From the instant he arrives at his grandfather's house in Oelwein, Iowa, David fears the drought-stricken summer signals a bad omen for his yearly visit. His parents, who are back in Chicago, are experiencing serious marital problems, for which David feels partly responsible. Miss Holcomb, Grandpa's neighbor, always competes against David and his grandfather at the county fair. She always wins the blue ribbon for the best tomatoes. David and his friend, Katie, find out that Miss Holcomb has been spreading lies about Grandfather. They set up a plan to retaliate. Armed with their knowledge and a gunnysack of red balloons, they plan and execute an attack, aimed at teaching Miss Holcomb a lesson. Young friends of David's help him create a newspaper called "Kids' Register." The story continues as a large group of children go to the Fayette County Fair where the winner of the tomato contest is divulged. The end is a bittersweet moment when David and the archenemy, Miss Holcomb, discuss why marriages fail.

Recovering International Relations bridges two key divides in contemporary IR: between 'value-free' and normative theory, and between reflective, philosophically inflected explorations of ethics in scholarship and close, empirical studies of practical problems in world politics. Featuring a novel, provocative and detailed survey of IR's development over the second half of the twentieth century, the work draws on early Frankfurt School social theory to suggest a new ethical and methodological foundation for the study of world politics-sustainable critique-which draws these disparate approaches together in light of their common aims, and redacts them in the face of their particular limitations. Understanding the discipline as a vocation as well as a series of academic and methodological practices, sustainable critique aims to balance the insights of normative and empirical theory against each other. Each must be brought to bear if scholarship is to meaningfully, and responsibly, address an increasingly dense, heavily armed, and persistently diverse world.

A NEW YORKER & GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A love letter to the verbal artistry of hip-hop, What's Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysis "What's Good is, among a great many other things, a byproduct of joyful obsession and immersion into both language and sound, an intersection that offers a rich and expansive land upon which to play." -Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance " . . . an often hilarious, surprisingly moving and always joyful paean to rap's relationship to words."-Jayson Greene, The New York Times "Rap, he is not afraid to say, is as close to a universal tongue as we have."-Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker What's Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysis, a set of freewheeling liner notes, and a love letter to the most vital American art form of the last half century. Over a series of short chapters, each centered on a different lyric, Daniel Levin Becker considers how rap's use of language operates and evolves at levels ranging from the local (slang, rhyme) to the analytical (quotation, transcription) to the philosophical (morality, criticism, irony), celebrating the pleasures and perils of any attempt to decipher its meaning-making technologies. Ranging from Sugarhill Gang to UGK to Young M.A, Rakim to Rick Ross to Rae Sremmurd, Jay-Z to Drake to Snoop Dogg, What's Good reads with the momentum of a deftly curated mixtape, drawing you into the conversation and teaching you to read it as it goes. A book for committed hip-hop heads, curious neophytes, armchair linguists, and everyone in between. "For those of us who love rap, What's Good is a gift. The book offers a new set of eyes and ears through which to see and to hear the language of rap. Its brief and brilliant chapters are like the best kinds of freestyles: spontaneous and structured, startling and profound. A remarkable achievement." -Adam Bradley, author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop "Could this be the rap equivalent of Lewis Hyde's The Gift or Marina Warner's Once Upon A Time? Anyhow, it's an electrifying book, full of wild epiphanies and provocations, an exhibition of a critical mind in full and open contact with their subject at the highest level, with a winning streak of confessional intimacy as well." -Jonathan Lethem, author of The Arrest: A Novel "What's Good is a feat of critical precision and personal obsession: Daniel Levin Becker's deep appreciation for rap is rangy and illuminating, and his delight in language is infectious. What a thrill to swing so gracefully from Lil Wayne to Mary Ruefle to the lyrical evolution of 'tilapia'; pure pleasure. A generous, joyful exegesis."-Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley: A Memoir

An Italian antiquities squad discovers a woman's preserved corpse inside an ancient column. Pages torn from priceless manuscripts litter the floor of an abandoned warehouse. An illegal excavation burrows beneath Jerusalem's Dome of the rome, ground sacred to three religions.
Jonathan Marcus a young American lawyer and a former doctoral student in classics, has become a sought-after commodity among antiguities dealers. But when he is summoned to Rome to examine a client's fragment of an ancient stone map, he stumbles across a startling secert: a hidden message carved inside the stone itself. The discovery propels him on a perilous journey from the labyrinth beneath the Colosseum to the biblical-era tunnels of Jerusalem in search of a hidden 2,000-year-old artifact sought by empires throughout the ages. As MArcus and a passionate UN preservationist, Dr. Emili Travia, dig more deeply into the past, they're stunned to discover not only an anicent intelligence operation to protect the artifact, but also a ruthless modern plot to destroy all trace of it by a mysterious radical bent on erasing every remnant of Jewish and Christian presence from the Temple Mount. With a cutting-edge plot as intricately layered as the ancient sites it explores, "The Last Ember" is a gripping thriller spanning the high-stakes worlds of archaeology, politics, and terrorism in its portrayal of the modern struggle to define--and redefine--history itself.

Nominated for the 2016 PEN Translation Prize One of Flavorwire's Top 50 Independent Books of 2015 One of Entropy Magazine's Best Fiction Books of 2015 One of Bookriot's 100 Must-Read Books Translated From French Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garreta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others. A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language. Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist, LGBT, and experimental literary canons appearing in English for the first time.

