Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461295 • US $24.95 • 8.5 in x 11 in • 160 pgs. • 75 B&W photos
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Palante is the first book about the Young Lords. Through photographs, essays, and interviews with members, the book captures the spirit and actions of the sixties’ movements.
The Young Lords fought for the rights of Puerto Ricans in the United States and for the independence of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rican and Latino activists founded the Young Lords Organization in Chicago in 1968, taking inspiration from the Black Panther Party and other national liberation movements across the world. In July 1969, a Young Lords chapter was formed in New York, and it became the Young Lords Party (YLP). They expressed their political beliefs in a13-point program, published and distributed a newspaper called Palante, and produced a weekly radio show on WBAI also called “Palante.”
The YLP focused on community issues from the lack of affordable housing to police brutality and organized street garbage clean ups, “serve the people programs,” and door-to-door health testing for tuberculosis and lead poisoning. Through dramatic takeovers of institutions — such as The Peoples Church and Lincoln hospital — and mass mobilizations, the YLP brought media and public attention to the socio-economic and political situation of people of color in the United States and to the colonial status of Puerto Rico.
PRAISE:
“Palante is an indispensable source for learning about the history of the Young Lords and the ways in which this remarkable grassroots organization inspired and engaged a whole generation of Puerto Rican youth in New York and other U.S. cities during the 1970s to struggle for social and racial justice, for improving living conditions in their neglected communities, and for the liberation of Puerto Rico from its colonial bondage. Through the voices of several members who were part of the Young Lords’ leadership and the keen photographic eye of Michael Abramson, this new edition of Palante reaffirms the power of political engagement and collective action in promoting social change. An added foreword by Iris Morales producer and director of the documentary film, ¡Palante, Siempre Palante! (1996), enriches this long-awaited new edition of Palante. In it, Morales provides a compelling, honest, and balanced assessment of the Young Lords’ vision, accomplishments, challenges, and the multiple factors that contributed to the Young Lords’ eventual demise. Palante is a classic publication that guarantees that the historical memory of the past struggles of the Puerto Rican civil rights movement and what has been learned from it, will remain as an inspiration to future generations of Puerto Ricans in their own quests for empowerment, human dignity, and a more equitable society.”
Edna Acosta-Belén, Distinguished Professor, University at Albany, SUNY
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Michael Abramson is a graduate of Kenyon College and the University of Chicago, and — since 2009 — a bona fide inventor. In his more than 25-year career as a photojournalist for Time-Life and others, he has photographed a wide range of subjects — from deaf street gangs to American presidents — and has traveled the world. His book credits include Our Portion of Hell, Inside Las Vegas (text by Mario Puzo), Amy: The Story of Deaf Child, and Roy Lichtenstein: The Artist at Work. He recently finished his first novel, a future set political thriller entitled Rebecca Tree.
Iris Morales is an activist, educator, media producer, author, and attorney. Her lifelong commitment to social justice is inspired by the Puerto Rican peoples’ struggles for equality and self-determination as well as by the community’s vibrant contributions in arts and politics. A member of the Young Lords for five years, she rose through the ranks to become Deputy Minister of Education and leader of the Womens Union. ¡Palante, Siempre Palante! The Young Lords, her award-winning documentary, was broadcast on national public television and continues to screened in schools, universities and community venues across the United States.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Reflecting on the meaning of struggle, education, imperialism, and his own involvement in radical social movements, revolutionary journalist and former Black Panther, Mumia Abu-Jamal, directly addresses the diverse community of organizers and activists who support and participate in the Occupy movement.
“The real deal is Occupy Everything!” says Mumia. “Where the People are, there should you be. Where power and wealth are hurting the People, there should you be organizing, resisting, fighting back, winning a better world. … Keep on rolling. Keep on moving. And while you do it, treat each other as brothers and sisters, compañeras and compañeros.”
“A tour de force for those just discovering themselves within the movement and struggle, and a smack of hope for those who had thought the moment to act was over.” – Daniel Olonso, Occupy Columbia University
On April 25, 2012, the day after dozens were arrested at the White House following a mobilization to Occupy the Justice Department in Washington DC, Mumia spoke with Amy Goodman and Danny Glover on Democracy Now. Among the things he said was, “As for the Occupy movement, I think it’s one of the greatest advances in the democracy movement in our modern period. And it’s pushed because of the economic crisis that’s facing the United States and especially young people who have come out of college and have no hope for a job, have no hope for a future, have no hope for a life without terrifying, crippling loans over their heads. I think they did something wonderful, but it’s a first step. They have something else to do, something more important to do, and that’s to connect with other people’s movements around the country build a kind of resistance that can transform this country.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mumia Abu-Jamal is author of many books, including Live From Death Row, Death Blossoms, All Things Censored, and We Want Freedom. He has been living on death row in a Pennsylvania prison since 1982.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463244 • US $17 • 5 1/8 in x 8 1/4 in • 312 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Efforts to achieve a “two-state solution” have finally collapsed, and the struggle for justice in Palestine is at a crossroads. As Israeli society lurches toward greater extremism, many ask where the struggle is headed. This book offers a clear analysis of this crossroads moment and looks forward with urgency down the path to a more hopeful future.
PRAISE:
“Every community that stands fast, loving its people and its land, its customs and its ways, will be seen, eventually, as worthy of saving. This is because it is our own humanity we are learning from, our own value. There will also arise a special voice to champion us, one that is brave, trustworthy and true. In The Battle for Justice in Palestine it is the voice of Ali Abunimah, fierce, wise — a warrior for justice and peace — someone whose large heart, one senses, beyond his calm, is constantly on fire. A pragmatist but also a poet. This is the book to read to understand the present bizarre and ongoing complexity of the Palestine/Israel tragedy. And though it is filled with the grim reality of this long and deadly, ugly and dehumanizing, conflict, it also offers hope: that as more people awaken to the shocking reality of what has for decades been going on, we can bring understanding and restitution to the Palestinian people. Their struggle to exist in dignity and peace in their own homeland – and this may be the biggest surprise of Abunimah’s book — is mirrored in the struggles for survival and autonomy of more than a few of us.”
Alice Walker
“A crucially needed dose of educated hope. This is what hits me from this fascinating amalgam of incisive journalism, analytic prose and intellectually compelling vision that emanates from many years of brilliant activism. Sailing effortlessly from the domestic to the global, from Johannesburg to Belfast and from Chicago to Tel Aviv, Ali Abunimah paints a lucid, accessible picture out of a complex web of racism, racialized oppression, and creative resistance. Ali does not give us hope; he helps us dig for it within us by meticulously laying out before us the facts, the trends, the challenges and the inspiring resistance to them.”
Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights activist, co-founder of the BDS movement, author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights
“In The Battle for Justice in Palestine, Ali Abunimah — the most astute commentator writing on Palestine today — bursts the leaky myths of Israeli exceptionalism while carefully examining where the battle for Palestine is currently being waged. Forget the endless ‘peace process,’ which has ushered in little more than massive economic exploitation, tragic environmental degradation, and servile and destructive politics. Focus instead, Abunimah tells us, on the many civil society and campus initiatives around the world that are bravely ushering in a new era of global grass-roots organizing for justice. Rich in information and deep in analysis, The Battle for Justice in Palestine will inspire readers that Palestinian self-determination is not only possible but absolutely necessary.”
Moustafa Bayoumi
“This is the best book on Palestine in the last decade. No existing book presents the staggering details and sophistication of analysis that Abunimah’s book offers. Abunimah’s scope includes an analysis of the politics, economics, environmental policies, identity politics, international relations, academic scholarship and activism, global solidarity, and official and unofficial lobbies that have come to bear on Palestine and the Palestinians. The Battle for Justice in Palestine is the most comprehensive treatment of Palestinian suffering under Israeli control and offers the only possible way to end it. It is a must read for anyone seeking to understand the current situation of the Palestinians and Israel.”
Joseph Massad, Columbia University
“Although by now there are many fine, indispensable books devoted to the Palestinian ordeal and struggle, The Battle for Justice in Palestine would be my clear first choice if asked for a recommendation. … His book is filled with useful information, imparts a deep understanding of essential issues, and holds the reader’s attention as it is written in a lively style. Beyond this, Abunimah has an unusual capacity to focus conceptual and policy questions with clarity and precision.”
Richard Falk
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ali Abunimah is the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli Palestinian Impasse, and cofounder and director of the widely acclaimed publication The Electronic Intifada. Based in the United States, he has written hundreds of articles and been an active part of the movement for justice in Palestine for 20 years. He is the recipient of a 2013 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642596991 • US $19.99 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Imagining the future of Gaza beyond the cruelties of occupation and Apartheid, Light in Gaza is a powerful contribution to understanding Palestinian experience.
Gaza, home to two million people, continues to face suffocating conditions imposed by Israel. This distinctive anthology imagines what the future of Gaza could be, while reaffirming the critical role of Gaza in Palestinian identity, history, and struggle for liberation.
Light in Gaza is a seminal, moving and wide-ranging anthology of Palestinian writers and artists. It constitutes a collective effort to organize and center Palestinian voices in the ongoing struggle. As political discourse shifts toward futurism as a means of reimagining a better way of living, beyond the violence and limitations of colonialism, Light in Gaza is an urgent and powerful intervention into an important political moment.
PRAISE:
“Light in Gaza is a strong, honest presentation of today’s Gazans, a necessary read that provides a good understanding of the humanity of the Palestinians in Gaza.”
Palestine Chronicle
“This book is rich in insights from Gazans living under Israel’s brutal siege as well as those living abroad. The editors and authors are determined to start a conversation about Gaza and to break “the intellectual blockade” imposed on it. From Jehad Abusalim’s introduction to the last word, these compelling works move from personal reflections to political and economic analysis. They capture the reader and pull them through a journey that is as uplifting as it is heartbreaking that it should have to be lived at all. It will not leave you unmoved and will reinforce your determination to strive for Palestinian freedom.”
Nadia Hijab, co-founder and honorary president, Al-Shabaka: the Palestinian Policy Network
“Because of Israel’s blockade, I’ve only been able to go to Gaza once. Everyone I spoke to there could tell me about the unimaginable hardship and trauma they’d experienced. But what stayed with me most was something I hadn’t expected: The unquenchable optimism and humor of Palestinians there. Reading Light in Gaza a decade after my visit brought that feeling flooding back. This brilliant, funny, inspiring collection of stories and essays by writers in Gaza was exactly what I needed to reinvigorate my hope and determination to work for a future that uplifts us all.”
Ali Abunimah
“A must read for anyone interested in learning about Gaza, from the Palestinians of Gaza themselves. Powerful and engaging.”
Laila Elhaddad
“Gaza is often referred to as an ‘open-air prison,’ because it is so hard for messages, images or bodies to get out, or for resources to get in. Light in Gaza breaks through the prison walls and gives us a unique opportunity to hear and learn from those living under Israeli occupation in Gaza. Their voices are filled with pain, loss, frustration, anger, but most of all, hope. This powerful and beautifully crafted collection is one that readers must engage with heads and hearts wide open.”
Barbara Ransby, historian, author, activist
“An emotionally and intellectually sophisticated collection that is deep, processed and enlightening.” —Sarah Schulman
“A book that embodies the central paradox all Gaza-watchers are aware of: while Israel – aided by Egypt and tolerated by the international system – constantly sharpens tools to control and brutalize Gaza, Gaza insists on its agency, its dignity and its imagination. Read these writings – literally ‘born of fire’ for the wealth and variety of their ideas and for their grounding of the aspirations and dreams of Palestinian Gazans. “
Ahdaf Soueif
“Light In Gaza is essential reading, not least because it reflects the voice of a people who are routinely and egregiously robbed of their basic humanity. It also represents a profound challenge to anyone who reads it. One author asks, “Can a story or a poem change the mind? Can a book make a difference?” The answer, as ever, is up to us all.”
Rabbi Brant Rosen, Founding Rabbi of congregation Tzedek Chicago
“As Mahmud Darwish wrote as early as 1973, “we do injustice to Gaza when we turn it into a myth”. This is why “Light in Gaza”, through its insightful collection of essays and poems, offers such a unique picture of the Palestinian experience in a territory cut off from the world for a decade and a half.”
Jean-Pierre Filiu, author of Gaza: A History
“The poignant first-person essays in this wide-ranging anthology have the greatest and rarest of virtues: they are portraits–brave, tender, resilient–of life in Gaza by the people who actually live it.”
Nathan Thrall, author of The Only Language They Understand
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Jehad Abusalim is the Education and Policy Associate of the Palestine Activism Program at the American Friends Service Committee. He is completing his PhD in the History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies joint program at New York University. His main area of research is Palestinian and Arab perceptions of the Zionist project and the Jewish question before 1948. An accomplished speaker and writer, Jehad combines his passion for history with his commitment to activism and policy change work. Jehad’s family continues to live in Gaza.
Jennifer Bing has worked with AFSC’s Palestine-Israel Program since 1989. Based in Chicago, she organizes events, national speaking tours, exhibits and trainings, and coordinates AFSC’s education and advocacy work on the campaigns Israeli Military Detention: No Way to Treat a Child and Gaza Unlocked. In this role, she works closely with faith organizations and human rights groups throughout the U.S. Jennifer has appeared in numerous media outlets including Truthout, Worldview/WBEZ, Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, Alternet, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, Friends Journal, and The Washington Post. She is also a regular contributor to AFSC’s Acting in Faith and News and Commentary blogs. Jennifer is a Quaker and an active member of the Quaker Palestine Israel Network.
Mike Merryman-Lotze is the American Friends Service Committee’s Palestine-Israel Program Director. He coordinates AFSC’s Israel and Palestine focused advocacy and policy programming, working closely with AFSC’s offices in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and throughout the US. From 2000 through 2003 Mike worked as a researcher with a human rights organization in the West Bank, and from 2007 through 2010 he worked in Save the Children UK’s Jerusalem office managing child rights and child protection programming. Between these two experiences he worked for an international development NGO managing community and local government development programs in Lebanon, Jordan, and Yemen.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599107 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 350 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A leading international relations expert uncovers the key stages that led from the end of the Cold War to the War in Ukraine.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, warnings of a new Cold War proliferated. In fact, argues Gilbert Achcar in this timely new account, the New Cold War has been ongoing since the late 1990s.
Racing to solidify its position as the last remaining superpower, the US alienated Russia and China, pushing them closer and rebooting the ‘old’ Cold War with disastrous implications. Vladimir Putin’s consequent rise and imperialist reinvention, along with Xi Jinping’s own ascendancy and increasingly autocratic tendencies, would culminate, respectively, in the invasion of Ukraine and mounting tensions over Taiwan and trade.
Was all this inevitable? What comes after Ukraine, and what might the contours of a more peaceful world look like? These questions and many others are addressed in this essential book by one of the most seasoned analysts of international relations.
PRAISE:
“[A] powerful, necessary, and timely book.”
The Irish Times
“Learned and incisive, ranging easily from broad geopolitical analysis to the details of policy formation, this masterful study of the new cold war of the past thirty years—by the scholar who first identified and studied it— is an indispensable guide to the current global disorder and its ominous portent.“
Noam Chomsky
“Gilbert Achcar has long been warning of a new Cold War, and this volume is perfectly timed to anatomise the newest stage of the conflict. No one who hopes to move beyond complacent rhetoric and slogans can afford to miss this essential book.”
Samuel Moyn, Yale University
Praise for the work of Gilbert Achcar:
“One of the best analysts of the contemporary Arab world.”
Le Monde
“A sobering yet generous account of the Arab people’s fight for true liberation and the lessons that have been learned from that struggle.”
Jacobin (for Morbid Symptoms)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon. He is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has written extensively on politics and development economics, as well as social change and social theory. His publications include The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder (2002), published in 15 languages; Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy (2008), with Noam Chomsky; the critically acclaimed The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli-War of Narratives (2010); The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013); and Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprisings.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642597417 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Abolishing State Violence is an urgent and accessible analysis of the key structures of state violence in our world today, and a clarion call to action for their abolition.
Connecting movements for social justice with ideas for how activists can support and build on this analysis and strategy, this book shows that there are many mutually supportive abolition movements, each enhanced by a shared understanding of the relationship between structures of violence and a shared framework for challenging them on the basis of their roots in patriarchy, racism, militarism, settler colonialism, and capitalism.
This book argues that abolition is transformative. It is about defunding, demilitarizing, disbanding, and divesting from current structures of violence, but also about imagining new ways to organize and care for each other and our planet, and about building new systems and cultures to sustain ourselves in a more equitable, free, and peaceful way. It shows that change is possible.
PRAISE:
“In Abolishing State Violence, Ray Acheson makes the case that the work for liberation must – fundamentally – be rooted in the legacy of transformative politics that only abolition movements can bring. The book insists on this radical position through a clear recessitation of how various forms of state violence are constitutive of one another, and how the various sites of institutional abuse and misery work together to create violence and death. The analysis is so clear and the demand to build a different world is so compelling that readers will turn the last pages of this book and be ready to get to work for freedom.”
Beth E. Richie
“Ray Acheson is a determined feminist realist. She shows us in Abolishing State Violence that we can abolish the instruments of state violence if we muster the collective stamina to, step-by-conscious-step, build genuinely trusting, vibrant communities. Reading each chapter here stretched me, energized me.”
Cynthia Enloe, The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging Persistent Patriarchy
“In this book, Acheson provides a helpful primer on current abolitionist arguments and strategies and applies the framework in new directions and to a range of issues beyond its common usage.”
“Abolishing State Violence is an excellent, inspiring, and extremely important book for anyone who cares about helping transform our world. Beyond any book I’ve read, Abolishing State Violence brilliantly shows the interconnected nature of police and prisons, war and borders, capitalism and climate change, as well as related forces including racism, colonialism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and class domination. Ray Acheson provides a roadmap for a desperately needed cross-issue movement working simultaneously to abolish these intertwined forms of violence while replacing them with structures founded in justice, equality, and care. Everyone should read this book.”
David Vine, author of The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State
Praise for Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy:
“This is a powerful and encouraging approach to an often overlooked concern, an informative work that will inspire readers to pay close attention to and even consider participating in the nuclear weapons disarmament movement.”
Booklist
“Hooray for the peacemakers, who prevail in the end! They — and Acheson — have gifted us with a deliciously relevant organizing model for challenging any status quo.”
CODEPINK: Women for Peace
“Ray Acheson tells a profoundly important and timely story of movements and resistance, of protest and vision, of diplomats and activists who have committed to banning the bomb. This book will make you understand the urgent need to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons.”
Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ray Acheson is director of disarmament at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and a steering group member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its work to highlight the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons and work with governments to develop the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Acheson is the author of Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Eqbal Ahmad interviewed byDavid Barsamian, with a Foreword by Edward W. Said New Introduction by Pervez Hoodbhoy
Haymarket Books (Fall 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466214 • US $16 • 147 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Edward W. Said once urged the legendary Eqbal Ahmad (1933–99) not to “leave your words scattered to the winds, or even recorded on tape, but collected and published in several volumes for everyone to read. Then those who don’t have the privilege of knowing you will know what a truly remarkable, gifted man you are.”
Unfortunately, Ahmad died before Said’s words came to fruition. But in this classic book, David Barsamian made Ahmad’s most provocative ideas available in book form. In these intimate and wide-ranging conversations, Ahmad discusses nationalism, ethnic conflict, the politics of memory, and liberation struggles around the world.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
“Ahmad was that rare thing, an intellectual unintimidated by power or authority… Perhaps the shrewdest and most original anti-imperialist of Asia and Africa.”
Edward W. Said
“Fighting words, wise words, from one of the most powerful activist intellectuals of our time.”
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
“A dazzling intellectual encounter: thoughtful questions by a superb interviewer, David Barsamian—and brilliant responses by the extraordinary Eqbal Ahmad.”
Howard Zinn
“[Eqbal Ahmad] cared deeply and was willing to believe people could endure and be more brave and creative than they knew. He saw the big picture and still the value of individual stories. His incisive and lucid way of thinking and his voice are clear and sharp in these skillful interviews by David Barsamian.”
Pervez Hoodbhoy, from the Introduction
“For [those] who have missed Eqbal Ahmad in the year since he died, this book comes like rain during a drought.”
Radha Kumar, Council on Foreign Relations
“These interviews provide a wonderfully focused, yet wide-ranging compendium of Eqbal Ahmad’s worldview.”
Richard Falk, Princeton University
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:
“Eqbal Ahmad, perhaps the shrewdest and most original anti-imperialist analyst of Asia and Africa…[was] a man of enormous charisma and incorruptible ideals…. He had an almost instinctive attraction to movements of the oppressed and the persecuted…[and] a formidable knowledge of history. Arabs, for example, learned more from him about the failures of Arab nationalism than from anyone else. … Ahmad was that rare thing, an intellectual unintimidated by power or authority.”
Edward W. Said, author of Culture and Imperialism
“[Eqbal Ahmad] was a shining example of what a true internationalist should be … Eqbal was at home in the history of all the world’s great civilizations. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of states past and present, and he knew that states had a rightful role to play. But he also knew that states existed to serve people not the other way around and he had little to do with governments, except as a thorn in their side. To friends, colleagues, and students, however, he gave unstintingly of himself and his time … His example and his memory will inspire many to carry on his work.”
Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations
“A very dedicated and honorable activist, Eqbal was right in the middle of everything.… He was a student of revolution and imperialism and a very good one.”
Noam Chomsky
“Eqbal Ahmad was unique in combining compassion for the dispossessed-en masse and one by one; the intellectual capacity to analyze cultural, political, and economic issues on a transnational level; and an ability to raise his always eloquent voice on behalf of constructive and original solutions.”
Victor Navasky, Publisher and Editorial Director, The Nation
“Eqbal was a teacher, a poet-analyst, a mentor to far more of us than he knew.”
Phyllis Bennis, Insitute for Policy Studies
“Eqbal Ahmad was a multitude of men—scholar, activist, political analyst, teacher, diplomat, visionary—but, above all, a foot-soldier in the army of peoples everywhere.”
Race and Class
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Eqbal Ahmad (1933-1999) was Professor Emeritus of International Relations and Middle Eastern Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He was managing editor of the quarterly Race and Class. His articles and essays appeared in the Nation and other journals throughout the world.
David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio—now in its thirty-fifth year—and his books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.
Edward W. Said (1935-2003) was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature and of Kings College Cambridge, his celebrated works include Orientalism, The End of the Peace Process, Power, Politics and Culture, and the memoir Out of Place. He is also the editor, with Christopher Hitchens, of Blaming the Victims, published by Verso. He died in September 2003.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599114 • US $22.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The border regimes of imperialist states have brutally oppressed migrants throughout the world. To enforce their borders, these states have constructed a new digital fortress with far-reaching and ever-evolving new technologies. This pathbreaking volume exposes these insidious means of surveillance, control, and violence.
In the name of “smart” borders, the U.S. and Europe have turned to private companies to develop a neocolonial laboratory now deployed against the Global South, borderlands, and routes of migration. They have established immigrant databases, digital IDs, electronic tracking systems, facial recognition software, data fusion centers, and more, all to more “efficiently” categorize and control human beings and their movement.
These technologies rarely capture widespread public attention or outrage, but they are quietly remaking our world, scaling up colonial efforts of times past to divide desirables from undesirables, rich from poor, expat from migrant, and citizen from undocumented. The essays and case studies in Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence shed light on this new threat, offering analyses of how the high-tech system of borders developed and inspiring stories of resistance to it.
The organizers, journalists, and scholars in these pages are charting a new path forward, employing creative tools to subvert the status quo, organize globally against high-tech border imperialism, and help us imagine a world without borders.
PRAISE:
“The essays in Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence are all excellent, but collectively add up to more than their parts, a keyhole look into the future, where new repressive technologies will be met by new forms of creative resistance. Mizue Aizeki, Matt Mahmoudi, and Coline Schupfer have put together a vital collection of essays that help us imagine escaping what they have in store for us.”
Greg Grandin
“In a world awash with violent borders, this book serves as a beacon of hope guiding us towards a more just future.“
Reece Jones, author of Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States
“A valuable resource for those trying to dismantle technologized regimes of state terror around the world and create something life-giving in their place.”
Ben Tarnoff, author of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
“Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence is an essential book for the difficult times we find ourselves in. This collection provides vital insight and nuance about the political, social, and technological dynamics of borders and technologies of coercion. Far more than just lines on a map, this book illuminates how modern borders are more fluid and complex than ever, but perhaps most importantly, how we can organise against them. Through compelling case studies and meticulous research, readers will find the book to be an essential resource for building movements that can fight back against technological authoritarianism in various forms.”
Lizzie O’Shea, author, Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Mizue Aizeki is the Director of Surveillance,Technology, and Immigration Policing at the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP). Aizeki’s photographic work appears in Dying to Live, A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid and Policing the Planet.
Matt Mahmoudi is Researcher/Adviser on Artificial Intelligence & Human Rights at Amnesty Tech, where he has spent the last two years leading the effort to ban facial recognition technologies. He is an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Mahmoudi is co-author of the book Digital Witness, published by Oxford University Press.
Coline Schupfer is a consultant working with the International Institute for Environment and Development and Open Society Foundations on community-based public interest litigation. She has written for publications including the International Justice Monitor, Border Criminologies, Opinio Juris, and the Asia Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law.
Ruha Benjamin is an internationally recognized writer, speaker, and professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she is the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. She is the award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code and editor of Captivating Technology, among many other publications. Her work has been featured widely in the media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, The Root, and The Guardian.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781844675050 • US $14 • 8 in x 6 in • 311 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Parecon: Life After Capitalism answers the question so often put to activists: “What do you want?” It puts the lie to Margaret Thatcher’s odious slogan TINA, “There is no alternative.” Participatory economics (“parecon” for short) is an alternative set of institutions for accomplishing economic production, consumption, and allocation in accord with people’s needs and abilities and in ways that promote equity, solidarity, diversity, and democratic decision-making input.
Parecon is built on certain key institutions: worker and consumer council self-management; remuneration for effort rather than output, property, or bargaining power; balanced job complexes instead of corporate divisions of labor; and participatory planning, seeking human fulfillment and development instead of markets seeking private profit.
Parecon briefly critiques existing economic options and models, including those that have gone under the label “socialist,” and then presents the new alternative: first its values, then its institutions, and then graphic descriptions of how it would operate and feel. Finally, the book addresses concerns that skeptics and critics might raise.
Participatory economics was born as an economic vision almost exactly a decade ago. Its advocates have grown slowly but steadily in number, around the world, and all indications are that it is about to enter, stage left, in the international debate about the kind of economic relations we wish to create in place of the “American model” of unrestrained corporate power and neoliberalism.
PRAISE:
“…this participatory vision is what Albert successfully provides for activists and academics alike, with the hope that it will be used to inspire social projects aimed at defeating inequality and leading to people democratically managing their own lives.”
Rob Maguire, ZNet
“Parecon is a pragmatic and visionary programme that would certainly boost human freedom; we ought at least to try it out.”
Red Pepper
“an imaginative, carefully reasoned description, persistently provocative, of how we might live free from economic injustice.”
Howard Zinn
“It merits close attention, debate, and action.”
Noam Chomsky
“Albert is ideally suited to synthesizing all the strands running through the anti-capitalist movement.”
The Ecologist
“Parecon is a brave argument for . . . a much needed…more equitable, democratic, participatory…alternative economic vision.”
Arundhati Roy
“A historically informed and logical economic blueprint with the practicality of a hand-tool, and a vision guided by the desire to find nobility in work.”
Kirkus Reviews
“He is advocating a top to bottom economic revolution.”
Library Journal
“Capitalism not working for you? Michael Albert may be tilting at windmills, but readers are flocking to his book on a system to spread the wealth and work.”
Los Angeles Times
“an important contribution to the imaginative tools for everyone who wants to dismantle capitalism.”
International Socialism
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael Albert, a long-time activist, speaker, and writer, is editor of ZNet and co-editor and co-founder of Z Magazine. He also co-founded South End Press and has written numerous books and articles.
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ISBN-13: 9781608462193 • Trade paper • 6 x 9 • US $22 • 560 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Tariq Ali, Isaac Deutscher, Ernest Mandel, and others analyze the nature of Stalinism, and its continuing impact on world politics. Marx once wrote that “history weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” and even twenty years after the Soviet Union’s collapse activists are still confronted by the legacy of Stalinism.
Was the Russian Revolution doomed to failure? Did the Bolsheviks, by daring to challenge both Tsarist absolutism and capitalism inevitably reap a century of mass slaughter and continued oppression in the name of liberation? Political commentators and historians alike have all but reduced the revolution to the sum total of Stalin’s gulags, secret police, and the anti-semitism which attended its decline. And today, even twenty years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, activists the world over are forced to confront this ghastly legacy whenever they too dare to struggle for a more just society.
This volume aims to deepen our understanding of the origins, impacts, and enduring prominence of Stalinism, so as to help exorcise these ghosts of the past and reclaim the hopes for a better tomorrow they have conspired to steal.
Featuring essays by Tariq Ali, Ernest Mandel, Isaac Deutscher, Leon Trotsky, and many others.
PRAISE:
Praise for Tariq Ali:
“The charm of stylish dissent: less Chomsky, more poetry. Empires may come and go but Tariq Ali, the rebel who has lost the streets but gained the ghettos, is here to stay, to fight on. … Buy his spirit.”
India Today
“[Tariq Ali is] undeniably passionate.”
Financial Times
“Ali … remains an outlier and intellectual bomb-thrower in his adopted London; an urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist.”
The Observer
“Ali is smart as fire.”
Ian Epstein, New City
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics, and seven novels (translated into over a dozen languages) as well as scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of New Left Review and lives in London. His website is http://tariqali.org/.
SPEAKING OF EMPIRE AND RESISTANCE
Conversations with Tariq Ali
By Tariq Ali and David Barsamian
With a new afterword on the 2004 elections.
The New Press (2005, world English rights, except India, Australia, New Zealand)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781565849549 • US $16.95 • 5.25 in x 7.5 in • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Speaking of Empire and Resistance is a series of stirring conversations between Tariq Ali and Alternative Radio’s David Barsamian, conducted from January 2002 to November 2004. In these interviews, Ali’s prescient observations turn a sharp eye on the American and British invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. His provocative ideas explain not only Anglo-American motivations, but the sense of betrayal and powerlessness that has led to the international terrorism that Americans now claim to fight. “In order to justify infinite war, they have invented this enemy, which — I’m almost tired of pointing this out — they created themselves at the height of the Cold War,” says Ali.
Ali also addresses the development of resistance movements within and outside the United States. In particular, he discusses Palestinian and Iraqi resistance to the occupation of their own countries. He evokes the early American anti-imperial movements of the nineteenth century, as well as the unprecedented public reaction across the world to the US invasion of Iraq.
PRAISE:
“Come and join this talk. It’s a feast for the mind and the heart. We’re all invited.”
Eduardo Galeano, author, The Open Veins of Latin America
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Tariq Ali — public intellectual, novelist, playwright, and filmmaker — has been, above all, a major political activist. From Vietnam to Iraq, he has been a distinguished and sophisticated critic of the malfeasant foreign policy of an increasingly imperialistic world. Born in Lahore, now part of Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, Ali received a Catholic school education before attending Government College, part of Punjab University, where he organized public demonstrations against Pakistan’s military dictatorship.
He went to Britain to study at Exeter College, Oxford. There he became involved with socialist student organizations and soon emerged as a key figure in radical politics. During his tenure at Oxford, Ali debated such figures as Henry Kissinger and British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart, protested vehemently against the Vietnam War, led the now infamous march on the American Embassy in London in 1968, and edited the revolutionary paper Black Dwarf, where he became fast friends with Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
As the radicalism of the 1960s began to wane, Ali refocused his energies and emerged as a prolific writer and speaker. He is a board member and longstanding editor of the New Left Review and has written more than a dozen books on history and politics. A Sultan in Palermo, the fourth volume of Ali’s “Islamic Quintet,” an award-winning collection of historical novels, was published in Spring 2005. His Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002) is a broad analysis of the historical and religious roots of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the “War of Terror” and the inexorable collision between rigid Islamic fundamentalism and persistent American aggrandizement. Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq (2003), presents a cultural and political history of Iraqi resistance against empires of old and new. Ali is also a regular contributor to publications such as the Guardian, Independent, and London Review of Books.
David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio—now in its thirty-fifth year—and his books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461493 • US $16 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 120 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In working together on two challenging new documentaries – South of the Border and the forthcoming Untold History of the United States series for Showtime – filmmaker Oliver Stone engaged with author and filmmaker Tariq Ali in a probing, hard-hitting conversation on the politics of history.
Their dialogue brings to light a number of forgotten – or deliberately buried – episodes of American history, from the U.S. intervention against the Russian Revolution and the dynamic radicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World to Henry Wallace’s sidelining by Democratic Party machine insiders and the ongoing interference of the United States in Pakistani political affairs.
For Stone and Ali – two of our most insightful observers on history and popular culture – no topic is sacred, no orthodoxy goes unchallenged.
PRAISE:
“Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali, two of our most provocative and radical voices, engage in a thought-provoking conversation about history – ripping apart entrenched establishment narratives which have suppressed the alternative visions we desperately need for our radical social movements and a true participatory democracy.”
Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor and Publisher, The Nation
“Oliver Stone asks smart questions about the rise and fall of the United States and its empire in the twentieth century, and Tariq Ali provides smart answers. The result is a provocative book that is sure to incite controversy and stimulate debate.”
Jon Wiener, professor of history, University of California at Irvine
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Tariq Ali is an internationally acclaimed Pakistani writer and filmmaker. He has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics and seven novels (translated into over a dozen languages) as well as scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of New Left Review and lives in London.
Oliver Stone has directed, among other films, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, W., World Trade Center, Alexander, Any Given Sunday, Nixon, Natural Born Killers, Heaven and Earth, JFK, The Doors, Born on The Fourth of July, Talk Radio, Wall Street, Platoon, Salvador, and the documentaries Looking for Fidel, Comandante, Persona Non Grata, South of the Border, and the upcoming Untold History of the United States series for Showtime.
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The 1917 uprising of Russian workers and peasants against the centuries-old Tsarist autocracy reverberated across the world. This meticulously assembled and expertly translated collection of documents from the Petrograd socialist movement provides a riveting firsthand glimpse into the urgent revolutionary moment as it unfolds.
PRAISE:
”An indispensable collection. These texts, and Barbara Allen’s expert curation and explication, bring to vivid life the astonishing tussles, turns and transformations of 1917, Russia’s revolutionary year.”
China Miéville, author of October
“Authentic human voices are what we hear in these leaflets from the Russian Revolution of 1917. The leaflets, emanating from different socialist parties and workers’ organizations, recreate all the vividness and excitement of contemporary debates, while the helpful introduction and notes provide the necessary historical context.”
Sheila Fitzpatrick, author of The Russian Revolution
“In this valuable volume, Barbara Allen furnishes all those interested in the Russian revolution with an important collection of political leaflets reflecting the epoch-defining struggle for power in 1917 Russia. Allen’s fine translations and insightful introductions add to the value of the collection.”
Alexander Rabinowitch, author of The Bolsheviks in Power
“The leaflets, nicely translated, take the reader into the fervent debates between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks during the 1917 revolution. Allen pays particular attention to Alexander Shlyapnikov, a level-headed Bolshevik metal worker who was involved in party and union organizing. She also provides clear, comprehensive introductions to the materials. The result is a collection that goes beyond the party luminaries and into the ranks of lower ranking activists. Most of these materials heretofore have been available only in Russian.”
Barbara Clements, author of A History of Women in Russia
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Barbara C. Allen, Ph.D.(2001), Indiana University Bloomington, is Associate Professor of History at La Salle University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. She is the author of Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (Brill 2015 and Haymarket Books 2016).
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594560 • US $19.95 • 9 in x 10 in • 124 pgs •100 B&W images
This revised and expanded paperback edition of the NAACP Image Award nominee features additional material from the 2020 uprising for Black Lives, and includes two new essays.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
On April 18, 2015, the city of Baltimore erupted in mass protests in response to the brutal murder of Freddie Gray by police. Devin Allen was there, and his iconic photos of the Baltimore uprising be-came a viral sensation. In these stunning photographs, Allen documents the up-rising as he strives to capture the life of his city and the people who live there.
Each photo reveals the personality, beauty, and spirit of Baltimore and its people, as his camera complicates popular ideas about the “ghetto.” Allen’s camera finds hope and beauty doing battle against a system that sows desperation and fear, and above all, resistance, to the unrelenting pressures of racism and poverty in a twenty- first- century American city.
PRAISE:
“Devin Allen’s photographs paint a picture not only of the protests themselves but also of the ups and downs of everyday life in Baltimore. The collection reenvisions the meaning of the term “ghetto,” showing vibrancy within a racially divided city.”
NYMag’s The Cut
“The cumulative effect of Allen’s photographs is of a city that’s lively, arresting and—against the odds—undeniably gorgeous.”
Mary Carol McCauley, Baltimore Sun
“Allen’s work demonstrates a connection between resistance as a daily activity, a way of life in the ghetto, and resistance as a political act, as played out in the streets last spring. He documents resistance without judgment, without asking the usual questions that outsiders might: Is it justified? Is it effective? Is it legal? Resistance is represented not as a tactic, but as a fundamental aspect of life.”
The Washington Post
“Reminiscent of the work produced by the late Gordon Parks.”
Ebony
“Devin Allen has compiled his poignant and sincere images of the real Baltimoreans who are often mischaracterized or neglected in the city’s narrative for his first book. A Beautiful Ghetto captures the essence of the city before, during, and after the Baltimore Uprising.”
Baltimore City Paper
“Devin Allen is both a poet and a documentarian. His images capture all of the particular details that make up a life, a time period, a moment. But all of those details add up to something universal—something that all people of all times could understand. A kid squinting underneath the bill of a too-big baseball cap sitting in the dappled shadows dancing off the stoop. In the same way that the details in each individual image add up to create something larger, each of the photographs in A Beautiful Ghetto adds context—conversation—to the others. Haymarket Books did a great job; they beautifully produced the book as a physical object, and stayed out of Allen’s way. Three close-up images of a man contorting his face are offset against a young man with one foot on a curb, looking at a makeshift memorial, a teddy bear strapped to a tree, flowers at its base. The black and white images bounce off each other creating multiple narratives, glimpses overlapping—like life in the city.”
Baltimore Beat, “The Beat’s Top Baltimore Books of 2017”
“Gorgeous.”
Cassius
“A Beautiful Ghetto is a visual love letter to Devin Allen’s hometown of Baltimore and a chronicle of its 2015 unrest after police killed Freddie Gray.”
Colorlines
“Devin Allen’s images are live and direct: vital visages of the city’s people—many of whom Allen knows personally—and the decaying infrastructure that can barely support them.”
Afropunk
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Devin Allen, a Baltimore native, is only the third amateur photographer to have their photograph appear on the cover of Time. His work has also been featured in New York Magazine, the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, BBC, NBC News, Aperture Magazine, and “Yahoo!.” Allen’s photographs have been exhibited in the Smithsonian.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. Her articles have been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics,Culture and Society, Jacobin, New Politics, TheGuardian, In These Times, Black Agenda Report, Ms., International Socialist Review, Al Jazeera America, and other publications. Taylor is assistant professor in the department of African American Studies at Princeton University.
D. Watkins is a columnist for Salon. His work has been published in the New York Times, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and other publications. He holds a master’s in Education from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Baltimore. He is a college professor at the University of Baltimore and founder of the BMORE Writers Project. Watkins has been the recipient of numerous awards including Ford’s Men of Courage and a BME Fellowship. Watkins is from and lives in East Baltimore. He is the author of The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir and The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America.
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Trade Cloth / Ebook • ISBN-13: 9781608461264 • US $22.95 • 5 1/4 in x 7 7/8 in • 328 pgs. • B&W illustrations
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The long-buried story of a Chicagoan’s struggle for justice after four of his children perished in a tragic fire.
In 1947, James Hickman shot and killed the landlord he believed was responsible for a tragic fire which took the lives of four of his children on Chicago’s west side. Prosecutors sought a death sentence for Hickman, but a vibrant defense campaign — which included the famous actress Tallulah Bankhead and acclaimed artist Ben Shahn — exposed how working poverty and racism led to his crime and helped win Hickman’s freedom.
In the best tradition of True Crime drama and narrative non-fiction, Joe Allen unearths the compelling story of a campaign that was willing to stand up to Jim Crow well before the modern civil rights movement had even begun. As deteriorating housing conditions and an accelerating foreclosure crisis combine to form a hauntingly similar set of factors as those which led to the tragic fire that claimed the lives of James Hickman’s children, Allen’s book restores to prominence a previously unknown individual whose story has profound relevance to today.
PRAISE:
“James Hickman was one of the hundreds of thousands of black Mississippians to move to Chicago in the 1940s. The nightmarish tragedy that befell the Hickman family there, as well as the actions of the dedicated activists who fought to save Hickman’s life by revealing the institutional foundations of that tragedy, are vividly depicted in Joe Allen’s important and moving history. Hickman’s story illustrates the toxic nature of racial segregation and economic exploitation. The outraged community that united to support Hickman is a refreshing reminder of people’s power to organize for change.”
Beryl Satte, author of Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
“Astonishing. … People Wasn’t Made to Burn does nothing less than reinvent the true-crime genre. … Allen has rescued a part of our social history, which on its own is an impressive accomplishment. He has turned the true-crime genre upside down, which also is a fantastic feat. But by book’s end, Allen relates the Hickman case to our own troubled times.”
Dave Zirin, The Nation
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Joe Allen is a frequent contributor to the International Socialist Review and a longstanding social justice fighter, involved in the ongoing struggles for labor, abolition of the death penalty, and against the Iraq war. He is the author of Vietnam: The (Last) War the United States Lost.
Ben Shahn’s social realist art celebrated the lives of those who struggled for justice, from Sacco and Vanzetti to the labor militants of the Great Depression to the civil rights activists of the 1960s.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591644 • US $17.95 • 5.5 in x 8 in • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
If the 20th Century was the American Century, it was also UPS’s Century. Joe Allen’s The Package King tears down the Brown Wall surrounding one of America’s most admired companies—United Parcel Service (UPS). The company that we see everyday but know so little about. How did a company that began as a bicycle messenger service in Seattle, Washington become a global behemoth? How did it displace General Motors, the very symbol of American capitalism, to become the largest, private sector, unionized employer in the United States? And, at what cost to its workers and surrounding communities? Will it remain the Package King in the 21st Century or will be dethroned by Amazon?
PRAISE:
“UPS activists, Teamsters, and others involved in the labor movement will want to buy this book, put it in their libraries, and take it down and refer to it as they strategize with their coworkers. All of those interested in the increasing inequities societies and the forces that cause them should get this book or get it into your community or university library.”
Solidarity
“Get a copy of Allen’s book for yourself and then pass it on to a UPS driver the next time you get a delivery. She is part of the most organized section of what is possibly the most important industry in 21st-century capitalism, and the outcome of her story will have a lot to do with what our world looks like on the other side of this pandemic.“
Indypendent
“Excellent book!! If you’re the least bit interested in the lengthy and nefarious relationship between the Teamsters and UPS, this book covers it all. I’m embarrassed that I’ve worked for more than a quarter century for UPS and been a Teamster for just as long and didn’t know half of the stuff that’s uncovered, exposed, and revealed in The Package King!”
Rob Atkinson, veteran UPS and Teamster activist
“The Package King’s step by step narrative of how major changes in the Teamsters and in labor history can and did happen, should serve as an example to any young militants entering the trade union movement today. Anyone interested in taking on the rich and powerful on the shop floors of the 21st century should download and read this book.”
Guy Miller, In These Times
“His new book The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service which was revelatory to me on a number of levels. “Oh, hell, you may say, I know what United Parcel Service is”—and that’s what I thought, and know you don’t is the answer!”
Rick Kogan, “After Hours with Rick Kogan,” WGN Radio
“The Package King is a wonderful look at over a century of capitalism, its transformations, and the rank and file militancy, and peaks and troughs that have characterized the U.S. labour movement of the last 100 years. It is also a call to activists to get serious about analyzing the modern logistics system and how to think about how to build worker power within it.”
Gerard Di Trolio, rankandfile.ca
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joe Allen worked for nearly a decade at UPS between its Watertown, Massachusetts and Chicago, Illinois Jefferson Street hubs. Starting out as a part-time loader he worked his way through a series of part-time sorting and driving jobs until his final year at UPS where he was a package car driver in Chicago’s Loop. Allen’s work life has largely revolved different sections of the freight and logistics including for such major employers as A.P.A Transport (Canton, Mass.), Yellow Freight (Maspeth, NY), and UPS. He has been a member of several Teamster local unions and a member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. He campaigned for Ron Carey’s reelection in 1996, and for Tom Leedham in the two following Teamster elections.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859493 • US $14 • 5.3 in x 8 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
As the United States faces unwinnable wars in the Middle East, the history of the Vietnam War (as a historic blunder for U.S. military forces abroad) and the true story of how it was stopped, take on a fresh importance. Unlike specialized academic studies on the topic, The (Last) War the United States Lost examines the lessons of the Vietnam era for a popular audience. Joe Allen writes as both a dedicated historian and an engaged participant in today’s antiwar movement. Many damaging myths about the Vietnam era persist, including the accusations that antiwar activists routinely jeered and spat at returning soldiers or that the war finally ended because Congress cut off its funding. Writing in a clear and accessible style, Allen reclaims the stories of the courageous GI revolt; its dynamic relationship with the civil rights movement and the peace movement; the development of coffeehouses where these groups came to speak out, debate, and organize; and the struggles waged throughout barracks, bases, and military prisons to challenge the rule of military command. Allen’s analysis of the U.S.’s failure in Vietnam is also the story of the hubris of U.S. imperial overreach, a new chapter of which is unfolding in the Middle East today.
PRAISE:
“Joe Allen’s book is so needed, and so welcome. Indeed, the following pages amount to a masterpiece in which the author, unrelenting in his research, has reclaimed memory from the organized forgetting that has so bedeviled the very word ‘Vietnam.’ … What I also appreciate about Joe Allen’s work is that he demonstrates as an historian how a rapacious force as seemingly invincible as the United States can be defeated politically, if not militarily. While not claiming a likeness between the two invasions, he draws many valuable parallels of how they began. Rather than giving us ‘hope,’ he is giving us power: the power of information, meticulous, distilled, coherent, principled. His mighty primer should be on every curriculum. No, it should be in every home.”
John Pilger
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joe Allen is a regular contributor to the International Socialist Review and a longstanding social justice fighter, involved in the ongoing struggles in the labor movement, for the abolition of the death penalty, and to free political prisoner Gary Tyler. He lives in Chicago.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591507 • US $16.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Text Messages is the first multi-genre collection by Montreal-based Iraqi hip-hop artist, activist, and professor Yassin “Narcy” Alsalman. Composed entirely on a smartphone during air travel and married to artwork from comrades, Narcy’s writing speaks of the existential crises experienced by diasporic children of war before and during imperialism in the age of the Internet.
Narcy’s verses span the space between hip-hop and manifesto, portraying a crumbling, end-stage capitalist society, visions for a new reality, and exposes the myth of multiculturalism in post-9/11 North America. The wordsmith hollows and transmogrifies the grotesque excess of the West by juxtaposing McLife with images of death, destruction, and trauma in the East.
From the depths of apathetic consumerism arises a voice of spiritual self-realization that explodes the misrepresented, mythical monolith of Islam in the West and with the rubble builds healing through intelligent resistance and radical love.
“Young boys and girls trapped in Walmarts— our consumer interim camps. A family-friendly, discounted freedom. You don’t see what the Internet can’t. Not our land or home. Not your mans or holmes. Not your towers or domes. Not your power or drones.”
PRAISE:
“Yassin ‘Narcy’ Alsalman is a one-of-a-kind artist. He is transcendental, he is pop, he is the Muslim, he is the poet. Through his questioning of the tides of time, and the world’s disregard of the Arab, he writes lyrics as anthem, providing a source material for a part of the world that is so often misunderstood and forgotten. This book is exciting in its futurity. It is punchy in its enthusiasm. I am grateful for this book’s aliveness.”
Fariha Róisín, author, How To Cure a Ghost
“Yassin Alsalman’s writing weaves through the epic struggles of people to get free, enduring and resisting brutality, dictatorship, war, and occupation. As a hip-hop artist, he was forged in the rubble of 9/11 and the ensuing war against Muslims, emerging as one of the most creative and sharp artists chronicling the crimes of the powerful and giving voice to people’s uprisings. Text Messages is a potent book rooted in the poetry and art of Alsalman’s Iraqi ancestors, translated in a global language for the urgency of the times in which we now live.”
Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept and author of Blackwater and Dirty Wars
“Narcy’s voice cuts through the rubble piled high in the wake of Amerikkka’s ‘War on Terror,’ a true testament to hip-hop’s intersectional revolutionary power and an unapologetic representation of the Muslim world in the 21st century’s most ubiquitous art form.”
Vic Mensa
“Yassin Alsalman possesses one of the most important voices in the world, and Text Messages could not be more timely or more necessary of a read. On paper, this Muslim teacher who raps should not be a success, but because of the beauty of his words and the pureness of his heart, he wins despite the massive odds against him. Narcy makes me feel heard, he gives me life. I am proud to be his friend and his peer.”
Talib Kweli
Passion, pain, anger, hope, and swagger. Yassin is a man from the future. Narcy beautifully captures the chaotic multitudes of being a brown diaspora kid living through the war on terror in the technology age. Text Messages is an ambitious and bold time capsule capturing the insane times we’re living through. Poems, barbs, and bars — take a bow Yassin, you’ve made a classic.”
Hasan Minhaj
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Real name Yassin Alsalman, Narcy is a musician, director, professor, writer, and actor. He teaches a hip-hop production class and a cultural study of rap and politics at Concordia University. He is the cofounder of WeAreTheMedium, a culture point for publishing, media, and the arts. He currently resides in Tiohtià:k, on unceded Indigenous lands, has his heart in the Arab world, and is grounded on planet Earth. Most importantly, he is a father of two.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902509 • US $22.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This striking collection of more than 200 full-color infographics is a vivid portrait of Israeli settler colonialism and the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
Meticulously crafted for both factual and emotional impact, these visuals reflect the ingenuity of a new generation of movement-builders who are using digital media to change the way people learn about the roots of injustice in Palestine and practice solidarity with Palestinians.
The infographics present more than just data: colorful, accessible, and thoughtfully arranged, the oppression they document in stark detail dovetails with stories of perseverance and strength. From the history of Zionist settlement to the depopulation of Palestinian villages; from the construction of an apartheid wall to the destruction of olive trees; from hunger strikes to mass protests to boycotts, Visualizing Palestine‘s graphics are powerful, comprehensive, and demand our attention.
PRAISE:
“Deploying a unique combination of creative design, scholarly rigor, and unwavering moral commitment, Visualizing Palestine helps us glimpse the myriad cruelties and excruciating asymmetries of Israeli apartheid, colonization, and rapidly escalating violence against Palestinian people. This is political art and popular education at its most urgent and potent.”
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
“The anatomy of an occupation laid bare.”
Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things
“Visualizing Palestine embodies ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ for one of the most critical global justice issues of our time. This book is a journey of storytelling, compelling facts, and imagery that reflect the conditions, hopes, struggles and aspirations of the Palestinian people. The narrative is shifting towards justice and Visualizing Palestine is at the center of it.”
Linda Sarsour, author of We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders: A Memoir of Love and Resistance
“Visualizing Palestine has captured nearly a century of Palestinian knowledge production in a series of striking visuals to further emphasize just how uncomplicated oppression is. The only controversy is whether this oppression should be accepted. Overcoming this hurdle is a battle over narrative and against racial-colonial logic. This text is a significant contribution in prevailing in both realms.”
Noura Erakat, Professor and author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
“The mission and fruits of Visualizing Palestine’s labors are ones to be taken seriously and held tightly not to feed our despair, but to nourish our hopes. These pages are testament that even when one of the strongest military powers in the world tries to keep its practices strategically concealed, nothing remains untold. Allow the information laid out in this book to equip you with the context and realities that are intentionally denied to justify the killing of humanity. If you do, it will—at once—shake and balance you.”
Mariam Barghouti
“Visualizing Palestine has been generating visual data based on research that makes understanding the mechanics of colonial structures accessible to anyone interested in learning them. It is visual design in its noblest form, translating challenging realities into comprehensible graphics to communicate with the masses. An instrumental tool for shifting the global narrative on justice, Visualizing Palestine is visualizing justice.”
Bahia Shehab, Professor of Design, award winning artist and author
“This book has all the rigor of academia, the urgency of journalism, and the power of historical documentation.” Mona Chalabi, Pulitzer Prize-winning data journalist
“Visualizing Palestine is the perfect book for the current political moment. Building on more than a decade of labor, the contributors have masterfully transformed the visual medium into a site of radical political education and anti-Zionist struggle. After viewing the hundreds of carefully crafted and remarkably lucid images contained in this book, readers will undoubtedly be better equipped to challenge dominant narratives and refute dangerous misinformation. This is an absolute must-read book for students, teachers, activists, organizers, and anyone else committed to Palestinian liberation!”
Marc Lamont Hill
“These bold, perfectly designed and lucid graphics get straight to the point in illuminating the grave injustices perpetrated against the Palestinian people.” Joe Sacco, author of Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza
“Mere statistics often obfuscate what needs to be fully apprehended, and multiple competing narratives magnify the task of interpretation. Each image in Visualizing Palestine invites us to begin to fathom the unfathomable; together, these graphic works are an answer to the problem of narrative confuscation. They are powerful—even beautiful—not only in design but for the ethical clarity they provide at this critical juncture. What an amazing team.”
