From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland comes Catherynne M. Valente's dark fantasy tale "L’Esprit de L’Escalier", a Tor.com Original. In this provocative and rich retelling of the Greek myth, Orpheus, the musician son of Apollo and Calliope, successfully rescues his wife Eurydice from Hades after her untimely death. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Learn about the feeling of l'Esprit de l'Escalier with iMinds insightful knowledge series. There's nothing like a good comeback. It's witty, snappy and completely devastating to your verbal sparring partner. A woman once said to US President Calvin Coolidge: "I've made a bet with a friend that I can get you to say at least three words to me this evening. What do you have to say to that?" Coolidge looked at her and calmly replied: "You lose." But how many times have you gone completely blank when arguing with someone, only to think of the perfect comeback an hour later? It's too late, of course. More than anything, you wish you could wind back time and deliver your riposte at the perfect moment. That's l'esprit de l'escalier. iMinds brings targeted knowledge to your eReading device with short information segments to whet your mental appetite and broaden your mind.

From 1978 to 1993, the renowned Soviet "paper architects" Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin created an incredible collection of elaborate etchings depicting outlandish, often impossible, buildings and cityscapes. Funny, cerebral, and deeply human, their obsessively detailed work layers elements borrowed from Egyptian tombs, Ledoux's visionary architecture, Le Corbusier's urban master plans, and other historical precedents in etchings of breathtaking complexity and beauty. Back by popular demand following the sold-out original 1991 edition and 2003 reprint, Brodsky & Utkin presents the sum of the architects' collaborative prints and adds new material, including an updated preface by the artists' gallery representative, Ron Feldman, a new introductory essay by architect Aleksandr Mergold, visual documentation of the duo's installation work, and rare personal photographs.

Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering historical experience of being caught among unequal languages, is the subject of Rey Chow's book. A diverse group of personae, never before assembled in a similar manner, make their appearances in the various chapters: the young mulatto happening upon a photograph about skin color in a popular magazine; the man from Martinique hearing himself named "Negro" in public in France; call center agents in India trained to Americanize their accents while speaking with customers; the Algerian Jewish philosopher reflecting on his relation to the French language; African intellectuals debating the pros and cons of using English for purposes of creative writing; the translator acting by turns as a traitor and as a mourner in the course of cross-cultural exchange; Cantonese-speaking writers of Chinese contemplating the politics of food consumption; radio drama workers straddling the forms of traditional storytelling and mediatized sound broadcast. In these riveting scenes of speaking and writing imbricated with race, pigmentation, and class demarcations, Chow suggests, postcolonial languaging becomes, de facto, an order of biopolitics. The native speaker, the fulcrum figure often accorded a transcendent status, is realigned here as the repository of illusory linguistic origins and unities. By inserting British and post-British Hong Kong (the city where she grew up) into the languaging controversies that tend to be pursued in Francophone (and occasionally Anglophone) deliberations, and by sketching the fraught situations faced by those coping with the specifics of using Chinese while negotiating with English, Chow not only redefines the geopolitical boundaries of postcolonial inquiry but also demonstrates how such inquiry must articulate historical experience to the habits, practices, affects, and imaginaries based in sounds and scripts.

They Have a Word for It takes the reader to the far corners of the globe to discover words and phrases for which there are not equivalents in English. From the North Pole to New Guinea, from Easter Island to Tibet, Howard Rheingold explores more than forty familiar and obscure languages to discover genuinely useful (rather than simply odd) words that can open up new ways of understanding and experiencing life. --Sarabande Books.

The first English translation of an essential Austrian novel about life in early-twentieth-century Vienna, as seen through a wide and varied cast of characters. The Strudlhof Steps is an unsurpassed portrait of Vienna in the early twentieth century, a vast novel crowded with characters ranging from an elegant, alcoholic Prussian aristocrat to an innocent ingenue to “respectable” shopkeepers and tireless sexual adventurers, bohemians, grifters, and honest working-class folk. The greatest character in the book, however, is Vienna, which Heimito von Doderer renders as distinctly as James Joyce does Dublin or Alfred Döblin does Berlin. Interweaving two time periods, 1908 to 1911 and 1923 to 1925, the novel takes the monumental eponymous outdoor double staircase as a governing metaphor for its characters’ intersecting and diverging fates. The Strudlhof Steps is an experimental tour de force with the suspense and surprise of a soap opera. Here Doderer illuminates the darkness of passing years with the dazzling extravagance that is uniquely his.

My gym shorts burrow into my butt crack like a frightened groundhog. Don't you want to read a book that starts like that?? Lupe Wong is going to be the first female pitcher in the Major Leagues. She's also championed causes her whole young life. Some worthy...like expanding the options for race on school tests beyond just a few bubbles. And some not so much...like complaining to the BBC about the length between Doctor Who seasons. Lupe needs an A in all her classes in order to meet her favorite pitcher, Fu Li Hernandez, who's Chinacan/Mexinese just like her. So when the horror that is square dancing rears its head in gym? Obviously she's not gonna let that slide. Not since Millicent Min, Girl Genius has a debut novel introduced a character so memorably, with such humor and emotional insight. Even square dancing fans will agree...

Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures introduces a collection of algorithms for complex programming challenges in data analysis, machine learning, and graph computing. Summary As a software engineer, you’ll encounter countless programming challenges that initially seem confusing, difficult, or even impossible. Don’t despair! Many of these “new” problems already have well-established solutions. Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures teaches you powerful approaches to a wide range of tricky coding challenges that you can adapt and apply to your own applications. Providing a balanced blend of classic, advanced, and new algorithms, this practical guide upgrades your programming toolbox with new perspectives and hands-on techniques. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology Can you improve the speed and efficiency of your applications without investing in new hardware? Well, yes, you can: Innovations in algorithms and data structures have led to huge advances in application performance. Pick up this book to discover a collection of advanced algorithms that will make you a more effective developer. About the book Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures introduces a collection of algorithms for complex programming challenges in data analysis, machine learning, and graph computing. You’ll discover cutting-edge approaches to a variety of tricky scenarios. You’ll even learn to design your own data structures for projects that require a custom solution. What's inside Build on basic data structures you already know Profile your algorithms to speed up application Store and query strings efficiently Distribute clustering algorithms with MapReduce Solve logistics problems using graphs and optimization algorithms About the reader For intermediate programmers. About the author Marcello La Rocca is a research scientist and a full-stack engineer. His focus is on optimization algorithms, genetic algorithms, machine learning, and quantum computing. Table of Contents 1 Introducing data structures PART 1 IMPROVING OVER BASIC DATA STRUCTURES 2 Improving priority queues: d-way heaps 3 Treaps: Using randomization to balance binary search trees 4 Bloom filters: Reducing the memory for tracking content 5 Disjoint sets: Sub-linear time processing 6 Trie, radix trie: Efficient string search 7 Use case: LRU cache PART 2 MULTIDEMENSIONAL QUERIES 8 Nearest neighbors search 9 K-d trees: Multidimensional data indexing 10 Similarity Search Trees: Approximate nearest neighbors search for image retrieval 11 Applications of nearest neighbor search 12 Clustering 13 Parallel clustering: MapReduce and canopy clustering PART 3 PLANAR GRAPHS AND MINIMUM CROSSING NUMBER 14 An introduction to graphs: Finding paths of minimum distance 15 Graph embeddings and planarity: Drawing graphs with minimal edge intersections 16 Gradient descent: Optimization problems (not just) on graphs 17 Simulated annealing: Optimization beyond local minima 18 Genetic algorithms: Biologically inspired, fast-converging optimization