A major new collection of stories by one of the most exciting and creative voices in contemporary Chinese literature Can Xue’s stories observe no obvious conventions of plot or characterization. That is the only rule they follow. Instead, they tend to limn a disordered and poetic state given structure by philosophical wonder and emotional rigor. Combining elements of both Chinese materiality—the love of physical things—and Western abstract thinking, Can Xue invites her readers into an immersive landscape that blends empirical fact and illusion, mixes the physical and spiritual, and probes the space between consciousness and oblivion. She brings us to a place that is both readily familiar yet unmappable and can make us hyperaware of the inherent unreliability in our relationship to the world around us. Delightful, enchanting, and filled with secrets, Can Xue’s newest collection shines a light on the forces that give contours to the visible terrain we acknowledge as reality.

Celebrated urban theorist Davis provides a global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor.

More than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and a billion of these urban dwellers reside in neighborhoods of entrenched disadvantage—neighborhoods that are characterized as slums. Slums are often seen as a debilitating and even subversive presence within society. In reality, though, it is public policies that are often at fault, not the people who live in these neighborhoods. In this comprehensive global history, Alan Mayne explores the evolution and meaning of the word “slum,” from its origins in London in the early nineteenth century to its use as a slur against the favela communities in the lead-up to the Rio Olympics in 2016. Mayne shows how the word slum has been extensively used for two hundred years to condemn and disparage poor communities, with the result that these agendas are now indivisible from the word’s essence. He probes beyond the stereotypes of deviance, social disorganization, inertia, and degraded environments to explore the spatial coherence, collective sense of community, and effective social organization of poor and marginalized neighborhoods over the last two centuries. In mounting a case for the word’s elimination from the language of progressive urban social reform, Slums is a must-read book for all those interested in social history and the importance of the world’s vibrant and vital neighborhoods.

A major new collection of stories by one of the most exciting and creative voices in contemporary Chinese literature Can Xue's stories observe no obvious conventions of plot or characterization. That is the only rule they follow. Instead, they tend to limn a disordered and poetic state given structure by philosophical wonder and emotional rigor. Combining elements of both Chinese materiality--the love of physical things--and Western abstract thinking, Can Xue invites her readers into an immersive landscape that blends empirical fact and illusion, mixes the physical and spiritual, and probes the space between consciousness and oblivion. She brings us to a place that is both readily familiar yet unmappable and can make us hyperaware of the inherent unreliability in our relationship to the world around us. Delightful, enchanting, and filled with secrets, Can Xue's newest collection shines a light on the forces that give contours to the visible terrain we acknowledge as reality.

The year 2008 has witnessed a major shift in the way people across the world live: for the first time in human history more people live in cities than in rural areas. This triumph of the urban, however, does not entirely represent progress as the number of people living in urban slumsoften in abject conditionswill soon exceed one billion. From 2005 to 2007 Jonas Bendiksen documented life in the slums of four different cities: Nairobi, Kenya; Mumbai, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Caracas, Venezuela; . His lyrical images capture the diversity of personal histories and outlooks found in these dense neighborhoods that, despite commonly held assumptions, are not simply places of poverty and misery. Yet, slum residents continuously face enormous challenges, such as the lack of health care, sanitation, and electricity. The Places We Live includes twenty double gatefold images, each representing an individual home and its denizens story. Through its innovative design and experiential approach, The Places We Live brings the modern-day Dickensian reality of these individuals into sharp focus

Seventeen-year-old Astor thinks she's about to wed the handsome plutocrat Lorrain Swale. But to her horror, her mother and stepfather abandon her, and she finds herself a lowly governess in the Swale household. Treated with contempt by the whole family, Astor is determined to escape. Help arrives unexpectedly in the form of the charismatic and mysterious Verrol. Together they plunge into the slums of Brummingham and find themselves in a street band, making wild music-- a new kind of music that takes the world by storm. But the Swale brothers haven't finished with them yet.

In the center of Mumbai, next to the city’s newest and most expensive commercial developments, lies one of Asia’s largest slums, where as many as one million squatters live in makeshift housing on one square mile of government land. This is the notorious Dharavi district, best known from the movie Slumdog Millionaire. In recent years, cities from Delhi to Rio de Janeiro have demolished similar slums, at times violently evicting their residents, to make way for development. But Dharavi and its residents have endured for a century, holding on to what is now some of Mumbai’s most valuable land. In The Durable Slum, Liza Weinstein draws on a decade of work, including more than a year of firsthand research in Dharavi, to explain how, despite innumerable threats, the slum has persisted for so long, achieving a precarious stability. She describes how economic globalization and rapid urban development are pressuring Indian authorities to eradicate and redevelop Dharavi—and how political conflict, bureaucratic fragmentation, and community resistance have kept the bulldozers at bay. Today the latest ambitious plan for Dharavi’s transformation has been stalled, yet the threat of eviction remains, and most residents and observers are simply waiting for the project to be revived or replaced by an even grander scheme. Dharavi’s remarkable story presents important lessons for a world in which most population growth happens in urban slums even as brutal removals increase. From Nairobi’s Kibera to Manila’s Tondo, megaslums may be more durable than they appear, their residents retaining a fragile but hard-won right to stay put.