For many centuries the library of lawless hell hole Santa Mondega, in South America, has held a gruesome secret. There is on its shelves a nameless book, by an anonymous author, and everyone who has ever read it ... is dead.

Heinz von Foerster was the inventor of second-order cybernetics, which recognizes the investigator as part of the system he is investigating. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name provides an accessible, nonmathematical, and comprehensive overview of von Foerster’s cybernetic ideas and of the philosophy latent within them. It distills concepts scattered across the lifework of this scientific polymath and influential interdisciplinarian. At the same time, as a book-length interview, it does justice to von Foerster’s élan as a speaker and improviser, his skill as a raconteur. Developed from a week-long conversation between the editors and von Foerster near the end of his life, this work playfully engages von Foerster in developing the difference his notion of second-order cybernetics makes for topics ranging from emergence, life, order, and thermodynamics to observation, recursion, cognition, perception, memory, and communication. The book gives an English-speaking audience a new ease of access to the rich thought and generous spirit of this remarkable and protean thinker.

'What if she isn't happy - does she think men are happy in this world? Doesn't she know how lucky she is to be a woman?' The pioneering Betty Friedan here identifies the strange problem plaguing American housewives, and examines the malignant role advertising plays in perpetuating the myth of the 'happy housewife heroine'. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

In 1954, in a remote mountain village in South America, a little girl was abducted. She was four years old. Marina Chapman was stolen from her housing estate and abandoned deep in the Colombian jungle. That she survived is a miracle. Two days later, half-drugged, terrified, and starving, she came upon a troop of capuchin monkeys. Acting entirely on instinct, she tried to do what they did: copying their actions she slowly learned to fend for herself. So begins the story of her five years among the monkeys, during which time she gradually became feral; lost the ability to speak, lost all inhibition, lost any sense of being human, replacing human society with the social mores her new simian family. But society was eventually to reclaim her. At age ten she was discovered by a pair of hunters who took her to the lawless Colombian city of Cucuta where, in exchange for a parrot, they sold her to a brothel. When she learned that she was to be groomed for prostitution, she made her plans to escape. But her adventure was not over yet... In the vein of Slumdog Millionaire and City of God, this rousing story of a lost child who overcomes the dangers of the wild to finally reclaim her life will astonish readers everywhere.

Katie Carrollton and her friends decide to spend the first party of their senior year at an old house, recently acquired by her mother’s real estate company. The party is set for early October, so preparations begin. First and foremost, they have to gain access to the house without Katie’s mother’s knowledge. Once that’s done, the celebration is on. As the night progresses, the partiers experience unexplainable events. They become the targets of nameless supernatural foes, and their lives are now in danger. Horrific attacks force each party guest to face his or her deepest, darkest fears. Katie soon learns she has a connection to the mysterious house; her ancestors once owned it. Due to frightful occurrences, her own newly realized gifts awaken and could help them stay alive. Katie’s unknown family secrets are the key to saving her friends—friends who will be forever changed by this night of terror.

This book explores this project, as well as the work of other women who have created ongoing organizations for the express purpose of bringing excluded groups "into voice." Because these organizations are so effective in nurturing the development of their members, the authors call them "public homeplaces." While these diverse project are rooted in very different soils - declining inner-city neighborhoods, affluent middle-class suburbs, and African American communities in the Deep South - they have much in common. They are places where every voice is heard, where the group's action projects are designed to address the members' most driving questions and concerns, and where all are supported to be the best they can be.