In 1929, the German city of Dusseldorf was afflicted by a horrifying series of brutal, random and often fatal attacks upon women and young girls. With weapons ranging from knives and hammers to his bare strangling hands, a shadowy predator left a mounting trail of sexual assault, carnage and murder in his wake, fomenting mortal terror amongst the local populace. Police finally arrested Peter Kurten, a convicted felon, in connection with the crimes; his subsequent confessions revealed a staggering career of evil, documented in at least 69 cases of theft, arson, rape, throttling, stabbing, hammering, hacking, mutilation, blood-drinking and corpse immolation spanning some 30 years. THE SADIST, an in-depth forensic and psychiatric report on Kurten by Dr. Karl Berg, was published in 1931 in the "Deutschen Zeitschrift fur die Gesamte Gerichtliche Medizin”, revealing fully for the first time the irreconcilable lusts, compulsions, obsessions, pathologies and atrocities of a remorseless and psychopathic sex-killer – the inhuman monster known as the Vampire of Dusseldorf. The report is illustrated by 8 pages of detailed and disturbing forensic photographs.

FROM EXCITING ROMANCE AUTHOR HANNAH MURRAY Book four in the Perfect Taboo series Never make a bet with a Dom... It' s a bad idea under any circumstances, and when the Dom is Jack— a sadist with a perpetual frown and no discernible sense of humor— it' s a really bad idea. But backing down isn' t in Sadie' s DNA, and by the time her self-preservation instincts kick in, it' s too late— she' s lost the bet and owes Jack a scene. Jack' s been waiting for a chance to have Sadie all to himself from the moment he saw her, but the timing' s never been right. Now, thanks to her sassy mouth overriding her common sense, his patience is paying off. She owes him a scene, and he intends to collect. But one scene does not a relationship make, and Jack wants Sadie for more than an occasional play partner— he wants her as his lover, his partner... and his submissive. Problem is Sadie' s not interested in serious, and showing his cards too soon could send her running. If he' s going to win the day— and the girl— he' ll have to play his hand at just the right time. If he doesn' t overplay it first.

Journalist Tom Maxon's investigation into his brother Bob's brutal murder takes him deep into the underworld of BDSM clubs and parties in this Agatha Christie-style mystery with a twist: Can Tom unmask the vicious killer before he strikes again?

What does it mean to be Black in an anti-Black world? In Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania, Tendayi Sithole offers a compelling example of how to engage South Africa differently. Set in the Black point of view as a site of critical reflection, he confronts the question of colonial conquest, social cohesion and justice. Since South Africa is a name given to the country by its conquerors, not by its indigenous inhabitants, for true liberation, a renaming needs to occur. The concept of Azania holds this emancipatory gesture. The post conquest, post 1994 liberal narratives mute the prevalence of racism while valorizing non-racialism and the transcendence of race. To indicate this silencing, the book deploys the concept of X, both as a signifier of repression and dehumanization of the Black subject, and as an empty signifier that holds the opportunity for radical and compassionate rehumanization. The book examines these strands of erasure and hope for the Black subject. Sithole scrutinizes the colonial contract, arguing that it is not a contract since there has never been an agreement between the indigenous people and the settler colonialists. This brings into focus the land question, specifically land dispossession and its existential connection to black life. The relevance of Black Consciousness to the Azanian existential tradition is based on Steve Biko’s case that Marxism ignores Black ontological misery through its valorization of class and failure to include anti-Black racism in its analysis of power. Finally, Sithole analyses Mabogo P. More’s philosophical meditations around what it means to be Black in an anti-Black world. In erasing the idea of South Africa and inscribing an open-ended naming of X, the book opens the way for something new to take its place that is imbued with greater humanity. This gesture opens up the potential to think about liberation in this country that is yet to rename and redefine itself.

