Sojourns

Heidegger's philosophical journal, written during his first visit to Greece in 1962, and appearing here in English for the first time.

Sojourns and Extremes of Stochastic Processes is a research monograph in the area of probability theory. During the past thirty years Berman has made many contributions to the theory of the extreme values and sojourn times of the sample functions of broad classes of stochastic processes. These processes arise in theoretical and applied models, and are presented here in a unified exposition.

A sweeping collection of observations and episodes penned by visitors to Louisiana from the sixteenth century to the 1990s, Louisiana Sojourns is—much like the state itself—a wonder to behold in its sum, and in its particulars, full of surprise and delight. The seventy-six pieces that Frank A. de Caro has selected give readers a vivid sense of how Louisiana's unique blend of Old World, South, the exotic, and quintessential America has exerted a pull and hold on travelers. Included are writings by well-known figures such as Mark Twain, Teddy Roosevelt, Kate Chopin, John Steinbeck, Frederick Law Olmsted, Walker Percy, William Faulkner, Simone de Beauvoir, Henry Miller, John James Audubon, Calvin Trillin, Zora Neale Hurston, A. J. Liebling, William Least Heat Moon, and Frederick Turner. Dozens of other wayfarers are represented as well.

This collection of essays represents a reflective inquiry into the way in which our world is set apart from its past, its present defined and its destiny shaped by technology. The contributors tackle the subject from different perspectives within the fields of philosophy and politics.

In this, the first of the Wanderings and Sojourns series, the reader is taken on a variety of journeys spanning all the continents of the world except Antarctica and Australasia. They'll travel by sea and land through Caribbean islands and sub-Saharan savannah, South American mountain ranges and rivers of Asia, North African markets and verdant English valleys, all the while living the adventures and experiences that gave rise to the unique philosophies shared within these pages. Interspersed between these true stories are works of lyrical verse; songs as varied as the wanderings and sojourns from which they were born. Themes vary from sharing of wisdom among travelers to respect for one's rifle during insurgent war, transition of a boy into manhood or the last portage two adventurers will ever share. The world beyond convention is the canvas upon which these unusual stories and songs are painted, the pallet comprises an entire spectra from shipwreck to war, spirituality to atavism, Aboriginals to ghosts, and the resulting pictures provide a fascinating view of the world as seen through unusual windows by someone who doesn't quite conform to the norms of society....

In this haunting and noirish novel by a leading author and critic, an Indian writer travels to Berlin and soon finds himself slipping into a fragmented, fuguelike state. An Indian writer has come to Berlin as a visiting professor. This is his second sojourn in the city, which seems strange, and also strangely familiar, to him. He is disoriented by its names, its immensity, and its history; he is worried that something may happen to him there. Faqrul, a friendly Bangladeshi poet living in exile, takes him up—then disappears. The visiting writer is increasingly adrift in a city that not long ago was two cities, each cut off from the other, much as the new unified city is cut off from the divided one of the past. It is the fall of 2005; every day it grows colder. The visitor is beginning to feel his middle age. To him, the new world of the twenty-first century, with its endless commodities from all over the place and no prospect of any sort of historical transformation, appears to exist in a state of amnesiac suspense. He gets involved with a woman, Birgit. He begins to miss his classes. He blacks out in the street. People are worried. “I’ve lost my bearings—not in the city; in its history,” he thinks. “The less sure I become of it, the more I know my way.” But does he? Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn is a dramatic and disconcerting work of fiction, a book about the present as it slips into the past, a picture of a city and of a troubled mind, a historical novel about an ostensibly post-historical time, a story of haunting. Here, as in his earlier work, Chaudhuri pries open fictional form to explore questions of public and private life in ways that are both bold and subtle.