Winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise emerges at a time when science is discovering more and more about the mystical particles that make up our universe and our bodies. From tidal forces and prairie burns to ruminations on racial identity while standing at the foot of Mount Rushmore, these poems chart a travelogue through mental and physical landscapes and suggest that place, time, love, and bodies are all shifts in the “undulate cosmos.” Straddling the lyrical and experimental, these poems conjure and connect the cosmological, the carnal, and the personal in a country--and a universe--that is gobbling itself into oblivion. But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise is in love with the universe of language--its forms, its sounds, and even its static.

A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker’s short stories The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.

This collection of essays begins with the premise that violence, in its relationship to order, is a central element of history. Taking a broad definition of violence, including structural and symbolic violence, the contributions move beyond the problematic of civilization’s mitigating or foundational role, instead seeing violence as inherently social, and, perhaps, socially inherent (if variable). The question then becomes what forms of harm are authorized or banned in which social orders and how they change over time. Beginning with a theoretical introduction, this interdisciplinary volume includes seven papers representing cultural anthropology, history, archaeology and international relations. The papers range from China to the Americas and from the 2nd millennium BCE to the 21st century CE. Some deal with long-term developments while others focus on a single time and place. Many treat the issue of the visibility/invisibility of violence, while all in one way or another deal with the role of violence in the re-production of community. Together, the volume aims to paint, with a few strokes, the outlines of a deep historical anthropology of social violence. The volume is based on the proceedings of a symposium hosted at Brown University.

//Three_last_words -- //Counternarratives -- //Soldier Buffalos: anagrams in trees -- //Husband stories -- //@Code_Switching -- //Zombie nightmare -- //@Tubman's_Rock -- //A new sermon on the Warpland -- //Coming of age stories -- //"Incident".

Unofficial Histories Behind the Mass Expansion of Makkah Through a series of photographs, Ahmed Mater charts the city's origins to its more recent history over the last 5 years. It is a study of the site's recent transformation -- Makkah, until recently, embodied a unique urban tapestry, layered with histories that are stitched together by an abundance of organically rooted communities and cultures. It is a place that accommodated not only sacred structures and sites but also huge fluctuations in population during Ramadan (up to 3 million visitors a year travel to Makkah for Eid and Hajj). More recently, these sites and communities have been eradicated and are being replaced with five-star-studded high rise developments, transforming it from an active metropolis to the world's most exclusive, yet most visited religious tourist destination, reflective of an unprecedented experimentation with architecture and its possible impact on social stratification. This photographic essay is a celebration of Makkah's real and projected or imaginary states. It provides singular access to this site and its associated social and religious rituals, along with its architectural urban planned and proposed development. AUTHOR: Ahmed Mater, born in 1979, grew up in Saudi Arabia. He led a young artist collective, was a founding member of Al-Miftaha Arts Village in Abha, and went on to co-founded the non-profit entity, Edge of Arabia. His work was exhibited in numerous international institutions and forms part of public and private art collections. 400 illustrations

The Lebanese video artists, documentarians and photographers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have been a duo since the 1990s, making works that address the turbulent history of their homeland. This monograph surveys the duo's projects, including their most recent series of installations and research on the now defunct Lebanese space exploration program.

How the future has been imagined and made, through the work of writers, artists, inventors, and designers. The future is like an unwritten book. It is not something we see in a crystal ball, or can only hope to predict, like the weather. In this volume of the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series, Nick Montfort argues that the future is something to be made, not predicted. Montfort offers what he considers essential knowledge about the future, as seen in the work of writers, artists, inventors, and designers (mainly in Western culture) who developed and described the core components of the futures they envisioned. Montfort's approach is not that of futurology or scenario planning; instead, he reports on the work of making the future—the thinkers who devoted themselves to writing pages in the unwritten book. Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, and Ted Nelson didn't predict the future of computing, for instance. They were three of the people who made it. Montfort focuses on how the development of technologies—with an emphasis on digital technologies—has been bound up with ideas about the future. Readers learn about kitchens of the future and the vision behind them; literary utopias, from Plato's Republic to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland; the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair; and what led up to Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web. Montfort describes the notebook computer as a human-centered alterative to the idea of the computer as a room-sized “giant brain”; speculative practice in design and science fiction; and, throughout, the best ways to imagine and build the future.