He might be best known for sex and violence, but Lode Lauwaert shows that the Marquis du Sade sits at a crossroads of surprisingly disparate branches of western culture: abstract art, Tom and Jerry, gnosticism, Kant's moral philosophy, romanticism, scholasticism, stoicism and more. To explore these links, Lauwaert reads six interpretations of Sade in French postwar philosophy - looking specifically at Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze. Lauwaert shows how these interpretations of de Sade can be read as a lively introduction to a postmodern way of thinking that is often considered inaccessible, but which dominated the French intellectual scene after the Second World War.

For the past 60 years, Leo Bersani has inspired, resisted, guided, and challenged scholarly work in the fields of literary criticism, queer theory, cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, and film and visual studies. Moving across an impressive range of sources, Mikko Tuhkanen seeks out the “fundamental notes”-the questions that we find and refind-in Bersani's extensive oeuvre across the decades. The chapters explore Bersani's engagement with psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Laplanche, Klein, Lacan), French and American modernist fiction (Proust, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, James, Beckett), poststructuralist theory (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Blanchot), queer theory (Butler, Edelman), and the visual arts (Caravaggio, Almodóvar, Pasolini, Malick, Dumont). This first introduction to Bersani's work provides a chronological overview of his thought and details his contributions to literary studies and critical theory.

Enter the dark and sensual realms of the Black Jewels, a world where power always has a price, in this sweeping story in the New York Times bestselling fantasy saga. They are Warlord Princes, men born to serve and protect. They are the Queen's Weapons, men born to destroy the Queen's enemies--no matter what face that enemy wears. Daemonar Yaslana knows how to be bossy yet supportive--traits he shares with his father, the Demon Prince, and his uncle, the High Lord of Hell. Within his generation of the family, he assumes the role of protector, supporting his sister Titian’s artistic efforts and curbing his cousin Jaenelle Saetien’s more adventurous ideas. But when a young Eyrien Queen, someone Titian thought was a friend, inflicts an emotional wound, Daemonar's counterattack brings him under the tutelage of Witch, the Queen whose continued existence is known only to a select few. As Daemonar is confronted by troubling changes within and around the family, he sees warnings that a taint in the Blood might be reappearing. Daemonar, along with his father and uncle, must uncover the source of a familiar evil--and Daemon Sadi, the High Lord of Hell, may be forced into making a terrible choice.

In his first book, Listening Subjects, David Schwarz succeeded in fusing post-Lacanian psychoanalytic, musical-theoretical, and musical-historical perspectives. In Listening Awry, he expands his project to “tell a story of historical modernism writ large”—how German music spanning two centuries refracts changes in society and culture, as well as the impacts of concepts introduced by psychoanalysis. Schwarz shows how post-Lacanian psychoanalysis can be applied to ideological interpellation that connects psychoanalysis to culture and how music theory can ground these considerations in precise details of musical textuality. He “listens awry” in several ways: by understanding musical meaning in both objective and socially structured ways, by embracing historical and also aesthetic approaches, by addressing high art as well as popular music, and by listening “around” conventional forms of musical meaning to reach toward that which evades signification. Structured around four themes—trauma, the other/Other, the look/gaze binary, and Judaism—Listening Awry explores five key moments in post-Enlightenment music: the rise of the singular orchestral conductor and the emergence of a new form of alterity, the Art Song and “the sublime of the delicate” (a correlate of the Kantian mathematical and dynamical sublime), the birth of psychoanalysis and the twentieth-century turn toward atonality, German war songs and the subversion of German music by the Nazis, and two different versions of Wagner’s Parsifal that were performed one hundred years apart and in radically different contexts. This highly original work, filled with imaginative readings and disquieting observations, links trauma with the culture and history of modernity and German music, deftly tying the experience of the body to the sounds it hears: how it reaches us slowly, penetrates the skin, and resonates. David Schwarz is assistant professor of music at the University of North Texas. He is the author of Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture.

Some have asked for more attention to the virtues within the compass of familiar underlying approaches to morality like utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. However, others have argued that a freestanding and systematic form of virtue ethics would have advantages over other large-scale approaches. This work attempts the latter approach.

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