To The Margins

Have you ever heard, "you were really great, but the chosen candidate just had a bit more experience?" How about "we really liked your pitch, but the other vendor tightened their pricing/" Or, "you've been doing a fabulous job, but I think we'll hold off this year for your promotion?" If you've ever experienced any of these, somewhere deep in your gut, you've probably questioned what you could have done differently to change the outcome. Where in the interview, meeting, or day-to-day performance did you "lose" the chance for success? At The Margins: Mastering the Nuances of Communication to Build Credibility, Persuade and Differentiate will help you dramatically increase your success in every high stakes communication. The line between winning a pitch or getting that great job is often no different than the Olympic sprinter who wins the Gold Medal by fractions of seconds. All the competitors are outstanding, but the winner did a few subtle things marginally better, giving them the winning edge. At The Margins looks at every aspect of Communication with a similar lens. In a competitive environment where everyone is good, you need to master all the nuances of presenting an idea and yourself credibly, persuasively and, confidently to give decision-makers that feeling that you are the best! At The Margins will help you build your entire communication repertoire: effective presentations, pitches, starting and carrying conversations, asking great questions...and most critically, listening. Persuading key stakeholders may result in winning a major piece of business, getting approval on a critical initiative, building your professional credibility, or making you feel empowered. You know how important it is to communicate with confidence, clarity, and conviction. Like anyone great at anything, it looks effortless, but every great athlete, artist, or musician has spent countless hours honing their skills to make it look easy. Communication is no different. At The Margins: Mastering the Nuances of Communication to Build Credibility, Persuade, and Differentiate will help you rethink Communication without having to give up any of your authenticity. Whether you're a "natural" or the person who is deathly afraid of being the centre of attention, this book will help you be consistently credible, persuasive, and differentiate you from your competition. Neil Grammer has been a Communication Coach and Consultant for over 25 years. He has coached thousands of business professionals from CEO's and Board Members to new hires just starting their careers. He has worked with hundreds of decision-makers to learn what ultimately persuades them to commit their time, resources and, ultimately, reputations when they approve a contract or new hire. This combination of in-depth real-world experience and perspective on how decision-makers think that makes At The Margins a book that will help you improve at the one skill that most differentiates you and your business.

Four "pitch-perfect" (Oprah Daily) essays by the author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lost Daughter. In these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look into the origins of her literary prowess. She describes her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she warns against the perils of "bad language" and the ways in which it has long excluded women's truth; she proposes a choral fusion of feminine talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Ingeborg Bachmann, and many others. An "incandescent...philosophical monograph on the nature of writing," (Molly Young, New York Times) this candid collection by one of the great novelists of our time is destined to delight general readers, writers, and Ferrante fans in equal measure. "Everyone should read everything with Elena Ferrante's name on it."--The Boston Globe

The death of Edmond Jabès in January 1991 silenced one of the most compelling voices of the postmodern, post-Holocaust era. Jabès's importance as a thinker, philosopher, and Jewish theologian cannot be overestimated, and his enigmatic style—combining aphorism, fictional dialogue, prose meditation, poetry, and other forms—holds special appeal for postmodern sensibilities. In The Book of Margins, his most critical as well as most accessible book, Jabès is again concerned with the questions that inform all of his work: the nature of writing, of silence, of God and the Book. Jabès considers the work of several of his contemporaries, including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Roger Caillois, Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Leiris, Emmanuel Lévinas, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and his translator, Rosmarie Waldrop. This book will be important reading for students of Jewish literature, French literature, and literature of the modern and postmodern ages. Born in Cairo in 1912, Edmond Jabès lived in France from 1956 until his death in 1991. His extensively translated and widely honored works include The Book of Questions and The Book of Shares. Both of these were translated into English by Rosmarie Waldrop, who is also a poet. Religion and Postmodernism series

Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname.

Artist Charley Keo's new gig begins as a fun challenge to breathe new life into the forgotten pulp world of Elad - this time as a comic book. But as tendrils of this lost realm creep into her sleepy Portland neighborhood, Charley realizes that Elad is much more than the lines on a day-dreamt map, more than the sum of an old hack's prose. Elad has its hooks in Charley, and what was once fantasy has become deadly reality for both the artist and the woman she loves.

Each of the chapters in this volume derives from recently conducted research grounded in an attempt to examine some of the issues posed in what can be described as postmodernist theorising on the nature of the contemporary city. Implicit in the very conception of the book, and running through each of the contributions, is the view that contemporary popular culture is crucial to the understanding of the transformations to which we refer, and that the investigation of this popular culture needs to move beyond the parameters of cultural studies to include sociological, political and economic analyses. In addition to students of popular cultural studies, the book will be of interest to all those studying sociology, urban studies and cultural studies, as well as those with a desire to have contemporary social theorising more firmly located in empirical investigation.

Should modern Chinese history be approached from the center looking out or from the margins looking in? In this book, twelve contributors attempt to answer this question. In the process, they adopt various conceptual schemes for understanding relations between the center and the margins, including at least four different ones: capital as center and provinces as margins; coast as center and interior as margins; cultural metropolis as center and parochial hinterland as margins; China as a center and bordering states also as centers with margins in between. The contributors explore the relations between these centers and margins in periods of time that span three major political eras: the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) when China s capital was in Beijing; the Republic of China (1912-1949) when its capital was in Beijing (1912-1927), Nanjing (1927 1937), Chongqing (1938-1945), and Nanjing again (1945-1949); and the People s Republic of China (1949-present) when its capital has been in Beijing. Taken together, the essays have both a cohesive thematic unity and a long chronological sweep.

Experimenting with new ways of looking at the contexts, subjects, processes and multiple political stances that make up life at the margins, this book provides a novel source for a critical rethinking of marginalisation. Drawing on post-colonialism and critical assemblage thinking, the rich ethnographic works presented in the book trace the assemblage of marginality in multiple case-studies encompassing the Global North and South. These works are united by the approach developed in the book, characterised by the refusal of a priori definitions and by a post-human and grounded take on the assemblage of life. The result is a nuanced attention to the potential expressed by everyday articulations and a commitment to produce a processual, vitalist and non-normative cultural politics of the margins. The reader will find in this book unique challenges to accepted and authoritative thinking, and provides new insights into researching life at the margins.