Oh Bartelby

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street is a short story by Herman Melville about a strange man with a strange phrase: "I would prefer not to." This American short story is now one of the most famous of American short stories and has been adapted into many variations. This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you’ll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it. Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes

Over the past decade, mainstream feminist theory has repeatedly and urgently cautioned against arguments which assert the existence of fundamental—or essential—differences between men and women. Any biological or natural differences between the sexes are often flatly denied, on the grounds that such an acknowledgment will impede women's claims to equal treatment. In Caring for Justice, Robin West turns her sensitive, measured eye to the consequences of this widespread refusal to consider how women's lived experiences and perspectives may differ from those of men. Her work calls attention to two critical areas in which an inadequate recognition of women's distinctive experiences has failed jurisprudence. We are in desperate need, she contends, both of a theory of justice which incorporates women's distinctive moral voice on the meaning of justice into our discourse, and of a theory of harm which better acknowledges, compensates, and seeks to prevent the various harms which women, disproportionately and distinctively, suffer. Providing a fresh feminist perspective on traditional jurisprudence, West examines such issues as the nature of justice, the concept of harm, economic theories of value, and the utility of constitutional discourse. She illuminates the adverse repercussions of the anti-essentialist position for jurisprudence, and offers strategies for correcting them. Far from espousing a return to essentialism, West argues an anti- anti-essentialism, which greatly refines our understanding of the similarities and differences between women and men.

Bartleby is a newly-hired scrivener who initially produces great work but slowly reduces his output, declining assignments and responding with: "I would prefer not to." Despite his poor performance, his boss struggles to reprimand the eccentric character. A Manhattan lawyer decides to hire a third scrivener called Bartleby to help manage his growing workload. Yet, the quiet unassuming man soon becomes a source of contention. At first, Bartleby is an active member of the team yet one day he refuses to complete an assignment, setting an unusual precent. He continues to refuse work, which confuses the lawyer and frustrates his peers. Bartleby’s passive attitude is indicative of a larger issue his boss has yet to uncover. Herman Melville delivers a simple story about a man who follows his own path. He chooses not to engage with work or society as a whole. It’s an examination of passive resistance in a modern world fueled by compliance and consumerism. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Bartelby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street is both modern and readable.

A FACE FROM THE PAST Once upon a time, Jonathan West lost his best friend, Ansel, under horrific circumstances. Or, at least, he thought he had. On a warm summer night, he finds himself reunited with the dead man—and hunted by a hideous entity that occupies Ansel's body. In his hour of need, Jonathan could have gone to the authorities, or hired an esteemed security service. Instead, he winds up soliciting help from none other than Tanglewood's most curmudgeonly private eye. Harlan Ulrich is on the case, for better or worse. The over-caffeinated eccentric will have to employ every tactic in his unorthodox playbook if he's to save the client—and himself. DRESSED IN SMOKE is a novel of supernatural suspense, the second in the Detective Harlan Ulrich series.

On the Nature of Marx’s Things is a major rethinking of the Marxian tradition, one based not on fixed things but on the inextricable interrelation between the material world and our language for it. Lezra traces to Marx’s earliest writings a subterranean, Lucretian practice that he calls necrophilological translation that continues to haunt Marx’s inheritors. This Lucretian strain, requiring that we think materiality in non-self-evident ways, as dynamic, aleatory, and always marked by its relation to language, raises central questions about ontology, political economy, and reading. “Lezra,” writes Vittorio Morfino in his preface, “transfers all of the power of the Althusserian encounter into his conception of translation.” Lezra’s expansive understanding of translation covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Obscured by later critical attention to the contradictory lexicons—of fetishism and of chrematistics—that Capital uses to describe how value accrues to commodities, and by the dialectical approach that’s framed Marx’s work since Engels sought to marry it to the natural philosophy of his time, necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx’s thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an object is, of what counts as matter, value, sovereignty, mediation, and even number. In On the Nature of Marx’s Things a materialism “of the encounter,” as recent criticism in the vein of the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form theory, post-Schmittian divisible sovereignty, object-oriented-ontologies and the critique of correlationism, and philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine, Cassin, and Derrida. The inheritors of the problems with which Marx grapples range from Spinoza’s marranismo, through Melville’s Bartleby, through the development of a previously unexplored Freudian political theology shaped by the revolutionary traditions of Schiller and Verdi, through Adorno’s exilic antihumanism against Said’s cosmopolitan humanism, through today’s new materialisms. Ultimately, necrophilology draws the story of capital’s capture of difference away from the story of capital’s production of subjectivity. It affords concepts and procedures for dismantling the system of objects on which neoliberal capitalism stands: concrete, this-wordly things like commodities, but also such “objects” as debt traps, austerity programs, the marketization of risk; ideologies; the pedagogical, professional, legal, even familial institutions that produce and reproduce inequities today.

