For over sixty years, Selma James has been organizing from the perspective of unwaged women who, with their biological and caring work, reproduce the whole human race--along with whatever other labor they are performing. This work goes on almost unnoticed everywhere on the planet and in every culture. When this work is not economically prioritized, politically protected, or socially supported there are dire consequences for the whole of humanity, beginning with women and children. This collection compiles several decades of James's work with a focus on her more recent writings, including an analysis of C.L.R. James's two masterpieces, The Black Jacobins and Beyond a Boundary, and an account of her formative partnership with him over three decades. Her experience with the Caribbean movement for independence and federation is reflected in her introduction to Ujamaa, the work of Tanzanians to bypass capitalism, and much more. Steeped in the tradition of Marx urging the need for a "practical movement," James recounts the unusual history of how autonomous organizations formed within the International Wages for Housework Campaign and reshaped it. Women of color, queer women, sex workers, women with disabilitie... each independent but mutually accountable (including to the men's network with whom they work) as they confront sexism, racism, deportation, rape, and other violence. James makes the argument that the climate justice movement can draw on all the movements' people have formed to refuse their particular exploitation, to end the capitalist hierarchy that is destroying the world. ---From publisher description.

This is the story, in his own words, of the extraordinary life of Stuart Hall: writer, thinker and one of the leading intellectual lights of his age. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Jamaica, then still a British colony, Hall found himself caught between two worlds: the stiflingly respectable middle class in Kingston, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white planter elite; and working-class and peasant Jamaica, neglected and grindingly poor, though rich in culture, music and history. But as colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Jamaica and across the world. When, in 1951, a scholarship took him across the Atlantic to Oxford University, Hall encountered other Caribbean writers and thinkers, from Sam Selvon and George Lamming to V. S. Naipaul. He also forged friendships with the likes of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, with whom he worked in the formidable political movement, the New Left, and developed his groundbreaking ideas on cultural theory. Familiar Stranger takes us to the heart of Hall's struggle in post-war England: that of building a home and a life in a country where, rapidly, radically, the social landscape was transforming, and urgent new questions of race, class and identity were coming to light. Told with passion and wisdom, this is a story of how the forces of history shape who we are.

On May 25, 1991, a Boeing 747 packed with eleven hundred Ethiopians left the besieged capital of Addis Ababa for Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv. In the next thirty-six hours, thirteen thousand more Ethiopians were to depart for Israel in what became known as "Operation Solomon." After generations of praying and years of diplomatic wrangling, Ethiopia's Jews were at last going to the Promised Land. In the last twelve years, forty thousand "Falasha," or, as they prefer to call themselves, Ethiopian Jews, have left their native land and emigrated to Israel. Rarely in human history has an entire community been transplanted in such a short period from one civilization to another. Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the world's most famous psychosexual therapist, and sponsor of a companion documentary to this volume, and Dr. Steven Kaplan, a renowned authority on Ethiopian Jewry, were among the millions of people around the world watching this human drama play itself out on their television screens. Their mutual interest in the Ethiopian Jews, as well as a series of unique circumstances, led them to join forces to produce this engrossing and handsomely illustrated volume. But this is not a book about the journey of the Ethiopian Jews; rather it is a chronicle of their experiences once they reached their destination. In Ethiopia, they were united by a shared faith and a broad network of kinship ties that served as the foundation of their rural communal society. They observed a form of religion based on the Bible that included customs such as the isolation of women during menstruation, long abandoned by Jewish communities elsewhere in the world. Suddenly transplanted, they are becoming rapidly and aggressively assimilated. Thrust from isolated villages without electricity or running water into the urban bustle of modern, postindustrial society, Ethiopian Jews have seen their family relationships radically transformed. Gender roles are being continually redefined, often resulting in marital crises; parents watch with a growing sense of alienation as their children become "westernized"; women, traditionally confined to the domestic realm, are now moving into the labor force - these are but a few of the whirlwind of wholesale changes confronting the Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Combining Dr. Ruth's insights and experiences with Dr. Kaplan's expertise, this book, illustrated with over forty striking photographs, is the tale of their struggle and the emotional saga of their experiences in the Promised Land.

