The inspiration for the Major Motion Picture O, Canada directed by Paul Schrader and starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, and Michael Imperioli. A searing novel about memory, abandonment, and betrayal from the acclaimed and bestselling Russell Banks "During a career stretching almost half a century, Russell Banks has published an extraordinary collection of brave, morally imperative novels. . . . In this complex and powerful novel, we come face to face with the excruciating allure of redemption." —Washington Post At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex–star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife’s wife and alongside Malcolm’s producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession. Imaginatively structured around Fife’s secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself. Russell Banks gives us a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man’s mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past.

We are continually trying to make sense of our world through the stories we tell and are told, but in our search for coherence, we often sacrifice our freedom and the rich randomness of life. In this passionate and lucid book, Michael André Bernstein challenges our practice of "foreshadowing," in which we see our lives as moving toward a predetermined goal or as controlled by fate. Foreshadowing, he argues, demeans the variety and openness that exist in even the most ordinary moments of life. And it is precisely ordinary life, with its random, haphazard, and contradictory choices, that Bernstein celebrates in his call for "sideshadowing"—an alternative practice that reminds us that every present is dense with possible futures. Bernstein sees the Holocaust as the prime example of how our tendency to "foreshadow" and "backshadow" misrepresents history. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who posit the Holocaust as foreordained and who depict its victims as somehow complicit with a fate that they should have been able to foresee. Instead, Bernstein proposes a radically new understanding of the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier Jewish experience, transforming how we read and write both individual and communal history. Foregone Conclusions is an extraordinarily wide-ranging book, both in its scope and in its broader intellectual and moral implications. From the latest biographies of Kafka to the peace accords between Israel and the PLO, from the role of cultural diversity in universities to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns us against passively accepting our identities as being shaped primarily by historical or personal victimization. His book liberates us from stereotyped patterns of understanding the relationship between our lives as individuals and as members of racial, sexual, and historic/ethnic communities. Berstein ultimately opens a powerful new way to understand the principles governing how we read and write narratives--whether historical, personal, or literary. In striking original juxtapositions and critical evaluations of Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and Aharon Appelfeld, Bernstein sugests the need for a new literary model based on the prosaics of daily life. Bernstein speaks directly and persuasively to many of the most pressing issues in Jewish history, Holocaust studies, literary criticism, and cultural history. Foregone Conclusions is a provocative and poignant attempt to find coherence in our world without accepting either ineluctable destiny of pure coincidence. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Fundamental changes in Brazilian economic policy in the mid-1990s have dramatically slowed inflation and set the stage for sustained growth. These gains provide the opportunity to turn to other social and economic problems overshadowed for years by the country's macroeconomic problems. Among the most important issues on the agenda is education. Opportunity Foregone: Education in Brazil offers a frank and thorough assessment of the country's educational performance and the resulting social costs. It identifies necessary reforms and the barriers to reform. The book's 18 studies examine a wide variety of key issues regarding the economics of education in Brazil.

This volume brings together papers that examine American literary texts and cultural phenomena as manifestations and/or expressions of nostalgia. Inspired by Svetlana Boym’s seminal study The Future of Nostalgia (2001), the authors of the sixteen chapters demonstrate that this sentiment proves to be a useful key in the process, opening up new interpretive vistas and enabling new critical insights. The experience that comes under scrutiny in these texts is informed by the fundamental division into a certain “present,” which is the domain of insatiability, and a certain “past” – the locus of at-homeness, often irretrievably lost.

This brand new Dictionary of Agriculture and Land Management addresses the increasing overlap between agricultural sectors and the demands of the management of rural land and property. It covers the main areas of agricultural management, husbandry, environment, estate management, rural recreation, woodland and forestry, as well as general terms such as organizations, policies, and legislation. In over 2,000 clear and concise A to Z entries, it offers authoritative and up-to-date information, and the content is enhanced by entry-level web links that are listed on a dedicated companion website. Useful tables and line drawings complement the entries, and make this volume an excellent point of reference for anyone who needs a guide to agricultural terminology. The most up-to-date dictionary of its kind, it is a must-have for students of agriculture and land management, as well as for professionals in the agricultural and land-management sectors.

For many readers, this story belongs to Mr. Howells' most perfect pieces of work. In saying this, these people are not unmindful of the delicious humor and exquisite descriptions of " A Chance Acquaintance," of Kitty's breezy freshness and Mr. Arbuton's typical Bostonism. But Mr. Howells has lived in Venice till the melancholy beauty of its decay has so taken possession of him that he can describe all phases of its life more perfectly than any other English writer; and against a background of palaces and canals' he creates a picture of the drama of love, ever old, yet ever new, which causes a soul to dwell among the shadows of that great past. The American mother and daughter wandering forlorn in foreign lands, in quest of the health for the elder which never is found, the artist consul, the priest wearily going through the round of offices which are a lie to him, and dreaming over his inventions, till he wakes to find himself in love with the young girl whom he has taught Italian, the group of lesser characters, from gondolier to canonico, briefly drawn, but instinct with life, are delineated with the same subtle skill of portraiture, keen irony, and delicious pen, which makes a new book of Mr. Howells' a literary event. The atmosphere of the " Queen of the Sea " hangs over all. Those who know Venice inhale its unique beauty again from these pages, and those who have never floated on those still waters, away from the common world, can see its very spirit reflected here, as the outlines of its buildings and the hues of its skies are imaged in the canals below them.

During his many years of working in law enforcement, Clint Wolf has investigated more than his share of bizarre cases. However, he has never worked a case where a dead man has come back to life...until now. While trying to help Clint figure out how something like this could happen, Amy Cooke stumbles upon an old newspaper article that details an unsolved case from nineteen years earlier. The details are sketchy, but it seems that a woman went missing after an argument with her husband. The husband's story is fishy and the woman's family suspects foul play, but there are no reports or evidence from back then to assist with the investigation, so Amy's left trying to recreate the file from scratch. There's a chance that neither case will be solved, but one thing can be counted on: Clint and Amy will die trying.