Gina Dent, Professor and Co-Director of Visualizing Abolition, University of California, Santa Cruz
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781902593579 • US $10 • 10.9 in x 8.4 in • 69 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Addicted to War takes on the most active, powerful and destructive military in the world. Hard-hitting, carefully documented with 161 reference notes, and heavily illustrated, Addicted to War reveals why the U.S. has been involved in more wars in recent years than any other country.
Read Addicted to War to find out who benefits from these military adventures, who pays and who dies.
One of Roam’s all-time bestsellers — beloved by activists and teachers all over the US and beyond — Joel Andreas’s Addicted to War is now available in a brand-new edition! Updates include Obama’s drone wars, Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks, up-to-date statistics on military spending, and the ongoing costs and consequences of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
PRAISE:
“Addicted to War is a witty and devastating portrait of U.S. military policy, a fine example of art serving society.”
Howard Zinn, author, People’s History of the United States
“I highly recommend [Addicted to War] to anyone who is interested in learning the truth about US wars.”
Glenn Greenwald
“This is the most important comic book ever written … It is my hope that you read this book and pass it along to as many people as you can.”
Woody Harrelson
“The enormous criminal impact of U.S. militarism on the people of the world and the people of the U.S. is hard to grasp. This book makes it easier to understand.”
Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General of the United States
“As a veteran of three wars, World War II through Vietnam, with 33 years of Army service, I find this book to be the most truthful recitation of our government’s policies available anywhere.”
Col. James Burkholder, U.S. Army, Retired
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joel Andreas began following his parents to demonstrations against the Vietnam War while in elementary school in Detroit. He has been a political activist ever since, working to promote racial equality and workers’ rights inside the United States and to stop U.S. military intervention abroad. After working as an automobile assembler, a printer, and a civil engineering drafter, he completed a doctoral degree in sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles, studying the aftermath of the 1949 Chinese Revolution. He now teaches at John Hopkins University in Baltimore. Addicted to War is Joe’s third illustrated exposé. He wrote and drew The Incredible Rocky, an unauthorized biography of the Rockefeller family (which sold nearly 100,000 copies) while a student at Berkeley High School in California. He also wrote another comic book, Made with Pure Rocky Mountain Scab Labor, to support a strike by Coors brewery workers.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461400 • US $19 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Too Many People? provides a clear, well-documented and popularly written refutation of the idea that “overpopulation” is a major cause of environmental destruction, arguing that a focus on human numbers not only misunderstands the causes of the crisis, it dangerously weakens the movement for real solutions.
No other book challenges modern overpopulation theory so clearly and comprehensively, providing invaluable insights for activists and environmental scholars alike.
PRAISE:
“With clear prose and careful, cogent analysis, Angus and Butler provide the tools necessary to dismantle the myth of overpopulation step by step. In so doing, they also show the way to a more hopeful, justice-centered environmental and reproductive politics. Like the excellent publications they edit, Climate and Capitalism and Green Left Weekly, this book makes complex information, ideas and arguments accessible to a wide variety of readers — activists, students, educators, journalists, policymakers and indeed anyone who wants to better understand the world.”
Betsy Hartmann, director of the Population and Development Program and professor of Development Studies, Hampshire College
“This excellent book is steadfast in its refutations of the flabby, misogynist and sometimes racist thinking that population growth catastrophists use to peddle their claims. It’s just the thing to send populationists scurrying back to their bunkers.”
Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Ian Angus is editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate and Capitalism.
Simon Butler is co-editor of Green Left Weekly.
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RUSSIA
From Worker’s State to State Capitalism
Second Edition
By Anthony Arnove, Tony Cliff, Ahmed Shawki, and Chris Harman Haymarket Books (June 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465453 • 174 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
To millions throughout the world, the Russian workers’ state offered new hope. People everywhere turned from the grim alternatives of a declining capitalism—unemployment, poverty, the threat of new wars—to place their hopes in the government that the soviets, councils of working people, put into power in Russia.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Anthony Arnove produced the Academy Award-nominated documentary Dirty Wars and wrote, directed, and produced The People Speak with Howard Zinn. He is the editor of several books, including Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which Arnove co-edited with Zinn, The Essential Chomsky, and Iraq Under Siege, and is the author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal. He is on the editorial boards of Haymarket Books and the International Socialist Review. Tony Cliff was a lifelong organizer within the international socialist movement. His groundbreaking work established the unique interpretation of the Soviet Union as a bureaucratic, state-centered version of capitalism, rather than a workers’ state. His many works include State Capitalism in Russia and the volume that follows-up from this book, All Power to the Soviets, about Lenin’s political leadership from 1914 to 1917.
Ahmed Shawki is the editor of the International Socialist Review and the author of Black Liberation and Socialism.
Chris Harman (1942–2009) was a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) and the editor of the newspaper, Socialist Worker for many years. He was the author of many books, articles and pamphlets, including A People’s History of the World, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe, The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After, Economics of the Madhouse, How Marxism Works, and Zombie Capitalism.
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Hardcover • ISBN-13:9780807061688 • US $24.95 • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Addresses how tech empowers community organizing and protest movements to combat the systems of capitalism and data exploitation that helped drive tech’s own rise to ubiquity.
The battle over who is really in control when it comes to our smartphones will determine whether they will tether us ever more tightly to processes of commodification and oppression, or serve as a liberatory tool to resist corporate monopoly and increasingly authoritarian governments–and build a better future. The author shows us how smartphones have emerged as a key site of struggle between consumers and corporations.
Smartphones have appeared everywhere seemingly overnight: since the first iPhone released in 2007, the number of smartphone users has skyrocketed to over two billion. Smartphones have allowed users to connect worldwide in a way that was previously impossible, created communities across continents, and provided platforms for global justice movements. However, the price of connection is paid in something incredibly lucrative: data. Users are more vulnerable than ever before to have their private data mined without their knowledge or consent. The Smartphone Society identifies the lasting ripple effects of this technology, unveiling the social, political, economic, and ecological relationships embedded in these pocket-sized computers that we take everywhere we go.
In this New Gilded Age of inequality and precarity, smartphones both reflect and reconfigure deep divides rooted in existing antagonisms of race, gender, and class. At the same time, an unprecedented surveillance state has emerged that uses our smartphones to digitally monitor, harass, and even kill. Network effects and aggressive efforts to control the digital marketplace have turned platform companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon into modern-day monopolies. This has dire consequences for privacy, equality and democracy.
PRAISE:
“Aschoff’s analysis of our relationship to our phones is relevant and urgent. She gives us enough context to understand our addictions, our willingness to be surveilled and manipulated, and, better yet, the avenues of resistance against the tech titans that increasingly control our time, attention, and futures.”
Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy and CEO of O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing
“In The Smartphone Society, Nicole Aschoff gives us fresh insight into how the device and our everyday lives have morphed into one another. She considers the good and the bad, and helps us to understand how the smartphone has reshaped society in innumerable ways. With accessible prose, she looks into selfies and social media, politics and protest, profit and women’s unpaid work. It is a cogent read in the era of the smartphone.”
Rich Ling, Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology, Nanyang Technological University
“The Smartphone Society pierces the fog of the Silicon Valley fantasy, showing us how these little pocket computers control our lives for profit—but also how they open new paths to justice. Nicole Aschoff has given us that rare book, packed with insights and written with verve. I will never look at my smartphone the same way—and after reading The Smartphone Society, neither will you.”
Jason W. Moore, professor of sociology and author of Capitalism in the Web of Life
Praise for The New Prophets of Capital:
“A highly original and fascinating exploration of what we might think of as ‘changeless change’—the kind of innovation that simultaneously upends current practices and studiously protects existing wealth and power inequities. Through four well-chosen and emblematic case studies, Aschoff tackles this slippery subject with confidence and subtlety, providing readers with key intellectual tools to separate fact from fiction.”
Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
“Nicole Aschoff expertly dissects the magical thinking behind America’s idolatry of the invisible hand. In a series of lively and closely argued case studies, she lets readers see the threadbare state of our rationales for the market’s uncontested sovereignty. And just as impressively, she urges us not to be daunted by the challenges ahead.”
Chris Lehmann, author of Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class
“Nicole Aschoff has skewered the high priests and priestesses of our most unshakable religion: capitalism. Anyone persuading you to ‘lean in,’ engage in ‘conscious capitalism’ or admire philanthropists will be (rightfully) upset by Aschoff’s takedown of some of the big-name ‘ethical capitalists’ of our era: Sheryl Sandberg, Bill Gates, Whole Foods’ John Mackey. Aschoff takes apart the platitudes of liberal capitalism and offers a solid set of alternatives that stress the collective over the individual, people over profit, and real narratives over cover stories.”
Nina Power, author of One Dimensional Woman
“The New Prophets of Capital is intellectually serious without succumbing to critical jargon, and Aschoff makes her points both thoughtfully and rigorously.”
Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe
“Wry and adroit.”
Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, The New Republic
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nicole Aschoff is a writer and sociologist. She is the author of The New Prophets of Capital (Verso, 2015). She is a member of the Jacobin editorial board and her writing has been featured in the Guardian, the Nation, Al Jazeera, Dissent, and openDemocracy. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins University, taught at Boston University, and is the former managing editor of Jacobin magazine.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781608466047• US $16 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 250 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Halal If You Hear Me: The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3 is an anthology to highlight the work of Muslim writers who are women, trans, queer and gender nonconforming. The collected poems dispel the notion that there is one correct way to be a Muslim, holds space for our multiple intersecting identities, and to celebrate and protect those identities.
Halal If You Hear Me features poems by Safia Elhillo, Fatimah Asghar, Warsan Shire, Tarfia Faizullah, Angel Nafis, Beyza Ozer, and many others.
PRAISE:
“This is the third volume of Haymarket Books’ popular “The Breakbeat Poets Anthology Series” and another hit in the making, for readers of the Muslim diaspora, people with Muslim families and anyone interested in listening in on a contemporary conversation with writers from the fastest growing religion, around two billion worldwide. If I could go back in time, “Halal If You Hear Me” is a book I would give my mother when she was young, when she had no idea how to navigate life as a brown woman with a hidden Muslim side, in a hostile environment where she was often harassed. How wonderful to be in this space, to be “just seen… just be heard… be celebrated.”
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), recipient of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, she is a 2016 Pushcart Prize nomine, co-winner of the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her fellowships and residencies include Cave Canem, The Conversation, and SPACE on Ryder Farm. Her work appears in POETRY Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism.
Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. Fatimah Asghar is the author of the poetry collection If They Should Come for Us (One World/Random House, forthcoming 2018) and the chapbook After (Yes Yes Books, 2015). She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608469055 • US $22 • 8.5 in x 5.5 in • 305 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In A Marxist Education, professor and education activist Wayne Au traces his own development as a Marxist educator as well as the development of radical educational theory. Arguing that dialectical materialism is at the heart of Marxist theory, Au uses dialectics not only to analyze the relationship between capitalism and schools, but also to understand teaching, learning, and curriculum.
PRAISE:
“In A Marxist Education, Wayne Au reveals the method he has applied for years to understand structures of education that have made him one of the most insightful voices nationally in the struggle for education justice. Au boldly illustrates to educators and activists how Marxism is a dynamic tool for resisting the ways schooling has been used to reproduce racism and oppression.”
Jesse Hagopian, author of More Than a Score
“Shattering myths and misconceptions about Marxism in every chapter, Wayne Au shows how Marx’s method has guided his pathbreaking research on the racial politics of education policy and his work as an activist and organizer for educational justice.”
Brian Jones, Associate Director of Education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
“Au’s purpose is to upend the dogma of common sense, to analyze the educational catastrophe before us and the seeds of the struggles we will need to mount in order to imagine and then enact just schools; his method is dialectical-materialism; his insights are profound and plentiful. The result is an essential book for these times, a weapon to carry to the next school board meeting, the picket line, or the barricades.”
Bill Ayers, author of Demand the Impossible! and Teaching Toward Freedom
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Wayne Au is a former public high school social studies and language arts teacher and assistant professor in the education program at the University of Washington. He is editor at Rethinking Schools as well as the author and editor of many books, including Critical Curriculum Studies, and Unequal by Design.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592764 • US $15.00 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 250 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens, this book exposes the link between the struggle for freedom here in the US to the larger international struggle to build a better world, from the US to Palestine and beyond. It looks at both the historical and contemporary trajectory of the solidarity movement to describe what lessons can be gleaned for building a movement today, and lays out the unique case that understanding the solution to how justice can be achieved in Palestine has to take up the question of socialism regionally and internationally.
PRAISE:
“…an urgent bulletin to socialists everywhere seeking to analyze, understand and organize for Palestinian liberation”
Bill Mullen, Mondoweiss
“In Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, editors Sumaya Awad and brian bean introduce both the Question of Palestine as well as socialist principles—topics that have each produced volumes of scholarly literature—to new audiences. They accomplish this tremendous feat with moral clarity and analytical rigor. The volume provides the reader with an internationalist framework, defined as a commitment to anti-imperialism, and uses it to place Palestine into local, regional, and global historical context. The book connects the past to our present and, despite the daunting odds before us, sustains a commitment to a socialist future where all of us are free because all of us are free.”
Noura Erakat, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
“A crucial reminder that Israel’s settler-colonial project is not merely a historical event that we can move past, but an ongoing reality backed by successive western administrations. In moments where those who fight for freedom and equality triumph in their local battles around the world, we (Palestinians) see this as part of the victory in our battle for freedom in Palestine. Only through the strengthening of our civil society, of trade unions and workers, can we build our struggle against occupation and pressure Israel until it ends its project of colonialism and racial segregation. This volume lays bare just that.”
Ahmed Abu Artema, Palestinian journalist and peace activist
“The Vietnam war was once a line in the sand. Protests against the war radicalized a generation, built a new Left, and taught it why imperialism was indispensable for capitalism. Palestine is the Vietnam of our times. This urgent book will offer a new generation of activists lessons on why, to fight capitalism and apartheid today, we need to fight like Palestinians.”
Tithi Bhattacharya, co-author of Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
“This collection is a poignant and incisive engagement with the past, and possible future, role of the Left in the struggle for justice in Palestine. From critical analysis of organizational matters to the very complex issues of gender and secularism, this book is a must read for anyone whose socialism has brought them to care and act on behalf of Palestine and the Palestinians. As a Left, we are at a crucial juncture of strategic contemplation in general and on Palestine in particular. This book offers ways forward that can re-energize the Left as a robust alliance of identification and solidarity for the sake of the liberation of Palestine as well as that of all the oppressed workers and peoples around the globe.”
Ilan Pappé, author of Ten Myths About Israel
“Ten powerful essays, meticulously woven together by Sumaya Awad and brian bean, combine rich political history with incisive analysis of the current conjuncture and struggle. The book provides an entry-point for new activists to understand a conflict whose history has been so deliberately obfuscated, alongside a rich well of analysis on complex political questions. Awad and bean’s book should be widely read, and its socialist, bottom up vision of transformation acted upon.”
Hadas Thier, author of A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics
“The contributions within this book not only offer an understanding of Palestinian realities, they also provide insight into themes such as Diaspora and the search for belonging, and reflect the voices of all those who wish to return home in dignity, justice, and freedom. In essence it is a book which outlines a roadmap for return, with nuance and an offer to go beyond acknowledging the injustice in order to do something about it.”
Mariam Barghouti, Palestinian American writer
“This collection of essays is an essential contribution to the socialist perspective on the issue of Palestinian liberation. Its authors share a valuable overarching insight: that for socialists the fight for Palestinian individual and national rights is not a mere object of abstract solidarity, but must be approached within the context of the international struggle against imperialism and for socialism.”
Moshé Machover, author of Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution
“A Palestine primer for the growing socialist movement, and an argument for socialism for the growing Palestine solidarity movement, this book is a valuable resource for building the type of US left that the world desperately needs.”
Danny Katch, author of Socialism…Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation
“The truth is simple: Palestinian people deserve the right to self-determination. But to get to that truth, you need to understand the history and politics of their struggle. This book is a tremendous roadmap to get to that truth.”
Dave Zirin, author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States
“Essential reading for anybody interested in understanding the past, present, and future of the Palestinian liberation struggle.”
Eric Blanc, author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Sumaya Awad is a 25-year-old New York–based, Palestinian, socialist writer and activist. She is a cofounder of the Against Canary Mission Project, which helps defend student activists targeted by blacklists because of their advocacy for Palestinian human rights. Sumaya is a senior media editor at the Institute for Middle East Understanding, and an independent writer focused on refugee issues, Palestine solidarity, Islamophobia, and immigration. She has been published and interviewed by a wide variety of outlets including the Feminist Wire, Truthout, In These Times, Open City and the Middle East Solidarity Magazine, and Slate.
brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist activist, writer, and speaker originally from North Carolina. He is one of the founding editors of Masses magazine. His work has been published in Jacobin, Socialist Worker, Red Flag, International Viewpoint, Bel Ahmar, Spring Magazine, Green Left Weekly, Chronique de Palestine, Agency, Viento Sur, and more.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466702 • US $14.95 • 150 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Demand the Impossible is a manifesto for movement-makers and an invitation to join hands and make history together. In an era defined by mass incarceration, endless war, economic crisis, catastrophic environmental destruction, and a political system offering more of the same, radical social transformation has never been more urgent—or seemed more remote.
A manifesto for movement-makers in extraordinary times, Demand the Impossible! urges us to imagine a world beyond what this rotten system would have us believe is possible.
In critiquing the world around us, insurgent educator and activist Bill Ayers uncovers cracks in that system, raising the horizons for radical change, and envisioning strategies for building the movement we need to make a world worth living in.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
“Demand the Impossible! is more than a book, more than a manifesto. It is a torch. Bill Ayers’ vision for a humane future is incendiary—fire that incinerates old logics and illuminates new paths. If we do not end the violence of militarism, materialism, caging, dispossession, debt, want, ignorance, and global warming, our very survival is impossible. Read aloud.”
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams
“With the beautiful idealism of a young radical and the sage wisdom of an elder, Bill Ayers is making trouble again, and we should all be grateful. In Demand the Impossible! Ayers troubles the waters of staid political practices, insisting that we close our eyes for a moment and think creatively about what a better world might look like, and then open our eyes wide and organize boldly to make that world a reality. This is an elegant and provocative manifesto for our time, one that honors the social justice organizing currently in motion.”
Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
“Bill Ayers has produced a portrait of two worlds. One is a dystopia, recognizable as the world in which we live, the other a world that capitalism describes as a fantasy—a world reconstructed around values that place the advancement of humanity and the sanctity of the planet above the accumulation of wealth and power. The two portraits stand in dramatic contrast and make Demand the Impossible! both illuminating and compelling. This manifesto is radical less in its rhetoric than in its daring to actually go to the roots of the barbarism of the capitalist system. Demand the Impossible! is to be read and then shared widely. It can serve as a motivator for those of us engaged in the long battle for justice and social transformation.”
Bill Fletcher, Jr, author of Solidarity Divided
“In his many years of practicing and theorizing pedagogy, Bill Ayers has proven himself a master teacher. Now, Demand the Impossible! is a brilliant and accessible distillation of techniques and knowledge crafted into a powerful manifesto for our times, expanding the horizon of our expectations.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“Bill Ayers is the philosopher of the revolutionary spirit. These are despondent times, and yet, as Bill muses – history can surprise us. In preparation for that surprise, Bill has written a smart and inspirational manifesto.”
Vijay Prashad, author of The Poorer Nations
“Bill Ayers’ Demand the Impossible! is a strong shot of inspiration for anyone searching for deep social transformation. It is a heartfelt, upbeat manifesto in favor of activism as an antidote to despair. Chock-full of personal stories, real facts and concrete examples packaged in exquisite writing, Demand the Impossible! will open your mind to possibilities you never thought existed. Ayers will get you off your seat and into the street, fist raised, heart full, reaching for the spectacular.”
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink and author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control
Demand the Impossible! is just what the world needs right now, a manifesto that challenges us to imagine bigger, love harder, create more expansively, and struggle toward a liberatory future in spite of our deepest doubts. Bill Ayers wakes us up and shows us that even the most entrenched, most permanent-seeming institutions—the military, the prison, the police, capitalism itself—are no match for the creativity and determination of the “universal family” and the “better angels of ourselves.” Demand the Impossible! is a call to abandon the illusory American Dream wholesale, and, in its place, to unleash our own collective, revolutionary dreams into the universe. I dare you to not be inspired by this book.
Maya Schenwar, editor of Truthout and author of Locked Down, Locked Out
“This is a deeply refreshing book, reminding us of why the core principles of socialist and anarchist thought—peace, justice, freedom, equality—are grounded, not in utopian fantasy, but in the joyous work of the creative imagination in everyday life. In large ways (an end to the military-industrial complex and the U.S. prison system) and small (the rebirth of community and public life in neighborhoods) Ayers offers a program that is long on ideals and even longer on actually existing programs, groups, movements, and individuals working toward a humane future. By turns alarming in its realistic assessment of the madness and stupidity of the present global system, and inspiring in its down to earth proposals for alternative human futures, this is a must-read for discouraged progressives everywhere. It is a book that could be a clear and present danger to Western civilization as we know it—and in the very best way.”
W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry and author of Seeing Through Race and Cloning Terror
“Every once in a while a book comes along that not only changes the way one thinks, but opens a new space for imagining and then acting to create a better world with commitment, courage, and a heightened sense of ethical and social responsibility. Demand the Impossible! is one of those books, and it ranks right at the top of the list. Ayers has a gift—he not only writes like a poet but he never fails to deal with rigorous and important ideas in an accessible and moving style. Touching on a range of issues extending from police violence and racism to ecological destruction, Ayers raises all the right questions and connects the dots that provide a tapestry for energizing the radical imagination. This may be one of the best books written in that tradition. Powerful, insightful, prodding, challenging, and most of all hopeful—if you want to understand the problems facing a society tipping into the abyss of authoritarianism, this book is a must-read, a kind of master text for those of us figuring out how to change a world that seems at time beyond our reach.”
Henry Giroux, author of Theory and Resistance in Education and The Violence of Organized Forgetting
“Demand the Impossible! provides the imperative we need now. As public consciousness and despair heighten in our various locales, we must be willing to engage lessons from the past and present while building a future that is reflective of our commitment to justice. If we’re serious about this, we know there is no choice: all we got is US!”
David Stovall, author of Born Out of Struggle
“Ever the educator and agitator, Ayers envisions a future society where the levers of power are pulled collectively by masses of active citizens working for the greater good and not, as he argues, for the benefits of the 1 percent and corporations. . . . The grand social visions of the 1960s are alive and well in Ayers’ call to action. Progressives will seek out this treatise.”
Booklist
“The book is simply formatted and powerfully written. The problem and situation are clearly stated and the need for change made explicitly clear. Ideally, Demand the Impossible! would be distributed for free at every rally and meeting called to discuss the issues explored therein. It is not the only book or article that provides an outline of what must be done, but it is certainly one of the most concise and evocatively written ones. Imagine a series of speeches designed to inspire and teach; to move us from frustration and apathy to the streets; that is what this book is all about.”
Counterpunch
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Bill Ayers is a social justice activist, teacher, Distinguished Professor of Education (retired) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and author of two memoirs, Fugitive Days and Public Enemy. A graduate of the University of Michigan, the Bank Street College of Education, Bennington College, and Teachers College, Columbia University, Ayers has written extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. He is a past vice-president of the curriculum studies division of the American Educational Research Association.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598346 • US $19.99 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 368 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
On Shedding an Obsolete Pastprovides a much-needed and comprehensive critique of recent US national security policies in both the Trump and Biden administrations. These policy decisions have produced a series of costly disappointments and outright failures that have destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands around the world and cost US taxpayers astronomical sums of money.
Bacevich provides urgent and critical insights into how these failures occurred and what needs to be done to prevent similar failures in the future. He reminds us that, by understanding the past, we can alter our current trajectory and transform the world for the better.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599022 • US $18.00 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A book-length poetic sequence using the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole as a lens through which to view the vitality of Black lives and the afterlife of slavery.
ballast is a relentless, wrenching, and gorgeously written book, a defiant reclamation of one of the most important but overlooked events in US history, and an essential contribution to contemporary poetry.
In 1841, the only successful, large-scale revolt of American-born enslaved people erupted on the ship Creole. 135 people escaped chattel slavery that day. The event was recounted in US senate documents, including letters exchanged between US and British consulates in The Bahamas and depositions from the white crew on the ship. There is no known record or testimony from the 135 people who escaped.Their story has been lost to time and indifference. Quenton Baker’s ballast is an attempt at incomplete redress.
With imagination, deep empathy, and skilled and compelling lyricism, Baker took a black marker to those senate documents and culled a poetic recount of the Creole revolt. Layers of ink on the senate documents connect readers to Baker’s poetic process: (re)phrasing the narrative of the state through a dexterous process of hands-on redactions.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461479 • US $17 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 220 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Based on their own experiences, teachers across the country offer ideas on resolving the crisis in education.
The conservative, bipartisan consensus dominating the discussion about what’s wrong with our schools and how to fix them offers “solutions” that scapegoat teachers, vilify unions, and promise market mentality as the answer. But, in each case, students lose. This book, written by teacher activists, speaks back to the elite consensus and offers an alternative vision of learning for liberation.
Contributors: Jeff Bale, Sarah Knopp, Rose Aguilar, Bill Bigelow, Megan Behrent, Michele Bollinger, John T. Green, Jesse Hagopian, Adrienne Johnstone, Brian Jones, Jessie Muldoon, Gillian Russom, Adam Sanchez, Elizabeth Terzakis, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Jeff Bale is Associate Professor of Language and Literacies Education Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto.
Sarah Knopp is a public high school teacher in Los Angeles, and an activist in the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA).
Their work has appeared in Rethinking Schools, International Socialist Review, and Counterpunch.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591323 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8 in • 200 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The rise of capitalism to global dominance is still largely associated – by both laypeople and Marxist historians – with the industrial capitalism that made its decisive breakthrough in 18th century Britain. Jairus Banaji’s new work reaches back centuries and traverses vast distances to argue that this leap was preceded by a long era of distinct “commercial capitalism”, which reorganised labor and production on a world scale to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated.
Rather than a picture centred solely on Europe, we enter a diverse and vibrant world. Banaji reveals the cantons of Muslim merchants trading in Guangzhou since the eighth century, the 3,000 European traders recorded in Alexandria in 1216, the Genoese, Venetians and Spanish Jews battling for commercial dominance of Constantinople and later Istanbul. We are left with a rich and global portrait of a world constantly in motion, tied together and increasingly dominated by a pre-industrial capitalism. The rise of Europe to world domination, in this view, has nothing to do with any unique genius, but rather a distinct fusion of commercial capitalism with state power.
PRAISE:
Praise for Theory as History
“From the impact of slavery, the rise of the poor taking control, and the role of other philosophies and faiths impacting the discussion, Theory as History is a unique way to discuss history, economics, and the people behind it, a core addition to any community library history collection.”
Midwest Book Review
“The great merit of this volume is that it establishes an approach for [the debates about the nature and origin of capitalism] that is deeply theoretical, but at the same time refreshingly unhampered by the kind of doctrinaire attachment to a perceived (and often misread) orthodoxy that plagued so much of “historical materialism” for the past century. It is scholarly, without being purely academic … Banaji’s book deserves to be read and debated as one of the starting points for a new wave of Marxist historiography, still in the process of liberating itself from the ghost of its formalist past.” ”
Pepijn Brandon, International Socialism
“Banaji’s seemingly idiosyncratic but in fact highly sophisticated and original approach to historical analysis provides not only a welcome stimulus and a challenge for scholars today, but also will give them plenty to think about for many years to come.” ”
Marcel van der Linden, research director of the International Institute of Social History
“Theory as History is a book written at the summit of a lifetime’s engagement with issues of Marxist theory and practice … Banaji’s work demonstrates that no aspect of human history is irrelevant to the present. His scholarship shows immense skill, depth and range … [proving] it is not the Marxist method that has been at fault, but the dominance of non-Marxist theory and method in the minds of Marxist.”
Counterfire
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jairus Banaji spent most of his academic life at Oxford. He has been a Research Associate in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, for the past several years. He is the author of Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2007), Theory as History (Haymarket Books, 2011) — for which he won the prestigious Isaac and Tamara Deutsche Memorial Prize — and numerous other volumes and articles.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
International boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) efforts helped topple South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime. In this urgent book, Omar Barghouti makes the case for a rights-based BDS campaign to stop Israel’s rapacious occupation, colonization, and apartheid against the Palestinian people. This considered, convincing collection contributes to the growing debate on Israel’s violations of international law and points the way forward to a united global civil society movement for freedom, justice, self-determination, and equality for all.
PRAISE:
“No one has done more to build the intellectual, legal, and moral case for BDS than Omar Barghouti. The global Palestinian solidarity movement has been transformed and is on the cusp of major breakthroughs.”
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine
“Barghouti explains with lucidity, passion, and unrivaled intelligence … that bringing an end to apartheid in Palestine and seeing justice and equality for all the people who live there is not a distant dream but a reality we can bring about in the next few years using BDS.”
Ali Abunimah, author of One Country and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada
“I have been to Palestine where I’ve witnessed the racially segregated housing and the humiliation of Palestinians at military roadblocks. I can’t help but remember the conditions we experienced in South Africa under apartheid. We could not have achieved our freedom without the help of people around the world using the nonviolent means of boycotts and divestment to compel governments and institutions to withdraw their support for the apartheid regime. Omar Barghouti’s lucid and morally compelling book is perfectly timed to make a major contribution to this urgently needed global campaign for justice, freedom and peace.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“Those who think they are free to disregard international law because they are powerful … are dead wrong. At the same time it is the tolerance of such behavior that has led Israel to believe that they can literally get away with murder. … Omar Barghouti’s book…is timely and responsibly written by a man who understands that creative and relentless nonviolence is the only way out of the dire situation in which Palestine, and our entire world for that matter, finds itself.”
Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, M.M., former president of the UN General Assembly
“For the first time, we have in front of us a succinct and poignant case made for the BDS strategy vis-à-vis Israel. There is no one better placed to make this case than Omar Barghouti, as this book shows clearly…. This is a must read for anyone interested in, and committed to, the Palestine cause, regardless of their particular stance on the BDS strategy.”
Ilan Pappé, University of Exeter, and co-author of Gaza in Crisis
“Barghouti reminds us what public responsibility entails, and we are lucky to have his re lentless and intelligent analysis and argument. There is no more comprehensive and persuasive case than his for boycott, divestment, and sanctions to end the Israeli occupation and establish the ethical claim of Palestinian rights.”
Judith Butler, University of California at Berkeley
“Barghouti is the future. He is intelligent, empowered, and nonviolent. He is completely impressive. It would help Americans to see such a picture of Palestinian political engagement when they have such a distorted image of who Palestinians are. Some day they will know him.”
Phillip Weiss, co-founder of Mondoweiss: The War of Ideas in the Middle East
“The ABC for internationalist support for Palestine is BDS. And the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Israeli cruelty and injustice is gaining in significance and scope. Like the anti-apartheid movement against racist South Africa, BDS is helping to make a tremendous difference in what has been a most difficult struggle for human rights and the right of a colonized and dispossessed people to national self-determination. This inspiring book is a weapon in a noble struggle in which all right-thinking people can play a part.”
Ronne Kasrils, author, activist, and former South African government minister
“I commend this excellent book by Omar Barghouti.…It challenges the international community to support the BDS campaign until the entire Palestinian people can exercise their inalienable rights to freedom and self-determination and until Israel fully complies with its obligations under international law. BDS is a call to refuse to be silent in the face of military occupation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli regime, apartheid, and colonialism. BDS is a nonviolent way in which each of us and our governments can follow our conscience and rightful moral and legal responsibility and act now to save Palestinian lives by demanding that the Israeli apartheid regime give justice and equality to all.”
Mairead Maguire, 1976 Nobel Peace Laureate
“When powerful governments will not act, ordinary people must take the lead. … Essential reading for all who care about justice and the plight of an oppressed people.”
Ken Loach, filmmaker
“This is a book about the political actions necessary to hinder and finally to stop the Israeli state machine that is operating every day to eliminate the Palestinian people. It is like an engineer’s report, not a sermon. Read it, decide, and then act.”
John Berger, author
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian commentator and human rights activist. He is a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University, NY, and a master’s degree in philosophy (ethics) from Tel Aviv University.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594683 • US $24.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 410 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This indispensable volume surveys revolutionary upheavals across the world between 1989 and 2019, drawing lessons for theorizing revolution today.
This ambitious volume examines revolutionary situations during a non-revolutionary historical conjuncture–the neoliberal era. The last three decades have seen an increase in the number of political upheavals that challenge existing power structures, many of them taking the form of urban revolts. This book compellingly explores a series of such upheavals–in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Indonesia, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, sub-Saharan Africa (including Congo, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso) and Egypt. Each chapter studies the ways in which protest movements developed into insurgent challenges to state power, and the strategies that regimes have deployed to contain and repress revolt.
In addition to empirical chapters, the book engages in theorization of revolution, dealing with questions such as the patterning of revolution in contemporary history, the relationship between class struggle and social movements, and the prospects of socialist revolution in the twenty-first century.
PRAISE:
“General histories of the neoliberal era are shaped by an overwhelming sense of defeat for radical movements. It is, of course, true that neoliberalism was spectacularly ushered in by shattering working-class resistance in some key workplaces in India, Australia, the UK, and the US. Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age, however, compels us to be attentive to a different view of this era. Tracing revolutionary uprisings from 1989 to 2019, this book is a map of resistance and resilience in the face of tremendous odds. The case studies, as well as the introductory essay, lead us through situations where the victory of capitalism over humanity was anything but assured. And yet the book is not a wistful history about what could have been. Rather, it is a strategic assessment of near-victories to prepare us for the fire next time.”
Tithi Bhattacharya, coauthor of Feminism for the 99%
“This fine collection of essays deals with some of the most significant revolutionary situations in the neoliberal era. It makes great reading, with powerful arguments, and concludes with a wager on the future: climate change is a terrible danger, but it has revolutionary potential, because it cannot be prevented by partial reforms which do not challenge the capitalist system itself.”
Michael Löwy, author of Revolutions and Ecosocialism
“What remains of revolution after decades of neoliberalism? The question is both perplexing and urgent. With realism and radical intransigence, Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age tackles it head on. Acknowledging the inadequacy of longstanding left-wing models to our era, the authors gathered here also refuse to counsel despair. Instead, they trace emancipatory impulses and upheavals across the scorched landscape of neoliberalism. The result is a provocative, stimulating, and deeply radical set of reflections on the meaning of revolution today. This is a book for everyone who wants to change the world.”
David McNally, author of Blood and Money and Monsters of the Market
“How can popular movements not only topple repressive governments, but also create more thoroughly democratic, egalitarian, and solidaristic societies? This is the question that animates the contributions to Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age, which examines a wide range of revolutionary situations from 1989 to 2019. The case studies, which are well researched and insightful, include Central and Eastern Europe; Africa, including South Africa; Indonesia; Argentina, Bolivia, and the ‘pink tide’ in Latin America; and Egypt. The theoretical reflections by Colin Barker and Neil Davidson are provocative and challenging. This volume will interest anyone who seeks to understand popular uprisings and revolutions and the ways in which capitalism motivates, structures, and constrains them.”
Jeff Goodwin, Professor of Sociology, NYU
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Colin Barker (1939–2019) taught sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. Neil Davidson (1957–2020) taught sociology at Glasgow University.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Hard cover • ISBN-13: 9781642599800 • US $27.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A unique, stunning collection of images of Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a testament to the vibrancy of Palestinian society prior to occupation.
This book tells the story of a land full of people—people with families, hopes, dreams, and a deep connection to their home. Denying Palestinian existence has been a fundamental premise of Zionism, which has sought not only to hide this existence but also to erase its memory. But existence leaves traces, and the imprint of the Palestine that was remains, even in the absence of those expelled from their lands. It appears in the ruins of a village whose name no longer appears in the maps, in the drawing of a lost landscape, in the lyrics of a song, or in the photographs from a family album. The photographs in this book are traces of that existence that have not been erased. They are testament not to nostalgia, but to the power of resistance.
PRAISE:
“At a time of an unfolding Israeli genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, enabled as much by racist, dehumanizing propaganda as by Western arms, funds and colonial complicity, it is more important than ever to always remember to see the human behind the number, the oppression behind the violence, and the complicity behind the genocide. This precious book shares a glimpse of Palestinian lives prior to the Nakba, the initial destruction of our beautiful homeland to project an image of a “desert” that needs a white colonial settler to make it bloom. In the face of this excruciatingly painful phase of our ongoing Nakba of ruthless, inherently supremacist settler-colonial conquest, celebrating our heritage, our cultural roots, our love for life, for freedom, for justice becomes more necessary than ever. This book helps us do so.”
Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of the BDS movement for Palestinian rights
“Against Erasure is a stunning demonstration of Palestinian resistance, joy, and the beautiful persistence of our people. As argument, it documents the thriving existence of families, children, and whole communities before Nakba, illustrating our powerful connection to the homeland, which persists and resists until full liberation. This book is a testament to the schools we once occupied and the orange groves our great-grandfather’s planted. Through this book, we look into the past as a means of creating and charging towards a future of return.”
Noor Hindi
“We live in a moment when Palestinian life is being ruthlessly dehumanized in the service of a looming genocide. A critical defense of humanity amidst this atrocity is the constant assertion that these are a people who had a culture and a land before it was violently stolen. Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba, is not only beautiful and heart wrenching; it is a political reminder that we are fighting not only with Palestinian life but against an erasure of their entire history.”
Dave Zirin, Sports Editor, The Nation Magazine
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Teresa Aranguren is a journalist based in Spain. In 1982, she covered the Israeli invasion of Lebanon as a correspondent for Mundo Obrero (Workers World), has worked for a number of Spanish publications, covering the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the Gulf Wars, and since 1989 has been the Middle East correspondent for Telemadrid. Aranguren is the author of Palestina: El hilo de la memoria (Palestine: The Thread of Memory) (2004) and Olivo Roto: Escenas de la ocupación (Broken Olive Tree: Scenes from the Occupation) (2006).
Sandra Barrilaro is a Spanish photographer and activist. She has been a speaker at the Palestinian Educational Cultural Forum, and participated in the Women’s Boat to Gaza flotilla in 2016. Barrilaro’s work on Palestine has been exhibited widely under the title “Palestine, A Look at Injustice,” and she is currently working on several projects about Palestine.
Mohammed El-Kurd is an internationally touring and award-winning poet, writer, journalist, and organizer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine. In 2021, He was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time. He is best known for his role as a co-founder of the #SaveSheikhJarrah movement. His work has been featured in numerous international outlets and he has appeared repeatedly as a commentator on major TV networks. Currently, El-Kurd serves as the first-ever Palestine Correspondent for The Nation. His first published essay in this role, “A Night with Palestine’s Defenders of the Mountain,” was shortlisted for the 2022 One World Media Print Award. Rifqa, his debut collection of poetry, published by Haymarket Books, was named “a masterpiece” by The New Arab and a “remarkable debut” by the Los Angeles Review of Books. The book was one of Middle East Eye’s “Best Books of 2021” and was shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for “Best First Collection.” El-Kurd holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College (CUNY) and a BFA in Writing from Atlanta’s Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). He is the Culture Editor at Mondoweiss.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Writer/director/producer Justine Bateman examines the aggressive ways that society reacts to the aging of women’s faces.
Face: One Square Foot of Skin is a book of fictional vignettes that examines the fear and vestigial evolutionary habits that have caused women and men to cultivate the imagined reality that older women’s faces are unattractive, undesirable, and something to be “fixed.”
Based on “older face” experiences of the author, Justine Bateman, and those of dozens of women and men she interviewed, the book presents the reader with the many root causes for society’s often negative attitudes toward women’s older faces. In doing so, Bateman rejects those ingrained assumptions about the necessity of fixing older women’s faces, suggesting that we move on from judging a woman’s worth based on the condition of her face.
With impassioned prose and a laser-sharp eye, Bateman argues that a woman’s confidence should grow as she ages, not be destroyed by society’s misled attitude about that one square foot of skin.
“In her superb new book, Face: One Square Foot of Skin, Bateman invites us to intimately explore the fears that lead women to alter their faces to erase the signs of aging.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“Face…is filled with fictional vignettes that examine real-life societal attitudes and internal fears that have caused a negative perspective on women’s faces as they age.”
The TODAY Show, a Best Book of 2021
“There is nothing wrong with your face. At least, that’s what Justine Bateman wants you to realize. Her new book, Face: One Square Foot of Skin, is a collection of fictional short stories told from the perspectives of women of all ages and professions; with it, she aims to correct the popular idea that you need to stop what you’re doing and start staving off any signs of aging in the face.”
W Magazine
“The actor and author of Face: One Square Foot of Skin wants to push back against the ubiquity of plastic surgery.”
Vanity Fair
“Bateman asks, what if we just rejected the idea that older faces need fixing. What if we ignored all the clanging bells that remind women every day on every platform that we are in some kind of endless battle with aging.”
TIME Magazine
“In Fame, Bateman deconstructed the flimsy edifice of celebrity. In this equally fiery and potent follow-up, she does the same for our notions of what constitutes a beautiful face . . . Combining the author’s intensely personal stories with relevant examples from the culture at large, the book is heartbreaking and hopeful, infuriating and triumphant.”
Kirkus Reviews, STARRED Review
“Both protest and paean, Bateman’s chronicle advocates for a power shift away from buying into the incessant selling of cosmetic perfection and toward the recognition that a woman’s unaltered face is a record of earned intelligence, wisdom, and confidence. Bateman issues a call to invert the age-old paradigm, stop stoking shame about signs of growing older, and name the ultimate accessory that is powerfully individual to each woman, an aging face that has faced life.”
Booklist
“Justine Bateman extends her creative talents to include fiction in this collection of vignettes that focus on how we’ve learned to react to women’s faces as they age. Based on Bateman’s own real-life interviews, the stories dig deep to uncover why we’re uncomfortable with faces of a certain age, and argue that confidence—and not cosmetic procedures—are the answer to the problem.”
Town & Country, one of the Best Books of Spring 2021
“Through a selection of short stories, [Bateman] examines just how complicated it is for women to get older, both in and out of the spotlight.”
Glamour
“Face: One Square Foot of Skin [is] a creative nonfiction tome about the ways society responds to women as they age . . . [Bateman] said she was compelled to take a deeper look at the unfair expectations placed on women, particularly women in the public eye like her, as they grow older.”
Hollywood Reporter
“[Bateman] recounts her own experiences and interviews more than 20 other individuals to present a series of fictional vignettes that argue that women’s aging faces should be viewed as beautiful—the proof of complex lives well lived.”
Alta Journal
“Totally enthralling and wholly engrossing from start to finish.”
Exclusive Magazine
“[Bateman] argues that American society has long equated the signs of aging on a woman’s face with unattractiveness. But she also asserts that women need not participate in such prejudice by accepting and internalizing it.”
AARP
“I can’t think of anyone better than Justine Bateman to start the conversation about how we’ve devolved into a society that doesn’t allow women to age. Brave, brilliant, and unflinchingly honest, Justine is that writer you trust because she goes after every subject with a warrior’s focus, and throws herself to the lions while she’s at it. It doesn’t hurt that she’s a gorgeous woman who hasn’t tried to erase an ounce of history from her face. I love the way she thinks, and am amazed at the many sublayers she manages to excavate while everyone else is scratching the surface.”
Mary-Louise Parker, actress
“These honest, no-flinch stories about womanhood, beauty, and meaning will make you mad, break your heart, will have you longing for a better world, have you rooting for her, yourself, for all women. And you will stand up and cheer when Bateman slides into home plate with an ending of grace and revelation. Riveting read! Profound glimpses into the soul of our society.”
Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8
Critical praise for Fame: The Hijacking of Reality by Justine Bateman:
“Wholly riveting.”
New York Times Book Review
“Justine Bateman was famous before selfies replaced autographs, and bags of fan mail gave way to Twitter shitstorms. And here’s the good news: she took notes along the way. Justine steps through the looking glass of her own celebrity, shatters it, and pieces together, beyond the shards and splinters, a reflection of her true self. The transformation is breathtaking. Revelatory and raucous, fascinating and frightening, Fame is a hell of a ride.”
Michael J. Fox, actor, author of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future
“In a new book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, the two-time Emmy nominee takes a raw look at the culture of celebrity, reflecting on her stardom at its dizzying peak–and the ‘disconcerting’ feeling as it began to fade.”
People
“As the title Fame: The Hijacking of Reality more than implies, this is a book about the complicated aspects of all things fame.”
Vanity Fair
“Bateman digs into the out-of-control nature of being famous, its psychological aftermath and why we all can’t get enough of it.”
New York Post
“The Family Ties alum has written the rawest, bleakest book on fame you’re ever likely to read. Bateman’s close-up of the celeb experience features vivid encounters with misogyny, painful meditations on aging in Hollywood, and no shortage of theses on social media’s wrath.”
Entertainment Weekly
“Bateman addresses the reader directly, pouring out her thoughts in a rapid-fire, conversational style. (Hunter S. Thompson is saluted in the acknowledgments.)…But her jittery delivery suits the material–the manic sugar high of celebrity and its inevitable crash. Bateman takes the reader through her entire fame cycle, from TV megastar, whose first movie role was alongside Julia Roberts, to her quieter life today as a filmmaker. She is as relentless with herself as she is with others.”
Washington Post
“While Bateman’s new book Fame: The Hijacking of Reality (out now) touches on the former teen starlet’s experience in the public eye, it’s not a memoir. Far from it, in fact–it’s instead an intense meditation on the nature of fame, and a glimpse into the repercussions it has on both the individual experiencing it and the society that keeps the concept alive.”
Entertainment Weekly
“Bateman takes an unsentimental look at the nature of celebrity worship in her first book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality.”
LA Weekly
“In Justine Bateman’s Fame, a deeply personal book about the Family Ties actor’s experience in the limelight, she reminds us that famous people are exactly that: people.”
The Guardian
“You’ve never read anything quite like this book–don’t call it a memoir–by the actress/director/producer best known for her role on the ’80s sitcom Family Ties. It’s a meditation on fame (if something so raw and full of expletives can be called a meditation), examining what it does to celebrities–and the rest of us.”
Newsday
“Now, nearly 30 years after Family Ties went off the air, Bateman is examining the ins and outs of stardom in her new book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality. In it, she looks at the internal reality-shift of the famous and explores theories on the public’s behavior at each stage of a celebrity’s career. She also gets candid about her own ups and downs with stardom.”
Huffington Post
“What is fame? In 2018, Justine Bateman wrote a book about it. The title of her book is Fame: The Hijacking of Reality. In it, Bateman…writes about the experience of becoming extremely famous (and gradually becoming much less famous) and what it was like from the inside…Fame is a condition of being widely seen, while also not being seen in particular, human terms. It is a nonreciprocal transaction of interest or attention, on unequal terms of exchange.”
Slate
“Her first book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality is not a memoir–she hates them–it’s an in-depth look at what fame is and how it affects people.”
Los Angeles Magazine
“Instead of crashing and burning, Bateman has found a life outside the maelstrom, ably described in this sharp, take-no-prisoners book.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Bateman delivers a blisteringly honest analysis of fame and her years in and out of the spotlight…Bateman’s impassioned narrative points out to those who relentlessly seek fame that rather than a blessing, it can be a curse.”
Publishers Weekly
“Razor-sharp…Rarely has anyone written so honestly about the experience of being famous. In the interest of better understanding the figures we claim to know and love, Bateman’s book is a must-read.”
Booklist
“Actor and writer Bateman…reflects on the toxicity of fame in this brutally honest, seemingly cathartic work…At just over 200 pages, Fame still manages to pack a punch.”
Library Journal
“If you’ve ever dreamed of being famous someday, you need to read this book. If you’ve ever called a celebrity, a ‘has-been’ or a ‘flash in the pan’ on social media, then you really need to read this book. Justine Bateman has crafted the most compelling and comprehensive treatise on the nature of fame that you’re ever likely to read. Through a fearless act of self-examination, which she conducts with the scientific detachment of an anthropologist, Bateman illuminates both the short- and long-term effects of attempting to navigate the labyrinth of celebrity.”
Ernest Cline, author of Ready Player One
“Justine Bateman, in a voice both empathetic and take-no-prisoners, has produced a fascinating look at the psychology of present-day fame. She traces its roots down to humble beginnings in the injured psyche of every human, hoping to find a cure for what ails us all. In these early, heady days of the ascension of social media, in which everyone seems able to fulfill the Warholian dictum of fifteen minutes, Bateman casts a sober, never overly serious eye on today’s media landscape and emerges without cynicism on the hard-won side of love and acceptance.”
Justine Bateman is a writer/director/producer with an impressive, decades-long resume in film and TV that includes a Golden Globe nomination and two Emmy nominations. Bateman wrote and produced her directorial film short debut Five Minutes, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival and was chosen by seven more festivals, including the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Violet, Bateman’s critically-acclaimed directorial feature film debut of her own script, stars Olivia Munn, Luke Bracey, and Justin Theroux, and was an official selection at the 2021 SXSW Film Festival and the 2021 Toronto Film Festival. Her best-selling first book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, was published in 2018 by Akashic.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Entertainment shows, magazines, websites, and other channels continuously report the latest sightings, heartbreaks, and triumphs of the famous to a seemingly insatiable public. Millions of people go to enormous lengths to achieve Fame. Fame is woven into our lives in ways that may have been unimaginable in years past.
And yet, is Fame even real? Contrary to tangible realities, Fame is one of those “realities” that we, as a society, have made. Why? What is it about Fame that drives us to spend so much time, money, and focus to create the framework that maintains its health?
Mining decades of experience, writer, director, producer, and actress Justine Bateman writes a visceral, intimate look at the experience of Fame. Combining the internal reality-shift of the famous, theories on the public’s behaviors at each stage of a famous person’s career, and the experiences of other famous performers, Bateman takes the reader inside and outside of the emotions of Fame. The book includes twenty-four color photographs to highlight her analysis.
PRAISE:
“Wholly riveting.”
The New York Times Book Review
“[A] visceral, insightful dissection of celebrity.”
Washington Post
“In this collection of razor-sharp essays, prolific actor and producer Bateman meditates on the fear, trauma, and access of fame…Rarely has anyone written so honestly about the experience of being famous. In the interest of better understanding the figures we claim to know and love, Bateman’s book is a must-read.”
Booklist
“Instead of crashing and burning, Bateman has found a life outside the maelstrom, ably described in this sharp, take-no-prisoners book.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Producer and actress Bateman delivers a blisteringly honest analysis of fame and her years in and out of the spotlight…Bateman’s impassioned narrative points out to those who relentlessly seek fame that rather than a blessing, it can be a curse.”
Publishers Weekly
“Justine Bateman, in a voice both empathetic and take-no-prisoners, has produced a fascinating look at the psychology of present-day fame. She traces its roots down to humble beginnings in the injured psyche of every human, hoping to find a cure for what ails us all. In these early, heady days of the ascension of social media, in which everyone seems able to fulfill the Warholian dictum of fifteen minutes, Bateman casts a sober, never overly serious eye on today’s media landscape and emerges without cynicism on the hard-won side of love and acceptance.”
David Duchovny, actor, author of Bucky F*cking Dent
“A smart, unflinching, touching, riveting, one-of-a-kind hybrid of memoir and cultural analysis. Fame in its contemporary form is strange and powerful and deeply American; so is Fame.”
Kurt Andersen, novelist and radio host
“A raw look into stardom and how notoriety got to now with a style that would make Bukowski proud. Justine gives us a vivid, sharp and forceful read.”
Jerry O’Connell, actor
“I thought my ideas about fame were intractable until Justine Bateman took them apart with her relentlessly truthful and engrossing investigation. She mines the subject with bracing honesty, and by including herself in the whole experiment she makes it hard for the reader to avoid examining their own ego, their own social agenda. Justine’s voice is fresh: she throws down with a free-associating slam that you won’t expect but can identify with, and the searching and sometimes profane rant that accompanies each idea is one you can’t help but trust. She distills it all into the questions: Why do we value this person over that one? And why do we ultimately resent the ones we overvalue? An honest and imminently quotable rumination by a qualified and intellectually formidable source.”
Mary-Louise Parker, actress, author of Dear Mr. You
“If you’ve ever dreamed of being famous someday, you need to read this book. If you’ve ever called a celebrity, a ‘has-been’ or a ‘flash in the pan’ on social media, then you really need to read this book. Justine Bateman has crafted the most compelling and comprehensive treatise on the nature of fame that you’re ever likely to read. Through a fearless act of self-examination, which she conducts with the scientific detachment of an anthropologist, Bateman illuminates both the short- and long-term effects of attempting to navigate the labyrinth of celebrity.”
Ernest Cline, author of Ready Player One
“Justine Bateman was famous before selfies replaced autographs, and bags of fan mail gave way to Twitter shitstorms. And here’s the good news, she took notes along the way. Justine steps through the looking glass of her own celebrity, shatters it, and pieces together, beyond the shards and splinters, a reflection of her true self. The transformation is breathtaking. Revelatory and raucous, fascinating and frightening, FAME is a hell of a ride.”
Michael J. Fox, actor and author of Lucky Man, Always Looking Up, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future
“Justine Bateman’s new book FAME grabs you by the lapels. A raw, raging blast of honesty aimed squarely at what “being famous” is, does, and means. The absurd gravity of it, and the myriad public, personal, and private distortions it precipitates. This book is a bracing read.”
