Writing, Maurice Blanchot taught us, is not something that is in one's power. It is, rather, a search for a non-power that refuses mastery, order, and all established authority. For Blanchot, this search was guided by an enigmatic exigency, an arresting rupture, and a promise of justice that required endless contestation of every usurping authority, an endless going out toward the other. "The step/not beyond" ("le pas au-dela") names this exilic passage as it took form in his influential later work, but not as a theme or concept, since its "step" requires a transgression of discursive limits and any grasp afforded by the labor of the negative. Thus, to follow "the step/not beyond" is to follow a kind of event in writing, to enter a movement that is never quite captured in any defining or narrating account. Last Steps attempts a practice of reading that honors the exilic exigency even as it risks drawing Blanchot's reflective writings and fragmentary narratives into the articulation of a reading. It brings to the fore Blanchot's exceptional contributions to contemporary thought on the ethico-political relation, language, and the experience of human finitude. It offers the most sustained interpretation of The Step Not Beyond available, with attentive readings of a number of major texts, as well as chapters on Levinas and Blanchot's relation to Judaism. Its trajectory of reading limns the meaning of a question from The Infinite Conversation that implies an opening and a singular affirmation rather than a closure: "How had he come to will the interruption of the discourse?"

1910. Anna Karenina and War and Peace have made Leo Tolstoy the world's most famous author. But fame comes at a price. In the tumultuous final year of his life, Tolstoy is desperate to find respite, so leaves his large family and the hounding press behind and heads into the wilderness. Too ill to venture beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believes his last days will pass in isolation. But as we learn through the journals of those closest to him, the battle for Tolstoy's soul will not be a peaceful one. Jay Parini introduces, translates and edits this collection of Tolstoy's autobiographical writing, diaries, and letters related to the last year of Tolstoy's life published to coincide with the 2009 film of Parini's novel The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year.

Earnie Larsen

We often think of death as the end, but it's really just the beginning of eternal life. Death, judgment, heaven, and hell — often called the Four Last Things — are both awe-inspiring and fear-inducing, yet countless saints testify to the profound spiritual benefit of contemplating the awesome mysteries that await us in the afterlife. Few saints have thought more deeply about the Four Last Things than St. Thomas Aquinas — history's greatest theologian. In these pages, Dr. Kevin Vost has made readable and accessible St. Thomas's core teachings and insights on the Four Last Things and the wondrous experiences God has in store for us. With St. Thomas as his guide, Dr. Vost explores the destination of our souls after death and uncovers the mysteries surrounding limbo and purgatory. He unveils what our bodies will look like at the resurrection and identifies the four special gifts that will perfect

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed extended postproceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Membrane Computing, WMC 2005, held in Vienna, Austria, in July 2005. The 20 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited papers went through two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers in this volume cover all the main directions of research in membrane computing, ranging from theoretical topics in mathematics and computer science, to application issues, especially in biology. More specifically, these papers present research on topics such as: computational power and complexity classes, new types of P systems, relationships to Petri nets, quantum computing, and brane calculi, determinism vs. nondeterminism, hierarchies, the size of small families, algebraic approaches, and designing polynomial solutions to NP-complete problems through the use of membrane systems.

Rowan and Bex have been through the noktum and come out the other side stronger. They work directly for the queen, searching for Giant artifacts to help Humanity. But all of their wit and skills are tested when darkness descends across the entire continent of Noksonon. It's the beginning of a war that the Humans can't win. All they can do is survive. Luckily Rowan still carries the Grief Draw, a lantern that can push back the darkness and keep a small scrap of Humanity alive in the dark. But when a Giant out of legend comes after the Grief Draw--and anyone who has ever held it--Rowan and Bex must lead their friends and families across the continent to keep them safe. Their only hope lies in Tera, the companion they left behind on the island of Taur. She is a fighter and the only one among them they would trust to face a Giant. And she has ties to a legendary weapon, a final artifact hidden in a stronghold that might keep them safe. They just have to find Tera. And make her a Giant killer.

Internet-based information systems, the second covering the large-scale in- gration of heterogeneous computing systems and data resources with the aim of providing a global computing space. Eachofthesefourconferencesencouragesresearcherstotreattheirrespective topics within a framework that incorporates jointly (a) theory, (b) conceptual design and development, and (c) applications, in particular case studies and industrial solutions. Following and expanding the model created in 2003, we again solicited and selected quality workshop proposals to complement the more "archival" nature of the main conferences with research results in a number of selected and more "avant-garde" areas related to the general topic of Web-based distributed c- puting. For instance, the so-called Semantic Web has given rise to several novel research areas combining linguistics, information systems technology, and ar- ?cial intelligence, such as the modeling of (legal) regulatory systems and the ubiquitous nature of their usage. We were glad to see that ten of our earlier s- cessful workshops (ADI, CAMS, EI2N, SWWS, ORM, OnToContent, MONET, SEMELS, COMBEK, IWSSA) re-appeared in 2008 with a second, third or even ?fth edition, sometimes by alliance with other newly emerging workshops, and that no fewer than three brand-new independent workshops could be selected from proposals and hosted: ISDE, ODIS and Beyond SAWSDL. Workshop - diences productively mingled with each other and with those of the main c- ferences, and there was considerable overlap in authors.