The first book to look at the relationship either between Surrealism and Science Fiction or between Surrealism and comics.

In Bashan and I (sometime referred to as Man and Dog), Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice, writes in the most remarkable way of the unique relation that links a dog with his master. These memoirs read as a novel, and describe in fierce detail the behavior, feelings and psychology of Mann’s dog Bashan, and of Mann himself. Mann tells how he acquired Bashan, details traits of his character, and describes how they go on harmless and bucolic hunts. Written in 1918 at the end of the First World War, Bashan and I is an ode to life, to nature, to simple joys, and to a dog. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

George Kateb’s writings have been innovatory in exploring the fundamental quandary of how modern democracy—sovereignty vested in the many—might nevertheless protect, respect, promote, even celebrate the singular, albeit ordinary individual. His essays, often leading to unexpected results, have focused on many inter-related topics: rights, representation, constitutionalism, war, evil, extinction, punishment, privacy, patriotism, and more. This book focuses in particular on his thought in three key areas: Dignity These essays exhibit the breadth and complexity of Kateb’s notion of dignity and outline some implications for political theory. Rather than a solely moral approach to the theory of human rights, he elaborates a human-dignity rationale for the very worth of the human species Morality Here Kateb challenges the position that moral considerations are often too demanding to have a place in the rough-and-tumble of modern politics and political analysis. Rejecting common justifications for the propriety of punishment, he insists that state-based punishment is a perplexing moral problem that cannot be allayed by repairing to theories of state legitimacy. Individuality These essays gather some of Kateb’s rejoinders and correctives to common conceptions and customary critiques of the theory of democratic individuality. He explains that Locke’s hesitations and religious backtracking are instructive, perhaps as precursors for the ways in which vestigial beliefs can still cloud moral reasoning.

How can literary imagination help us engage with the lives of other animals? The question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and other animals in writings from antiquity to the present. Ranging from ancient Greek poets to modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Payne considers how writers have used verse to communicate the experience of animal suffering, created analogies between human and animal societies, and imagined the kind of knowledge that would be possible if human beings could see themselves as animals see them. The Animal Part also makes substantial contributions to the emerging discourse of the posthumanities. Payne offers detailed accounts of the tenuousness of the idea of the human in ancient literature and philosophy and then goes on to argue that close reading must remain a central practice of literary study if posthumanism is to articulate its own prehistory. For it is only through fine-grained literary interpretation that we can recover the poetic thinking about animals that has always existed alongside philosophical constructions of the human. In sum, The Animal Part marks a breakthrough in animal studies and offers a significant contribution to comparative poetics.

When author Kenneth McKenney, his wife, and their two young children moved to Comillas in northern Spain, they knew nothing about the town. The McKenneys soon discover that Comillas was converted from a fishing village to a treasury of neo-Gothic architecture by one man-the first Marquis of Comillas-who convinced the King of Spain to stay and call his parliament there. During the McKenneys' explorations many more intriguing tales of the town were revealed. Close by are the caves of Altamira, with some of the finest rock paintings in the world, discovered when a man lost his dog. There is the beach where the second transatlantic crossing landed-by mistake. And high in the hills is the village of Garabandal, where four girls had visions of the Virgin Mary, and where a miracle is still expected. Above all, the McKenneys learnt what it is like to be the only English family in a Spanish town-where one word can make an enemy, and another a friend. In the land of the Marquis is also a book about writing a book, as the author first wrote a guide to Comillas, then extended it to cover small adventures in other parts of the world.

The year is 1742, and the people of Preston are looking forward to their ancient once-every-twenty-years festival of merriment and excess, the Preston Guild. But the prospect darkens as the town plunges into a financial crisis caused by the death of pawnbroker and would-be banker Philip Pimbo, shot behind the locked door of his office. Is it suicide? Coroner Titus Cragg suspects so, but Dr Luke Fidelis disagrees. To untangle the truth Cragg must dig out the secrets of Pimbo's personal life, learn the grim facts of the African slave trade, search for a missing Civil War treasure and deal with the machinations of his old enemy Ephraim Grimshaw, now the town's mayor. Cragg relies once again on the help and advice of his analytical friend Fidelis, his astute wife Elizabeth and the contents of a well-stocked library. As in his previous Cragg and Fidelis stories, Robin Blake brings a vivid cast of characters to the page in this third historical mystery about the dramas that breeds below the surface of life in a provincial Georgian town. "For financial buccaneering it's the 18th Century you want....The sleuths in this series are too precious for words, but what's valuable here is the author's portrait of the emergence of investment banking." -Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review