Jon Cryer, actor and author of So That Happened
“Bateman mixes personal stories of the hazards of experiencing fame at an early age with a sociologist’s eye for what makes Americans so fascinated with celebrity, and delivers it all in a rat-a-tat style that makes you feel like you are right there with her on the red carpet.”
Rachel Dratch, author of Girl Walks into a Bar
“FAME is a socio-pop-culture front-line must-read, told by one of the funniest, most powerful and elevated women I have ever met in my life.”
Kelly Cutrone, Fashion Publicist, New York Times best-selling author of If You Have to Cry, Go Outside
Justine Bateman is a writer/director/producer/author with an impressive acting résumé that includes Family Ties, Satisfaction, Arrested Development, and many more. She has earned a Golden Globe nomination and two Emmy nominations. Bateman wrote and produced her directorial film short debut Five Minutes, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival and was chosen by seven more festivals, including the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Violet, Bateman’s directorial feature film debut of her own script, stars Olivia Munn, Luke Bracey, and Justin Theroux, and was an official selection at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival. Face: One Square Foot of Skin is her latest work.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591620 • US $28.00• 6 in x 9 in • 500 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This is the story of the decline and fall or an empire, a region devastated by war, and a world stage fundamentally transformed by the Russian Revolution. Bauer’s magisterial work — available in English for the first time in full — charts the evolution of three simultaneous, overlapping revolutionary waves: a national revolution for self-determination, which brought down imperial Austro-Hungary; a bourgeois revolution for parliamentary republics and universal suffrage; and a social revolution for workers’ control, factory councils, and industrial democracy.
The brief but crowning achievement of Red Vienna, alongside Bauer’s unique theorisation of an “integral socialism” — an attempted synthesis of revolutionary communism and social democracy — is a vital part of the left’s intellectual and historical heritage. Today, as movements once again struggle with questions of reform or revolution, political strategy, and state power, this is a crucial resource. Bauer tells the story of the Austrian Revolution with all the immediacy of a central participant, and all the insight of a brilliant and original theorist.
PRAISE:
“The revolution in Central Europe in 1918-21 was a giant event that came closer to changing world history than most of us realize. For English-speakers, this translation opens a challenging new window on the history of the Austrian workers’ council movement and the role of the Entente powers in the counter-revolution that followed. Published in 1923, it stands unique as an analysis of the revolution’s internal dynamics and the costs of defeat.”
Mike Davis
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Walter Baier, an economist in Vienna, was National Chairman of the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) from 1994 to 2006. He was an editor of the Austrian weekly Volksstimme and from 2007 has been Coordinator of the network transform!Europe, a network of 36 think tanks and educational organizations from 22 European countries, which as is recognized as the associated political foundation of the Party of the European Left (EL).
Otto Bauer (5 September 1881 4 July 1938) was the leading figure of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers Party. An early inspiration for the New Left and Eurocommunist movements in later decades, his theories of imperialism and the national question, as well as his practical work building a mass organization, made him a key figure in the First and Second Internationals.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595871 • US $19.95 • 5.25 in x 7.5 in • 250 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Coup analyzes the conditions that led to the 2019 coup in Bolivia and details its repressive aftermath.
In three dramatic weeks in October and November 2019, the fourteen years of progressive change that Evo Morales’ pink tide government had worked to implement in Bolivia and beyond came to a screeching halt. President Morales was forced to resign after protests against his re-election to a fourth term in allegedly fraudulent elections erupted among the urban middle classes, anti-indigenous racists, and prominent conservative politicians. The country’s far right used the ensuing crisis to orchestrate a successful coup, with military and police backing, paving the way for a repressive “transition” government led by Jeanine Áñez to take power. The Áñez government quelled popular protests with lethal force, shut down critical media outlets, and targeted members of Morales’ political party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). Despite postponing elections three times, the Áñez government was eventually forced to call elections in October 2020. The MAS swept back into power, winning elections with 55% of the vote and returning democracy to the country.
This book tells the story of this year of upheaval in Bolivia, providing a critical analysis of the 14 years of the MAS government that preceded it as well as the MAS return to power in 2020. It includes personal stories and commentary from women and men on the streets, leaders in social movements, members of the MAS party and government, survivors of Áñez’s abuses, and intellectuals.
PRAISE:
“This book makes a vital contribution to the struggles of the peoples of the Americas to defend themselves against the coup d’etats that anti-democratic elites of the hemisphere have unleashed again, albeit cloaked in new garments. Paraguay in 2012, Brazil in 2016 and 2018, Bolivia in 2019 all suffered coups, with intensifying violence, revealing that slaveholding, racist, and colonial legacies are still very much alive among the wealthiest in the region. The victory of Bolivia’s popular movements—courageous, heroic and swift—resulting in the extraordinary victory of Lucho Arce and the return of Evo Morales’ MAS party in 2020, serve as an inspiring example for neighboring states. Once again the lesson is clear: whenever the will of the people may be expressed freely through the ballot, proposals that lead to greater equality, more just distribution of income and vigorous efforts to combat hunger and poverty will prevail. But this is possible only with robust popular participation in the decision-making process.”
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former-President of Brazil
“Coup tells the story of Bolivia’s MAS Party, the ousting of its popular indigenous president Evo Morales and the following wave of abuses committed by the authoritarian Áñez regime. The book is a vital contribution to our understanding of how reactionary forces leveraged a bogus claim of fraud to overthrow the elected president. It is essential reading for those committed to democracy and social justice in the Americas. Coup highlights the need to remain on alert in electoral times and serves as a warning about the cunning preparation of coups d’états. Today’s coups are more sophisticated than those of previous decades, but they are equally ruthless and equally dangerous.”
Madres de la Plaza de Mayo—Linea Fundadora, mothers of Argentina’s disappeared
“Coup is a comprehensive account of the democratic disruption that Bolivia suffered in 2019. With remarkable handling of sources, Linda Farthing and Thomas Becker present a critical vision of Bolivia as well as the political, social and democratic challenges the country faces. Captivating read!
Eduardo Rodriguez Veltzé, former-President of Bolivia
“Future historians will look back at the reversal of Bolivia’s 2019 coup as an event equal in importance to Fidel Castro’s defeat of the U.S.-organized invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Linda Farthing and Thomas Becker have provided us with an indispensable analysis to the sources of the conflict and how the forces of hope triumphed.”
Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
“In the international media discourse that emerged in late 2019 after Evo Morales was forced into exile and Jeanine Áñez declared herself president of Bolivia, some voices remained conspicuously absent: those of the Bolivians living through the turmoil. Farthing and Becker set out to challenge this trend, crafting a narrative based on the testimony of dozens of Bolivian activists, political figures, and intellectuals. Stitched together in a compelling and lucid narrative, the insights of those on the ground—not only about the brutal right-wing repression under Áñez but also about both the advances and shortcomings of Morales’s time in power—provide the clearest picture yet of what happened in Bolivia in 2019.”
Dr. Christy Thornton, Assistant Professor Johns Hopkins University and former Executive Director of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) “Measured and methodical, Farthing and Becker’s analysis of the right-wing coup d’état in Bolivia is mandatory reading for anyone attempting to come to grips with the country’s recent past. Sharp, expeditious prose mirror the often-frenetic pace of political developments in recent years. Rooted in a blend of on-the-ground reportage and a mastery of the best local sources of journalism and social-scientific inquiry, Coup: A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia, contextualizes the socio-political gains and contradictions of the era of Evo Morales, unearths the root causes of his ouster from office, and surveys the violent regime of Jeanine Áñez installed in the coup’s aftermath. In a period of recurring crises of global capitalism and an attendant rise in authoritarian forms of right-wing rule, the significance of this book extends well beyond the borders of Bolivia.”
Jeffery R. Webber, author of Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Paper • ISBN-13:9781608461912 • US $ 21.95 • 381 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Fascism’s ascent to power across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s marks one of the greatest historical defeats of the left in all of history. Far from inevitable, this catastrophic defeat was resisted at every turn by Marxists of varying stripes who tried, unsuccessfully, to push the mass communist and social democratic parties to organize an opposition to the rising movements of violent reaction. Their devastating failure paved the way for the gas chamber, decades of ruthless dictatorship, and war.
This important volume offers the most complete selection of Marxist writings on fascism from this period in any language and provides invaluable lessons for contemporary readers concerned with today’s far-right. Drawing from the political experience of the left in Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain the collection offers an unparalleled documentation of Marxist attempts to understand and stop the fascist threat, as well as the tragic ways in which a combination of sectarian divisions, irresponsible political strategy, and inadequate theoretical analysis ultimately lead to the failure of those efforts.
PRAISE:
“Marxists in the Face of Fascism, with a very useful introduction by David Beetham, is an unrivaled and vital piece, allowing us to grasp the major contribution of inter-war Marxism, in its great diversity of theoretical approaches and political orientations, and to deepening our understanding of fascism and to antifascist practice.”
Ugo Palheta, author La Possibilité du Fascisme
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Beetham is a social theorist making extensive contributions in the fields of democracy and human rights; including social and economic rights. He joined Democratic Audit at the University of Essex in 1992 where he became Associate Editor, working closely with Director Stuart Weir, to devise a methodology for assessing democracy which was pioneered by the Audit in the UK and developed for wider use across the world. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Leeds.
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
In this remarkable collection of intimate and compelling photographs — featuring R.E.M., as well as Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Michael Moore, Neil Young, Patti Smith, The Dixie Chicks, and other artists — you will see the band as they have never been seen before. Over the past six years, photographer David Belisle has traveled with R.E.M. on tours as well as photographed their recording and video sessions, and has captured their on- and off-stage lives with unprecedented access. The 175 color and black and white photographs in the book are accompanied by handwritten captions by the band and an introduction by Michael Stipe. These lush images, photographed with an intensely artistic eye, capture the members of R.E.M. in public performances around the world and in the most personal spaces that only the band and their closest friends can access.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
David Belisle (http://www.davidbelisle.com/) is a Seattle-based photographer who has worked with R.E.M., the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Mudhoney, the Tiny Vipers, and others.
Michael Stipe is a singer, photographer, film producer, and activist. He lives in Athens, Georgia and New York City, and is the author of Two Times Intro: On the Road with Patti Smith.
R.E.M. (http://www.remhq.com/) formed in 1980 in Athens, Georgia, and is composed of Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe. Heralded by Rolling Stone as “America’s Best Rock and Roll Band,” R.E.M. rose from cult college radio status to sell more than 70 million albums worldwide and be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
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Paperback • ISBN-13: 9781642590234 • US $18.00 • 8.5 in x 5.5 in • 268 pgs
Hardcover debut at #4 on the New York Times Bestseller list for Sports & Fitness
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Michael Bennett is a Super Bowl Champion, a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, a fearless activist, a feminist, a grassroots philanthropist, an organizer, and a change maker. He’s also one of the most scathingly humorous athletes on the planet—and he wants to make you uncomfortable.
Written with award-winning sportswriter and author Dave Zirin, Things That Make White People Uncomfortable is a sports book for our times, a memoir and manifesto as hilarious as it is revealing.
Bennett, a defensive end for the Seattle Seahawks, has gained international recognition for his public support for the Black Lives Matter Movement, women’s rights, and other social justice causes. Bennett donates all his endorsement money and half of the proceeds from his jersey sales to fund health and education projects for poor underserved youth and minority communities, and recently expanded his reach globally to support STEM programming in Africa.
Co-author Dave Zirin has been called the “finest, most important writer on sports and politics in America” by Dr. Cornel West. He is sports editor for The Nation and author of several books, including the critically acclaimed The John Carlos Story, written with 1968 Olympian John Carlos.
PRAISE:
“Michael Bennett is an agent of change.”
The New York Times
“Like athletes-turned-authors Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the late Arthur Ashe, Philadelphia Eagles defensive end Bennett uses his professional fame to shed light on American racism in these astute personal essays… Bennett’s book proves he can tackle the ills of society as capably as he tackles quarterbacks.”
Publishers Weekly
“Bennett goes in hard on everything. Nothing is spared. Not the NFL. Not the Trump administration. Not police brutality. Not even the n-word.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A fiery memoir/manifesto by an athlete with his heart in the right place.”
Kirkus Reviews
“There are few men I know as conscious, intentional and intersectional in fighting for women’s equality as Bennett – to the point where this author feels inspired to step up my own game.”
Chuck Modiano, NY Daily News
“Painfully honest, incredibly thought-provoking and often hilarious.”
The Seattle Post Intelligencer
“It would be easy for Michael Bennett to remain silent, to play in the NFL and make his mark through accomplishments on the field. Instead Michael has chosen to use his voice and his platform to fight injustice.”
Senator Bernie Sanders
“I was going to say this is the most courageous book on race written by an athlete in my lifetime, but I actually think this is one of the most courageous books on race and racism in America that has ever been written by anyone. It’s that good and that important.”
Shaun King, columnist for The Intercept and writer-in-residence for Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project
“In his powerful book about the relationship between race and sports, Bennett writes simply, ‘I’ll be a football player for just a few more years, but I’ll be Black forever.’ That line captures the point and the focus of his memoir. Things That Make White People Uncomfortable traverses Bennett’s life from being raised by a teenage mother to going undrafted in the NFL because he wasn’t ‘coachable’ to finding his voice in a professional league that attempts to stifle those who want to raise awareness about social ills. Bennett is brutally honest throughout his book in an effort to challenge fellow professional athletes to champion the causes that matter.”
Bitch Media, “15 Books Feminists Should Read In April”
“Things That Make White People Uncomfortable is a real and unblinkingly raw memoir that is going to make a lot of White people, and people of color too, very uncomfortable. And that is precisely the point. Because Michael Bennett is one of the most outspoken and dynamic athletes in America today, and his co-writer, Dave Zirin, is very clearly our nation’s most fearless sports journalist. Together they are Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell bringing the noise about race, sports, and the wonderfully diverse life that is Michael Bennett’s journey as a Black man who refuses to be stereotyped. At a time when the protests of sport heroes like Bennett and Colin Kaepernick have once more revealed the huge racial divides that have always been present, what makes this book different, and unique, is that Bennett remixes the past into an unavoidable and necessary dialogue for this 21st century, on his own terms. Indeed, Michael Bennett’s voice echoes that of Jack Johnson, Paul Robeson, Ali. And his voice is that of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, too. Because Michael Bennett is clear, mad clear, that he is a leader and a change agent, too.
Kevin Powell, author, The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey into Manhood
“There is a tradition of athletes who understand that sports is a way to reach people and change the world. I am proud and humbled to be recognized as part of that tradition. I believe that Michael Bennett’s name deserves mention alongside the best of us. This book doesn’t only explain the roots of Michael Bennett’s courage. It will inspire the people who read it to conquer their fears and fight for what’s right.”
John Carlos, 1968 Olympic medalist
“There is a revolution underway inside professional sports and Michael Bennett is at ground zero. In this revelatory book, he puts everything on the line to share the reasons, strategy, pain and deep thought behind this historic uprising. And he invites us into a vision of justice and liberation that is simply irresistible. This book is pure fire.:
Naomi Klein, author, No Is Not Enough
“Michael Bennett—husband and father, citizen, NFL Pro Bowl Player and Super Bowl MVP—presents a series of perspectives on cultural, institutional, and political realities within the sports arena and beyond that provokes us to a deeper consideration of athlete political activism, activism that today makes many in white America uncomfortable. His arguments are as persuasively reasoned and analytical as they are passionate and moving, as challenging in their message as they are disarming in their humor. Though appropriately titled, the book at core really urges us all to a better understanding of the current saga of athlete protests, protests that are testament to what we already have become as a society and a warning about where we might be headed as a nation, protests that constitute a cautionary tale that should make us all , irrespective of race, at least a little ‘uncomfortable,’ perhaps even uncomfortable enough to ‘grow in our own responsiveness to the call to form that more Perfect Union.’ A must-read for anyone looking to better understand today’s political climate in American sports.”
Harry Edwards, author, The Revolt of the Black Athlete
“One of the most outspoken and progressive voices in the NFL”
The Root, “The Root 100 Most Influential African Americans 2017′
“Michael Bennett is a Warrior for Justice. His spirit is in line and step with all those freedom fighters who came before him.”
Craig Hodges, author of Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter
“In a social media age where professional athletes are regularly criticized by anyone with a Twitter account, Michael Bennett has the courage to stand up for what he believes despite the possibility of losing fans, support or endorsements. Whether it’s speaking on police brutality, systemic racism, Black Lives Matter, or human rights for Palestinian people he doesn’t hesitate to lend his voice. This book is a live wire. It’s electric.”
Etan Thomas, 10 Year NBA Veteran, author of We Matter: Athletes and Activism
“With vulnerability, humility, and the courage to tell the truth, Michael Bennett reminds us at the heart of every social awakening are ordinary people who choose justice and resistance over silence and comfort. In a profession where independent thought is punished, Michael Bennett lays it all on the line with this book. Bennett’s insights into everything from Black Lives Matter, to college athletics, to intersectional feminism will not only make white people uncomfortable, but it will challenge the status quo of our entire society.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
“Fresh from his icon cementing appearance on the cover of The New Yorker with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Colin Kaepernick, Michael Bennett proves he’s worth the hype with this brilliant, disturbing, and courageous exploration of race and whiteness in America. Just as he does on the field, Bennett flies to problem areas with grace and speed, plowing through knotted social issues, tackling difficult matters, and defending democracy against its determined foes. With this book, Bennett joins the ranks of our fiercest activist athletes who understand that a pair of cleats pales in comparison to a set of balls. Michael Bennett is not only a champion, he’s a modern warrior for justice!”
Michael Eric Dyson, author of Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America
“This book is a courageous and compassionate story of a great athlete and grand human being full of deep care for his fellow citizens! Don’t miss it!”
Dr. Cornel West, author, Race Matters
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Michael Bennett is a three-time Pro Bowler, Pro Bowl MVP, Super Bowl Champion, and two-time NFC Champion. He has gained international recognition for his public support for the Black Lives Matter Movement, women’s rights, and other social justice causes. In 2017, he was named one of the 100 Most Influential African Americans by The Root,was the Seattle Seahawks nominee for the NFL’s Walter Payton Man of the Year award, and was honored along with his brother Martellus with a BET Shine a Light award for exceptional service. He is the cofounder with Pele Bennett of The Bennett Foundation, which educates underserved children and communities through free, accessible programming. He has held free camps and health clinics in Seattle, in his hometown of Houston, in his current offseason home, Honolulu, and in South Dakota on the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He donates all of his endorsement money and the proceeds from his jersey sales to fund health and education projects for poor and underserved youth and minority communities, and recently expanded his reach globally to support STEM programming in Africa. He is the proud father of three daughters, Peyton, Blake, and Ollie.
Martellus Bennett is a Super Bowl champion, NFL Pro Bowler, children’s book author, and younger brother to Michael Bennett. His first children’s book, Hey A. J., It’s Saturday, was released in 2016 through his own company, The Imagination Agency
Named one of the “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World” by the Utne Reader, Dave Zirin is the author of ten books on the intersection of sports and politics. He also writes on this subject for the Nation magazine, their first sports writer in 150 years of existence. Zirin is also the host of the “Edge of Sports Podcast” and “The Collision with Etan Thomas and Dave Zirin” on WPFW in Washington DC.
Hardback • ISBN-13:9781642590227 • US $21.95 • 8.5 in x 5.5 in • 170 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
With a new introduction from Michael Bennett, this adaptation of his bestselling book Things That Make White People Uncomfortable is specifically geared for 12-17 year olds and will appeal to students, teachers and librarians looking for a book that seamlessly connects politics, personal narratives and sports.
Michael Bennett is a Super Bowl Champion, a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, a fearless activist, a feminist, an organizer, and a change maker. He’s also one of the most humorous athletes on the planet, and he wants to make you uncomfortable. Bennett adds his voice to discussions of racism and police violence, Black athletes and their relationship to powerful institutions like the NCAA and the NFL, the role of protest in history, and the responsibilities of athletes as role models to speak out against injustice. Following in the footsteps of activist-athletes from Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick, Bennett demonstrates his outspoken leadership both on and off the field.
Written with award-winning sportswriter and author Dave Zirin, this is a sports book for young people who want to make a difference, a memoir, and a book as hilarious and engaging as it is illuminating.
PRAISE:
Praise for Things That Make White People Uncomfortable:
“Michael Bennett is an agent of change.”
The New York Times
“A shockingly honest take on sports and politics.”
The Stranger
“This book is a courageous and compassionate story of a great athlete and grand human being full of deep care for his fellow citizens! Don’t miss it!”
Cornel West
“It would be easy for Michael Bennett to remain silent, to play in the NFL and make his mark through accomplishments on the field. Instead Michael has chosen to use his voice and his platform to fight injustice.”
Senator Bernie Sanders
“There is a tradition of athletes who understand that sports is a way to reach people and change the world. I am proud and humbled to be recognized as part of that tradition. I believe that Michael Bennett’s name deserves mention alongside the best of us. This book doesn’t only explain the roots of Michael Bennett’s courage. It will inspire the people who read it to conquer their fears and fight for what’s right.”
Dr. John Carlos, 1968 Olympic medalist
“I was going to say this is the most courageous books on race written by an athlete in my lifetime, but I actually think this is one of the most courageous books on race and racism in America that has ever been written by anyone. It’s that good and that important.”
Shaun King, columnist for The Intercept and writer-in-residence for Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project
“There is a revolution underway inside professional sports and Michael Bennett is at ground zero. In this revelatory book, he puts everything on the line to share the reasons, strategy, pain and deep thought behind this historic uprising. And he invites us into a vision of justice and liberation that is simply irresistible. This book is pure fire.”
Naomi Klein
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Michael Bennett is a three-time Pro Bowler, Pro Bowl MVP, Super Bowl Champion, and two-time NFC Champion. He has gained international recognition for his public support for the Black Lives Matter Movement, women’s rights, and other social justice causes. In 2017, he was named one of the 100 Most Influential African Americans by The Root,was the Seattle Seahawks nominee for the NFL’s Walter Payton Man of the Year award, and was honored along with his brother Martellus with a BET Shine a Light award for exceptional service. He is the cofounder with Pele Bennett of The Bennett Foundation, which educates underserved children and communities through free, accessible programming. He has held free camps and health clinics in Seattle, in his hometown of Houston, in his current offseason home, Honolulu, and in South Dakota on the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He donates all of his endorsement money and the proceeds from his jersey sales to fund health and education projects for poor and underserved youth and minority communities, and recently expanded his reach globally to support STEM programming in Africa. He is the proud father of three daughters, Peyton, Blake, and Ollie.
Martellus Bennett is a Super Bowl champion, NFL Pro Bowler, children’s book author, and younger brother to Michael Bennett. His first children’s book, Hey A. J., It’s Saturday, was released in 2016 through his own company, The Imagination Agency
Named one of the “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World” by the Utne Reader, Dave Zirin is the author of ten books on the intersection of sports and politics. He also writes on this subject for the Nation magazine, their first sports writer in 150 years of existence. Zirin is also the host of the “Edge of Sports Podcast” and “The Collision with Etan Thomas and Dave Zirin” on WPFW in Washington DC.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888903674 • US $24.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this genre-bending memoir, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her stint at one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the country and what it teaches us about the absurdity of work—for readers of Bullshit Jobs and fans of Office Space and Sorry to Bother You
The year is 1999, and the world is about to end. The only thing standing between corporate America and certain annihilation is a freshly employed twenty-two year old and her three-ring binders.
While headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, our protagonist Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process—a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Anderson People (her fellow consultants) believe holds world saving powers. Her heroic task: printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. After a series of equally mundane tasks, and one well timed deployment of an anecdote about a legendary quarterback, she soon found herself jet-setting on the firm’s dime to thirty-minute lunch meetings in Johannesburg, giving impromptu lectures to Japanese executives about limiting liability at the end of the world, and leaping from burning vehicles on Mexico City’s busiest highway.
As present-day Leigh Claire reflects on the inanity of her former employment, we’re introduced to a carousel of characters plucked from a Mike Judge screenplay, and are treated to post-facto theoretical interjections about the nature of financialized capitalism that recall David Graeber at his best.
PRAISE:
Praise for Marx for Cats
“ Marx for Cats is an undomesticated and indefinable meow de coeur. You can open this book anywhere—it’s a Marxist Choose Your Own Adventure—and come away as unsettled, possessed, and reflective as any transportative encounter with a cat might leave you.”
Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
“Who knew that following cats could open up history and enliven Marxism? This delightful archive of the feline in class struggle reminds us that cats are our comrades. Hand in paw, we have a world to win!”
Jodi Dean, author of Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Leigh Claire La Berge is Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and author of Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art and Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary .
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9780375714399 • US $19.95 • 402 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The wisdom and artistry of Latin America’s storytellers preserve one of the world’s richest folktale traditions—combining the lore of medieval Europe, the ancient Near East, and pre-Columbian America. Among the essential characters are the quiet man’s wife who knew the Devil’s secrets, the three daughters who robbed their father’s grave, and the wife in disguise who married her own husband—not to mention the Bear’s son, the tricksters Fox and Monkey, the two compadres, and the classic rogue Pedro de Urdemalas.
Gathered from twenty countries, including the United States, the stories are brought together here in a core collection of one hundred tales arranged in the form of a velorio, or wake, the most frequent occasion for public storytelling. The tales are preceded by a selection of early Colonial legends foreshadowing the themes of Latino folklore and are followed by a carefully chosen group of modern Indian myths that replay the basic stories in a contrasting key. Riddles, chain riddles, and folk prayers, part and parcel of the velorio along with folktales, are introduced at appropriate junctures.
The collection is unprecedented in size and scope, and most of the tales have not been translated into English before. The result is the first panoramic anthology of Hispano-American folk narratives in any language.
Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library
PRAISE:
“A cornucopia of magic and myth . . . Beware, for the pages of this volume—filled with tricksters, witches, and ghosts—are enchanted!”
Ilan Stavans
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Bierhorst is the author of two books on Latin American folklore, The Mythology of South America and The Mythology of Mexico and Central America. A specialist in Aztec languages and literatures, he is the translator of Cantares Mexicanos and the author of a Nahuatl-English dictionary. He is currently an editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature and has received grants and scholarships from the Americas Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Trade Paper • ISBN 9780375713972 • US $16.95 • 464 pages
SOBRE EL LIBRO
Extendiendo a veinte países y quinientos años, desde los mitos coloniales más tempranos hasta los cuentos orales coleccionados en el siglo veinte desde el sur de California, Florida, Texas y Nuevo México, EE.UU., Cuentos Folklóricos Latinoamericanos es la primera antología publicada en español representante de la tradición folklórico de América hispanohablante en su totalidad.
Incluido en ésta colección panorámica, hay relatos con origen en la Europa medieval, el Medio Oriente anciano, y la América precolombina. Los personajes esenciales del mundo de antigüedad son el hombre tranquilo cuya esposa conoce el diablo y las tres hijas que roban la tumba de su padre. También se encuentra el trágico informe Mexicano desde el siglo diez y seis sobre Moctezuma, el rey Azteca destinado a confrontar y ser destruido por la conquista, y un cuento moderno desde Los Angeles, sobre un esposo que realiza su promesa ser sepultado en vivo con su esposa.
Colocado en forma de un velorio, el más común foro público de contar cuentos, Cuentos Folklóricos Latinoamericanos conserva los matices y expresivos idiomáticos de esos narradores originales cuando nos proveen unos de los más provocativos e emotivos cuentos desde la tradición oral.
OPINIONES:
“Una cornucopia de magia y mita. . . . Las páginas de éste volumen son encantadoras.”
Ilan Stavans
“Cuentos dinámicos que son cortos e expresivos y frecuentemente tienen remates sorpresas, haciendo la lectura super-interesante.”
John Bierhorst is the author of two books on Latin American folklore, The Mythology of South America and The Mythology of Mexico and Central America. A specialist in Aztec languages and literatures, he is the translator of Cantares Mexicanos and the author of a Nahuatl-English dictionary. He is currently an editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature and has received grants and scholarships from the Americas Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642597424 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 270 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Abolition Feminisms: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice, offers wide-ranging feminist abolitionist methods for liberation forged in collectivity, radical care, and transformation.
This groundbreaking double-volume engages the theme of abolition feminisms, a political tradition grounded in radical anti-violence organizing, Black feminist and feminist of color rebellion, survivor knowledge production, strategies devised inside and across prison walls, and a full, fierce refusal of race-gender pathology and punitive control. This analysis disrupts the politics of carceral feminism as conversations about the ramifications of the prison-industrial complex continue.
PRAISE FOR ABOLITION FEMINISMS:
“As inspiring as it is edifying, this phenomenal collection, Abolition Feminisms, Volume 2: Feminist Ruptures Against the Carceral State, offers us a broad range of ideas, images, provocations, and organizing approaches enabled by developing theories and practices associated with abolition feminisms. Thanks to the thoroughgoing familiarity of the editors with the grassroots efforts that constitute the groundwork of abolition femi-nism, we are offered important tools that help us to recognize punitive logics within and beyond conventional carceral contexts and to support us as we struggle for a world of mutual care, transformative justice, and freedom.”
Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
“This essential two-volume collection maps the shared roots between abolitionist life-making and feminist resistance, showing us how rebellious organizing and radical care are always at the heart of real change. Brimming with dispatches across borders and prison walls, archives of movement building, and striking creative work, Abolition Feminisms describes a breathtaking body of freedom practices, galvanizing us to do everything we can to help forge the liberatory future that we urgently need. Anyone who engages this collection is guaranteed to learn some-thing new.”
Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This ’Til We Free Us
“This beautiful two-volume collection of essays, poems, and artwork brings a refreshing vibrancy to the radical work of abolition feminism. Inspiring, accessible, and far-reaching, the books are precisely what is needed right now: clear demands for radical change, reflections on the power of radical organizing, and radical statements of hope. Readers will be lifted up as they turn the pages, where each entry is a reminder of how abolition feminism is critical to freedom struggles, and our movement will therefore be challenged and changed.”
Beth E. Richie, coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now.
“Contrary to popular belief, revolutions don’t come with handbooks or blueprints. They do carry histories, memories, manifestos, maps, moments of clarity and deep contradictions, dreams, principles, and real people who endure the oppressions they are seeking to overturn. This extraordinary collective of activists, artists, and scholars understand that this is what revolutions are made of, and that through study and struggle we see abolition feminism not as a variant or a tendency within some larger liberatory movement but the revolution we need to genuinely overturn things.”
Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Abolition Feminisms: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice upends feminism’s relegation to an afterthought or appendage of abolition and urges us toward social arrangements defined by caring collectively. One of the most exquisite volumes on abolition feminism to date, this gather-ing of essays, dispatches, art, and poetry features a constellation of vibrant theorists, including those who have been criminalized and imprisoned. Abolition Feminisms offers original insights into the everyday terror and annihilating deprivation facing people inside women’s prisons, the work of imprisoned people to challenge gender and sexual oppression, the structuring role of gender violence to the logic and technologies of the carceral state, the nexus of imperial and domestic modes of repression, the carceral production of gender and sexual normativity, settler-colonial and anti-Black carceral violence, and more. Bierria, Caruthers, and Lober effectively establish abolition’s feminist provenance in an utterly brilliant account of abolition feminism’s decolonial heart, intimate practice, and radical momentum. This collection will be an instant classic in feminist and queer of color critique.”
Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
“The creative, political, intellectual interventions in this book, with their deeply intersectional locations of study and methods of analysis, fuel our ongoing work to understand what we are taking apart and to tear it down fully, once and for all. These articles, poems, and images also provide the warm, inviting entry points we need to imagine how bold, risky, ordinary work done by brave, ordinary people is the only path for building a world in which it is impossible for anyone to put anyone in a cage.”
Alisa Bierria is a Black feminist philosopher and an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. Her writing can be found in numerous scholarly journals and public anthologies, including her co-edited volume, Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue of Social Justice. She has been an advocate within the feminist anti-violence movement for over 25 years, including co-founding Survived & Punished, a national abolitionist organization that advocates for the decriminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
Jakeya Caruthers is Assistant Professor of English & Africana Studies at Drexel University. Her research attends to black political aesthetics within 20th and 21st century cultural production as well as race, gender, sexuality, and state discipline. Jakeya is a principal investigator of an inside-outside research initiative with Survived & Punished California that maps pathways between surviving gender violence, incarceration, and radical possibilities for survivor release. She is also collaborating on a digital archive of feminist decriminalization campaigns waged over the last 50 years.
Brooke Lober is a teacher, writer, activist, and social movement scholar who is currently researching legacies of antiracist and anti-Zionist feminisms in the Bay Area, and teaching courses in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at UC Berkeley. Brooke is the co-editor of a special issue of Sinister Wisdom, “Out of Control: Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners” (2022); her writing is published in the scholarly journals Feminist Formations, Women’s Studies, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and on numerous websites of radical culture.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598452 • US $22.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 328 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this expansive companion to Abolition Feminisms Vol. I, contributors confront multiple paradigms of punitivity—the foundational logics of family, borders, heterosexuality, colonial violence, and more—to disengage us from root systems of carcerality.
The book transcends various modes and forms: through grassroots praxis, critical research, storytelling, diagrams, poetry, and visual art, these pieces build on the legacies of feminist thinkers who formulated abolitionist critiques of policing, surveillance, and control. The resulting framework provides readers with the resources to cultivate and inhabit a post-carceral world of radical freedom and possibility.
PRAISE FOR ABOLITION FEMINISMS:
“As inspiring as it is edifying, this phenomenal collection, Abolition Feminisms, Volume 2: Feminist Ruptures Against the Carceral State, offers us a broad range of ideas, images, provocations, and organizing approaches enabled by developing theories and practices associated with abolition feminisms. Thanks to the thoroughgoing familiarity of the editors with the grassroots efforts that constitute the groundwork of abolition femi-nism, we are offered important tools that help us to recognize punitive logics within and beyond conventional carceral contexts and to support us as we struggle for a world of mutual care, transformative justice, and freedom.”
Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
“This essential two-volume collection maps the shared roots between abolitionist life-making and feminist resistance, showing us how rebellious organizing and radical care are always at the heart of real change. Brimming with dispatches across borders and prison walls, archives of movement building, and striking creative work, Abolition Feminisms describes a breathtaking body of freedom practices, galvanizing us to do everything we can to help forge the liberatory future that we urgently need. Anyone who engages this collection is guaranteed to learn some-thing new.”
Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This ’Til We Free Us
“This beautiful two-volume collection of essays, poems, and artwork brings a refreshing vibrancy to the radical work of abolition feminism. Inspiring, accessible, and far-reaching, the books are precisely what is needed right now: clear demands for radical change, reflections on the power of radical organizing, and radical statements of hope. Readers will be lifted up as they turn the pages, where each entry is a reminder of how abolition feminism is critical to freedom struggles, and our movement will therefore be challenged and changed.”
Beth E. Richie, coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now.
“Contrary to popular belief, revolutions don’t come with handbooks or blueprints. They do carry histories, memories, manifestos, maps, moments of clarity and deep contradictions, dreams, principles, and real people who endure the oppressions they are seeking to overturn. This extraordinary collective of activists, artists, and scholars understand that this is what revolutions are made of, and that through study and struggle we see abolition feminism not as a variant or a tendency within some larger liberatory movement but the revolution we need to genuinely overturn things.”
Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Abolition Feminisms: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice upends feminism’s relegation to an afterthought or appendage of abolition and urges us toward social arrangements defined by caring collectively. One of the most exquisite volumes on abolition feminism to date, this gather-ing of essays, dispatches, art, and poetry features a constellation of vibrant theorists, including those who have been criminalized and imprisoned. Abolition Feminisms offers original insights into the everyday terror and annihilating deprivation facing people inside women’s prisons, the work of imprisoned people to challenge gender and sexual oppression, the structuring role of gender violence to the logic and technologies of the carceral state, the nexus of imperial and domestic modes of repression, the carceral production of gender and sexual normativity, settler-colonial and anti-Black carceral violence, and more. Bierria, Caruthers, and Lober effectively establish abolition’s feminist provenance in an utterly brilliant account of abolition feminism’s decolonial heart, intimate practice, and radical momentum. This collection will be an instant classic in feminist and queer of color critique.”
Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
“The creative, political, intellectual interventions in this book, with their deeply intersectional locations of study and methods of analysis, fuel our ongoing work to understand what we are taking apart and to tear it down fully, once and for all. These articles, poems, and images also provide the warm, inviting entry points we need to imagine how bold, risky, ordinary work done by brave, ordinary people is the only path for building a world in which it is impossible for anyone to put anyone in a cage.”
Alisa Bierria is a Black feminist philosopher and an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. Her writing can be found in numerous scholarly journals and public anthologies, including her co-edited volume, Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue of Social Justice. She has been an advocate within the feminist anti-violence movement for over 25 years, including co-founding Survived & Punished, a national abolitionist organization that advocates for the decriminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
Jakeya Caruthers is Assistant Professor of English & Africana Studies at Drexel University. Her research attends to black political aesthetics within 20th and 21st century cultural production as well as race, gender, sexuality, and state discipline. Jakeya is a principal investigator of an inside-outside research initiative with Survived & Punished California that maps pathways between surviving gender violence, incarceration, and radical possibilities for survivor release. She is also collaborating on a digital archive of feminist decriminalization campaigns waged over the last 50 years.
Brooke Lober is a teacher, writer, activist, and social movement scholar who is currently researching legacies of antiracist and anti-Zionist feminisms in the Bay Area, and teaching courses in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at UC Berkeley. Brooke is the co-editor of a special issue of Sinister Wisdom, “Out of Control: Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners” (2022); her writing is published in the scholarly journals Feminist Formations, Women’s Studies, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and on numerous websites of radical culture.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Haymarket Books (August 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466054 • US $18.00 • 180 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
While the Great French Revolution of 1789 served as a political compass for several generations of European radicals, for socialists in particular, Gracchus Babeuf was far and away its most important leader. Babeuf and the newspaper he edited, Le Tribun du Peuple, pushed well beyond his contemporaries in their staunch defense of democracy and demands for the abolition of private property. Going so far as to call for an insurrection against the government of the Directory as it increased its repression against domestic agitators, Babeuf was eventually arrested and executed in what became known as the “conspiracy of equals.”
This study of Babeuf as a political thinker, based on an analysis of his extensive writings, and on scholarship unavailable in English, draws out why so many considered him to be a major precursor of the modern revolutionary socialist tradition and goes on to make the case that his ideas have much to teach today’s activists. The first part traces Babeuf’s political evolution in the context of the French Revolution, the second examines his changing reputation among subsequent historians, and the final section assesses the originality of his thought, showing him to be neither a Jacobin nor a Utopian.
This updated second edition features an important new introduction by Ian Birchall, a prolific writer and leading authority on Babeuf, that summarizes Babeuf’s historical significance, his ideas, and his practice in revolutionary France.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ian Birchall is a socialist historian and translator based in London. His books include Sartre Against Stalinism, A Rebel’s Guide to Lenin, and Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time
PRAISE
The story of the French Revolution has been the subject of countless books and articles, but the story of Gracchus Babeuf has rarely been told in the English language, so this reprint of Ian Birchall’s 1997 book looking at the French revolutionary is enormously welcome…as Ian Birchall’s excellent book shows us, we still have much to learn from the revolutionary life of Gracchus Babeuf.
Resolute Reader
“Birchall succeeded magnificently in Spectre in restoring Babeuf as a major actor in the French Revolution and recovering his genuine place in the wider socialist tradition of self-emancipation. Babeuf comes alive as a revolutionary thinker who made a practical plan of action to realise communism.”
Doug Greene, RS21
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595895 • US $19.95 • 6 in x 9 in
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This important volume traces efforts to advance the socialist project through the organization of revolutionary collectives, engaging with a pantheon of relevant thinkers. Offering an indispensable assessment of the place of collectives in the radical tradition, Paul Le Blanc also considers related questions which have more recently featured on the left.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paul Le Blanc, long-time activist and Professor of History at La Roche College, is the author of a number of widely-read studies, including Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, From Marx to Gramsci, and Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience. With Michael Yates he has written the widely-acclaimed A Freedom Budget for All Americans and has co-edited a selection of Leon Trotsky’s Writings in Exile.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900987 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 140 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A book of stunning black and white photographs, capturing the events, people, and landscape of Chicago’s Washington Park during the summer of 1987.
Located in Chicago’s South side and designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Washington Park takes its name from the first president of the United States. But in 1987, for at least one joyous summer, the community claimed it as their own—even renamed it Harold Washington Park—as depicted in this vibrant collection of work by Chicagoan and photographer, Rose Blouin. The resulting images represent a profile of Chicago’s Black community in a place where they come together for recreation, festivals, sports, community events, parades, weddings, and other arts and cultural events.
These photographs brim with the delights of summer: a verdant natural world, food, fun, music, family gatherings, and a community inhabiting the vast expanse of the Chicago park.They embody the diversity, strength, and humanity of the people for whom Washington Park is a summertime gathering place. To Washington Park, With Love includes forewords by Eve L. Ewing and Adrienne Maree Brown, contextualizing and celebrating the 140 black and white photographs from Blouin’s indispensable body of work.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rose Blouin is a self-taught photographer who has created documentary and fine art photography since 1980. Her work has been exhibited in a number of museums and galleries including Woman Made Gallery, ARC Gallery, Nicole Gallery, The South Side Community Art Center, Artemesia Gallery, The North Suburban Fine Arts Center, Evanston Arts Center, the State of Illinois Art Gallery, Bridgeport Art Center and the Chicago Cultural Center. Her work has received awards in juried exhibitions including Tall Grass Arts “From Earth” exhibition, Black Creativity (Museum of Science and Industry), University of Chicago Logan Center for the Arts “Chicago Jazz: A Photographer’s View,” DuSable Museum Annual Art Fair, and the Milwaukee Inner City Art Fair. Blouin has had solo exhibitions at the South Side Community Art Center and at the Ferguson Gallery of Concordia University featuring photographs from South Africa, and The New Studio in Evanston featuring photographs of Havana. Her most recent solo exhibition, “To Washington Park, With Love: Photographs from the Summer of 1987, was mounted at Arts + Public Life Arts Incubator Galleries in 2021. Blouin is a founding member of Sapphire & Crystals, a collective of African-American women artists active since 1987. Her book, A Week In Havana, was published May, 2023, with the assistance of an Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, as well as a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, through federal funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461561 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 11 in • 210 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
101 profiles of social justice leaders that changed the world, made accessible for students in grades 3-8.
In the great tradition of Howard Zinn, 101 Real Changemakers offers a “peoples’ history” version of the individuals who have shaped our country, for middle school students. In the place of Founding Fathers, Presidents and titans of industry, are profiles of those who courageously fought for social justice in America: Tecumseh, Harriet Tubman, Henry Wallace, Mark Twain, Cesar Chavez, Rachel Carson, Harvey Milk, and many more.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Michele Bollinger is a veteran high school social studies teacher in Washington, DC, whose writing has appeared in the International Socialist Review.
Dao X. Tran is a manuscript editor based in the Bronx, NY. She was active in antiracist and community organizing among Asian Americans and people of color as a youth in Philadelphia. Currently she continues to be involved in progressive and socialist politics and movements, including Take Back/Occupy the Bronx.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper• ISBN-13: 9781642594614 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Her Word is Bond recounts the triumphs and setbacks of a rap legend who blazed a new trail for women in hip hop.
“Nowhere near famous but still infamous,” Psalm One is a legend to rap nerds, scholars, and “heads,” and has gone on to work with the brightest names in rap and have her work celebrated and taught around the globe. In Her Word Is Bond, Psalm One tells her own story, from growing up in Englewood, Chicago through her life as a chemist, teacher, and legendary rapper. Intrinsically feminist, this story is a celebration of the life and career of one artist who blazed the trail for women in hip hop.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cristalle Bowen, also known as Psalm One, is an international touring and recording artist. She has been consistently named one of the nation’s best by the Chicago Tribune, and in 2011 made her television debut on MTV’s Emmy- winning series, MADE.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592665 • US $16.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 136 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Award-winning poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor pays tribute to her departed son Malik ‘Phife Dawg’ Taylor of the legendary hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest in this intimate collection.
Mama Phife Represents is a hybrid-story that follows the journey of a mother’s grieving heart through her first two years of public and private mourning. Told through a tapestry of narrative poems, dreams, anecdotes, journal entries, and letters, these treasured fragments of their lives show a great love between mother and son. Artist and artist, teacher and friend. Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s gift includes drawings, emails, hip-hop lyrics, and notes Malik wrote to his parents beginning at age eight. Both elegy and praise song, there is joy and sorrow, healing, and a mother’s triumphant heart that rises and blooms again.
PRAISE:
“Malik Phife Dawg Taylor represents everything that’s beautiful about Hip-Hop. I had the honor of meeting his mother Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, the poet, long before I met him. She inspired me to become a better artist. When I became a professional artist, Malik was one of my biggest supporters. Without them, I don’t know if I would be the artist I am today. This book is like a piece of me.”
Talib Kweli, Hip-Hop Artist
“A teacher begets a teacher and a poet begets a poet. This book is the embodiment of pure love, grace and hope. Herein, Mama Phife aka Cheryl Boyce-Taylor has given us a gift about her greatest gift, her son Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor. Malik was a great storyteller. To say he got it from his mama is an understatement. He was a treasure to me and Cheryl’s writings and memoirs help to comfort the place that misses him greatly. I thank her for this book and for still teaching us… like her mother before her.”
Ali Shaheed Muhammad, A Tribe Called Quest
“I am eternally hopeful that more people in the world come to terms with understanding that for anyone to share an experience of grief is a true generosity. With Mama Phife Represents, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor allows a reader to bask in the generosity. The sharing of loss and grief is the building of a bridge that others who have experienced that specific loss can cross. This is a book about losing a child, yes. But beyond that, it is a book of tactile emotions, and a singularly musical writing, which Boyce- Taylor has always done so well. Above all, Mama Phife Represents shows anyone who has lost someone how to make the most of memory, and the most of their own survival.”
Hanif Abdurraqib, author of Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
“‘All around are unhinged bones / wailing at the lip of sea.’ And: ‘I’ve stitched your breath / to my throat.’ Such lines carry the loss of the writer’s beautiful son out of which emerges this book of love, of joy, of grief, but also of plenty. Through poems, letters, photographs, and other communications, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor has gathered an exquisite record of this Great love between mother and son, artist and artist. Quietly I say to you here: It is like nothing else I have quite read. An elegy, an epic, a duet. A motherhand gathering the lastings. We are so utterly fortunate to witness this immense devotion, and in that witnessing be changed by yet another glimpse of deepest love and what it makes possible.”
Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
“Mama Phife Represents is an intimate and heartbreaking tribute to Boyce-Taylor’s son, Malik ‘Phife Dawg’ Taylor. Not only does Boyce-Taylor deftly humanize the hip-hop superhero, but she also logs every fragile emotion in both eulogy and celebration: so much so that ‘she will travel to Anguilla/ beg Yemaya to bring him back.’ The light that the poet finds on this journey is nearly unfathomable, but always redemptive. This collection is a monument, and I am grateful for it.”
Michael Cirelli, CEO of Urban Word National Youth Poet Laureate Program
“Mama Phife Represents is at once a memoir and a living archive of one man’s extraordinary life and his mother’s love and pain in the face of his loss. At a time in the United States when so many black mothers are losing their black children —through illness and violence — this book stands as a testament to the deep, ground-shifting impact of that loss across generations. Honest, Healing, Timely.”
Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara, poet, novelist, and scholar
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a poet and teaching artist. She earned an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine and an MSW from Fordham University. Her collections of poetry include Raw Air (2000), Night When Moon Follows (2000), Convincing the Body (2005), and Arrival (2017), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize.
The founder and curator of Calypso Muse and the Glitter Pomegranate Performance Series, Boyce-Taylor is also a poetry judge for the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. She has led workshops for Cave Canem, Poets & Writers, and the Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center. Her poetry has been commissioned by The Joyce Theater and the National Endowment for the Arts for Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company. Boyce-Taylor is the recipient of the 2015 Barnes & Noble Writers For Writers Award and a VONA fellow. Her life papers and portfolio are stored at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade Paper • ISBN 9780199376896 • US $95.95 • 960 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Since publication of the first edition, in 1974, Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen’s Film Theory and Criticism has been the most widely used and cited anthology of critical writings about film. Now in its eighth edition, this landmark text continues to offer outstanding coverage of more than a century of thought and writing about the movies. Incorporating classic texts by pioneers in film theory and cutting-edge essays by contemporary scholars, the text examines both historical and theoretical viewpoints on the subject.
Building upon the wide range of selections and the extensive historical coverage that marked previous editions, this new compilation stretches from the earliest attempts to define the cinema to the most recent efforts to place film in the contexts of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, and to explore issues of gender and race. Reorganized into ten sections—each comprising the major fields of critical controversy and analysis—this new edition features reformulated introductions and biographical headnotes that contextualize the readings, making the text more accessible than ever to students, film enthusiasts, and general readers alike.
A wide-ranging critical and historical survey, Film Theory and Criticism remains the leading text for undergraduate courses in film theory. It is also ideal for graduate courses in film theory and criticism.
PRAISE:
“A near-exhaustive collection of essential film writing. The essays contained in Film Theory and Criticism testify not only to the diversity of topics that make up the study of film, but to their increasing relevance in our globalized, digitized age.”
John Bruns, College of Charleston
“It is the best compilation of the widest range of critical approaches that relies on complete reproductions (not truncated extracts) of some of the most influential and provocative theory on film.”
Terri A. Hasseler, Bryant University
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Leo Braudy is University Professor and Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature and Professor of English, Art History, and History at the University of Southern California. Among other books, he is author of Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, and most recently, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity.
Marshall Cohen is University Professor Emeritus and Dean Emeritus of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California. He is coeditor, with Roger Copeland, of What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism, and founding editor of Philosophy and Public Affairs.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466856 • US $22• 352 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In the new edition of this definitive work on the history of the revolutionary socialist current in the United States that came to be identified as “American Trotskyism,” Paul Le Blanc offers fresh reflections on this history for scholars and activists in the twenty-first century. Includes a preface written especially for the new edition of this distinctive work.
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHORS:
Praise for Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience (Paul LeBlanc):
“Looking back at the tumultuous events associated with revolutionary Marxism in the past century, Paul Le Blanc offers us an insightful, sympathetic, and even-handed assessment of the sources of its dynamism as well as the causes of its decline.”
Walden Bello
Praise for Exiles from a Future Time (Alan Wald):
“A solid contribution to American studies, this will be welcomed by literary scholars, historians, and political scientists for its thorough research and wide ranging scholarship.”
Library Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Alan M. Wald is the H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan and is the recipient of the Mary C. Turpie Prize of the American Studies Association. Among Alan Wald’s widely acclaimed writings is The New York Intellectuals (1987).
Paul Le Blanc is a professor of History at La Roche College, has written on and participated in the U.S. labor, radical and civil rights movements, and is author of such books as Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience, and Lenin and the Revolutionary Party.
George Breitman (1916-86) was an American communist political activist and newspaper editor. He is best remembered as a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party and as a long-time editor of that organization’s weekly paper, The Militant. He also edited internationally influential volumes of works by Malcolm X and Leon Trotsky.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595703 • US $28.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 380 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
I remember death by its proximity to what I love most is an expansive poetic meditation on who we think is bound by incarceration. The answer: all of us. Weaving personal narrative, case studies and inventive form, Browne invokes the grief, pain and resilience in the violent wake of the prison system. This poem is dirge work but allows us to revel in the intricacies of our human condition. Written by a beloved and prolific writer, organizer, and educator, this work serves as a practice of self-reflection and accountability. Browne steps into the lineage of Sonia Sanchez’s Does Your House Have Lions?, with the precision of a master wordsmith and the empathy of an attentive storyteller.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mahogany L. Browne is the executive director of Bowery Poetry Club, artistic Director of Urban Word NYC, and poetry coordinator at St. Francis College. She has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research and Rauschenberg. She is the author of Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice, Woke Baby, Black Girl Magic, Kissing Caskets, and Dear Twitter. She is also the founder of the Woke Baby Book Fair (a nationwide diversity literature campaign) and as an Arts for Justice grantee, is completing her first book of essays on mass incarceration, investigating its impact on women and children. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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Haymarket Books (2006, world English rights, except southern Africa)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859226 • US $16 • 5.5 in x 8.4 in • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This collection of interviews, poetry, and essays of the much-loved anti-apartheid leader Dennis Brutus is the first book of its kind to bring together the full, forceful range of his work. Much of the material has never been published before outside South Africa.
Brutus, imprisoned along with Nelson Mandela, is known worldwide for his unparalleled eloquence as an opponent of the apartheid South African regime. In the more than ten years since its fall, Brutus has remained a voice for justice and humanity, speaking and writing extensively on issues of debt, poverty, war, racism, and neoliberalism.
PRAISE:
“We in South Africa needed the support of the international community in our efforts to end the vicious system of racial oppression called apartheid. We had to have eloquent advocates to tell the world our story and persuade it to come to our assistance…. We had none more articulate and with all the credibility and integrity so indispensable than Dennis Brutus to plead our cause. He was quite outstanding and we South Africans owe an immense debt of gratitude.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“Dennis Brutus stands as a tribune of the dispossessed. His willingness to speak out on all cases of injustice, and side with the oppressed makes him the type of person we all wish to emulate. His perseverance, dedication and eloquence have made him not only a hero for the South African freedom struggle, but for all those who struggle for social justice.”
Bill Fletcher, TransAfrica Forum
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Dennis Brutus is known as “the singing voice of the South African liberation movement,” Brutus, more than any other person, was responsible for South Africa’s and Rhodesia’s exclusion from the Olympic Games. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Brutus was a hated figure for those defending sports-apartheid. Knowing that if white South Africa was deprived of its fanatical sports devotion it would be forced to change, he helped secure suspension from the Olympics in 1964 and expulsion in 1970.