Another cruise is off to a deadly start… Ruth Shores—cruise ship pastry chef extraordinaire—is busy creating her scrumptious desserts for an upcoming class reunion. The party includes an appearance by the famed alumnus and world-renowned author, Vincent Von Hemmingsly. Understaffed, Ruth must work alongside her best friend, Loretta Moran, to meet an unrealistic deadline for the party. But there is a shining hope: newly hired John Anderson, a recent graduate of an esteemed culinary arts academy. However, instead of being an asset to their team, it’s soon discovered that he’s clumsy and prone to causing calamity in the kitchen. But Ruth’s fumbling new team member is the least of their worries. The reunion party ends as tragically as one of Von Hemmingsly’s novels, and Ruth and Loretta find themselves in the middle of another mystery. When it is discovered that the victim was poisoned by Loretta’s chocolate soufflé, Loretta is deemed the prime suspect. Will Ruth help her best friend prove her innocence? Or will their futures be as beyond repair as the dozens of cupcakes splattered on the kitchen floor? Shenanigans. Madcap fun. And murder. All wrapped up in this fun and quirky cozy mystery! Killer Soufflés & Clichés is the second book in this nutty, lighthearted Cruise Ship Cozy Mystery Series. So, get nestled in a cozy chair, pour your favorite beverage, and get ready for an exciting Bahamas escapade aboard the Splendor of the Seas! For lovers of books by Molly Fitz, A.R. Winters, Hope Callaghan, JA Whiting, HY Hanna, and Shelly West.

This book is a selection of papers written over 25 years of practising psychoanalytic psychotherapy, of training and supervising psychotherapists, psychodynamic counsellors and supervisors. It reflects a preoccupation with the growth and diversification of counselling and psychotherapy, with the imperatives of training, supervision and regulation, and with the significant changes in the profession due to the invention of brief, time-limited, intermittent and recurrent psychotherapy. An overall theme is the conviction that what patients and therapists share is vulnerability, and that the therapist is a 'wounded healer', whose reparative tendency informs his professional choice, his therapeutic empathy and his capacity to bear the rigours of therapeutic work. Thus an unconscious connection between the helper and the helped is the driving force of every therapeutic relationship, for better and for worse. Its responsible management requires thorough training, ongoing supervision and a firm frame in order to contain the powerful forces operating when two strangers meet for the purpose of therapy.

Childhood friends Jimmy Lemond and Peter LeBlanc grow into adulthood during the tumultuous days of the Vietnam War. Like Herman Melville’s character, Bartleby, they both “prefer not to” take up arms, but they still can’t avoid turmoil. Jimmy is a student journalist who soon finds himself on the front lines of protests, where his fellow students not only demand an end to war but also the end of racism and segregation in their college community. Peter is still haunted by his father’s death on an ill-fated fishing trip. He joins the Mennonites in Vietnam as a peace worker. Through his relationship with a Thai woman he is introduced to the Mother Goddess ceremony and finds spiritual confirmation of his gender transformation. What an intriguing and unexpected tale Robitaille gives us. Bartleby’s Revenge kept me turning pages. The novel engages themes I care about a great deal, specifically those of peacemaking in response to war and of personality development through all the vicissitudes of social forces swirling around us. The story brought home for me in a renewed way the impact of the American War in Vietnam on individuals and families here in the US, particularly those with children facing the draft. For me as a Mennonite peacemaker, the draft was a welcome thing that midwifed me from a sheltered life here to years of peace work in Vietnam during the war, a path similar to that of one of the protagonist’s in the novel. —Earl Martin, author of Reaching the Other Side (1978), memoir of Mennonite peace work service in Vietnam I loved it. The pairing of Peter and Jimmy is a beautiful framework; their divergence and reunion are really engaging. They achieve a reconciliation without sentimentality, predictability, or compromise of their richly developed characters. —William C. Lineaweaver, MD, Editor in Chief, Annals of Plastic Surgery ... That a son of New Bedford imagines his life and the biography of his generation through the lens of Melville’s Bartleby is a moving exemplar of a mystory, testing in novel form Nietzsche’s insight, that life is the iron hand of necessity shaking the dice box of chance. —Gregory Ulmer, Professor of English, University of Florida and author of Teletheory and Internet Invention