By Afshin rad

The document The Inner Beams by Afshin Rad is a historical novel set in East Berlin during the final years of the Cold War, focusing on the brutal atmosphere created by the East German Ministry of State Security, the Stasi. The narrative combines political history with a deeply personal story, illustrating how authoritarianism corrodes ordinary lives. It opens with a preface explaining the power and reach of the Stasi, an organization that employed nearly a hundred thousand agents and twice as many informants under the chilling slogan that anyone who “thinks differently” is an enemy.

The story follows Nadia, a young, marginalized woman surviving on the fringes of society through prostitution while raising her daughter Maya. Despite her poverty, stigmatization, and abuse at the hands of neighbors and strangers, she displays resilience and a rebellious spirit. Her life becomes entangled with the violence and hypocrisy of both the state and the church. She is alternately vilified and desired, caught between accusations of being a spy and exploitation by priests who hide their own corruption.

As events unfold, Nadia becomes a victim of the Stasi’s cruelty. She is imprisoned, tortured, and left for dead, only to be saved by a compassionate old man who hides her and helps her plan to reclaim her daughter, who has been taken by Party officials. Their efforts culminate in a daring but tragic attempt to rescue the child from a powerful regime family. The old man sacrifices his life to protect Nadia, while she herself endures near-death encounters in the collapsing state.

Against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall’s fall and the chaos of 1989, Nadia’s fate is sealed in both tragedy and symbolic triumph. Though she dies violently, her memory and sacrifice become a posthumous inspiration. Her grave, once marked with disdain, is later reclaimed as a shrine to freedom, with an epitaph honoring her rebellious spirit.

The work blends history, fiction, and allegory to show how individuals—especially the marginalized and forgotten—resist oppression and become unwilling martyrs of liberty. Through Nadia’s story, the book captures the human cost of totalitarianism while leaving readers with a sense of dignity, defiance, and the enduring value of freedom.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 77p.

By Ring W. Gardner (Author), Colin Heston (Preface) Format: Kindle Edition

Round Up gathers together the taut, muscular stories of Ring W. Lardner, a writer whose work bridges the divide between the mythologized West and its harsher, less forgiving realities. In these pages, Lardner is neither sentimental nor nostalgic. He strips the Western narrative to its barest elements, presenting us with a landscape that is both expansive and claustrophobic, and characters who are caught between the lure of freedom and the inevitability of fate.
Lardner’s contribution to the American short story lies in his ability to invest the familiar tropes of frontier life with psychological depth and moral ambiguity. His cowboys and ranchers are not mere archetypes; they are restless souls negotiating loyalty, isolation, and survival in a world where law and justice are provisional at best. The violence in these stories is never gratuitous—it is sudden, often senseless, and always carries a human cost. Lardner understands that the West was not only a place but also an idea, one that promised reinvention yet often delivered ruin.
What sets Lardner apart from many of his contemporaries is his prose: terse, unsentimental, yet charged with a quiet lyricism. His narratives move with the inevitability of a gathering storm, his dialogue as spare as the plains he describes. The result is a body of work that feels astonishingly modern in its refusal of easy resolutions.
In an era when the Western genre risks being dismissed as an artifact of popular culture, Round Up demands reconsideration. These are not mere adventure tales or moral fables. They are stories of a liminal world, where the boundaries between civilization and wilderness, justice and vengeance, myth and memory, blur and collapse. Lardner’s West is not simply the West that was; it is also the West as it continues to haunt the American imagination.

By George Meredith (Author)

Set in an imaginary Oriental landscape, The Shaving of Shagpat follows the humble barber Shibli Bagarag, who embarks on an epic quest to perform the symbolic and dangerous act of shaving Shagpat—a powerful figure whose enchanted, unshorn hair represents the tyranny of falsehood and delusion over the minds of men. The narrative is populated with genies, enchantresses, magical cities, and perilous tasks, weaving a tapestry of adventure that operates on both the literal and allegorical planes. At first glance, The Shaving of Shagpat appears to be a whimsical fantasy—an exotic romance filled with the familiar trappings of Eastern fable. Yet beneath the surface lies a sophisticated commentary on the nature of truth, illusion, and the moral evolution of the individual. Meredith uses the framework of fantasy not merely to entertain but to craft a parable about the necessity of intellectual courage and the struggle for personal enlightenment.

For contemporary readers, the book remains a fascinating artifact of literary daring—a playful yet profound reminder that the struggle against illusion, whether in the form of personal vanity or societal falsehood, is both eternal and essential. In The Shaving of Shagpat, Meredith offers not only an enchanting fable but also an enduring meditation on the human condition.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 242p.

