Global/Liberal Studies’ Eugene Ostashevsky has just published a monumental work of translation: Alexander Vvedensky. An Invitation for Me to Think: Selected Poems. As Ostashevsky writes, “Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941) was born into the liberal intelligentsia of St. Petersburg and grew up in the midst of war and revolution, reaching artistic maturity just as Stalin consolidated control over Russia. After attending a progressive high school, Vvedensky spent a year working at the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINKhUK) as a researcher in a lab devoted to Futurist abstract poetry. Along with Daniil Kharms, he then became a major figure in the short-lived underground avant-garde group OBERIU (a neologism for “the union for real art”). Unable to publish his poetry—by the 1930s there was no tolerance in the USSR for work of such shimmering invention and provocation—Vvedensky made a living as a writer of children’s literature. In 1931 he was arrested for his so-called counterrevolutionary literary activities, interrogated, and sentenced to three years of internal exile. He was detained again in 1941, and on February 2 he died of pleurisy on a prison train, leaving behind his wife and four-year-old son. Though much of Vvedensky’s work has been lost, what remains has established him as one of the most influential Russian poets of the twentieth century.”

We congratulate Dr. Ostashevsky on this important contribution to the cultural legacy of modern Russian literature and English translation and look forward to reviews of the work.

Farzad Mahootian’s “Paneth’s epistemology of chemical elements in light of Kant’s Opus postumum” was recently published in Foundations in Chemistry (Springer). Mahootian begins with Immanuel Kant’s attempt to revoke, in light of developments in the science of chemistry at the end of the 18th century, the transcendental-empirical distinction that he had established in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Mahootian then turns to the 20th century, and the still-reigning definition of chemical element, due to Fritz Paneth and officially adopted in 1923, which is only partly founded on early quantum theory; the experimental chemistry of the 19th century played an equally important part. By re-conceiving Kant’s transcendental-empirical distinction, Paneth maintained a dual definition of element that resisted the reduction of empirical and theoretical aspects. Paneth’s concept of element treats the opposites as complementary frames of explanation and proposes the necessity of deliberate shifts between them. Mahootian proposes that that the dynamic epistemology of chemistry is strongly suggestive of some interesting structural and functional features of metaphor, and vice versa. He argues that chemistry’s ongoing negotiation between two or more possible approaches is necessitated by the fact that its subject doesn’t already exist: it must literally synthesize the subject matter it investigates.

Michael Rectenwald has published “Postmodernism, the Academic Left, and the Crisis of Capitalism” in Insurgent Notes: A Journal of Communist Theory and Practice. The article explores the fate of postmodern theory in light of the crisis of capitalism as manifest from the financial collapse of 2008 to the present. Rectenwald reviews postmodern theory and its claims is in order to show exactly how and why postmodernism fails in light of the present moment.

Tim Tomlinson adds to his recent spate of publications. His recent-most published poem is “At Night, After the Screams,” which appears in the February issue of Full of Crow. His short story, “A Troubling Appearance,” is a featured story in the fiction e-zine, The Write Place at the Write Time. “A Troubling Appearance” continues the coming-of-age chronicles of Clifford Foote. We eagerly anticipate the continuation of this series.

“From limited access to open access order in Chile. Take two,” by NYU-GLS’s Patricio Navia, has been included in the anthology, In the Shadow of Violence. Politics, Economics and the Problems of Development, published by Cambridge University Press in November 2012. The volume applies the conceptual framework of Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast’s Violence and Social Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2009) to nine developing countries. The cases show how political control of economic privileges is used to limit violence and coordinate coalitions of powerful organizations. Rather than castigating politicians and elites as simply corrupt, the case studies illustrate why development is so difficult to achieve in societies where the role of economic organizations is manipulated to provide political balance and stability. The volume develops the idea of limited-access social order as a dynamic social system in which violence is constantly a threat and political and economic outcomes result from the need to control violence rather than promoting economic growth or political rights.

Writer Tim Tomlinson has been prolific in Shanghai. In addition to publishing several poems, his recent-most work has included “Gun,” and “I Must Not,” two of many linked short stories in the series concerning the coming of age of Clifford Foote. “Gun” appeared in the winter 2013 issue of The Coachella Review and “I Must Not” appeared in the autumn issue of LITnIMAGE.

Tim Tomlinson — poet, fiction writer and co-author of The Portable MFA in Creative Writing — has recently published several poems, including in the fall 2102 issue of Tule Review “Night Dive, Bloody Bay Wall, Little Cayman, 1996.”  “Night Dive,” which has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, concerns an encounter between species on a scuba dive at night.

Tim has also published “Two Poems” in the winter issue of The Citron Review, a poem that includes “Before Martha Stewart, There Was,” and “Taylor Ham on White.”

Lina Meruane publishes Viajes Virales.