Explore the vast range of titles available.

\"Monsters, demons, angels, vampires, the boogeyman under your bed: I've seen it, I've hunted it, I've killed it. I'm not the only hunter out here, but there aren't as many as there used to be. Not near as many as there need to be. I've learned everything I can about every damned critter that walks, crawls, or flies, and I'm not gonna let that all be for nothing. I'm not going down without a fight. I'm not letting everything I've learned disappear. So that's what you're holding in your hands--everything I know. Anything that'd be useful for Sam, Dean, and the hunters that come after me\"--Page 4 of cover.

Experimental poetry and prose by black writers rejects traditional interpretations of social protest and identity formation to reveal radical new ways of perceiving the world. Winner, 2016 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association Standard literary criticism tends to either ignore or downplay the unorthodox tradition of black experimental writing that emerged in the wake of protests against colonization and Jim Crow–era segregation. Histories of African American literature likewise have a hard time accounting for the distinctiveness of experimental writing, which is part of a general shift in emphasis among black writers away from appeals for social recognition or raising consciousness. In Freedom Time, Anthony Reed offers a theoretical reading of \"black experimental writing\" that presents the term both as a profound literary development and as a concept for analyzing how writing challenges us to rethink the relationships between race and literary techniques. Through extended analyses of works by African American and Afro-Caribbean writers—including N. H. Pritchard, Suzan-Lori Parks, NourbeSe Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, Claudia Rankine, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, and Nathaniel Mackey—Reed develops a new sense of the literary politics of formally innovative writing and the connections between literature and politics since the 1960s. Freedom Time reclaims the power of experimental black voices by arguing that readers and critics must see them as more than a mere reflection of the politics of social protest and identity formation. With an approach informed by literary, cultural, African American, and feminist studies, Reed shows how reworking literary materials and conventions liberates writers to push the limits of representation and expression.

A significant challenge in chemistry is to rationally reproduce the functional potency of a protein in a small molecule, which is cheaper to manufacture, non-immunogenic, and also both stable and bioavailable. Synthetic peptides corresponding to small bioactive protein surfaces do not form stable structures in water and do not exhibit the functional potencies of proteins. Here we describe a novel approach to growing small molecules with protein-like potencies from a functionally important amino acid of a protein. A 77-residue human inflammatory protein (complement C3a) important in innate immunity is rationally transformed to equipotent small molecules, using peptide surrogates that incorporate a turn-inducing heterocycle with correctly positioned hydrogen-bond-accepting atoms. Small molecule agonists (molecular weight <500 Da) examined for receptor affinity and cellular responses have the same high potencies, functional profile and specificity of action as C3a protein, but greater plasma stability and bioavailability. Replicating the functionality of bioactive proteins using rationally designed small molecule mimics is both economically valuable and synthetically challenging. Here the authors develop a mimic of the inflammatory protein C3a with equal biological potency but enhanced stability and bioavailability.

The Black Scholar The Erotics of Mourning in Recent Experimental Black Poetry

Of 14 million marathon finishers, only twenty were US-born, African American women who finished in under three hours. This documentary is about nine sub-three-hour women, National Black Distance Running Hall of Fame inductees.

There is a need to increase access to surgical treatments in African countries, but perioperative complications represent a major global health-care burden. There are few studies describing surgical outcomes in Africa. We did a 7-day, international, prospective, observational cohort study of patients aged 18 years and older undergoing any inpatient surgery in 25 countries in Africa (the African Surgical Outcomes Study). We aimed to recruit as many hospitals as possible using a convenience sampling survey, and required data from at least ten hospitals per country (or half the surgical centres if there were fewer than ten hospitals) and data for at least 90% of eligible patients from each site. Each country selected one recruitment week between February and May, 2016. The primary outcome was in-hospital postoperative complications, assessed according to predefined criteria and graded as mild, moderate, or severe. Data were presented as median (IQR), mean (SD), or n (%), and compared using t tests. This study is registered on the South African National Health Research Database (KZ_2015RP7_22) and ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT03044899). We recruited 11 422 patients (median 29 [IQR 10–70]) from 247 hospitals during the national cohort weeks. Hospitals served a median population of 810 000 people (IQR 200 000–2 000 000), with a combined number of specialist surgeons, obstetricians, and anaesthetists totalling 0·7 (0·2–1·9) per 100 000 population. Hospitals did a median of 212 (IQR 65–578) surgical procedures per 100 000 population each year. Patients were younger (mean age 38·5 years [SD 16·1]), with a lower risk profile (American Society of Anesthesiologists median score 1 [IQR 1–2]) than reported in high-income countries. 1253 (11%) patients were infected with HIV, 6504 procedures (57%) were urgent or emergent, and the most common procedure was caesarean delivery (3792 patients, 33%). Postoperative complications occurred in 1977 (18·2%, 95% CI 17·4–18·9]) of 10 885 patients. 239 (2·1%) of 11 193 patients died, 225 (94·1%) after the day of surgery. Infection was the most common complication (1156 [10·2%] of 10 970 patients), of whom 112 (9·7%) died. Despite a low-risk profile and few postoperative complications, patients in Africa were twice as likely to die after surgery when compared with the global average for postoperative deaths. Initiatives to increase access to surgical treatments in Africa therefore should be coupled with improved surveillance for deteriorating physiology in patients who develop postoperative complications, and the resources necessary to achieve this objective. Medical Research Council of South Africa.

Reed talks about Claude McKay's 1929 Banjo: A Story without a Plot, concerned with spontaneous forms of black internationalist cultural politics in interwar Marseilles, is a novel of conjunction. From its setting in a port city to its thematization of novel forms of association, it attempts to imagine new ways of being together and forms of politics beyond the limits suggested by the \"Negro intelligentsia\" its characters criticize or those available under liberal capitalist modernity. Reed discusses the temporal politics to which the figure of woman--as a figure of reproduction, repetition, and attachment to the existing aesthetic, sexual, and power regimes--serves as a limit to the regulatory fictions governing race and music.

“Another Map of the South Side” traces the resonances between Native Son and the film Bigger watches during a pivotal scene to tease out the international and colonial political contexts of Wright’s novel. Reading the film’s references to Trader Horn , this essay argues that Bigger Thomas moves between the positions of native and native informant, without fully achieving the position of explorer himself. Mapping Dark Continent tropes onto Chicago’s mostly black South Side, the novel situates imagined black “otherness” within a global context, establishing synchronisms between U. S. and global forms of economic exploitation, racialized epistemologies, and knowledge production.