Ilsa

Ilsa just wanted a good life. Her being abandoned on the doorsteps of the St. Friedrix Hann Orphanage, in Germany at the frightful age of two, left her with a longing to be loved. The nuns did all they could to find her a good home. Rupert, also abandoned on the orphanage doorsteps, was a gregarious four year old who became Ilsa’s only friend. They became inseparable in their teenage years. Turning eighteen allowed Rupert Ulrich the right to leave the orphanage to seek his fortune. Rupert promised Ilsa he would come back to get her. She yearned to see him. He was her confidant, friend and lover. Two years passed and he never did. Ilsa felt abandoned again. Ilsa becoming of age, left the only home she knew, to go to the closest big city to get a job. This would be a new beginning for her. Ilsa acquired a job in the City Hall of Munich. Ilsa met a young man in the lobby of the building where she worked. That’s how she met and married Reinhardt Werner, the first man who promised to love her, take care of her and most of all, never leave her. Her marriage to Reinhardt, a struggling farmer, convinced Ilsa she had to advance her education in order to get a good job to help pay off their mortgage. Her decision to go to the Stewardess Training School paid off. This lucrative job was to be temporary, to pay off the mortgage on the farm. However, the many temptations Ilsa encounters across the span of Europe, pulls her into some harrowing situations. Her life has gone amuck when two henchmen are sent to kill her. In desperation she seeks the help of the one person she knows, who is somewhere in Berlin, Rupert Ulrich. Over the years Ilsa had heard Rupert had become a con-man. In her current predicament, she felt he would be the one to trust and confide in for assistance. Searching for Rupert puts her in more danger. Now she has four thugs chasing her. Two want her alive, two want her dead. By chance she no longer becomes the hunted. She now is the assassin on a mission. She is nearing the day of her revenge. It is funny how old adages turn up in real life. Ilsa finds her adage to be true, “It’s A Small World After All.”

The New York Times Bestselling duo behind Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily return with twins out to throw the party of a lifetime--or at least the best party of high school! Siblings Sam and Ilsa Kehlmann have spent most of their high school years throwing parties for their friends--and now they've prepared their final blowout, just before graduation. The rules are simple: each twin gets to invite three guests, and the other twin doesn't know who's coming until the partiers show up at the door. With Sam and Ilsa, the sibling revelry is always tempered with a large dose of sibling rivalry, and tonight is no exception. One night. One apartment. Eight people. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, we all know the answer is plenty. But plenty also goes right, as well...in rather surprising ways.

An electromagnetic pulse flashes across the sky, destroying every electronic device, wiping out every computerized system, and killing billions. When it happens, Alex was hiking in the woods to say good-bye to her dead parents and her personal demons. Now desperate to find out what happened after the pulse crushes her to the ground, Alex meets up with Tom—a young soldier—and Ellie, a girl whose grandfather was killed by the EMP. For this improvised family and the others who are spared, it's now a question of who can be trusted and who is no longer human. Author Ilsa J. Bick crafts a terrifying and thrilling novel about a world that could be ours at any moment, where those left standing must learn what it means not just to survive, but to live amidst the devastation.

Philosophy and Film moves from broad theoretical reflections on film as a medium to concrete examinations of individual films.

In Look, a Negro!, political theorist Robert Gooding-Williams imaginatively and impressively unpacks fundamental questions around race and racism. Inspired by Frantz Fanon's famous description of the profound effect of being singled out by a white child with the words Look, a Negro!, his book is an insightful, rich and unusually wide-ranging work of social criticism. These essays engage themes that have dominated debates on race and racial identity in recent years: the workings of racial ideology (including the interplay of gender and sexuality in the articulation of racial ideology), the viability of social constructionist theories of race, the significance of Afrocentrism and multiculturalism for democracy, the place of black identity in the imagination and articulation of America's inheritance of philosophy, and the conceptualization of African-American politics in post-segregation America. Look, a Negro! will be of interest to philosophers, political theorists, critical race theorists, students of cultural studies and film, and readers concerned with the continuing importance of race-consciousness to democratic culture in the United States.