On a chilly evening in March, 1917, 17-year-old Virginia Lampley disappears from her upper-class home in Richmond, Virginia. Her straight-laced parents never see or hear from her again. Seventy years later, her granddaughter Christine begins an earnest search for Virginia, using a single diary entry as the only clue to her whereabouts. In March, 1977, ill-tempered reference librarian William Wilson begins his own diary in an attempt to explain why his existence is so loathsome to him. When he meets Christine by chance in the library, he begins to be as obsessed by her as she is by her grandmother. When he finds that she has been writing a journal about her activities, his boring life takes a turn that he never could have imagined. Their search takes them not only into the life of the theater in the early 1900s, but into their childhoods as well, where it turns out that nothing is what it seems. Three notebooks; three diaries; three very different fates.

Nothing better represented the early spirit of American expansion than the railroad. Dominant in daily life as well as in the popular imagination, the railroad appealed strongly to creative writers. For many years, fiction of railroad life and travel was plentiful and varied. As the nineteenth century receded, the railroad's allure faded, as did railroad fiction. Today, it is hard to sense what the railroad once meant to Americans. The fiction of the railroad--often by railroaders themselves--recaptures that sense, and provides valuable insights on American cultural history. This extensively annotated bibliography lists and discusses in 956 entries novels and short stories from the 1840s to the present in which the railroad is important. Each entry includes plot and character description to help the reader make an informed decision on the source's merit. A detailed introduction discusses the history of railroad fiction and highlights common themes such as strikes, hoboes, and the roles of women and African-Americans. Such writers of "pure" railroad fiction as Harry Bedwell, Frank Packard, and Cy Warman are well represented, along with such literary artists as Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, and Ellen Glasgow. Work by minority writers, including Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Frank Chin, and Toni Morrison, also receives close attention. An appendix organizes entries by decade of publication, and the work is indexed by subject and title.

Greek and Roman art methods, medieval techniques, tempera painting, van Eyck's revolutionary use of oil paints, Flemish methods of preparing colors, methods of 18th-century British artists, technical secrets of Italian schools, including such masters as Leonardo, Raphael, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto, and more.

As the professional film and television industries move away from conventional media and toward computer-based technology, file formats have become a key enabling technology. Users are aware that they need to move to networked teleproduction, and they are aware that various file formats are available, but they don't have a clear understanding of their advantages and disadvantages (Should I use Windows Media 9 or QuickTime?). For example, as many versions of one movie are needed (subtitle, TV or Airplane)a master file is now created with metadata controling which features (subtitles, editing) are needed. This book is the authoritative work on all professional file formats for film and television, globally. Covers all major professional file formats, including the Digital Picture Exchange (DPX), General eXchange Format (GXF), Material eXchange Format (MXF), Advanced Authoring Format (AAF), QuickTime and Windows Media-in most cases by the lead author of the format.

Literary fiction of humor and horror, poetry and mystery, science fiction and myth, exploring the limits and inner and outer space. Short-short fictions of only a few lines hint at terrible depths. The long story "The Perquisites of His Position" tells a tale of ghostly revenge. The novella "The Darkness of the Heart" relates a story of the day slavery was abolished in Haiti. The satirical "Pangloss Triumphant" tells of a happy hermaphrodite. From the revelations of the aged Don Juan to the musings of B-movie actors trapped in deteriorating celluloid, from the voice of the ancient Sphinx to the senility of a quantum particle at the very end of the physical universe, the thirty-three artfully crafted stories presented here are full of deftly drawn characters, amazing plots, psychological insights, and universal truths.

Jean Baudrillard is one of the most celebrated and most controversial of contemporary social theorists. This major work occupies a central place in the rethinking of the humanities and social sciences around the idea of postmodernism. It leads the reader on an exhilarating tour encompassing the end of Marxism, the enchantment of fashion, symbolism about sex and the body, and the relations between economic exchange and death. Most significantly, the book represents Baudrillard′s fullest elaboration of the concept of the three orders of the simulacra, defining the historical passage from production to reproduction to simulation. A classic in its field, Symbolic Exchange and Death is a key source for the redefinition of contemporary social thought. Baudrillard′s critical gaze appraises social theories as diverse as cybernetics, ethnography, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, communications theory and semiotics. This English translation begins with a new introductory essay.

The new economy, under the impetus of the ever-widening outreach of the Internet, is undergoing a transition. In the meantime, there's also been a shift to the information paradigm, with its emphasis on lack of foresight. These processes have almost completely supplanted the concept of market that was once one of the most cardinal features of conventional economic theory. In Toward a General Theory of Exchange: Strategic Decisions and Complexity, author Dr. Javaid R. Khwaja traces the slow melting of the market, the most ubiquitous contraption and the summum bonum of economic science, as an organized manifestation of complexity, with its wide-ranging impact on the flow of funds. Using the historical background of economic theories, this study blends the interdisciplinary range and fills the vacuum that has existed among current conventional economic theory, the theory of strategic decision making, actor-network theory, the domain of law and economics, and the science of complexity. An observer of economic development for several decades, Khwaja shows the relationship between technology and economics and how it affects social exchanges and trends.

Now updated to include Trump's election and the rise of global populism, Corey Robin's 'The Reactionary Mind' traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution.

How to master the art of narrative leadership Telling the Story shows how leaders affect our understanding of what is possible and desirable through the stories they tell. It opens a door into the world of narrative leadership: what stories are and how they work; when to tell a story and how to tell one well; and how the language and metaphors we use influence our actions and change how we think about the world. • Explains how narrative leadership shapes and defines what’s possible on an organizational level • Written by a renowned consultant on the art of narrative leadership • Challenges leaders to consider how narrative can influence and help create the kind of society they envision