Blurred Borders

Cash is haunted by things. Hungry, hollow things. They only leave him alone when Heaven’s beautiful reaper, Anaya, is around. Cash has always been good with girls, but Anaya isn’t like the others. She’s dead. And with his deteriorating health, Cash might soon be as well. Anaya never breaks the rules, but the night of the fire, she recognized part of Cash’s soul—and doomed him to something worse than death. Cash’s soul now resides in an expired body, making him a shadow walker, a rare, coveted being that can walk between worlds. A being creatures of the underworld would do anything to get their hands on. The lines between life and death are blurring, and Anaya and Cash find themselves falling helplessly over the edge. Trapped in a world where the living don’t belong, can Cash make it out alive?

Two journalists provide a guide for navigating through the Internet Age's viral and opinion-based news sources, explaining how to discern what sources or facts are reliable and how to think like a journalist and unearth the truth.

"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination In Black and Blur—the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and José Esteban Muñoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.

This collection of essays focuses on the way blurred boundaries are represented in pre-modern texts and visual art and how they were received and perceived by their audiences: readers, listeners, and viewers. According to the current understanding that opposing cognitive categories that are so common in modern thinking do not apply to pre-modern mentalities, we argue that individuals in medieval and pre-modern societies did not necessarily consider sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and opposing emotions as absolute dichotomies. The contributors to the present collection examine a wide range of cultural artifacts – literary texts, wall paintings, sculptures, jewelry, manuscript illustrations, and various objects as to what they reflect regarding the dominant perceptual system – the network of beliefs, worldviews, presumptions, values, and norms of viewing/reading/hearing different from modern epistemology strongly predicated on the binary nature of things and people. The essays suggest that analyzing pre-modern cultural works of art or literature in light of reception theory can lead to a better understanding of how those cultural products influenced individuals and impacted their thoughts and actions.

A new sexual revolution is sweeping the country, and college students are on the front lines. Few places in America have felt the influence of #MeToo more intensely. Indeed, college campuses were in many ways the harbingers of #MeToo. Grigoriadis captures the nature of this cultural reckoning without shying away from its complexity. College women use fresh, smart methods to fight entrenched sexism and sexual assault even as they celebrate their own sexuality as never before. Many “woke” male students are more open to feminism than ever, while others perpetuate the cruelest misogyny. Coexisting uneasily, these students are nevertheless rewriting long-standing rules of sex and power from scratch. Eschewing any political agenda, Grigoriadis travels to schools large and small, embedding in their social whirl and talking candidly with dozens of students, as well as to administrators, parents, and researchers. Blurred Lines is a riveting, indispensable illumination of the most crucial social change on campus in a generation.

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Despite the fact that the field of artists' books has grown steadily since the mid-sixties, the discourse has been largely under- theorized. BLURRED LIBRARY: ESSAYS ON ARTISTS' BOOKS, is a stunning collection of the most revered essays by Tate Shaw, the Director of Visual Studies Workshop. For years, Shaw's contributions to the field of artists' books as a theorist, artist, writer, historian, and teacher have been celebrated internationally, but have largely gone undocumented, until now. Shaw's versatility as a scholar and artist allow him to take a holistic approach to his subject that is historical, conceptual, anecdotal, contemplative, and engaging. BLURRED LIBRARY is an indispensible contribution to the field of artists' books, essential reading for emerging and seasoned artists and scholars alike. Lavishly illustrated throughout by photographer Doug Manchee.