New Books at UAB Sterne Library: February 2025

A bold reimagining of the literary history of Decadence through a close examination of the transnational contexts of Oscar Wilde's classic The Picture of Dorian Gray.

In this revolutionary book, Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction, and explains why so many of today's products are irresistible.

The Renaissance, scholars have long argued, was a period beset by the loss of philosophical certainty. In Possible Knowledge, Debapriya Sarkar argues for the pivotal role of literature--what early moderns termed poesie--in the dynamic intellectual culture of this era of profound incertitude.

The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature tracks an important shift in early modern conceptions of selfhood, arguing that the period hosted the birth of a new subset of the human, the eco-self, which melds a deeply introspective turn with an abiding sense of humans' embedment in the world.

This book also helps you: Understand the architecture of Transformer language models that excel at text generation and representation Build advanced LLM pipelines to cluster text documents and explore the topics they cover Build semantic search engines that go beyond keyword search, using methods like dense retrieval and rerankers Explore how generative models can be used, from prompt engineering all the way to retrieval-augmented generation.