Lurianics tells the story of a youngish man – one Isaac Luria (namesake of one of the world's great Kabbalists) – who seeks to create a "true work" which will give his life a meaning that is uniquely beyond label. Set on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the novel anatomizes this unlikely hero's ambivalence-racked relationships with a veritable cast of thousands, all of whom have one thing in common – a craving to derail his every attempt to get on with the job. They include: a smugly go-getting kid brother, a hyper-articulate mystery woman, and assorted bosses, co-workers, composers and filmmakers living and dead, ballet stars, murdered doormen, stuff-strutting sparrows, and honey locusts about to bloom. But chaos does not always reign supreme and in the end every encounter plays its part in forcing Luria to confront the ultimate question: Does he have the guts not just to erect his Valhalla (any fool can do that) but to erect it with the only building blocks worth a damn, i.e., the very things befouling the path?

A ship has vanished in the dark, in the very outer reaches of Earth's solar system. Alien invaders sweep through the void, destroying outposts and threatening humanity. The truth is known only to a few: We fired first. We fired on aliens whose very appearance and body language sent all humans into a flying rage. All but a few. Now an autistic savant from Mars and an alien diplomat seek peace...while some on both sides desire only conflict. Suza McRae and Haniyar must bridge the gap between their species, or risk a war that will destroy everything and everyone in its path.

Animal characters abound in graphic narratives ranging from Krazy Kat and Maus to WE3 and Terra Formars. Exploring these and other multispecies storyworlds presented in words and images, Animal Comics draws together work in comics studies, narrative theory, and cross-disciplinary research on animal environments and human-animal relationships to shed new light on comics and graphic novels in which animal agents play a significant role. At the same time, the volume's international team of contributors show how the distinctive structures and affordances of graphic narratives foreground key questions about trans-species entanglements in a more-than-human world. The writers/artists covered in the book include: Nick Abadzis, Adolpho Avril, Jeffrey Brown, Sue Coe, Matt Dembicki, Olivier Deprez, J. J. Grandville, George Herriman, Adam Hines, William Hogarth, Grant Morrison, Osamu Tezuka, Frank Quitely, Yu Sasuga, Charles M. Schultz, Art Spiegelman, Fiona Staples, Ken'ichi Tachibana, Brian K. Vaughan, and others.

Winner, 2019 Science Fiction & Technoculture Studies Book Prize Radical Botany excavates a tradition in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Modernity, the book claims, is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants’ liveliness and animation, as a result of scientific discoveries from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art. Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. Radical Botany traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought. If, as Michael Foucault has argued, the notion of the human was born at a particular historical moment and is now nearing its end, Radical Botany reveals that this origin and endpoint are deeply informed by vegetality as a form of pre- and posthuman subjectivity. The trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world. Plants profoundly shape human experience, from early modern absolutist societies to late capitalism’s manipulations of life and the onset of climate change and attendant mass extinction. A major intervention in critical plant studies, Radical Botany reveals the centuries-long history by which science and the arts have combined to posit plants as the model for all animate life and thereby envision a different future for the cosmos.

This book sets forth a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics for the age of the Anthropocene. It explores the challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate change. In the Anthropocene when geologic conditions and processes are primarily shaped by human activity, climate indicates not only atmospheric forces but the gamut of human activity that shape these forces. It includes the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and together these point to the possible futures we may encounter. This book demonstrates how every weather event constitutes the climatic forces that are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. By foregrounding this fundamental insight, it intervenes in the well-established political and scientific discourses of climate change by identifying and exploring emergent aesthetic practices and the conceptual project of mediating the various forces embedded in climate. This book is the first to sustain a theoretical and analytical engagement with the category of realism in the context of anthropogenic climate change, to capture climate’s capacity to express embedded histories, and to map the formal strategies of representation that have turned climate into cultural content.