In 'The Otio in Negotio', E. W. Farnsworth has brought together another lively, intelligent collection of stories, focusing on the humor, romance and oddities of exceptionally active and intelligent people in the contemporary world of business. As the title of the entire collection implies, these stories are highly allusive and full of hidden puzzles and games meant to pique the reader's attention. Names are significant. Allusions enrich the narratives. The scope of business is global, and many business plans resemble those of top startup companies in today's financial headlines. The fun in these stories is tempered by the constraints and challenges of business. Farnsworth's CEOs are human and infallible. Sometimes love finds a way, and sometimes it is cruelly eliminated from the personal equation. Where business triumphs, so does the human spirit. When satire chastens, the biters are bitten. A seasoned editor described lead story 'TwinLions' as "Breathtakingly new ... I've read nothing remotely like it."

E. W. Farnsworth's brainy and visionary short stories in this volume are meant to be read individually as invitations to other of his creations. The uncanny interplay of the writer and his context can be understood by the thoughtful, patient reader capable of perceiving semantic patterns beneath the surface of words. The excerpt from 'Nightworld: A Novel of Virtual Reality' inspired the cover image for this book since the woman with the wolf in the forest is a boundary-crossing Artificial Intelligence. Part of Farnsworth's epic vision for the future of humankind, AIs and robotics, the stories from 'DarkFire' and 'DarkFire Continuum' weave a continuous cosmology as the adventures of the spaceship 'Arcturus' begin. These stories reveal how their many intellectual games open vistas to the author's past and future stories as well as to inventions and discoveries on the far-horizon of human thought. E. W. Farnsworth is currently working on a visionary epic poem, 'Voyage of the Spaceship Arcturus'.

This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to concepts of the self associated with the development of humanism in England, and to strategies for both inclusion and exclusion in structuring the early modern nation state. It addresses writings about rhetoric and behavior from 1495–1660, beginning with Erasmus’ work on sermo or the conversational rhetoric between friends, which considers the reader as an ‘absent audience’, and following the transference of this stance to a politics whose broadening democratic constituency needed a legitimate structure for governance-at-a-distance. Unusually, the book brings together the impact on behavior of these new concepts about rhetoric, with the growth of the publishing industry, and the emergence of capitalism and of modern medicine. It explores the effects on the formation of the ‘subject’ and political legitimation of the early liberal nation state. It also lays new ground for scholarship concerned with what is left out of both selfhood and politics by that state, studying examples of a parallel development of the ‘self’ defined by friendship not only from educated male writers, but also from women writers and writers concerned with socially ‘middling’ and laboring people and the poor.

This edition, the first modern one in English, introduces undergraduates and more advanced students to the therapeutic possibilities of Seneca's Stoic philosophy. The short treatises De otio and De brevitate vitae balance each other by representing different but complementary aspects of Senecan philosophy: in De otio, one's duty to the 'active' life, in De brevitate vitae, one's duty to oneself in reclaiming life from the impositions made upon the self. The provocative Senecan message is to promote introspection in life, and to suggest the benefits of an inner existence of the personal. In addition to its literary and linguistic emphasis, this edition tries to advertize the means by which Seneca conveys the attractions of his therapeutic 'philosophy'.