In the years since 9/11, the U.S. war on terror has focused on al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Coverage of Iran has been devoted almost exclusively to its nuclear ambitions. Yet, as this investigative history reveals, for thirty years Iran has been the world's leading sponsor of global terror. Bergman, one of Israel's top investigative reporters, gained unprecedented access to sources in the Mossad and intelligence agencies around the world. Based on over ten years of research and hundreds of interviews with key intelligence figures, he reveals that Iranian terrorist masterminds have crisscrossed the globe, conducting bombings and assassinations with impunity. In response, a vast clandestine war has been fought with Iran and Hizballah on one side and the CIA, Israel's Mossad, and their European counterparts on the other. The full story of that secret war, told here, will fundamentally change the debate about U.S. national security priorities --

First published in 1969, this novel by one of the most prolific authors in the history of science fiction explores an idea that is truly "far out." Imagine a future world where death is not exactly the end. You can record everything about you that ever made you a distinct human being and then be implanted in the mind of someone living.

Note to readers: The New Testament Code Companion only contains the newly revised endnotes; original pictures, genealogical charts, and maps from Robert Eisenman's classic work. This text is designed for those who wish a side-by-side comparative experience with the end materials as they read the original text. The New Testament Code Companion is only available in print. The material in this text is contained within the eBook edition of The New Testament Code. In The New Testament Code: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ world-renowned scholar and bestselling author Robert Eisenman uncovers the Truth and unravels the real code behind New Testament allusions like "this is the Cup of the New Covenant in my blood" and connects them to "the New Covenant in the Land of Damascus" and "drinking the Cup of the Wrath of God" in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In doing so, Eisenman demonstrates the integral relationship of James the Brother of Jesus to the Righteous Teacher of the Dead Sea Scrolls, deciphers the way the picture of "Jesus" was put together in the Gospels, and clarifies the real history of Palestine in the first century and, as a consequence, what can be known about the real "Jesus." In paring away the traces of Greco-Roman anti-Semitism-which were deliberately introduced into "this picture" thereby tainting Western history ever since-The New Testament Code shows what happened in Palestine in that time, not what the enemies of those making war against Rome wanted people to think happened. In making these arguments and exposing these revisions, overwrites, and falsifications that were introduced into the New Testament, Eisenman also explains the esoteric meaning of many of the usages with which we are all so familiar in the Western World. In doing so, he identifies the Scrolls as the literature of 'the Messianic Movement in Palestine' and 'decodes' many well-known and beloved sayings in the Gospels such as, "Every Plant which My Heavenly Father has not planted shall be uprooted," "Do not throw Holy Things to dogs," "A man shall not be known by what goes into his mouth but, rather, by what comes out of it," and "These are the signs that the Lord did in Cana of Galilee." Offering a thorough and in-depth, point-by-point analysis of James' relationship to the Dead Sea Scrolls, he illumines such subjects as the "Pella Flight," "the Wilderness Camps," and Paul as an "Herodian," exposing Peter's true historical role as "a prototypical Essene," who was used in the Gospels and the Book of Acts as a mouthpiece for Anti-Semitism, and demonstrating how, once we have found the Historical James, we have found the Historical Jesus. He covers new archaeological discoveries along the Dead Sea, AMS radiocarbon dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the controversial almost miraculous appearance of the "James Ossuary" (which he considers having been based on his book on James) and the reasons for its being considered a fraud. A crucial new point that emerges in The New Testament Code is the identification of the document known as the MMT as a Letter from James to someone early Church Fathers call the "Great King of the Peoples beyond the Euphrates." Readers will not be disappointed.

How can we understand India today, fifty years after Independence and only months after its nuclear tests outraged the world? The novelist Arundhati Roy has written, specially for this collection, a fierce denunciation of the Indian nuclear program, which serves as an introduction to nine essays on India, all originally published in The New York Review of Books . In this volume, seven distinguished writers offer penetrating insights into the complexities of the subcontinent. Roderick MacFarquhar reflects on the legacy of Empire and Partition, Ian Buruma considers secularism and Indian democracy, Pankaj Mishra remembers life in Benares, and Christopher de Bellaigue writes on a violent Bombay. But the volatile intersections of history, politics, and culture on which they focus haunt Indian literature too, as shown in essays by Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen on Rabindranath Tagore, Hilary Mantel on Rohinton Mistry, and Anita Desai on Indian women's writing.

