diary, philosophical inquiry, and fantasy, Land of Love and Ruins is a richly imagined and utterly unique book about being human in the modern world.

Today, H. P. Lovecraft is both more popular and controversial than ever: the influence of his "Cthulhu mythos" is everywhere in popular culture, his cosmic pessimism has reemerged as a major theme in contemporary philosophy, and his racism continues to spark controversy in the media. The Love of Ruins takes a fresh look at a figure widely acknowledged as the father of modern horror or "weird" fiction. In these pages, Lovecraft emerges not as the atheist and nihilist he is often claimed to be, but as a kind of "psychonaut" and mystic whose stories, through their own imaginative rigor, expose the intellectual bankruptcy of their author's racism. The Love of Ruins is itself written in the form of letters, in order to do homage to Lovecraft's love of the form of the personal letter (he wrote more than 100,000), and to emulate Lovecraft's lifetime practice of thinking-as-corresponding.