We have a postmodern architecture, a postmodern dance, perhaps even a postmodern philosophy and a postmodern condition. But do we have a postmodern fiction?In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Doležel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fictin’s ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Far from being, as unsympathetic critics have sometimes complained, about nothing but itself — or even about nothing at all — postmodernist fiction in McHale’s construction of it proves to be about (among other things) those handy literary perennials, Love and Death.

    In what will likely become the introduction to the history of the Spanish language, David Pharies clearly and concisely charts the evolution of Spanish from its Indo-European roots to its present form. An internationally recognized expert on the history and development of this language, Pharies brings to his subject a precise sense of what students of Spanish linguistics need to know.After introductory chapters on what it means to study the history of a language, the concept of linguistic change, and the nature of language families, Pharies traces the development of Spanish from its Latin roots, all with the minimum amount of technical language possible.  In the core sections of the book, readers are treated to an engaging and remarkably succinct presentation of the genealogy and development of the language, including accounts of the structures and peculiarities of Latin, the historical and cultural events that deeply influenced the shaping of the language, the nature of Medieval Spanish, the language myths that have become attached to Spanish, and the development of the language beyond the Iberian Peninsula, especially in the Americas. Focusing on the most important facets of the language’s evolution, this compact work makes the history of Spanish accessible to anyone with a knowledge of Spanish and a readiness to grasp basic linguistic concepts.Available in both English and Spanish editions, A Brief History of the Spanish Language provides a truly outstanding introduction to the exciting story of one of the world’s great languages.

    The essay focuses on political language, which, according to Orwell, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Orwell believed that the language used was necessarily vague or meaningless because it was intended to hide the truth rather than express it.

    The author examines the political, social, economic and cultural conditions that enabled one culture to influence or suppress another.

    That essay which eventually became the foundation of D’Agata’s critically acclaimed About a Mountain was accepted by another magazine, the Believer, but not before they handed it to their own fact-checker, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment, and beyond the essay’s eventual publication in the magazine, was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D’Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction.This book includes an early draft of D’Agata’s essay, along with D’Agata and Fingal’s extensive discussion around the text. What emerges is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between “truth” and “accuracy” and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other.

    The site now features more than one hundred short conversations, has had some 7 million downloads to date, and is listened to all over the globe.Philosophy Bites brings together the twenty-five best interviews from this hugely successful website. Leading philosophers--including Simon Blackburn, Alain de Botton, Will Kymlicka, Alexander Nehamas, and more than twenty others--discuss a wide range of philosophical issues in a surprisingly lively, informal, and personal way. For instance, Peter Singer, arguably the world's leading animal rights philosopher, states that for people living in the western world, vegetarianism is the only moral choice, but he allows that this would not be the case for an Inuit who lives by killing fish--causing an animal to suffer must be balanced against the necessity to survive. Julian Savulescu talks about the "yuk factor"--the natural revulsion that keeps us from practicing incest or cannibalism--attacking its use as an argument against gay rights and abortion. Anthony Appiah discusses cosmopolitanism, the idea that emphasizes that people around the world have much in common, and that we have to be able to live with people despite our differences. And Stephen Law shows why it is unreasonable to believe in an all-powerful, all-good deity.Time, infinity, evil, friendship, animals, wine, sport, tragedy--all of human life is here. And as these bite-sized interviews reveal, often the most brilliant philosophers are eager and able to convey their thoughts, simply and clearly, on the great ideas of philosophy.

    Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it.   Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.

    It is the long-awaited follow-up to Derek Parfit's 1984 book Reasons and Persons, one of the landmarks of twentieth-century philosophy. In this first volume Parfit presents a powerful new treatment of reasons and rationality, and a criticalexamination of three systematic moral theories -- Kant's ethics, contractualism, and consequentialism -- leading to his own ground-breaking synthetic conclusion. Along the way he discusses a wide range of moral issues, such as the significance of consent, treating people as a means rather than anend, and free will and responsibility. On What Matters is already the most-discussed work in moral philosophy: its publication is likely to establish it as a modern classic which everyone working on moral philosophy will have to read, and which many others will turn to for stimulation andillumination.