The biblical idea of a distinct 'Jewish contribution to civilization' continues to engage Jews and non-Jews alike. This book seeks neither to document nor to discredit the notion, but rather to investigate the idea itself as it has been understood from the seventeenth century to the present. It explores the role that the concept has played in Jewish self-definition, how it has influenced the political, social, and cultural history of the Jews and of others, and whether discussion of the notion still has relevance in the world today. The book offers a broad spectrum of academic opinion: from tempered advocacy to reasoned disavowal, with many variations on the theme in between. It attempts to illustrate the centrality of the question in modern Jewish culture in general, and its importance for modern Jewish studies in particular. Part I addresses the idea itself and considers its ramifications. Richard I. Cohen focuses on the nexus between notions of 'Jewish contribution' and those of 'Jewish superiority', David N. Myers shifts the focus from 'contribution' to 'civilization', arguing that the latter term often served the interests of Jewish intellectuals far better, and Moshe Rosman shows how the current emphasis on multiculturalism has given the idea of a 'Jewish contribution' new life. Part II turns to the relationship between Judaism and other monotheistic cultures. Elliott Horowitz's essay on the sabbath serves as an instructive test-case for the dynamic and complexity of the 'contribution' debate and a pointer to more general, theoretical issues. David Berger expands on these in his account of how discussion of Christianity's Jewish legacy developed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Susannah Heschel shows how the Jewish-Christian encounter has influenced the study of other non-Western 'others'. Daniel Schroeter raises revealing questions about the altogether Eurocentric character of the 'contribution' discourse, which also bore heavily on perceptions of Jews and Judaism in the world of Islam. Part III introduces us to various applications and consequences of the debate. Yaacov Shavit probes the delicate balance forged by nineteenth-century German Jewish intellectuals in defining their identity. Mark Gelber moves the focus to the present and considers the post-war renewal of German Jewish culture and the birth of German-Jewish studies in the context of the 'contribution' discourse. Bringing the volume to its conclusion, David Biale compares three overviews of Jewish culture and civilization published in America in the twentieth and twenty-first-centuries.

"Peter Godwin's mother is dying. Born in England, and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a hospital bed in the partitioned living room of his sister's London home. Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, a longing that does not diminish as he reflects on his time as a journalist on the frontlines of combat around the world, or life in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children. In his mother's final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was and wasn't: the secrets they kept from one another, the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them, and the beauty of the wildly different places they called home. With generations of history behind him, Godwin lyrically brings us into the spaces which make us question and suffer, shows us how we can heal our own scars, and celebrate the lives we have among family and friends" -- Publisher's description.

Over the past decade, a small group of economists has challenged traditional wisdom about international trade. "Rethinking International Trade provides a coherent account of this research program and traces the key steps in an exciting new trade theory that offers, among other possibilities, new arguments against free trade. Krugman's introduction is a valuable guide to research that has delved anew into the causes of international trade and reopened basic questions about the international pattern of specialization, the effects of protectionism, and what constitutes an optimal trade policy In the four sections that follow, he takes a revisionary look at the causes of international trade, and discusses growth and the role of history, technological change and trade, and strategic trade policy. Essays in part I review and challenge the theories of Ricardo and his successors, rethinking a 160-year tradition of looking at international trade. Models are presented in which trade frequently arises because of opportunities to exploit increasing returns through exports rather than from comparative advantage. In part II, Krugman traces the resulting pattern of trade specialization not only to the influence of comparative advantage but also to more arbitrary factors such as historical events, the rachet effect of cumulative processes, technological changes, and temporary economic shocks. Part III expands on the theme of technological change as a key factor in determining the pattern of specialization in international trade and addresses questions about the effects of innovation, or lack of it, on a country's international trade position. The concluding essays examine the issue of protectionismalong with other elements of trade policy, showing how protectionist policies, used as an export enhancement device by some national governments, may shift world specialization to the advantage of the protectionist nations. Paul R. Krugman is Professor of Economics at MIT.