Campaigns led to his being banned from all political and social activity in South Africa. Trying to escape his ban to attend an Olympic meeting in Europe in 1963, he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to eighteen months of hard labor. He was held captive on Robben Island off Capetown, South Africa, where he spent time breaking rocks with Nelson Mandela.
After leaving South Africa in 1966 with a Rhodesian passport, Brutus made his home in England. In 1983, after engaging in a protracted legal struggle and appearing on ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel, he won the right to stay in the United States as a political refugee. Currently living in the United States, he is now a professor of African Studies and African Literature, and Chair of the Department of Black Community Education Research and Development, at the University of Pittsburgh. He was the recipient of the Langston Hughes Award in 1987 (the first non-African American honoree) and was honored with the first Paul Robeson Award in 1989, for “artistic excellence, political consciousness and integrity.”
Brutus’ first collection of poetry, Sirens, Knuckles and Boots (1962), was published in Nigeria while he was still banned in South Africa. His later works include A Simple Lust (1973), China Poems (1975), Stubborn Hope (1978), Salutes and Censures (1984), Airs and Tributes (1989), and Still the Sirens (1993).
Lee Sustar has written extensively on the global justice and labor movements for numerous publications. He is a member of the National Writers Union and lives in Chicago, Illinois.
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University of KwaZulu-Natal Press
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466795 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 140 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Susan Buck-Morss asks: What does Revolution look like today? How will the idea of Revolution survive the inadequacy of the formula: “progress = modernization through industrialization,” to which it has owed its political life?
Socialism plus computer technology, citizen resistance plus a global agenda of concerns, revolutionary commitment to practices that are socially experimental and inclusive of difference – these are new forces being mobilized to make another future possible.
Revolution Today celebrates the new political subjects that are organizing thousands of grass-roots movements to fight racial and gender violence, state-led terrorism, and capitalist exploitation of people and the planet worldwide. The 21st century has already witnessed unprecedented popular mobilizations. Unencumbered by old dogmas, mobilizations of opposition are not only happening, they are gaining support, and developing a global consciousness in the process. They are themselves a chain of signifiers, creating solidarity across language, religion, ethnicity, gender, and every other difference.
Trans-local solidarities exist. They came first. The right-wing authoritarianism and anti-immigrant upsurge that has followed is a reaction against the amazing visual power of millions of citizens occupying public space in defiance of state power. They are demanding a society that puts people over corporate profits, protects our common planet, and refuses to cover up the obscene gap between rich and poor with the diversionary tactic of erecting walls of separation among us.
We cannot know how to act politically without seeing others act. This book provides photographic evidence of that fact, while making us aware of how much of the new revolutionary vernacular we already share.
PRAISE:
“Susan Buck-Morss in Revolution Today offers people across the globe a newer way of seeing, knowing, acting, and naming their political engagements. She uses extraordinary images to assist us in articulating newly robust revolutionary imaginings. As always, Susan finds history in the present without its limitations. It’s a stunning read for these urgent times.”
Zillah Eisenstein, writer, activist, and Professor Emerita of Anti-Racist Feminist Theory, Ithaca College
“Susan Buck-Morss is a researcher who scrutinizes the porous boundaries of the systems of meanings and looks for cracks in the seemingly cohesive modern narration on freedom, emancipation and humanity. She reaches beyond the specialized languages of individual disciplines, on which she draws and which she mixes, and intently observes visual culture.”
Political Critique
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Susan Buck-Morss is a core faculty member of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization and Social Change. Her trans-disciplinary work in political theory emerges out of a constellation of historical material, visual images, and contemporary events. Her previous books include Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, which won the Frantz Fanon Prize Book Prize in 2011, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608460724 • US $18 • 5.5 in x 8.25 in • 304 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This history of the Palestinian Communist Party upends the caricature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an ancient religious blood feud. Musa Budeiri shows how the complex history of the Palestinian Left before the Zionist destruction of historic Palestine was defined by secularism and solidarity between Arab and Jewish workers. With a new introduction and afterword by the author.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Musa Budeiri is a Palestinian political scientist and a resident of East Jerusalem. He was born in West Jerusalem, Palestine, in 1946, and teaches politics in the Program for Democracy at the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Birzeit University.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591231 • US $22.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 220 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by documenting how women, families, and communities cope with generational systems of oppression. Prescription opioids are associated with rising rates of overdose deaths and hepatitis C and HIV infection in the US, including in rural Central Appalachia. Yet there is a dearth of studies examining rural opioid use. RX Appalachia explores the gendered inequalities that situate women’s encounters with substance abuse treatment as well as additional state interventions targeted at women who use drugs in one of the most impoverished regions in the US.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lesly-Marie Buer is an activist and public health practitioner at Positively Living/Choice Health Network in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her work on substance use A harm reduction has appeared in such publications as Boston Review, the Journal of Appalachian Studies, and North American Dialogue.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595840 • US $16.95 • 5.25 in x 7.5 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
For those who want to build a fighting labor movement, there are many questions to answer. How to relate to the union establishment which often does not want to fight? Whether to work in the rank and file of unions or staff jobs? How much to prioritize broader class demands versus shop floor struggle? How to relate to foundation-funded worker centers and alternative union efforts? And most critically, how can we revive militancy and union power in the face of corporate power and a legal system set up against us?
Class struggle unionism is the belief that our union struggle exists within a larger struggle between an exploiting billionaire class and the working class which actually produces the goods and services in society. Class struggle unionism looks at the employment transaction as inherently exploitative. While workers create all wealth in society, the outcome of the wage employment transaction is to separate workers from that wealth and create the billionaire class. From that simple proposition flows a powerful and radical form of unionism. Historically, class struggle unionists placed their workplace fights squarely within this larger fight between workers and the owning class. Viewing unionism in this way produces a particular type of unionism which both fights for broader class issues but is also rooted in workplace-based militancy.
Drawing on years of labor activism and study of labor tradition Joe Burns outlines the key set of ideas common to class struggle unionism and shows how these ideas can create a more militant, democratic and fighting labor movement.
PRAISE:
“There is nothing more essential for the resurgence of the labor movement than cutting through the racial, social, gender and political divisions driven by the corporate class to deny working class power and keep workers in competition with each other. Class Struggle Unionism not only defines the urgency of our common struggle, it’s a textbook on how to organize around our common demands right where we work in order to build a movement strong enough to realize an inclusive economy and thriving democracy. This is required reading for these times, and required consciousness for our labor movement at all times.”
Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO
“Anyone trying to rebuild an effective U.S. labor movement needs to read Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns. He lays out the fundamental principles that UE has tried to uphold for the last 85 years. For a union to be worthwhile to the working class, it needs to know which side it is on and it has to recognize that the fight itself is what allows workers to gain the knowledge and power they need.”
Carl Rosen, General President, United Electrical Workers (UE)
“Joe Burns’ Class Struggle Unionism gives us a vision of what a labor movement should and could be. Burns reminds us that unions are about more than collective bargaining. When workers take collective action into their own hands, they can change the political agenda and bring real power to the struggles for equality and a truly democratic society.”
Kim Moody, author, On New Terrain: How Capital Is Shaping The Battleground of Class War
“What will reignite the labor movement? Beyond organizing techniques, Class Struggle Unionism argues that a revival would require a grounding in class struggle ideology and organizing to name and confront the power of capital. Burns draws out why this has gone missing from labor, the steps to bring it back, and the solidarity and power it will build. Read it. Share it. Put the movement back in the labor movement.”
Barbara Madeloni, Labor Notes, former president Massachusetts Teachers Association
“Class Struggle Unionism has arrived just in time. It is supremely relevant and cutting-edge smart, providing exactly what’s needed at a moment when our labor movement is finally regaining its footing after decades of flat-footed, directionless wandering. Joe Burns thinks strategically like an organizer, brings the sweeping view of a historian, and writes so that workers, organizers, and allies can come away transformed by what he says. It is a book that reminds us why we have a labor movement, and what hell we can raise when we remember which side we’re on.”
Ellen David Friedman, Labor Notes
“How can we rekindle widespread working class militancy? And what should such militancy seek to achieve? In Class Struggle Unionism, Joe Burns makes the case that a combative, cohesive, and effective labor movement requires class-conscious unions expressly committed to challenging capitalist exploitation. Burns’ handbook will prove invaluable to organizers who recognize that taking on the ruling class must begin with an ideological reorientation of the labor movement.”—Toni Gilpin, author, The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland
“Joe Burns’ Class Struggle Unionism is a must read for any labor activists or socialists concerned with the future of the US workers’ movement. He details that the ersatz social unionism of “labor liberalism”—with its abandonment of workplace organization and struggle, and reliance on professional staff and alliances with the Democratic Party—is no alternative to the discredited “business unionism” that had dominated US labor since World War II. His alternative—a class struggle unionism that builds upon workplace confrontations to challenge capitalist exploitation and oppression across society—is crucial for labor militants today.”
Charlie Post, editor Spectre: A Marxist Journal
“The notion of ‘class struggle unionism’ sounds like ‘duh’ until you realize how widespread is the idea that some force can save workers other than workers themselves—in Class Struggle Unionism, Joe Burns has coined the great phrase ‘labor liberalism,’ and makes clear why the labor movement can’t survive without committing to fighting the bosses and thinking big.”
Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes
“Workers and bosses have conflicting interests. Workers build power in the workplace. Unions need to strike to win. Strikes need to shut down the company. These are basic ideas that built the labor movement, but they have fallen out of favor in recent years. In this bracing call to action, Joe Burns calls for a revival of class struggle unionism, showing why it’s the only hope for rebuilding the labor movement and creating a better world.”
Barry Eidlin, McGill University
“I appreciate theories about union organizing and socialism but I always needed something I could carry back to work. Joe Burns did it again. He explains in prose as solid and precise as a toolmaker what class struggle unionism is, how it works, and how to implement a workable solution to the chronic failure of socialist organizing: integration with the working class.”
Gregg Shotwell, author, Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream
“Joe Burns’ new book, Class Struggle Unionism, is both timely and urgently needed for young and new fighters emerging in the labor movement today. It’s also a must-read for those union veterans who need a shot of adrenaline after many years. Winning will come from disciplined efforts and adherence to proven formulas, not from employer schemes or panaceas dreamed up by those far, far away from our reality. I commend it to all militants in the workplaces today trying to kick-start our movement again.”
Chris Townsend, organizing director, ATU International Union
“With the public’s and particularly young people’s growing support for unions, Joe Burns has written an easy-to-read and insightful contribution. Class Struggle Unionism clarifies the different approaches to labor organizing and contract campaigns, staff roles and responsibilities, and most importantly, different philosophies of labor’s vision and mission. Burns’ prescriptions for the labor movement’s revitalization build on his own years of practical experience. Anyone who aspires to be a union leader or organizer should read this book!”—Rand Wilson, former national organizer, Labor for Bernie
“Written in a very accessible fashion, this book provides a refreshingly bold, uncompromising, and compelling reassertion of the value of the class struggle and need for a form of ‘kick-ass’-fighting-unionism, fundamentally different from what we are accustomed to today within the labor movement. It deserves to become an A-Z guidebook for activists in helping to energize collective resistance.”
Ralph Darlington, Emeritus Professor of Employment Relations, University of Salford
“Can the union movement revive, or even survive, without winning more fights against corporate power? Joe Burns doesn’t think so. In Class Struggle Unionism, Burns makes the case for labor organizations that are militant, democratic, and membership-oriented. Drawing on his own past experience in the public and private sector, Burns provides a road map for union-rebuilding that will increase bargaining and organizing success. His latest invaluable book is essential reading for rank-and-file activists, new and old.”
Steve Early, author, Refinery Town and Civil Wars in US Labor
“Joe Burns’ Class Struggle Unionism has application to working class struggles around the world. This book shows we can address the challenges of class struggle unionism, which are capable of defeating our ruling classes. Our organizing task is historic, necessary, and urgent in today’s capitalist domination, exploitation, and ecological crisis.”
Chris White, former Secretary of the United Trades and Labor Council of South Australia
“In Class Struggle Unionism, Joe Burns makes an impassioned argument for a militant labor movement. He covers a great deal of ground in this highly readable volume that challenges contemporary unions to step out of their complacency to build a more just and equitable world. “
Tom Juravich, Professor of Labor Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst
“In this new book, Class Struggle Unionism, written and published just as pundits and labor activists are hailing the resurgence of strikes, militancy, and new organizing, Joe Burns fires a well-aimed volley across the bow of ‘business unionism’ and ‘labor liberalism,’ insisting that ‘class struggle unionism’ provides a path leading not only to the revival of the labor movement but also to the transformation of the American working class into a cohesive force for social change. Class Struggle Unionism is certain to become part of the brewing debates among labor activists, scholars, socialist theorists, and union supporters as we seek to learn from history, think critically about the present, and envision a brighter future.”
Peter Rachleff, Co-Executive Director, East Side Freedom Library, St. Paul, Minnesota
“How are we going to build a movement that can occupy plants, violate injunctions and pick the big, audacious fights that can galvanize millions of workers? Joe Burns shows how only a movement grounded in a clear understanding of the struggle between workers and bosses can figure this out. We don’t need more labor-management partnership, better tactics or more polished messaging. We need a labor movement that stands for militant struggle, member control, anti-racism and political independence – and isn’t afraid to say it. Joe Burns offers some of the vital tools we’ll need to get there.”
Mark Meinster, Director of Organization, United Electrical Workers (UE)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joe Burns is a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer with over 25 years experience negotiating labor agreements. He is currently the Director of Collective Bargaining for the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA. He graduated from the New York University School of Law. Prior to law school he worked in a public sector hospital and was president of his AFSCME Local. He is the author of Strike Back: Rediscovering Militant Tactics to Fight the Attacks on Public Employee Unions and Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859929 • 8.5 in x 5.5 in • 340 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This is the autobiography of a remarkable life.
As the New York Times wrote, “A first generation Venezuelan-American … Mr. Camejo [spoke] out against the Vietnam War and for the rights of migrant workers. He marched in Selma, Alabama, with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.”Camejo (1939-2008) founded the California Green Party, won 360,000 votes in his run for Governor in 2002, and ran as Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential candidate in 2004.
PRAISE FOR PETER CAMEJO:
“Peter was a friend, colleague and politically courageous champion of the downtrodden and mistreated of the entire Western Hemisphere.”
Ralph Nader
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Peter Camejo (1939-2008) was a leader of the Green Party and prominent social justice activist.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461813• US $22.95 • 6 in x 9 in• 350 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Most mainstream economists view capitalism’s periodic breakdowns are nothing more than temporary aberrations from an otherwise unbroken path toward prosperity. For Marxists this fundamental flaw has long been acknowledged as a central feature of the free market system. is groundbreaking volume brings together Marxist scholars from around the world to offer an empirically grounded defense of Marx’s law of profitability and its central role in explaining these capitalist crises.
PRAISE:
“An ambitious series of essays, with contributions from economists around the globe, dedicated to providing empirical support for the hypothesis that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is behind the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. The authors also intervene in the much-debated issue of “financialization” in order to articulate how this phenomenon contributed to the financial crisis….This collection represents a much-needed effort to determine empirical estimates of Marxist categories and trends in order to evaluate the hypothesis. Contributions, such as those by Tony Norfield, also provide original insights into the connection of finance to the long-term trends. Another strength of the work is to provide support for the Marxist explanation against competing hypotheses. For instance, the work of José A. Tapia deploys a test called “Granger-causality” to determine if patterns in profitability preceded patterns in investment. If such is the case, this fact weakens the Keynesian hypothesis that “investment, generally, causes profit.”
International Socialist Review
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Gugliemo Carchedi has worked at the United Nations in New York and has taught at the University of Amsterdam.
Michael Roberts has worked as an economist for over thirty years in the City of London financial center.
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Paper • ISBN-13:9781608462247• US $15.95 • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Seen around the world, John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s Black Power salute on the 1968 Olympic podium sparked controversy and career fallout. Yet their show of defiance remains one of the most evocative images of Olympic history and the Black Power movement. Here is the remarkable story of one of the men behind the salute, lifelong activist John Carlos. The John Carlos Story was an NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literary Work Biography/Autobiography.
PRAISE:
“The John Carlos Story is the remarkable chronicle of an epic life sketched against the defining crisis of race in America. Carlos’ athletic genius on the field is matched by his heroic will to overcome trials and tribulations in his personal life, and to find resurrection in his professional life. This is an inspiring and eloquent story about a great American whose commitment to truth, justice and democracy were tested and found true.”
Michael Eric Dyson, author of I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr.
“John Carlos is one of the grand figures of the 20th century. His incredible political courage, indisputable athletic excellence and indestructible spiritual fortitude set him apart from most contemporary celebrities. In fact, his fame derives from his courage, excellence and fortitude. Yet it is only in this powerful and poignant memoir that we learn of what and who made him who he is.”
Cornel West
“In this breathlessly readable tale, John Carlos finally steps out of that iconic photograph to become the vibrant, fascinating hero we never really knew.”
Robert Lipsyte, author of An Accidental Sportswriter
“John Carlos’s life story is an insightful and gripping look at the times he lived and the Olympics he helped make so memorable. He shows us that the one day that made him famous was only the most outward and visible sign of a touching and thoughtful life.”
Frank Deford, author and sports commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition
“Dave Z is irreplaceable. He’s the sports world Geiger counter, exposing the truth and protecting the fan from first, second, and third degree burns.”
Chuck D, Public Enemy
“Biblically, athletes with superior attributes were seen as gifts from God. Whether it was Samson staring down the Philistines or David slaying Goliath, they and latter-day heroes such as Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali, selflessly used their gifts and magnificently magnified platforms to transform society. It is in that tradition that John Carlos, and his teammate Tommie Smith, raised their fists in solidarity with the American civil rights struggle, as well as the struggles of those who exist on the downside of advantage. It was a statement for the ages. This act of righteous defiance lifted us all to a new level of dignity and shared responsibility to improve the conditions of the poor the world over. … But the price of heroism is high. John Carlos paid and this is his story.”
Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.
“John Carlos is an American hero. And finally he has written a memoir to tell us his story – and a powerful story it is. I couldn’t put this book down.”
Michael Moore
“John Carlos’s story of bravery and sacrifice will warm your heart. But beyond his individual heroism, it speaks to the power of athletes who bodaciously refuse to just “shut up and play.” Carlos and Zirin capture the way that through sports, the actions of a few athletes resonate across the globe.”
William Hunter, Executive Director, National Basketball Players Association
“An intelligent and insightful look into the journey of one of our most underrated heroes. Mr. Carlos’ passion for justice and fairness has changed our world. You can feel his passion (and his anger) in every word.”
Jemele Hill, ESPN columnist and television analyst
“John Carlos tells a compelling story of courage and the consequences of action. He, Tommie Smith and many other Black athletes took a stand against racial injustice in the U.S. and racial injustice in sports. They were ridiculed by many mainstream commentators at the time, but their actions helped to transform both the sports world and this country. This book was by and about someone who has been and remains one of my heroes.”
Bill Fletcher, Jr., editorial board member, BlackCommentator.com
“History tells us iconic moments in sport are always enveloped in personal stories of sacrifice, courage, and angst. The lasting images that we see occur in a flash contain enriching back stories that are typically even more significant and tragic than the moment itself. John Carlos and Dave Zirin have combined to tell such a story. The moment that two men stood on the world platform to take a stand after they had become the best in the world is rich, complicated but most importantly as relevant today as it was in Mexico City. Dave brings a beautiful and passionate voice of truth to his listeners and achieves the same in this book about a man who became a legend. I am proud to call him my friend.”
John Carlos is a former track and field athlete and professional football player, and a founding member of the Olympic Project for Human Rights. He won the bronze medal in the 200-meter race at the 1968 Olympics, where his Black Power salute on the podium with Tommie Smith caused much political controversy.
Named one of the “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World” by the Utne Reader, Dave Zirin is the author of ten books on the intersection of sports and politics. He also writes on this subject for the Nation magazine, their first sports writer in 150 years of existence. Zirin is also the host of the “Edge of Sports Podcast” and “The Collision with Etan Thomas and Dave Zirin” on WPFW in Washington DC.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902547 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 272 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Thirty years after its original publication, this newly imagined edition brings the work and musings of fifteen Black literary luminaries in conversation with a new generation of writers and readers. The first edition of I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, published in 1994, remains an essential text for readers of Black feminist literature in all genres. Featuring interviews with and excerpts by writers like Rita Dove, Pearl Cleage, Barbara Neely, June Jordan, and others, this indispensable work speaks to the intersections of politics and art-making along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class.
Now, writer and cultural critic Rebecca Carroll presents the original conversations alongside personalized introductions by some of the brightest voices in today’s literary world, including Donika Kelly, Safiya Sinclair, Diamond Sharp, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, among others. This new edition also includes an introductory poem by Morgan Parker, a foreword by Salamishah Tillet, and a new author’s note. The new contributors carry the torch of the original interviewees’ lives and words with heart, rigor, gratitude, and radical imagination, illuminating how these conversations are about more than just writing—they are about life, relationships, joy, gratitude, wellness, and self-preservation.
I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like is a book unbound by time, lifting up a chorus of past and present voices. Paying homage to a historic lineage of Black feminist writers and their impact on our current literary landscape, it is a book by and for the storytellers, the poets, the playwrights, the dreamers, and all readers interested in what it means to make art within and from marginalized spaces.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rebecca Carroll is a writer, cultural critic, and host of the podcasts Come Through with Rebecca Carroll: 15 conversations about race in a pivotal year for America and the award-winning Billie Was a Black Woman. Rebecca’s writing has been published widely, and her critically acclaimed memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, has been optioned by Killer Films with Rebecca attached to write and develop for episodic TV. She is the creator, curator, and executive producer of In Love and Struggle, a live and audio event series that centers the lived experiences of Black women and nonbinary people through monologues, music, and humor. The series is a co-production with The Meteor media collective, where Rebecca serves as Editor-at-Large.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467754 • US $20 • 6 in x 9 in • 500 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Radicals in the Barrio uncovers a rich history of political radicalism within the Mexican and Chicano working class in the United States. Chacón clearly and sympathetically documents the ways that migratory workers carried with them radical political ideologies, new organizational models, and shared class experience, as they crossed the border into southwestern barrios during the early 20th century.
PRAISE:
“Radicals in the Barrio reveals the rich and compelling history of the Mexican migrants who came to the United States before and after the 1910 Mexican Revolution and brought with them workplace militancy, radical ideology, organizational innovation, and class culture that made a profound impact on the labor movement of the day….Radicals in the Barrio is necessary reading as we live through a prolonged migrant and refugee crisis driven by capitalism, spawning wars, ecological devastation, grinding poverty, displacement, crime, and state violence.”
International Socialist Review
Praise for No One Is Illegal:
“The ‘immigration debate’ suffers from ideologically-induced amnesia. No One Is Illegal is brimming with the historical context—and brave analysis —that we need to address the political and above all human crisis of migration. This book arrives not a moment too soon… literally, there are lives on the line.”
Rubén Martinez, author, The New Americans: Seven Families Journey to Another Country
“Is immigration really a “national crisis”? Chacón and Davis attack the question by revealing the disturbing, centuries-old context for the cross-border working-class, and the resurgence of reactionary anti-immigrant politics and racist vigilante violence. No One Is Illegal powerfully argues that the borders themselves are barriers to imagining real social justice. A urgent, important must-read.”
Jeff Chang, author, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Justin Akers Chacón is an activist, writer, and educator in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. He is Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego City College. His previous work includes No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis).
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594607 • US $13.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A compelling argument that rebuilding unions requires solidarity with migrant workers and opening borders. The aggressive exploitation of labor on both sides of the US–Mexico border has become a prominent feature of capitalism in North America. Kids in cages, violent ICE raids, and anti-immigrant racist rhetoric have become features of political discourse in Trump’s America and are every day shaping how people intersect at the US–Mexico border.
Despite the violence of the police state dedicated to the repression of trans-border populations—the migra- state— migrant workers have been at the fore-front of class struggle in the United States. Labor and migrant solidarity movements are showing how we can fight for justice, rebuild the international union movement, and why we must open the border.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Justin Akers Chacón is an activist, labor unionist, and educator living in the San Diego–Tijuana border region. He is a professor of Chicana/o history at San Diego City College. His other books include No One is Illegal (with Mike Davis) and Radicals in the Barrio.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591248 • US $19.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 225 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Suicides, excessive overtime, and hostility and violence on the factory floor in China. Drawing on vivid testimonies from rural migrant workers, student interns, managers and trade union staff, Dying for an iPhone is a devastating expose of two of the world’s most powerful companies: Foxconn and Apple.
As the leading manufacturer of iPhones, iPads, and Kindles, and employing one million workers in China alone, Taiwanese-invested Foxconn’s drive to dominate global electronics manufacturing has aligned perfectly with China’s goal of becoming the world leader in technology. This book reveals the human cost of that ambition and what our demands for the newest and best technology means for workers.
Foxconn workers have repeatedly demonstrated their power to strike at key nodes of transnational production, challenge management and the Chinese state, and confront global tech behemoths. Dying for an iPhone allows us to assess the impact of global capitalism’s deepening crisis on workers.’
PRAISE:
‘Takes us to the dark side of Apple’
Le Monde Diplomatique – Books of the Month
‘Dying for an iPhone is an absolutely necessary read for anyone seeking to understand the realities of modern-day capitalism. Contrary to the mythology of Silicon Valley, this carefully researched book explains why companies like Apple owe their success more to exploitation than to innovation’
Wendy Liu, author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism
‘Dying for an iPhone takes readers deep inside the dark Satanic mills of Foxconn’s industrial empire. Drawing on the words of the workers themselves, the book offers an invaluable portrait of the Chinese working class as it pumps blood (sometimes literally) into the productive heart of world capitalism’
Ben Tarnoff, co-founder of Logic Magazine
‘Critical, accessible, and rigorously researched, this book offers the most comprehensive analysis of Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics factory: its bleak landscape, dire consequences, and inspiring efforts to change it for the better’
Jack Linchuan Qiu, author of Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition
‘A sobering investigation into the human, social and environmental costs of producing the devices we have come to rely on, a process in which both corporations and we, the consumers, are complicit’
Nick Holdstock, author of Chasing the Chinese Dream
‘A deep dive into exploitation and labour struggle in the world of high-tech electronics manufacturing in China during the past decade. Dying for an iPhone is an expose of the human suffering behind the brands. Everyone should read this’
Hsiao-Hung Pai, Taiwanese journalist
‘Deeply researched, comprehensively annotated and fuelled by anger’
Mike Cormack, South China Morning Post
‘An invaluable resource for anyone wishing to explore the abuses inherent in labour practices, both in China and in tech supply lines’
Oliver Farry,Irish Times
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Jenny Chan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is also the Vice President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Labour Movements. Her recent articles have been published widely in Current Sociology, Modern China, Rural China, and many other journals and edited volumes.
Mark Selden is Senior Research Associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University. He is editor of the online Asia-Pacific Journal. His books include China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited; The Political Economy of Chinese Development; and The Cambridge History of Communism.
Pun Ngai is Professor of Sociology at The University of Hong Kong. She is author of Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace and Migrant Labor in China.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
DISPOSABLE DOMESTICS
Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy
By Grace Chang
Foreword by Alicia Garza Afterword by Ai-jen Poo
Haymarket Books (Fall 2015, world English rights)
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465286 • US $17.95 • 5 1/8 in x 8 1/4 in • 235 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Illegal. Un-American. Disposable. In a nation with an unprecedented history of immigration, the prevailing image of those who cross our borders in search of equal opportunity is that of a drain.
Grace Chang’s vital account of immigrant women—who work as nannies, domestic workers, janitors, nursing aides, and home care workers—proves just the opposite: the women who perform our least desirable jobs are the most crucial to our economy and society. Disposable Domestics highlights the unrewarded work immigrant women perform as caregivers, cleaners, and servers and shows how these women are actively resisting the exploitation they face.
PRAISE:
“Since Grace Chang’s Disposable Domestics was first published fifteen years ago, it has not only become a major classic in feminist studies, but has helped to make transnational analyses of reproductive labor central to our understanding of race and gender in the twenty-first century.”
Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Grace Chang’s Disposable Domestics is as timely and relevant now as it was when it was first written. As debates rage over ‘immigration reform,’ Chang exposes the outlandish myth that corporate interests, big agriculture, and liberal Democrats represent enlightened voices standing against mass deportation and xenophobia. Instead she reveals a long history of collusion between the U.S. government, the IMF and World Bank, corporations, and private employers to create and maintain a super-exploited, low-wage, female labor force of caregivers and cleaners. Structural adjustment policies force them to leave home; labor, welfare, and educational policies deny them basic benefits and protections; employers deny them a living wage. But as Chang also shows us, the forces of racism, misogyny, and neoliberalism have never succeeded in denying these women dignity, personhood, or power. A decade and a half later, they are still here and still fighting for the workers of the world.”
Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor of History and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in United States History, UCLA
“Grace Chang teaches us how to understand contemporary globalization. Refusing to segregate people, places, or processes, Disposable Domestics reorganizes our capacity to think powerfully about the world in which the struggle for social justice is too often imperiled by certain kinds of partiality. In other words, Chang’s classic compels us to see the contradictory motion of workers toward the goal of gathering varieties of motion into a movement.”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor, Graduate Center, CUNY and author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
“America is nothing without its immigrant work force. Offices would not be cleaned, fruits would not be picked, children would not be loved. Grace Chang’s classic Disposable Domestics brings alive the world of the immigrant workers and of the structures that rely upon them but that deny them dignity. But more than anything, Disposable Domestics champions the immigrants themselves — their words, their politics, their leadership. This is a book to throw at Donald Trump.”
Vijay Prashad, author, The Poorer Nations: The Possible History of the Global South
“Grace Chang is a pioneer in the contemporary study of home care and domestic workers. Disposable Domestics paints a compelling and textured picture of how immigration, race, gender, law, politics and culture conspire to impoverish caregivers. But just as importantly, it portrays caregivers as the heroes of their own story, not just as the victims of someone else’s. Future readers will look back on Disposable Domestics as part of the essential liberation literature of our time.”
David Rolf, president of SEIU 775
“Grace Chang’s nuanced analysis of our immigration policy and the devastating consequences of global capitalism captures the experiences of poor immigrant women of color. Disposable Domestics reveals how these women, servicing the economy as domestics, nannies, maids, and janitors, are vilified by politicians and the media.”
Mary Romero, Professor, Justice and Social Inquiry, Arizona State University
“Disposable Domestics gives readers a 360-degree perspective on both the lives of immigrant women laborers and the macro and global forces that shape them. When first published over fifteen years ago, the book was eye-opening. Today, readers will see how Grace Chang’s work foretold the future about the indispensable role of women from the global South in the grinding machination of economic globalization; the evidence of their collective indispensability and individual “disposability” is now all around and much more visible. The power and durability of Disposable Domestics is due in large measure to Chang’s activist-scholar orientation and sensibilities, which generated descriptions that humanize the women and analysis that explains how they are dehumanized and exploited, and shows who benefits and how.”
Margo Okazawa-Rey, Professor Emerita, San Francisco State University
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
Grace Chang is a writer and activist, joining in struggles for the rights of migrant women and women of color in the United States. She teaches about social science research methods and ethics; women resisting and surviving violence in all forms; and grassroots, transnational, feminist social justice movements. She is founding director of WORD (Women Of color Revolutionary Dialogues), a support group for women and queer and trans people of color building community through spoken word, political theater, music, dance, and film.
Alicia Garza is a writer and Oakland-based activist. Garza is one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, an organization founded in 2013 after the shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin.
Ar-jen Poo is an American activist. She is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She is also the co-director of Caring Across Generations, a national coalition of 200 advocacy organizations working to transform the long-term care system in the US, with a focus on the needs of aging Americans, people with disabilities, and their caregivers.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592658 • US $16.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 100 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Doppelgangbanger, rendered as the A- and B-sides of an album of poems, re-imagines and remixes American politics of the 90s, the Obama era, and today via a hip-hop blerd’s investigation of a hi/lo culture of American crime.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Cave Canem fellow from the Chicago suburbs. His debut collection, Telepathologies, won the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by D.A. Powell. He began writing and performing poetry as a member of The Excelano Project when he was an undergraduate studying economics and urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
His poetry is a marriage between art and activism, and a call for a more involved and empathetic understanding of the diversity of the human experience. In 2017, Charleston was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He currently serves as poetry editor at The Rumpus.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591293 • US $19.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 225 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In the dynamic tradition of the BreakBeat Poets anthologies, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext celebrates the embodied narratives of Latinidad. Poets speak from an array of nationalities, genders, sexualities, races, and writing styles, staking a claim to our cultural and civic space. Like Hip- Hop, we honor what was, what is, and what’s next.
Felicia Rose Chavez is a native New Mexican with an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa. An award-winning educator, Felicia is currently at work on The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize The Creative Classroom, forthcoming from Haymarket Books.
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and won the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize.
Willie Perdomo is an Afro-Caribbean Nuyorican from East Harlem. He is the author of The Crazy Bunch, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Smoking Lovely, winner of the PEN Open Book Award; and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, a finalist for the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. He teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592672 • US $24.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A captivating mix of memoir and progressive teaching strategies, this book demonstrates how to be culturally attuned, twenty-first century educators. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a call to create healthy, sustainable, and empowering classroom communities. Award-winning educator Felicia Rose Chavez exposes the invisible politics of power and privilege that have silenced writers of color for far too long.
Finally, a teaching model that protects and platforms students of color, because every writer deserves access to a public voice. For everyone looking to liberate their thinking from “the way it’s always been done,” The Anti-Racist Workshop is a clear, compelling guidebook on a necessary step forward.
PRAISE:
“In this spirited call for building more inclusive and supportive writing workshops… the mindfulness and generosity that guide [Chavez’s] teaching principles will resonate with scholars and students who have been working to diversify creative writing and English literature programs.”
Publishers Weekly
“Felicia Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a generational intervention. Chavez is expanding expectations of How-To books while giving radical generative portals of entry into workshop reconstruction. Every writing teacher on Earth needs this book.”
Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
“There is power in the words we write. Understanding how we can use those words to build community, challenge racism, and decolonize classrooms is the work of anti-racist educators. Felicia Rose Chavez has skillfully and lovingly done all three in a book that will transform how we write to create an anti-racist world. Chavez lays out powerful and inclusive ways to model a writing workshop structure that would make June Jordan proud.”
Dr. Bettina L. Love, author of We Want to Do More Than Survive
“The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is an intelligent and necessary rethinking of the creative writing workshop. It provides a map to diversify the workshop and its aesthetics, to restructure its power dynamics and to align the process of critique more with basic principles of creativity and psychology. ”
David Mura, author of A Stranger’s Journey
“How does one write but not necessarily learn voice?” This is one of the most halting and necessary questions Felicia Rose Chavez poses in The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. What Chavez presents from her experience as workshop participant, artist, activist, and professor is vital and generous. She expertly outlines the steps to produce a nurturing, collaborative, inclusive space for BIPOC writers where the core tenets are about emotional recognition, writing rituals, representative reading lists, and fully collaborative workshops where no one is silenced. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop breaks down how a universal acclimation to inherently racist practices in workshops has stifled and harmed students of color. Chavez shares a methodology that is pure, enlightened, encouraging, and productive, allowing creators of color to understand their value and potential. As an author, editor, and teacher I found myself wholly changed by The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop and will be implementing much of this thinking and these actions to facilitate more accountability and unity within the workshop environment.
Jennifer Baker, editor, Everyday People: The Color of Life — A Short Story Anthology
“Part memoir, part pedagogical tract, part guidebook, part testimony, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom is everything . “Dismantle” has become a trendy word in our current historical moment. We use it, but don’t really know how to dismantle. Felicia Rose Chavez personifies the word. True to the adage, she shows us, doesn’t tell us. When it comes to anti-racist pedagogy, most instructors go silent after acknowleging that systemic oppression exists in classrooms worldwide. They go silent as a form of denial, resistance, or they need the how-to, the step-by-step instructions and tools to work with. Chavez brilliantly confronts our comfort levels and our played out forms of teaching. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a vital book. If we are truly going to learn, write, and read in an equitable, supportive, creative, humanity-driven environment that seeks to dismantle white-centered patriarchal teaching techniques, this book is required reading; it’s bound to be an instant classic. Word to everything I love.”
Willie Perdomo, author of The Crazy Bunch
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Felicia Rose Chavez is a digital storyteller with an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa. An award-winning educator, Felicia served as Program Director to Young Chicago Authors and founded GirlSpeak, a feminist webzine for high school students. She went on to teach writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was recognized as the Most Innovative Instructor of the Year, the University of Iowa, where she was distinguished as the Outstanding Instructor of the Year, and Colorado College, where she received the Theodore Roosevelt Collins Outstanding Faculty Award.
Her creative scholarship earned her a Ronald E. McNair Fellowship, a University of Iowa Graduate Dean’s Fellowship, and a Riley Scholar Fellowship. She is a co-editor, with Willie Perdomo and José Olivarez, of The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, and her work has been featured in the Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, The Normal School, and Brevity, among others.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642590258 • US $16 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 112 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Crossfire collects Staceyann Chin’s empowering, activist-driven poetry for the first time in a single book.
According to The New York Times, Chin “is sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking.” The Advocate wrote her poems, “combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform” and note “Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world.”
PRAISE:
“With this astounding new collection of poems, Crossfire, it is evident that Staceyann Chin has come into her raw, sexual, revolutionary, poetic power. These poems are jet fueled from the hot center of the body—from rage, from sorrow, from pure unmitigated life force. Poems that suffer no fools, that hold no punches, that will not be repressed, dressed up, or tamed. They are provocations, invitations, incantations, elevations, revelations, and warnings. They are at you, in you, and on you. Mind orgasms that seer the soul and smack the conscience and just simply turn you the fuck on. Just wow!”
Eve Ensler
“Crossfire: A Litany for Survival scared me, and I was thrilled to read something that rattled me so deeply. I’ve never been as brave as Staceyann Chin, never as forthright about my own sexuality or trauma or longing, and she, who stands on the far side of the curve of feminist power, love, and rage, inspires us all to inch our way just a bit more in her direction. This book is full of ‘random beauty,’ as she says, and she reminds me, and all writers, that the reason we put pen to paper is ‘for the words that threaten insanity/ if I do not speak out loud.’ I’m so grateful for the reminder, and the exhortation to tell the stories and ‘pitch this voice far beyond/ the secrets of our silent survival/ to reach for the greater intention/ to save more than my own life.’ Staceyann is surely saving more than her own life by offering her voice to us.”
Rosanne Cash
“Staceyann Chin’s Crossfire: A Litany for Survival is a remarkable collection from a dynamic and talented writer, whose urgent storytelling and commanding voice feel vital for our times.”
Edwidge Danticat
“We’ve all been waiting for this collection—all of us that know the brilliance, the heartbreaking truth-telling, and the magic of Staceyann’s cadences. Now all of us who have been lucky to have seen her on stage, heard her from the ramparts, can be joined at last by readers in the quiet spaces to properly celebrate this remarkable voice and watch her take her place in American letters.”
Walter Mosley
“Staceyann Chin writes ‘This child will never be silent / I speak now / because my grandmother gave me tongue.’ How fortunate we all are that Staceyann speaks her truth and, in doing so, speaks the truth of so many others. Crossfire brings together a passionate and riveting body of work that inspires all of us who speak for justice, for truth, for liberation.”
Karine Jean-Pierre, author of Moving Forward
“Staceyann Chin possesses an epic sense of poetry. In Crossfire, she fuses Aborigines of Australia with Zulus with Seminoles, and she dangles readers—you, me, us—in her crosshair. We either do or don’t do the reading. But we better do the reading. We don’t want to risk not gaining the knowledge of her poetic insights. She’s a tough teacher, whose “pen is angry” at how much she does “not know about mothering.” But she knows how to bring to fruition a book of poetry, an exquisite form of “motherhood.” From the various multi-part poems, like the lesbian appreciation poem, ”Common Truths: Or Why I Love My Pussy” or the advice poem “Lesbian Chasing Straight” or the stunning “Take Back the Night” or the brilliant “Not My President” to the more lyrical “Fast as I Need To,” a tribute to the late June Jordan, and the elegiac and explosive “Raise the Roof,” Staceyann Chin exhausts and exhilarates us with “conversations of race/class/privilege in a house called women of color.”
Cheryl Clarke, Author of Living As A Lesbian and By My Precise Haircut
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Staceyann Chin is a full-time artist. A resident of New York City and a Jamaican National, she has been an “out poet and political activist” since 1998. From the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe to one-woman shows Off- Broadway to acting in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe and performing in both the stage and film versions of Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States, to starring in the Tony nominated, Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.
Jacqueline Woodson is the 2018-2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. She received the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, and is the 2014 National Book Award Winner for her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which was also a recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, the NAACP Image Award and a Sibert Honor. In 2015, Woodson was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. Her recent adult book, Another Brooklyn, was a National Book Award finalist, and her new adult book, Red at the Bone, is coming in September 2019. She is the author of more than two dozen award-winning books for young adults, middle graders and children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a four-time National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592771 • US $15.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Boston’s economy has become defined by a disconcerting trend that has intensified throughout much of the United States since the 2008 recession. Economic growth now delivers remarkably few benefits to large sectors of the working class – a phenomenon that is particularly severe for immigrants, people of color, and women. Labor in 21 Century Boston explores this nation-wide phenomenon of “unshared growth” by focusing on Boston, a city that is famously liberal, relatively wealthy, and increasingly difficult for working people (who service the city’s needs) to actually live in.
Organizing for Power is the only comprehensive analysis of labor and popular mobilizing in Boston today, the volume contributes to a growing body of academic and popular literature that examines urban America, racial and economic inequality, labor and immigration, and the right-wing assault on working people.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Aviva Chomsky is professor of history at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her recent books include They Take Our Jobs! And 20 Other Myths about Immigration; Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal; and A History of the Cuban Revolution. She has been active in Latin America solidarity and immigrant rights movements since the 1980s.
Steve Striffler is Director of the Labor Research Center and Professor of Anthropology at UMass Boston.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9780872866577 • US $15.95 • 5.2 in x 7.9 in • 200 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Concise, forceful commentaries on US politics and global crises, from cyberwar and surveillance to the increasing urgency of climate change.
Because We Say So presents more than thirty concise, forceful commentaries on U.S. politics and global power. Written between 2011 and 2015, Noam Chomsky’s arguments forge a persuasive counter-narrative to official reports on US politics and policies during global crises. Find here classic Chomsky on the increasing urgency of climate change, the ongoing impact of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing, nuclear politics, cyberwar, terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, and the Middle East, security and state power, as well as deeper reflections on the Obama doctrine, political philosophy, the Magna Carta, and the importance of a commons to democracy.
Because We Say So is the third in a series of books by Chomsky published by City Lights that includes Making the Future(2012) and Interventions (2007), a book banned by US military censors. Taken together, the three books present a complete collection of the articles Chomsky writes regularly for the New York Times Syndicate and News Service, which are largely ignored by newspapers in the United States. Because We Say So offers fierce, accessible, and timely political writing by America’s foremost public intellectual and political dissident.
PRAISE:
“Chomsky’s relevance has only grown with time, and … more prescient as years pass.”
The Daily Beast
“Implicit to [Chomsky’s] role as a public intellectual are the questions of what a real democracy should look like, how its ideals and practices are subverted, and what forces are necessary to bring it into being. These are the questions at the heart of his thinking, his talks and the commentaries in this book.”
Henry A. Giroux, from the foreword
“There is no living political writer who has more radically changed how more people think in more parts of the world about political issues.”
Glenn Greenwald
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781904859208 • US $16.95 • 6.1 in x 9.0 in • 256 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
We all know what Noam Chomsky is against. His scathing analysis of everything that’s wrong with our society reaches more and more people every day. His brilliant critiques of-among other things-capitalism, imperialism, domestic repression and government propaganda have become mini-publishing industries unto themselves. But, in this flood of publishing and republishing, very little ever gets said about what exactly Chomsky stands for, his own personal politics, his vision of the future. Not, that is, until Chomsky on Anarchism, a groundbreaking new book that shows a different side of this best-selling author: the anarchist principles that have guided him since he was a teenager.
This collection of Chomsky’s essays and interviews includes numerous pieces that have never been published before, as well as rare material that first saw the light of day in hard-to-find pamphlets and anarchist periodicals. Taken together, they paint a fresh picture of Chomsky, showing his lifelong involvement with the anarchist community, his constant commitment to nonhierarchical models of political organization and his hopes for a future world without rulers. For anyone who’s been touched by Chomsky’s trenchant analysis of our current situation, as well as anyone looking for an intelligent and coherent discussion of anarchism itself, Chomsky on Anarchism will be one of this season’s most exciting and surprising reads.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463985 • US $23 • 5 3/8 in x 8 1/2 in • 269 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This classic text provides a scathing critique of U.S. political culture through biting analysis of the Iran-Contra scandal. Chomsky irrefutably shows how the United States has opposed human rights and democratization to advance its economic interests.
PRAISE:
“Culture of Terrorism follow an earlier study, Turning the Tide, but with the new insights provided by the flawed Congressional inquiry into the Irangate scandal. [Chomsky’s] thesis is that Untied States elites are dedicated to the rule of force, and that their commitment to violence and lawlessness has to be masked by an ideological system which attempts to control and limit the domestic damage done when the mask occasionally slips. Clandestine programs are not a secret to their victims, as he points out. It is the domestic population in the USA which needs to be protected from knowledge of them. . . . Chomsky takes issue with tow recent themes, the notion of ‘good intention,’ which is said to be the mainspring of American police, and the excuse of a ‘change of course,’ which is used to wipe out the memory of atrocities and repression on the grounds that this was an unfortunate episode, now corrected. The record, he argues, show a continual pattern of violence and disregard for democracy.”
The Guardian
“Closely argued, heavily documented . . . will shake liberals and conservatives alike.”
Publishers Weekly
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Trade paper• ISBN-13: 9798888901427 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 424 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In Deterring Democracy, the impassioned dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky describes a world in which the United States exploits its advantage ruthlessly to enforce its national interests—and in the process tramples democratic movements.
PRAISE:
“A volatile, serious contribution to the debate over American’s role as the globe’s sole remaining superpower.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Chomsky is the Left’s answer to William F. Buckley. Deterring Democracy can sparkle with inspiration.”
Los Angeles Times
“[Offers] a deepened understanding of the dynamics of global politics before, during, and after the Cold War . . . A compendious and thought-provoking work.”
The New Statesman
“Noam Chomsky . . . is a major scholarly resource. Not to have read [him] . . . is to court genuine ignorance.”
The Nation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages. Recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Optimism Over Despair, Notes on Resistance, and Chronicles of Dissent. He lives in Tucson, AZ.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper• ISBN-13: 9798888901434 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 424 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
It’s hard to imagine any American reading this book and not seeing his country in a new, and deeply troubling, light.” —The New York Times Book Review
The United States has repeatedly asserted its right to intervene militarily against “failed states” around the globe. In this much-anticipated follow-up to his international bestseller Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky turns the tables, showing how the United States itself shares features with other failed states—suffering from a severe “democratic deficit,” eschewing domestic and international law, and adopting policies that increasingly endanger its own citizens and the world.
Forceful, lucid, and meticulously documented, Failed States offers a comprehensive analysis of a global superpower that has long claimed the right to reshape other nations while its own democratic institutions are in severe crisis.
PRAISE:
“Chomsky is a global phenomenon . . . perhaps the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet.”
The New York Times Book Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages. Recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Optimism Over Despair, Notes on Resistance, and Chronicles of Dissent. He lives in Tucson, AZ.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463992 • US $22 • 5 7/8 in x 9 1/2 in • 600 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Fateful Triangle is Noam Chomsky’s seminal work on Mideast politics. In the updated edition of this classic book, with a new introduction by Chomsky, readers seeking to understand the Middle East and US foreign policy today will find an invaluable tool.
PRAISE:
“Fateful Triangle may be the most ambitious book ever attempted on the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians viewed as centrally involving the United States. It is a dogged expose of human corruption, greed, and intellectual dishonesty. It is also a great and important book, which must be read by anyone concerned with public affairs.”
Edward Said, from the foreword
“A devastating collection of charges aimed at Israeli and American policies that affect the Palestinian Arabs negatively.”
Library Journal
“Brilliant and Unscrupulous.”
Observer
“A major, timely and devastating analysis of one of the great tragedies.”
Fred Halliday, Tribune
“Formidable.”
The Jewish Quarterly
“One of the definitive works on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Amy Goodman
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Edward W. Said was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature and of Kings College Cambridge, his celebrated works include Orientalism, The End of the Peace Process, Power, Politics and Culture, and the memoir Out of Place. He is also the editor, with Christopher Hitchens, of Blaming the Victims, published by Verso. He died in September 2003.
Trade paper• ISBN-13: 9798888901458 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 304 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“Reading Chomsky today is sobering and instructive . . . He is a global phenomenon . . . perhaps the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet.” —The New York Times Book Review
An immediate national bestseller, Hegemony or Survivaldemonstrates how the United States has pursued a grand imperial strategy with the aim of staking out the globe. Our leaders have shown themselves willing to follow the dream of dominance no matter how high the risks.
In lucidly written prose, with rich documentation, Chomsky investigates how we came to this perilous moment and why our rulers are willing to jeopardize the future of our species.
With the striking logic that is his trademark, Chomsky tracks the U.S. government’s aggressive pursuit of “full spectrum dominance” and vividly lays out how its drive for hegemony ultimately threatens our existence.
PRAISE:
“If, for reasons of chance, or circumstance (or sloth), you have to pick just one book on the subject of the American Empire, I’d say pick this one. It’s the Full Monty. It’s Chomsky at his best. Hegemony or Survival is necessary reading.”
Arundhati Roy
“Reading Chomsky today is sobering and instructive.”
Samantha Power, The New York Times
“Highly readable…cogent and provocative.”
Publishers Weekly
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages. Recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Optimism Over Despair, Notes on Resistance, and Chronicles of Dissent. He lives in Tucson, AZ.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859967 • 5.5 in x 7.5 in • 200 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this urgent book, Noam Chomsky surveys the dangers and prospects of our early twenty-first century. Exploring challenges such as the growing gap between North and South, American exceptionalism (including under President Barack Obama), the fiascos of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli assault on Gaza, and the recent financial bailouts, he also sees hope for the future and a way to move forward-in the democratic wave in Latin America and in the global solidarity movements that suggest “real progress toward freedom and justice.”
Hopes and Prospects is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the primary challenges still facing the human race.
PRAISE:
“This selection of Chomsky’s essays and lectures comes divided into geographical areas, but the issues are global in scope and import. In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of American empire and class domination, at home and abroad, Chomsky continues a longstanding and crucial work of elucidation and activism. His latest updates elaborate upon his signature themes — the double standards applied by the centers of U.S. power, including the mainstream media and intellectual culture, and the pervasive disconnect between American policies and public opinion in what Chomsky dubs a dysfunctional democracy. But this book flags another major interest of Chomsky’s, signaled in the title: global avenues of resistance, in particular the democratic and independent course being forged across Latin America (where several of these lectures were originally delivered). There are significant redundancies and polemical flourishes, but the writing remains unswervingly rational and principled throughout, and lends bracing impetus to the real alternatives before us.”
Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review)
“Noam Chomsky is a global phenomenon … he may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today.”
New York Times Book Review
“A revelation … he excavates the reality behind the Babel of 24/7 corporate news, and places long-buried truths on the table to examine. Every one is sourced to the leading academic journals, the best experts, the sharpest medical advice — yet each one is a shock. … This is a book woven through with hope and awe at all the people who slip beyond imperial control and establish real democracy. … Chomsky presents all this plainly, and a sly sense of humor. … Hopes and Prospects is a book that can do the same for many more people — a treasure-trove of truths that shouldn’t be left buried in our sandpit of propaganda and lies.”
Johann Hari, The Independent (London)
“In Hopes and Prospects, Noam Chomsky’s gritty, politically charged essays redefine the nature and practice of democracy in an increasingly unsteady world climate. … Supported by extensive political and historical research, the essays turn a critical eye on popular topics, retraining the reader to assess familiar themes in new ways. … Chomsky’s commentary is razor sharp and offers a compendium of facts that make a well-supported-and undoubtedly controversial-claim of the incongruity between US actions and the democratic ideals it professes. … A valuable resource for both academics and everyday concerned citizens.”
ForeWord
“This is a classic Chomsky work: a bonfire of myths and lies, sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky is an enduring inspiration all over the world — to millions, I suspect — for the simple reason that he is a truth-teller on an epic scale. I salute him.”
John Pilger
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9780367430580 • US $24.95 • 118 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In his new book, Noam Chomsky writes cogently about the threats to planetary survival that are of growing alarm today. The prospect of human extinction emerged after World War II, the dawn of a new era scientists now term the Anthropocene.
Chomsky uniquely traces the duality of existential threats from nuclear weapons and from climate change—including how the concerns emerged and evolved, and how the threats can interact with one another. The introduction and accompanying interviews place these dual threats in a framework of unprecedented corporate global power which has overtaken nation states’ ability to control the future and preserve the planet. Chomsky argues for the urgency of international climate and arms agreements, showing how global popular movements are mobilizing to force governments to meet this unprecedented challenge to civilization’s survival.
PRAISE:
“No one but Noam Chomsky so passionately links the twin, man-made threats to organized human existence—cataclysmic climate change and nuclear doomsday machines—and no previous communications of his warnings and challenge to action, has presented them so impressively.”
Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Open Media Books / City Lights (May 2007, North American English rights)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780872864832 • US $11.95 • 5.5 in x 7.5 in • 160 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
For over a decade, Noam Chomsky wrote column for the New York Times Syndicate in which he cogently and critically examined the leading issues of the day. This powerful collection of Chomsky’s razor-sharp analyses covers the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Bush presidency, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and other burning issues of our day. A timely, accessible, clear contribution from the world’s leading political intellectual and dissident.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics—including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon,The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome—as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.
MAKING THE FUTURE
Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance
By Noam Chomsky
City Lights (February 2012, North American English rights)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780872865372 • US $15.95 • 200 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Making the Future presents more than thirty concise and persuasively argued commentaries on US politics and policies, written between 2007 and 2010. Noam Chomsky takes on a wide range of hot-button issues including the ongoing financial crisis, Obama’s presidency, the limits of the two-party system, nuclear Iran, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, Iraq, North Korea, Mexico, corporate power, and the future of American politics. Laced throughout his critiques are expressions of commitment to democracy and the power of popular struggles. “Progressive legislation and social welfare,” writes Chomsky, “have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above. Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.”
Making the Future is a follow-up to Interventions, published by City Lights in 2007 and banned from Guantánamo Bay by US military censors. Both books are drawn from articles Chomsky wrote regularly for the New York Times Syndicate, but which go largely ignored by newspapers in the United States. Making the Future offers fierce, accessible, timely, gloves-off political writing by one of America’s foremost intellectual and political dissidents.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Paperback • ISBN-13: 9781608463633 • US $12.95 • 160 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this collection of essays from 1969-2013, Noam Chomsky exposes the real nature of state power. With unrelenting logic, he holds the arguments of empire up to critical examination and shatters the myths of those who protect the power and privilege of the few against the interests and needs to the many.
Including essays on subjects such as:
* Human Intelligence and the Environment * Terror, Justice and Self-Defense * The Welfare-Warfare state
This is an indispensable compilation of searing insights into the state of our world.
PRAISE:
“There is no living political writer who has more radically changed how more people think in more parts of the world about political issues.”
Glenn Greenwald
“Considering that Chomsky’s relevance has only grown with time, and that his positions prove less radical and more prescient as years pass, the timing of his new book release, The Masters of Mankind, a retrospective of lectures and essays stretching from 1969 to 2013, is perfect… There is more than enough profound, powerful material in this collection to impress any readers unfamiliar with Chomsky’s intellectual agility.”
The Daily Beast
“Chomsky is a global phenomenon . . . perhaps the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet.”
New York Times Book Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Marcus Raskin is the co-founder of the politically progressive Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), and he teaches social movements, national security and the philosophy of public policy at the Stephen J. Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781612050744 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 176 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
US intervention is never what it seems – Chomsky shows us why
How do we understand the role and ethics of humanitarian intervention in today’s world? This expanded and updated edition is timely as the West weighs intervention in Libyan civil war. Discussions of Libyan intervention involved the international principle of “the right to protect.” Chomsky dissects the meaning and uses of this international instrument in a new chapter. Other chapters from the book help readers understand the West’s uses and abuses of “humanitarian intervention,” which is not always what it seems, including detailed studies of East Timor and Kosovo.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
OCCUPY
Reflections on Class War, Rebellion, and Solidarity (Second Edition)
Noam Chomsky
Zuccotti Park Press / Occupied Media Pamphlet Series (October 2013, north American English rights)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781884519253 • US $9.95 • 128 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From its sudden appearance in September 2011, the Occupy movement spread to thousands of towns and cities across the world. Through relentless organizing and ongoing civil disobedience, the movement occupied the global conscience as its influence spread from street assemblies and protests to op-ed pages and the corridors of power. From the movement’s onset, Noam Chomsky was there, offering his voice, his support, and his detailed analysis of what’s been going down and what might be done.
In Occupy, Chomsky presents his thinking on the core issues, questions, and demands that are driving ordinary people to protest. How did we get to this point? How do the wealthiest 1% influence society? How can we separate money from politics? What would a genuine democracy look like? How can we create new institutions to increase freedom and equality for all?
Following the old course, says Chomsky, isn’t going to work. If we continue to follow the model of growth set for us by the 1%, we’ll be “like lemmings walking off a cliff.” The only alternative is to get involved and fight for a better future. If not now, when? If not us, who?
Occupy also features graphics by R. Black, photography by Alex Fradkin and Stanley Rogouski, and a “What To Do If You Get Arrested” guide for protestors written by The National Lawyers Guild.
PRAISE:
“Having spent so much time thinking about and engaging with social movements, Chomsky is both optimistic about the energy of Occupy and realistic about the challenges it faces. He appreciates the ‘just do it’ ethos and embraces its radical approach to participatory democracy. … What makes Chomsky’s perspective so interesting, aside from the wealth of his political experience, is the range of his interests. He draws from examples around the world to demonstrate his points. … It’s a big agenda that Occupy has identified, nothing less than a complete renewal of US society and the US role in the world. Chomsky sees not only the radical agenda but also the radical practice of the Occupiers. ‘Part of what functioning, free communities like the Occupy communities can be working for and spreading to others is just a different way of living, which is not based on maximizing consumer goods, but on maximizing values that are important for life,’ he concludes in this valuable set of remarks and interviews.”
John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus, Pick Review
“For decades, Chomsky has been marginalized for his insightful, levelheaded, and accurate observations about how our society functions. In Occupy, Chomsky… sets the record straight. And he’s got an answer for everything. ‘It’s necessary,’ Chomsky warns, ‘to get out into the country and get people to understand what this is about, and what they can do about it, and what the consequences are of not doing anything about it.’ Occupy begins with a powerful editor’s note from Greg Ruggiero, who comments on ‘the heartlessness and inhumanity of the system,’ where ‘people’s stolen homes are sold off to the highest bidder.’ And if it isn’t obvious to those who are still asking what the demands of Occupy Wall Street are, Ruggiero puts it plainly: ‘Occupy embodies a vision of democracy that is fundamentally antagonistic to the management of society as a corporate-controlled space that funds a political system to serve the wealthy, ignore the poor.’ One can only cringe at the thought of what will happen if we continue to ignore the wisdom of Noam Chomsky. He gives a clue in Occupy…”
The Coffin Factory, The Magazine for People who Love Books
“Chomsky has long been one of the keenest observers of the American, and global, political economy. In Occupy he turns his formidable knowledge of the history of social movements to the uprising that began in Zuccotti Park last year. He illuminates how we got here – through the long predations of the 1% – and where the movement might head in order to bring about real change from below. … Occupy is another vital contribution from Chomsky to the literature of defiance and protest, and a red-hot rallying call to forge a better, more egalitarian future.”
AlterNet
“Occupy is at once a vivid portrait of the now-global movement and a practical guide to intelligent activism, infused with Chomsky’s signature meditations on everything from how the wealthiest 1% came to steer society to what a healthy democracy would look like to how we can separate money from politics. Alongside Chomsky’s words are some of the most moving and provocative photographs from the Occupy movement. … [One of] 10 essential books on protest.”
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464005 • US $16 • 4 5/8 in x 8 1/8 in • 140 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
One of Noam Chomsky’s most accessible books, On Power and Ideology is a product of his 1986 visit to Managua, Nicaragua, for a lecture series at Universidad Centroamericana. Delivered at the height of US involvement in the Nicaraguan civil war, this succinct series of lectures lays out the parameters of Noam Chomsky’s foreign policy analysis.
The book consists of five lectures on US international and security policy. The first two lectures examine the persistent and largely homogenous features of US foreign policy, and overall framework of order. The third discusses Central America and its foreign policy pattern. The fourth looks at US national security and the arms race. And the fifth examines US domestic policy.
These five talks, conveyed directly to the people bearing the brunt of devastating US foreign policy, make historic and exciting reading.
PRAISE:
“A rigorous exposition of the logic of U.S. foreign policy.”
The Nation
“Highly persuasive writing.”
H-Net
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781594519710 • 5 in x 7.5 in • 192 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This updated and significantly revised edition explores the dynamics of power relationships and international negotiations and the use of terror between the United States and Western countries and the nations of the Middle East in the post-9/11 era. Chomsky looks back to patterns since World War II to show how acts of terrorism today cannot be understood outside the context of Western power and state terror throughout the world, especially in the Middle East. This new edition offers the best opportunity to follow Chomsky’s analysis in its development during the ten years since 9/11.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464241 • US $18 • 5 1/8 in x 8 1/8 in • 244 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this intellectual tour de force, Noam Chomsky brings together his thinking on topics ranging from language and human nature, to the Middle East settlement, and the place of East Timor in the New World Order. Powers and Prospects is a collection of some of Chomsky’s most important essays on questions of linguistics, philosophy, ethics, and international affairs. Supported by a wealth of disturbing details and facts, Chomsky provides a scathing critique of government policy and media complicity, while offering an inspirational view of the potential for true democracy worldwide.
PRAISE:
‘Powers and Prospects – Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order adds another controversial volume to Chomsky’s already tottering pile on language and politics…This political chapters, by contrast, boil with barely restrained moral outrage and passion…A powerful section covers the British and Us role is organizing and supporting Suharto’s murderous military coup of 1965, which resulted in the slaughter of some 600 000 people…Chomsky presents here a timely review of the western-backed massacres in East Timor…Chomsky, as ever, remains one of the few people willing to put the true value of all three in their proper perspective’
The Ecologist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464036 • US $16 • 5 1/8 in x 8 1/8 in • 172 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Rethinking Camelot is a thorough analysis of John F. Kennedy’s role in the US invasion of Vietnam and a probing reflection on the elite political culture that allowed and encouraged the Cold War. In it, Chomsky dismisses efforts to resurrect Camelot—an attractive American myth portraying JFK as a shining knight promising peace, fooled only by assassins bent on stopping this lone hero who would have unilaterally withdrawn from Vietnam had he lived. Chomsky argues that US institutions and political culture, not individual presidents, are the key to understanding US behavior during the war in Vietnam.
PRAISE:
“Chomsky is a global phenomenon . . . he may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet.”
The New York Times Book Review
“[Rethinking Camelot provides] strong arguments against Kennedy mythologists.”
Publisher’s Weekly
“An interesting work not only for the history it explores, but also as a study of how various individuals and groups write and interpret history.”
Choice
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464043 • US $18 • 5 1/8 in x 8 1/4 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this still-timely classic, Noam Chomsky argues that the real “rogue” states are the United States and its allies. Chomsky turns his penetrating gaze toward U.S. involvement in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America to trace the enduring combined effects of military domination and economic imperialism on these regions.
PRAISE:
“World-famous MIT linguist [Noam Chomsky] has long kept up a second career as a cogent voice of the hard left, excoriating American imperialism, critiquing blinkered journalists and attacking global economic injustice…. [In Rogue States] Chomsky has delivered another impressive argument that the U.S. flouts international law when it finds it convenient to do so.”
Publishers Weekly
“Noam Chomsky is like a medic attempting to cure a national epidemic of selective amnesia…. [Rogue States is] a timely guide to the tactics that the powerful employ to keep power concentrated and people compliant…. Chomsky’s work is crucial at a time when our empire perpetually disguises its pursuit of power under the banners of ‘aid,’ ‘humanitarian intervention,’ and ‘globalization.’ Americans have to begin deciphering the rhetoric. Chomsky’s a good place to start.”
Village Voice
“Nothing escapes [Chomsky’s] attention… [Rogue States is] wonderfully lucid.”
PeaceWork
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464050 • US $19 • 5 1/8 in x 8 1/4 in • 298 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Noam Chomsky explores relations throughout Central America and relates these to superpower conflicts and the overall impact of the Cold War.
The United States has supported reaction throughout the region through a combination of economic pressure, CIA intervention, and proxy military activity. Turning the Tide succinctly and powerfully addresses three interrelated questions: What is the aim and impact of US Central American policy? What factors in US society support and oppose current policy? And, how can concerned citizens affect future policy?
A particularly revealing focus of Chomsky’s argument is the world of US academia and media, which he analyzes in detail to explain why the US public was so misinformed about its government’s policies.
PRAISE:
“This book contains liberatory knowledge… There is an incredible amount of new research and understanding to be gained from reading these important chapters.”
Counterpoise
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Cloth • ISBN-13: 9780231175968 • US 19.95 • 176 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Noam Chomsky is widely known and deeply admired for being the founder of modern linguistics, one of the founders of the field of cognitive science, and perhaps the most avidly read political theorist and commentator of our time. In these lectures, he presents a lifetime of philosophical reflection on all three of these areas of research to which he has contributed for over half a century.
In clear, precise, and non-technical language, Chomsky elaborates on fifty years of scientific development in the study of language, sketching how his own work has implications for the origins of language, the close relations that language bears to thought, and its eventual biological basis. He expounds and criticizes many alternative theories, such as those that emphasize the social, the communicative, and the referential aspects of language. Chomsky reviews how new discoveries about language overcome what seemed to be highly problematic assumptions in the past. He also investigates the apparent scope and limits of human cognitive capacities and what the human mind can seriously investigate, in the light of history of science and philosophical reflection and current understanding. Moving from language and mind to society and politics, he concludes with a searching exploration and philosophical defense of a position he describes as “libertarian socialism,” tracing its links to anarchism and the ideas of John Dewey, and even briefly to the ideas of Marx and Mill, demonstrating its conceptual growth out of our historical past and urgent relation to matters of the present.
PRAISE:
“A master class taught by a master, and if someone were to ask me what exactly is it that academics do, I would point to these lectures and say, simply, here it is, the thing itself.”
Stanley Fish, The New York Times
“Chomsky’s relevance has only grown with time, and … more prescient as years pass.”
The Daily Beast
“There is no living political writer who has more radically changed how more people think in more parts of the world about political issues.”
Glenn Greenwald
Chomsky’s writings invariably reflect the force of intellect and cogency of thought that befits one of the greatest thinkers of our times—this work is no exception.
Robert May, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy & Linguistics, University of California, Davis
Noam Chomsky is arguably the most influential thinker of our time, having made seminal contributions to linguistics and philosophy, as well as political and social thought. In one succinct and powerfully argued volume, he presents a synthesis of his key ideas.
Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard University
Noam Chomsky launches this remarkable discussion with the age old question, “What kind of creatures are we?” Thus begins an extended inquiry into human cognition that takes him from the ancients to contemporary theorists of language and science, to politics. Chomsky’s erudition is formidable, and I read his disquisition with pleasure and many “aha’ moments. But what stands out for me is his wisdom; he accepts that being mere biological creatures, there is much that we can never know, and yet he is deeply empathetic with us, his fellow creatures who must struggle and try to impact our world, even though we ultimately cannot know.
Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Graduate Center of the City University of New York
It’s always spring in Mr. Chomsky’s garden. Like John Ashbery, Noam Chomsky seems to come up with thoughts that are always fresh, unaffected by the polluting cliches that most of us inhale and exhale all day and night. To read his sentences is a life-giving elixir.
Wallace Shawn, author, Essays
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Columbia University Press (1997, world English rights, except Europe, United Kingdom, and Middle East)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780231101578 • US $20 • 9 in x 6 in • 311 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this widely acclaimed study of global politics, Chomsky offers a devastating critique of conventional definitions of the “new world order.” It is, he argues, nothing more than an ingenious piece of “historical engineering,” whereby the pretexts for the Cold War — nuclear threat, Eastern Bloc menace — have been deftly replaced by a new set of convenient justifications for a Western agenda that remains largely unchanged. Includes an updated and extensive epilogue on the Middle East, World Orders Old And New is as relevant now as when it was first published.
PRAISE:
“The most we can hope for I suppose is that every reporter might one day carry World Orders, Old and New around in his back pocket.”
Robert Fisk
“Chomsky’s work is neither theoretical, nor ideological: it is passionate and righteous. It has some of the qualities of Revelations, the Old Testament prophets and Blake.”
Times Literary Supplement
“For those who pursue justice and have an interest in the future of the planet World Orders, Old and New is compulsory reading.”
Catholic Herald
“For nearly thirty years now, Noam Chomsky has parsed the main proposition of American power — what they do is aggression, what we do upholds freedom — with encyclopedic attention to detail and an unflagging sense of outrage. World Orders Old and New may be his best book; it’s certainly his most concise and far-ranging.”
Utne Reader
“With his customary mastery of the historical record and his command of enormous amounts of source material, Chomsky here debunks the notion that the ‘new world order’ of Bush and Clinton is different in any essentials from the old world order. . . . Impressive.”
The Progressive
“To Chomsky, the Cold War was just a passing phase in the West’s 500-year global domination of poorer nations, providing the U.S. with easy formulas to justify criminal interventionist actions abroad and entrenchment of privilege and state power at home. Marshaling meticulous scholarship, this leading critic of American foreign policy cogently argues that Washington’s support-open and covert-for repressive regimes in Colombia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Angola and elsewhere has undermined attempts to create meaningful democracy, thus exacerbating poverty and misery. Chomsky, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor, describes NAFTA as a protectionist pact, mislabeled ‘free trade’, which is likely to drive millions of Mexicans out of work while enriching U.S. agribusiness. He sets the Israeli-Arab conflict in the broad context of America’s postwar domination of the Middle East along lines established by British imperialism, with family dictatorships taking orders from Washington and protected by ‘regional enforcers’, preferably non-Arab (Turkey, Israel, Iran under the Shah, Pakistan). His devastating critique of the ‘new world order’ foresees a growing abyss between rich and poor-both internationally and at home.”
Publishers Weekly
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464074 • US $16 • 5 1/8 in x 8 1/8 in • 331 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Year 501 definitively shows how the United States developed into the world’s most implacable and powerful empire. Analyzing Haiti, Latin America, Cuba, Indonesia, and even pockets of the Third World developing in the United States, Chomsky draws parallels between the genocide of colonial times and the murder and exploitation associated with modern-day imperialism.
PRAISE:
“Year 501 is another awesome achievement by Noam Chomsky. It is a devastating array of information about the U.S. role in the world, placed in the long historical perspective of the 500 years that followed the voyages of Columbus. The result is a wonderful single-volume education in history and world politics.”
Howard Zinn
“This book portrays the world born five centuries ago: An immense supermarket where value is determined by price tags. What is the price of an intellectual? Chomsky’s fierce talent proves once more that human beings are not condemned to become commodities.”
Eduardo Galeano
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781629634425 • US $17.95 • 8 in x 5 in • 192 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The Balkans, in particular the turbulent ex-Yugoslav territory, have been among the most important world regions in Noam Chomsky’s political reflections and activism over the past couple of decades. Through his articles, public talks, and correspondence, he has been addressing some of the crucial political and social issues (such as the relevancy of international law in today’s politics, media manipulations, and economic crisis as a means of political control) that affect both the region and the international community.
This volume provides a comprehensive survey of virtually all of Chomsky’s texts and public talks that focus on the region of the former Yugoslavia, from the 1970s to the present. With numerous articles and interviews, this collection presents a wealth of materials appearing in book form for the first time along with reflections on events twenty-five years after the official end of communist Yugoslavia and the beginning of the war in Bosnia
PRAISE:
“Chomsky is a global phenomenon. . . . He may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet.”
New York Times Book Review
“For anyone wanting to find out more about the world we live in . . . there is one simple answer: read Noam Chomsky.”
New Statesman
“With relentless logic, Chomsky bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us—and to discern what they are leaving out. . . . Agree with him or not, we lose out by not listening.”
BusinessWeek
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781629638683 • US $16.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 160 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This conversational interview by Michael Albert, who has been close to Chomsky for roughly half a century and talked with him many hundreds of times, spans a wide range of topics including journalism, science, religion, the racist foundations of American society, education as indoctrination, issues of class and resistance, colonialism, imperialism, and much more.
The thread through it all is that every topic—and the list above takes us just about halfway through this book—reveals how social systems work, what their impact on humanity is, and how they are treated by the elite, mainstream intellectuals, and leftists. It gets personal, theoretical, and observational. The lessons are relevant to all times, so far, and pretty much all places, and Chomsky’s logical scalpel, with moral guidance, is relentless.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is a laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics, and Chomsky is one of the foremost critics of U.S. foreign policy. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics. His recent books include Who Rules the World? and Hopes and Prospects.
Michael Albert is an organizer, publisher, teacher, and author of over twenty books and hundreds of articles. He cofounded South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, ZNet, and various other projects, and works full time for Z Communications. He is the author of Practical Utopia: Strategies for a Desirable Society.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781629638782 • US $16.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 448 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
As Noam Chomsky writes about something—US foreign policy, corporate policies, an election, or a movement—he is not only quite specific in recounting the topic and its facts but also exercises blisteringly relentless logic to discern the interconnections between the evidence and broader themes involved. This may seem mundane, but virtually every time, even aside from the details of the case in question, the process, the steps, the ways of linking one thing to another illustrate what it means to be a thinking, critical subject of history and society, in any time and place.
Taming the Rascal Multitude is a judicious selection of essays and interviews from Z Magazine from 1997 to 2014. In each, Chomsky takes up some question of the moment. As such, in sum, the essays provide an historical overview of the history that preceded Trump and the reaction to Trump. The essays situate what followed even without having known what would follow. They explicate what preceded the current era and provide a step-by-step revelation or how-to for successfully comprehending social events and relations. They are a pleasure to read, much like the pleasure of watching a great athlete or performer, but they also edify. They educate.
Reading Chomsky is about understanding how society works, how people relate to society and social trends and patterns and why, and, beyond the specifics, how to approach events, relations, occurrences, trends, and patterns in a way that reveals their inner meanings and their outer connections and implications. It is like reading the best you can get about topic after topic, and, more, it is like watching a master-craftsmen in a discipline that ought to be all of ours understanding the world to change it.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is a laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics, and Chomsky is one of the foremost critics of U.S. foreign policy. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics. His recent books include Who Rules the World? and Hopes and Prospects.
Michael Albert is an organizer, publisher, teacher, and author of over twenty books and hundreds of articles. He cofounded South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, ZNet, and various other projects, and works full time for Z Communications. He is the author of Practical Utopia: Strategies for a Desirable Society.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595741 • US $22.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 400 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Conducted from 1984 to 1996, these interviews first appeared in the books Class Warfare, Chronicles of Dissent, and Keeping the Rabble in Line, all published by the independent publisher Common Courage Press in Monroe, Maine.
This omnibus collection includes a new introduction by David Barsamian, looking back on conversations and engagement with Chomsky’s ideas that now spans decades, as well as a classic essay by Alexander Cockburn on Chomsky that served as the introduction to one of the original volumes.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. He is the author of numerous bestselling political works, which have been trans-lated into scores of languages worldwide. Among his most recent books are Who Rules the World? and What Kind of Creatures Are We?
David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio—now in its thirty-fifth year—and his books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.
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Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
Language/Territory
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English in the UK, Australia, New Zeland, and Commonwealth excluding Canada
Trade paper • ISBN-13:9781567510928 • US 19.95 • 185 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Western societies are divided more clearly than ever before into the haves and the have-nots, the needy and the greedy. In addition, neoliberal doctrines have been reshaped into more effective instruments of oppression and domination. Through a fascinating dialogue with long-time collaborator and fellow activist David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky explores this growing economic and social crisis, arguing that it is now acceptable political discourse to discuss class warfare. Chomsky focuses his customarily critical eye on a range of themes and issues – from Israel to East Timor, from the US federal reserve to women’s rights, from transport subsidies to the dangers of devolution – and touches on some of his more personal concerns, such as his teaching, his critics and local labour disputes. Class Warfare is challenging, thought-provoking, illuminating and profound, and a powerful road-map to the emerging global capitalism.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio—now in its thirty-fifth year—and his books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.
Trade paper• ISBN-13: 9798888901441 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 236 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In these compelling interviews with David Barsamian, his longtime interlocutor, Noam Chomsky identifies the “dry kindling” of discontent around the world. Chomsky asks us to consider “the world we are leaving to our grandchildren”: one imperiled by climate change and the growing potential for nuclear war. If the current system is incapable of dealing with these threats, he argues, it’s up to us to radically change it.
The twelve interviews in Global Discontents examine the reach of state surveillance, growing anger over economic inequality, conflicts in the Middle East, and the presidency of Donald Trump. In personal reflections on his Philadelphia childhood, Chomsky also describes his own intellectual journey and the development of his uncompromising stance as the premier dissident intellectual in the United States.
PRAISE:
“Noam Chomsky . . . is a major scholarly resource. Not to have read [him] . . . is to court genuine ignorance.”
The Nation
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages. Recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Optimism Over Despair, Notes on Resistance, and Chronicles of Dissent. He lives in Tucson, AZ.
David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio, and his books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper• ISBN-13: 9798888901465 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 226 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This important volume of previously unpublished interviews conducted by award-winning radio journalist David Barsamian features Noam Chomsky discussing U.S policies in an increasingly unstable world. With his famous insight, lucidity, and redoubtable grasp of history, Chomsky offers his views on the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the doctrine of “preemptive” strikes against so-called rogue states, warning of the growing threat to international peace posed by the U.S drive for domination. In his inimitable style, Chomsky also dissects the propaganda system that fabricates a mythic past and airbrushes inconvenient facts out of history.
PRAISE:
“If, for reasons of chance, or circumstance, (or sloth), you have to pick just one book on the subject of the American Empire, I’d say pick this one. It’s the Full Monty. It’s Chomsky at his best…necessary reading.”
Arundhati Roy
“How did we ever get to be an empire? The writings of Noam Chomsky–America’s most useful citizen–are the best answer to that question.”
The Boston Globe
“Unique insight into Chomsky’s decades of penetrating analyses, drawn together . . . by a brilliant radio interviewer, David Barsamian.”
Ben Bagdikian, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, on Propaganda and the Public Mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages. Recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Optimism Over Despair, Notes on Resistance, and Chronicles of Dissent. He lives in Tucson, AZ.
David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio, and his books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Noam Chomsky dissects the multiple crises facing humankind and the planet; and provides a road map for resistance.
In this completely original set of interviews between the legendary duo of Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, the two confront topics such as the pandemic, the wealth gap (made worse because of the pandemic), climate destruction, the increasing power of the corporate owned media, systematic racism, Big Tech, and more.
Noam Chomsky is one of the most cited scholars in human history. He ranks right up there with Aristotle and Marx, and this book reaffirms his esteemed reputation. Notes on Resistance will inspire all those struggling for human liberation.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. Recent books include Internationalism or Extinction, Consequences of Capitalism, and The Precipice.
David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio, and his books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.
Trade paper• ISBN-13: 9798888901472 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 224 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A compelling new set of interviews on our changing and turbulent times with Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s foremost thinkers.
In these conversations, Noam Chomsky explores the breakdown of mainstream political institutions in the United States. Chomsky presents his ideas vividly and accessibly, with uncompromising principle and clarifying insight. The latest volume from a long-established, trusted partnership, Power Systems shows once again that no interlocutor engages with Chomsky more effectively than David Barsamian.
PRAISE:
“Chomsky is a global phenomenon… perhaps the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet.”
Samantha Power, The New York Times Book Review
“Sitting down and talking to Noam Chomsky about current affairs has to be one of the most illuminating experiences going. But what if you can’t always think of the best questions? Not to worry: David Barsamian’s interviews with Chomsky consistently ask penetrating and provocative questions. If you’re familiar with Chomsky, he will still manage to surprise you.”
Political Affairs
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages. Recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Optimism Over Despair, Notes on Resistance, and Chronicles of Dissent. He lives in Tucson, AZ.
David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio, and his books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464029 • US $18 • 5 1/8 in x 8 1/4 in • 256 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Renowned interviewer David Barsamian showcases his unique access to Chomsky’s thinking on a number of topics of contemporary and historical import. Chomsky offers insights into the institutions that shape the public mind in the service of power and profit. In an interview conducted after the important November 1999 “Battle in Seattle,” Chomsky discusses prospects for building a movement to challenge corporate domination of the media, the environment, and even our private lives. Whether discussing US military escalation in Colombia, attacks on Social Security, or growing inequality worldwide, Chomsky shows how ordinary people, if they work together, have the power to make meaningful change.
PRAISE:
In Propaganda and the Public Mind, we have unique insight into Noam Chomsky’s decades of penetrating analyses . . . drawn together in one slender volume by a brilliant radio interviewer, David Barsamian.”
Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly
“To anyone who wonders if ideas, information, and activism can make a profound difference in the twenty-first century, I say: ‘Read this book.’ Propaganda and the Public Mind challenges us to think more independently and more deeply about the human consequences of power and privilege.”
Norman Solomon, The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio—now in its thirty-fifth year—and his books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.
Trade paper• ISBN-13: 9798888901489 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 240 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An indispensable set of interviews on foreign and domestic issues with the bestselling author of Hegemony or Survival, “America’s most useful citizen.” The Boston Globe
In this collection of conversations with his longtime interlocutor David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky explores the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of China, and the growing power of the left in Latin America. These conversations confirm that Chomsky is an unparalleled resource for anyone seeking to understand our world today.
PRAISE:
“Chomsky criticizes those journalists and public intellectuals who, in reporting and commenting on events, do not question the assumptions under which the country acts and have framed the debate so that only the details are fodder for discussion. Chomsky’s points are challenging.”
Library Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages. Recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Optimism Over Despair, Notes on Resistance, and Chronicles of Dissent. He lives in Tucson, AZ.
David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio, and his books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9780367543396 • US $24.95 • 136 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In these pages, the world-renowned author speaks for the first time in depth about his career in activism, and his views and tactics.
Chomsky offers new and intimate details about his life-long experience as an activist, revealing him as a critic with deep convictions and many surprising insights about movement strategies. The book points to new directions for activists today, including how the crises of the Coronavirus and the economic meltdown are exploding in the critical 2020 US presidential election year. Readers will find hope and new pathways toward a sustainable, democratic world.
PRAISE:
“It is heartening to hear Chomsky’s steady voice come through these interviews and writings — radical, analytic, and prophetic. Chomsky for Activists is the tonic we need in troubled times to peel away the illusions and fuel our fight for democracy, justice and economic equality.”
Chuck Collins, Institute for Policy Studies, author, The Wealth Hoarders and Born on Third Base.
“Some people get to know the thinking of Noam Chomsky by listening to his presentations. But in this book you, the reader, have the opportunity to get to know the thinking of Chomsky in a different way. Through interviews as well as his commentaries, the reader gets a sense of the ‘comprehensive’ Chomsky. It is not just what he thinks but how he approaches the challenges facing the contemporary Left and progressive movements in the USA that makes this a compelling volume. This book is of additional value in identifying where the reader may agree and disagree with Chomsky, but nevertheless appreciate his invaluable insight. It was both a great honor and opportunity to have been asked to preview this volume in order to suggest to you, the potential reader, my encouragement that you embrace this work. You will not regret it!”
Bill Fletcher, Jr., executive editor, globalafricanworker.com, former president of TransAfrica Forum.
“Could you benefit from a wise elder putting this present moment in historical perspective, explaining the gravity of today’s existential crises but showing how activism has–and can–change the course of history for the better? Then curl up with Uncle Noam to read Chomsky for Activists. Chomsky gives simplistically brilliant answers to such questions as ‘Is Trump a fascist?’ (his response might surprise you) and ‘Should we change the Democratic Party from within or create an independent party?’. Chomsky for Activists is an uplifting gift for all of us who feel depressed or confused about the state of our nation and world. Read it and act.”
Medea Benjamin, Author and Cofounder of CODEPINK
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is one of the most cited scholars in history and among the best known public intellectuals in the world today. He is the author of more than 100 books. Before coming to the University of Arizona as Laureate Professor of Linguistics in 2017, Chomsky taught linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 50 years.
Charles Derber, Professor of Sociology at Boston College is a noted public intellectual and author of twenty-five books, including several best-sellers reviewed in the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and other prominent media. His recent books include Welcome to the Revolution, Moving Beyond Fear, and Glorious Causes. Co-editor of the Routledge book series, Universalizing Resistance, Derber is a life-long activist for peace and justice.
Suren Moodliar is editor of the journal Socialism and Democracy and coordinator of encuentro5, a movement-building space in downtown Boston. He is a co-author of A People’s Guide to Greater Boston (UC Press, 2020).
Paul Shannon worked for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) for 40 years where he ran the national film library and was active in various peace, union, prison reform, economic justice and international solidarity movements. Now retired, he serves as a volunteer with the AFSC, teaches courses on the Vietnam war, writes, and continues his intersectional organizing around the Yemen war, the military industrial complex, climate change, criminal justice issues, and regime-change wars. He is a board member of Mass. Peace Action and The Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463978 • US $22 • 5 3/8 in x 5 1/2 in • 382 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
With a new preface by the authors, this companion book to The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, dissects the aftermath of the war in Southeast Asia, the refugee problem, the Vietnam/Cambodia conflict and the Pol Pot regime.
PRAISE:
“The publication of Herman and Chomsky’s The Political Economy of Human Rights in 1979 stands out as a landmark in US publishing, and in the analysis of US imperialism.”
Monthly Review
“After the Cataclysm is the story of how the US press prints the news it sees fit to print…The establishment press will do all it can to proven this powerful book from being read, but the evidence is too clear and the analysis too careful done for the best of orchestrated campaigns to keep the book in the close. Read it! Put it in your library! Talk to your neighbors about it! No Where have I read such an incisive statement on the how the press serves the corporations and institution rather than the truth.”
Don Luce, Clergy and Laity Concerned
“Anyone who doubts the active hostility and dishonesty of the country’s most prestigious liberal media—including the New York Times and Washington Post—should read this book.”
Dave Dellinger, one of the Chicago Seven
“After the Cataclysm is a valuable, carefully document assessment of Western reporting on post-1975 Indochina. Especially comprehensive in its treatment of Cambodia, it provides a trenchant—and healthy—critique of news media coverage that has usually been as tendencious as the dealing with the early years of US military intervention in Indochina.”
George Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia
“By revealing to us the true history of postwar Indochina developments, Chomsky and Herman have given us an essential weapon in the ongoing struggle against willed historical amnesia.”
Marilyn Young, President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Edward S. Herman (1925-2017) was an American economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. Herman was Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464067 • US $19 • 5 1/8 in x 8 1/4 in • 462 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A brilliant, shattering, and convincing account of United States-backed suppression of political and human rights in Latin America, Asia, and Africa and the role of the media in misreporting these policies
The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism relentlessly dissects the official views of establishment scholars and their journals. The “best and brightest” pundits of the status quo emerge from this book thoroughly denuded of their credibility.
PRAISE:
“The publication of Herman and Chomsky’s The Political Economy of Human Rights in 1979 stands out as a landmark in U.S. publishing, and in the analysis of U.S. imperialism.”
Monthly Review
“A major contribution to understanding political repression inflicted by the CIA and its related services on millions around the globe and the economic requirements behind such repression . . . A must-read for all those who would resist.”
Philip Agee, former CIA agent
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Edward S. Herman (1925-2017) was an American economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. Herman was Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781629638805 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 224 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“The world is full of information. What do we do when we get the information, when we have digested the information, what do we do then? Is there a point where ye say, yes, stop, now I shall move on.”
This exhilarating collection of essays, interviews, and correspondence—spanning the years 1988 through 2018, and reaching back a decade more—is about the simple concept that ideas matter. They mutate, inform, create fuel for thought, and inspire actions.<.p>
As Kelman says, the State relies on our suffocation, that we cannot hope to learn “the truth. But whether we can or not is beside the point. We must grasp the nettle, we assume control and go forward.”
Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime is an impassioned, elucidating, and often humorous collaboration. Philosophical and intimate, it is a call to ponder, imagine, explore, and act.
PRAISE:
“The real reason Kelman, despite his stature and reputation, remains something of a literary outsider is not, I suspect, so much that great, radical Modernist writers aren’t supposed to come from working-class Glasgow, as that great, radical Modernist writers are supposed to be dead. Dead, and wrapped up in a Penguin Classic: that’s when it’s safe to regret that their work was underappreciated or misunderstood (or how little they were paid) in their lifetimes. You can write what you like about Beckett or Kafka and know they’re not going to come round and tell you you’re talking nonsense, or confound your expectations with a new work. Kelman is still alive, still writing great books, climbing.”
James Meek, London Review of Books
“A true original . . . A real artist. . . . It’s now very difficult to see which of his peers can seriously be ranked alongside [Kelman] without ironic eyebrows being raised.”
Irvine Welsh, Guardian
“Probably the most influential novelist of the post-war period.”
The Times
“Kelman has the knack, maybe more than anyone since Joyce, of fixing in his writing the lyricism of ordinary people’s speech . . . Pure aesthete, undaunted democrat—somehow Kelman manages to reconcile his two halves.”
Esquire (London)
“Kelman has always been a true and honest writer; which is why he is one of the fairly few who really matter.”
Scotsman
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is a laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics, and Chomsky is one of the foremost critics of U.S. foreign policy. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics. His recent books include Who Rules the World? and Hopes and Prospects.
James Kelman is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist whose many literary awards include the Booker and James Tait Black prizes. He was born in Glasgow in 1946 and left school in 1961, moving around and passing through Los Angeles for a brief period in the mid-1960s then in various jobs in various places in England. He started writing at the age of twenty-two: ramblings, musings, sundry phantasmagoria, stories, whatever. In 1969 while working in London he met and married Marie Connors from South Wales. They settled in Glasgow, where he has lived as writer, father, and grandfather. Kelman has been a vocal supporter of the Kurdish people and campaigns regularly with Scottish Solidarity with Kurdistan. For further information go to jameskelman.net.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463312 • US $16.95 • 7 7/8 in x 5 1/8 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Israel’s Operation Cast Lead was described by a UN fact finding mission (aka “the Goldstone report”) as “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” The winter 2008-09 assault claimed the lives of 1,400 Palestinians and thrust the crisis in Gaza into the center of the debate about the Israel/Palestine conflict.
The crippling siege continues to block access to construction materials desperately needed to rebuild in the wake of the Israeli attack and prevents people from leaving the Strip even for life threatening illnesses. With the constant humiliation of living a life punctuated by regular military incursions and ubiquitous checkpoints, Gaza has come to be known as the world’s largest open-air prison.
Following Israel’s naval attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla — a humanitarian aid mission aimed at breaking the unbearable siege — international observers are increasingly questioning the logic of Israeli military aggression, and worldwide public support for Palestine is growing.
In Gaza in Crisis, Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, two of the conflict’s most insightful critical commentators, survey the fallout from Israel’s conduct in Gaza and place it into the context of Israel’s longstanding occupation of Palestine. This second edition includes new material covering the latest developments in Gaza, including Chomsky’s account of his 2012 visit to Gaza.
PRAISE:
“Chomsky is a global phenomenon … he may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet.”
New York Times Book Review
“Ilan Pappé is Israel’s bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.”
John Pilger, journalist and filmmaker
“This sober and unflinching analysis should be read and reckoned with by anyone concerned with practicable change in the long-suffering region.”
Publishers Weekly
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Ilan Pappé is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Frank Barat was the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. His books include Gaza in Crisis, On Palestine, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, and We Still Here.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464708 • US $11.95 • 4 1/2 x 7 5/8 • 120 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza, left thousands of Palestinians dead and cleared the way for another Israeli land grab. The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine in this book edited by Frank Barat. On Palestine is the sequel to their acclaimed book Gaza in Crisis (Haymarket Books).
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Ilan Pappé is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Frank Barat was the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. His books include Gaza in Crisis, On Palestine, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, and We Still Here.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902622 •US $19.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 272 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A sweeping yet penetrating collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky, exploring the most pressing global concerns of our time.
In these illuminating interviews, conducted for Truthout by C.J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky yet again shares his brilliant insights on an array of struggles and challenges facing humanity. A Livable FutureIs Possible addresses artificial intelligence and the potential for such programs to surpass humans in cognitive awareness; what lies ahead for a world engulfed in a deadly climate crisis; the rise of neo-fascism internationally, and why we should organize across borders to confront it; the striking similarities between Trump and Biden’s foreign policies; and a number of other critical issues gripping the planet.
Noam Chomsky has been an incomparable model of moral clarity and intellectual courage during his many decades as a scholar and critic. He is the most cited living scholar. One would be hard-pressed to find a more influential voice than Chomsky’s in the West. A Livable FutureIs Possible is not only an urgent and informative resource, it is a call-to-action for those hoping to help carry the torch of one of history’s greatest minds.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages. Recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Optimism Over Despair, Notes on Resistance, and Chronicles of Dissent. He lives in Tucson, AZ.
C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His main research interests are in European economic integration, globalization, the political economy of the United States and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a columnist for Global Policy Journal and a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published several books, including, with Noam Chomsky, Optimism Over Despair and The Precipice, and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers, and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into several foreign languages, including Croatian, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. He lives in Conshohocken, PA.
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Hardcover • ISBN-13: 9781642599053 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 350 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A wide-ranging and incisive collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky, addressing the urgent questions of this tumultuous time, particularly the fallout of the war in Ukraine.
In these informative interviews, conducted for Truthout by C.J. Polychroniou, Chomsky addresses the rapidly deteriorating quality of democracy in the United States and the crumbling of the social fabric, fractures of the Biden era, including rising tensions among the United States, China, and Russia, the War in Ukraine, the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, and the ongoing fallout of COVID-19. Throughout, Chomsky “remains … a beacon of hope in the darkest of times” (Sarah Jaffe).
PRAISE:
Praise for Optimism Over Despair:
“This book of interviews with Noam Chomsky is a must read in these troubling times. [A]n excellent collection of interviews that highlights Chomsky’s encyclopedic knowledge of the key issues of our day and his unwavering criticism of the regime of the global 1%.”
Deepa Kumar, author, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire
“In this brilliant series of recent and wide-ranging interviews, Noam Chomsky combines an astounding breadth of knowledge, great depth of insight, clarity in explaining his ideas, and a relentless commitment to social and economic justice. The full package is simply exhilarating, especially in our current dismal era of Donald Trump. Optimism over Despair is a book to devour.”
Robert Pollin, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Co-Director, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages. Recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Optimism Over Despair, Notes on Resistance, and Chronicles of Dissent. He lives in Tucson, AZ.
C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His main research interests are in European economic integration, globalization, the political economy of the United States and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a columnist for Global Policy Journal and a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published several books, including, with Noam Chomsky, Optimism Over Despair and The Precipice, and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers, and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into several foreign languages, including Croatian, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. He lives in Conshohocken, PA.
This volume offers readers a concise and accessible introduction to the ideas of Noam Chomsky, described by the New York Times as “arguably the most important intellectual alive.”
In these recent, wide-ranging interviews, conducted for Truthout by C.J. Polychroniou, Chomsky discusses his views on the “war on terror” and the rise of neoliberalism, the refugee crisis and cracks in the European Union, prospects for a just peace in Israel/Palestine, the rise of Black Lives Matter, the dysfunctional US electoral system, the grave danger posed to humanity by the climate crisis, and the prospects and challenges of building a movement for radical change.
PRAISE:
“This fascinating series of interviews convincingly covers an astonishing range of fundamental and urgent issues of societal concern, demonstrating anew that Noam Chomsky is the world’s most humane, philosophically sophisticated, and knowledgeable public intellectual. I cannot imagine a better primer for anyone seeking a better, safer, fairer future.”
Richard Falk, Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University
“In this brilliant series of recent and wide-ranging interviews, Noam Chomsky combines an astounding breadth of knowledge, great depth of insight, clarity in explaining his ideas, and a relentless commitment to social and economic justice. The full package is simply exhilarating, especially in our current dismal era of Donald Trump. Optimism over Despair is a book to devour.”
Robert Pollin, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Co-Director, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
“…Chomsky argues that the choice between optimism and despair is really no choice at all. I have a great admiration for Chomsky’s combination of consistent critical moral perspective and sharp eye for the details of world politics…”
Heikki Patomäki, professor of world politics at the University of Helsinki, and a civic and political activist
“In this series of highly informative conversations deftly organized by C. J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky teaches us—yet again—so much on a huge range of issues: from economic globalization through international politics to the linguistic foundations of humanity. If you haven’t read Chomsky before, this book will make you realize that you still have more eyes to be opened. This book is a beacon—or rather a GPS—in this turbulent and darkening world.”
Ha-Joon Chang, University of Cambridge, author of Bad Samaritans, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, and Economics: The User’s Guide
“For all those of us who have always dreamed of spending a day with Noam Chomsky and getting his answers to all our questions and concerns about the [sorry] state of the world, here’s the next best thing: a collection of interviews with our greatest living intellectual on capitalism, empire, and social change, fielded by C. J. Polychroniou of Truthout. Especially valuable in helping us navigate the dreadful challenges of the Trumpian era.”
Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies, Hampshire College, and defense correspondent, the Nation
“This book of interviews with Noam Chomsky is a must read in these troubling times. Divided into three parts, it begins with Chomsky’s razor sharp analysis of neoliberalism, imperialism, the EU, the role of religion in politics, and class polarization. In the second, it focuses on the Trump presidency and lays out the long history of US foreign policy, as well as other topics such as health care, global warming and education policy. Finally, it looks at various alternatives—anarchism, communism and socialism. This is an excellent collection of interviews that highlights Chomsky’s encyclopedic knowledge of the key issues of our day and his unwavering criticism of the regime of the global 1%.”
Deepa Kumar, author, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire
“The elder statesman of a resurgent left offers clear-eyed assessments of the US, past and present, and its role in the world. From meditations on human nature to strategic advice for the Trump era, Chomsky remains the thinker who shaped a generation, a beacon of hope in the darkest of times.”
Sarah Jaffe, author, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of languages worldwide. His latest books include the New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Who Rules the World? Other recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Power Systems, Occupy, Hopes and Prospects, and Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books recently reissued twelve of his classic books with new introductions by the author.
Editor C. J. Polychroniou is an political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His main research interests are in European economic integration, globalization, the political economy of the United States and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout‘s Public Intellectual Project. He has published several books and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into several foreign languages, including Croatian, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594584 • US $16.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A collection of interviews with the world’s leading public intellectual from the time of the rise to power of Donald Trump to the end of his presidency and the election of Joe Biden.
In The Precipice, Noam Chomsky sheds light onto the phenomenon of Trumpism and exposes the catastrophic nature and impact of Trump’s policies on people, the environment, and the planet as a whole. Chomsky also captures the dynamics of the brutal class warfare launched by the masters of capital to maintain and even enhance the features of a dog-eat-dog society, along with the unprecedented mobilization of millions of people against neoliberal capitalism, racism, and police violence.
A powerful sequel to Chomsky and Polychroniou’s last interview collection, Optimism Over Despair.
PRAISE:
“The elder statesman of a resurgent left offers clear-eyed assessments of the US, past and present, and its role in the world. From meditations on human nature to strategic advice for the Trump era, Chomsky remains the thinker who shaped a generation, a beacon of hope in the darkest of times.”
Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back
“For those of us who have always dreamed of spending a day with Noam Chomsky and getting his answers to all our questions and concerns about the sorry state of the world, here’s the next best thing: a collection of interviews with our greatest living intellectual on capitalism, empire, and social change, fielded by C. J. Polychroniou of Truthout. This book is especially valuable in helping us navigate the dreadful challenges of the Trumpian era.”
Michael Klare, defense correspondent for the Nation
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. His recent books include Consequences of Capitalism, with Marv Waterstone, and, with C. J. Polychroniou, Optimism Over Despair.
C. J. Polychroniou is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592634 • US $19.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 400 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Is our “common sense” understanding of the world a reflection of the ruling class’s demands of the larger society? If we are to challenge the capitalist structures that now threaten all life on the planet, Chomsky and Waterstone forcefully argue that we must look closely at the everyday tools we use to interpret the world.
Consequences of Capitalism makes the deep, often unseen connections between common sense and power. In making these linkages we see how the current hegemony keep social justice movements divided and marginalized. More importantly, we see how we overcome these divisions.
PRAISE:
“At a moment of converging crises and political upheaval, Consequences of Capitalism provides essential support for activists and intellectuals as they try to envision a freer and fairer world.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics.Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works, which have been translated into scores of countries worldwide. Recent books include What Kind of Creatures Are We?, as well as Optimism and Despair, and Internationalism of Extinction.
Marv Waterstone is Professor Emeritus in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona, where he has been a faculty member for over 30 years. He is also the former director of the University of Arizona Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies. His research and teaching focus on the Gramscian notions of hegemony and common sense, and their connections to social justice and progressive social change. His most recent books are Wageless Life: A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press; co-authored with Ian Shaw) and Geographic Thought: A Praxis Perspective (Routledge; co-edited with George Henderson)
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Haymarket Books (May 2019). World audio rights, except UK / Ireland, only.
Paper • ISBN-13:9781608467280 • US $15.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in• 200 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Marx’s Capital, inspired, in particular, by the crisis of 2008–9 and the period of slow growth that has followed. Marx was capitalism’s greatest critic and his work retains its relevance 150 years after its initial publication. Here, Choonara breaks down the thousand page text, making it inviting and accessible for the reader. A Reader’s Guide to Capital is an essential tool for students, activists, and others looking to read this classic text today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joseph Choonara teaches International Political Economy at King’s College London. He is the author of Unravelling Capitalism, a columnist for Socialist Review and an editorial board member of International Socialism.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608468614 • US $24.00 • 271 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
One hundred years ago, the Russian Revolution turned the world upside down. Ordinary people took over their factories, farms, regiments, and schools, and set out to build a new society. Selections from testimonials, debates, documents, and memoirs, fill this new reader, bringing to life the voices of men and women who witnessed firsthand the inspiring, heroic, and sometimes tragic story of 1917.
PRAISE:
“The 1917 revolution lifts its voice again in Todd Chretien’s sparkling and moving collection. While providing new insights for the historian, Eyewitnesses to the Russian Revolution remains above all easily accessible to those with no prior knowledge.”
John Riddell, editor, To the Masses
“In 1918, Rosa Luxemburg wrote, ‘Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary far-sightedness, and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky, and all the other comrades have given in good measure.’ This new anthology brings readers into the fray as Bolshevik activists and leaders, and their friends and foes, argue and organize over the course of 1917.”
Helen Scott, editor, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg
“Readers looking to get a feel for the revolution and its emancipatory project should grab a copy immediately.”
Eric Blanc, author, Anti-Colonial Marxism: Oppression & Revolution in the Tsarist Borderlands
“This fast-paced collection brings the debates and drama of the Bolshevik Revolution to life through the voices of leading participants and accidental observers alike. An accessible and informative reader for those who want to learn more about how Lenin and his friends shook the world.
Kevin Murphy, author, Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Todd Chretien is a member of the International Socialist Organization, a frequent contributor to Socialist Worker and the International Socialist Review, and editor of Haymarket Books’ edition of State and Revolution by V.I. Lenin (2014).
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Hardcover • ISBN-13: 9781642599695 •US $18.95 • 8 in x 10 in • 32 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Journey with the carbon atom through a history of Earth’s wild climate, from dinosaurs to wooly mammoths to today’s climate crisis.
The Everywhere Atom blends facts, humor, cartoons, and simple narration to explain how the carbon cycle affects the climate, now and throughout Earth’s history. The carbon cycle is often missing from children’s climate books, yet it is fundamental to laying the conceptual groundwork for understanding climate science. This engaging guide uses creatures that kids love, like dinosaurs and wooly mammoths, as an entry point for understanding climate science and the climate crisis. The book ends with a message of hope: only broad-scale social change and collective action can possibly address the scale of the climate crisis.
Balancing the heaviness of the climate crisis with dynamic illustrations and humor, the book’s cartoon carbon atoms are designed to not only engage younger audiences and bring some comic relief to the subject, but also drive home a central point: carbon is not bad per se, it’s how humans affect the movement of carbon that can make it so powerful and damaging—which also means the climate crisis can be reversed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Christine Shearer, PhD, has been working on climate and energy for over 15 years. She is currently a researcher at the Climate Imperative Foundation. Her previous professional experience includes working as an energy analyst and program director at the think tank Global Energy Monitor; as a researcher for Project Drawdown; and as a postdoctoral scholar in Earth System Science at UC Irvine. Her academic work has appeared in Earth’s Future, AGU Advances, and Nature, and has been featured in the Economist, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among others. She is a Lannan fellow and author of Kivalina: A Climate Change Story (Haymarket Books, 2011), which was recipient of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award. She has a PhD in Sociology from UC Santa Barbara.
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By Tony Cliff and Duncan Hallas Haymarket Books (July 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465415 • 112 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Party and Class dispels the myths about “democratic centralism” and demonstrate that the kind of socialist party that Lenin built had nothing in common with the Stalinist despotism that replaced it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tony Cliff was a lifelong organizer within the international socialist movement. His groundbreaking work established the unique interpretation of the Soviet Union as a bureaucratic, state-centered version of capitalism, rather than a workers’ state. His many works include State Capitalism in Russia and the volume that follows-up from this book, All Power to the Soviets, about Lenin’s political leadership from 1914 to 1917.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902653 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 224 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An oral history and critical genealogy of “accountability,” the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: just what do we mean by “community?”
A concept just short of a program, accountability has been taken up as a coreprinciple within leftist organizing and activity over the past quarter century. While it invokes a particular vocabulary and set of procedures, it has also come to describe a more expansive, if often vague, approach to addressing harm within movement work. The term’s sudden, widespread adoption as abolitionist concepts began to circulate broadly in recent years cast light on certain shifts in its meaning, renewing the urgency of understanding its relation to militant leftist history and practice.
After Accountability gathers interviews conducted by members of the Pinko collective with nine transformative justice practitioners, socialist labor organizers, incarcerated abolitionists, and activists on the left, and also includes framing essays by the Pinko collective in which its members situate and reflect on those illuminating conversations. An investigation into the theoretical foundations and current practice of accountability, this volume explores the term’s potential and limits, discovering in it traces of the past half-century’s struggles over the absence of community and the form revolutionary activity should take.
