The Master Of Knots

“Dangerous, edgy noir crime fiction at its absolute finest and certain to be one of my books of the year” featuring PI Marco “The Alligator” Burrati (reviewingtheevidence.com). A woman has gone missing. Her husband, too ashamed to admit to the police that he and his wife were part of a ring of sexual adventurers that organized sadomasochistic orgies, turns instead to the Alligator. Marco Burrati enters a depraved demiworld where ferocious deviates prey upon lonely victims. But the savagery of this world is only the first surprise this investigation holds in store for the Alligator. Encountering such violence and desperation triggers memories of his own time in prison. And while the unwritten rule of ex-cons is that you must never talk about your experiences behind bars, the Alligator and his two longtime associates, Max the Memory and Beniamino Rossini, are forced to confront demons they thought long buried. In The Master of Knots, “the reigning king of Mediterranean noir,” Massimo Carlotto, gives his readers a work of hardboiled noir fiction that is darker than ever before as he digs into the shadowy corners of human experience (The Boston Phoenix). This stunning novel sets a new high-water mark in the literary history of the Mediterranean Noir novel. “Brooding, sexual, and connected to Italy’s socio-political climate . . . Carlotto’s tight prose makes for a quick and satisfying journey into a world absent of clear-cut morality.” —Publishers Weekly “The author shows a sure grasp of the double lives of BDSM devotees for whom unmasking would mean calamity.” —Kirkus Reviews

Knots features a cast of eccentric and only conditionally-trustworthy characters that will appeal to fans of Roger Zelazny or Neil Gaiman. Or if you enjoy the inventive magic systems of Brandon Sanderson, let Knots introduce you to Topomancy. In this world, a precisely tied knot, an exactly folded paper, or a cunningly drawn figure can unlock wonders and horrors. Resche, an art thief, finds himself in a quaint Swiss town that borders Spain on one side and South America on the other. Mages are engaged in playing a game of Geomancy with tiles the size of cities. When he is caught stealing from one of them, he becomes a pawn in their intricate game. The Fractalist priest is enigmatic, the Jeweler may not be what he seems, and the Astromancer turned up dead the night he consulted her. Emeline, the newspaper editor, seems sympathetic, but what are her motives? His companion Trefoil tells Resche to trust her, but what does a cat know (even a talking one)? It’s time to find a way back to his own world, but the bridge he crossed has vanished in the fog. Wouldn’t you love to have a Knot of Confusion to use against your enemies? Step into the unique world of Knots today. Just remember your way back.

A serial killer leaves his victims tied with intricate knots as he tries to surpass his heros, two notorious serial killers.

Climbing: Knots features instructional knot-making information for the novice climber. Pocket-size, it's portable and easy-to-use, with photos throughout to assist with learning.

Backpacker's Outdoor Knots provides readers step-by-step instructions for tying the most useful knots and hitches, splices and lashings for the outdoors; info on the best type of rope and knot for each task at hand; how to properly prepare, coil, and maintain ropes for durability and reliability. This handy pocket-sized guide is 96 pages, includes two popouts, and incorporates color photos, charts, and illustrations as needed throughout the interior.

This collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide array of new psychoanalytic approaches impacted by Lacanian theory, queer studies, post-colonial studies, feminism, and deconstruction in the domains of film and literature. We have witnessed a remarkable return to psychoanalysis in those fields, fields from which it had been excluded or discredited for a while. This has changed recently, and we need to understand why. The fourteen essays make use a freshly minted psychoanalytic concepts to read diverse texts, films and social practices. The distinguished authors gathered here, an international group of scholars coming from Japan, China, Korea, India, Belgium, Greece, France, Australia, and the USA, are all cognizant of the advances of theory under the form of deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial studies and trauma studies. These essays take into account the latest developments in Lacanian theory and never bracket off subjective agency when dealing with literature or film. The authors make sense of changes brought to psychoanalytical theory by redefinitions of the Oedipus complex, reconsiderations of the death drive, applications of Lacan’s symptom and the concept of the Real, reassessments of the links between affect and trauma, insights into the resilience of Romantic excess and jouissance, awareness of the role of transference in classical and modernist texts, and pedagogical techniques aimed at teaching difficult texts, all the while testifying to the influence on Lacanian theory of thinkers like Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Melanie Klein, Didier Anzieu, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003002727