The daring, mischievous micro-essays of award-winning French humorist Éric Chevillard, published in English for the first time   Éric Chevillard is one of France’s leading stylists and thinkers, an endlessly inventive observer of the everyday whose erudition and imagination honor the legacy of Swift and Voltaire—with some good-natured postmodern twists.   This ensemble of comic miniatures compiles reflections on chairs, stairs, stones, goldfish, objects found, strangers observed, scenarios imagined, reasonable premises taken to absurd conclusions, and vice versa. The author erects a mental museum for his favorite artworks, only to find it swarming with tourists. He attends a harpsichord recital and lets his passions flare. He happens upon a piece of paper and imagines its sordid back story. He wonders if Hegel’s cap, on display in Stuttgart, is really worth the trip.   Throughout, Chevillard’s powers of observation chime with his verbal acrobatics. His gaze—initially superficial, then deeply attentive, then practically sociopathic—manages time and again to defamiliarize the familiar with a coherent and charismatic charm. Daniel Levin Becker’s translation deftly renders the marvels of the original, and a foreword by Daniel Medin offers rich contextual commentary, making a vital wing of French literature and humor newly accessible in English.

Recovering International Relations bridges two key divides in contemporary IR: between 'value-free' and normative theory, and between reflective, philosophically inflected explorations of ethics in scholarship and close, empirical studies of practical problems in world politics. Featuring a novel, provocative and detailed survey of IR's development over the second half of the twentieth century, the work draws on early Frankfurt School social theory to suggest a new ethical and methodological foundation for the study of world politics-sustainable critique-which draws these disparate approaches together in light of their common aims, and redacts them in the face of their particular limitations. Understanding the discipline as a vocation as well as a series of academic and methodological practices, sustainable critique aims to balance the insights of normative and empirical theory against each other. Each must be brought to bear if scholarship is to meaningfully, and responsibly, address an increasingly dense, heavily armed, and persistently diverse world.

What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau-and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature's quirkiest movements. An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature's possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for "workshop for potential literature") is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec's novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo's mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker's love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman's delight in Russian literature in The Possessed. In recent years, the Oulipo has inspired the creation of numerous other collectives: the OuMuPo (a collective of DJs), the OuMaPo (marionette players), the OuBaPo (comic strip artists), the OuFlarfPo (poets who generate poetry with the aid of search engines), and a menagerie of other Ou-X-Pos (workshops for potential something). Levin Becker discusses these and other intriguing developments in this history and personal appreciation of an iconic-and iconoclastic-group.

"Riveting . . . Well-written and highly compelling."--Wall Street Journal "Truly thrilling. Daniel Levin brilliantly conveys both the menace and the evil of Middle Eastern intrigue, and some victories of human kindness over cruelty and despair."--Daniel Kahneman, New York Times bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Levin was in his New York office when he got a call from an acquaintance with an urgent, cryptic request to meet in Paris. A young man had gone missing in Syria. No government, embassy, or intelligence agency would help. Could he? Would he? So begins a suspenseful, shocking, and at times brutal true story of one man's search to find a miss ing person in Syria over twenty tense days. Levin, a lawyer turned armed-conflict negotia tor, chases leads throughout the Middle East, meeting with powerful sheikhs, drug lords, and sex traffickers in his pursuit of the truth. In Proof of Life, Levin dives deep into the shadows--an underground industry of war where everything is for sale, including arms, drugs, and even people. He offers a fasci nating study of how people use leverage to get what they want from one another and of a place where no one does a favor without wanting something in return, whether it's immediately or years down the road. A fast-paced thriller wrapped in a memoir, Proof of Life is a cinematic must-read by an author with access to a world that usually remains hidden.

SIC] includes public domain works published under Davis Schneiderman's name, including everything from the prologue to The Canterbury Tales to Wikipedia pages to genetic codes, along with a transformation of the Jorge Luis Borges story: "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." SIC] is part of DEAD/BOOKS trilogy of conceptual works by Davis Schneiderman from Jaded Ibis Press. Other books in the trilogy are BLANK (2011), and INK (forthcoming).

From the instant he arrives at his grandfather's house in Oelwein, Iowa, David fears the drought-stricken summer signals a bad omen for his yearly visit. His parents, who are back in Chicago, are experiencing serious marital problems, for which David feels partly responsible. Miss Holcomb, Grandpa's neighbor, always competes against David and his grandfather at the county fair. She always wins the blue ribbon for the best tomatoes. David and his friend, Katie, find out that Miss Holcomb has been spreading lies about Grandfather. They set up a plan to retaliate. Armed with their knowledge and a gunnysack of red balloons, they plan and execute an attack, aimed at teaching Miss Holcomb a lesson. Young friends of David's help him create a newspaper called "Kids' Register." The story continues as a large group of children go to the Fayette County Fair where the winner of the tomato contest is divulged. The end is a bittersweet moment when David and the archenemy, Miss Holcomb, discuss why marriages fail.

'Brilliant observations on the anthropology of power. You will laugh aloud and you won't put it down' Daniel Kahneman In this eye-opening exploration of the human weakness for power, Daniel Levin takes us on a hilarious journey through the absurd world of our global elites, drawing unforgettable sketches of some of the puppets who stand guard. and the jugglers and conjurers employed within. Most spectacular of all, however, are the astonishing contortions performed by those closest to the top in order to maintain the illusion of integrity, decency, and public service. Based on the author's first-hand experiences of dealing with governments and political institutions around the world, Nothing but a Circus offers a rare glimpse of the conversations that happen behind closed doors, observing the appalling lengths that people go to in order to justify their unscrupulous choices, from Dubai to Luanda, Moscow to Beijing, and at the heart of the UN and the US government.

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