The most important German playwright since Brecht.-John Rockwell, New York Times

"Terror, disaster, memory, selfhood, happiness . . . leave it to a poet to tackle the unthinkable so wisely and so wittily."* A literary guide to life in the pre-apocalypse, The Unreality of Memory collects profound and prophetic essays on the Internet age’s media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world’s ills. We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase “Did you see?” The feeling that we’re living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten—and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last. The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end—if indeed it will—and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it. Can we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? With The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert offers a hauntingly perceptive analysis of our new ways of being and a means of reconciling ourselves to this unreal new world. "A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery.” *—Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less

Theatre History Studies is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-American Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference encompasses the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The purpose of the conference is to unite persons and organizations within the region with an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre.

Ash is still falling from the sky two years after a series of globally devastating volcanic eruptions. Sunlight is as scarce as food, and cities are becoming increasingly violent as people loot and kill in order to maintain their existence. Sixteen-year-old Miles Newell knows that the only chance his family has of surviving is to escape from their Minneapolis suburban home to their cabin in the woods, As the Newells travel the highways on Miles' supreme invention, the Ali Princess, they have high hopes for safety and peace. But as they venture deeper into the wilderness, they begin to realize that it's not only city folk who have changed for the worse.

Memory is perhaps the most extraordinary phenomenon in the natural world. Every person's brain holds millions of bits of information in long-term storage. This vast memory store includes our extensive vocabulary and knowledge of language; the tremendous and unique variety of facts we've amassed; all the skills we've learned, from walking and talking to musical and athletic performance; many of the emotions we feel; and the continuous sensations, feelings, and understandings of the world we term consciousness. Without memory there can be no mind as we understand it. Focusing on cutting-edge research in behavioral science and neuroscience, Memory is a primer of our current scientific understanding of the mechanics of memory and learning. Over the past two decades, memory research has accelerated and we have seen an explosion of new knowledge about the brain. For example, there now exists a wide-ranging and successful applied science devoted exclusively to the study of memory that has yielded better procedures for eliciting valid recollections in legal settings and improved the diagnosis and treatment of memory disorders. Everyone fascinated by the scope and power of the human brain will find this book unforgettable.

Analyzing the ways U.S. culture has been formed and transformed in the 80s and 90s by its response to the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic, Marita Sturken argues that each has disrupted our conventional notions of community, nation, consensus, and "American culture." She examines the relationship of camera images to the production of cultural memory, the mixing of fantasy and reenactment in memory, the role of trauma and survivors in creating cultural comfort, and how discourses of healing can smooth over the tensions of political events. Sturken's discussion encompasses a brilliant comparison of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Quilt; her profound reading of the Memorial as a national wailing wall—one whose emphasis on the veterans and war dead has allowed the discourse of heroes, sacrifice, and honor to resurface at the same time that it is an implicit condemnation of war—is particularly compelling. The book also includes discussions of the Kennedy assassination, the Persian Gulf War, the Challenger explosion, and the Rodney King beating. While debunking the image of the United States as a culture of amnesia, Sturken also shows how remembering itself is a form of forgetting, and how exclusion is a vital part of memory formation.

This is the first book length defence of a counterfactual theory of causation. The analysis defended is new. It expresses the idea that, independent of its competitors, a cause raises the chance of an effect over its mean background chance by a complete causal chain. The analysis depends upon a novel development of David Lewis's Theory of Counterfactuals. One consequence of the analysis is that causation is not transitive. Causation is also nonsymmetric. The counterfactual basis of causal nonsymmetry is the result of a number of different, and sometimes interacting, nonsymmetries. The analysis allows for the development of a novel theory of events whose nature is independent of their role in causation and the identification of one other important causal relationship: property causation. Although compatible with Hume's denial of necessary connections between distinct existences, a key feature of the theory is that it benefits from being independent of the Humean framework. There are two ways in which something may be metaphysically fundamental: vertically and horizontally. Many metaphysicians emphasise vertical fundamentality and focus on truth making. The book rejects this emphasis and the truth making approach in particular. Horizontally fundamental metaphysical entities are those that are necessary components in different possible universes. Causation has a claim to be horizontally fundamental: the cement of any universe. Laws are patterns of causation realised in different metaphysical frameworks such as those articulated by Lewis, Armstrong and the powers ontologists. The book recognises varieties of causation both in, for example, counting cases of double prevention and causation by genuine processes as types of causation, and allowing that the analysis identifies causes across these different metaphysical frameworks.