Lucy Corin's daring debut story collection interweaves the traditional and the experimental, leading the reader through a world where characters behave normally in the most extreme situations and bizarrely with almost no provocation at all. Corin is an original, stylistically courageous emerging voice in contemporary avant-garde fiction. Lucy Corin’s daring debut story collection leads the reader through a world where characters behave normally in the most extreme situations and bizarrely with almost no provocation at all. Unpredictable and playful, Corin brilliantly dissects time, people, places, and things, truly rendering how it feels to be human.

In this refreshing, funny, and startling collection of stories, Lucy Corin veers far from the path of staid contemporary fiction. She masterfully weaves traditional and experimental topics and techniques, creating a fictional world where people behave normally in the most extreme situations, and in bizarrely with almost no provocation at all. But thanks to her vivid, sharp prose and insightful first-person voices, even the oddest behavior is utterly believable. Unpredictable and playful, these stories transcend their apocalyptic feel to offer a vision that is clear, humane, and completely engaging.The Entire Predicamentsecures Corin’s reputation as an original, stylistically courageous voice in contemporary avant-garde fiction.

Lucy Corin's "eye popping, enlightening read" (Publishers Weekly), now in paperback. At the heart of Lucy Corin’s dazzling collection are one hundred apocalypses: visions of loss and destruction, vexation and crisis, revelation and revolution, sometimes only a few lines long. In these haunting and wickedly funny stories, an apocalypse might come in the form of the end of a relationship or the end of the world, but they all expose the tricky landscape of our longing for a clean slate. In three longer stories, contemporary American life is playfully, if disturbingly, distorted: the rite of passage for adolescent girls involves choosing the madman who will accompany them into adulthood; California burns to the ground while, on the east coast, life carries on; and a soldier returns home broke from war to encounter a witch who extends a dangerous offer. At once mournful and explosively energetic, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses is "deeply rooted in the politics and upheaval of our times" (Lambda Literary).

Are our lives meaningful, or meaningless? Is our inevitable death a bad thing? Would immortality be an improvement? Would it be better, all things considered, to hasten our deaths by suicide? Many people ask these big questions -- and some people are plagued by them. Surprisingly, analytic philosophers have said relatively little about these important questions about the meaning of life. When they have tackled the big questions, they have tended, like popular writers, to offer comforting, optimistic answers. The Human Predicament invites readers to take a clear-eyed and unfettered view of the human condition. David Benatar here offers a substantial, but not unmitigated, pessimism about the central questions of human existence. He argues that while our lives can have some meaning, we are ultimately the insignificant beings that we fear we might be. He maintains that the quality of life, although less bad for some than for others, leaves much to be desired in even the best cases. Worse, death is generally not a solution; in fact, it exacerbates rather than mitigates our cosmic meaninglessness. While it can release us from suffering, it imposes another cost - annihilation. This state of affairs has nuanced implications for how we should think about many things, including immortality and suicide, and how we should think about the possibility of deeper meaning in our lives. Ultimately, this thoughtful, provocative, and deeply candid treatment of life's big questions will interest anyone who has contemplated why we are here, and what the answer means for how we should live.

Passion, peril and a princess in hiding Forced into hiding after a threat to her life, Princess Gabriella St. Pierre must protect both herself and her unborn child. Working at an orphanage, the princess tries to suppress memories of a passionate night long ago with Whit Howell—her father's royal bodyguard and a man she never thought she'd see again. When an attempted abduction occurs as Princess Gabriella is leaving the orphanage, Whit rescues her and vows to keep her safe. But how can he shepherd the princess back to her country without knowing who is orchestrating these attacks…and why? It is the most important mission of his life—and he'd risk everything to save the one woman he can't live without.

Ooh-la-la! This magical first-person novel poignantly captures the quest for love, truth, and meaning in a tumultuous world. Chances are, you know someone like Camille: tenderhearted and ambitious, yet free-as-the-breeze. An American portrait artist in Paris, Camille Portraro leads an enchanting existence until her life forever changes when everything she loves crashes in a flash. Camille’s life is entangled with a foreigner who mirrors lost parts of her life; as the narrative sweeps these strangers together, you will find yourself doing a double take. Sasha Lauren’s dramatic debut novel The Paris Predicament is a playful, thrilling, and unpredictable page-turner; it will take you for a wondrous ride around the world without ever leaving your seat. The whimsical words lilt and roll off the page, beckoning you on.

A groundbreaking work explaining our ecological predicament in the context of the first scientific theory of humankind's development.

The Predicament of Culture is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, James Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in post-colonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance: Who has the authority to speak for any group’s identity and authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and “the other” clash in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations? In chapters devoted to the history of anthropology, Clifford discusses the work of Malinowski, Mead, Griaule, Lévi-Strauss, Turner, Geertz, and other influential scholars. He also explores the affinity of ethnography with avant-garde art and writing, recovering a subversive, self-reflexive cultural criticism. The surrealists’ encounters with Paris or New York, the work of Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the Collège de Sociologie, and the hybrid constructions of recent tribal artists offer provocative ethnographic examples that challenge familiar notions of difference and identity. In an emerging global modernity, the exotic is unexpectedly nearby, the familiar strangely distanced.

A stunningly ambitious, prescient novel about madness, generational trauma, and cultural breakdown At the outset of the 2008 financial crisis, Em has a dependable, dull marketing job generating reports of vague utility while she anxiously waits to hear news of her sister, Ad, who has gone missing—again. Em’s days pass drifting back and forth between her respectably cute starter house (bought with a “responsible, salary-backed, fixed-rate mortgage”) and her dreary office. Then something unthinkable, something impossible, happens and she begins to see how madness permeates everything around her while the mundane spaces she inhabits are transformed, through Lucy Corin’s idiosyncratic magic, into shimmering sites of the uncanny. The story that swirls around Em moves through several perspectives and voices. There is Frank, the tart-tongued, failing manager at her office; Jack, the man with whom Frank has had a love affair for decades; Em and Ad’s eccentric parents, who live in a house that is perpetually being built; and Tasio, the young man from Chiapas who works for them and falls in love with Ad. Through them Corin portrays porousness and breakdown in individuals and families, in economies and political systems, in architecture, technology, and even in language itself. The Swank Hotel is an acrobatic, unforgettable, surreal, and unexpectedly comic novel that interrogates the illusory dream of stability that pervaded early twenty-first-century America.

Chasing a Different Carrot follows a fortunate son as he reclaims his humanity and moves towards the exit of the most destructive living arrangement the planet has ever witnessed. Michael Sliwa left his teaching career behind to speak truth to power and to try and live without making a living. Follow one man through our collective cultural narrative and see how your own life connects to the challenges we all face as the planet enters a period of inevitable change. Can someone use their privilege to move towards the exit of a culture that requires it to function? Chasing a Different Carrot: A Manifesto for the Predicament of Privilege answers this question plus plenty of others on a path towards systemic liberation.