The title Favet Neptunus Eunti, Latin for “Neptune favors the traveler,” looks at the traveling nature of the Armenian merchant-banking Mouradian family. Written in three parts, the book chronicles 700 years of Mouradian family history in five continents beginning with a description of both the family’s pre-twentieth century life and merchant trade route spanning the Eastern hemisphere from Singapore to Manchester and Marseille. It then focuses on the family's Chungoush (Çüngüş) branch by providing a biography of the last chatelain of the city’s Mouradentz Abarankn, Sarkis Agha Mouradian, his wife Mariam Khatoun (née Karagheusian), their children, and their control of the family’s outposts in Kharpert (Harput), Aleppo, Turkmenistan, and Singapore leading up to, and during, the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Lastly, it follows Sarkis Agha and Mariam Khatoun's descendants as they integrated into various countries after World War I and established a presence in business, legal, political, entertainment, and culinary industries. Whereas the foreword and epilogue to the book remain specific to the Mouradians, the methodological introduction to the book, “Seeing and Being Seen: Methods of Witnessing the Unwitnessable,” strays momentarily from the family and focuses more generally on torture as both the primary mechanism of genocide and the principal obstacle to documenting it, while proposing a means to overcoming this paradox. Research for the book is based on: - roughly 26 hours of recorded and previously unpublished interviews from now-deceased survivors of the Genocide and their descendants; - 13 public and private archives located in Italy, France, Turkey, and the United States of America; - 161 primary and secondary sources, along with over 50 previously unpublished private correspondence and governmental documents translated from Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, Armenian, and French into English; - 26 nineteenth century Ottoman certificates of property title covering a portion of the family’s Chungoush property holdings, which are annexed, including both scans of the documents and their complete translation from the original Ottoman Turkish to English. The text is accompanied with over 400 illustrations, comprising of photographs of family members, properties, jewels, personal effects, documents, and maps of both the family’s trade and escape routes. The book is a limited hardcover edition in oversize format with lithograph printing on acid-free paper, Smyth sewn signatures, reinforced library binding, as well as gold and silver gilding to the cover.

In present-day society, seaports have a very negative image, which is mainly due to the environmental pressures and pollution risks they cause, the monomaniac capitalist mentality of their operators, the dubious reputation of the shipping industry, the uninspired, strictly utilitarian design of port facilities and the dehu-manisation of port areas. Currently, the erosion of public support for seaports is a major issue in port management and policy.

Fierce competitiveness between established and emerging major cities, such as Berlin, London, Shanghai and Sydney, has led to a pressure to excel as desirable locations for business, cultural activities, highly skilled migrants and tourists. At the same time, the transformation of settled and new migrant communities creates complex urban borders and variegated representations (academic, cinematic, popular, official) of the city. While cities increasingly deploy cosmopolitan images portraying the diversity of past and present populations and activities, this continues to coexist with parochialism as a mood and mode of cultural formations and a reflection of local specificities. This volume brings together cultural analysts, social scientists, and media and film scholars to explore the ways in which core cities generate competing claims on, and visions of, their use and their future, and thus have engaged with the necessity to brand their image for international consumption and for internal coherence.

The French Atlantic is a compelling and timely contribution to ongoing debates about nationhood, culture, and “Frenchness” that have come to define France and its diaspora in light of the diplomatic fracas surrounding the Iraq war and other mass cultural events. With interdisciplinary navigation of fields nearly as diverse as the locations he explores, Bill Marshall considers the cultural history of seven different French Atlantic spaces—from Quebec to the southern Caribbean to North Atlantic territory and back to metropolitan France—in this groundbreaking study of the Atlantic world.

Julien Gracq, the most important writer in France, is also the only living writer whose complete works appear in a volume of the prestigious Pleiades editions. The most original of his later works is this book about Nantes, which is Gracq's personal and profound response to Proust's synthesis of memory, reverie, and realism. The work begins with a quote from Baudelaire: "The shape of a city, as we all know, changes more quickly than the mortal heart." The author writes of a child's experience of the hierarchy of urban spaces: the radial avenues walked during school recreation periods, the districts between the axes, and the relationship to Nantes of those who lived there, including Breton and Rimbaud.