Contributors: Kim Diehl, Michelle Foy, Peter Hardie, Emi Kane and Hyejin Shim, Esteban Kelly, Pilar Maschi, and Stevie Wilson, and Pinko collective members Lou Cornum, Max Fox, M.E. O’Brien, and Addison Vawters.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592627 • US $15.00 • 176 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A Powerful Guide to Action for People in Debt.
Debtors have been mocked, scolded and lied to for decades. We have been told that it is perfectly normal to go into debt to get medical care, to go to school, or even to pay for our own incarceration. We’ve been told there is no way to change an economy that pushes the majority of people into debt while a small minority hoard wealth and power.
The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that mass indebtedness and extreme inequality are a political choice. In the early days of the crisis, elected officials drew up plans to spend trillions of dollars. The only question was: where would the money go and who would benefit from the bailout?
The truth is that there has never been a lack of money for things like housing, education and health care. Millions of people never needed to be forced into debt for those things in the first place.
Armed with this knowledge, a militant debtors movement has the potential to rewrite the contract and assure that no one has to mortgage their future to survive.
Debtors of the world must unite. Through tactics such as strikes and collective bargaining, debtors’ movements can help redress our country’s foundations in racial capitalism and environmental destruction. As isolated individuals, debtors have little influence. But as a bloc, we can leverage our debts and devise new, powerful strategies to challenge the corporate creditor class and help win reparative, universal public goods.
Individually, our debts overwhelm us. But together, our debts can make us powerful.
PRAISE:
“Can’t Pay Won’t Pay will help higher education librarians understand the conditions under which their students are laboring, as well as illuminating both the personal and systemic positions of librarians themselves.”
College & Research Libraries
“The Debt Collective has given us a visionary roadmap for forming an army of debtors that is powerful enough to make capital scream.”
Naomi Klein
“The Debt Collective’s Student Debt Strike is an important campaign to help build the mass movement we need to resist and abolish student debt.”
Rep. Rashida Tlaib
“This book explains why we are overdue for a debt revolution and, more importantly, how to do it. To abolish debt is to begin to rebuild society. We need to start doing so now.”
David Graeber
“Defusing explosive debts and undermining the legitimacy of the punitive, profitable debt system of the current United States is insurrectionary work, and uniting debtors in common cause is solidarity and justice work. This anticapitalist manual is a beautiful guide to how and why to do all those things.”
Rebecca Solnit
“The Debt Collective turns a sense of entrapment into a collective call for liberation.”
Stephanie Kelton, NYT bestselling author, The Deficit Myth
“’By prioritizing redress and repair, we can win free and universal education, housing, and healthcare. No one should have to go into debt to meet their basic needs,’ Debt Collective declares in this urgent book, which lays out concrete strategies and a powerful vision for radical change.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
“Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay is a clear, readable, and hugely powerful account of debt resistance in the age of financialized capitalism. Debt Collective brilliantly summarizes the contradictions of debt-fueled growth, and demonstrates how ordinary people can work together to resist it. Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay is the bible of debt resistance—a must-read for activists and academics alike.”
Grace Blakeley
“This timely and outstanding book demonstrates the many predatory ways that debt stifles mobility for the most economically vulnerable. Fortunately it does not conclude there, but presents a political pathway. Through solidarity and collective action, debtor unions can forge a new economy that prioritizes finance working for all people, rather than our most vulnerable working for finance.”
Darrick Hamilton, Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
The Debt Collective is a new kind of union—a debtors’ union—that transforms individual financial struggles into a source of collective power by enabling its members to engage in strategic campaigns ofeconomic disobedience and debt refusal. The Debt Collective’s writers’ bloc includes Ann Larson, Astra Taylor, Hannah Appel, Thomas Gokey, and Laura Hanna.
Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, author, and activist. She is the author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age and Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone.
Paperback • 9781642597080 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The tragedy of American science is that its direction is determined by private profit rather than by the desire to improve the human condition. As a result, Conner argues, Big Science has been irredeemably corrupted by Big Money. This corruption threatens the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the medicines we take.
The Tragedy of American Science explores how the U.S. economy’s addiction to military spending distorts and deforms science by making it overwhelmingly subservient to military interests. The primary motive driving American science and technology has become the search for new and more efficient ways to kill people. This transforms science from the classic ideal of a creative force for the advancement of humankind into its destructive and antihuman opposite. That those trillions of dollars in resources and scientific talent are not devoted to solving the problems of poverty, disease, and environmental destruction is one of the greatest tragedies of our times.
While the underlying problems may appear intractable, Conner compellingly argues that replacing the current science-for-profit system with a science-for-human-needs system is not an impossible, utopian dream. But to get there, we’ll need to grapple with this important history.
PRAISE:
“The history that Conner has laid bare impels all of us, as citizens or working scientists, to avoid the Faustian bargain of American exceptionalism.”
Science for the People Magazine
“Clifford Conner’s examination of the military and corporate capture of science in the US could not be more relevant. He makes the urgent case that human needs, and not profits or militarism, should guide scientific inquiry.”
Sarah Lazare, In These Times
“The Tragedy of American Science makes a strong case for freeing science from the fetters of capital and rededicating it for the good of humanity.”
Against the Current
“I highly recommend this book and consideration of what I take to be its main message: science could have worked wonders if properly used (and if a bit of military budgets were spent on something useful) and perhaps it still can.”
World Beyond War
“We should read [Conner’s] book as a political economy of science because science is embedded in a perverse set of cultural constraints and incentives allowing it to be misused and manipulated in a way that endangers our democracy. Conner views science writ large, encompassing theory (disciplinary science) as well as technology… The most rewarding part of the book…is Conner’s analysis of military science since World War II. Among the scientific and technological military projects discussed by Conner, which are rarely investigated in today’s popular press, are cluster bombs, Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles, drones, cyberwarfare, the SDI, and nanotechnologies, those ‘tiny insect-mimicking drones that operate in swarms, sneak into private dwelling spaces of targeted victims, and blow their heads off with microexplosive bombs…”
Science, Technology & Human Values
“American political and intellectual culture today, including scientific culture, is in a state of decay. The denial of human-caused climate change, the destruction of scientific records by the government, the attack on public education, and most recently, the Center for Disease Control’s banishing words such as “scientific-based” and “evidence-based” are significant indications of this. The policies of the masters of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex are ruinous. We can fight back by discrediting their junk ideas and magical thinking. Cliff Conner’s book helps immensely in this effort.”
Michael Steven Smith, Co-host, Law And Disorder Radio
“Clifford Conner’s remarkable study does so much more than simply ask and answer how American science has become weaponized over the past century. The Tragedy of American Science is a thorough and vividly engaging account—a history of science that draws deeply on social and geopolitical analysis, and with excellently crafted case studies. It is a call to rethink the myths of American exceptionalism that, under the guise of scientific altruism and U.S. foreign policy, have cultivated a science-for-profit system. Despite its unflinching disdain for the corporatization of research, policy, and practice, Conner’s story is not a pessimistic one. Instead, with keen insight, wit, and an empathetic eye on the future, Conner helps rescue the promise of science from the tragedy it has become.”
Jacob Blanc, author of Before the Flood: the Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil
“Cliff Conner has brought together journalists, advocates, leakers, and litigators to restore the principles of free inquiry from its perversions by the big lies of Big Food, Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big War. The method is true and it is simple: they lift the big rock, and let fresh air and sunlight expose the little, nasty, squirmy things underneath.”
Peter Linebaugh, author of Red Round Globe Hot Burning
Praise for Conner’s APeople’s History of Science:
“Cliff Conner’s A People’s History of Science is a delightfully refreshing new look at the history of science. I know of nothing like it…” —Howard Zinn
“A People’s History of Science sticks up for little guys. . . . Clifford D. Conner finds the fingerprints of the common man on humanity’s great advances.” —New York Times Book Review
“Conner writes clearly and skillfully shows connections as he ranges across time periods and disciplines from medicine to art to astronomy.” —Publishers Weekly
“[An] eloquently written book is accessible to lay readers and equally valuable for scholars. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal
“Valuable…” —Booklist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Clifford D. Conner is a historian of science at the School of Professional Studies, CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of A People’s History of Science (Bold Type Books, 2005) and biographies of three revolutionaries: Jean Paul Marat, Arthur O’Connor, and Colonel Despard.
Hardcover • ISBN-13:9781642590241 • US $16 • 5 in x 7 in • 80 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This poignant play, written by current and formerly incarcerated authors, uses gripping truths and soulful dialogue to reveal the human cost of America’s for-profit justice system. The story follows Omar, pulled back into the prison system after trying to lift his family out of poverty, who struggles to maintain a sense of humanity while fighting to keep his loved ones close.
According to NJ.com, “From institutionalized racism to addiction to the prison-industrial complex, this is a play about a great many large, pressing social challenges, but at its core it is a play about one family and its struggles to remain united as their world steadily crumbles. Impactful, warm, and unrelenting, this play that began as an experiment turns out to be an excellent examination of the human cost of a harsh and inhospitable world.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
The New Jersey Prison Theater Cooperative is a committee that includes not only the 28 formerly incarcerated participants but also six theater professionals, who worked on the script’s development.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, Truthdig columnist and host of the Emmy Award–winning RT America show On Contact. He is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. His most recent book is America: the Farewell Tour published in 2018. He teaches in college credit courses in prisons in New Jersey.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859158 • US $12 • 7.1 in x 6.6 in • 264 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The inside story of how the worldwide movement against corporate globalization has become such a force.
The annual World Social Forum has become a key part of the international global justice movement, attracting hundreds of thousands of activists the world round. Here Leite lays out the origins, development, and challenges of this international movement for social, political, and economic justice.
PRAISE:
“In January 2001, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 20,000 activists, students, film makers–some of the best minds in the world—came together to share their experiences and exchange ideas about confronting Empire. That was the birth of the now historic World Social Forum. It was the first, formal coming together of an exciting, anarchic, unindoctrinated, energetic, new kind of Public Power. The rallying cry of the WSF is ‘Another World is Possible’. It has become a platform where hundreds of conversations, debates, and seminars have helped to hone and refine a vision of what kind of world it should be. By January 2004, when the fourth WSF was held in Mumbai, India, it attracted 200,000 delegates. I have never been part of a more electrifying gathering.”
Arundhati Roy, author, The God of Small Things and War Talk
“José Corrêa’s book is not only a remarkable historical survey of the origins and development of the World Social Forum, but also a most insightful discussion of the main issues being confronted by the international movement against corporate globalization. An indispensable piece of reading for anybody that wants to understand one of the great social and political inventions of the new century.”
Michael Löwy, author, The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
José Corrêa Leite is a member of the Brazilian Organizing Committee and of the Secretariat and International Council of the World Social Forum. He is a university professor and member of the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC). An editor of the journal Em Tempo, Leite edited the collection Marxism, Modernity and Utopia (2000), with chapters by Michael Löwy and Daniel Bensaïd (Xamã, 2000), and co-edited, with Isabel Loureiro e Maria Elisa Cevasco, The Spirit of Porto Alegre (2003).
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599770 • US $19.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The remarkable true story of an indigenous family who fought back, over multiple generations, against the world-destroying power of settler colonial violence.
Just weeks before police would kill him in Gallup, New Mexico, in March of 1973, Larry Casuse wrote that “never before have we faced an enemy such as this.” An Enemy Such as This, for the first time, tells the history of that colonial enemy through the simultaneously epic and intimate story of Larry Casuse and those, like him, who fought against it.
From the genocidal Mexican war against the Apaches in the nineteenth century, through the collapse of European empires in the first half of the twentieth century, and culminating in the efforts of young Navajo activists and organizers in the second half of the twentieth century to confront settler colonialism in New Mexico, the book offers a resolutely Native-focused history of colonialism.
PRAISE:
“Like his Apache forbearers, Larry represents an undeniable reality, an unshakeable strength. ‘Their evil is mighty. But it can’t stand up to our stories,’ writes Leslie Marmon Silko. These words open An Enemy Such as This. Like all Indigenous freedom fighters, Larry is a story. As long as this story continues, so too will Indigenous life. Settler colonialism is the negation of life, held together through violence. You can’t forge a future out of a negation. Indigenous resistance is a story of affirmation. Larry is an affirmation.”
Melanie Yazzie, from the Foreword
“A brilliant tour de force bringing back to life the beloved Navajo militant Larry Casuse who died at the hands of Gallup, NM police. In doing so, David Correia traces the Casuse family history within a world-historical context of Western colonialism, both world wars, US wars against the Native Nations, and continued settler-colonialism and bordertown violence, propped up by US law. This is a breathtaking and original historical narrative that is also a page-turner.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Not “A Nation of Immigrants,” Settler-Colonialism, White Supremacy and a History of Erasure and Exclusion
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Correia is a Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Properties of Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2013), co-author with Tyler Wall of Police: A Field Guide (Verso, 2018), and co-author with Nick Estes, Melanie Yazzie, and Jennifer Denetdale of Red Nation Rising Nation: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press, 2021). He is a co-founder of AbolishAPD, a research and mutual aid collective in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Melanie K. Yazzie (Diné) is Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and coauthor of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900901 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 288 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An eye-opening narrative of the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, showing how the strike—and the violent backlash that ensued—reveal the genesis of modern policing.
In the early years of the 20th century, in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, nearly 150,000 miners took part in one of the most critical events in the history of US labor organizing. The brutal response by the state of Pennsylvania–as well as the federal government–inaugurated the structure and power of policing that we know today.
In this gripping account of the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, scholar and activist David Correia takes readers through the story of the United Mine Workers of America, their struggle against systems of private policing—which were present in practically every industry in the US—and the development of public, professionalized, state-sanctioned and state-serving police.
The demands of their strike included shorter work days, higher wages, and safer conditions in the deadly mines. However, their labor was crucial to westward expansion, colonial occupations in the Caribbean and the Philippines, and many burgeoning industries in the US. To keep the fires of capitalism burning, industrialists prodded the state and federal governments to intervene. Together, they established the first uniformed police force of its kind, a model soon emulated in other states.
PRAISE:
“David Correia has excavated a trove of forgotten or little-known history from the hard coal of Pennsylvania, culminating in the question that remains with us today— just who are the police meant to protect and serve?”
John Sayles
“A breath of fresh air in writing the history of working people. Correia dramatically captures the drama of class warfare in the coal fields and convincingly connects attacks on labor organizing with important questions regarding the history of public and private policing in the United States.”
David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Correia is a Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Properties of Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2013), co-author with Tyler Wall of Police: A Field Guide (Verso, 2018), and co-author with Nick Estes, Melanie Yazzie, and Jennifer Denetdale of Red Nation Rising Nation: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press, 2021). He is a co-founder of AbolishAPD, a research and mutual aid collective in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594669 • US $19.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 225 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This book’s radical theory of police argues that the police demand for order is a class order and a racialized and patriarchal order, by arguing that the institution of policing, in order to fabricate and defend capitalist order, must patrol an imaginary line between society and nature and transform nature into inert matter made available for accumulation. The thin blue line doesn’t just refer to a social order, rather police announce a general claim to domination— of labor and of nature..
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
David Correia is an associate professor at the University of New Mexico. Tyler Wall is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Rachel Herzing is a cofounder of Critical Resistance and co director of Center for Political Education.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859271 • US $16 • 5.25 in x 8.375 in • 364 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The definitive account of GI resistance to the Vietnam War, with a new introduction by Howard Zinn.
This book — on the historic resistance of GIs and veterans against the Vietnam War — is vital for understanding the overstretched U.S. military and opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq among soldiers and their families today.
Soldiers in Revolt documents one of the least known and most important aspects of the Vietnam War: the rebellion among U.S. soldiers opposed to the war. From the front lines to stateside military bases, the U.S. armed forces were wracked by widespread resistance, including combat refusals and mutinies. GIs produced more than 250 antiwar committees and underground newspapers to voice their discontent. A new chapter looks at the enduring imprint of this period on the U.S. military and the lessons that this era holds for the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
PRAISE:
“This fine study, combining scrupulous scholarship with the sharp insights of a highly informed participant-observer, was the first to explore in depth the processes of disaffection, organized opposition, and resistance that undermined U.S. military forces attacking Indochina, and their far-reaching consequences. It remains today the most penetrating and revealing investigation and analysis of these remarkable developments, with current implications that are all too evident.”
Noam Chomsky
“A powerful and fascinating look at rebellion within the ranks of America’s military. An important book!”
Ron Kovic, author, Born on the Fourth of July
“David Cortright, in this remarkable book, reminds us, as the war in Iraq continues, that a point can be reached where men and women in uniform can no longer tolerate what they begin to see as an unjust war. It is encouraging to be reminded of the basic desire of human beings to live at peace with other human beings, once they have divested themselves of the deceptions, the nationalism, and the racism that is provoked by war.”
From the new introduction by Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States
“An invaluable account of a uniquely American movement that helped to bring the Vietnam War to an end. This book restores an important chapter to our living history.”
Tod Ensign, author, America’s Military Today
“[A]n exhaustive account of rebellion in all the armed forces, not only in Vietnam but throughout the world. … Perhaps Cortright’s most important conclusion is that most of the GI resistance came not from draftees but from volunteers from working class backgrounds.”
New York Review of Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Cortright is president of the Fourth Freedom Forum and a research fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including A Peaceful Superpower: The Movement Against War in Iraq (2004).
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Known variously as the “Windy City,” the “City of Big Shoulders,” or “Chi-Raq,” Chicago is one of the most widely celebrated, routinely demonized, and thoroughly contested cities in the world.
Chicago is the city of Gwendolyn Brooks and Chief Keef, Al Capone and Richard Wright, Lucy Parsons and Nelson Algren, Harold Washington and Studs Terkel. It is the city of Fred Hampton, house music, and the Haymarket Martyrs. Writing in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Kevin Coval’s A People’s History of Chicago celebrates the history of this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins, whose stories often go untold. These seventy-seven poems (for the city’s seventy-seven neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city’s workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social landscape.
PRAISE:
“Chicago-based poet and educator Kevin Coval has one of the strongest and most long-standing literary visions in the city. Big and inviting, direct and accessible, A People’s History of Chicago is a passionate and illuminating collection. Reading Coval’s words evokes the experience of being guided through the city by someone who loves it for what it is and pushes it toward the potential of what it could become.”
The Chicago Tribune
“A fascinating book. Beautiful poems that really teach you a lot about Chicago.”
Trevor Noah, The Daily Show
“Coval’s poems not only bridge the past and the present; they create a community through history, returning the city to those who built and continue to build it.”
New Republic
“Kevin Coval made me understand what it is to be a poet, what it is to be an artist and what it is to serve the people.”
Chance the Rapper
“…incantatory spoken-word assailing notions of racial purity.”
The New York Times
“Invoking past Chicago writers and artists like Studs Terkel, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Common, Coval joins those who so engrossed themselves in their city that they found a mirror reflection of the beauty and horror of the entire country within its confines.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“As the city of Chicago blows out its birthday candles this weekend, Kevin Coval is clearing the smoke with the real and sometimes forgotten stories of the city’s working-class heroes.”
Chicago Sun Times
“In history, there is the official narrative; and there is the parallel, underreported version of events. There’s the Great Man interpretation of our collective past; and there’s the view from the grassroots. Kevin Coval’s A People’s History of Chicago is an alternate chronology of the city he calls home. The book is animated by a twin desire to celebrate the contributions of working people and the endless cultural stamina of Chicago’s minority communities.”
Chicagoist
“Kevin Coval has given us a gift, a collection of heartfelt, piercing poems, stories really, about America’s city.”
Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here
“This vibrant, dynamic collection of vignettes exposes the naked truth of our fair city.”
Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teacher’s Union
“The spine of this book of the People’s History of Chicago is the people’s resistance and struggle for justice and a fair shake. Coval is in the Chicago Tradition – fire, earth, and endless blues.”
Angela Jackson, author of Where I Must Go, winner of the American Book Award
“Coval’s poems vividly color in the lines of history, adding humanity to the people who shaped Chicago’s story.”
The Red Eye (Chicago Tribune’s free daily)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kevin Coval is the author of Schtick, L-vis Lives, and Everyday People the American Library Association “Book of the Year” Finalist Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica. Kevin is also the co-author of This is Modern Art, and an editor of The BreakBeat Poets. He is the founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, Artistic Director at Young Chicago Authors, and teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642590265 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in• US $17.00 • 100 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Award-winning poet Kevin Coval and graphic artist Langston Allston bare witness to the effects of gentrification in a Chicago neighborhood.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Kevin Coval is a poet and community builder. As the artistic director of Young Chicago Authors, founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, and professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago—where he teaches hip-hop aesthetics—he’s mentored thousands of young writers, artists and musicians. He is the author and editor of ten books, including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Schtick, and co-author of the play, This is Modern Art. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Drunken Boat, Chicago Tribune, CNN, Fake Shore Drive, Huffington Post, and four seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam.
Langston Allston is a painter and muralist based in New Orleans, Louisiana. He uses his art practice as a way to tell stories, drawn from his own experience, and from the experiences of people in his community, drawing a thread between the past and the present.
is a poet and community builder. As the artistic director of Young Chicago Authors, founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, and professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago—where he teaches hip-hop aesthetics—he’s mentored thousands of young writers, artists and musicians. He is the author and editor of ten books, including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Schtick, and co-author of the play, This is Modern Art. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Drunken Boat, Chicago Tribune, CNN, Fake Shore Drive, Huffington Post, and four seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. Langston Allston is a painter and muralist based in New Orleans, Louisiana. He uses his art practice as a way to tell stories, drawn from his own experience, and from the experiences of people in his community, drawing a thread between the past and the present.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461516 • US $16 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 100 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An American archetype, “L-vis” lives! in this poetic journey of artists past and present who useand misuse Black culture.
PRAISE:
“This book is bold, brave and morally messy – twelve rounds of knock-down, drag-out shadowboxing against a shapeshifter. The dark humor, intellectual fervor, and emotional rigor Coval brings to bear animates these pieces, turns caricatures to characters, implicates us all. It’s about time.”
Adam Mansbach, author, Go the F**k to Sleep
“A new, glowing voice in the world of literature.”
Studs Terkel
“L-vis is an unstinting excavation of race and culture, art and ownership. Though dubbed ‘post-racial,’ Coval reminds us America is a country in which race is always receding but ever returning to the center of our consciousness. With poignancy, humor, and no small amount of soul, Coval has fashioned a poetry for the present.”
Adam Bradley, co-editor, The Anthology of Rap
“Tough and smart, real and surreal, aching and funny, in-the-tradition and startlingly original, the trials of L-Vis show us the challenges of giving up on whiteness — a process at once monumentally hard, too easy, and absolutely necessary.”
David Roediger, author of How Race Survived U.S. History
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kevin Coval is the author of Slingshots and Everyday People, and co-founder and Artistic Director of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival. A regular contributor to Chicago Public Radio, and a four-time HBO Def Poet, Coval teaches in schools around Chicago.
ISBN-13: 9781608462704 • Trade paper • 5 1/2 x 8 3/8 • US $15 • 220 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From the poet hailed as a “new growing voice in the world of literature” by the legendary Studs Terkel, comes Shtick. Schtick is the tale of Jewish assimilation and its discontents; a sweeping exposition on Jewish-American culture in all its bawdy, contradictory, and inventive glory. Exploring how Jews shed minority status in America – in his own family and in culture and politics at large – poet Kevin Coval shows us a people’s transformation out of diaspora, landing on both sides of the color line.
i will tell my jewish kids
we have a long story. More than what is seen
now
PRAISE:
“Coval does for the Jews what Whitman did for America.”
Marc Maron, comedian and host of WTF
“Coval leans all the way in with Schtick, exposing the grimy, slippery truths about how we live and love and hate with his characteristic wit, rhythmic cadence and unflinching honesty. Powerful.”
Tricia Rose, author, Hip Hop Wars
“As a poet once observed, ‘Poetry is the music of facts.’ Kevin Coval’s poetry rings with that music. From the grit and turmoil of everyday life, Coval constructs a new beauty that inspires and transforms.”
Bernie Sahlins, founder of The Second City and author of Days and Nights at The Second City: A Memoir
“One of my favorite poets.”
Mos Def
“Kevin Coval is a new, glowing voice in the world of literature.”
Studs Terkel
“I dig this book, for many reasons, mainly because it makes me think. Any literature that causes us to use our brains and contemplate our roles within the human condition is a good thing! I love … how it mixes Humpty-Hump in with the likes of American iconism. Also I’m part Jewish (it’s a slice of my mutt-ism).”
Shock G, aka Humpty-Hump of Digital Undergound
“A concious Jewish phenomenon … [Coval’s] work speaks to the Jewish relationship to the American color line.”
Jew School
“Coval’s greatest strength is his rhythmic, beautiful prose and his willingness to speak truth to power, no matter what the personal cost.”
URB
“Historical/hysterical… reverent/blasphemous… this book bursts with pride/shame/joy/pain. Coval bravely edits nothing. His dazzling images/ideas fly at you, as if scattershot from some Yiddish theater/circus cannon.”
Tim Kazurinsky, Saturday Night Live (cast member 1981–84) and screenwriter of About Last Night…
“Kevin’s poems are hugely influenced by the fact I performed at his bar mitzvah. Yes, I said the word doody. And yes, now he’s brilliant.”
Jeff Garlin, co-star and Executive Producer of the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm
“A new take-no-prisoners Jewish classic.”
Rabbi Brant Rosen
“[Coval’s] newest work may be his best work … a sensational collection, alternately heartfelt, humorous and provocatively political.”
Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune
“‘Schtick’ implies routine, but Coval’s book is anything but. Instead it’s an outpouring of self-assessment, cloaked in a tallith of vivid, streetwise language.”
Chicago Reader
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kevin Coval is the author of ALA “Book of the Year” finalist Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica, Everyday People, and most recently, L-vis Lives! Racemusic Poems. Founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival, Coval is the Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors. He is a regular contributor to WBEZ Chicago Public Radio and teaches creative-writing at schools across the city.
Kevin Coval and Idris Goodwin pay poetic homage to slam dunk virtuoso Dominique Wilkins, and creativity & improvisation in the game of basketball.
In 1988, Dominque Wilkins & Michael Jordan squared off in Chicago for the most epic dunk contest in the history of the sport. 30 years later, poets & playwrights, Idris Goodwin & Kevin Coval, long-time collaborators, pay homage to the slam dunk, the anniversary of contest & to the moment & to the sport that changed culture in America & around the globe. Human Highlight: An Ode to Dominique Wilkins is a celebration of creativity, improvisation & the beauty & power in the game of basketball.
Kevin Coval is the author of Schtick, L-vis Lives, Everyday People the American Library Association “Book of the Year” Finalist Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica, and an editor of The BreakBeat Poets. He is the founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, Artistic Director at Young Chicago Authors, and teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Idris Goodwin is a playwright, spoken word performer and essayist recognized across mediums by The National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford and Mellon Foundation. His play How We Got On, developed at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, premiered at The 2012 Festival of New Play.
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By Kevin Coval and Idris Goodwin Foreword by Lisa Yun Lee Haymarket Books (August 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465972 • US $14.95 • 67 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Graffiti crews are willing to risk anything for their art. Called vandals, criminals, even creative terrorists, Chicago graffiti artists set out to make their voices heard and alter the way people view the world. But when one crew finishes the biggest graffiti bomb of their careers, the consequences get serious and spark a public debate asking, where does art belong?
PRAISE:
“Chicago’s most controversial play of the year.”
Chicago Magazine
“A romantic ode to the art of graffiti and the act of tagging, a piece that demystifies authorial signatures and charts the storied history of graffiti art in Chicago, shouting out its great artists and their canvases, from Kennedy underpasses to CTA train yards.”
Chicago Tribune
“A raw, visceral narrative that gives graffiti artists the humanity and genius the headlines rob them of.”
Newcity Stage
“This is a piece about the overwhelming urge not just to create art, but to get it seen—if only by a scant few before the sandblasters come along.”
TimeOut Chicago
“A provocative play… that raises philosophical and political questions that are already generating heated discussions among theatergoers of all ages.”
Gapers Block
“A wildly wrong-headed and potentially damaging work — No amount of classroom discussion will scrub clean the irresponsible ideas promulgated in this play.”
Chicago Sun-Times
“It was at once an act of artistic expression, social protest, and criminal vandalism—guaranteed to rattle the art world and media establishment, set the Twittersphere abuzz, and send the young rebels underground, if not to jail. This world premiere, written by Idris Goodwin and Young Chicago Authors artistic director Kevin Coval, is simultaneously celebratory and cautionary—clearly sympathetic to the artists’ point of view, but not blind to the impact their reckless act would have on their own lives.”
Chicago Reader
“This production is sharp, exciting and stimulating, both visually and emotionally. It will entertain, educate and is guaranteed to prompt heated discussions about the nature of art and the place for graffiti in our world.”
Kevin Coval is the author of Schtick, L-vis Lives, Everyday People the American Library Association “Book of the Year” Finalist Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica, and an editor of The BreakBeat Poets. He is the founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, Artistic Director at Young Chicago Authors, and teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Idris Goodwin is a playwright, spoken word performer and essayist recognized across mediums by The National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford and Mellon Foundation. His play How We Got On, developed at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, premiered at The 2012 Festival of New Play.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463954 • US $19.95 • 5 1/8 in x 8 1/4 in • 160 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Hip-hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the hip-hop generation. It is for people who love hip-hop, for fans of the culture, for people who’ve never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.
The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.
“Finally! Here’s the anthology that puts in print what we’ve know all along: Rap is Poetry, and hip-hop is a genre of poetry bigger than poetry itself. Read these poems and get rid of the notion once and for all that hip-hop poems are meant for the stage and don’t work on the page. And the author’s statements and essays place these poems straight in the American grain, the current iteration of the African-American poetic lineage. The Breakbeat Poets is the essential text for anyone who wants to know what’s up with American poetry in the Digital Age.”
Bob Holman, Bowery Poetry Club
“Authors from a wide range of marginalized existences compose modern poetry in this exciting, important collection.”
Foreword Reviews
“The Breakbeat Poets presents the struggle-born whispers, joyous shouts, and hopeful flows of a beautiful multitude four decades in the making. Here are the voices of a movement that just won’t stop. For the urgent midnight roar of the people’s poetry and the glimpses of freshly conjured dawns awaiting their own breaks — this book is nothing short of essential.”
Jeff Chang, author of Who We Be: The Colorization of America
“It’s amazing to see how expansive the dialogue has become. This book is heavy!”
Bobbito Garcia former host of All That: Hip Hop/Spoken Word Showcase @ The Nuyorican Poets Cafe 1991-1998
“A cool & diversified version of a mix tape. The BreakBeat Poets is a thorough and complete summation of Golden Era writers who continue to build the scene of literary and performance poetry.”
Chance the Rapper
“Every generation needs its poets; we never doubted that the rappers were poets, but as The Breakbeat Poets shows, the rappers didn’t put the poets out of work.”
Mark Anthony Neal co-editor of That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader
“[T]he first definitive anthology of poems by poets who fuse together the aesthetic of hip-hop and the style of slam poetry with the written-word tradition… [a] dynamic, groundbreaking, genre-merging volume.”
Kevin Coval is the author of ALA “Book of the Year” finalist Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica and Everyday People. Founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival, Coval serves as Artistic Director and teaches at the Art Institute. He is regular contributor to WBEZ Chicago Public Radio and teaches art and art history department at University of Illinois at Chicago.
Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at The University of Michigan and received his BA at Vanderbilt University. His work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Indiana Review, The New Republic, [PANK] Online, and in many other publications. He was the star of the award winning full-length documentary “Louder Than A Bomb” and has been featured on HBO’s “Brave New Voices.” He is an Assistant Poetry Editor for Muzzle. He is also a rapper.
Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of eight poetry books, three textbooks, a children’s book, editor of eight anthologies, and coauthor of a book of pedagogy. He is a faculty member of the Creative Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute and the Red Earth MFA Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma City University. He is also a former faculty member of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School. Lansana served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2011, where he was also Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing. Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community (with Georgia A. Popoff) was published in March 2011 by Teachers & Writers Collaborative and was a 2012 NAACP Image Award nominee. His most recent books include The Walmart Republic w/ Christopher Stewart (Mongrel Empire Press, September 2014) and reluctant minivan (Living Arts Press, May 2014).
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The dominant view of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is of a movement led by prominent men like Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Despite the demonstrations of female workers for ‘bread and herrings’, which sparked the February Revolution, in most historical accounts of this momentous period, women are too often relegated to the footnotes. Judy Cox argues that women were essential to the success of the revolution and to the development of the Bolshevik Party.
With biographical sketches of famous female revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai and less well-known figures like Elena Stasova and Larissa Reisner, The Women’s Revolution tells the inspiring story of how Russian women threw off centuries of oppression to strike, organize, liberate themselves and ultimately try to build a new world based on equality and freedom for all.
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Paper • ISBN 9780813521770 • US $34.50 • 496 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The Second Creation is a dramatic—and human—chronicle of scientific investigators at the last frontier of knowledge. In this revised edition, Robert Crease and Charles Mann take the reader on a fascinating journey in search of “unification” (a description of how matter behaves that can apply equally to everything) with brilliant scientists such as Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, and many others. They provide the definitive and highly entertaining story of the development of modern physics, and the human story of the physicists who set out to find the “theory of everything.”
The Second Creation tells the story of some of the most talented and idiosyncratic people in the world—many times in their own words. Crease and Mann conducted hundreds of interviews to capture the thinking and the personalities as well as the science. The authors make this complex subject matter clear and absorbing.
PRAISE:
“One of the top 15 books of the year.”
Publishers Weekly
“Gives a real feeling of the intense work that goes into major scientific discoveries and of the people who can deal with this kind of intellectual and emotional pressure.”
Jeremy Bernstein, The New Yorker
“An absolutely marvelous book. No one who cares about science should miss reading it.”
Timothy Ferris, author of Coming of Age in the Milky Way and The Mind’s Sky
“Without qualification, this is the best account of the phenomenal story of physics in the twentieth century.”
Dick Teresi, coauthor of The God Particle and winner of the 1994 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Prize
Robert P. Crease is a professor of philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook, where he uses laboratory history to examine key issues in the philosophy of science, science studies, and ethics. His books include The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science (Random House, 2003), Making Physics: A Biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1946–1972 (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and The Play of Nature, Experimentation as Performance (Indiana University Press, 1993), along with other edited collections and translated works. Crease organized the Science Studies Forum, an interdisciplinary group of faculty in the social sciences, and is active in organizing and teaching ethics and science courses, including the training programs for the protection of human subjects in research. Crease writes a monthly column, “Critical Point,” about science and society issues for Physics World.
Award-winning science writer Charles C. Mann is the author of 1493, a New York Times best-seller, and 1491, which won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Keck award for the best book of the year. A correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Wired, he has covered the intersection of science, technology, and commerce for many newspapers and magazines here and abroad, including National Geographic, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the Washington Post. In addition to 1491 and 1493, he is the co-author of five other books.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594522 • US $16.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 228 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Fill the void. Lift your voice. Say Her Name.
Black women, girls, and femmes as young as seven and as old as ninety-three have been killed by the police, though we rarely hear their names or learn their stories.
Breonna Taylor, Alberta Spruill, Rekia Boyd, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Kayla Moore, Kyam Livingston, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, and Tanisha Anderson are among the many lives that should have been.
#SayHerName provides an analytical framework for understanding Black women’s susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, and it explains how—through black feminist storytelling and ritual—we can effectively mobilize various communities and empower them to advocate for racial justice.
Centering Black women’s experiences in police violence and gender violence discourses sends the powerful message that, in fact, all Black lives matter and that the police cannot kill without consequence.This is a powerful story of Black feminist practice, community-building, enablement, and Black feminist reckoning.
PRAISE:
“The lack of visibility of Black women has changed—and the incredible work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, African American Policy Forum, and the #SayHerName campaign are examples of this. So is this powerful book.” —Janelle Monáe, from the Foreword
“Kimberlé Crenshaw is a national treasure.” —Kerry Washington
“The United States does not value Black life—and white supremacy threatens all of humanity. The Black women’s stories of state violence and public silence featured in this powerful and inspiring book are extremely important. We bear children, so when they are robbed from us, it’s like our own breath is taken away. We thank the #SayHerName campaign and Kimberlé Crenshaw and Janelle Monáe for uplifting our stories. The African American Policy Forum is a vital platform for Black voices.” —Samaria Rice, founder, Tamir Rice Foundation, and mother of Tamir Rice
“Reading #SayHerName is an act of solidarity, refusal, and love. Every piercing story in this book, every Black woman heartlessly murdered by the police, had a mother, a sister, a family, a community. Every one of them matters.” —V (formerly Eve Ensler), author of The Vagina Monologues and Reckoning
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, is a leading authority in the areas of civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law. Her work has been foundational in two fields of study that have come to be known by terms that she coined: critical race theory and intersectionality. She co-founded and serves as the executive director of the African American Policy Forum.
The African American Policy Forum is an innovative think tank that connects academics, activists, and policymakers to promote efforts to dismantle structural inequality. AAPF is dedicated to advancing and expanding racial justice, gender equality, and the indivisibility of all human rights, both in the United States and internationally.
Janelle Monáe is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, performer, producer, actor, and activist.
It is fashionable for pundits to declare every so often that Marxism is dead. As the late socialist author Daniel Singer aptly put it, their aim “is to doom as impossible a radical, fundamental transformation of existing society.”
But you can’t keep a good theory down. The poverty, class inequality, war and environmental degradation that today’s globalized capitalist system creates on an ever-expanding scale raises questions for which Marxism still offers fresh and relevant answers.
This book is a lively and accessible introduction to the ideas of Karl Marx, as well as other key Marxists, with historical and contemporary examples. The Meaning of Marxism shows that a “radical, fundamental transformation of existing society” is indeed not only possible, but urgently necessary.
PRAISE:
“Marx’s ideas remain crucial for comprehending the modern world, and no one does a better job of explaining them and showing how to apply them to contemporary issues than Paul D’Amato. This book is a treasury of powerful arguments illustrating the continuing relevance of class politics. A superb introduction to the Marxist method.”
Phil Gasper, editor of The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Political Document
“There is an expression that Marxism is not merely a theory but a guide to action. Paul Damato’s new book, The Meaning of Marxism, represents the best of that tradition. In his able hands, Marxist politics come alive and leap before us, pointing a way toward a better world. It’s a knockout.”
Dave Zirin, author, What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States
“When it comes to thinking about the continuing relevance of Marxist principles and perspectives for today’s political struggles, Paul D’Amato is one of the best writers around. Every progressive activist has something to learn from this volume.”
William Keach, Brown University
“Paul D’Amato reintroduces us to the classical Marxist tradition, showing how revolutionary socialist ideas remain the most powerful tools for changing the upside-down world of 21st-century capitalism.”
Lance Newman, Westminster College
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paul D’Amato is the associate editor of the International Socialist Review. His writing has appeared in CounterPunch, Socialist Worker and Selves and Others.
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Language/Territory
Publisher
English in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902660 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 256 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In his retelling of the boldness and tragedy of the Zhina uprising in Iran, Hamid Dabashi asks: What constitutes the success of revolutions and how do we measure their failures?
In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Zhina Mahsa Amini, was killed in police custody for failing to observe the strict dress code imposed on Iranian women. Her death sparked a massive social uprising within and outside of Iran. The slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” spread like wildfire from Amini’s hometown to solidarity protests held in London, New York, Melbourne, Paris, Seoul and beyond. The pain felt by millions of Iranians, caused by the Islamic Republic, was on the global stage again.
Yet, misreadings of the Zhina uprising—both accidental and insidious—began to proliferate, with different parties vying for power. Iran in Revoltby author and scholar Hamid Dabashi cuts through the white noise of imperialist war mongers and social media bots to provide a careful and principled account of the revolution, and how it has forever altered the nature of politics in Iran and the wider region. Iran in Revolt argues that “democracy” and the “nation-state” are tired concepts, exploring what it means to fight for a just society instead. Through detailed political, philosophical, and historical analysis, Dabashi shows that the vulnerable lives and fragile liberties of nations have never been so intimately connected, just as the pernicious cruelties of ruling regimes have never been so identical as they are today.
PRAISE:
“Reading Dabashi is like going for an extended coffee with a very smart friend.” Vijay Prashad, author of The Poorer Nations
“The grand clash of civilizations and ideologies will increasingly take place in the West, with such writers and intellectuals as Dabashi.”
The Guardian
“A leading light in Iranian studies.”
Chronicle of Higher Education
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Hamid Dabashi is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City. He is the author of over twenty books.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592733 • US $24.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Edward Said (1953–2003) was a towering figure in post-colonial studies and the struggle for justice in his native Palestine, best known for his critique of orientalism in western portrayals of the Middle East. As a public intellectual, activist, and scholar, Said forever changed how we read the world around us and left an indelible mark on subsequent generations.
Hamid Dabashi, himself a leading thinker and critical public voice, offers a unique collection of reminiscences, travelogues and essays that document his own close and long-standing scholarly, personal and political relationship with Said. In the process, they place the enduring significance of Edward Said’s legacy in an unfolding context and locate his work within the moral imagination and environment of the time.
PRAISE:
“This book moves elegantly between anecdotes in Edward Said’s life and a profound analysis of the intellectual contribution of one of the most influential thinkers of our times. Hamid Dabashi guides us skillfully between Said’s universalist, humane and moral position and his total commitment for the liberation of Palestine. With the help of this book we revisit, in a very accessible language and a straightforward style, Said’s intellectual prominence and impact on cultural studies. We are also introduced once more to the extent of his commitment to the struggle for justice in Palestine. Whether you are a devoted ‘Saidian’ or a newcomer to his world, this book is an essential reading.”
Ilan Pappé
“Reading Dabashi is like going for an extended coffee with a very smart friend.”
Vijay Prashad, author of The Poorer Nations
“Hamid Dabashi’s respect and affection for Edward W. Said and his intellectual legacy are manifest throughout this book. As a former colleague and friend of Said’s, Dabashi’s engagement is not only personal, but also emphatically political and intellectual.”
Joseph Massad
“Hamid Dabashi has written a deeply moving text that pays tribute and engages with one of the most important thinkers of time, Edward Said. The book is comprised of essays , documents and shorter political pieces which skillfully highlight the impact of Said’s work on the pressing political issues of time. The original presentation which shows Said’s influence over many years not only on Dabashi himself but on some many others who struggled and continue to struggle with what it means to challenge Eurocentrism and the brutal legacy of colonialism This is a book that is a must read not only for those interested in Said but for anyone who reads him for the sake of a life committed to justice.”
Drucilla Cornell
“A lyrical homage to his friend and colleague, the great Palestinian theorist, humanist, and agitator Edward Said. Dabashi follows in Said’s footsteps, reliving his own march through Mideast war zones and jousts with Islamophobes with lively turns of phrase and a soul laid bare.”
Timothy Brennan
“If you want to know more about Edward Said, the person, the intellectual, the friend, the political public figure, this is a book to read. And it is more than that. Palestinian/American Edward Said is revived in the memories of Iranian/American Hamid Dabashi. At a time when hate is propelled by the State to extreme high, what transpire from these pages is care, respect and decolonial love between a Palestinian/American and Iranian/American connected through colonial wounds inflicted upon migrants from the Middle East. Through the chapters, you will find also the dignified anger with which Said and Dabashi responded to the intolerance and hate towards free thinkers in the public sphere. The account of personal and professional ethics that Dabashi learned from Said, is not only a distinctive feature of the book but it is of extreme relevance when free thinking at the university has been mutating into corporate thinking.”
Walter D. Mignolo
“By turns skeptical and erudite, passionate and poetic, Hamid Dabashi’s book is animated by his love for Edward Said and his work. It will raise many hackles, but in its provocations it challenges one to rethink many of the standard clichés and prejudices of our time. Some pages are threaded with melancholy, others with anger, as in his white-hot assessment of the films of Michael Haneke and the books of his academic opponents. Above all, On Edward Said is powered by Dabashi’s commitment to the ideal that “Palestine belongs to the Palestinians—whether Jews, Christians or Muslims”. There is not a page in this book that does not challenge its reader. Whether one disagrees with it or not, this is a work that will leave its mark on all who read it.”
David Freedberg
“This remarkable collection of essays and interviews represents a long and diverse journey with a constant companion: the living memory of Edward Said. In lucid and passionate prose, Dabashi reminds us how much we need to return to Said’s thought and work, especially in ‘the darker moments of our despair,’ when we can, if we concentrate, find him ‘waiting for … us to awake, to arrive.’ This is how death, for Dabashi, becomes a form of suspension rather than a terminal loss.”
Michael Wood
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, an internationally renowned cultural critic, and award-winning author, with over 25 books to his name. He also offers commentary as a current affair essayist and his articles have appeared on major international print, digital, and broadcast media. He is regularly featured on CNN, BBC, CBC, Al Jazeera, and other global, national, and local venues. His essays have regularly appeared in al-Ahram Weekly in Egypt, Bir Gun in Turkey, and CNN in the United States. He currently writes a regular column for Al Jazeera.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463305 • US $22 • 338 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, amidst an extraordinary international upsurge in strike action, the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism developed into a major influence within the world-wide trade union movement. Committed to destroying capitalism through direct industrial action and revolutionary trade union struggle, the movement raised fundamental questions about the need for new and democratic forms of power through which workers could collectively manage industry and society.
This study provides an all-embracing comparative analysis of the dynamics and trajectory of the syndicalist movement in six specific countries: France, Spain, Italy, America, Britain, and Ireland. This is achieved through an examination of the philosophy of syndicalism and the varied forms that syndicalist organisations assumed; the distinctive economic, social and political context in which they emerged; the extent to which syndicalism influenced wider politics; and the reasons for its subsequent demise.
It also provides the first ever systematic examination of the relationship between syndicalism and communism, focusing on the ideological and political conversion to communism undertaken by some of the syndicalist movement’s leading figures and the degree of synthesis between the two traditions within the new communist parties that emerged in the early 1920s.
PRAISE:
“All in all, Darlington has delivered an informative representation of syndicalism that highlights its essential features and lays out the debates and experiences that defined it in a clearly constructed synthesis.”
International Journal of Social History
“This is a very valuable, well thought out and useful volume … Darlington’s work will remain a touchstone for scholarly debate on syndicalism for years to come.”
European History Quarterly
“Darlington’s book impressively pulls together the diverse literature on syndicalism. But more importantly, by looking at syndicalist politics thematically and studying their often stormy relationship with the Communists after the Russian Revolution, he has done a service to all those grappling today with how to engage with the politics of trade unions and political trade unionism.”
Simon Basketer, International Socialism
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ralph Darlington is Professor of Employment Relations at the University of Salford. His research is concerned with the dynamics of trade union organisation, activity and consciousness in Britain and internationally within both contemporary and historical settings. He is author of The Dynamics of Workplace Unionism, and The Political Trajectory of J.T. Murphy; co-author of Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain; and editor of What’s the Point of Industrial Relations? In Defence of Critical Social Science.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781608467655 • US $30 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 700 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Tim Davenport and David Walters have extracted the essential core of Debs’s life work, illustrating his intellectual journey from conservative editor of the magazine of a racially segregated railway brotherhood to his role as the public face and outstanding voice of social revolution in early 20th century America. Well over one thousand Debs documents will be republished as part of this this monumental project, the vast majority seeing print again for the first time since the date of their original publication.
Tim Davenport is an independent scholar from Oregon. He is the founder of the Early American Marxism website and is a blackbelt Wikipedian, writing as “Carrite.” He volunteers with Marxists Internet Archive and other online information initiatives.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642590326 • US $36.00 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 700 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Eugene V. Debs exploded onto the national scene in 1894 as the leader of a sensational strike by his American Railway Union (ARU) against the Pullman Parlor Car Company—a job stoppage which paralyzed the country’s transportation network for nearly two weeks. On January 1, 1897, the polarizing public figure Debs declared his allegiance to international socialism, emerging as the most widely recognized socialist in America. He would thereafter tour the country relentlessly, speaking to large audiences and writing hundreds of articles on political and economic themes over the ensuing three decades.
Debs almost singlehandedly established a new political party, the Social Democracy of America, in the summer of 1897, building upon the remnants of the depleted ARU. The organization advanced a double agenda, seeking to promote both electoral politics and the construction of socialist colonies on the frontier—a dual focus which led to internal tensions and a bitter split. In 1898 Debs cast his lot with Milwaukee publisher Victor L. Berger in a new organization dedicated to political action, the Social Democratic Party of America.
After a split of the older and larger Socialist Labor Party of America in 1899, protracted unity discussions between the Debs group and an organized body of former SLP dissidents ensued. This unity effort was marked by Debs’s first run for president of the United States on a joint Social Democratic ticket in November 1900. After heated on-again off-again negotiation between the two groups, a marriage was finally brokered in the summer of 1901 and the Socialist Party of America was launched. The party would soon grow to become the third biggest in American politics, with Debs enthusiastically heading the Socialist ticket in 1904 in the second of his five runs for the presidency.
Tim Davenport and David Walters have extracted the essential core of Debs’s life work, illustrating his intellectual journey from conservative editor of the magazine of a racially segregated railway brotherhood to his role as the public face and outstanding voice of social revolution in early 20th century America. Well over 1,000 Debs documents will be republished as part of this this monumental project, the vast majority seeing print again for the first time since the date of their original publication.
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Paper • ISBN-13:9781608469727• US $24.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 540 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This is the first in a five-volume series that will collect much of trade unionist and Socialist Party founding father Eugene V. Debs’ work for the first time in a single place. The collection makes readily accessible approximately 150 documents, only a few of which were ever subsequently republished, by one of the seminal figures in the labor movement of his era. Illuminating 19th century labor history, particularly the complex and shifting situation in the transportation industry, this volume provides a basis for deeper understanding of Debs and his role later during the glory days of the Socialist Party of America.
Tim Davenport is an independent scholar from Oregon. He is the founder of the Early American Marxism website and is a blackbelt Wikipedian, writing as “Carrite.” He volunteers with Marxists Internet Archive and other online information initiatives.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595901 • US $36 • 6 in x 9 in • 650 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Volume 4 of Eugene V. Debs’s selected works explores the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, Deb’s move from freelance oratory to employment on the staff of the mass circulation Appeal to Reason (the red paper), and his coast-to-coast 1908 campaign for president of the United States aboard the legendary Socialist Red Special.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Tim Davenport is an independent scholar from Corvallis, Oregon. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Oregon State University. He is the creator of the Early American Marxism website (marxisthistory.org) and a long-time volunteer with Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) and regularly contributes scans of rare material to the Internet Archive (archive.org) He co-edited The “American Exceptionalism” of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940 with Paul LeBlanc [Haymarket, 2018] and The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs with David Walters [in six volumes, Haymarket, 2019–]. Davenport is a member of the Organization of American Historians, Historians of American Communism, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the Labor and Working Class History Association. He is also an active collector of political books and pamphlets.
David Walters lives in Pacifica, California, originally hails from New York City. Having been formally a member of several socialist organizations since High School in 1972, David was active in the labor movement and is now a retired member of IBEW 1245. He now dedicates himself toward the building of the Marxists Internet Archive which he helped found in the mid-1990s. Additionally he is the Director of the San Francisco based Holt Labor Library, a brick-and-mortar library for papers, documents and journals of the labor and revolutionary left.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463336 • US $22 • 6 in x 9 in • 400 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this fascinating collection, Neil Davidson explores the nature of the Marxist tradition through a series of essays on individual thinkers. Combining surveys of the careers of figures including Tom Nairn and Alasdair MacIntyre with assessments of important works like Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, and ranging in time from the legacy of Adam Smith to Naomi Klein’s analysis of neoliberalism, Davidson argues for a self-reflective form of historical materialism as a necessary intellectual component of the struggle for human liberation.
PRAISE:
“In this volume, Davidson provides an impressive survey of the Marxian and radical tradition — from precursors like Adam Smith through Gramsci, Hobsbawm, Deutscher and Benjamin to contemporary non-Marxists like Naomi Klein. Throughout he combines a clear political and theoretical perspective without any concessions to sectarianism and cant. For this alone, Holding Fast to an Image of the Past is a provocative contribution.”
Charles Post, author, The American Road to Capitalism
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Neil Davidson is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000), Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003), for which he was awarded the Deutscher Prize, and How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Haymarket, 2012). Davidson lectures in Sociology in the School of Political and Social Science at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
By Neil Davidson Haymarket Books (Fall 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608460670 • US $20 • 5.5 in x 6.25 in • 400 pages
Also available in an abridged edition:
Haymarket Books (Fall 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467310 • 400 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this panoramic historical analysis, Neil Davidson defends a renovated concept of bourgeois revolution. Davidson shows how our globalized societies of the present are the result of a contested, turbulent history marked by often forceful revolutions directed against old social orders, from the Dutch Revolt to the English and American Civil Wars and beyond.
PRAISE:
“I was frankly pole-axed by this magnificent book. Davidson resets the entire debate on the character of revolutions: bourgeois, democratic and socialist. He’s sending me, at least, back to the library.”
Mike Davis
“How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? is a monumental work. Neil Davidson has given us what is easily the most comprehensive account yet of the ‘life and times’ of the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution,’ from its origins in seventeenth and eighteenth century political thought through its distillation in classical Marxism and onward to more recent debates and revisions. This would have been enough. However, Davidson has also provided us with a refined set of theoretical tools for understanding the often complex interactions between political revolutions which overturn state institutions and social revolutions which involve a more thorough-going transformation of social relations. Contemporary debates over the meaning of revolution, from 1989 in Eastern Europe to the Arab Spring, Davidson rightly insists, demonstrate that the past is far from dead nor is the revolution ever finally over. This deeply committed work of scholarship, succeeds magnificently in rescuing the idea of revolution ‘from the condescension of (bourgeois) posterity.'”
