Index. Bibliography: p. 449-455.

A comprehensive and interpretative biography of Franz Kafka that is both a monumental work of scholarship and a vivid, lively evocation of Kafka's world.

“Brilliant...Timely and necessary.” —Financial Times “Especially timely as we struggle to make sense of how it is that individuals and communities persist in holding beliefs that have been thoroughly discredited.” —Darren Frey, Science If reason is what makes us human, why do we behave so irrationally? And if it is so useful, why didn’t it evolve in other animals? This groundbreaking account of the evolution of reason by two renowned cognitive scientists seeks to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue, helps us justify our beliefs, convince others, and evaluate arguments. It makes it easier to cooperate and communicate and to live together in groups. Provocative, entertaining, and undeniably relevant, The Enigma of Reason will make many reasonable people rethink their beliefs. “Reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant...Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?...Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber [argue that] reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems...[but] to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker “Turns reason’s weaknesses into strengths, arguing that its supposed flaws are actually design features that work remarkably well.” —Financial Times “The best thing I have read about human reasoning. It is extremely well written, interesting, and very enjoyable to read.” —Gilbert Harman, Princeton University

Everything Aoife thought she knew about the world was a lie. There is no Necrovirus. And Aoife isn't going to succomb to madness because of a latent strain--she will lose her faculties because she is allergic to iron. Aoife isn't human. She is a changeling--half human and half from the land of Thorn. And time is running out for her. When Aoife destroyed the Lovecraft engine, she released the monsters from the Thorn Lands into the Iron Lands and now she must find a way to seal the gates and reverse the destruction she's ravaged on the world that's about to poison her.

The Nightmare Affair is the first in a gripping new urban fantasy trilogy by Mindee Arnett. Sixteen-year-old Dusty Everhart breaks into houses late at night, but not because she's a criminal. No, she's a Nightmare. Literally. Being the only Nightmare at Arkwell Academy, a boarding school for magickind, and living in the shadow of her mother's infamy, is hard enough. But when Dusty sneaks into Eli Booker's house, things get a whole lot more complicated. He's hot, which means sitting on his chest and invading his dreams couldn't get much more embarrassing. But it does. Eli is dreaming of a murder. Then Eli's dream comes true. Now Dusty has to follow the clues—both within Eli's dreams and out of them—to stop the killer before more people turn up dead. And before the killer learns what she's up to and marks her as the next target. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The development of linear perspective in the 15th century represented a radical transformation in the European's sense of the world, the body and the self. Robert Romanyshyn's latest book examines the claim that the development of linear perspective vision was and is indispensable to the emergence of our technological world. It does so by telling the story of how an artistic technique has become a cultural habit of mind.

A book for book lovers by a true lover of books! At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning, and at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist and editor Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the six-thousand-year-old conversation between words and that hero without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader. Manguel brilliantly covers reading as seduction, as rebellion, and as obsession and goes on to trace the quirky and fascinating history of the reader’s progress from clay tablet to scroll, codex to digital.