It was one of the biggest scandals in New York University history. Professor John Buettner-Janusch, chair of the Anthropology Department, was convicted of manufacturing LSD and Quaaludes in his campus laboratory. He claimed the drugs were for an animal behavior experiment, but the jury found otherwise. B-J, as he was known, served two years in prison before being paroled, emerging to find his life and career in shambles. Four years later, he sought revenge by trying to kill the sentencing judge and others with poisoned Valentine’s Day chocolates. After pleading guilty to attempted murder, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison, where he died in mysterious circumstances. But before he was infamous at NYU, B-J, a scientific luminary, had also taught at Yale and Duke. One of the world’s foremost authorities on lemurs, our distant primate relatives on the remote island of Madagascar, he brought international attention to these endearing and endangered creatures. He cofounded the Duke Lemur Center in North Carolina and inspired a whole generation of scientists to study them and conservationists to save them and their habitat. His trials captured national headlines, but the mad scientist’s full story has never been told—until now.

After the Glorious Revolution, a not so glorious age of lawlessness befell England. Crime ran rampant, and highwaymen, thieves, and prostitutes ruled the land. Execution by hanging often punished the smallest infractions, and rip-roaring stories of fearless criminals proliferated, giving birth to a new medium: the newspaper. In 1724, housebreaker Jack Sheppard—a “pocket Hercules,” his small frame packed with muscle—finally met the hangman. Street singers sang ballads about the Cockney burglar because no prison could hold him. Each more astonishing than the last, his final jailbreak took him through six successive locked rooms, after which he shimmied down two blankets from the prison roof to the street below. Just before Sheppard swung, he gave an account of his life to a writer in the crowd. Daniel Defoe stood in the shadow of the day’s literati—Swift, Pope, Gay—and had done hard time himself for sedition and bankruptcy. He saw how prison corrupted the poor. They came out thieves, but he came out a journalist. Six months later, the author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders covered another death at the hanging tree. Jonathan Wild looked every bit the brute—body covered in scars from dagger, sword, and gun, bald head patched with silver plates from a fractured skull—and he had all but invented the double-cross. He cultivated young thieves, profited from their work, then turned them in for his reward—and their execution. But one man refused to play his game. Sheppard didn’t take orders from this self-proclaimed “thief-taker general,” nor would he hawk his loot through Wild’s fences. The two-faced bounty hunter took it personally and helped bring the young burglar’s life to an end. But when Wild’s charade came to light, he quickly became the most despised man in the land. When he was hanged for his own crimes, the mob wasn’t rooting for Wild as it had for Sheppard. Instead, they hurled stones, rotten food, and even dead animals at him. Defoe once again got the scoop, and tabloid journalism as we know it had begun.

Once upon a time, a young grey Rabbit explored a forgotten WW2 chemical dump. Being young and foolish he drank some sweet tasting liquid. Very soon he was experiencing growing pains and, by the age of one, was five feet eight inches high and talking English with a South London accent. He called himself, rather un-originally, Bunny Warren and become a bit of a Dick; a sleazy, alcoholic, wise cracking, Private Eye. This is a report of one of the investigations of Bunny Warren, the Strange Case of the Missing Ginger. When a lady goes missing from a premier rate call line, Bunny and his beautiful assistant Jane, go in search of her. Along the way, they get drawn into a web of bad guys, fiesty females and a very odd mad scientist.

The present study uncovers the psychical stakes and dramas involved in Redgrove's practice, and in turn relates these stakes and dramas to the marked element of cultural critique to be found in Redgrove's nonfiction, but which is virtually absent from the poems."--BOOK JACKET.

Drawing on the extraordinary collection of The Library of Congress, one of the greatest repositories for silent film and memorabilia, Peter Kobel has created the definitive visual history of silent film. From its birth in the 1890s, with the earliest narrative shorts, through the brilliant full-length features of the 1920s, Silent Movies captures the greatest directors and actors and their immortal films. Silent Movies also looks at the technology of early film, the use of color photography, and the restoration work being spearheaded by some of Hollywood's most important directors, such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Richly illustrated from the Library of Congress's extensive collection of posters, paper prints, film stills, and memorabilia -- most of which have never been in print -- Silent Movies is an important work of history that will also be a sought-after gift book for all lovers of film.

Finance Fictions takes the measure of what it means to live in a world ruled by high finance by examining the tension between psychosis and realism that plays out in the contemporary finance novel. When the things traded at the center of the economy cease to be things at all, but highly abstracted speculations, how do we come to see the real? What sorts of narrative can accurately approach the actual workings of a neoliberal economy marked by accelerating cycles of market crashes, economic and political crisis, and austerity? Revisiting such twentieth-century classics of the genre as Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, De Boever argues that the twenty-first century is witnessing the birth of a new kind of realistic novel that can make sense of complex financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and digital algorithms operating at speeds faster than what human beings or computers can record. If in 1989 Wolfe could still urge novelists to work harder to “tame the billion-footed beast of reality,” today’s economic reality confronts us with a difference that is qualitative rather than quantitative: a new financial ontology requiring new modes of thinking and writing. Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Quentin Meillassoux in the close reading of finance novels by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, Ben Lerner and less well-known works of conceptual writing such as Mathew Timmons’ Credit, Finance Fictions argues that realism is in for a speculative update if it wants to take on the contemporary economy—an “if” whose implications turn out to be deeply political. Part literary study and part philosophical inquiry, Finance Fictions seeks to contribute to a new mindset for creative and critical work on finance in the twenty-first century.