Colin Mooers
“Neil Davidson wends his way through the jagged terrain of a wide range of Marxist writings and debates to distil their lessons in what is unquestionably the most thorough discussion of the subject to date. If the paradox at the heart of the bourgeois revolutions was that the emergence of the modern bourgeois state had little to do with the agency of the bourgeoisie, then Davidson’s study is by far the most nuanced and illuminating discussion of this complex fact. A brilliant and fascinating book, wide-ranging and lucidly written.”
Jairus Banaji
“What should our conception of a bourgeois revolution be, if it is to enlighten rather than to mislead? Neil Davidson’s instructive and provocative answer is given through a history both of a set of concepts and of those social settings in which they found application. His book is an impressive contribution both to the history of ideas and to political philosophy.”
Alasdair MacIntyre
“Davidson exhibits a dazzling ability to synthesise, to pull in a bewildering array of secondary source material and all manner of eclectic cultural and political references into a continuous stream of unadulterated dialectical exhibition. This is, quite simply, the finest book of its kind.”
Tony McKenna
“Epic in scale, How Revolutionary? is by any standards a significant achievement. Its intellectual scope is commendably wide-ranging; no one else has put together such a broad field of references on this subject, or conjoined such widely dispersed historical and theoretical arguments. In addition, Davidson discusses virtually every key issue in Marxist political sociology, sweeping from the tributary mode to the nation-state, the differentiation of the peasantry to the revolution en permanence.”
New Left Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Neil Davidson is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000), Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003), for which he was awarded the Deutscher Prize, and Holding Fast to An Image of the Past (Haymarket, 2013). Davidson lectures in Sociology in the School of Political and Social Science at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465682 • US $22 • 5 in x 8 in • 400 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In his latest collection of essays, Neil Davidson brings his formidable analytical powers to bear on the concept of the capitalist nation-state. Through probing inquiry, Davidson draws out how nationalist ideology and consciousness is used to bind the subordinate classes to “the nation,” while simultaneously using “the state” as a means of conducting geopolitical competition for capital.
PRAISE
“Davidson’s analysis of nationhood and its historical and contemporary realities is a triumph of non-dogmatic historical materialism”
Scottish Left Review
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:
Praise for How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?:
“I was frankly pole-axed by this magnificent book. Davidson resets the entire debate on the character of revolutions: bourgeois, democratic and socialist. He’s sending me, at least, back to the library.”
Mike Davis
“How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? is a monumental work. Neil Davidson has given us what is easily the most comprehensive account yet of the ‘life and times’ of the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution,’ from its origins in seventeenth and eighteenth century political thought through its distillation in classical Marxism and onward to more recent debates and revisions. This would have been enough. However, Davidson has also provided us with a refined set of theoretical tools for understanding the often complex interactions between political revolutions which overturn state institutions and social revolutions which involve a more thorough-going transformation of social relations. Contemporary debates over the meaning of revolution, from 1989 in Eastern Europe to the Arab Spring, Davidson rightly insists, demonstrate that the past is far from dead nor is the revolution ever finally over. This deeply committed work of scholarship, succeeds magnificently in rescuing the idea of revolution ‘from the condescension of (bourgeois) posterity.’”
Colin Mooers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Neil Davidson is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000), Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003), for which he was awarded the Deutscher Prize, and How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (2012). Davidson lectures in Sociology in the School of Political and Social Science at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464678 • US $22 • 5 1/2 in x 8 7/8 in • 500 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Neil Davidson explores classic themes of nation, state, and revolution in this collection of essays. Ranging from the extent to which nationalism can be a component of left-wing politics to the difference between bourgeois and socialist revolutions, the book concludes with an extended discussion of the different meanings history has for conservatives, radicals, and Marxists.
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:
Praise for How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?:
“I was frankly pole-axed by this magnificent book. Davidson resets the entire debate on the character of revolutions: bourgeois, democratic and socialist. He’s sending me, at least, back to the library.”
Mike Davis
“How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? is a monumental work. Neil Davidson has given us what is easily the most comprehensive account yet of the ‘life and times’ of the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution,’ from its origins in seventeenth and eighteenth century political thought through its distillation in classical Marxism and onward to more recent debates and revisions. This would have been enough. However, Davidson has also provided us with a refined set of theoretical tools for understanding the often complex interactions between political revolutions which overturn state institutions and social revolutions which involve a more thorough-going transformation of social relations. Contemporary debates over the meaning of revolution, from 1989 in Eastern Europe to the Arab Spring, Davidson rightly insists, demonstrate that the past is far from dead nor is the revolution ever finally over. This deeply committed work of scholarship, succeeds magnificently in rescuing the idea of revolution ‘from the condescension of (bourgeois) posterity.’”
Colin Mooers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Neil Davidson is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000), Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003), for which he was awarded the Deutscher Prize, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Haymarket, 2012), and Holding Fast to An Image of the Past (Haymarket, 2013). Davidson lectures in Sociology in the School of Political and Social Science at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599152 • US $22.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 270 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Eminent scholar-activist Neil Davidson’s brilliance is on full display in this posthumous work, a timely and prescient introduction to the neoliberal era.
While it is widely agreed that neoliberalism arose in the wake of the global economic crisis of the 1970s, there remains much debate about how to understand its significance and even how to define it. Is it best seen as an ideology of free market fundamentalism, a series of policy decisions gutting the public sector and breaking unions, or as an era of capitalist development with its own logic?
Bringing his considerable intellectual breadth and characteristic generosity to bear on this question, in What Was Neoliberalism? Neil Davidson addresses the most common answers and offers some of his own. While other commentators have built their concept of neoliberalism around its economic tenants, Davidson shows that to truly appreciate both what is unique about neoliberalism, and what marks it out as a continuation of capitalism more generally, it is necessary to examine its social dimensions—specifically what layer of society has this particular regime of accumulation most depended upon.
What Was Neoliberalism? holds fast to Davidson’s conviction that thoroughly understanding the past means being better prepared for the struggles of the future.
PRAISE:
Praise for How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions “I was frankly pole-axed by this magnificent book. Davidson resets the entire debate on the character of revolutions: bourgeois, democratic and socialist. He’s sending me, at least, back to the library.”
Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums
“This is, quite simply, the finest book of its kind.”
Tony McKenna, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books
“What should our conception of a bourgeois revolution be, if it is to enlighten rather than to mislead ? Neil Davidson’s instructive and provocative answer is given through a history both of a set of concepts and of those social settings in which they found application.His book is an impressive contribution both to the history of ideas and to political philosophy.”
Alasdair MacIntyre, author, After Virtue
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Neil Davidson (1957-2020) lectured in Sociology at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Glasgow. He authored The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000), Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003), for which he was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (2012), Holding Fast to an Image of the Past (2014) and We Cannot Escape History (2015). Davidson was on the editorial boards of rs21 and the Scottish Left Project website, and was a member of the Radical Independence Campaign.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599640 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 272 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A major collection of essays and interviews from pioneering freedom fighter Angela Y. Davis
For over fifty years, Angela Y. Davis has been at the forefront of collective movements for abolition and feminism and the fight against state violence and oppression. Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, the first of two important new volumes, brings together an essential collection of Davis’s essays, conversations, and interviews over the years, showing how her thinking has sharpened and evolved even as she has remained uncompromising in her commitment to collective liberation. In pieces that address the history of abolitionist practice and thought in the United States and globally, the unique contributions of women to abolitionist struggles, and stories and lessons of organizing inside and beyond the prison walls, Davis is always curious, always incisive, and always learning.
Rich and rewarding, Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises will appeal to fans of Davis, to students and scholars reflecting on her life and work, and to readers new to feminism, abolition, and struggles for liberation.
PRAISE:
“In a brilliantly observant, profoundly knowledgeable, and unfailingly original text, the author’s passion and eloquence render even the driest facts fascinating… even the staunchest Davis devotees are likely to discover new material and new ways to reimagine a more just world. A must-read essay collection for anyone invested in racial equity.”
Kirkus
“An activist. An author. A scholar. An abolitionist. A legend.”
Ibram X. Kendi
Before the world knew what intersectionality was, the scholar, writer and activist was living it, arguing not just for Black liberation, but for the rights of women and queer and transgender people as well.”
New York Times
“As an iconic educator, scholar, and leader in the civil rights movement, Angela Davis is an obligatory add to your list of must-read black authors.”
O Magazine
On Angela Davis: An Autobiography
“Riveting; as fresh and relevant today as it was almost 50 years ago. The words fire off the page with humour, anger and eloquence.”
The Guardian
“Angela Davis: An Autobiography continues to fulfill that goal as the rare book that even almost 50 years later feels timely and relevant. Maybe too relevant, considering how little has changed in the interim.”
Los Angeles Times
“This new edition of the autobiography is meant to bring Davis and her story to a new generation of readers, who can still identify with her experiences. Still a key work in the areas of prison abolition and feminism, this reissue of a classic autobiography deserves a place of honor in any collection.”
Library Journal
On Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
“This is vintage Angela: insightful, curious, observant, and brilliant, asking and answering questions about events in this new century that look surprisingly similar to the last century.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal
“Angela Davis once again offers us an incisive, urgent, and comprehensive understanding of systematic racism, the grounds for intersectional analysis and solidarity, and the importance of working together as equals to unmask and depose systems of injustice…. Angela Davis gathers in her lucid words our luminous history and the most promising future of freedom.”
Judith Butler
“She has eyes in the back of our head. With her we can survive and resist.”
Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition, and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598988 • US $28.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 400 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“An activist. An author. A scholar. An abolitionist. A legend.” —Ibram X. Kendi
This beautiful new edition of Angela Davis’s classic Autobiography features an expansive new introduction by the author.
“I am excited to be publishing this new edition of my autobiography with Haymarket Books at a time when so many are making collective demands for radical change and are seeking a deeper understanding of the social movements of the past.” —Angela Y. Davis
Angela Davis has been a political activist at the cutting edge of the Black Liberation, feminist, queer, and prison abolitionist movements for more than 50 years. First published and edited by Toni Morrison in 1974, An Autobiography is a powerful and commanding account of her early years in struggle. Davis describes her journey from a childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, to one of the most significant political trials of the century: from her political activity in a New York high school to her work with the U.S. Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and the Soledad Brothers; and from the faculty of the Philosophy Department at UCLA to the FBI’s list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. Told with warmth, brilliance, humor and conviction, Angela Davis’s autobiography is a classic account of a life in struggle with echoes in our own time.
PRAISE:
“Her book is riveting; as fresh and relevant today as it was almost 50 years ago. The words fire off the page with humor, anger and eloquence.”
The Guardian
“One of the great activist autobiographies by one of this country’s greatest ever activists…Davis is a living legend, one of the inspirational public figures of the last century, and this iconic portrait of the revolutionary as a young woman will remind you why.”
LitHub
“This new edition of the autobiography is meant to bring Davis and her story to a new generation of readers, who can still identify with her experiences. Still a key work in the areas of prison abolition and feminism, this reissue of a classic autobiography deserves a place of honor in any collection.”
Library Journal
“An activist. An author. A scholar. An abolitionist. A legend.”
Ibram X. Kendi
“Before the world knew what intersectionality was, the scholar, writer and activist was living it, arguing not just for Black liberation, but for the rights of women and queer and transgender people as well.”
The New York Times
“If anyone is qualified to make an assessment on the current situation, it is Angela Davis. She has spent five decades as an intellectual campaigning for racial justice, yet the causes she has pursued – prison reform, defunding the police, restructuring the bail system – had, until recently, been considered too radical for mainstream political thinking.”
The Guardian
“As an iconic educator, scholar, and leader in the civil rights movement, Angela Davis is an obligatory add to your list of must-read black authors.”
O Magazine
“In a new edition of the classic Angela Davis: An Autobiography, readers get something of a unicorn: A period account of living through the late ’60s and early ’70s that still feels vital and relevant two decades into the 21st century…’My contribution, like the work of others who have attempted to narrate aspects of the anti-racist struggle, will hopefully help us better understand the world today,’ Davis writes now. Angela Davis: An Autobiography continues to fulfill that goal as the rare book that even almost 50 years later feels timely and relevant.”
Los Angeles Times
“Angela Davis has spent more than 50 years working for social justice. This summer, society started to catch up.”
Ava Duvernay, Vanity Fair
“An activist. An author. A scholar. An abolitionist. A legend.”
Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. She is the author of several books, including Women, Race, and Class and Are Prisons Obsolete? She is the subject of the acclaimed documentary Free Angela and All Political Prisoners and is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis is the recipient of the 2020 Cultural Freedom Prize from Lannan Foundation.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465644 • US $15.95 • 4 3/4 in x 7 1/2 in • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.
Reflecting on the importance of Black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today’s struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles—from the Black freedom movement to the South African antiapartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today’s struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.
Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that “freedom is a constant struggle.”
PRAISE:
“In this latest text of her magisterial corpus, Angela Davis puts forward her brilliant analyses and resilient witness here and abroad. In a clear and concise manner, she embodies and enacts ‘intersectionality’ — a structural intellectual and political response to the dynamics of violence, White Supremacy, patriarchy, state power, capitalist markets, and imperial policies.”
Dr. Cornel West, from the Foreword
“Here is someone worthy of the Ancestors who delivered her. Angela Davis has stood her ground on every issue important to the health of our people and the planet. It is impossible to read her words or hear her voice and not be moved to comprehension and gratitude for our incredible luck in having her with us.”
Alice Walker
“Whether you’ve grown up with the courage and conscience of Angela Davis, or are discovering her for the first time, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is a small book that will be a huge help in daily life and action, from exposing the ‘prison industrial complex’ that she named long ago to understanding that leaders are only leaders if they empower others. She herself exposes facts and makes connections, but also leads in the most important way — by example.”
Gloria Steinem
“Angela Davis’ new book made me think of what Dear Nelson Mandela kept reminding us, that we must be willing to embrace that long walk to freedom. Understanding what it takes to really be free, to have no fear, is the first and most important step one has to make before undertaking this journey. Angela is the living proof that this arduous challenge can also be an exhilarating and beautiful one.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“She has eyes in the back of our head. With her we can survive and resist.”
John Berger
“This is vintage Angela: insightful, curious, observant, and brilliant, asking and answering questions about events in this new century that look surprisingly similar to the last century.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal
“Angela Davis once again offers us an incisive, urgent, and comprehensive understanding of systematic racism, the grounds for intersectional analysis and solidarity, and the importance of working together as equals to unmask and depose systems of injustice. This wide-ranging and brilliant set of essays includes a trenchant analysis of police violence against people of color, of the systematic incarceration of black people in America, the grounds of Palestinian solidarity for the Left, the affirmation of transgender inclusion, and the necessity of opposing the G4S corporation and its high-profit empire dedicated to the institutionalization of racism in the name of security. These essays take us back in history the founders of revolutionary and anti-racist struggle, but they also take us toward the possibility of ongoing intersectional solidarity and struggle. Angela Davis gathers in her lucid words our luminous history and the most promising future of freedom.”
Judith Butler
“Davis teaches us to imagine a kind of liberation we do not yet know and cannot yet name.”
Truthout
“Freedom is a Constant Struggle…leaves us with the exhilarating feeling that we are indeed part of something historical…We are lucky to have people such as Davis to show us the way, or at least to accompany us as spiritual guides in the search for a better world.”
Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. Davis is the recipient of the 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.
Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University. He is best known for his classic Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and his new memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He appears frequently on Tavis Smiley, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Colbert Report, CNN, and C-Span.
Frank Barat was the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. His books include Gaza in Crisis, On Palestine, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, and We Still Here.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592580 • US $15.95 • 5.25 in x 7.5 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and a challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate—even incompatible—political projects.
In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century.
This pathbreaking book also features illustrations documenting the work of grassroots organizers embodying abolitionist feminist practice.
Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated out of vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. highlights necessary historical linkages, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to imagine a future where we can all thrive.
PRAISE:
“Abolition. Feminism. Now. underlines the fact that we are living in a moment of epic struggles, not simply over questions of race and class but also of gender and social reproduction. Not only over the scale of prisons and police, but the shape of schools, health care, and the commons.”
LA Review of Books
“Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a demand in every way. It pushes readers not to accept simple stories but to embrace complexity and new ways of thinking. But it is also a celebration of feminist agitators and freedom fighters who undermine the carceral state while building new sources safety, repair, and accountability. Of an ever-changing, growing, and evolving movement that puts survivors at the center of its analysis, not the periphery. And of a historic political struggle that considers freedom worth the fight. And, in the end, the authors make it clear that abolition feminism isn’t on its way; it’s already unfolding all around us.”
Nia T. Evans, Boston Review
“This is the book we’ve all needed for a long long time.”
Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives
“In this powerful, wise and well-crafted book, filled with insight and provocation, Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie make it patently and abundantly clear why abolitionist feminism is necessary. Offering vivid snapshots from a political movement, the book explains how organizing to end violence without turning to violent institutions such as prisons and the police as remedies, is how we learn what we need to do to make change possible. Abolitionist feminists, they teach us, in taking up the slow, practical and painstaking work of campaigning, also expand our political horizons and create imaginative tools for world building. Attentive to histories of organising that are too quickly erased, and alive to new possibilities for working collectively in the present time, this book is as capacious and demanding as the abolitionist feminism it calls for. It gives us a name for what we want. Abolitionism. Now.”
Sara Ahmed, author of Willful Subjects
“This extraordinary book makes the most compelling case I’ve ever seen for the indivisibility of feminism and abolition, for the inseparability of gendered and state violence, domestic policing and militarism, the street, the home, and the world..”
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“This little book is a massive offering on where we have been, where we are right now, and what we are imagining and organizing into being as abolition feminists. Breaking us out of every container and binary, Abolition. Feminism. Now. invites us to be in the complexity and contradictions of our humanity in the massive intersectional work of structural change. The ideas of abolition and feminism are rivers moving through us towards a liberated future which we can already feel existing within and between us. Invigorating and rooting, this text is instantly required reading, showing us how everything we have done and are doing is accumulating towards a post-punitive, transformative future—our lineage is bursting with brilliance! And we are prefiguring this possibility—wherever we are is a site of practice, a place where we are collectively becoming accountable to a justice infused with humanity, compassion and the belief that we can change. This book is a lineage of words and visuals, showing us the beauty of our efforts, and gently reminding us that we are not failing—we are learning, and we are changing.”
adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice
“In Abolition. Feminism. Now., Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie—four visionaries whose longstanding abolitionist work is inseparable from their feminist principles—brilliantly show how abolition feminism has always offered the radical tools we need for revolutionary change. Feminist approaches to the carceral regime reveal the connections between state violence and intimate violence, between prisons and family policing, and between local and global organizing. By illuminating the genealogy of anti-carceral feminism and its vital struggles against all carceral systems, the authors compel us to see the urgent necessity of abolition feminism now.”
Dorothy Roberts, author, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build A Safer World
Praise for Freedom is a Constant Struggle, by Angela Y. Davis:
“Angela Davis’s new book made me think of what Dear Nelson Mandela kept reminding us, that we must be willing to embrace that long walk to freedom. Understanding what it takes to really be free, to have no fear, is the first and most important step one has to make before undertaking this journey. Angela is the living proof that this arduous challenge can also be an exhilarating and beautiful one.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“Whether you’ve grown up with the courage and conscience of Angela Davis, or are discovering her for the first time, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is a small book that will be a huge help in daily life and action, from exposing the ‘prison industrial complex’ that she named long ago to understanding that leaders are only leaders if they empower others. She herself exposes facts and makes connections, but also leads in the most important way by example.”
Gloria Steinem
“This is vintage Angela: insightful, curious, observant, and brilliant, asking and answering questions about events in this new century that look surprisingly similar to the last century.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal
“Here is someone worthy of the Ancestors who delivered her. Angela Davis has stood her ground on every issue important to the health of our people and the planet. It is impossible to read her words or hear her voice and not be moved to comprehension and gratitude for our incredible luck in having her with us.”
Alice Walker
“Angela Davis once again offers us an incisive, urgent, and comprehensive understanding of systematic racism, the grounds for intersectional analysis and solidarity, and the importance of working together as equals to unmask and depose systems of injustice. This wide-ranging and brilliant set of essays includes a trenchant analysis of police violence against people of color, of the systematic incarceration of black people in America, the grounds of Palestinian solidarity for the Left, the affirmation of transgender inclusion, and the necessity of opposing the G4S corporation and its high-profit empire dedicated to the institutionalization of racism in the name of security. These essays take us back in history to the founders of revolutionary and anti-racist struggle, but they also take us toward the possibility of ongoing intersectional solidarity and struggle. Angela Davis gathers in her lucid words our luminous history and the most promising future of freedom.”
Judith Butler
“She has eyes in the back of our head. With her we can survive and resist.”
John Berger
“In this latest text of her magisterial corpus, Angela Davis puts forward her brilliant analyses and resilient witness here and abroad. In a clear and concise manner, she embodies and enacts ‘intersectionality’ a structural intellectual and political response to the dynamics of violence, White Supremacy, patriarchy, state power, capitalist markets, and imperial policies.”
Angela Y. Davis is professor emerita of history of consciousness and feminist studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom is a Constant Struggle.
Gina Dent is associate professor of feminist studies, history of consciousness, and legal studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the editor of Black Popular Culture and lectures and writes on African diaspora literary and cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and critical area studies. Her current project, Visualizing Abolition, grows out of her work as an advocate for transformative and transitional justice and prison abolition.
Erica R. Meiners is a professor of education and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Northeastern Illinois University. A writer, organizer and educator, Meiners is the author For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State, coauthor of The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence, and a coeditor of The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom.
Beth E. Richie is head of the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice and professor of Black studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Richie is the author of Compelled to Crime: the Gender Entrapment of Black Battered Women and Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation and a coeditor of The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom.
ISBN-13: 9781608462681 • Trade paper • 5 1/4 x 7 7/8 • US $16 • 224 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This book seeks to show how a clear understanding of class makes sense of what is at stake in a broad number of contemporary art’s most persistent debates, from definitions of political art, to the troubled status of “outsider” and street art, to the question of how we maintain faith in art itself in a dysfunctional world.
PRAISE:
“In this provocative essay collection, Artinfo executive editor Davis’s thesis makes the relentless theoretical debates over art and politics seem tangential. ‘There are no formal or aesthetic solutions to the political and economic dilemmas that art faces — only political and economic solutions,’ he writes. An old-fashioned Marxist, Davis examines class and inequality to address problems that bedevil contemporary art (the distortions effected by scandalous amounts of cash, for instance), problems that he claims are also those of society at large. Davis is an intellectually clearheaded critic dishing out some tough truths, often backed up with statistics, to the rarefied ‘art world.’ For example, he attributes the underrepresentation of female artists in galleries and collections to the gender pay gap and the absence of an ‘activist-oriented women’s rights movement.’ He condemns what he aptly calls ‘aesthetic politics’ as a delusion and an ‘excuse not to be engaged in the difficult, ugly business of organizing.’ His claim that visual art is essentially a form of ‘middle-class labor’ dispels the lofty romance that obscures the social position of artists. The book reframes the production and sale of art in tough terms, which is why the collection’s centerpiece, ‘9.5 Theses on Art and Class,’ should be required reading for art professionals. In this first book, Davis proves himself a critic to be reckoned with.”
Publishers Weekly
“Just when it seemed that contemporary art writing and the subject of real-life politics had permanently parted ways, along comes the young New York critic Ben Davis with a book that brings them together. No cheerleading here, no swoony prosody, no easy kiss-offs; just smart, ardent, illusion-puncturing observation and analysis on the intersection of art, commerce, and — the elephant in the art fair V.I.P. lounge — class. None of this would matter much of he didn’t tell us why we should care, but he does. Under all his excoriations lies a faith in art as an agent of transformation toward a post-neoliberal, post-greed society that could be, should be.”
Holland Cotter art critic for the New York Times
“Bracing, provocative, exasperated, and good humored, Davis is skilfully committed to getting the best out of art and art theory — and the world.”
China Miéville
“9.5 Theses on Art and Class is the first book I’ve read by an art critic that spoke to the world I lived and worked in as an artist. Incisive, irreverent, and intellectually fearless. A truth-bomb of a book.”
PMolly Crabapple
“Among excellent younger critics now is Ben Davis.”
Peter Schjeldahl (art critic for the New Yorker), in Frieze Magazine
“Ben Davis’ ‘On the Age of Semi-Post-Postmodernism’ engaged directly with the complexity of the present moment, refusing a flight into this or that idea of ‘the contemporary’ while his ‘9.5 Theses on Art and Class’ gave an apparently un-publishable voice to an unarticulated, if widely held sentiment about the economic reality of the art market.”
Stephen Squibb, Best Art Writing of 2010, Artlog
“‘Postmodernism,’ my fellow art scribe Ben Davis wrote in paraphrase of the cultural critic Fredric Jameson, ‘is the cultural logic of neoliberalism.’ No truer sentence has been penned in the past decade; no more radical idea has been elevated from beneath the collective proboscis.”
Christian Viveros-Faune, Village Voice
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ben Davis was born in Seattle, Washington. He currently lives and works in New York City where he is Executive Editor at Artinfo.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Language/Territory
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English in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594621 • US $19.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
It is a scary and disorienting time for art, as it is a scary and disorienting time in general. Aesthetic experience is both overshadowed by the spectacle of current events and pressed into new connection with them. The self-image of art as a social good is collapsing under the weight of capitalism’s dysfunction.
In these incisive essays, art critic Ben Davis makes sense of our extreme present as an emerging “after-culture”—a culture whose forms and functions are being radically reshaped by cataclysmic events. In the face of catastrophe, he holds out hope that reckoning with the new realities of art, technology, activism, and the media, can help us weather the super-storms of the future.
PRAISE:
“When future art historians seek perspectives on our era of billion-dollar auctions, carbon-footprint art fairs, and market-driven diversity, this collection of essays by the American critic Ben Davis is a text they’ll consult. An alert data hoarder, a shrewd analyst, and a propulsive stylist, Davis views the hot-air balloon called the art world in a broad political context. He writes with the coolness of a sociologist, the passion of someone with a horse in the race, and the smarts to avoid both cheerleading and snootiness.”
New York Times, Best Art Books of 2022
“Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy is worth it for the chillingly ingenious prologue alone. This book is for everyone who cares about art and anyone who is concerned with culture in the digital age. Contemporary art might seem like a bewildering indulgence for the rich, but, as explored in Davis’s glistening, passionate yet coolly precise prose, its power to shape our perceptions and our politics extends far beyond the art-fair cocoon. In a world of AI-enabled “prosumers”, “the technological society that has made plausible the promise that everyone can be an artist” has become “a new instrument of alienation” via which the aesthetic and hence the real has come to be defined by an ever more powerful technocracy. Brilliant, revelatory, urgent.”
Times Literary Supplement Best Books of the Year 2022
”Ben Davis understands that you can’t truly understand art without an analysis of the economic system that created the artist. He understands that movements create change and that artists only create change if they are involved with that movement in other ways than being the expert observer. Here’s to art criticism with an axe to grind.”
Boots Riley
“Ben Davis is the only art critic I read. These erudite and entertaining essays take the reader on a mind-bending tour through our fragmented, confounding, and commodified cultural landscape, providing welcome historical and political context to many of the high-profile controversies and existential challenges that define our age. Ever attuned to questions of power and profit, Davis never yields to cynicism or forecloses the possibility of creativity’s role in our collective liberation. This kaleidoscopic collection will help you see and comprehend the world anew—which is, in my book, what good art should do.”
Astra Taylor
“Amid the cultural sandstorm of infinite memes and ravenous engagement algorithms, rare sneakers and mythic NFTs, made-for-Instagram immersive installations and the relentless firehose of TikTok clips, Ben Davis asks a simple question “What about Art?” What follows is an indispensable series of provocations on the future of culture, politics, and society that speak to some of the most urgent issues facing societies where culture, capitalism, and identity have become nearly indistinguishable from one another. Following in the footsteps of theorists like John Berger, Stuart Hall, and Lucy Lippard, Ben Davis is an essential guide to the politics of culture in the 21st Century.”
Trevor Paglen
Praise for 9.5 Theses on Art and Class:
“Just when it seemed that contemporary art writing and the subject of real-life politics had permanently parted ways, along comes the young New York critic Ben Davis with a book that brings them together. No cheerleading here, no swoony prosody, no easy kiss-offs; just smart, ardent, illusion-puncturing observation and analysis on the intersection of art, commerce, and the elephant in the art-fair VIP lounge class. None of this would matter much if he didn ‘t tell us why we should care, but he does. Under all his excoriations lies a faith in art as an agent of transformation toward a post-neoliberal, post-greed society that could be, should be.”
The New York Times
“Like watching an expert pole-vaulter ply his craft, witnessing this critic reach for first principles in this day and age constitutes its own reward… On 9.5 Theses, the verdict is crystal: This is one helluva pamphlet.”
The Village Voice
“…a riveting manifesto…”
New York Magazine
“By reminding artists where they really stand, Davis hopes, in the end, to put them on firmer footing, both politically and creatively.”
BOOKFORUM
“Davis is an intellectually clearheaded critic dishing out some tough truths, often backed up with statistics, to the rarefied ‘art world.’ . . . The book reframes the production and sale of art in tough terms, which is why the collection ‘s centerpiece, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, should be required reading for art professionals. In this first book, Davis proves himself a critic to be reckoned with.”
Publishers Weekly
“9.5 Theses on Art and Class is the first book I ‘ve read by an art critic that spoke to the world I lived and worked in as an artist. Incisive, irreverent, and intellectually fearless. A truth-bomb of a book.”
Molly Crabapple, artist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ben Davis is author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, and essays for The Baffler, Jacobin, the New York Times, and elsewhere. A 2019 survey of art writers ranked him as the fifth most influential critic in the United States.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN 9780060516208 • US $15.99 • 480 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In The Human Story, James C. Davis takes us on a journey to ancient times, telling how peoples of the world settled down and founded cities, conquered neighbors, and established religions, and continues over the course of history, when they fought two nearly global wars and journeyed into space.
Davis’s account is swift and clear, never dull or dry. He lightens it with pungent anecdotes and witty quotes. Although this compact volume may not be hard to pick up, it’s definitely hard to put down.
For example, on the death of Alexander the Great, who in a decade had never lost a single battle, and who had staked out an empire that spanned the entire Near East and Egypt, Davis writes: “When they heard how ill he was, the king’s devoted troops insisted on seeing him. He couldn’t speak, but as his soldiers—every one—filed by in silence, Alexander’s eyes uttered his farewells. He died in June 323 B.C., at the ripe old age of thirty-two.”
In similar fashion Davis recounts Russia’s triumph in the space race as it happened on an autumn night in 1957: “A bugle sounded, flames erupted, and with a roar like rolling thunder, Russia’s rocket lifted off. It bore aloft the earth’s first artificial satellite, a shiny sphere the size of a basketball. Its name was Sputnik, meaning ‘companion’ or ‘fellow traveler’ (through space). The watchers shouted, ‘Off. She’s off. Our baby’s off!’ Some danced; others kissed and waved their arms.”
Though we live in an age of many doubts, James C. Davis thinks we humans are advancing. As The Human Story ends, he concludes, “The world’s still cruel; that’s understood, / But once was worse. So far so good.”
PRAISE:
“At his best, Davis does for human history what Stephen Hawking did for the atom and the universe—take a step back from the details and translate them into common terms. . . . It is refreshing to have a treatment of human life at once learned and optimistic, and one that so forcefully focuses on the primacy of ideas in our triumphant story.”
Publishers Weekly
“Davis is an academic historian reaching for a mass readership. . . . However, there’s nothing simplistic about his prose style. Every average reader of Davis’ survey will likely have detailed familiarity with some subject and will sense that the author’s grasp of it (whether of the history of health, religions, or empires) reveals him to be a reliable pathfinder to the central facts and narrative of unfamiliar terrain as well. Regarding history as a progressive process overall, Davis’ reconnoitering of humanity’s record of depravity and enlightenment is a wise choice as an introduction to world history.”
Booklist
“A brisk and cheerfully traditional trip through our history, from homo erectus to George W. Bush”
Kirkus Reviews
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
James C. Davis taught history at the University of Pennsylvania for thirty-four years. He is the author of four other books, dealing with Venice, the early history of European nations, and the lives of peasants and blue-collar workers.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For English-language inquiries, please contact Roam Agency at roam[at]roamagency.com
For all other languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Saddle-stiched • ISBN-13: 9781608462179 • US $4.95 • 5.5 x 8.5 • 48 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
With wit, humor and a remarkable grasp of the political marginalization of the poor and working class by the 1%, Mike Davis crafts a striking defense of the Occupy Wall Street movement. This inspired pamphlet brilliantly undertakes the most pressing question facing the struggle – what is to be done next?
PRAISE:
“Davis’ work is the cruel and perpetual folly of the ruling elites.”
The New York Times
“A rare combination of an author, Rachel Carson and Upton Sinclair all in one.”
Susan Faludi
Praise for City of Quartz:
“A brilliant exegesis on how cities cannot prosper by wealth alone.”
Los Angeles Times
Praise for Late Victorian Holocausts
“Davis has given us a book of substantial contemporary relevance as well as great historical interest … this highly informative book foes well beyond its immediate focus.”
Amartya Sen, New York Times
“Davis, a brilliant maverick scholar, sets the triumph of late-nineteenth-century Western imperialism in the context of the catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time. This is groundbreaking, mind-stretching stuff.”
The Independent
“The global climate meets a globalizing political economy, the fundamentals of one clashing with the fundamentalisms of the other. Mike Davis tells the story with zest, anger, and insight.”
Stephen J. Pyne, author of World Fire
“Davis’ range is stunning … He combines political economy, meteorology, and ecology with vivid narratives to create a book that is both a gripping read and a major conceptual achievement. Losts of us talk about writing ‘world history’ and ‘inter-disciplinary history’: here is the genuine article.”
Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great Divergence
“Eloquent and passionate, this is a veritable Black Book of liberal capitalism.”
Tariq Ali
Praise for Magical Urbanism:
“Fans of Mike Davis’ slash-and-burn prose and take-no-prisoners credo will not be disappointed.”
Andrew Ross, Bookforum
“Magical Urbanism is a lively, trenchant inquiry into a demographic phenomenon of great importance.”
Times Literary Supplement
“In this short book … Davis brings his characteristic analytical energy, eye for detail and exhaustive research to bear on an important phenomenon that remains mostly unexplored.”
In These Times
Praise for No One is Illegal
“Brilliant, provocative, and exhaustively researched.”
Scott Malcomson, Village Voice Literary Supplement
“Perceptive and rigorous.”
David Montgomery, The Nation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Writer, historian, and activist Mike Davis is the author of more than 20 books and more than 100 book chapters and essays, includingIn Praise of Barbarians(Haymarket Books). A former meat cutter and long-distance truck driver, Davis has been a fellow at the Getty Institute, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998, received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2007, and is the recipient of the 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Davis is Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902578 • US $24.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Dead Cities, published more than twenty years ago and now finally back in print, is a blistering and characteristically prescient analysis of what happens to the urban environment when profit is left to rule unrestrained.
The third book in a trilogy that began with City of Quartz, Dead Cities‘ wide-ranging, incisive, and hauntingly relevant essays ask us to consider what we would find if we put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis, and provide a riveting account of urban disasters—natural, man-made, and those (as in the case of climate calamity) where the distinction is impossible to make. Using environmental science as his frame of understanding, Davis begins his examination by sifting through the rubble of the Twin Towers in the wake of 9/11, identifying the seeds of war already germinating in the scorched soil of Ground Zero, and closes by considering how underprepared our hollowed out urban infrastructure is to deal with shocks of any kind, be they from car bombs or ice storms. Along the way, we are treated to tours of blasted wastelands where American generals built and destroyed replicas of Berlin, glimpses of Las Vegas’s penchant for annihilating its best-known landmarks, and other riveting tales of the dialectic between nature and the city.
Dead Cities abounds with visions of the future, contains echoes of our current moment where conspiracies abound and anxieties drown out official celebrations of prosperity, and offers dreams of alternative paths not taken. Davis’s unifying theme—and challenge to conventional theory—is the radical contingency of the metropolis.
PRAISE:
“If America is over, the prose laureate of its decline is Mike Davis…a vivid indictment of the social and environmental chaos enveloping urban America”
J.G. Ballard
“A crash course in what makes Davis so good.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Davis culls nuggets of avarice and depredation the way miners chisel coal.”
The Nation
“Rangy, astute, switchblade-wicked essays.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Smart and tough: an author with one eye out for the underdog.”
Library Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mike Davis (1946-2022) was a writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian. He is best known for his investigations of power and class in works such as City of Quartz, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Planet of Slums. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism. He was a Getty Scholar (1996-97), and was awarded the World History Association Book Prize, and the Deutscher Memorial Prize. He was recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859424 • US $15 • 5.5 in x 7.5 in • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums attacks the current fashion for empires and white men’s burdens in this blistering collection of radical essays. He skewers such contemporary idols as Niall Ferguson and Howard Dean; debates with Tom Frank about ‘what’s wrong with America’; unlocks some secret doors in the Pentagon and the California prison system; visits Star Wars in the Arctic and vigilantes on the Border; predicts ethnic cleansing in New Orleans more than a year before Katrina; recalls the anarchist avengers of the 1890s and 1960s; remembers ‘Private Ivan’ who defeated fascism; recalls the ‘teeny bopper riots’ on Sunset Strip; and looks at the future of global capitalism from the top of Hubbert’s Peak.
PRAISE:
“A rare combination of an author, [Mike Davis is] Rachel Carson and Upton Sinclair all in one.”
Susan Faludi
“[Davis’ writing is] perceptive and rigorous.”
David Montgomery, The Nation
“[Davis’ work is] brilliant, provocative, and exhaustively researched.”
Writer, historian, and activist Mike Davis is the author of more than 20 books and more than 100 book chapters and essays. A former meat cutter and long-distance truck driver, Davis has been a fellow at the Getty Institute, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998, received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2007, and is the recipient of the 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Davis is Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608468492 • US $19.95 • 420 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In No One Is Illegal, Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis expose the racism of anti-immigration vigilantes and put a human face on the immigrants who daily risk their lives to cross the border to work in the United States. Countering the mounting chorus of anti-immigrant voices, No One Is Illegal debunks the leading ideas behind the often violent right-wing backlash against immigrants, revealing their deep roots in U.S. history and documents the new civil rights movement that has mounted protests around the country to demand justice and dignity for immigrants.
No One Is Illegal features moving, evocative photos from award-winning photographer Julián Cardona. This timely second edition has a new introduction and additional chapters highlighting the ongoing struggle for immigrant rights and the roots of the backlash in the current political moment.
PRAISE:
“Is immigration really a ‘national crisis’? Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis attack the question by revealing the disturbing, centuries-old context for the cross-border working-class, and the resurgence of reactionary anti-immigrant policies and racist vigilante violence. No One Is Illegal powerfullyargues that the borders themselves are barriers to imagining real social justice. An urgent, important, must-read.”
Jeff Chang, author, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
“[The phrase] ‘No human being is illegal’ was coined by Bert Corona in the 1960s. Forty years later, Mike Davis and Justin Akers Chacón tell us the real story about the immigrant worker heroes.
Nativo V. Lopez, president, Mexican American Political Association
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Writer, historian, and activist Mike Davis is the author of more than 20 books and more than 100 book chapters and essays, includingIn Praise of Barbarians(Haymarket Books). A former meat cutter and long-distance truck driver, Davis has been a fellow at the Getty Institute, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998, received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2007, and is the recipient of the 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Davis is Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside.
Justin Akers Chacón is professor of U.S. History and Chicano Studies in San Diego, California. He has contributed to the International Socialist Review and the book Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints (Greenhaven Press).
Julián Cardona was born in 1960 in Zacatecas, Mexico, and migrated to the border city of Juárez with his family as a small child. He worked as a technician in the maquiladora industry before becoming a photojournalist in 1993. In 2004, Cardona received a Cultural Freedom Fellowship from Lannan Foundation.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599701 •US $22.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 336 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A global account of the grassroots environmental movements on the frontlines of the climate crisis.
Environmentalism from Below takes readers inside the popular struggles for environmental liberation in the Global South. These communities—among the most vulnerable to but also least responsible for the climate crisis—have long been at the forefront of the fight to protect imperiled worlds. Today, as the world’s forests burn and our oceans acidify, grassroots movements are tenaciously defending the environmental commons and forging just and sustainable ways of living on Earth.
Scholar and activist Ashley Dawson constructs a gripping narrative of these movements of climate insurgents, from international solidarity organizations like La Via Campesina and Shack Dwellers International to local struggles in South Africa, Colombia, India, Nigeria, and beyond. Taking up the four critical challenges we face in a warming world—food, urban sustainability, energy transition, and conservation—Dawson shows how the unruly power of environmentalism from below is charting an alternative path forward, from challenging industrial agriculture through fights for food sovereignty and agroecology to resisting extractivism using mass nonviolent protest and sabotage.
An urgent, essential intervention, Environmentalism from Below offers a hopeful alternative to the gridlock of UN-based climate negotiations and the narrow nationalism of some Green New Deal efforts. As Dawson reminds us, the fight against ecocide is already being waged worldwide. Building on longstanding traditions of anticolonial struggle, environmentalism from below is a model for a people’s movement for climate justice—one that demands solidarity.
PRAISE:
“Environmentalism from Below is a much-needed and important book. In it, Dawson goes beyond narrow and technocratic imaginaries rooted in the nation-state, but also takes us past abstract romantic appeals to clearly trace the emancipatory potentials of global peoples’ environmental movements. Carefully researched and accessibly written, the book connects food, cities, energy, conservation, debt and borders in a narrative that manages to be both a sharp wake-up call and an optimistic assessment of what our common liberation can look like. This book is a must-read for anyone who feels there must be more to environmental justice than climate accords.”
Gianpaolo Baiocchi, director of the Urban Democracy Lab, New York University, and author of We, the Sovereign
“Environmentalism from Below offers a politically erudite and passionate cacophony of momentum drawing from the world’s variegated yet articulated grassroots, all attempting in solidarity to upend the transgression of key planetary ecological relations. Deploying an intersectional form of analysis and mobilization, the book powerfully examines the interplay among how food is produced, cities inhabited, space enclosed, and energy generated in an effort to abolish the debilitating indebtedness of the majority to capital’s voracious calculations and their entrapment amidst borders. The book embodies the exigencies for the synergies of multiple movements underway—of people, affordances, collective capacities, rights, and resources—toward more just dispositions and the prospect of attaining a livable world.”
AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, and author of The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture
“Environmentalism from Below brims with fresh insights and new approaches to some of the most vexing issue of our time. In lucid, passionate prose, Ashley Dawson charts the global alliances forged from below against unregulated plunder and ecocide. Few scholars can match Dawson’s vast transnational experience as an environmental scholar-activist. His global yet textured understanding of resistance movements from Bolivia, South Africa, India, Brazil, the U.S. and far beyond makes this a profound contribution to our understanding of how common struggles are forged. Environmentalism from Below is sure to become a staple in the environmental classroom as well as a guiding light for activists.”
Rob Nixon, Barron Family Professor of Environment and Humanities, Princeton, and author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
“Ashley Dawson takes us on a wondrous tour of communities working for life after capitalism. These grassroots ecologies are so potent, and their promise so profound, they’ve elicited lethal violence from the state and private sector. For that reason, Environmentalism from Below is also an atlas of the world’s most important global struggles.”
Raj Patel, Research Professor, University of Texas at Austin, and co-author of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
“On a global scale humankind faces multiple existential crises as a result of climate change and the systematic environmental degradation that has brought us collectively to the brink. Populations in the global south are most at risk, owing to decades of austerity measures imposed on peasant and indigenous communities by the cruel alliances of neocolonial and neoliberal authoritarian governments, transnational corporations, and a host of multilateral NGOs. Ashley Dawson reframes these grim realities to instead emphasize how grassroots communities proactively resist the privatization and toxic exploitation of the natural world in innovative and empowering ways. Altogether, their examples stand as roadmaps for what many more of us will likely face in coming years.”
Dina Gilio-Whitaker, author of As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock
“True to its aim, this book celebrates ideas and actions that come from below. It is a book that deserves to be celebrated as it presents clear evidence of active organizing and resistance by climate victims and the dispossessed against manifestations of neocolonial and oppressive policies and actions. Environmentalism from Below is a book that fossil fuel tycoons and other purveyors of fictional environmental optimism will hate.”
Nnimmo Bassey, author of To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa
“Though debates rage on the climate left about what language or strategy ought to be taken in order to confront the climate crisis, those involved in such conversations frequently seem to have their minds in the clouds and no grounded connection to existing class struggles. Dawson stands these critics on their head by foregrounding the wildly diverse, actually-existing, and ineluctably global people’s movements for climate justice. In these scattered movements of urban squatters, migrants, industrial workers, peasant farmers, feminists, and Indigenous nations, one finds more comprehensive strategies for confronting imperialism and capitalism, which are the roots of environmental crises. Environmentalism From Below is a readable, practical, and inspiring guide to building ecological counterpower.”
Kai Bosworth, author of Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century
“Ashley Dawson’s book focuses on environmentalism from below and enlightens us on all those central issues such as the food model, agroecology, the debates on the just energy transition, the question of the sustainability of life in big cities, and climate debt. Written with commitment and elegance, this is an indispensable book for understanding the re-existence process and the organizational fabric, especially in the global south.”
Maristella Svampa, Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact from the South
Praise for Extinction:
“An elegant, controversial thesis”
The Guardian
“A welcome contribution to the growing literature on this slow-motion calamity.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“Dawson’s searing report on species loss will sober up anyone who has drunk the Kool-Aid of green capitalism.”
Andrew Ross
“Fusing social and ecological challenges to power is the only way forward … a long-awaited, elegant and comprehensive expression of why the time is right to make these links.”
Patrick Bond
Praise for Extreme Cities: Named One of the Top 10 Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly and Planetizen
“Extreme Cities is a ground-breaking investigation of the vulnerability of our cities in an age of climate chaos. We feel safe and protected in the middle of our great urban areas, but as Sandy and Katrina made clear, and as this fine book reveals anew, the massive shifts on our earth increasingly lay bare the social inequalities that fracture our civilization.“
Bill McKibben, author and founder of 350.org
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. He is the author of several books on key topics in the environmental humanities, including People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, and Extinction: A Radical History. A member of the Public Power NY campaign and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist. Dawson lives in Queens, New York.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
AGAINST APARTHEID
The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities
Ashley Dawson and Bill V. Mullen, editors
Foreword by Ali Abunimah
Haymarket Books (Fall 2015, world English rights)
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465262 • US $19.95 • 5 1/4 in x 8 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Focusing on the complicity of Israeli universities in maintaining the occupation of Palestine, and on the repression of academic and political freedom for Palestinians, Against Apartheid powerfully explains why scholars and students throughout the world should refuse to do business with Israeli institutions. This rich collection of essays is a handbook for scholars and activists.
Contributors include Kristian Davis Bailey, Omar Barghouti, Tithi Bhattacharya, Vincente M. Diaz, Haidar Eid, Noura Erakat, Diane Feeley, David Finkel, Sami Hermez, Rima Kapitan, David Lloyd, Sunaina Maira, Joseph Massad, Nerdeen Mohsen, Nadine Naber, Rima Najjar-Merriman, David Palumbo-Liu, Ilan Pappé, Andrew Ross, Steven Salaita, Malini Schueller, Sarah Schulman, Joan Scott, Magid Shihade, Mayssun Sukarieh, Lisa Taraki, Salim Vally.
PRAISE:
“A stunning collection by leading scholar-activists–offering rigorous, challenging, clearly argued and fiercely urgent examinations of the role of the academic boycott in the Palestinian struggle for freedom. It is crucial reading for anyone interested in the intellectual and moral underpinnings of the BDS movement in the academy.”
Rebecca Vilkomerson, Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace
“This book is a tour de force: a must read that belongs on the nightstand of every decent human being on this earth concerned with peace and justice. Superbly edited, it brings together the most powerful and cogent cases ever made for BDS: the now widely global, non-violent civil disobedience that Palestinians and their supporters have launched against the vicious monstrosity of Zionist theft of their homeland. BDS is the civilized people’s response to the barbarity of Israeli colonial occupation of Palestine and Against Apartheid provides a relentlessly persuasive body of brilliant scholarship to prove the point. Do not miss it!”
Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York
“Voices resound through this book with the reasoned argument that Israeli apartheid must be ended – and the way for intellectuals and artists to participate in this struggle is to boycott Israeli institutions that participate in and benefit from the occupation of Palestinian lands. This is an intellectual guidebook for the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement.”
Vijay Prashad, editor, Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation
“A specter is haunting Israel–the specter of a new anti-apartheid movement, working to end occupation, home demolitions, illegal settlements, detentions, relentless state violence, and the complicity of its most respected institutions in the brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people. Against Apartheid is its text, its manifesto. It is at once a powerful indictment of Israeli apartheid and the university’s role in designing, maintaining, and protecting the system, and an inspiring history of how Palestinian activists, artists, and intellectuals turned a global appeal into a global movement.”
Robin D. G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of U.S. History at UCLA
“The explosive growth of the BDS movement on US campuses has been one of the sparks that is firing the critical exit of business from Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements, and it owes much of its weight to many of the writers of this book. There is already a sea change in attitudes around the world to Israel’s decades long record of impunity for the violent dispossession of Palestinians, the assassinations of their leaders, the deaths of their children, the theft of their land and water, the denial of dignity and hope in their shameful refugee camps across the region. Key to this book’s intervention is its demonstration of the silent complicity between Israeli universities and the military establishment. This alone is enough to force a rethink for those who still think boycotting Israeli universities is an issue of freedom of speech.”
Victoria Brittain, author, Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He is the author of Capitalism and Extinction (PM Press, 2015), The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature (2013) and Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Michigan, 2007), and co-editor of three essay collections: Democracy, the State, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge, 2009); Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (Michigan, 2009); and Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Duke, 2007). He is former editor of Social Text Online and of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom.
Bill V. Mullen is Professor of American Studies and English at Purdue University. He is a member of the Advisory Board for USACBI (United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) and faculty advisor for Purdue Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2012 he was a member of a USACBI delegation to Palestine. He is the author of Un-American: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution, Afro-Orientalism, and Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935-1946. His writing on Palestine and academic boycott has appeared in Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, Social Text and International Socialist Review. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Ali Abunimah is the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli Palestinian Impasse, The Battle for Justice in Palestine, and cofounder and director of the widely acclaimed publication The Electronic Intifada. Based in the United States, he has written hundreds of articles and been an active part of the movement for justice in Palestine for 20 years. He is the recipient of a 2013 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591545 • US $16.95 • 5.5 in x 7.25 in • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In 1971, Eddie Conway, Lieutenant of Security for the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party, was convicted of murdering a police officer and sentenced to life plus thirty years behind bars. Paul Coates was a community worker at the time and didn’t know Eddie well – the little he knew, he didn’t much like. But Paul was dead certain that Eddie’s charges were bogus. He vowed never to leave Eddie – and in so doing, changed the course of both their lives. For over forty-three years, as he raised a family and started a business, Paul visited Eddie in prison, often taking his kids with him. He and Eddie shared their lives and worked together on dozens of legal campaigns in hopes of gaining Eddie’s release. Paul’s founding of the Black Classic Press in 1978 was originally a way to get books to Eddie in prison. When, in 2014, Eddie finally walked out onto the streets of Baltimore, Paul Coates was there to greet him. Today, these two men remain rock-solid comrades and friends – each, the other’s chosen brother.
When Eddie and Paul met in the Baltimore Panther Party, they were in their early twenties. They are now into their seventies. This book is a record of their lives and their relationship, told in their own voices. Paul and Eddie talk about their individual stories, their work, their politics, and their immeasurable bond.
PRAISE:
“A landmark book for anyone who wants to understand the deep connectivity of Black America. It provides a ringside seat to the bruising fight for Civil Rights with two men, Eddie Conway and Paul Coates, as they provide necessary lessons on politics, change, community and enduring bonds. Their journey together and their hard-earned insights span nearly fifty years of seismic change in America. It’s a lesson in loyalty, commitment under fire, and what we can all do to make America keep its promise.”
Walter Mosley
“The Brother You Choose is a powerful addition to the rich collection of Panther autobiographies. Former political prisoner Eddie Conway and Black Classic Press founder Paul Coates have worked with radical journalist Susie Day to craft a beautiful dialogue about their life trajectories through the military, the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party, the prison system and the ongoing struggle for Black Liberation. Their narrative moves the BPP’s center of gravity from the Oakland leadership to explore the very different dynamics in the East Coast in which the Panthers emerged from dense black communities in cities like New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. There is so much to be learned here about the BPP, the Black Liberation Army, the effects of state repression and the role of political education and publishing in the fight for freedom. I have read all of the Panther autobiographies and this is one of my favorites. The Brother You Chose is an ideal book to assign to undergraduates as well as for the larger reading public. Its elegant structure and powerful content speak directly to moment we face as the urban uprisings against state violence sweep cities across the US.”
