In Untold Futures, J. K. Barret locates models for recovering the variety of futures imagined within some of our most foundational literature. These poems, plays, and prose fictions reveal how Renaissance writers embraced uncertain potential to think about their own present moment and their own place in time. The history of the future that Barret reconstructs looks beyond futures implicitly dismissed as impossible or aftertimes defined by inevitability and fixed perspective. Chapters on Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost trace instead a persistent interest in an indeterminate, earthly future evident in literary constructions that foreground anticipation and expectation. Barret argues that the temporal perspectives embedded in these literary texts unsettle some of our most familiar points of reference for the period by highlighting an emerging cultural self-consciousness capable of registering earthly futures predicated on the continued sameness of time rather than radical ruptures in it. Rather than mapping a particular future, these writers generate imaginative access to a range of futures. Barret makes a strong case for the role of language itself in emerging conceptualizations of temporality.

Why can’t you understand those people who think so differently from you? Why have we failed to meaningfully address climate change despite 40 years of clear climate science? Why are so many of our systems of social support failing us? At the root of the answers to these questions lies the extraordinary power of story. The world is built upon stories - stories we believe about ourselves and others, narratives about “the way things are”, and myths that define our relationship to the world around us. Many of the stories and narratives that we subconsciously believe have led us down the dark path to rising inequality, food insecurity, unprecedented levels of polarisation, and ecological instability on a planetary scale. And because it was us - humans - who collectively authored these stories, it is us who have the power to change them. An entertaining and inspiring rallying cry, A Future Untold urges us to return to the most fundamental driver of human behaviour and culture setting – story. Drawing heavily from her experience in environmental advocacy, activism, political communications, spoken word, and the entrepreneurial sector, New Zealand National Poetry Slam champion Alina Siegfried (AKA Ali Jacs) translates the fundamentals of narrative change into authentic stories, entertaining anecdotes, new myths for humanity, and a handful of powerful poems to provide a call to action for everyday citizens who believe that we can build a better future together.

In Untold Futures, J. K. Barret locates models for recovering the variety of futures imagined within some of our most foundational literature. These poems, plays, and prose fictions reveal how Renaissance writers embraced uncertain potential to think about their own present moment and their own place in time. The history of the future that Barret reconstructs looks beyond futures implicitly dismissed as impossible or aftertimes defined by inevitability and fixed perspective. Chapters on Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost trace instead a persistent interest in an indeterminate, earthly future evident in literary constructions that foreground anticipation and expectation. Barret argues that the temporal perspectives embedded in these literary texts unsettle some of our most familiar points of reference for the period by highlighting an emerging cultural self-consciousness capable of registering earthly futures predicated on the continued sameness of time rather than radical ruptures in it. Rather than mapping a particular future, these writers generate imaginative access to a range of futures. Barret makes a strong case for the role of language itself in emerging conceptualizations of temporality.

A decade ago, Tim Low journeyed to the remote northernmost tip of Australia. Instead of the pristine rain forests he expected, he found jungles infested with Latin American carpet grass and feral cattle. That incident helped inspire Feral Future, a passionate account of the history and implications of invasive species in that island nation, with consequences for ecological communities around the globe. Australia is far from alone in facing horrific ecological and economic damage from invading plants and animals, and in Low's capable hands, Australia's experiences serve as a wake-up call for all of us. He covers how invasive species like cane toads and pond apple got to Australia (often through misguided but intentional introductions) and what we can do to stop them. He also covers the many pests that Australia has exported to the world, including the paperbark tree (Melaleuca) that infests hundreds of thousands of acres in south Florida.

