The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) has been labeled the very icon of modernity, the scribe of the modern city, and an observer of an emerging capitalist culture. Seeing Double reconsiders this iconic literary figure and his fraught relationship with the nineteenth-century world by examining the way in which he viewed the increasing dominance of modern life. In doing so, it revises some of our most common assumptions about the unresolved tensions that emerged in Baudelaire’s writing during a time of political and social upheaval. Françoise Meltzer argues that Baudelaire did not simply describe the contradictions of modernity; instead, his work embodied and recorded them, leaving them unresolved and often less than comprehensible. Baudelaire’s penchant for looking simultaneously backward to an idealized past and forward to an anxious future, while suspending the tension between them, is part of what Meltzer calls his “double vision”—a way of seeing that produces encounters that are doomed to fail, poems that can’t advance, and communications that always seem to falter. In looking again at the poet and his work, Seeing Double helps to us to understand the prodigious transformations at stake in the writing of modern life.

An exploration of the relationship between quantum theory and concepts of individuality and identity from ancient Greece to the present.

When, in the third century B.C.E., the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt, they found themselves not only kings of a Greek population but also pharaohs for the Egyptian people. Offering a new and expanded understanding of Alexandrian poetry, Susan Stephens argues that poets such as Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius proved instrumental in bridging the distance between the two distinct and at times diametrically opposed cultures under Ptolemaic rule. Her work successfully positions Alexandrian poetry as part of the dynamic in which Greek and Egyptian worlds were bound to interact socially, politically, and imaginatively. The Alexandrian poets were image-makers for the Ptolemaic court, Seeing Double suggests; their poems were political in the broadest sense, serving neither to support nor to subvert the status quo, but to open up a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively re-created, examined, and critiqued. Seeing Double depicts Alexandrian poetry in its proper context—within the writing of foundation stories and within the imaginative redefinition of Egypt as "Two Lands"—no longer the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, but of a shared Greek and Egyptian culture.

All is not well in the West African State of Niagra. The General---the Unique Miracle of the Century---has banned all but country and western music; a giant statue of Elvis desecrates the sacred Amuz Rock; street children are terrorized by the General's disposal units, and someone is conducting experiments on unwitting Evangelical Christians. In Xanadu, Bob Marley, the sign painter, draws portraits that are more real than the real, more human than human, and longs for the mother stolen from him by Idi Amin Ogwu. The nation rejoices when idealistic young army officers stage a bloodless coup, but the revolution and dreams of a utopian democracy are shortlived. An American-led "coalition of the willing" sponsors a countercoup and reinstates the General. The young idealists are rounded up, tortured, and murdered. Forced to flee to secret caves, the girlfriends, wives, and sisters of the revolutionaries gather together a guerrilla army of woman and children and prepare to wage a very unorthodox war against the General and his powerful allies. Seeing Double is a provocative contemporary tale of dictatorship, kleptocracy, globalization, and greed. It is also a story of idealism, love, gangs, country and western music, Elvis, and war against terror. With caustic humor and keen observation, Seeing Double is a biting satire that manages to be uncompromising in its analysis of world events and the African continent.

A psychologist and collector, Block has put his life's work, his enthusiasm, and his knowledge into this treasure trove of puzzles, illusions, and double diversions. Each page is guaranteed to surprise and delight, while celebrating the amazing flexibility and creativity of the human mind. and mind-bending illustrations that trick the eye into seeing two different images-and never both at the same time. Double illusions, upside-downs, ambiguous images and ambigrams are smartly organized by technique and illusory effect, with vivid descriptions of the psychological impact of each image as well as current scientific explanations for each stunning effect. Psychologist and collector J. Richard Block has put his life's work, his enthusiasm, and his knowledge into this wonderfully fun, informative treasure trove of classic and contemporary puzzles, illusions and double diversions.

Wonderland finally seems as if it’s getting back to normal. Queen Alyss is back on the throne, and reunited with her childhood sweetheart, Dodge. But the fight for Wonderland is far from over. King Arch, in nearby Boarderland, is conniving to overthrow everything for which Alyss and her friends have fought so hard. Even worse, King Arch has found an ally in the recently returned Redd, who has been biding her time and gathering new and evil assassins in the Catacombs of Paris. With enemies circling and danger looming, someone close to Alyss lets her down—and threatens the future of Wonderland forever.

Blackness and Value investigates the principles by which "value" operates, and asks if it is useful to imagine that the concepts of racial blackness and whiteness in the United States operate in terms of these principles. Testing these concepts by exploring various theoretical approaches and their shortcomings, Lindon Barrett finds that the gulf between "the street" (where race is acknowledged as a powerful enigma) and the literary academy (where until recently it has not been) can be understood as a symptom of racial violence. While commonly approaches to race and value are examined historically or sociologically, this intriguing study provides a new critical approach that speaks to theorists of race as well as gender and queer studies.