The Power of Conferences: Stories of serendipity, innovation and driving social change asks ten notable Australians to reflect on the role that conferences have played in their personal and professional achievements. Through their stories the power of conferences is revealed, providing evidence of a deep and lasting impact on the development and success of Australian luminaries and their communities. This book arose from a long term collaboration with Business Events Sydney.

Although the idea that graphic narratives represent an important literary form is still debated in academic circles, in recent years comics scholarship has emerged into wider contexts. This collection of new essays considers various literary approaches to graphic narrative and sequential art. The authors examine the politics of comic form and narrative, the ways in which graphic narrative and sequential art "cross over" into other forms and genres, and how these articulations challenge the ways we read and interpret texts. By bringing literary theory to bear on graphic narrative and balancing readings of individual texts with larger ideas about comics scholarship as a whole, this work expands our understanding of the form itself and its engagement with political culture.

Hawaiian legends figure greatly in the image of tropical paradise that has come to represent Hawai'i in popular imagination. But what are we buying into when we read these stories as texts in English-language translations? Cristina Bacchilega poses this question in her examination of the way these stories have been adapted to produce a legendary Hawai'i primarily for non-Hawaiian readers or other audiences. With an understanding of tradition that foregrounds history and change, Bacchilega examines how, following the 1898 annexation of Hawai'i by the United States, the publication of Hawaiian legends in English delegitimized indigenous narratives and traditions and at the same time constructed them as representative of Hawaiian culture. Hawaiian mo'olelo were translated in popular and scholarly English-language publications to market a new cultural product: a space constructed primarily for Euro-Americans as something simultaneously exotic and primitive and beautiful and welcoming. To analyze this representation of Hawaiian traditions, place, and genre, Bacchilega focuses on translation across languages, cultures, and media; on photography, as the technology that contributed to the visual formation of a westernized image of Hawai'i; and on tourism as determining postannexation economic and ideological machinery. In a book with interdisciplinary appeal, Bacchilega demonstrates both how the myth of legendary Hawai'i emerged and how this vision can be unmade and reimagined.

No one is safe. Secret McQueen, Book 8 Secret McQueen thought she'd seen it all, but that was before she, Desmond and Holden came home to find New York City burning and the streets overwhelmed with the walking dead. Now, in a race against time, she must find out who is responsible for unleashing hell on Earth. For that, she's going to need a whole new team of vampire wardens to help round up the perpetrators, who turn out to be a gang that makes Sons of Anarchy look like toddlers on tricycles. Her quest across the city brings old friends and enemies out of the woodwork and reminds Secret once and for all why mercy and forgiveness are not always prudent. Lives will be lost, sacrifices will be made, and when the dust settles, nothing will ever be the same again. With no time to mourn her losses, the only question remaining is if Secret can survive long enough to stop the apocalypse...or if this is the one challenge that will finally drown her in rivers of undead blood. Warning: The final book in the Secret McQueen series has it all: hot kisses, unexpected guests, and enough tear-jerking moments to require a whole box of tissues. You've been warned.