Product Description Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation examines the emergence, implementation, and representation of industrial killing, an inherent and crucial component of modernity whose most extreme manifestation was the Holocaust.The mechanized, impersonal, and sustained mass destruction of human beings, organized and legitimized by states, scientists, jurists, and intellectuals, is rooted in the industrial slaughterhouse of the Great War. In Murder in Our Midst, Omer Bartov argues that the Nazi death factories are best understood in the context of modern warfare, beginning with the First World War. He shows how the way we understand ourselves reflects the ambivalent effects of the Holocaust on our perceptions of war and violence, history and memory, progress and barbarism.Analyzing a wide array of historical texts, works of fiction, films, and museums, Bartov leads the reader from ancient myths of heroism to the trenches of the Western Front, from Thomas Mann's romantic vision of war to Primo Levi's stark depictions of genocide, from colonial war museums to the visual art of the Holocaust. These representations of killing share some of the same important features. They attempt to form coherent images from horrific events, to draw didactic lessons from them, and to use them for political ends. About the Author Omer Bartov is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.

Internationally honored for brilliant achievements throughout his career, author of Cybernetics, ExProdigy, and the essay God and Golem, Inc., which won the National Book Award in 1964, Norbert Wiener was no ordinary mathematician. With the ability to understand how things worked or might work at a very deep level, he linked his own mathematics to engineering and provided basic ideas for the design of all sorts of inventions, from radar to communications networks to computers to artificial limbs. Wiener had an abiding concern about the ethics guiding applications of theories he and other scientists developed. Years after he died, the manuscript for this book was discovered among his papers. The world of science has changed greatly since Wiener's day, and much of the change has been in the direction he warned against. Now published for the first time, this book can be read as a salutary corrective from the past and a chance to rethink the components of an environment that encourages inventiveness.Wiener provides an engagingly written insider's understanding of the history of discovery and invention, emphasizing the historical circumstances that foster innovations and allow their application. His message is that truly original ideas cannot be produced on an assembly line, and that their consequences are often felt only at distant times and places. The intellectual and technological environment has to be right before the idea can blossom. The best course for society is to encourage the best minds to pursue the most interesting topics, and to reward them for the insights they produce. Wiener's comments on the problem of secrecy and the importance of the "free-lance" scientist are particularly pertinent today. Steve Heims provides a brief history of Wiener's literary output and reviews his contributions to the field of invention and discovery. In addition, Heims suggests significant ways in which Wiener's ideas still apply to dilemmas facing the scientific and engineering communities of the 1990s.

For decades, liberal democracy has been extolled as the best system of governance to have emerged out of the long experience of history. Today, such a confident assertion is far from self-evident. Democracy, in crisis across the West, must prove itself. This highly timely volume is both a conceptual and practical guide of impressive scope to the challenges of good governance as the world continues to undergo profound transformation in the coming decades.

In a hushed, Italian town after the Second World War Elsa lives with her parents in the house where she was born. Twenty-seven and unmarried, she is of constant concern to her mother, whose status anxiety manifests itself in acute hypochondria. Elsa hopes to live a life different to the one she's always known and when she meets Tommasino, it seems possible. Tommasino belongs to the De Francisci family, who owns the cloth factory where Elsa's father works, and whose lives and stories Elsa has known all her life. In the course of their secret meetings, Elsa and Tommasino begin to imagine another future for themselves, free from the constraints of shared history and expectation. But all of this is threatened when their relationship is revealed. In the course of their secret meetings, Elsa begins to imagine a future with Tommasino, free from the constaints of shared history and expectation. But all of this is threatened when their relationship is revealed.