A history of audiobooks, from entertainment & rehabilitation for blinded World War I soldiers to a twenty-first-century competitive industry. Histories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out of that familiar account are nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Recounting the fascinating history of audio-recorded literature, Matthew Rubery traces the path of innovation from Edison’s recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for his tinfoil phonograph in 1877, to the first novel-length talking books made for blinded World War I veterans, to today’s billion-dollar audiobook industry. The Untold Story of the Talking Book focuses on the social impact of audiobooks, not just the technological history, in telling a story of surprising and impassioned conflicts: from controversies over which books the Library of Congress selected to become talking books—yes to Kipling, no to Flaubert—to debates about what defines a reader. Delving into the vexed relationship between spoken and printed texts, Rubery argues that storytelling can be just as engaging with the ears as with the eyes, and that audiobooks deserve to be taken seriously. They are not mere derivatives of printed books but their own form of entertainment. We have come a long way from the era of sound recorded on wax cylinders, when people imagined one day hearing entire novels on mini-phonographs tucked inside their hats. Rubery tells the untold story of this incredible evolution and, in doing so, breaks from convention by treating audiobooks as a distinctively modern art form that has profoundly influenced the way we read. Praise for The Untold Story of the Talking Book “If audiobooks are relatively new to your world, you might wonder where they came from and where they’re going. And for general fans of the intersection of culture and technology, The Untold Story of the Talking Book is a fascinating read.” —Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times “[Rubery] explores 150 years of the audio format with an imminently accessible style, touching upon a wide range of interconnected topics . . . Through careful investigation of the co-development of formats within the publishing industry, Rubery shines a light on overlooked pioneers of audio . . . Rubery’s work succeeds in providing evidence to ‘move beyond the reductive debate’ on whether audiobooks really count as reading, and establishes the format’s rightful place in the literary family.” —Mary Burkey, Booklist (starred review)

The Renaissance, scholars have long argued, was a period beset by the loss of philosophical certainty. In Possible Knowledge, Debapriya Sarkar argues for the pivotal role of literature--what early moderns termed poesie--in the dynamic intellectual culture of this era of profound incertitude. Revealing how problems of epistemology are inextricable from questions of literary form, Sarkar offers a defense of poiesis, or literary making, as a vital philosophical endeavor. Working across a range of genres, Sarkar theorizes "possible knowledge" as an intellectual paradigm crafted in and through literary form. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers such as Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Milton marshalled the capacious concept of the "possible," defined by Philip Sidney as what "may be and should be," to construct new theories of physical and metaphysical reality. These early modern thinkers mobilized the imaginative habits of thought constitutive to major genres of literary writing--including epic, tragedy, romance, lyric, and utopia--in order to produce knowledge divorced from historical truth and empirical fact by envisioning states of being untethered from "nature" or reality. Approaching imaginative modes such as hypothesis, conjecture, prediction, and counterfactuals as instruments of possible knowledge, Sarkar exposes how the speculative allure of the "possible" lurks within scientific experiment, induction, and theories of probability. In showing how early modern literary writing sought to grapple with the challenge of forging knowledge in an uncertain, perhaps even incomprehensible world, Possible Knowledge also highlights its most audacious intellectual ambition: its claim that while natural philosophy, or what we today term science, might explain the physical world, literature could remake reality. Enacting a history of ideas that centers literary studies, Possible Knowledge suggests that what we have termed a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination.

The Third Domain is the untold story of how the discovery of a new form of life-first ridiculed, then ignored for the past thirty years by mainstream scientists-is revolutionizing science, industry, and even our search for extraterrestrial life. Classification is a serious issue for science: if you don't know what you're looking at, how can you interpret what you see? Starting with Carolus Linnaeus in the 17th century, scientists have long struggled to order and categorize the many forms of life on Earth. But by the early 20th century the tree of life seemed to have stabilized, with two main domains of life at its roots: single-celled and multi-celled organisms. All creatures fit into one of these two groups. Or so we thought. But in 1977, a lone scientist named Carl Woese determined that archaea-biochemically and genetically unique organisms that live and thrive in some of the most inhospitable environments on Earth-were a distinct form of life, unlike anything seen on Earth before. This shocking discovery was entirely incompatible with the long-standing classification of life as we know it. But as it turned out, archaea were not life as we know it, and the tree of life had to be uprooted once again. Now, archaea are being hailed as one of the most important scientific revelations of the 20th century. The Third Domain tells the story of their strange potential and investigates their incredible history to provide a riveting account of an astonishing discovery.