A summer trip to Paris in 1976…the toss of a strange challenge coin…and the offer to join a clandestine government program…that’s what led Isobelle Wylie on an unforgettable journey into the dangerous world of espionage, love, and betrayal. Even her family never knew about the secret life she lived. She was covertly trained to shadow national security threats as a member of the CIA’s Pantomime Team. Their main target? The KGB’s Eighth Chief Directorate, whose illegals used dirty tricks and coercion to gain access to America’s highly sensitive, very classified communications, equipment, and technology. Forty-five years later, she is attacked in a park in Maryland, savagely beaten and left for dead. Was it just a random encounter with a brutal assailant, or something far more sinister? Something to do with the current state of national security? Her nephew, Will Redfern, is quickly drawn into the intrigue when he opens the professional safe in her condo. As he reads her journals and manuscript, he realizes that the enemy she’s been fighting for decades is still actively hunting for the Pantomime Team. Why is Moscow so worried about what Belle and her fellow shadows know about those old spy cells? Desperate for answers, Will tracks down a man his aunt calls “MacGuyver”. As the two men search for Belle’s assailant, they uncover a heinous plot that has its roots deep inside Moscow and the old KGB First Directorate, where President Vladimir Putin served as a KGB officer. Did Putin reactivate the old terror networks once handled by the KGB in order to get inside America’s present day national security?

Exploring the role of boundaries and limits in the writing of James Joyce Beating the Bounds examines the role of boundaries and limits in James Joyce’s later works, primarily Finnegans Wake but also Ulysses and other texts. Building on the ideas of philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Giordano Bruno, and scholar Fritz Senn, Roy Benjamin explains and reconciles Joyce’s contrary tendencies to establish and transgress limits. Benjamin begins by contrasting Joyce’s exploration of the artificial impositions of ritual and political power with the writer’s attention to natural boundaries of rivers and mountains. The next section considers sexual, spiritual, and interpersonal boundaries in the Wake. Benjamin then discusses how Joyce simultaneously affirms and undermines the limits of philosophy, geometry, and aesthetics. The final section covers Joyce’s representation of the boundaries imposed in cosmogonic myths, the collision between the bounded medieval world and the boundless world of modern science, and the drive to escape from the boundaries of place. In this detailed and original analysis, Benjamin demonstrates that in Joyce’s writing, the tendency to disintegrate into chaos is countered by an urge to impose order. Benjamin’s close readings put an abundance of subjects in conversation through the concept of limits, showing the Wake’s relevance to many different fields of thought. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

This innovative book finally takes seriously the need for anthropologists to produce in-depth ethnographies of children's play. In examining the subject from a cross-cultural perspective, the author argues that our understanding of the way children transform their environment to create make-believe is enhanced by viewing their creations as oral poetry. The result is a richly detailed ‘thick description' of how pretence is socially mediated and linguistically constructed, how children make sense of their own play, how play relates to other imaginative genres in Huli life, and the relationship between play and cosmology. Informed by theoretical approaches in the anthropology of play, developmental and child psychology, philosophy and phenomenology and drawing on ethnographic data from Melanesia, the book analyzes the sources for imitation, the kinds of identities and roles emulated, and the structure of collaborative make-believe talk to reveal the complex way in which children invoke their experiences of the world and re-invent them as types of virtual reality. Particular importance is placed on how the figures of the ogre and trickster are articulated. The author demonstrates that while the concept of ‘imagination' has been the cornerstone of Western intellectual traditions from Plato to Postmodernism, models of child fantasy play have always intruded into such theorizing because of children's unique capacity to throw into relief our understanding of the relationship between representation and reality.