I am indebted first to Thomas B. Hess and James Fitzsimmons, the editors of Artnews and Art International, who encouraged me to publish the essays and reviews that led, years later, to this book. I am equally grateful for the encouragement I have received from Elizabeth C. Baker, the editor of Art in America.

Winner of the WordWeaving Award for Excellence: The stories and poems in this fantasy collection explore the enchanted realms of the imagination—and our universal need for love and acceptance The title character of Nebula Award finalist “The Boy Who Plaited Manes” is a nameless mute at a royal stable who teaches his abusive noble master an unforgettable lesson. Gage undergoes a transformation in the “Bard” as he strums a silver harp and dreams of horses and a lost love. In “Bright-Eyed Black Pony,” the reclusive sorcerer Wystan devises a plan to help a despairing young prince. Pregnant wife Lin Burke has just moved to a backwater coal town in Pennsylvania and is about to meet her very unusual neighbor in “Primal Cry.” The title story is told in two parts: “Chance” and “The Golden Face of Fate.” As Lord’s Warden, it is the orphaned bastard Chance’s job to keep the vast forest of Wirral safe from poachers, spies, and the occasional murderer. But other creatures dwell here. They are the Denizens, whose tiny faces disappear in the blink of an eye, and who are never spoken of by name. They see and know all, including the truth about Chance’s love for the beautiful, unattainable Lady Halimeda—and the final, terrible secret of Wirral. Other pieces feature female wolves, dog-kings, and sun kings. In poems and prose of grief and atonement, hope, healing, and lost faith, Springer mines the magic that makes us human.

The second novel from the critically acclaimed New York Times–bestselling author Chang-rae Lee. His remarkable debut novel was called "rapturous" (The New York Times Book Review), "revelatory" (Vogue), and "wholly innovative" (Kirkus Reviews). It was the recipient of six major awards, including the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. Now Chang-rae Lee has written a powerful and beautifully crafted second novel that leaves no doubt about the extraordinary depth and range of his talent. A Gesture Life is the story of a proper man, an upstanding citizen who has come to epitomize the decorous values of his New York suburban town. Courteous, honest, hardworking, and impenetrable, Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth, is careful never to overstep his boundaries and to make his neighbors comfortable in his presence. Yet as his story unfolds, precipitated by the small events surrounding him, we see his life begin to unravel. Gradually we learn the mystery that has shaped the core of his being: his terrible, forbidden love for a young Korean Comfort Woman when he served as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II. In A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee leads us with dazzling control through a taut, suspenseful story about love, family, and community—and the secrets we harbor. As in Native Speaker, he writes of the ways outsiders conform in order to survive and the price they pay for doing so. It is a haunting, breathtaking display of talent by an acclaimed young author.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

In everyday reasoning - just as in science and art - knowledge is acquired more by "doing" than with long analyses. What do we "do" when we discover something new? How can we define and explore the pattern of this reasoning, traditionally called "synthetic"? Following in the steps of classic pragmatists, especially C.S. Pierce, Giovanni Maddalena's Philosophy of Gesture revolutionizes the pattern of synthesis through the ideas of change and continuity and proposes "gesture" as a new tool for synthesis. Defining gesture as an action with a beginning and an end that carries on a meaning, Maddalena explains that it is a dense blending of all kinds of phenomena - feelings and vague ideas, actual actions, habits of actions - and of signs - icons, indexes, and symbols. When the blending of phenomena and signs is densest, the gesture is "complete," and its power of introducing something new in knowledge is at its highest level. Examples of complete gestures are religious liturgies, public and private rites, public and private actions that establish an identity, artistic performances, and hypothesizing experiments. A departure from a traditional Kantian framework for understanding the nature and function of reason, The Philosophy of Gesture proposes an approach that is more attuned with our ordinary way of reasoning and of apprehending new knowledge.

This book presents an historical account of media and catastrophe that engages with theories of biopolitics in the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and others. It explains how responses to catastrophe in media and cultural criticism over the past 150 years are embedded in biological conceptions of life and death, contamination and immunity, race and species. Mediated catastrophe is often understood today in terms of collective memory and according to therapeutic or redemptive accounts of trauma. In contrast to these approaches this book emphasizes the use of media to record, archive and analyze physical appearance and movement; to capture viewer attention through shock; to monitor and control bodies in economies of production and consumption; to enmesh social relations in information networks; and situate subjects in discourses of victimhood, immunity, survival and resilience. Chapters are focused on historical case studies of early photography, Nazi propaganda, colonial stereotypes, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the Cold War and the war on terror.