"Why did you do all this for me?" Wilbur asked. "I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you."

You have been my friend, replied Charlotte. That in itself is a tremendous thing.

from Charlotte's Web by E. B. White

Friendship encompasses a wide range of social bonds, from playground companionship and wartime camaraderie to modern marriages and Facebook links. For many, friendship is more meaningful than familial ties. And yet it is our least codified relationship, with no legal standing or bureaucratic definition. In A Tremendous Thing, Gregory...

The contributors to "Against Life" think critically about the turn to life in recent theory and culture. Editors Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood shape their collection to provocatively challenge the assumption, rife throughout the humanities, that life needs to be cultivated, affirmed, and redeemed. The editors and their contributors explore how we might be better off daring to think ethics and politics, as well as the project of the humanities, in more radical terms, as a refusal to choose life. What forms of equality and freedom might emerge if we did not organize being-together...

"Find your one true love and live happily ever after." The trials of love and desire provide perennial story material, from the BiblicalSong of Songsto Disney's princesses, but perhaps most provocatively in the romance novel, a genre known for tales of fantasy and desire, sex and pleasure. Hailed on the one hand for its women-centered stories that can be sexually liberating, and criticized on the other for its emphasis on male/female coupling and mythical happy endings, romance fiction is a multi-million dollar publishing phenomenon, creating national and international societies of...

Why do animals talk in literature? In this provocative book, Mario Ortiz Robles tracks the presence of animals across an expansive literary archive to argue that literature cannot be understood as a human endeavor apart from its capacity to represent animals. Focusing on the literary representation of familiar animals, including horses, dogs, cats, and songbirds, Ortiz Robles examines the various tropes literature has historically employed to give meaning to our fraught relations with other animals. Beyond allowing us to imagine the lives of non-humans, literature can make a lasting...

Why do animals talk in literature? In this provocative book, Mario Ortiz Robles tracks the presence of animals across an expansive literary archive to argue that literature cannot be understood as a human endeavor apart from its capacity to represent animals. Focusing on the literary representation of familiar animals, including horses, dogs, cats, and songbirds, Ortiz Robles examines the various tropes literature has historically employed to give meaning to our fraught relations with other animals. Beyond allowing us to imagine the lives of non-humans, literature can make a lasting...

William Moreira doesn't appreciate hearing the theories of geniuses like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

Their ideas make him feel like he's back in kindergarten listening to big-mouthed kids calling attention to themselves while mocking others. Instead of trying to solve real problems, these kids are spreading crazy ideas.

These geniuses should stop thinking about reaching places billions of light years away so they can focus on critical, daily-bread problems, and the calamities that could befall us today that might prevent a tomorrow.

Instead, we must contend...