By Markus Nehl

Markus Nehl focuses on black authors who, from a 21st-century perspective, revisit slavery in the U.S., Ghana, South Africa, Canada and Jamaica. Nehl’s provocative readings of Toni Morrison’s »A Mercy«, Saidiya Hartman’s »Lose Your Mother«, Yvette Christiansë’s »Unconfessed«, Lawrence Hill’s »The Book of Negroes« and Marlon James’ »The Book of Night Women« delineate how these texts engage in a fruitful dialogue with African diaspora theory about the complex relation between the local and transnational and the enduring effects of slavery. Reflecting on the ethics of narration, this study is particularly attentive to the risks of representing anti-black violence and to the intricacies involved in (re-)appropriating slavery's archive.

Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag, 2016. 213p.

By Dimitri A. Bogazianos

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law repealing one of the most controversial policies in American criminal justice history: the one hundred to one sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder whereby someone convicted of “simply” possessing five grams of crack—the equivalent of a few sugar packets—had been required by law to serve no less than five years in prison. In this highly original work, Dimitri A. Bogazianos draws on various sources to examine the profound symbolic consequences of America’s reliance on this punishment structure, tracing the rich cultural linkages between America’s War on Drugs, and the creative contributions of those directly affected by its destructive effects.

Focusing primarily on lyrics that emerged in 1990s New York rap, which critiqued the music industry for being corrupt, unjust, and criminal, Bogazianos shows how many rappers began drawing parallels between the “rap game” and the “crack game." He argues that the symbolism of crack in rap’s stance towards its own commercialization represents a moral debate that is far bigger than hip hop culture, highlighting the degree to which crack cocaine—although a drug long in decline—has come to represent the entire paradoxical predicament of punishment in the U.S. today.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2011. 216p.

by Gregory Forter

Though American crime novels are often derided for containing misogynistic attitudes and limiting ideas of masculinity, Greg Forter maintains that they are instead psychologically complex and sophisticated works that demand closer attention. Eschewing the synthetic methodologies of earlier work on crime fiction, Murdering Masculinities argues that the crime novel does not provide a consolidated and stable notion of masculinity. Rather, it demands that male readers take responsibility for the desires they project on to these novels.
Forter examines the narrative strategies of five novels--Hammett's The Glass Key, Cain's Serenade, Faulkner's Sanctuary, Thompson's Pop. 1280, and Himes's Blind Man with a Pistol--in conjunction with their treatment of bodily metaphors of smell, vision, and voice. In the process, Forter unearths a "generic unconscious" that reveals things Freud both discovered and sought to repress.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2000. 278p.

By Martha Grace Duncan

An ex-convict struggles with his addictive yearning for prison. A law-abiding citizen broods over his pleasure in violent, illegal acts. A prison warden loses his job because he is so successful in rehabilitating criminals. These are but a few of the intriguing stories Martha Grace Duncan examines in her bold, interdisciplinary book Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons.
Duncan writes: "This is a book about paradoxes and mingled yarns - about the bright sides of dark events, the silver linings of sable clouds." She portrays upright citizens who harbor a strange liking for criminal deeds, and criminals who conceive of prison in positive terms: as a nurturing mother, an academy, a matrix of spiritual rebirth, or a refuge from life's trivia. In developing her unique vision, Duncan draws on literature, history, psychoanalysis, and law. Her work reveals a nonutopian world in which criminals and non-criminals--while injuring each other in obvious ways--nonetheless live together in a symbiotic as well as an adversarial relationship, needing each other, serving each other, enriching each other's lives in profound and surprising fashion.

New York; London: NYU Press, 1996. 284p.

Sarah J. Jackson

“It is clear in news coverage of recent uprisings for Black life that journalists and media organizations struggle to reconcile the fact of ongoing racism with narratives of U.S. progress. Bound up in this struggle is how collective memory—or rather whose collective memory—shapes the practices of news-making. Here I interrogate how television news shapes collective memory of Black activism through analysis of a unique moment when protests over police abuse of Black people became newsworthy simultaneous with widespread commemorations of the civil rights movement. I detail the complex terrain of nostalgia and misremembering that provides cover for moderate and conservative delegitimization of contemporary Black activism. At the same time, counter-memories, introduced most often by members of the Black public sphere, o ff er alternative, actionable, and comprehensive interpretations of Black protest.”

Communication, Culture and Critique 00 (2021) 1–20.

Editors: Christiane Kruse, Birgit Meyer, and Anne-Marie Korte

What makes an image offensive? — This question is addressed in this volume. It explores tensions and debates about offensive images and performative practices in various settings in and beyond Europe. Its basic premise is that a deeper understanding of what is at stake in these tensions and debates calls for a multidisciplinary conversation. The authors focus on images that appear to trigger strongly negative reactions; images that are perceived as insulting or offensive; those subject to taboos and restrictions; or those that are condemned as blasphemous. In light of recurrent acts of violence leveled against images and symbols in the contemporary, globally entangled world, addressing instances of “icono-clash” (Bruno Latour) from a new post-secular, global perspective has become a matter of urgency.

