At Twilight In The Country

Knut Faldbakken is one of Norway's leading contemporary writers, and his novels have been published in fourteen countries. Twilight Country is the stark portrayal of a civilization in decline, a civilization with unnerving similarities to our own. When life in the stagnant and polluted city of Sweetwater becomes unbearable, its citizens desert it one by one to take refuge on the Dump, the repository of the city's unwanted surplus. Here they find freedom from the city's bureaucratic tyranny and filth as well as the material goods they depend on for survival. Twilight Country depicts the struggles of individuals who learn to cooperate, creating a new society from the detritus of the old.

A powerful and original argument that traces the roots of our present crisis of authority to an unlikely source: the meritocracy. Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another – from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters. How did we get here? With Twilight of the Elites, Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite--one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it. Mixing deft political analysis, timely social commentary, and deep historical understanding, Twilight of the Elites describes how the society we have come to inhabit – utterly forgiving at the top and relentlessly punitive at the bottom – produces leaders who are out of touch with the people they have been trusted to govern. Hayes argues that the public's failure to trust the federal government, corporate America, and the media has led to a crisis of authority that threatens to engulf not just our politics but our day-to-day lives. Upending well-worn ideological and partisan categories, Hayes entirely reorients our perspective on our times. Twilight of the Elites is the defining work of social criticism for the post-bailout age.

Contains the first printing of Sartor resartus, as well as other works by Thomas Carlyle.

Suggests ways to create a garden that blooms and releases aromatic scents at night while still looking wonderful in the day and includes information on water features, plants to attract wildlife, and entertaining ideas.

The war in Iraq and the Presidential campaign of 2008 provide the backdrop for this fictional account of where these two tumultuous events might lead. Filled with suspense, intrigue and a cast of larger-than-life characters, the story reveals the behind-the-scenes events in Washington that will surprise, shock and anger you. But the book's strongest feature is the objective portrayal of the differing perspectives and ideas that have polarized the American public and heightened their awareness of issues and the political process. Before you cast your next ballot, Twilight's Last Gleaming is a must read.

How do writers and artists represent the climate catastrophe so that their works stir audiences to political action or at least raise their environmental awareness without, however, appearing didactic? Storying the Ecocatastrophe attempts to answer this question while interrogating the potential of narrative to become a viable political force. The collection of essays achieves this by examining the representational strategies and ideological goals of contemporary cultural productions about climate change. These productions have been created across different genres, such as the traditional novel, dance performance, solarpunk, economic report, collage, and space opera, as well as across different languages and cultures. The volume’s twelve chapters demonstrate that rising temperatures, erratic weather, extinction of species, depletion of resources, and coastal erosion and flooding are an effect of our abusive relationship with nature. They also show that our use of nuclear power, extraction of natural resources and extensive farming, including heavy reliance on pesticides, intersect with intrahuman violence, as fleshed out by heteropatriarchy, racism, (neo)colonialism, and capitalism. They finally argue that human activity has indirectly contributed to other contemporary crises, namely the migrant crisis and the spread of contagious diseases such as Covid-19.