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Imagining Reality
Considered Charlottesville's most eligible lesbian, Jessie Ximena has recently grown tired of that status and has stopped dating entirely She'd rather focus on the important things in life like her family, her friends, and her job. There will always be plenty of time for relationships when she feels like jumping back into the fray. If she finds someone to hold her interest, that is. Lauren Aleric has been searching for Ms. Right since she began dating, but no one has yet filled the role. Her friends think that she's too much of a romantic mush to settle. She wishes she could be more like her good friend Jessie, who seems perfectly happy dating casually. But mostly, she wishes she could be like her best friend, Austy, who's just found her forever love. Imagining Reality is the story of these two friends and how they discover that what they're both looking for isn't as far apart as they might think..
Price: $12.55
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Imagining Argentina
Imagining Argentina is set in the dark days of the late 1970's, when thousands of Argentineans disappeared without a trace into the general's prison cells and torture chambers. When Carlos Ruweda's wife is suddenly taken from him, he discovers a magical gift: In waking dreams, he had clear visions of the fates of "the disappeared." But he cannot "imagine" what has happened to his own wife. Driven to near madness, his mind cannot be taken away: imagination, stories, and the mystical secrets of the human spirit..
Price: $2.50
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Money Jungle: Imagining the New Times Square
For more than a century, Times Square has mesmerized the world with the spectacle of its dazzling supersigns, its theaters, and its often-seedy nightlife. New York City's iconic crossroads has drawn crowds of revelers, thrill-seekers, and other urban denizens, not to mention lavish outpourings of advertising and development money. Many have hotly debated the recent transformation of this legendary intersection, with voices typically falling into two opposing camps. Some applaud a blighted red-light district becoming a big-budget, mainstream destination. Others lament an urban zone of lawless possibility being replaced by a Disneyfied, theme-park version of New York. In Money Jungle, Benjamin Chesluk shows that what is really at stake in Times Square are fundamental questions about city life--questions of power, pleasure, and what it means to be a citizen in contemporary urban space. Chesluk weaves together surprising stories of everyday life in and around the Times Square redevelopment, tracing the connections between people from every level of this grand project in social and spatial engineering: the developers, architects, and designers responsible for reshaping the urban public spaces of Times Square and Forty-second Street; the experimental Midtown Community Court and its Times Square Ink. job-training program for misdemeanor criminals; encounters between NYPD officers and residents of Hell's Kitchen; and angry confrontations between city planners and neighborhood activists over the future of the area. With an eye for offbeat, telling details and a perspective that is at once sympathetic and critical, Chesluk documents how the redevelopment has tried, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to reshape the people and places of Times Square. The result is a colorful and engaging portrait, illustrated by stunning photographs by long-time local photographer Maggie Hopp, of the street life, politics, economics, and cultural forces that mold America's urban centers..
Price: $16.47
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Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land, Revised Edition
The acclaimed multicultural fiction anthology, updated to include recent writers Thirty-seven short stories from 1900 to the present, written by some of our best authors—African, Asian, European, Jewish, Middle Eastern, and Native American—follow the waves of immigration into and migration within the United States. These stories are unique in time and circumstance, yet they address a common dilemma: how to reconcile America's mythologized "promise" with its more complex reality. New to the collection are Sherman Alexie, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Chitra Divakaruni, Jewelle Gomez, Thomas King, Bruce Morrow, Agnes Rossi, and David Wong Louie. They join Toni Cade Bambara, Richard Bausch, Marita Bonner, Nash Candelaria, Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Mei Mei Evans, Oscar Hijuelos, Gish Jen, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Kim Yong Ik, Monfoon Leong, Bernard Malamud, Paule Marshall, Nicholasa Mohr, Toshio Mori, Bharati Mukherjee, Mikhail Naimy, Tahira Naqvi, Gregory Orfalea, Grace Paley, Jeanne Schinto, Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Stephens, Sui Sin Far, Alice Walker, and Hisaye Yamamoto—making this, once again, the most authoritative and useful multicultural collection available..
Price: $9.99
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The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church
The conventional wisdom about mainline Protestantism maintains that it is a dying tradition, irrelevant to a postmodern society, unresponsive to change, and increasingly disconnected from its core faith tenets. In her provocative new book, historian and researcher Diana Butler Bass argues that there are signs that mainline Protestant churches are indeed changing, finding a new vitality intentionally grounded in Christian practices and laying the groundwork for a new type of congregation. The Practicing Congregation tracks these changes by looking at the overall history of American congregations, noting the cultural trends that have sparked change, and providing evidence of how mainline churches are reappropriating traditional Christian practices. The signs of life that Bass identifies lead the reader beyond the crumbling "liberal vs. conservative" dualities to a more nuanced and fluid understanding of the shape of contemporary ecclesiology and faithfulness. In so doing, she helps readers understand tradition in new ways and creates an alternative path through the culture wars that today arrest the energies of most denominations. Invigorated by stories from Bass's own experience, The Practicing Congregation provides a hopeful and exciting vision for the church. The imaginative "retraditioning" she identifies and celebrates will guide pastors and other leaders on this "pilgrimage of creating church" and convincingly counter the naysayers that long ago gave up on the viability of the mainline church..
Price: $14.00
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Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category
Imagining Transgender is an ethnography of the emergence and institutionalization of transgender as a category of collective identity and political activism. Embraced by activists in the early 1990s to advocate for gender-variant people, the category quickly gained momentum in public health, social service, scholarly, and legislative contexts. Working as a safer-sex activist in Manhattan during the late 1990s, David Valentine conducted ethnographic research among mostly male-to-female transgender-identified people at drag balls, support groups, cross-dresser organizations, clinics, bars, and clubs. However, he found that many of those labeled “transgender” by activists did not know the term or resisted its use. Instead, they self-identified as “gay,” a category of sexual rather than gendered identity and one rejected in turn by the activists who claimed these subjects as transgender. Valentine analyzes the reasons for and potential consequences of this difference, and how social theory is implicated in it. Valentine argues that “transgender” has been adopted so rapidly in the contemporary United States because it clarifies a model of gender and sexuality that has been gaining traction within feminism, psychiatry, and mainstream gay and lesbian politics since the 1970s: a paradigm in which gender and sexuality are distinct arenas of human experience. This distinction and the identity categories based on it erase the experiences of some gender-variant peopleâparticularly poor persons of colorâwho conceive of gender and sexuality in other terms. While recognizing the important advances transgender has facilitated, Valentine argues that a broad vision of social justice must include, simultaneously, an attentiveness to the politics of language and a recognition of how social theoretical models and broader political economies are embedded in the day-to-day politics of identity..
Price: $20.62
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Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism)
With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological.
Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them.
"These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."—Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review
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Price: $19.77
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Imagining the Balkans
"If the Balkans hadn't existed, they would have been invented" was the verdict of Count Hermann Keyserling in his famous 1928 publication, Europe. This book traces the relationship between the reality and the invention. Based on a rich selection of travelogues, diplomatic accounts, academic surveys, journalism, and belles-lettres in many languages, Imagining the Balkans explores the ontology of the Balkans from the eighteenth century to the present day, uncovering the ways in which an insidious intellectual tradition was constructed, became mythologized, and is still being transmitted as discourse. The author, who was raised in the Balkans, is in a unique position to bring both scholarship and sympathy to her subject. A region geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as "the other," the Balkans have often served as a repository of negative characteristics upon which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the "European" has been built. With this work, Todorova offers a timely, accessible study of how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into one of the most powerful and widespread pejorative designations in modern history..
Price: $21.95
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