Roaming from Tashkent to San Francisco, this is the true story of one budding writer's strange encounters with the fanatics who are devoted - absurdly! melancholically! ecstatically! - to the Russian classics. Combining fresh readings of the great Russians from Gogol to Goncharov with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence, The Possessed introduces a brilliant and distinctive new voice: comic, humane, charming, poignant and completely, and unpretentiously, full of an infectious love for literature.

By Authors Possessed examines the development of the demonic in key Russian novels from the last two centuries. Defining the demonic novel as one that takes as its theme an evil presence incarnated in the protagonists and attributed to the Judeo-Christian Devil, Adam Weiner investigates the way the content of such a book can compromise the moral integrity of its narration and its sense of authorship. Weiner contends that the theme of demonism increasingly infects the narrative point of view from Gogol's Dead Souls to Dostoevsky's The Devils and Bely's Petersburg, until Nabokov exorcised the demonic novel through his fiction and his criticism. Starting from the premise that artistic creation has always been enshrouded in a haze of moral dilemma and religious doubt, Weiner's study of the demonic novel is an attempt to illuminate the potential ethical perils and aesthetic gains of great art.

Ownership is on most people's lips these days, or at least the lack of ownership. Everywhere people seem to be fighting over what is theirs. They want to take back their property, their lands, their liberty, their bodies, their identity, and their right to do what they want. These demands arequite remarkable when you consider that ownership is not an observable property but rather an abstract concept. And yet this abstract concept controls just about everything we do, and rarely do we stop to consider how it rules our lives. Ownership even explains the anger and political turmoil thatis currently sweeping over Western democracies: people feel they have had something taken away, something they used to own in the past and want back.Possessed is the first accessible book to consider the psychological origins and future of ownership in a rapidly changing world. It reveals how we are compelled to accumulate possessions in a relentless drive to seek status and approval by signalling our values to others by what we own. It tracesthe history of ownership but looks to the future as our drive to own will need to adapt to environmental and technological change.

“Equal parts Harlequin romance, Gothic horror story and Camusian moral tale.” — GLOBE AND MAIL Nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award From the bestselling author of Drunk Mom, comes a story of romantic obsession, mental illness, and self-discovery as one woman travels to a haunted quarantine island. Josephine is obsessed. Or possessed — by unrequited love for a younger man who doesn’t promise anything, but who gives her a taste of intimacy that puts her on the brink of losing her mind. Oscillating between her elusive lover and her older former partner, stuck in the hell that is working in a cubicle, and obliged to tend to her destructive, senile mother, Josephine is trapped. After a work assignment promises to deliver distraction, Josephine makes a decision to visit a former quarantine island in the Adriatic Sea, where she meets an enigmatic, beautiful man with a haunting story. Intimate and erotic, Possessed is a dark and funny story exploring sexual obsession, mental illness, and the supernatural. A RARE MACHINES BOOK

In Possessed, Rebecca R. Falkoff asks how hoarding—once a paradigm of economic rationality—came to be defined as a mental illness. Hoarding is unique among the disorders included in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5, because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity: the hoard. Possessed therefore considers the hoard as an aesthetic object produced by clashing perspectives about the meaning or value of objects. The 2000s have seen a surge of cultural interest in hoarding and those whose possessions overwhelm their living spaces. Unlike traditional economic elaborations of hoarding, which focus on stockpiles of bullion or grain, contemporary hoarding results in accumulations of objects that have little or no value or utility. Analyzing themes and structures of hoarding across a range of literary and visual texts—including works by Nikolai Gogol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Luigi Malerba, Song Dong and E. L. Doctorow—Falkoff traces the fraught materialities of the present to cluttered spaces of modernity: bibliomaniacs' libraries, flea markets, crime scenes, dust-heaps, and digital archives. Possessed shows how the figure of the hoarder has come to personify the economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity. Thanks to generous funding from New York University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Don't call me a demon. I prefer the term Fallen Angel. Everybody deserves a vacation, right? Especially if you have a pointless job like tormenting the damned. So who could blame me for blowing off my duties and taking a small, unauthorized break? Besides, I've always wanted to see what physical existence is like. That's why I "borrowed" the slightly used body of a slacker teen. Believe me, he wasn't going to be using it anymore anyway. I have never understood why humans do the things they do. Like sin—if it's so terrible, why do they keep doing it? I'm going to have a lot of fun finding out!