Leiden: Brill - Schöningh and Fink Social Sciences, 2018. 383p.

By Viktor Lowenfeld

This book is written for art teachers- teachers who teach art, teachers and kindergarten teachers, and all who want not only to appreciate the creative production of children merely from an aesthetic viewpoint but would like to look behind the doors to see the sources from which their creative activity springs. It is written for those who want to understand the mental and emotional development of children. The idealistic concept of the child as an innate artist who has simply to get material and nothing else in order to create has done as much harm to art education as the neglect of the child's creative impulse. Books that are written from an idealistic view discourage teachers who are unable to produce the same easy and "beautiful" responses described by the writers of such books. Much of the literature in art education deals with results achieved under ideal conditions rather than with the outcomes which may be reasonably expected in the average classroom.

Macmillan. 1957. 572p.

By Cherly L. Neely

Though numerous studies have been conducted regarding perceived racial bias in newspaper reporting of violent crimes, few studies have focused on the intersections of race and gender in determining the extent and prominence of this coverage, and more specifically how the lack of attention to violence against women of color reinforces their invisibility in the social structure. This book provides an empirical study of media and law enforcement bias in reporting and investigating homicides of African American women compared with their white counterparts. The author discusses the symbiotic relationship between media coverage and the response from law enforcement to victims of color, particularly when these victims are reported missing and presumed to be in danger by their loved ones. Just as the media are effective in helping to increase police response, law enforcement officials reach out to news outlets to solicit help from the public in locating a missing person or solving a murder. However, a deeply troubling disparity in reporting the disappearance and homicides of female victims reflects racial inequality and institutionalized racism in the social structure that need to be addressed. It is this disparity this important study seeks to solve.

East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2015. 125p.

By Vian Bakir • Andrew McStay

This open access book deconstructs the core features of online misinformation and disinformation. It finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. The chapters distil societal harms, evaluate solutions, and consider what must be done to strengthen societies as new biometric forms of emotion profiling emerge. Based on a rich, empirical, and interdisciplinary literature that examines multiple countries, the book will be of interest to scholars and students of Communications, Journalism, Politics, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Information Science, as well as global and local policymakers and ordinary citizens interested in how to prevent the spread of false information worldwide, both now and in the future.

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 286p..

By Jordan Schildcrout

The “villainous homosexual” has long stalked America’s cultural imagination, most explicitly in the figure of the queer murderer, a character in dozens of plays. But as society’s understanding of homosexuality has changed, so has the significance of these controversial characters, especially when employed by LGBT theater artists themselves to explore darker fears and desires. Murder Most Queer examines the shifting meanings of murderous LGBT characters in American theater over a century, showing how these representations wrestle with and ultimately subvert notions of gay villainy.

Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 247p.

By Tatjana Neubauer

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said: »Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.« In the 1990s, nobody fell deeper than O.J. Simpson. Once considered a national treasure, the athlete was accused of brutally slaying his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman on June 12, 1994. Within days, the media and public developed an unprecedented obsession with the story, turning a murder investigation and trial into a sensationalized reality show. Tatjana Neubauer examines the mediatization, deliberate manipulation, and the simplification of popular criminal trials for profit on television. She demonstrates that TV conflated legal proceedings into entertainment programming by commodifying events, people, and places.

Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2023. 271p.

Edited by Giulia Gaimari and Catherine Keen

Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante presents new research by international scholars on the themes of ethics, politics and justice in the works of Dante Alighieri, including chapters on Dante’s modern ‘afterlife’.

Together the chapters explore how Dante’s writings engage with the contemporary culture of medieval Florence and Italy, and how and why his political and moral thought still speaks compellingly to modern readers. The collection’s contributors range across different disciplines and scholarly traditions – history, philology, classical reception, philosophy, theology – to scrutinise Dante’s Divine Comedy and his other works in Italian and Latin, offering a multi-faceted approach to the evolution of Dante’s political, ethical and legal thought throughout his writing career.

Certain chapters focus on his early philosophical Convivio and on the accomplished Latin Eclogues of his final years, while others tackle knotty themes relating to judgement, justice, rhetoric and literary ethics in his Divine Comedy, from hell to paradise. The closing chapters discuss different modalities of the public reception and use of Dante’s work in both Italy and Britain, bringing the volume’s emphasis on morality, political philosophy, and social justice into the modern age of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

London: UCL Press, 2019. 192p.

By Amanda Anderson

Prostitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seduction—the Victorian "fallen woman" represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. 264p.

