At the dawn of the nineteenth century, resourceful pioneers carved a small community out of the wilderness in far western New York State. An agent of the Holland Company opened the way by surveying a road from Big Tree Indian Reservation to Lake Erie in 1803. One mile section of that road today is Main Street, East Aurora. A year later, a man named Jabez Warren obtained a contract for 1,443 acres of land, which makes up a large part of the Town of Aurora. The earliest settlers arrived, cleared the forests, farmed the land, harnessed the waterpower, and built mills. Their efforts and the richness of the land formed the foundation of a town that in years to come provided food and materials for the the city of Buffalo and nearby areas. Town of Aurora: 1818-1930, presents more than a century of the history of this vibrant community. It includes some notable people and places. In the spring of 1823, young attorney Millard Fillmore opened the first law office in town--twenty-seven years before he became the nation's thirteenth president. In 1832, Aurora Academy, the most celebrated institution of learning in western New York, was incorporated. By the 1890s, Hamlin Village Farm, and Jewett's Stock Farm were world famous for the breeding of harness race horses. In 1895, Elbert Hubbard established the arts and crafts community of the Roycrofters, which flourished into the 1930s.

Despite a century of history, and the valiant efforts of all those who believed the town would last forever, Aurora, Nevada, is now and forevermore a "Colossal Wreck" slowly returning to its beginnings-a sagebrush and pinyon pine covered valley home to jackrabbits and a few ghosts from the past. While Aurora is gone, its historical record remains, thus providing us the opportunity to reconstruct the town and its society if only in our imagination. Most historical accounts about Aurora have focused on the town during its early 1860s mining boom. However, Aurora's rich and colorful history deserves a closer look. This new reference-oriented publication includes hundreds of edited and annotated newspaper clippings and other firsthand accounts about Aurora's buildings, businesses, major mines, social life, Paiute citizens, ghost town days, and final destruction over the entire length of its century-long history. It also includes directories for the boom years 1864, 1880, and 1915, as well as 6 maps and over 150 photographs, many of which are "then and now" comparisons of the same view.

Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions, and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely overlooked aspect of the Era Reformasi concerns the transition from a moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship, political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago. Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all domains of life.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM NETFLIX AND ACADEMY AWARD-WINNING DIRECTOR KATHRYN BIGELOW “Fantastic story, a real page-turner. Impossible to put down." – Stephen King From the author of Cold Storage comes a riveting, eerily plausible thriller, told with the menace and flair of Under the Dome or Project Hail Mary, in which a worldwide cataclysm plays out in the lives of one complicated Midwestern family. In Aurora, Illinois, Aubrey Wheeler is just trying to get by after her semi-criminal ex-husband split, leaving behind his unruly teenage son. Then the lights go out—not just in Aurora but across the globe. A solar storm has knocked out power almost everywhere. Suddenly, all problems are local, very local, and Aubrey must assume the mantle of fierce protector of her suburban neighborhood. Across the country lives Aubrey’s estranged brother, Thom. A fantastically wealthy, neurotically over-prepared Silicon Valley CEO, he plans to ride out the crisis in a gilded desert bunker he built for maximum comfort and security. But the complicated history between the siblings is far from over, and what feels like the end of the world is just the beginning of several long-overdue reckonings—which not everyone will survive . . . Aurora is suspenseful storytelling—both large scale and small—at its finest.

Though a small town at heart, Lawrenceton, Georgia, has its dark side-and crime buffs. One of whom is librarian Aurora "Roe" Teagarden, a member of the Real Murders Club, which meets once a month to analyze famous cases. It's a harmless pastime-until the night she finds a member killed in a manner that eerily resembles the crime the club was about to discuss. And as other brutal "copycat" killings follow, Roe will have to uncover the person behind the terrifying game, one that casts all the members of Real Murders, herself included, as prime suspects-or potential victims.