Two wives share a house divided. A writer writes himself a sexy new partner. A backseat driver's trapped. An elevator runs out of floors. And clothes control the man. Short, sharp jabs into your mind. Philosophical sci-fi quick reads. 17 pages.

Telling Stories to Change the World is a powerful collection of essays about community-based and interest-based projects where storytelling is used as a strategy for speaking out for justice. Contributors from locations across the globe—including Uganda, Darfur, China, Afghanistan, South Africa, New Orleans, and Chicago—describe grassroots projects in which communities use narrative as a way of exploring what a more just society might look like and what civic engagement means. These compelling accounts of resistance, hope, and vision showcase the power of the storytelling form to generate critique and collective action. Together, these projects demonstrate the contemporary power of stories to stimulate engagement, active citizenship, the pride of identity, and the humility of human connectedness.

Culture and Global Change presents a comprehensive introduction to the cultural aspects of third world development. It contains 25 chapters from leading writers in the field who each explore a particular aspect of 'culture' and the significance and meaning of cultural issues for different people in throughout the contemporary world. With chapters dealing with the importance of 'Third World' cultures but also with changes in Russia, Japan, the USA and the UK, this book considers the relationship between culture and development within a truly global context.

Tibor Déry (1894-1977), winner of Hungary's highest artistic honor, the Kossuth Prize, in 1948, was first imprisoned in 1934 by the Horthy regime for translating André Gide's diary of his journey to Russia, and again, over twenty years later, for his writings and political activities during the Hungarian Revolt of 1956 against Soviet occupation. Around the world, Tibor Déry Committees formed: Picasso, Camus, Sartre, Bertrand Russel, E.M. Forster, and in the Indian Congress Committee were among the many involved. Today, Tibor Déry is venerated as one of the most important literary figures of Hungary and, like Chekhov, a master of the modern short story. Love and Other Stories presents some of Déry's finest work. In "Games of the Underworld," ordinary people in Budapest try to survive the winter of war in cramped cellars and encounter menacing Arrow-Cross men, a towering giant, a blind horse, a vinegar sponge; in "The Circus," a group of bored children transmogrifies into a grotesque spectacle; in "Love," a political prisoner is released after seven years and returns home to his wife and son. George Szirtes, the award-winning translator from the Hungarian and winner of the 2004 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, gives a brilliant introduction to this visionary collection that deals passionately with questions of responsibility and conscience, of social justice and renewal.

A Washington Post Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Selection One of Electric Literature’s Best Short Story Collections of the Year A highly anticipated collection of wildly imaginative short stories from “one of contemporary fiction’s true mad scientists” (Necessary Fiction). In the weird and wonderful tradition of Kelly Link and Karen Russell, Amber Sparks’s dazzling new collection bursts forth with stories that render the apocalyptic and otherworldly hauntingly familiar. In “The Cemetery for Lost Faces,” two orphans translate their grief into taxidermy, artfully arresting the passage of time. The anchoring novella, “The Unfinished World,” unfurls a surprising love story between a free and adventurous young woman and a dashing filmmaker burdened by a mysterious family. Sparks’s stories—populated with sculptors, librarians, astronauts, and warriors—form a veritable cabinet of curiosities. Mythical, bizarre, and deeply moving, The Unfinished World and Other Stories heralds the arrival of a major writer and illuminates the search for a brief encounter with the extraordinary.

In a world where frontiers are militarised and classifications systems defining rights and belonging are reinforced, transnational feminist agendas are fundamental. We use the concept of ‘scholarships of hope’ to analyse the diversity of feminist struggles and imaginaries in diverse geopolitical locations. Dreaming Global Change, Doing Local Feminisms explores subversive practices of knowledge production that challenge Eurocentric scientific models and agendas. The book also explores the tensions and challenges of doing transnational feminist theory at the crossroads between feminist scholarship and feminist activism. In conjunction, these chapters provide a solid analysis framed by feminist methodologies opening complexities and contradictions of individual and collective feminist and trans identity struggles in Argentina, Belarus, Pakistan, Sweden, Taiwan and Turkey. These identities and struggles are rooted in transnational and local genealogies that go beyond the narratives of the West as the origin for democracy and human rights, providing powerful agendas for alternative futures.

Danse Macabre and Other Stories: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Global Dynamics examines the world using a systemic and psychoanalytic lens, including concepts of splitting, separation, projection, displacement, and the return of the repressed. They consider what impact the disappearance of some iconic and psychic containers has on individuals' functioning and why we choose populist leaders to shore up our own social defences. They question why the world feels so threatening to the twenty-first-century linked-in citizens when the objective facts suggest that overall much is improving for the global citizen. Building on their previous work, Halina Brunning and Olya Khaleelee have created a coherent framework in order to conceptualise global dynamics within a matrix form. The matrix contains dialectic dynamic forces for both good and evil, love and hate, creation and destruction. They take a closer look at the plethora of phenomena which they see arising therein. Whilst the matrix holds steady, inside it is a world in constant flux, reconfiguring and rearranging itself, as if in a kaleidoscope, with inevitable and unavoidable turbulence, but - Brunning and Khaleelee hypothesise - with an underlying pattern that is available to be discerned and studied. Aware of this turbulence, Brunning and Khaleelee wish to share their view of the world in the hope of offering a containing reflection, capable of calming the nerves of the readers as well as their own.