The New Symposium offers twenty-four essays, on the Commons, Justice, and Home, produced for a series of literary encounters on the Greek island of Paros. The International Writing Program invited poets and writers from around the world to exchange ideas, in an intimate setting, on some of the persistent questions of our time. What emerged was a dynamic collection of essays certain to challenge assumptions, broaden perspectives, and spark new ways of thinking.

With a new afterword from the authors, the critically praised indictment of widely embraced “alternatives to incarceration” Electronic monitoring. Locked-down drug treatment centers. House arrest. Mandated psychiatric treatment. Data driven surveillance. Extended probation. These are some of the key alternatives held up as cost effective substitutes for jails and prisons. But in a searing, “cogent critique” (Library Journal), Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law reveal that many of these so-called reforms actually weave in new strands of punishment and control, bringing new populations who would not otherwise have been subject to imprisonment under physical control by the state. Whether readers are seasoned abolitionists or are newly interested in sensible alternatives to retrograde policing and criminal justice policies and approaches, this highly praised book offers “a wealth of critical insights” that will help readers “tread carefully through the dizzying terrain of a world turned upside down” and “make sense of what should take the place of mass incarceration” (The Brooklyn Rail). With a foreword by Michelle Alexander, Prison by Any Other Name exposes how a kinder narrative of reform is effectively obscuring an agenda of social control, challenging us to question the ways we replicate the status quo when pursuing change, and offering a bolder vision for truly alternative justice practices.

Myth: A New Symposium offers a broad-based assessment of the present state of myth study. It was inspired by a revisiting of the influential mid-century work Myth: A Symposium (edited by Thomas Sebeok). A systematic introduction and 15 contributions from a wide spectrum of disciplines offer a range of views on past myth study and suggest directions for the future. Contributors blend theoretical analysis with richly documented historical, ethnographic, and literary illustrations and examples drawn from Native American, classical, medieval, and modern sources.

""Like Sylvia Plath's poems, these visionary poems are not only astute records of experience, they are themselves dazzling, verbal experiences. Worldly, wily, wise: Mad Honey Symposium is an extraordinary debut."-Terrance Hayes"[Mad Honey Symposium] has all the delicacy of [Mao's] earlier writing-but now there's also a gritty, world-wise sense of humor that gives her work heavyweight swagger."-Dave EggersMad Honey Symposium buzzes with lush sound and sharp imagery, creating a vivid natural world that's constantly in flux. From Venus flytraps to mad honey eaters, badgers to empowered outsiders, Sally Wen Mao's poems inhabit the precarious space between the vulnerable and the ferocious-how thin that line is, how breakable-with wonder and verve.From "Valentine for a Flytrap":.There's voltage in your flowers-mulch skeins, armory for cunning loves. Your mouth pins every sticky body, swallowing iridescence, digesting light. Venus, let me swim in your solarium. Venus, take me in your summer gown.Sally Wen Mao was born in Wuhan, China, and grew up in Boston and the Bay Area. She is a Kundiman fellow and 826 Valencia Young Author's Scholar. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, and West Branch, among others. She holds a BA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Cornell University, where she's currently a lecturer"--

In the spring of 2011, a diverse group of scientists gathered at Cornell University to discuss their research into the nature and origin of biological information. This symposium brought together experts in information theory, computer science, numerical simulation, thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, whole organism biology, developmental biology, molecular biology, genetics, physics, biophysics, mathematics, and linguistics. This volume presents new research by those invited to speak at the conference. The contributors to this volume use their wide-ranging expertise in the area of biological information to bring fresh insights into the explanatory difficulties that biological information raises. Going beyond the conventional scientific wisdom, which attempts to explain biological information reductionistically via chemical, genetic, and natural selective determinants, the work represented here develops novel non-reductionist approaches to biological information, looking notably to telic and self-organizational processes. Several clear themes emerged from these research papers: 1) Information is indispensable to our understanding of what life is. 2) Biological information is more than the material structures that embody it. 3) Conventional chemical and evolutionary mechanisms seem insufficient to fully explain the labyrinth of information that is life. By exploring new perspectives on biological information, this volume seeks to expand, encourage, and enrich research on the nature and origin of biological information.

"At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is a theory-fiction on the Middle East as a living entity. Negarestani bridges contemporary politics and the War on Terror with the archeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth."--Provided by publisher.