Porter's reputation as one of americanca's most distinguished writers rests chiefly on her superb short stories. This volume includes the collections Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and The Leaning Tower as well as four stories not available elsewhere in book form. Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

In this book, Anne Porter explores the idea that mobile and sedentary members of the ancient world were integral parts of the same social and political groups in greater Mesopotamia during the period 4000 to 1500 BCE. She draws on a wide range of archaeological and cuneiform sources to show how networks of social structure, political and religious ideology, and everyday as well as ritual practice, worked to maintain the integrity of those groups when the pursuit of different subsistence activities dispersed them over space. These networks were dynamic, shaping many of the key events and innovations of the time, including the Uruk expansion and the introduction of writing, so-called secondary state formation and the organization and operation of government, the literary production of the Third Dynasty of Ur and the first stories of Gilgamesh, and the emergence of the Amorrites in the second millennium BCE.

In this book, Anne Porter explores the idea that mobile and sedentary members of the ancient world were integral parts of the same social and political groups in greater Mesopotamia during the period 4000 to 1500 BCE. She draws on a wide range of archaeological and cuneiform sources to show how networks of social structure, political and religious ideology, and everyday as well as ritual practice, worked to maintain the integrity of those groups when the pursuit of different subsistence activities dispersed them over space. These networks were dynamic, shaping many of the key events and innovations of the time, including the Uruk expansion and the introduction of writing, so-called secondary state formation and the organization and operation of government, the literary production of the Third Dynasty of Ur and the first stories of Gilgamesh, and the emergence of the Amorrites in the second millennium BCE.

Occupying a space in-between conventional scholarship and imaginative storytelling, The University in Crumbs: A Register of Things Seen and Heard is an experimental work that dramatizes the everyday life of the academy. Consisting primarily of a series of five first-person reports, Robert Porter, Kerry-Ann Porter and Iain Mackenzie provide the reader with a number of stories that attempt to capture some of their everyday experiences of academic life in the UK, roughly between 2017 and 2022. Self-consciously written in a subjective and conversational register, and often in dialogical form, The University in Crumbs is an accessible series of interrelated narratives that allow us to develop a concrete sense of the grain, texture and feel for what it might be like to work in the academy at a specific point in time. These stories, first-person reports, dialogues, come alive, acquire their meaning, force and pragmatic effect by way of a rather unique circumlocutory form. There is a directedness to the everyday talk engaged in by Robert, Kerry-Ann and Iain that nonetheless, simultaneously, indirectly loops in and out of a kind of technical academic talk that provides the book its light and shade. University in Crumbs is an experimental work that implicitly and explicitly animates philosophy, social, cultural and political theory through first-person experiences and, in so doing, breathes new life into what can often otherwise remain rather conventional and technical academic language-games. More than that, this book dramatizes ideas and concepts in ways perhaps less burdened by the weight of canonical tradition, and encourages those readers with the talent to portray their social world differently to be more licentious and less bashful in putting such talents to work.

This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature.

This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature.

From the gothic Old South to revolutionary Mexico, few writers have evoked such a multitude of worlds, both exterior and interior, as powerfully as Katherine Anne Porter. This collection gathers together the best of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her fiance on his way to war, and 'Noon Wine', a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas. In all of the compelling stories collected here, harsh and tragic truths are expressed in prose both brilliant and precise.

This volume brings together twenty-nine pieces dating from before 1932, none of which appeared in Porter's collected works and many of which are published here for the first time. Both fiction and essays are covered. All these pieces belong to Porter's apprenticeship as a creative writer. Thus, they offer new insights into her artistic development and her relationship with Mexico, a place that, as she later said, "influenced everything I did afterward."

What is sacrifice? How can we identify it in the archaeological record? And what does it tell us about the societies that practice it? Sacred Killing: The Archaeology of Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East investigates these and other questions through the evidence for human and animal sacrifice in the Near East from the Neolithic to the Hellenistic periods. Drawing on sociocultural anthropology and history in addition to archaeology, the book also includes evidence from ancient China and a riveting eyewitness account and analysis of sacrifice in contemporary India, which engage some of the key issues at stake. Sacred Killing vividly presents a variety of methods and theories in the study of one of the most profound and disturbing ritual activities humans have ever practiced.