The attraction of a wink, a nod, a discarded snapshot—such feelings permeate our lives, yet we usually dismiss them as insubstantial or meaningless. With The Logic of the Lure, John Paul Ricco argues that it is precisely such fleeting, erotic, and even perverse experiences that will help us create a truly queer notion of ethics and aesthetics, one that recasts sociality and sexuality, place and finitude in ways suggested by the anonymity and itinerant lures of cruising. Shifting our attention from artworks to the work that art does, from subjectivity to becoming, and from static space to taking place, Ricco considers a variety of issues, including the work of Doug Ischar, Tom Burr, and Derek Jarman and the minor architecture of sex clubs, public restrooms, and alleyways.

Introduces an original approach to foundations of mathematics, departing from Gödel and Tarski and spanning many different areas of logic.

Noel Cummings's life is about to change irrevocably. After witnessing a brutal murder, Noel is recruited to assist the police by acting as the lure for a killer who has been targeting gay men. Undercover, Noel moves deeper and deeper into the dark side of Manhattan's gay life that stirs his own secret desiresÑuntil he forgets he is only playing a role.

The Decision Between Us combines an inventive reading of Jean-Luc Nancy with queer theoretical concerns to argue that while scenes of intimacy are spaces of sharing, they are also spaces of separation. John Paul Ricco shows that this tension informs our efforts to coexist ethically and politically, an experience of sharing and separation that informs any decision. Using this incongruous relation of intimate separation, Ricco goes on to propose that “decision” is as much an aesthetic as it is an ethical construct, and one that is always defined in terms of our relations to loss, absence, departure, and death. Laying out this theory of “unbecoming community” in modern and contemporary art, literature, and philosophy, and calling our attention to such things as blank sheets of paper, images of unmade beds, and the spaces around bodies, The Decision Between Us opens in 1953, when Robert Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, and Roland Barthes published Writing Degree Zero, then moves to 1980 and the “neutral mourning” of Barthes’ Camera Lucida, and ends in the early 1990s with installations by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Offering surprising new considerations of these and other seminal works of art and theory by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Catherine Breillat, The Decision Between Us is a highly original and unusually imaginative exploration of the spaces between us, arousing and evoking an infinite and profound sense of sharing in scenes of passionate, erotic pleasure as well as deep loss and mourning.

In the past, an upgrade in status would have remained a dream or just become the reality of a few. But today, upgrading socioeconomic status is commonplace, mostly in emerging markets. In the nineteenth century, self-appointed tastemaker of New York society Ward McAllister claimed that four generations were necessary to breed a gentleman. Today, due to rapid wealth creation and accumulation, the digital revolution, and the relative ease and affordability of travel, the process of developing a level of taste that is deemed acceptable by high society has been sped up dramatically. Luxury is relative at every level of society. While Michael Kors might be one woman's Gap, the brand might be the ultimate splurge for another woman. What marketers, retailers, and the media tend to ignore is that very possibly describes the same woman, just in different phases of her life, geography, and socioeconomic status. The Lure of Luxe explores the metaphorical climb up the Luxury Consumption Pyramid, which determines how and why a client will spend. The book provides a new way to think about marketing to this elite segment, and offers best practices across a variety of marketing tactics.

Cities, by their very nature, are a mass of contradictions. They can be at once visually stunning, culturally rich, exploitative, and unforgiving. In The Lure of the City, Austin Williams and Alastair Donald explore the potential of cities to meet the economic, social, and political challenges of the current age. This book seeks to examine the dynamics of urban life, showing that new opportunities can be maximized and social advances realized in existing and emerging urban centers. The book explores both the planned and organic nature of urban developments and the impacts and aspirations of the people who live and work in them. It argues convincingly that the metropolitan mindset is essential to the struggle for human liberation. The short, accessibly written essays are guaranteed to spark debate across the media and academia about the place of cities and urban life in our ever-changing world.

The Lure of the Image shows how a close study of camera movement challenges key assumptions underlying a wide range of debates within cinema and media studies. Highlighting the shifting intersection of point of view and camera position, Daniel Morgan draws on a range of theoretical arguments and detailed analyses across cinemas to reimagine the relation between spectator and camera—and between camera and film world. With sustained accounts of how the camera moves in films by Fritz Lang, Guru Dutt, Max Ophuls, and Terrence Malick and in contemporary digital technologies, The Lure of the Image exposes the persistent fantasy that we move with the camera within the world of the film and examines the ways that filmmakers have exploited this fantasy. In so doing, Morgan provides a more flexible account of camera movement, one that enables a fuller understanding of the political and ethical stakes entailed by this key component of cinematic style.