Mark believes he's meeting Jimmy for the first time in the diner where he works, but he's wrong. Mark has no recollection of their original encounter because the wholesome Jimmy of today couldn't be more different than he was two years ago. Back then, Jimmy sported multiple piercings and facial hair. He was painfully skinny--and a meth addict. The drug transformed him into a lying, conniving thief. Mark doesn't associate the memory of a hookup gone wrong with this fresh-faced twenty-something... but Jimmy knows. Can Mark see Jimmy for the man he is now and not the addict he was? The answers depend on whether true love holds enough light to shine through the darkness of past mistakes.

Therapists are at risk, and the risk is increasing. Well-meaning practitioners used to believe that if they were adhering to ethical codes, and doing their best, they didn't have to worry about being sued or brought before a licensing board. But numerous well-publicized cases, and even more settled outside the limelight of the press have changed all that. Therapists are now worried, and rightfully so. And all of this has happened at the same time that therapists are learning better ways to help very troubled patients who have often been severely abused and traumatized. Though these patients often require less rigid and more personal and creative approaches that may deviate from some proposed norm, they are also most often those who threaten legal action against their therapists. How does one engage intensely with these patients without being drawn into potentially destructive countertransference enactments? How does one remain a creative, spontaneous and helpful therapist while avoiding being pulled into a voracious and inhuman legal system? These are a few of the important questions addressed by this book.

“These stories . . . offer a peephole into a distinct fictional world . . . they attest to the author’s gift as an observer and archivist of emotion.” —The New York Times The thirty-four stories in this seminal collection powerfully display what have become Lydia Davis’s trademarks—dexterity, brevity, understatement, and surprise. Although the certainty of her prose suggests a world of almost clinical reason and clarity, her characters show us that life, thought, and language are full of disorder. Break It Down is Davis at her best. In the words of Jonathan Franzen, she is “a magician of self-consciousness.” Praise for Lydia Davis “Davis is one of the most precise and economical writers we have.” —Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s “An American virtuoso of the short story form.” —Salon “The best prose stylist in America.” —Rick Moody “[Davis has] a capacity to make language unleash entire states of existence.” —Siddhartha Deb, The New York Times

Compares today’s same-sex marriage movement to the experiences of black people in the mid-nineteenth century. The staggering string of victories by the gay rights movement’s campaign for marriage equality raises questions not only about how gay people have been able to successfully deploy marriage to elevate their social and legal reputation, but also what kind of freedom and equality the ability to marry can mobilize. Wedlocked turns to history to compare today’s same-sex marriage movement to the experiences of newly emancipated black people in the mid-nineteenth century, when they were able to legally marry for the first time. Maintaining that the transition to greater freedom was both wondrous and perilous for newly emancipated people, Katherine Franke relates stories of former slaves’ involvements with marriage and draws lessons that serve as cautionary tales for today’s marriage rights movements. While “be careful what you wish for” is a prominent theme, they also teach us how the rights-bearing subject is inevitably shaped by the very rights they bear, often in ways that reinforce racialized gender norms and stereotypes. Franke further illuminates how the racialization of same-sex marriage has redounded to the benefit of the gay rights movement while contributing to the ongoing subordination of people of color and the diminishing reproductive rights of women. Like same-sex couples today, freed African-American men and women experienced a shift in status from outlaws to in-laws, from living outside the law to finding their private lives organized by law and state licensure. Their experiences teach us the potential and the perils of being subject to legal regulation: rights—and specifically the right to marriage—can both burden and set you free.

Includes excerpts from conversations and interviews, previously published essays on Rosenthal, and writings and scripts by Rosenthal.

In Dante’s Inferno, the lowest circle of Hell is reserved for traitors, those who betrayed their closest companions. In a wide range of literatures and mythologies such intimate aggression is a source of ultimate terror, and in Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust, Peter Geschiere masterfully sketches it as a central ember at the core of human relationships, one brutally revealed in the practice of witchcraft. Examining witchcraft in its variety of forms throughout the globe, he shows how this often misunderstood practice is deeply structured by intimacy and the powers it affords. In doing so, he offers not only a comprehensive look at contemporary witchcraft but also a fresh—if troubling—new way to think about intimacy itself. Geschiere begins in the forests of southeast Cameroon with the Maka, who fear “witchcraft of the house” above all else. Drawing a variety of local conceptions of intimacy into a global arc, he tracks notions of the home and family—and witchcraft’s transgression of them—throughout Africa, Europe, Brazil, and Oceania, showing that witchcraft provides powerful ways of addressing issues that are crucial to social relationships. Indeed, by uncovering the link between intimacy and witchcraft in so many parts of the world, he paints a provocative picture of human sociality that scrutinizes some of the most prevalent views held by contemporary social science. One of the few books to situate witchcraft in a global context, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust is at once a theoretical tour de force and an empirically rich and lucid take on a difficult-to-understand spiritual practice and the private spaces throughout the world it so greatly affects.

Framed by the life, murder, and sensational trial over an enterprising seamstress, Love at Last Sight tells a history of dating in Berlin, where the romantic technologies and opportunities of the turn-of-the-century city--such as missed connections and newspaper personal ads--offered men and women on the margins the best shot at finding love but exposed them to tremendous risk.