Sensate Haven is profoundly influenced by augmented reality and artificial intelligence, and it symbolizes and acts as an excellent example of technological progress. Nevertheless, there's a shadow—an unintended result of unbridled expansion—somewhere amid the glistening skyline. A digital turbulent strikes the city, revealing the murky side of networked progress. The Bodhisattvas, discovers a malevolent force that seeks revenge with a technological weapon of unimaginable power and threatens to annihilate their worlds. An unfathomable power threatens to destroy their worlds with a diabolical force that demands retribution. The menacing sound of hopelessness reverberates through Sensate Haven's broken urban landscapes, pressing the Bodhisattvas to discover the evil force's mysteries and avert the ultimate convergence—a pit of unending fear. The haunting chorus of despair echoes through misty woods and shattered cityscapes, challenging the Bodhisattvas to unravel the malevolent force's secrets and prevent the ultimate abyss of perpetual dread. The previously praised innovations are now upending the delicate balance between creation and chaos, from holographic illusions to virtual horrors. This is a compelling story about using code to play god. Will the shadows cast by its own advancements kill Sensate Haven, or can the hesitant hero face the nightmare and find a way to restore balance to a planet on the verge of technological chaos? Travel into the digital shadows, a future where creativity as well as ethics collide and where unintended consequences of technology disruption wreak havoc.

An absorbing collection of essays on religious textures in Knausgaard’s writings and our time. Min kamp, or My Struggle, is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the novel presents an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a writer with the same name as the author, in a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted. In 2015, a group of scholars began meeting to discuss the peculiarly religious qualities of My Struggle. Some were interested in Knausgaard’s attention to explicitly religious subjects and artworks, others to what they saw as more diffuse attention to the religiousness of contemporary life. The group wondered what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, and about themselves. The Abyss or Life Is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor—a collection of interlocking essays on ritual, beauty, and the end of the world.

This work is the first history and evaluation of contemporary American critical theory within its European philosophical contexts. In the first part, Frank Lentricchia analyzes the impact on our critical thought of Frye, Stevens, Kermode, Sartre, Poulet, Heidegger, Sussure, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault, among other, less central figures. In a second part, Lentricchia turns to four exemplary theorists on the American scene—Murray Krieger, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom—and an analysis of their careers within the lineage established in part one. Lentricchia's critical intention is in evidence in his sustained attack on the more or less hidden formalist premises inherited from the New Critical fathers. Even in the name of historical consciousness, he contends, contemporary theorists have often cut literature off from social and temporal processes. By so doing he believes that they have deprived literature of its relevant values and turned the teaching of both literature and theory into a rarefied activity. All along the way, with the help of such diverse thinkers as Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Bloom, Lentricchia indicates a strategy by which future critical theorists may resist the mandarin attitudes of their fathers.

Award-winning writer of Wyatt Earp, An American Odyssey, winner of the 2020 Will Rogers Medallion Award, a 2019 Spur Award Finalist and an “Editor’s Choice” by The Historical Novel Society Clayton Jane, a war-weary ex-Confederate from Georgia, heads west to Wyoming, where he reconstructs his life as a ranch foreman and right-hand man for an English cattle baron. When the Englishman's sister, a promising Surrey painter, visits along with her husband and young son, the ranch hands soon learn that this reunion is more than a family gathering. The brother-in-law, who provided most of the investment money for the Rolling F Ranch, has come to take over the ownership and management. As the crew ponders its shift of loyalty to such a man, they begin to see signs that he is a wife-beater. When Clayton attempts to interfere in this suppressed spousal abuse, he finds himself in an awkward position with his present employer and future employer. His dedication to protecting this headstrong artistic woman leads to a surprising bond between ranch foreman and celebrated painter, a relationship that totters between mutual respect and romance. With these complications in place, Clayton is treated to a new level of troubles. A Pinkerton detective is sent to Laramie to investigate anonymous threats from a would-be president-assassin. President Grant is due to come into town on a political tour, and Clayton an ex-Southerner finds himself on the Pinkerton's list of suspects. Praise for Mark Warren “Woven with clarity and colorful prose, Warren leads readers on an odyssey . . .” —True West Magazine on Promised Land “A good book offers the ultimate escape . . . armchair travel to those wild places of the imagination. Warren’s book took me to places I had previously not expected to visit, but I’m really glad I went there. —New Zealand Booklovers on Promised Land "Warren's novel paints a vivid picture . . . and its colorful similes will put a smile on any genre-fiction lover's face." —Booklist on Born to the Badge

“[The] successful writer for TV, movies, and comics makes his debut as a memoirist with a stunning chronicle of survival”—introduction by Neil Gaiman (Kirkus). Joseph Michael Straczynski is the legendary writer behind Babylon 5, Sense8, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling and Marvel’s Thor, among many other beloved movies, TV shows and comics. In Becoming Superman, he reveals how the power of creativity and imagination enabled him to overcome the horrors of his youth and a dysfunctional family haunted by madness, murder, and a terrible secret. Joe’s early life nearly defies belief. Raised by damaged adults—a con-man grandfather and a manipulative grandmother, a violent, drunken father and a mother who was repeatedly institutionalized—Joe grew up in abject poverty, living in slums and projects when not on the road, crisscrossing the country in his father’s desperate attempts to escape the consequences of his past. Joe found refuge in comic books and his own dreams—imaginary worlds where superheroes used their amazing powers to overcome any adversity. The deeper he read, the more he came to realize that he, too, had a superpower: the ability to tell stories. But even as he found success, Joe could not escape a shocking family secret involving mass murder that he uncovered over the course of decades. Becoming Superman is the startling true story of a little boy who became the hero of his own life.

The first new translation of Kierkegaard's masterwork in a generation brings to vivid life this essential work of modern philosophy. Brilliantly synthesizing human insights with Christian dogma, Soren Kierkegaard presented, in 1844, The Concept of Anxiety as a landmark "psychological deliberation," suggesting that our only hope in overcoming anxiety was not through "powder and pills" but by embracing it with open arms. While Kierkegaard's Danish prose is surprisingly rich, previous translations—the most recent in 1980—have marginalized the work with alternately florid or slavishly wooden language. With a vibrancy never seen before in English, Alastair Hannay, the world's foremost Kierkegaard scholar, has finally re-created its natural rhythm, eager that this overlooked classic will be revivified as the seminal work of existentialism and moral psychology that it is. From The Concept of Anxiety: "And no Grand Inquisitor has such frightful torments in readiness as has anxiety, and no secret agent knows as cunningly how to attack the suspect in his weakest moment, or to make so seductive the trap in which he will be snared; and no discerning judge understands how to examine, yes, exanimate the accused as does anxiety, which never lets him go, not in diversion, not in noise, not at work, not by day, not by night."

Eschatology is generally understood to be the doctrine of last things, but understood rigorously eschatology actually speaks of the inauguration of a new, redeemed world to come and of the coming of God himself. To speak of eschatology in this way is to speak of the very possibility of the future in the radical sense, the future that is not a mere attenuated variation of presence. Eschatology speaks of a coming that comes only to pass away into a past; rather it speaks of the coming of the Holy itself, which is the very origin of time and is thus the event par excellence. This book attempts to make manifest the question that eschatology itself poses: that eschaton has something essential to do with the beginning. This work intervenes in contemporary debates on "postsecularism" and "the return to religion." By introducing the question of eschatology anew, this book reintroduces the problem of transcendence that effectively calls into question the logic of sovereign power and rethinks the place of ''religion'' as an affirmation of what lies beyond, which does not function as the legitimizing principle of sovereignty in today's world of mass consumption.