What did it mean to photographer Michael Ackerman and filmmaker Jem Cohen to ring the bell beside the singular green door of Robert Frank and June Leaf's timeworn home on New York's Bleecker Street? Or for Cohen to traverse dirt roads to their equally weathered house high above the ocean in Nova Scotia? First as newly developing artists and then across decades, it meant taking a chance--would it be an intensely beautiful encounter or a sad dismissal, a life-changing inspiration or a sorely missed moment? Visitors reflects on Cohen and Ackerman's times with Frank and Leaf, the artists who mean most to them in the world, via a scrapbook of their photos and filmstrips, alongside letters, postcards, and drawings by Robert and June. The book is an intimate and revelatory interchange marked by both lightness and weight. Cohen describes "warrens of tumbling rooms and staircases, museums of memories, crossed paths, dust, and souvenirs," the homes of the "living contradictions" Leaf and Frank: June, engrossed in her studio work and less encumbered than her husband by "all the renown and history going around, some of it heartbreaking"; and Robert, "the world's most famous and famously difficult photographer, as well as reclusive, even if that wasn't exactly true." Ackerman and Cohen's images of the two are candid, empathetic, and aesthetically daring: June and Robert thinking, laughing, waiting, working, watching the world go by. Including a Blu-ray film of a yet unreleased documentary film about the couple by Cohen, Visitors is a tribute to two friends and a gift for all of us who never had the chance (or nerve) to ring the bell by that green door.

Meyer Levin was a Chicago-born Jewish author. His best-known book is "Compulsion", which is a novelization of the notorious Loeb and Leopold murder case of 1924. Levin was in a special position to tell the story, because he was personally acquainted with the perpetrators. Levin is also famous for bringing Anne Frank's diary to light. But "The Old Bunch" may be his greatest work. "The Old Bunch" was written in the mid-1930's, and it tells the tales of the kids of a Chicago Jewish ghetto coming of age and stepping out into the world. It's presumably something of a fantasy autobiography, echoing Levin's own adventures -- Levin was born in 1905, and the events in this book take place beginning in the year 1921 (when the "bunch" is graduating from school), and running through to 1934. The book is compelling for its individual stories and for its living window into times past. Because it was written prior to the horrors of WWII, it's a very pure view of the pre-war era. (Anything written later will necessarily be done with hindsight, and will likely de-emphasize "unimportant" details in favor of those that connect to major war events.) But the history is merely a fascinating byproduct of the vivid human stories that fill the pages. "The Old Bunch" is surprisingly unknown today, which is a shame. This really is one of the great novels, in a class with Tolstoy and Steinbeck. It conveys the entirety of the era: The people, the culture, the economics, Chicago politics (very dirty!), with a global perspective as well (some characters travel to Europe and Palestine). It covers the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the New Deal. To read the book is to live and breathe in these bygone days. Most importantly, Meyer Levin depicts events without agenda or judgment. Characters may be Democrats or Republicans or workers or bosses or religionists or atheists or many other things, but all are portrayed with depth, and none are simple heroes or villains or symbols. These are, in the end, tales about the very personal and individual transitions to adulthood, and the elusive quest for wisdom. It is the same challenge that every generation must face. "The Old Bunch" was critically acclaimed and went through numerous print editions, but it eventually passed into the public domain and was temporarily forgotten. A Wall Street Journal article in 2012 ("Destiny's Children", by Joseph Epstein) sparked a revival of interest, and Rancho Lazarus Publications is proud to present a new edition, accurately rendered and true to the original text, and with the addition of occasional footnotes to clarify details of historical accuracy that the modern reader may not have on tap. With almost 700 pages of text (the original hardback book ran to almost 1000 pages), this is an epic novel. But far from being overlong, it's the sort of reading that leaves you wishing there was more. "Written in good hard-driving colloquial prose, full of sharp characterizations. . . A very fine novel." -- New Republic "A landmark -- vivid and exciting reading. It brilliantly succeeds in taking the reader on a memorable tour of the world in which the old bunch lived." -- The New York Times

This definitive anthology gathers stories, essays, memoirs, excerpts from novels, and poems by more than 130 Jewish writers of the past two centuries who worked in the Russian language. It features writers of the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods, both in Russia and in the great emigrations, representing styles and artistic movements from Romantic to Postmodern. The authors include figures who are not widely known today, as well as writers of world renown. Most of the works appear here for the first time in English or in new translations. The editor of the anthology, Maxim D. Shrayer of Boston College, is a leading authority on Jewish-Russian literature. The selections were chosen not simply on the basis of the author's background, but because each work illuminates questions of Jewish history, status, and identity. Each author is profiled in an essay describing the personal, cultural, and historical circumstances in which the writer worked, and individual works or groups of works are headnoted to provide further context. The anthology not only showcases a wide selection of individual works but also offers an encyclopedic history of Jewish-Russian culture. This handsome two-volume set is organized chronologically. The first volume spans the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, and includes the editor's extensive introduction to the Jewish-Russian literary canon. The second volume covers the period from the death of Stalin to the present, and each volume includes a corresponding survey of Jewish-Russian history by John D. Klier of University College, London, as well as detailed bibliographies of historical and literary sources.

