The Pirate Who Does Not Know The Value Of Pi

An original collection from one of the most active poets in contemporary literature. Winner of the 2019 International Poetry Prize from the City of Münster The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi is a poem-novel about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot who, after capturing a certain quantity of prizes, are shipwrecked on a deserted island, where they proceed to discuss whether they would have been able to communicate with people indigenous to the island, had there been any. Characterized by multilingual punning, humor puerile and set-theoretical, philosophical irony and narrative handicaps, Eugene Ostashevsky’s new large-scale project draws on sources as various as early modern texts about pirates and animal intelligence, old-school hip-hop, and game theory to pursue the themes of emigration, incomprehension, untranslatability, and the otherness of others.

An experiment with language. Is it an object cultivated in poetic laboratories where entry is locked for mere mortals? And what do language scholars think about it? Specialists in language and literature studies interested in linguistic innovation and experimental poetry will find answers to these questions in Vladimir Feshchenko’s book. The study investigates various strategies of radical linguistic creativity in Russian and American experimental writing of the 20th century and explores cases of contemporary ‘language-oriented’ and ‘trans-language’ poetry. It is a comparative examination of two national avant-garde cultures, but also a juxtaposition of the relationships that Russian and American avant-garde poetics had with linguistic ideas of their times. The monograph may serve as a wonderful introduction to the entire field of ‘linguistic poetics of the avant-garde’.

Award-winning poet Elaine Equi selects the poems for the 2023 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). Since its debut in 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents some of the year’s most striking and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves offering insight into their work. For The Best American Poetry 2023 guest editor Elaine Equi, whose own work is “deft, delicate [and] subversive” (August Kleinzahler), has made astute choices representing contemporary poetry at its most dynamic. The result is an exceptionally coherent vision of American poetry today. Including valuable introductory essays contributed by the series and guest editors, the 2023 volume is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.

This textbook is designed for an Introduction to Proofs course organized around the themes of number and space. Concepts are illustrated using both geometric and number examples, while frequent analogies and applications help build intuition and context in the humanities, arts, and sciences. Sophisticated mathematical ideas are introduced early and then revisited several times in a spiral structure, allowing students to progressively develop rigorous thinking. Throughout, the presentation is enlivened with whimsical illustrations, apt quotations, and glimpses of mathematical history and culture. Early chapters integrate an introduction to sets, logic, and beginning proof techniques with a first exposure to more advanced mathematical structures. The middle chapters focus on equivalence relations, functions, and induction. Carefully chosen examples elucidate familiar topics, such as natural and rational numbers and angle measurements, as well as new mathematics, such as modular arithmetic and beginning graph theory. The book concludes with a thorough exploration of the cardinalities of finite and infinite sets and, in two optional chapters, brings all the topics together by constructing the real numbers and other complete metric spaces. Designed to foster the mental flexibility and rigorous thinking needed for advanced mathematics, Introduction to Mathematics suits either a lecture-based or flipped classroom. A year of mathematics, statistics, or computer science at the university level is assumed, but the main prerequisite is the willingness to engage in a new challenge.

Whimsical and revolutionary poems and art by some of Russia's foremost avant-garde writers and illustrators A boy wants a toy horse big enough to ride, but where can his father find it? Not in the stores, which means it’s got to be built from scratch. How? With the help of expert workers, from the carpenter to the painter, working together as one. And now the bold boy is ready to ride off in defense of the future! Two trams, Click and Zam, are cousins. Click goes out for a day on the tracks and before long he’s so tired he doesn’t know where he is or how to get back. All he knows is he’s got to find Zam. Click is looking for Zam and Zam is looking for Click, and though for a while it seems like nobody knows where to find Click, good and faithful Zam is not to be deterred. Peter’s a car, Vasco’s a steamboat, and Mikey’s a plane. They’re all running like mad and going great guns until, whoops, there’s a big old cow, just a plain old cow, standing in the road. What then? The early years of the Soviet Union were a golden age for children’s literature. The Fire Horse brings together three classics from the era in which some of Russia’s most celebrated poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Daniil Kharms, teamed up with some of its finest artists, Lidia Popova, Boris Ender, and Vladimir Konashevich. Brilliantly translated by the poet Eugene Ostashevsky, this is poetry that is as whimsical and wonderful as it is revolutionary.

Slyly funny, inventive, and virtuosic, this new collection from a Russian-American master challenges poetic convention and explores themes of alienhood, translation, and human emotion. In Eugene Ostashevsky’s The Feeling Sonnets—his fourth collection of poems— words, idioms, sentences, and poetic conventions are dislodged and defamiliarized in order to convey the experience of living in a land, and a language, apart. The book consists of four cycles of fourteen unrhymed, unmetered sonnets. The first cycle asks about the relationship between interpretation and emotion, whether “we feel the feelings that we call ours.” The second cycle, mainly composed of “daughter sonnets,” describes bringing up children in a foreign country and a foreign language. The third cycle, called “Die Schreibblockade,” German for writer’s block, talks about foreign-language processing of inherited historical trauma, in this case the siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944. The fourth cycle is about translation. The sonnets are followed by a short libretto, commissioned by the Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti, about Ravel’s interaction with Paul Wittgenstein over the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

The first part of the yearbook contains ten essays on Futurist art and literature in Italy, France, Russia, Poland, Portugal and the former colony of Goa. Among other things, early Futurist publishing and propaganda initiatives by means of manifestos, press releases, and newssheets are examined, as well as Athos Casarini's artistic and political work undertaken in Italy and the USA. Articles in the second part deal with the 30th anniversary of the international Academy of Zaum as well as various conferences, exhibitions and publications celebrating the centenary of Zenitism in Serbia and Croatia. Critical responses to exhibitions, conferences and publications as well as a bibliographical section with information on 139 recent book publications on Futurism conclude the yearbook.