About the Book Lost in the crossways of finding their normalcy together, Kate Parker and James Taylor find themselves sinking into the pit roaring the flames giving birth to the rise of chaos that is yet to befall on them. Secrets soon start unravelling as their freshman year nears to an end, as they find their bianthromorphic physiologies rapidly progressing, the closer they get to finding the reason behind their selection of being the only two surviving Bianthromorphs, and the person behind it all, using the Samuels brothers as a decoy all along. The more they discover about the Cult, the larger the risks get as they continue rebelling against the chances for joining the hands of their Creator, in the being the prime examples of the specimen ensuring the conquest of mankind in the next forced stage of evolution, to create Utopia. Life wasn't supposed to be fair and certainly not for this pair, as the doom of uncertainty starts enveloping them and driving their lives further away from the certainty they crave, they discover the shadow holding the Reigns of The Cult, along with known hands of support.

In 2154, it has been over a century since the history of Homo sapiens was re-written due to an illegal scientific organization known as The Cult. They broke all the rules to experiment on humans and create genetically enhanced anthromorphs, mixing animal and human gene traits to create a superior race. Naïve and isolated, Kate Parker believes the solution to dealing with her problems is ignorance. Growing up as the only child of two A-list Hollywood stars, limelight has always enveloped her like a glorified prison cell, so she finds solace in self-made solitude while coping with her mother’s death. When she begins college, she meets bianthromorph James Taylor, and their bond redefines the course of Homo sapiens history. When The Cult targets Kate to assist in their dark objective, she must turn from ignorance into full knowledge of a world erupting in chaos where issues of right and wrong are no longer clear. James has always been isolated due to his differences; Kate once chose to isolate herself. Now, they enter the fray in order to preserve what’s left of humanity and stop an evil super power.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Controversial manifesto by acclaimed cultural theorist debated by leading writers Fredric Jameson’s pathbreaking essay “An American Utopia” radically questions standard leftist notions of what constitutes an emancipated society. Advocated here are—among other things—universal conscription, the full acknowledgment of envy and resentment as a fundamental challenge to any communist society, and the acceptance that the division between work and leisure cannot be overcome. To create a new world, we must first change the way we envision the world. Jameson’s text is ideally placed to trigger a debate on the alternatives to global capitalism. In addition to Jameson’s essay, the volume includes responses from philosophers and political and cultural analysts, as well as an epilogue from Jameson himself. Many will be appalled at what they will encounter in these pages—there will be blood! But perhaps one has to spill such (ideological) blood to give the Left a chance. Contributing are Kim Stanley Robinson, Jodi Dean, Saroj Giri, Agon Hamza, Kojin Karatani, Frank Ruda, Alberto Toscano, Kathi Weeks, and Slavoj Žižek.

The Dispossessed has been described by political thinker Andre Gorz as 'The most striking description I know of the seductions—and snares—of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society.' To date, however, the radical social, cultural, and political ramifications of Le Guin's multiple award-winning novel remain woefully under explored. Editors Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman right this state of affairs in the first ever collection of original essays devoted to Le Guin's novel. Among the topics covered in this wide-ranging, international and interdisciplinary collection are the anarchist, ecological, post-consumerist, temporal, revolutionary, and open-ended utopian politics of The Dispossessed. The book concludes with an essay by Le Guin written specially for this volume, in which she reassesses the novel in light of the development of her own thinking over the past 30 years.

In this fast-paced, semi-autobiographical novel, Head exposes the complicated life of Elizabeth, whose reality is intermingled with nightmarish dreams and hallucinations. Like the author, Elizabeth was conceived out-of-wedlock; her mother was white and her father black—a union outlawed in apartheid South Africa. Elizabeth eventually leaves with her young son to live in Botswana, a country less oppressed by colonial domination, where she finds stability for herself and her son by working on an experimental farm. As readers grow to know Elizabeth, they experience the inner chaos that threatens her stability, and her constant struggle to emerge from the torment of her dreams. There she is plagued by two men, Sello and Dan, who represent complex notions of politics, sex, religion, individuality, and the blurred line between good and evil. Elizabeth’s troubling but amazing roller-coaster ride ends in an unfettered discovery.

From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.

Leading the debate on the domestic effect of the growing influence of international adjudication, this invaluable text examines Serbia and Croatia’s erratic record of compliance with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Since the demise of the Milosevic and Tudjman regimes, Serbian and Croatian governments have been inconsistent in cooperating with the ICTY, despite the conditions of EU membership and US financial incentives. This study reconstructs events before, during and after extradition to build up a picture of the complex politics involved in ICTY relations, and provides a conceptual framework to study compliance in international relations and law. Through this analysis, a historical tracing of varied factors of political influence and a conceptualization of compliance is provided, resulting in a rich interdisciplinary work embracing political science, international relations and social theory. By scrutinizing the social meanings and political practices which become attached to prescribed norms in compliance processes, this book provides a highly-relevant insight into contemporary meanings of ‘compliance’. Politics of International Law and Compliance will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, international relations and international law, and European politics.

In an era when human lives are increasingly measured and weighed in relation to the medical and scientific, notions of what is “normal” have changed drastically. While it is no longer useful to think of a person’s particular race, gender, sexual orientation, or choice as “normal,” the concept continues to haunt us in other ways. In The End of Normal, Lennard J. Davis explores changing perceptions of body and mind in social, cultural, and political life as the twenty-first century unfolds. The book’s provocative essays mine the worlds of advertising, film, literature, and the visual arts as they consider issues of disability, depression, physician-assisted suicide, medical diagnosis, transgender, and other identities. Using contemporary discussions of biopower and biopolitics, Davis focuses on social and cultural production—particularly on issues around the different body and mind. The End of Normal seeks an analysis that works comfortably in the intersection between science, medicine, technology, and culture, and will appeal to those interested in cultural studies, bodily practices, disability, science and medical studies, feminist materialism, psychiatry, and psychology.

States of Grace offers a novel approach to the study of Brazilian culture through the lens of utopianism. Patrícia I. Vieira explores religious and political writings, journalistic texts, sociological studies, and literary works that portray Brazil as a utopian "land of the future," where dreams of a coming messianic age and of social and political emancipation would come true. The book discusses crucial utopian moments such as the theological-political utopia proposed by Jesuit Priest Antônio Vieira; matriarchal utopias, like the egalitarian society of the Amazons; work-free utopias that abolished the boundaries separating toil and play; and ecological utopias, where humans and nonhumans coexist harmoniously. The uniqueness of the book's approach lies in rethinking the link between messianic and utopian texts, as well as the alliances forged between progressive religious, socioeconomic, political, and ecological ideas.