My name is Riley Whittle and my story is a dark one. A story of betrayal, love, and choice. I will tell you this story. The story of how my life came to be, starting with the day when one mistake would change my life forever. And it all starts with my father, a promise, me, a Raven, and a curse, the curse of the moon. Blood will be shed, innocent people will be harmed, and I will be left with experiences that will never leave my mind. For people used to, and still do, turn without touching me. Especially the way my mother died. It made my father have to choose between me and the village, and of course… he chose them. I made an exception that I wouldn’t have any friends, but after the past few months of this stuff, I did have them. Ones I could trust, ones that wouldn’t turn their backs on me. Or would they?
My name is Riley Whittle and my story is a dark one. A story of betrayal, love, and choice. I will tell you this story. The story of how my life came to be, starting with the day when one mistake would change my life forever. And it all starts with my father, a promise, me, a Raven, and a curse, the curse of the moon. Blood will be shed, innocent people will be harmed, and I will be left with experiences that will never leave my mind. For people used to, and still do, turn without touching me. Especially the way my mother died. It made my father have to choose between me and the village, and of course... he chose them. I made an exception that I wouldn't have any friends, but after the past few months of this stuff, I did have them. Ones I could trust, ones that wouldn't turn their backs on me. Or would they?
Luna has nowhere to go. She leaves home after her stepfather sexually assaults her. Now her only option is to run as far and as fast as possible. Luna takes to the streets, where she survives by stealing food, hiding in a car, and living in an abandoned house. But how long can she survive on the run? Where can she go if she can't go home?
The next charming mystery from Carolyn Haines featuring spunky southern private investigator Sarah Booth Delaney. When a ritually murdered corpse is discovered at the new-found Native-American temple site smack in the middle of Sunflower County, Mississippi, the archaeology crew on the dig is immediately under suspicion — with particular focus on its handsome, flirtatious leader, Dr. Frank Hafner. So when Sheriff Coleman Peters closes in on him, Hafner does the only logical thing: he hires the Delaney Detective Agency to clear his name. Rumors swirl around Mount Salla, the burial mound created centuries before by the local Native tribes, and no one is sure what the site contains — bones, pottery, treasures, or a curse — but the victims start to add up. Sarah Booth and her partner, Tinkie, have too many likely suspects to whittle down the list. It’s a race against time once Sarah Booth’s resident ghost, Jitty, in the guise of various Native American warrior women, points to the waxing of the coming Crow Moon as the time of maximum danger. Death and mystery cloak the site, and Sarah Booth isn’t sure who to trust or what to believe. But she won’t rest until she’s dug up the truth.
In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium’s individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as “in-betweens,” shifting from firstorder to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic. Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.
Gelber's highly readable and lively prose makes clear how this unique economic ritual survived into the industrial twentieth century, in the process adding a colorful and interesting chapter to the history of the automobile.
By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize Selected by Time as One of the Ten Best Books of the Year | A New York Times Notable Book | Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post Book World, The Christian Science Monitor, Rocky Mountain News, and Kirkus Reviews | A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist | Winner of the ALA Alex Award | Finalist for the Costa Novel Award From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “nightcreeping” through the summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigré who is both more and less than she appears; of Jason’s search to replace his dead grandfather’s irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran LPs, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher’s recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons. Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell’s subtlest and most effective achievement to date. Praise for Black Swan Green “[David Mitchell has created] one of the most endearing, smart, and funny young narrators ever to rise up from the pages of a novel. . . . The always fresh and brilliant writing will carry readers back to their own childhoods. . . . This enchanting novel makes us remember exactly what it was like.”—The Boston Globe “[David Mitchell is a] prodigiously daring and imaginative young writer. . . . As in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Herman Melville, one feels the roof of the narrative lifted off and oneself in thrall.”—Time
In this comprehensive response to the education crisis, the author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity returns to the subject that established his reputation as one of our most insightful social critics. Postman presents useful models with which schools can restore a sense of purpose, tolerance, and a respect for learning.