By Leighton Andrews

Facebook, the Media and Democracy examines Facebook Inc. and the impact that it has had and continues to have on media and democracy around the world. Drawing on interviews with Facebook users of different kinds and dialogue with politicians, regulators, civil society and media commentators, as well as detailed documentary scrutiny of legislative and regulatory proposals and Facebook’s corporate statements, the book presents a comprehensive but clear overview of the current debate around Facebook and the global debate on the regulation of social media in the era of ‘surveillance capitalism.’ Chapters examine the business and growing institutional power of Facebook as it has unfolded over the fifteen years since its creation, the benefits and meanings that it has provided for its users, its disruptive challenge to the contemporary media environment, its shaping of conversations, and the emerging calls for its further regulation. The book considers Facebook’s alleged role in the rise of democratic movements around the world as well as its suggested role in the election of Donald Trump and the UK vote to leave the European Union. This book argues that Facebook, in some shape or form, is likely to be with us into the foreseeable future and that how we address the societal challenges that it provokes, and the economic system that underpins it, will define how human societies demonstrate their capacity to protect and enhance democracy and ensure that no corporation can set itself above democratic institutions. This is an important research volume for academics and researchers in the areas of media studies, communications, social media and political science.

London; New York: Routledge, 2020. 137p.

By Jon Lee

Jon Mee explores the popular democratic movement that emerged in the London of the 1790s in response to the French Revolution. Central to the movement’s achievement was the creation of an idea of ‘the people’ brought into being through print and publicity. Radical clubs rose and fell in the face of the hostile attentions of government. They were sustained by a faith in the press as a form of ‘print magic,’ but confidence in the liberating potential of the printing press was interwoven with hard-headed deliberations over how best to animate and represent the people. Ideas of disinterested rational debate were thrown into the mix with coruscating satire, rousing songs, and republican toasts. Print personality became a vital interface between readers and print exploited by the cast of radicals returned to history in vivid detail by Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 286p.

By Paula Matlach, Dominik Hammer and Christian Schwieter

This is a translation of a report first published in German on 10 August 2022 under the title “Auf Odysee: Die Rolle von Blockchain-Technologie für die Monetarisierung im rechtsextremen Onlinemilieu“.

Odysee is one of the “alternative” social media platforms identified by ISD Germany researchers as part of their project “Countering Radicalization in Right-Wing Extremist Online Subcultures,” funded by the German Federal Ministry of Justice. The video hosting portal, which markets itself as a YouTube alternative and hosts similar functions, relies on blockchain technology to provide platform-specific monetization opportunities that offer financial incentives. These “incentivized” platforms are structured to reward users for their activities – e.g. publishing, liking and distributing posts – by paying them cryptocurrencies. The use of decentralized blockchain technology in this context is often accompanied by promises of unmoderated exchange and anonymity. This and the opportunities to make profits are particularly interesting for right-wing extremists, “lateral thinkers” and conspiracy ideologues, whose content is often deleted on established platforms and who rely on financial support from their supporters. In this way, right-wing extremists can not only disseminate anti-constitutional content on the Internet undisturbed, but even earn money from it. For the far-right online milieu, Odysee serves as a regulation-free retreat or as part of a multiplatform strategy, or backup option. Whether it can be successful in the long run depends, among other things, on the fluctuating value of cryptocurrencies. Another determining factor is how investors who have lost money due to fraud or a drop in the value of cryptocurrencies on Odysee behave. As a crypto-related space, the platform is an ideal recruitment space for right-wing extremists who want to convince disappointed investors of their ideology. 

Beirut; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC : Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 24. 32p.

By Moustafa Ayad, Anisa Harrasy, Mohammed Abdullah A. 

Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) led a two-year investigation into the online media ecosystem of al-Shabaab and the Islamic State in Africa, analyzing the role of “independent news” outlets and their intersections with hundreds-strong networks of amplifier profiles on Facebook linked to a number of central pages identifying themselves as “media outlets” or “media personalities” operating in Somali, Kiswahili and Arabic. Researchers found that the network of support for al-Shabaab and Islamic State extended across several platforms, including decentralized messaging applications such as Element and RocketChat, and encrypted messaging platforms such as Telegram, as well as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.  A qualitative cross-platform analysis showed the most active, networked, and multilingual ecosystem of support for al-Shabaab and the Islamic State existed on Facebook, where profiles and pages classified as “media outlets” were sharing terrorist content openly and eschewing private groups and profiles. The content that ISD researchers observed through the networks is often linked to “media” and “media personality” pages in Somali, Kiswahili and Arabic, and not only violates the platform’s community guidelines, but also points to language moderation blind spots that have been previously documented by journalists as well as whistleblowers.

Beirut; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC : Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 2022. 22p.