The original bad boys of the comics page are back in this wildly entertaining seventh collection of Pearls Before Swine comic strips by Stephan Pastis. You know the lineup: Mucho macho Rat, who's ready to get down with anyone he can; sensitive Pig, who can't give up his disco dreams; Zebra, who will survive; and Goat, the brains of the outfit. Violent, unstable Guard Duck and the Crocs next door round out this fabulous cast. The dark, twisted adventures continue as these characters dance the night away.

A personal journey into our evolving relationships with animals, and a thought-provoking look at how those bonds are being challenged and reformed across disciplines We love animals, but does that make the animals' lives any happier? With factory farms, climate change and deforestation, this might be the worst time in history to be an animal. If we took animals' experiences seriously, how could we eat, think and live differently? How to Love Animals is a lively and important portrait of our evolving relationship with animals, and how we can share our planet fairly. Mance works in a slaughterhouse and on a pig farm to explore the reality of eating meat and dairy. He explores our dilemmas over hunting wild animals, over-fishing the seas, visiting zoos and saving wild spaces. What might happen if we extended the love we show to our pets to other sentient beings? In an age of extinction and pandemics, our relationship with animals has become unsustainable. Mance argues that there has never been a better time to become vegetarian or vegan, and that the conservation movement can flourish, if people in wealthy countries shrink their footprint. Mance seeks answers from chefs, farmers, activists, philosophers, politicians and tech visionaries who are redefining how we think about animals. Inspired by the author's young daughters, his book is a story of discovery and hope that outlines how we can find a balance with animals that fits with our basic love for them.

In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium’s individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as “in-betweens,” shifting from firstorder to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic. Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.

A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish is a comprehensive, cohesive and clear guide to the forms and structures of Spanish as it is written and spoken today in Spain and Latin-America. It includes clear descriptions of all the main grammatical phenomena of Spanish, and their use, illustrated by numerous examples of contemporary Spanish, both Peninsular and Latin-American, formal and informal. Fully revised and updated, the sixth edition is even more relevant to students and teachers of Spanish. The sixth edition includes: • new chapters, providing more detail and examples of key areas of Spanish grammar; • an increased number of Mexican examples to reflect the growing interest in this country’s variety of Spanish; • new information for readers studying Spanish and French together; • a glossary of grammatical terms including English translations of Spanish terms. The combination of reference grammar and manual of current usage is invaluable for learners at level B2–C2 of the Common European Framework for Languages, and Intermediate High–Advanced High on the ACTFL proficiency scales.

Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World (WLU Press, 2008) challenged cultural studies to include nonhuman animals within its purview. While the “question of the animal” ricochets across the academy and reverberates within the public sphere, Animal Subjects 2.0 builds on the previous book and takes stock of this explosive turn. It focuses on both critical animal studies and posthumanism, two intertwining conversations that ask us to reconsider common sense understandings of other animals and what it means to be human. This collection demonstrates that many pressing contemporary social problems—how and why the oppression and exploitation of our species persist—are entangled with our treatment of other animals and the environment. Decades into the interrogation of our ethical and political responsibilities toward other animals, fissures within the academy deepen as the interest in animal ethics and politics proliferates. Although ideological fault lines have inspired important debates about how to address the very material concerns informing these theoretical discussions, Animal Subjects 2.0 brings together divergent voices to suggest how to foster richer human–animal relations, and to cultivate new ways of thinking and being with the rest of animalkind. This collection demonstrates that appreciation of difference, not just similarity, is necessary for a more inclusive and compassionate world. Linking issues of gender, disability, culture, race, and sexuality into species, Animal Subjects 2.0 maps vibrant developments in the emergent fields of critical animal studies and posthumanist thought.

(abridged and revised) This reference grammar offers intermediate and advanced students a reason ably comprehensive guide to the morphology and syntax of educated speech and plain prose in Spain and Latin America at the end of the twentieth century. Spanish is the main, usually the sole official language of twenty-one countries,} and it is set fair to overtake English by the year 2000 in numbers 2 of native speakers. This vast geographical and political diversity ensures that Spanish is a good deal less unified than French, German or even English, the latter more or less internationally standardized according to either American or British norms. Until the 1960s, the criteria of internationally correct Spanish were dictated by the Real Academia Espanola, but the prestige of this institution has now sunk so low that its most solemn decrees are hardly taken seriously - witness the fate of the spelling reforms listed in the Nuevas normas de prosodia y ortograjia, which were supposed to come into force in all Spanish-speaking countries in 1959 and, nearly forty years later, are still selectively ignored by publishers and literate persons everywhere. The fact is that in Spanish 'correctness' is nowadays decided, as it is in all living languages, by the consensus of native speakers; but consensus about linguistic usage is obviously difficult to achieve between more than twenty independent, widely scattered and sometimes mutually hostile countries. Peninsular Spanish is itself in flux.

The critically acclaimed debut from the National Book Award–winning author of Blackouts. In this award-winning, groundbreaking novel, Justin Torres plunges us into the chaotic heart of one family, the intense bonds of three brothers, and the mythic effects of this fierce love on the people we must become. “A tremendously gifted writer whose highly personal voice should excite us in much the same way that Raymond Carver’s or Jeffrey Eugenides’s voice did when we first heard it.” —The Washington Post Three brothers tear their way through childhood—smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful. “We the Animals is a dark jewel of a book. It’s heartbreaking. It’s beautiful. It resembles no other book I’ve read.” —Michael Cunningham “A fiery ode to boyhood. . . A welterweight champ of a book.” —NPR, Weekend Edition NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE