When published in 1973, Gravity’s Rainbow expanded our sense of what the novel could be. Pynchon’s extensive references to modern science, history, and culture challenged any reader, while his prose bent the rules for narrative art and his satirical practices taunted U.S. obscenity and pornography statutes. His writing thus enacts freedom even as the book’s great theme is domination: humanity’s diminished “chances for freedom” in a global military-industrial system birthed and set...

The burgeoning field of 'visual social science' is rooted in the idea that valid scientific insight into culture and society can be acquired by observing, analyzing and theorizing its visual manifestations: visible behavior of people and material products of culture. Reframing Visual Social Science provides a well-balanced, critical-constructive and systematic overview of existing and emerging modes of visual social and cultural research. The book includes integrated models and conceptual ...

Jonathan Fly, XIII’s official father, was once a respected, famous journalist. Unfortunately, his radical ideas, deemed anti-American, led him to be discredited, arrested, and eventually sent to jail. Having served his sentence, he moved to the small town of Green Falls with his son Jason … who grew up mostly on his own, as Jonathan had never given up the fight and remained driven and distracted. Until, one day, a powerful man arrives in Green Falls, and the tragedy begins …

Luc Debieuvre is a French banker who between 2003 and 2005 wrote a fortnightly opinion column for the United Arab Emirate-based English-language daily "Gulf News". The period of Debieuvre's association with the newspaper has been among the most significant and memorable in recent history. The aftermath of America's War on Terror has unleashed forces that the world will have to contend with and endure long after the protagonists have left the stage. Now collated into book form for the first...

Spring of the year 1720...Young girl of the bourgeoisie, Blandine Veyre lives with her family in the majestic Phocaean city located in the South of the French Kingdom. On her sixteenth birthday, she receives a wonderful gift, a leisure voyage in the company of her brother, a naval Officer, onboard an impressive three-masted ship called ‘Lacydon’. However, very soon the first journey will turn into a series of unexpected and sometimes painful as well as solitary adventures. Finally, she wil...

Hydraulic parameter identification is a crucial step in hydrogeological investigations. The book proposes a unique and generalized interpretation method for single and multiple pumping tests made in groundwater reservoirs with layered heterogeneity and with or without lateral anisotropy. This method eliminates the drawbacks of the numerous and frequently applied interpretation methods. The book also presents an introduction to inverse modeling, resulting in optimal parameter values with th...

In all of Commissaire Georges Dupin’s time living in Brittany, there has never been a murder on his home turf, until now, in Jean-Luc Bannalec's The Body by the Sea.A town on the sea, Concarneau’s nickname is Ville Bleue, or the Blue Town. With three harbors at its center, visitors can see enormous ships, sailors, fishermen, and the industry that goes alongside it. Because of its geographical location, Concarneau has shown it’s perfectly positioned to prot...

Arizona, 1948. Novelist François Combe has taken up residence with his wife, his son, and his mistress in the strange no man's land of the Santa Cruz Valley. His imagination is sparked by the surrounding desert, its ghost towns, and other vestiges of the pioneer past. The present, too, draws him in, especially in the border town of Nogales, where luxury and lust come together against a backdrop of misery and servitude... and where games of the flesh are paid for in blood. Sometimes the gra...

While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it. One might wonder whether the discipline of philosophy even recognizes love. The word philosophy means “love of wisdom,” but the absence of love from philosophical discourse is curiously glaring. So where did the love go? In The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion asks this fundamental question of philosophy, while reviving inquiry into the concept of l...

"[From] our preeminent living philosopher of being-with. . . . A profound―and profoundly necessary―meditation on sex and being." —Tim Dean, author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of BarebackingSex, more than just a part of our experience, troubles our conceptions of existence.Drawing on a fascinating array of sources, ancient and modern, philosophical and literary, Jean-Luc Nancy explores and upholds the form-giving thrust of t...

By turns hilarious, angry, and revelatory, this is a striking portrait of a region the West still misunderstands—and a warning of what happens when empires fall apart but their cultural habits refuse to die.Snow, concrete, the KGB: that’s the cliché of the Soviet Union. But its collapse in 1991 sparked a story at once complicated and more compelling than any stereotype. Thirty-five years on, Moscow may brim with champagne bars and blacked-out Mercedes—but what beca...

FINALIST, 38th ANNUAL FRENCH-AMERICAN FOUNDATION TRANSLATION PRIZEExploring the ever-changing philosophy of city life with Jean-Luc NancyIn The City in the Distance, Jean-Luc Nancy embarks on nothing less than a philosophy of the city. Drawing on his widely discussed accounts of sense and of the fraught question of community, Nancy views the city as the site of a disposition that is constantly undergoing metamorphoses.Far f...