Research & Innovation

Maud Casey -- author of The Shape of Things to Come, a New York Times Notable Book -- explores how we survive modern crises of loss and love through the lives of emotional and geographic nomads. Each flirts with madness and self-destruction while reaching toward life. These simple gestures of optimism and vitality, gorgeously rendered, make drastic an unforgettable collection.

When Gabriel Lynch moves with his mother and brother from a brownstone in Baltimore to a dirt-floor hovel on a homestead in Kansas, he is not pleased. He does not dislike his new stepfather, a former slave, but he has no desire to submit to a life of drudgery and toil on the untamed prairie. So he joins up with a motley crew headed for Texas only to be sucked into an ever-westward wandering replete with a mindless violence he can neither abet nor avoid–a terrifying trek he penitently fears may never allow for a safe return.

Bringing together eight previously published stories the bestselling author of The Bird Artist explores the lives of characters who share a sense of loneliness and obsession. In the title story Tokyo-born Mrs. Moro is driven every day by her chauffeur, Tuttle Albers, so that she can walk the beach in hope of seeing white pelicans while her driver reads the Japanese authors she lends him and falls in love with a zoologist; in "Jenny Aloo" an Eskimo woman believes her missing son's soul is trapped inside a jukebox; and in "Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad" the narrator keeps track of a woman by whom he once spurned for nearly a decade while everything around him changes.

The Old Testament Library provides fresh and authoritative treatments of important aspects of Old Testament study through commentaries and general surveys. The contributors are scholars of international standing.

This anthology is the first to feature women's rhetorical theory from the fifth through the nineteenth centuries. Assembling selections on rhetoric, composition, and communication by 24 women around the world, this valuable collection demonstrates an often-overlooked history of rhetoric as well as women's interest in conversation as a model for all discourse. Among the theorists included are Aspasia, Pan Chao, Sei Shonagon, Madeleine de Scudéry, Hannah More, Hallie Quinn Brown, and Mary Augusta Jordan. The book also contains an extensive introduction, explanatory headnotes, and detailed annotations.

Monstrous Dreams of Reason explores of the most enduring and intriguing paradoxes of the British Enlightenment: how reason gives rise to both the beneficial and the monstrous. This collection of essays explores the conflicts sparked by the extraordinary range of new ideas and material possibilities in the eighteenth-century British Empire, reading the Enlightenment less a set of axioms then as a variety of cultural and ideological formations. The essays explore a wide range of texts to demonstrate how profoundly eighteenth-century formulations of gender, race, class, and sexuality set the terms for debates in the centuries that followed.

We've all been taught that history is the story of great events and important people—but is it, really? In this illuminating collection of essays, Michael Olmert explores how the most ordinary artifacts of everyday life can reveal a huge amount information about how history actually works. For example:

• Toothbrushes—how they eased civilization into the Industrial Revolution
• Playing Cards—how the technology of printing cards led to Gutenberg's Bible
• Keys—why these little metal objects have been a symbol of power and authority throughout the ages.
• Pets—why black cats were considered dangerous omens, while white ones were thought to be stupid.

How have these little things affected us, and what role does their history play in ours? Olmert forces us to take another look at the odds and ends of life we so often take for granted. Whimsical, witty, and highly informative, Milton's Teeth and Ovid's Umbrella holds the key through the back door and into the kitchen of history — where people really lived.

This book is a collection of songs, words and photographs of the Quichua-speaking people. It contains the translations of the Quechua language and tells of the culture.

There are studies that have looked at the ways in which the indigenous image is produced in the Ecuadorian narrative. Less researched have been the indianist and indigenist verses that have also contributed to the intellectual foundation of the Republic of Ecuador. This book repairs that emptiness with a critical and lucid look that covers the themes of culture and the nation, miscegenation and plurinationality, and different visions of the Indians in different periods. Taking as a basis of discussion poetic texts that offer images of the Indian in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this study brings together the analysis of the discourse and the poetic text with a discussion based on the practice of studies of culture, which allows us to see - from the antecedent of "Atahualpa huañui" - the articulation of indigenous symbols to the imaginary of the Ecuadorian national construction from Olmedo and Mera to the present day.

This book is a collection of songs, words and photographs of the Quichua-speaking people. It contains the translations of the Quechua language and tells of the culture.