In Media Res is a manifold collection that reflects the intersectional qualities of university programming in the twenty-first century. Taking race, gender, and popular culture as its central thematic subjects, the volume collects academic essays, speeches, poems, and creative works that critically engage a wide range of issues, including American imperialism, racial and gender discrimination, the globalization of culture, and the limitations of our new multimedia world. This diverse assortment of works by scholars, activists, and artists models the complex ways that we must engage university students, faculty, staff, and administration in a moment where so many of us are confounded by the “in medias res” nature of our interface with the world in the current moment. Featuring contributions from Imani Perry, Michael Eric Dyson, Suheir Hammad, John Jennings, and Adam Mansbach, In Media Res is a primer for academic inquiry into popular culture; American studies; critical media literacy; women, gender, and sexuality studies; and Africana studies.

“A beautiful, daring, challenging novel” of a young Muslim immigrant—from the author of the New York Times Notable Book, The Translator (The Guardian). Leila Aboulela’s American debut is a provocative, timely, and engaging novel about a young Muslim woman—once privileged and secular in her native land and now impoverished in London—gradually embracing her orthodox faith. With her Muslim hijab and down-turned gaze, Najwa is invisible to most eyes, especially to the rich families whose houses she cleans in London. Twenty years ago, Najwa, then at university in Khartoum, would never have imagined that one day she would be a maid. An upperclass Westernized Sudanese, her dreams were to marry well and raise a family. But a coup forces the young woman and her family into political exile in London. Soon orphaned, she finds solace and companionship within the Muslim community. Then Najwa meets Tamer, the intense, lonely younger brother of her employer. They find a common bond in faith and slowly, silently, begin to fall in love. Written with directness and force, Minaret is a lyric and insightful novel about Islam and an alluring glimpse into a culture Westerners are only just beginning to understand. “Lit up by a highly unusual sensibility and world view, so rarefied and uncompromising that it is likely to throw the reader out of kilter . . . Her delicacy of touch is to be complimented.” —Chandrahas Choudhury, San Francisco Chronicle

"Sloterdijk has in recent years grown into one of Germany's most influential thinkers. His work, which is extremely relevant for philosophers, scientists of art and culture, sociologists, political scientists and theologists, is only now gradually being translated in English. This book makes his work accessible to a wider audience by putting it to work in orientation towards current issues. Sloterdijk's philosophy moves from a Heideggerian project to think 'space and time' to a Diogenes-inspired 'kynical' affirmation of the body and a Deleuzian ontology of network-spheres. In a range of accessible and clearly written chapters, this book discusses the many aspects of this thought"--Publisher's website.

David Markson was a writer like no other. In his novels, which have been called "hypnotic," "stunning," and "exhilarating" and earned him praise from the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace, Ann Beattie and Zadie Smith. Markson created his own personal genre. With crackling wit distilled into incantatory streams of thought on art, life, and death, Markson's work has delighted and astonished readers for decades. Now for the first time, three of Markson's masterpieces are compiled into one page–turning volume: This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel. In This Is Not a Novel, readers meet an author, called only "Writer," who is weary unto death of making up stories, and yet is determined to seduce the reader into turning pages and getting somewhere. Vanishing Point introduces us to "Author," who sets out to transform shoeboxes crammed with note cards into a novel. In The Last Novel, we find an elderly author (referred to only as "Novelist") who announces that, since this will be his final effort, he possesses "carte blanche to do anything he damn well pleases." United by their focus on the trials, calamities, absurdities and even tragedies of the creative life, these novels demonstrate David Markson's extraordinary intellectual richness—leaving readers, time after time, with the most indisputably original of reading experiences.

Chosen by Heather McHugh as winner of the 2003 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

José Parlá (born 1973) has received critical acclaim for his works, which lie at the boundary between abstraction and calligraphy. Composed from layers of paint, gestural drawing and found ephemera, his work evokes the histories of urban environments. José Parlá is a documentarian of city life. Using the backdrop of New York and many other towns, he re-makes in paint what can appear to be photorealist fragments of what he sees in the chaos and rush of the metropolis. His paintings reflect the accumulated memories and experiences, the walls that show a place that was, but no longer is -- built over, renewed in some other configuration. Parlá paints revelations -- transcriptions of the process -- proof of the history of our neighborhoods. Parlá's work shows that words, signs, and marks come to mean more; over time, in this symphony of diversity, both incongruous and in harmony, that surrounds our contemporary life. His practice originated in graffiti's experimental and collaborative approaches during the eighties. These markings expose his drive to say or divulge the passing of time, in the moment. In Media Res concentrates on the body of Parlá's work that stems from his experiences of living and traveling in various countries: his time in Puerto Rico, his childhood in South Florida in the 1980s, extended journeys throughout the southern United States and Central America in the 1990s and most recent travels throughout Europe and Asia. Spanning painting, watercolor, photography and sculpture, this volume shows Parlá at his most versatile and cosmopolitan. Parlá was recently commissioned by Barclays Center in Brooklyn (January 2013) and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (September 2012), as well as having recently held solo exhibitions at Haunch of venison (London, U.K.) and Yuka Tsuruno gallery (Tokyo, Japan). In 2013, Parlá was added to the collection of the British Museum, (London, U.K.). José Parlá lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Approx.394 pages