While America is focused on religious militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege from religious extremism in another critical part of the world. As Martha Nussbaum reveals in this penetrating look at India today, the forces of the Hindu right pose a disturbing threat to its democratic traditions and secular state. Since long before the 2002 Gujarat riots--in which nearly two thousand Muslims were killed by Hindu extremists--the power of the Hindu right has been growing, threatening India's hard-won constitutional practices of democracy, tolerance, and religious pluralism. Led politically by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu right has sought the subordination of other religious groups and has directed particular vitriol against Muslims, who are cast as devils in need of purging. The Hindu right seeks to return to a "pure" India, unsullied by alien polluters of other faiths, yet the BJP's defeat in recent elections demonstrates the power that India's pluralism continues to wield. The future, however, is far from secure, and Hindu extremism and exclusivity remain a troubling obstacle to harmony in South Asia. Nussbaum's long-standing professional relationship with India makes her an excellent guide to its recent history. Ultimately she argues that the greatest threat comes not from a clash between civilizations, as some believe, but from a clash within each of us, as we oscillate between self-protective aggression and the ability to live in the world with others. India's story is a cautionary political tale for all democratic states striving to act responsibly in an increasingly dangerous world.

Marcel Schwob's 1896 novella The Children's Crusade retells the medieval legend of the exodus of some 30,000 children from all countries to the Holy Land, who traveled to the shores of the sea, which--instead of parting to allow them to march on to Jerusalem--instead delivered them to merchants who sold them into slavery in Tunisia or delivered them to a watery death. It is a cruel and sorrowful story mingling history and legend, which Schwob recounts through the voices of eight different protagonists: a goliard, a leper, Pope Innocent III, a cleric, a qalandar and Pope Gregory IX, as well as two of the marching children, whose naive faith eventually turns into growing fear and anguish. Though it is a tale drawn from the early 13th century, Schwob presents it through a modern framework of shifting subjectivity and fragmented coherency, and its subject matter and its succession of different narrative perspectives has been seen as an influence on and precursor to such diverse works as Alfred Jarry's The Other Alcestis, Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "In a Grove," William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Jerzy Andrzejewski's The Gates of Paradise. It is a tale told by many yet understood by few, a mosaic surrounding a void, describing a world in which innocence must perish.--Amazon.prime

Marcel Schwob (18671905) was one of the key symbolist writers, standing in French literature alongside such names as Stphane Mallarm, Octave Mirbeau, Andr Gide, Lon Bloy, Jules Renard, Rmy de Gourmont, and Alfred Jarry. His best-known works are Double Heart (1891), The King In The Gold Mask (1892), and Imaginary Lives (1896). Imaginary Lives contains twenty-two mythopoeic literary portraits of figures from ancient history, art history, and the history of crime and punishment. From demi-gods, sorcerers, incendiaries, wantons and philosophers of the ancient world, to the "poet of hate" Cecco Angiolieri and the painter Paolo Uccello, through to the pirates William Kidd and Major Stede-Bonnet, and finally Burke and Hare, the serial killers; Schwob presents a vivid array of characters who display all that is macabre, deviant and magnificently terrifying in human beings and in life. In Imaginary Lives, Schwob has created a "secret" masterpiece that joins other biographical glossaries such as Jorge Luis Borges' A Universal History Of Infamy and Alfonso Reyes' Real And Imagined Portraits in the pantheon of classic speculative fiction, of which Schwob's book is the dark progenitor. Livid with decadent imagery, Imaginary Lives resonates loudly today with its themes of temporality, myth, violence and sexuality, and stands as a major work of the fin-de-si]cle. Solar Nocturnal presents classic literature and art by key forerunners of modernism.