'The Coincidence Authority' is a novel about love in a random universe, about two lost souls each with a quest to understand the secret patterns of their lives. From the windswept tranquillity of a Manx village to the brutal abduction of child soldiers in Africa, the lives of Thomas Post and Azalea Lewis intertwine as they try to untangle the mystery of Azalea's past. A mystery that began with a seagull and four pieces of bread.

Thirty years ago, on the date in June known as Midsummer’s Day, a young girl is mysteriously orphaned. Now, after a life of bizarre and troubling circumstances, she becomes obsessed with the idea that she too will die on Midsummer’s Day . . . until she meets the one man who may be able to save her Azalea Lewis’s life has been dominated by coincidences—a bizarre, and increasingly troubling, series of chance events so perfectly coordinated that any sane person would conclude that only the hidden hand of providence could explain them. On Midsummer’s Day, 1982, at the age of three, Azalea was found wandering a fairground in England, alone, too young to explain what had happened to her or her parents. After a brief investigation, she was declared a ward of the court, and placed in foster care. The following year, the body of a woman—her mother—was found on a nearby beach, but by then everyone had forgotten about the little girl, and no connection was ever made. The couple who adopted Azalea brought her to Africa, where—on Midsummer’s Day, 1992—they were killed in a Ugandan uprising while trying to protect their children. Azalea is spared on that day, but as she grows into adulthood, she discovers that her life has been shaped by an uncanny set of coincidences—all of them leading back to her birth mother, a single mother on the Isle of Man, and the three men who could have been her father, each of whom has played an improbable but very real role in her fate. Troubled by what she has uncovered-and increasingly convinced that she, too, will meet her fate on Midsummer’s Day—she approaches Thomas Post, a rational-minded academic whose specialty is debunking our belief in coincidence: the belief that certain events are linked, even predestined, by the hands of fate. Even as they fall in love, Thomas tries to help to understand her past as a series of random events-not a divinely predetermined order. Yet as the fateful date draws closer, Thomas begins to fear that he may lose her altogether, and she may throw herself into the very fate she fears. A warm and romantic, yet intellectually fascinating, story of two souls trying to make sense of the universe and our place in it, Just Coincidence is an unforgettable novel by a storyteller of masterful gifts.

Combining literary, cultural, and political history, and based on extensive archival research, Archives of Authority argues that cultural politics - specifically America's often covert patronage of the arts - played a highly important role in the transfer of imperial authority from Britain to the USA during a critical period after WWII.

This title was first published in 2003. The "Red Mafia" in Russia have become the subject of increasing international interest and considerable misinterpretation. After well-received editions in Russian, French and Italian, Anton Oleinik's study of Russian prisons, in which he explores the social roots of organized crime in post-Soviet societies, is now published in English. This English edition includes a postscript on the Moscow terrorist crisis of 2002. Oleinik's analysis reveals prison society as a mirror of broader Russian society - characterized by the absence of the state as an organizer of social practices. He builds on this to make a central distinction between two types of societies - the modern "large" society and the "small" society, like Russia, that has only been partially modernized, and in which the world of everyday life, experiences and relationships remains entirely separated from the official aims of modernization and efficiency. Oleinik is interested in the void between these two separate worlds, a void he sees being filled in Russia by the Mafia.

This book addresses different linguistic and philosophical aspects of referring to the self in a wide range of languages from different language families, including Amharic, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Newari (Sino-Tibetan), Polish, Tariana (Arawak), and Thai. In the domain of speaking about oneself, languages use a myriad of expressions that cut across grammatical and semantic categories, as well as a wide variety of constructions. Languages of Southeast and East Asia famously employ a great number of terms for first person reference to signal honorification. The number and mixed properties of these terms make them debatable candidates for pronounhood, with many grammar-driven classifications opting to classify them with nouns. Some languages make use of egophors or logophors, and many exhibit an interaction between expressing the self and expressing evidentiality qua the epistemic status of information held from the ego perspective. The volume's focus on expressing the self, however, is not directly motivated by an interest in the grammar or lexicon, but instead stems from philosophical discussions on the special status of thoughts about oneself, known as de se thoughts. It is this interdisciplinary understanding of expressing the self that underlies this volume, comprising philosophy of mind at one end of the spectrum and cross-cultural pragmatics of self-expression at the other. This unprecedented juxtaposition results in a novel method of approaching de se and de se expressions, in which research methods from linguistics and philosophy inform each other. The importance of this interdisciplinary perspective on expressing the self cannot be overemphasized. Crucially, the volume also demonstrates that linguistic research on first-person reference makes a valuable contribution to research on the self tout court, by exploring the ways in which the self is expressed, and thereby adding to the insights gained through philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

Publisher Description