Donna Murch, author of Living for the City: Education, Migration and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California
“Too often unheard above the sirens, the desperate gasping for breath, is the consistent language of love, of tenderness, of support between men. In this powerful offering, Paul Coates and Eddie Marshall Conway speak to us of the brutal harm visited upon Black people and they speak to us of revolution and freedom. But woven masterfully throughout the conversations shared is a life-giving narrative that recalls the history of a people who walked as much as 100 miles barefoot to find their families when slavery came to its bloodsoaked close. Brother You Choose, like the men who tell it, is a national treasure.”
asha bandele, author of The Prisoner’s Wife
“The Brother You Choose encompasses all that is embodied in the soul of Gwendolyn Brooks’ words when she writes: “we are each others harvest; we are each others business; we are each others magnitude and bond.” This unique friendship (i.e., brotherhood) born under the early idealism of the Black Panther Party within its stated goals and objectives bring smiles to one who has also struggled on the same streets as Paul Coates and Eddie Conway. Susie Day has provided us with an insight into two lives that have survived and developed within the deadly American history that challenges us daily. The relationship that develops between the pages of these brothers’ lives is reflective of true heart and soul. The inimitable brotherhood chronicled here can only be measured by the depth of one’s own sense of grace and humanity. Over a span of fifty years, Paul Coates and Marshall “Eddie” Conway have remained “rock-solid comrades” and extended family in the Black Empowerment struggle. Their friendship exemplified the early promise of the BPP and its core meaning as articulated in the Ten-Point Program illustrated through Day’s poignant account of racial injustice, resistance and unyielding solidarity.”
Haki R. Madhubuti, Poet, Founder of Third World Press/Third World Press Foundation, author of Taught By Women
“Susie Day and the men who share their stories with her, Conway and Coates, have produced a jewel of oral history. Put it alongside Studs Terkel’s Working. Here are voices intimate, every-day, world historical, all at once. Here is life — the texture of thought, work, commitment, love: “Just that simple. Just that complicated.” It is a personal/political history that is deep, and funny, and tragic, and radically astute. And it is absolutely necessary. Here is a book that will not wear out.
JoAnn Wypijewski, author What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority & the Mess of Life
“Beautifully edited and narrated by Susie Day, The Brother You Choose allows us to eavesdrop on a humor-filled, heartwarming conversation between Eddie Conway and Paul Coates, whose love for each other and for their people carried them through revolutionary struggles and decades of wrongful imprisonment. An engaging read, these deeply personal perspectives on a common journey toward Black liberation encapsulate a history critical to movement-building today.”
Natsu Taylor Saito, author of Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists
“By turns touching, enraging, moving, tough, and tender, always riveting and ultimately inspiring, The Brother You Choose underscores the essential truth embodied in Che Guevara’s observation that “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”
Ward Churchill, author of Wielding Words Like Weapons
“My beloved comrade brothers, Eddie Conway & Paul Coates both connected together like Siamese twins for over forty-three years both with unflinching self determination and unconditional brotherly love and appreciation for the others humanity. Eddie’s confined in maximum security prison(s) while Paul navigates minimum security the world we all live in informing and educating the world to “FREE EDDIE CONWAY. What an amazing story of triumph over a system of wicked injustice behavior.”
Emory Douglas, Revolutionary Artist & Minister of Culture, Black Panther Party 1967-1981
“With a dramatist’s eye and a radical’s heart, Susie Day has crafted a conversation between two titans about fighting the good fight, enduring the hard stuff, and living to tell about it. The Brother You Choose is smart, endearing, funny and inspiring. Paul Coates and Eddie Conway reflect on commitment to the world and to each other. Pull up a chair and have a listen.”
Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing on the Civil Rights Era
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Susie Day began listening to people in prison at the DC Jail, where she interviewed four women charged with the 1985 bombing of the U.S. Capitol. She lives in Manhattan with her partner (and Capitol-bomber), Laura Whitehorn.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900888 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 388 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“One of the most distinctive writers to have emerged from South Asia in the last two decades.”
Pankaj Mishra
An incisive, lyrical, and deeply reported account of India’s descent into authoritarianism.
Traveling across India, interviewing Hindu zealots, armed insurgents, jailed dissidents, and politicians and thinkers from across the political spectrum, Siddhartha Deb reveals a country in which forces old and new have aligned to endanger democracy. The result is an absorbing—and disturbing—portrait. India has become a religious fundamentalist dystopia, one depicted here with a novelist’s precise language and eye for detail.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party—a formation explicitly drawing on European fascism—has deftly exploited modern technologies, the media, and market forces to launch a relentless campaign on minorities, women, dissenters, and the poor. Deb profiles these people, as well as those fighting back, including writers, scholars, and journalists. Twilight Prisoners sounds the alarm now that the world’s largest democracy is under threat in ways that echo the fissures in the United States, United Kingdom, and so-called democracies the world over.
PRAISE:
Praise for The Light at the End of the World
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“Extraordinary . . . I was in awe of Deb’s imagination and razor-sharp prose. The hallucinatory quality of his narrative reminded me of William Burroughs’s ‘Naked Lunch,’ while its apocalyptic trajectory had echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ . . . That the novel invokes a glorious past, hints at a utopian future and contradicts reality could be the author’s way to protest an authoritarian government skilled in just that . . . Whatever the author’s intent, I felt privileged to have been on an odyssey quite unlike any other.”
Abraham Verghese, The New York Times Book Review
“The Light at the End of the World is full of intriguing puzzles and opacities, but what brings it to life is less its inventiveness than its galvanizing anger, its outraged awareness of exploitation and cruelty. It travels, unbounded, into the past and the future, yet it always meets the reader in the middle of these destinations, the broken world of the present.”
The Wall Street Journal
“Deb explores a range of alternative explanations for and ramifications of historical events . . . Working in a speculative mode, Deb imagines a kind of agency for his characters barred to them by historical, and present, realities.”
The New Republic
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Born in Shillong, north-eastern India, Siddhartha Deb lives in Harlem, New York. His fiction and nonfiction have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and been awarded the Pen Open prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Dissent, The Baffler, N+1, and Caravan.
Trade paper• ISBN-13: 9781642599046 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 205 pgs, 16 images
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Eric Dickerson is the record-holder for most rushing yards in a season, and his prime was the best of any running back in NFL history. Yet an aura of negativity trailed him his entire career.
His style was iconic, and vintage ‘80s: aviator goggles, Jheri curls, neck roll, boxy pads.
Eric Dickerson is the greatest player in Los Angeles Rams history and the NFL’s single season record holder for most rushing yards. In 2019, Dickerson was named to the National Football League’s 100th Anniversary All-Time Team. With an elegant upright running style that produced some of football’s most-watched highlights, it was said he was so smooth you couldn’t hear his pads clack as he glided past you.
But during his Hall of Fame career, his greatness was often overshadowed by his contentious disputes with Rams management about his contract. In the pre-free agency era, tensions over his exploitative contract often overshadowed his accomplishments. What’s his problem? went the familiar refrain from the media. Can’t he just shut up and run?
It’s 2021. America is undergoing a racial reckoning. It’s time to reexamine how Eric Dickerson was portrayed. For the first time, he’s telling his story. And he’s not holding anything back.
PRAISE:
“Dickerson scores points in his takedown of a system, then and now, that chews players up and spits them out.“
Kirkus
“Watch My Smoke is the story of a great athlete who deals with the problematic parts of sports and celebrity, and who does so in an open, memorable way.“
Foreword Reviews
“There was no runner quite like Eric, and, it turns out, there’s no author like him either. His life story has page after page of ‘wow!’ moments — and he’s one of the best storytellers I’ve ever been around. Eric looked effortless as a runner, gliding through the defense. When I read his book I got the same feeling: The pages seemed to turn themselves. His story, from his account, reflects where we are today as a society: Divided, uncomfortable. People have to do a self-awareness check to determine who they are and where they stand on fundamental principles. Eric’s story is his experience — people have to reckon with it, and nobody can deny it until they walk or run a mile in his shoes.”
Emmitt Smith
“Eric Dickerson has never shied away from telling the truth: About life in the NFL, about being a Black celebrity, about racism. You might not like what he’s saying, but you know it’s true. Straight drink, no chaser.”
Lawrence Taylor
“Eric was one of the most graceful running backs ever to play in the NFL. It’s refreshing to know that as a writer and a friend, his integrity and sense of humor equals or surpasses that grace!”
Clyde Drexler
“Honestly, I hated watching Eric run — maybe that’s because he was a Ram and I was a 49er. But seriously, his style and grace were unique, and his upright running style, while criticized by many was damn fun to watch. Now that we’re friends, I can finally stomach watching old footage of him tearing us apart. Watch My Smoke is a great read. It’s the book football fans deserve about one of history’s greatest runners, and more importantly, my friend.”
Joe Montana
“Eric is a lot like me: He’s straight to the point and he tells you what he thinks, even if it’s something you don’t want to hear. We played in different eras but after meeting Eric I realized the similarities in our upbringings. I appreciate his friendship along with his straightforward and downhill approach with this book — which was the same approach as when he had the ball in his hands. Want to know the real Eric Dickerson? Read Watch My Smoke.”
Terrell Owens
“In all the years I have known Eric Dickerson as a friend, and as an incredible Hall of Fame Football Player. I was stunned as he was revealing the level of racism that he encountered early in his life and how he rose above those circumstances. Eric sharing is the strength we need so our world can be changed going forward. Think about it, Eric’s overcome every obstacle and still our country is affected by racism. My friend, I love you and I think you for sharing your innermost thoughts, Watch My Smoke is courageous.”
Nancy Lieberman
“As a newspaper columnist in Dallas, I spent a lot of time around Eric Dickerson’s SMU teams and always considered him a mysterious figure. Now, reading Watch My Smoke, I realize he was a shy kid from small-town Sealy, Texas wary of the mostly white media and haunted by the racism he experienced throughout his career. Now he spills it all in a book that reads nearly as fast as he was. Prepare for a jaw-dropper every other page.”
Skip Bayless
“As a running back, Eric Dickerson never tiptoed or showed any fear. As an author, he’s the exact same way: Fearless, and tough enough to take on any issue. He’s been one of my best friends since 1983, so I know that Eric will always tell you the truth.”
Rickey Jackson
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Eric Dickerson is an analyst for Fox Sports 1 and Vice President of Business Development for the Los Angeles Rams.
Greg Hanlon is an editor at People. He has written for Sports Illustrated and the New York Times.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461783 • 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 • US $17.95 • 384 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In an era of stark racial injustice and decisive action, Aaron Dixon dedicated his life to the struggle for change, founding the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968 at age 19. Through his eyes, we see the courage of a generation that stood up to injustice, their political triumphs and tragedies, and the unforgettable legacy of Black Power.
PRAISE:
“This book is a moving memoir experience: a must read. The dramatic life cycle rise of a youthful sixties political revolutionary, my friend Aaron Dixon, who’s very family had struggled with earlier life survival against institutionalized racism. And with the murders of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Little Bobby Hutton two days apart all but set the stage for Aaron to begin the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party’s protest resistance. A confrontation of resistance that cost the political murder of to many of our party members, but a resistance that included numerous community organizing programs, electoral campaigns and coalition political practices, and then beyond all the positive progressive protest movement efforts that sudden erroneous leadership demise of our Black Panther Party left many such as Aaron with levels of disillusionment. All of which this book biographically chronicles the true meaning of dedication and struggle for human liberation.”
Bobby Seale, founding Chairman and National Organizer of the Black Panther Party, 1966-1974
“My People Are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain is the most authentic book ever written by a member of the Black Panther Party. Aaron Dixon does an absolutely superb job of presenting life in the Party from the perspective of a foot soldier – a warrior for the cause of revolutionary change and Black Power in America. He pulls no punches and holds nothing back in writing honestly about those times (late 1960’s and during the 1970’s) as he successfully presents a visual picture of the courage, commitment, and sometimes, shocking brutality of life as a Panther activist in Seattle, Washington and Oakland, California. This is an unforgettable must read book!”
Larry Gossett, Chair, Metropolitan King County Council
“Aaron Dixon is a courageous, compassionate, and wise freedom fighter whose story of his pioneering work in the Black Panther Party is powerful and poignant. Don’t miss it!”
Cornel West
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Aaron Dixon, was co-founder and Captain of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party. He has since founded various non-profits for Seattle youth and run as a Green Party candidate in the 2006 Senate race. He lives in Seattle, WA.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900895 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 100 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From one of the most imaginative and radical voices in contemporary poetry, a debut collection of fierce tenderness, political acuity, and powerful lyricism.
Tarik Dobbs’s work explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs is achingly familiar with the power dynamics, violence, and capitalistic undercurrents woven through the language of the colonizer. They challenge this power in visual, free-verse, and formally intense poems—both traditional and innovative—that stretch the elasticity of borders, verbs, images, redactions, and more. Ranging from sonnets to concrete poems, Nazar Boy is visually stimulating, thought-provoking, emotionally wrenching, and exquisitely crafted.
Dobbs’ poems blur and collapse narrative distances within and between places, from the Levant to Michigan, and break down dichotomies portrayed in Western media: between Arabness and whiteness, intellectualism and the working poor, Muslimness and queerness, disability and desire. By turns irreverent and serenely gentle, Dobbs calls us to speak, to dream, and to imagine beyond those distances so that we might speak, dream, and imagine better versions of ourselves, our relationships to each other, and our places in the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tarik Dobbs (b.1997; Dearborn, MI) is a writer, an artist, and a Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Tarik’s poems appear in the Best New Poets and Best of the Net anthologies, as well as AGNI, Guernica, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Tarik helps run poetry.onl, and served as a guest editor at Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America as well as Zoeglossia: A Community for Poets with Disabilities. Tarik received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Minnesota, and is currently an M.F.A. fellow in art, theory, practice at Northwestern University.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591255 • US $22.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Cliché as it may seem to be, just about every major political issue taken up in this book from 1964 has once again become a major motivating force for contemporary activists. From Campus Free Speech fights to mounting tuition costs, the issues tackled by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and covered in this book have a growing audience. This, combined with the historical significance of Draper’s participant account, is sure to make this book an important point of reference for contemporary activists.
PRAISE:
“We live in an era in which it is becoming more and more difficult to learn from the lessons of history, especially from a history filled with the spirit of civic engagement, revolt, and a seething desire to struggle over institutions such as higher education, which are crucial to a democracy. Berkeley: The Student Revolt speaks to a moment in history alive with the spirit of student revolt, outrage over the corporatization and militarization of the university, and deeply aware of the connection between the crisis of the university and its relationship to the crisis of society. This book is both inspiring and informative, moving in its depiction of civil rights, the struggle for academic freedom, the necessity of free speech as a mode of dissent, the refusal to accept the university as a ‘knowledge industry,’ and the need to give voice to the students themselves. Berkeley: The Student Revolt speaks to both a language of not only critique, the visceral language of protest, but also to a merging of struggle and hope that can serve as invaluable resource for future generations.
Henry Giroux
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
The late Hal Draper is the author of the five-volume study of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (Monthly Review Press) as well as War and Revolution: Lenin and the Myth of Revolutionary Defeatism (Humanities Press) and Berkeley: The New Student Revolt (Grove Press.) He was also a prominent socialist journalist and editor of the journal Labor Action from 1948-1958.
Mario Savio was one of the most famous leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
In exploring the question: “What do we mean by socialism?,” Hal Draper argues genuine liberation can be won only through self-emancipation.
This reprint of a classic text by American Marxist Hal Draper outlines the important distinction between socialists who looked for some outside authority that would hand down liberation and socialism from above and those who saw the key to transforming society in the struggle of ordinary people from below for their own self-emancipation.
AFRICAN STRUGGLES TODAY
Social Movements Since Independence
By Peter Dwyer and Leo Zeilig
Haymarket Books (August 2012, English rights in North America)
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461202 • US $17 • 5 1/4 in x 7 7/8 in • 260 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This groundbreaking analysis examines the gains, contradictions, and frustrations of twenty-first century prodemocracy struggles across Southern Africa
Two leading Africa scholars investigate the social forces driving the democratic transformation of postcolonial states across Southern Africa. Extensive research and interviews with civil society organizers in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, Malawi, Namibia, and Swaziland inform this analysis of the challenges faced by non-governmental organizations in relating both to the attendant inequality of globalization and to grassroots struggles for social justice.
PRAISE:
“This intensely researched book is both original and systematic in its analysis of Africa’s post-colonial period. African Struggles Today looks at the critical role that has been played by grassroots social movements in resisting neoliberal capitalism as people struggle to improve their lives. The book also seeks to develop and deepen the search for political and economic alternatives against policies that have created austerity and dictatorships on the continent. The book must be read by anyone who wants to understand Africa and fight for its transformation.”
Tafadzwa Choto, Director, Zimbabwe Labour Centre
“This is a book about the potential for social transformation from below in Africa, and therefore a rejoinder to the vast majority of writing on the continent.
“It is self-consciously designed as ‘a corrective to the tendency to see Africa’s postcolonial half-century as one dominated by political repression, economic decline, and ethnic conflict’ which can be solved by the intervention of various outside agencies – stretching from multinationals to imperialist armies to NGOs.
“The book is rooted in ‘the history of protest and resistance over the last six decades – as manifested in strikes, marches, demonstrations, and riots’. But the major focus of the book is on developments over the last 20 years.
“Almost unnoticed by the mainstream press, a series of democracy movements swept across Africa from about 1990. In four years some 30 regimes, many of which had ruled for long periods, were brought down by revolt. However, although these movements could topple ancient dictators, they did not fully develop into social revolutions. Instead they were generally brought under the wing of neoliberalism.
“This experience of explosive movements for change therefore has to be set against their limitations – including the question of political leadership and organisation and the ideological underpinning of the revolts.
“Such questions are not of importance for Africans or people who are interested in African politics alone: they concern questions that face activists everywhere. Therefore this history and analysis deserves much wider circulation. Readers who may have knowledge of one part of Africa will gain from the detailed analysis of countries that they are less familiar with.
“Dwyer and Zeilig helpfully discuss the role of the employed working class and its relationships to other social groups – peasants, the unemployed, ‘informal’ workers and so on. They put forward a subtle understanding of the central role of workers (broadly conceived) but say, ‘There is no division between labour-based struggles and &lsqo;myriad acts of resistance’ they are in practice mutually reinforcing.’
“Finally there is a good discussion of the ‘social forums’ process in Africa.
“Zeilig and Dwyer ‘hope that activists who read this book – both African and Western – will see struggles and movements as messy, ideologically confused, and inherently contradictory – but that the book will also help them navigate through the mess, clear up confusion, and expose contradiction.’
“They have done much to fulfil that hope.”
Socialist Review
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Peter Dwyer is a tutor in economics at Ruskin College in Oxford.
The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor
Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old?
By Steve Early
Haymarket Books (North American English rights, February 2011)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608460991 • $17
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In 2008-10, the progressive wing of U.S. labor tore itself apart in a series of internecine struggles. More than $100 million was expended, by all sides, on ill-timed organizing conflicts that tarnished union reputations and undermined the campaign for real health care and labor law reform. Campus and community allies, along with many rank-and-file union members, were left angered and dismayed.
In his second book, labor journalist Steve Early draws on his own union organizing experience to explain why and how these labor civil wars occurred. Early examines the bitter disputes about union structure, membership rights, organizing strategy, and contract standards that enveloped SEIU, UNITE HERE, the California Nurses Association, and independent organizations like the Federacion de Maestros de Puerto Rico and the new National Union of Healthcare Workers in California.
Early’s timely and informed reporting draws on scores of interviews (and first-hand involvement) with many of the combatants and their non-labor supporters. We meet rank-and-file activists-both dissidents and loyalists–local union officers, national leaders from Change To Win and AFL-CIO affiliates, and concerned friends of labor. In the words of ILWU Organizing Director Peter Olney, “Early’s journalism is powerful because he has been in the trenches himself fighting to organize workers and make unions more democratic for four decades. This book is a must read, particularly for young activists trying make sense of contemporary American trade unionism.”
PRAISE:
“Steve Early’s account of recent troubles within and between progressive unions is an engaging and original work. Early is the most tenacious, free-thinking journalist covering labor today, respected by friend and foe alike. Civil Wars is essential to understanding how union centralization and top-down control have failed as a strategy for revitalizing the labor movement.”
Immanuel Ness, professor, Brooklyn College, CUNY, editor of WorkingUSA and author of Immigrants, Unions and the New U.S. Labor Movement
“Civil Wars in U.S. Labor is a passionate, thoroughly researched indictment of recent misdeeds by one of America’s largest and most important unions, the Service Employees International Union. It’s also a cri de coeur for union democracy, not just in principle or as a fine sentiment, but in highly practical ways that are illustrated throughout this rigorously argued book. Anyone who cares about the future of American labor should read (and study) this 21st-century J’accuse!”
Jack Metzgar, professor emeritus, Roosevelt University and author of Striking Steel
“Steve Early is not just another scholar situated outside the labor movement. For more than thirty years, he helped do the hard work of organizing and collective bargaining. Civil Wars demonstrates that there is no one with a better understanding of contemporary union problems. When he warns about the dangers of undemocratic practices, sweetheart deals with employers, and over reliance on the Democratic Party, we had better listen.”
Michael Yates, associate editor of Monthly Review and author of Why Unions Matter
“Steve Early’s book describes the kind of anti-union campaigning by management that makes passage of the Employee Free Choice Act so necessary. Early’s account of how and why labor law reform has been stalled for the third time in the last 32 years should be required reading for all workers’ rights advocates. As the author notes, collective bargaining faces private sector extinction. To protect the right to organize, we still need changes in the Wagner Act itself – not just better appointments to the NLRB.”
Bernie Sanders, United States Senator
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steve Early worked as a national staff member of the Communications Workers of America for 27 years. He is the author of Embedded With Organized Labor (Monthly Review Press, 2009) and a widely-published free-lance writer..
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461820 • 5 1/2 x 7 1/2 • US $16 • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Why did the Mexican Revolution happen? What makes it distinctive? Was it even a revolution at all?
More than 100 years since its outbreak in 1910, the Revolution remains the defining event in Mexico’s modern history. Yet elements of its history continue to be debated to this day.
Still contested is the issue of who the the winners and losers were: Did the Revolution’s heroes – men like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa – accomplish their goals?
This title addresses these questions in an accessible style, aimed at both students and general readers.
PRAISE:
“An excellent account and analysis of the Mexican Revolution, its background, its course, and its legacy. This study combines qualities not usually found in a single volume: erudite and theoretically sophisticated, yet broadly accessible. An important contribution to the study of revolutions in Latin America that is completely jargon free.”
Sam Farber, author, Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment
“The Mexican Revolution is a powerful work of historical synthesis. Slicing to the foundational bones of the revolution’s dramatic arc, Easterling’s precise, surgical narrative offers a remarkably clear rendering of the conflicting class forces at play and the historical personalities brought to life through their encounter. Backdrops of uneven capitalist development and complex configurations of political authority, power, and abuse are overlaid with vivid portraits of the epoch’s leading figures – Villa, Zapata, Obregón, and Carranza.”
Jeffery R. Webber, Queen Mary, University of London, author, From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Stuart Easterling is a Ph.D. candidate in Mexican History at the University of Chicago.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608469017 • US $15.95 • 8.5 in x 5.5 in • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Starting with the election from hell, A Nation Unmade by War surveys American exceptionalism in the age of absurdity. As Tom Engelhardt argues, despite having a more massive, technologically advanced, and better-funded military than any other power on the planet, in more than a decade and a half of constant war across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, the United States has won nothing, while only contributing to a world growing more chaotic by the second.
From its founding, the United States has been a nation made by wars. With penetrating analysis and characteristic wit, Engelhardt ponders whether in this century its citizenry and government will be unmade by them.
PRAISE:
“Incisive, lucid, and brutally informative.”
Noam Chomsky
“Unlike the myriad of lesser writers distracted by the latest antics of the man with the orange hair, the brilliant Tom Engelhardt keeps our focus where it should be: on the vast militarized empire whose leaders’s belief that they can control the world drains our tax dollars, undermines our children’s future, and sends young men and women to die in an unending series of fruitless wars.”
Adam Hochschild, author of Spain in Our Hearts
“The mainstream media call it the “Age of Trump.” Tom Engelhardt knows better: It’s the ‘Era of America Unhinged.”‘This new collection of essays gives us Engelhardt at his very best: incisive, impassioned, and funny even, in a time of great darkness.”
Andrew Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East
“Tom Engelhardt is a tireless analyst of the miseries of American Empire. In this indispensable book he shines an unrelenting spotlight on the steep cost to everyday Americans of the sunny fantasies about Middle East dominance retailed by generals, politicians and think tank rats inside the Beltway–fairy tales intended to obscure the dark failures of this enterprise.”
Juan Cole, University of Michigan
“We Americans have learned to sleep through our multiple wars, but Tom Engelhardt relentlessly shakes us awake. For sixteen years now, he has watched in astonishment and written the scene-by-scene review of this imploding empire and he only becomes sharper as old reels rewind and play again. In this volume, the nation wasted at home by its profligate wars abroad picks a big orange emperor, flanked by his very own generals, to lead us on into…well, just read the book!”
Ann Jones, author of They Were Soldiers
“Since September 11, no one has had a keener eye for American militarism, hypocrisy, and flat-out folly than Tom Engelhardt”
John Dower, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Violent American Century
“In his searing new book, A Nation Unmade by War, Tom Engelhardt has composed a requiem for a nation turned upside down by the relentless pursuit of global power. A devastating critique of the national security state, A Nation Unmade takes the reader from Nixon and Vietnam to Bush and the Iraq War through post-9/11 America, chronicling the errors, deceptions, and policy decisions which have ushered in a state of permanent war, reducing nations to rubble, wreaking chaos and confusion at home, and threatening the very principles upon which the country was founded. A must read for any student of 21st America.”
Karen J. Greenberg, author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of Shadow Government, and The American Way of War and The United States of Fear, both published by Haymarket Books, a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the cold war, The End of Victory Culture, and a novel, The Last Days of Publishing.
Many of his TomDispatch interviews were collected in Mission Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. With Nick Turse, he has written Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, a collection of pieces from his site that functions as an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He has worked as an editor at Pacific News Service in the early 1970s, and, these last four decades as an editor in book publishing. For fifteen years, he was senior editor at Pantheon Books, and is now Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books, as well as the cofounder and coeditor of Metropolitan’s the American Empire Project, where he has published bestselling works by Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky, and Nick Turse, among others. Many of the authors whose books he has edited and published over the years now write for TomDispatch.com. For a number of years, he was also a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley
A powerful survey of a militarized America building a surveillance structure unparalleled in history.
In 1964, a book entitled The Invisible Government shocked Americans with its revelations of a growing world of intelligence agencies playing fast and loose around the planet, a secret government lodged inside the one they knew that even the president didn’t fully control. Almost half a century later, everything about that “invisible government” has grown vastly larger, more disturbing, and far more visible. In his new book, Tom Engelhardt takes in something new under the sun: what is no longer, as in the 1960s, a national security state, but a global security one, fighting secret wars that have turned the president into an assassin-in-chief. Shadow Government offers a powerful survey of a democracy of the wealthy that your grandparents wouldn’t have recognized.
PRAISE:
“In his regular incisive and often searing columns, Tom Engelhardt has uncovered layer after layer of deceit, fraud, and distortion to reveal to us harsh truths about power and its exercise that we must comprehend, and resist, and reverse, if there is to be any hope of decent survival. Shadow Government is essential reading.”
Noam Chomsky
“This is a book about secrets and surveillance, but I’m here to tell you one secret its contents won’t. For more than a dozen years, Tom Engelhardt and his website or blog or postnewspaper wire service Tomdispatch.com have been one of the great forces on the side of clarity, democracy, openness, and really good writing. Tom himself, a legendary book editor, is also one of the country’s most eloquent and tenacious political writers, electronically publishing three essays a week for all these years and writing many of them himself. This collection, focused on the new Orwellianism, is some of the finest writing and finest public service gathered together in book form for your portable pleasure and outrage.”
Rebecca Solnit, author, Men Explain Things to Me
“Tom Engelhardt is an iconoclast, but he also is the latest exemplar of a great American tradition. Like George Seldes and I. F. Stone before him, he has bypassed conventionally minded newspapers and magazines, and with his remarkable website and in books like this, found a way of addressing readers directly about the issues central to our time. Again and again, he goes to the heart of the matter, drawing on his awesomely wide reading, his knowledge of history, and his acute political radar system that uncovers small but deeply revealing nuggets of news and often makes me feel, enviously: how could I have missed that?”
Adam Hochschild, author, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of The American Way of War and The United States of Fear, both published by Haymarket Books, a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the cold war, The End of Victory Culture, and a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. Many of his TomDispatch interviews were collected in Mission Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. With Nick Turse, he has written Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, a collection of pieces from his site that functions as an alternative history of the mad Bush years. TomDispatch is the sideline that ate his life. Before that he worked as an editor at Pacific News Service in the early 1970s, and, these last four decades as an editor in book publishing. For fifteen years, he was senior editor at Pantheon Books, where he edited and published award-winning works ranging from Art Spiegelman’s Maus and John Dower’s War Without Mercy to Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy. He is now Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books, as well as the cofounder and coeditor of Metropolitan’s the American Empire Project, where he has published bestselling works by Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky, and Nick Turse, among others. Many of the authors whose books he has edited and published over the years now write for TomDispatch.com. For a number of years, he was also a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to Nancy J. Garrity, a therapist, and has two children, Maggie and Will, and a grandchild, Charlie.
Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/profile/glenn-greenwald). A former constitutional lawyer, he was until 2012 a contributing writer at Salon. He is the author of How Would a Patriot Act?, a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power; A Tragic Legacy, which examines the George W. Bush presidency; and With Liberty and Justice For Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.
ABOUT TOMDISPATCH.COM:
Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch.com in November 2001 as an email publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of The Nation Institute, and went online as “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” The site now features three articles a week, all original to the site. These include Engelhardt’s regular commentaries, as well as the work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Michael Klare to Adam Hochschild, Noam Chomsky, Anand Gopal, and Karen J. Greenberg. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is its managing editor and research director. Andy Kroll is its associate editor, Erika Eichelberger, its social media director, and Christopher Holmes, its copyeditor. TomDispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608460717 • US $16.95 • 5.5 in x 8.25 in • 269 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Tom Engelhardt, creator of the indispensable website TomDispatch.com, takes a scalpel to the American urge to dominate the globe. Tracing developments from 9/11 to late last night, this is an unforgettable anatomy of a disaster that is yet to end.
Since 2001, Tom Engelhardt has written regular reports for TomDispatch that have provided badly needed insight into US militarism and its effects, both at home and abroad. When others were celebrating the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, he warned of the enormous dangers of both occupations.
In The American Way of War, Engelhardt documents Washington’s ongoing commitment to military bases to preserve — and extend — its empire; reveals damning information about the American reliance on air power, at great cost to civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan; and shows that the US empire has deep historical roots that precede the Bush administration — and continue today into the presidency of Barack Obama.
PRAISE:
“Tom Engelhardt is among our most trenchant critics of American perpetual war. Like I. F. Stone in the 1960s, he has an uncanny ability to ferret out and see clearly the ugly truths hidden in government reports and statistics. No cynic, he always measures the sordid reality against a bright vision of an America that lives up to its highest ideals.”
Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan
“They may have Blackwater/Xe, Halliburton, aircraft carrier battle groups, deadly drones by the score and the world’s largest military budget, but we have Tom Engelhardt — and a more powerful truth-seeking missile has seldom been invented. Long-time fans like me will be happy to see some of his most memorable pieces reprinted here, although woven together in a way that makes them still stronger; for anyone not yet familiar with his work, this is your chance to meet one of the most forceful analysts alive of our country’s dangerous, costly addiction to all things military.”
Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains and King Leopold’s Ghost
“Tom Engelhardt is the I. F. Stone of the post 9/11 age — seeing what others miss, calling attention to contradictions that others willfully ignore, insisting that Americans examine in full precisely those things that make us most uncomfortable.”
Andrew Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War
“There are a lot of ways to describe Tom Engelhardt’s astonishing service to this country’s conscience and imagination: you could portray him as our generation’s Orwell, standing aside from all conventional framings to see afresh our dilemmas and blind spots, as the diligent little boy sending in regular dispatches on the nakedness of the emperor and his empire, as a Bodhisattva dedicated to saving all beings through compassion and awareness, but analogies don’t really describe the mix of clear and sometimes hilarious writing, deep insight, superb information, empathy and outrage that has been the core of Tom’s TomDispatches for almost a decade, or the extraordinary contribution they’ve made to the American dialogue. Check out this bundle of some of the best from that time span.”
Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me
“One of my favorite websites.”
Bill Moyers
“Indispensable.”
Tony Karon
“TomDispatch is essential reading.”
Amy Goodman
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of Shadow Government and The United States of Fear, both published by Haymarket Books, a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the cold war, The End of Victory Culture, and a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. Many of his TomDispatch interviews were collected in Mission Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. With Nick Turse, he has written Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, a collection of pieces from his site that functions as an alternative history of the mad Bush years. TomDispatch is the sideline that ate his life. Before that he worked as an editor at Pacific News Service in the early 1970s, and, these last four decades as an editor in book publishing. For fifteen years, he was senior editor at Pantheon Books, where he edited and published award-winning works ranging from Art Spiegelman’s Maus and John Dower’s War Without Mercy to Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy. He is now Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books, as well as the cofounder and coeditor of Metropolitan’s the American Empire Project, where he has published bestselling works by Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky, and Nick Turse, among others. Many of the authors whose books he has edited and published over the years now write for TomDispatch.com. For a number of years, he was also a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
ABOUT TOMDISPATCH.COM:
Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch.com in November 2001 as an email publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of The Nation Institute, and went online as “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” The site now features three articles a week, all original to the site. These include Engelhardt’s regular commentaries, as well as the work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Michael Klare to Adam Hochschild, Noam Chomsky, Anand Gopal, and Karen J. Greenberg. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is its managing editor and research director. Andy Kroll is its associate editor, Erika Eichelberger, its social media director, and Christopher Holmes, its copyeditor. TomDispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461547 • US $16.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 200 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The creator of TomDispatch.com dissects America’s endless urge to go to war.
In 2008, when the U.S. National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of newly elected President Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet’s “sole superpower” would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years hence. In his new book, The United States of Fear, Tom Engelhardt makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts, because the U.S. is on the path to a major decline at a startling speed. Engelhardt, offers a savage anatomy of how successive administrations in Washington took the “Soviet path” — pouring American treasure into the military, war, and national security — and so helped drive their country off the nearest cliff.
This is the startling tale of how fear was profitably shot into the national bloodstream; how the country — gripped by terror fantasies — was locked down; and how a brain-dead Washington elite fiddled (and profited) while America quietly burned.
Think of it as the story of how the Cold War really ended, with the triumphalist “sole superpower” of 1991 heading slowly for the same exit through which the Soviet Union left the stage twenty years earlier.
PRAISE:
“A tour de force.”
Jeremy Scahill
“Tom Engelhardt, as always, focuses his laser-like intelligence on a core problem that the media avoid: Obama’s stunning embrace of Bush’s secret government by surveillance, torture, and sanctioned assassination. A stunning polemic.”
Mike Davis, author of In Praise of Barbarians and Planet of Slums
“Tom Engelhardt is the I. F. Stone of the post-9/11 age.”
Andrew J. Bacevich
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of Shadow Government and The American Way of War, both published by Haymarket Books, a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the cold war, The End of Victory Culture, and a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. Many of his TomDispatch interviews were collected in Mission Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. With Nick Turse, he has written Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, a collection of pieces from his site that functions as an alternative history of the mad Bush years. TomDispatch is the sideline that ate his life. Before that he worked as an editor at Pacific News Service in the early 1970s, and, these last four decades as an editor in book publishing. For fifteen years, he was senior editor at Pantheon Books, where he edited and published award-winning works ranging from Art Spiegelman’s Maus and John Dower’s War Without Mercy to Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy. He is now Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books, as well as the cofounder and coeditor of Metropolitan’s the American Empire Project, where he has published bestselling works by Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky, and Nick Turse, among others. Many of the authors whose books he has edited and published over the years now write for TomDispatch.com. For a number of years, he was also a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to Nancy J. Garrity, a therapist, and has two children, Maggie and Will, and a grandchild, Charlie.
ABOUT TOMDISPATCH.COM:
Tom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch.com in November 2001 as an email publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of The Nation Institute, and went online as “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” The site now features three articles a week, all original to the site. These include Engelhardt’s regular commentaries, as well as the work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Michael Klare to Adam Hochschild, Noam Chomsky, Anand Gopal, and Karen J. Greenberg. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is its managing editor and research director. Andy Kroll is its associate editor, Erika Eichelberger, its social media director, and Christopher Holmes, its copyeditor. TomDispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900826 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 192 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Awards:
One Book South Dakota Common Read, South Dakota Humanities Council, 2022. PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, PEN America, 2020. One Book One Tribe Book Award, First Nations Development Institute, 2020. Finalist, Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, 2019. Shortlist, Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, 2019.
Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto.
Now available in paperback on the fifth anniversary of its original publication, Our History Is the Future features a new afterword by Nick Estes about the rising indigenous campaigns to protect our environment from extractive industries and to shape new ways of relating to one another and the world.
In this award-winning book, Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the present campaigns against fossil fuel pipelines, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations.
In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan “Mni Wiconi”—Water Is Life—was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even with the encampment gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue.
While a historian by trade, Estes draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires) and his own family’s rich history of struggle.
PRAISE:
“Embedded in the centuries-long struggle for Indigenous liberation resides our best hope for a safe and just future for everyone on this planet. Few events embody that truth as clearly as the resistance at Standing Rock, and the many deep currents that converged there. In this powerful blend of personal and historical narrative, Nick Estes skillfully weaves together transformative stories of resistance from these front lines, never losing sight of their enormous stakes. A major contribution.”
Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything
“Nick Estes is a forceful writer whose work reflects the defiant spirit of the #NoDAPL movement. Our History Is the Future braids together strands of history, theory, manifesto and memoir into a unique and compelling whole that will provoke activists, scholars, and readers alike to think deeper, consider broader possibilities, and mobilize for action on stolen land.”
Julian Brave Noisecat, 350.org
“In Our History Is the Future, historian Nick Estes tells a spellbinding story of the ten-month Indigenous resistance at Standing Rock in 2016, animating the lives and characters of the leaders and organizers, emphasizing the powerful leadership of the women. Alone this would be a brilliant analysis of one of the most significant social movements of this century. But embedded in the story and inseparable from it is the centuries-long history of the Oceti Sakowin’ resistance to the United States’ genocidal wars and colonial institutions. And woven into these entwined stories of Indigenous resistance is the true history of the United States as a colonialist state and a global history of European colonialism. This book is a jewel—history and analysis that reads like the best poetry—certain to be a classic work as well as a study guide for continued and accelerated resistance.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“When state violence against peaceful protest at Standing Rock became part of the national consciousness, many noticed Native people for the first time—again. Our History Is the Future is necessary reading, documenting how Native resistance is met with settler erasure: an outcome shaped by land, resources, and the juggernaut of capitalism. Estes has written a powerful history of Seven Fires resolve that demonstrates how Standing Rock is the outcome of history and the beginning of the future.” Louise Erdrich, author of the National Book Award winner for The Round House
“With scrupulous research and urgent prose, [Nick Estes] declares the DAPL protest a flowering of indigenous resistance with roots deep in history and Native sacred land … A powerful work, Estes’s condemnation of the United States government is clear and resonant.”
Publishers Weekly
“A touching and necessary manifesto and history featuring firsthand accounts of the recent Indigenous uprising against powerful oil companies … With an urgent voice, Estes reminds us that the greed of private corporations must never be allowed to endanger the health of the majority. An important read about Indigenous protesters fighting to protect their ancestral land and uphold their historic values of clean land and water for all humans.”
Kirkus
“Activist, scholar, and Lower Brule Sioux citizen Estes challenges the power systems that have attacked and disenfranchised Indigenous peoples for centuries with both the story of northern Plains peoples as well as a political philosophy of Indigenous empowerment. The author provides context for contemporary struggles against the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines.”
Library Journal
“This book is a must read for anyone interested in the #NoDAPL movement. It works as an introduction—and a fearless analysis of—one of the biggest social movements of our times.”
Fiorella Lecoutteux, Peace News
“Our History Is The Future traces not just an Indigenous politics of opposition, but a vibrant and omnipresent theory of decolonisation that strives to create and preserve as well as resist … Perhaps the most powerful argument of the book is the conceptualisation of Indigenous resistance as an omnipresent process that runs throughout the course of American history.”
Shelley Angelie Saggar, Hong Kong Review of Books
“Nick Estes gives voice to the new wave of indigenous environmental mobilization.”
Neha Shah, The Guardian
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nick Estes is a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and is an Assistant Professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. Estes is an award-winning journalist whose writing has been featured in the New Yorker, the Guardian, Intercept, Jacobin, Indian Country Today, The Funambulist Magazine, and High Country News. He is the author of the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance and he co-edited Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement. Estes co-founded The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization, in 2014. Estes co-hosts the Red Nation podcast and is the lead editor of Red Media, an Indigenous-run nonprofit media organization that publishes books, videos, and podcasts. Estes is a member of the Oceti Sakowin Writers Society, a network of Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota writers committed to defend and advance Oceti Sakowin sovereignty, cultures, and histories.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781608465989• US $16 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 96 pgs.
Winner, Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Best Poetry Book of 2019
NPR Books of the Year, 2019 O Magazine Best Books by Women of Summer 2019 Chicago Tribune 25 hot books of summer 2019
The Millions Must-Read Poetry of June 2019 LitHub Most Anticipated Reads of Summer 2019 Buzzfeed 29 Summer Books To Get Excited About Chicago Review of Books Best New Books of June 2019
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the “Red Summer” of violence across the nation’s cities, has shaped the last century but is unfamiliar or altogether unknown to many people today.
In 1919, her second collection of poems, Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost five hundred injuries— through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, illuminating the thin line between the past and the present.
PRAISE:
“Ewing’s poems give voice to those whose historical memory was drawn in dispossession and often informed by the biblical themes of exodus and deliverance. I recommend 1919 because it holds a mirror up to America, to Chicago: a city where the fault lines of American history tremble underfoot, where the promise of America is betrayed by its past.”
NPR
“The genre-busting poet/scholar behind Electric Arches and Ghosts in the Schoolyard combines assiduously researched facts and bracing lyricism in this elegiac exploration of the 1919 Chicago race riot and the “summer-song folk” who were its human cost.”
O Magazine
“Eve Ewing is a poet of limitless possibility. She seems to get sharper and more daring with each book.”
Poetry Magazine “The Zora Neale Hurston of her generation.”
“Eve Ewing’s 1919 is a window into the mental and emotional lives of Black Americans in a Chicago, in an America, where time beckons oppressively. Exodus and deliverance to a promised land? The eternal return of racist violence? Time lends haunted hope. Maybe circular time, the eternal return, could cease and turn linear, toward exodus and deliverance. 1919 places readers in the minds and bodies of Black Chicagoans, Black Americans, and asks readers to see what has been, and what could be.”
Vice
“A truly rare cultural phenomenon: an artist who not only holds up a mirror to society, but makes herself a catalyst to change it.”
Chicago Tribune
“Ewing is a writer of great depth, reverence, and enthusiasm, one of the city’s greatest critics and champions…Her repertoire and curiosity are without boundary. She is Chicago’s true mayor; a young, charismatic guardian of the city’s possibility and spirit, who is goading us to do more and do better.”
The Cut
“These clarion and haunting poems—some psalm-like, others percussive, even concussive, all technically brilliant and sure to galvanize adults and teens alike—incisively and resoundingly evoke the promise and betrayal of the Great Migration and the everyday struggles of Chicago’s Black community against vicious and violent racism. The riot a century ago, Ewing writes, ‘left an indelible mark on the city,’ which she gracefully, imaginatively, and searingly illuminates with hope for a more just future.”
Booklist
“A mixture of grand voices, hushed laments, and ardent dreams, 1919 resurrects forgotten history.”
The Millions, “Must-Read Poetry of June”
“Following the publication of Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, respected writer and scholar Eve L. Ewing homes in on another critical moment in the city’s history: the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. In a new series of poems, she delves into this little-known event — lasting eight days and resulting in 38 deaths and nearly 500 injuries — and its reverberations over the last century.”
Chicago Tribune “25 Hot Books of Summer ”
“Dr. Eve L. Ewing’s third book and second poetry collection explores the “Red Summer” of 1919 and specifically the Chicago Race Riot. Centered on the inner lives of Black individuals, real and/or imaginary (who’s to say?), in 1919 Chicago, the poems in 1919 ask how far we’ve come, and question ideas of progress and of thriving and surviving. On the centenary of the Red Summer, in an America hardly less violent and anti-black, Ewing wields a kaleidoscopic Afrofuturist style to illuminate a crucial piece of history and to imagine a path forward.”
LitHub, “Most Anticipated Summer Reads”
“Ewing blends past, present, and future, imagining the stories of those who lived through the riot and beyond, and inquiring into its lasting consequences.”
Buzzfeed, “29 Summer Books To Get Excited About”
“These poems are crafted and tense, inventive and full of energy.”
Eve L. Ewing is the author of 1919, the Ironheart series, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, and Electric Arches. She is a professor at the University of Chicago
Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose.
Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing’s narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances—blues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects—hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook—as precious icons.
Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant—a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher’s angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.
PRAISE:
“Striking and visionary… a stunning debut.”
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Her language is conversational, her verse lulling the reader into territory that feels immediately familiar, even when it isn’t.”
Paris Review, Staff Pick
“Sociologist Eve L. Ewing’s debut poetry collection moves fluidly among scholarship, teaching, writing and visual art. In Electric Arches, she constructs an understanding of how forces like white supremacy, disinvestment in public education and migration twist around one another and around the lives of people living in places like Chicago. Ewing takes readers through those ideas with a precision that is both beautiful and deeply uncomfortable. She creates scenes that feel acutely intimate and then, through imagination or belief, asks the reader to step beyond that reality. Together, her poems are a profound act of love for family, a city and its children.”
NPR, Best Books of 2017
“Electric Arches lightened my heart. And so I’m honored, and also extremely glad, to congratulate Eve L. Ewing for imagining and writing a truly wonderful first book.”
Poetry Society of America
“The spirit of this collection soars.”
Roxane Gay, Goodreads
“A poet/sociologist/artist/schoolteacher, Eve L. Ewing has a special talent for finding the art in her life. The Chicago native’s debut volume is a singular blend of poetry, narrative and visual art, but its biggest accomplishment is in establishing Ewing as a truly rare cultural phenomenon: an artist who not only holds up a mirror to society, but makes herself a catalyst to change it.”
Chicago Tribune, “Best Books of 2017”
“Filled with meditations on race, gender, identity, and all kinds of coming-of-age struggle and joy, Electric Arches explores black girlhood and womanhood, and you’ll definitely want it in your TBR pile this season”
Bustle
“Exquisite”
Ava Duvernay
“A remarkable debut…while reading, I found myself continually thinking, I had no idea you could make poetry do that, followed by, Thank God she has done this.”
Tracy K. Smith, US Poet Laureate and bestselling author
“Eve L. Ewing’s collection Electric Arches melds poetry and prose, magic realism and memory, in an exploration of what it’s like to grow up as a black woman in America. Ewing brings the Chicago of her childhood to life, but also envisions the future (taking readers to an alien invasion!). Imaginative and magnetic, Electric Arches feels as lush as life itself while also offering insight into identity and growing up, and reads like a love letter to Chicago that shows the magic that was always there.”
Buzzfeed, “The 13 Best Poetry Books of 2017”
“The Chicago-based writer, artist and scholar shook up the literary world with her imaginative debut, Electric Arches, which explores black womanhood. Hailed as a “renaissance woman” by the Chicago Tribune, Ewing’s passions are numerous and varied, with a particular bend toward social justice.”
Newsweek
“Somehow Ewing has created a collection that is at once formally spectacular and grounded enough to ask readers the two most important questions in art: Will you stop to remember and imagine with me and will you help me change the world with memory and imagination?”
Guernica
“Ewing is a writer of great depth, reverence, and enthusiasm, one of the city’s greatest critics and champions…Her repertoire and curiosity are without boundary. She is Chicago’s true mayor; a young, charismatic guardian of the city’s possibility and spirit, who is goading us to do more and do better.”
The Cut
“Electric Arches is a complicated love letter to Chicago… a reminder that magic is made of asphalt and chain-link fences, the lives we painfully live in our childhoods where imagination offers us bodily escape.”
The Millions
“Eve Ewing defies simple categorization: she’s a writer, an artist, an educator, a Twitter celebrity and a Harvard-trained sociologist. Her new book, “Electric Arches,” showcases all of the above.”
Public Radio International
“I love you [Eve Ewing], you’re so good at articulating and simplifying the important part.”
Chance the Rapper
“Spellbinding… these poems will change you for the better. They will make you whole.”
Well Read Black Girl
“A groundbreaking collection of poetry, short fiction, and art from one of Chicago’s cultural icons… Electric Arches will go down as one of the best and most iconic poetry books about Chicago…ever. You have never seen Chicago this way before, and regardless of where you live, it’ll change your perspective.”
Chicago Review of Books
“Homegrown hero Eve Ewing is the artist and educator that Chicago needs right now.”
WGN
“A powerful revelation.”
Brightest Young Things
“Ewing illuminates difficult truths with a type of grace that enthralls and informs.”
Fortune
“Eve Ewing is one of Chicago’s most visible cultural icons.”
Chicago Magazine
“Eve L. Ewing tries to imagine a way out of this mess with poetry and prose.”
Newcity
“An intimate look at the changing Chicago landscape.”
The Lily (Washington Post)
“Again and again reading Eve Ewing’s Electric Arches, I felt some blooming in my body, or some flock of herons batting into the air in my body, which I think was indicating something like joy at witnessing the imagination at work in these poems, the imagination borne of rigorous attention coupled with critical love. Thankfully, there’s a word for all that: tenderness. And the joy is that we learn tenderness by witnessing it. Which is to say, and it’s not too much to say, this book is one of the maps to our survival.”
Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
“Of course she had me at Koko Taylor. She had me again at shea butter and Ron Artest and especially at an eerily intriguing fur suit. This is an effusive celebration of black girlhood in all its muted but relentless sparkle, a tenacious exploration of all its lives, the wide-aloud witnessing of a born storyteller slicing her two-wheeler through the streets of a broken and boisterous city. You won’t believe this is Eve Ewing’s first book. It’s that assured, that crafted. Ever heard Koko Taylor’s guttural growl, the lyric that floors you like a backhand slap? It’s that too.”
Patricia Smith, poet
“Reading Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches is such an awakening and active experience— this book time travels, makes myth, immerses, paints, opens pathways. This is a living and breathing document, memoir and map, guidebook and scroll. ‘Recall this,’ writes Ewing in ‘Shea Butter Manifesto,’ both as invitation and as spellbinding command. I’m awestruck by the rigor and intimacy of this book, by its insistent love for both black past and black future. Ewing leaves no unnamed ritual uncovered, no implicit idiom uncelebrated. This book is a gift, a visual and lyrical offering to be treasured as gospel.”
Morgan Parker, author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
“I didn’t think it was possible for one book to contain work and worlds that would be loved by eight year olds and eighty year olds, junior high school dropouts and emeritus English professors. I didn’t think it was possible for one book to contain the emotional sweat of Chicago, Dorchester and Yazoo City, Mississippi. I didn’t think it was possible for one book to make us smell the residue of classroom erasers, empty White Castle bags and wet wondrous balls of Black girl hair clinging to the bottoms of bathtubs. With Electric Arches, Eve Ewing has written a book I thought was un-write-able. The book is as precise as it is ambitious, pulling equally on shared memories and individual imagination. Every page feels like a beginning and end, an invitation and conclusion, but never in that order. Somehow Eve Ewing created a book that is at once formally spectacular and grounded enough to ask readers the two most important questions in art: will you stop to remember with me and will you help me change the world with that memory. Electric Arches is alive.”
Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division
“Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the fantastical, Ewing takes us from the streets of Chicago to an alien arrival in an unspecified future, deftly navigating boundaries of space, time, and reality with delight and flexibility.”
Eve L. Ewing is the author of 1919, the Ironheart series, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, and Electric Arches. She is a professor at the University of Chicago
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463916 • US $14.95 • 5 7/8 in x 8 1/2 in • 160 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire was covered up just days before his comrade Rory Fanning — who served in the same unit as Tillmann — left the Army Rangers as a conscientious objector. Disquieted by his tours in Afghanistan, Fanning sets out to honor Tillman’s legacy by crossing the United States on foot.
Told with page-turning style, humor, and warmth, Worth Fighting For explores the emotional and social consequences of rejecting the mission of one of the most elite fighting forces in the world. It is only through the generous, and colorful people Fanning meets and the history he discovers that he learns to live again.
PRAISE:
“You set out on foot to find things that can be found no other way: your country, yourself, your sense of direction in the most practical and metaphysical selves. In this book Rory Fanning, a young soldier back from the wars, shares the results of his odyssey with those of us who have not walked 3,000 miles through wild places and rough weather. His encounters with Americans who might be described as ordinary but are often extraordinary and with himself and the places and their historical backstories make great reading (and maybe most of us are on some version of this quest, whether we know it or not).”
Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking
“You can measure America’s glorification of all things military by the depth of US Ranger veteran Rory Fanning’s feeling on becoming a conscientious objector that he has let his country down. He walks coast to coast to serve a cause, to find himself, and to imagine a better America fit for all the good people he meets along the way and all the good soldiers lost. His hard journey changes him, and it may change you too.”
Ann Jones, author, They Were Soldiers
“Rory Fanning’s odyssey is more than a walk across America. It is a gripping story of one young man’s intellectual journey from eager soldier to skeptical radical, a look at not only the physical immenseness of the country, its small towns and highways, but into the enormity of its past, the hidden sins and unredeemed failings of the United States. The reader is there along with Rory, walking every step, as challenging and rewarding experience for us as it was for him.”
Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times
“[Fanning] shows us the imperial and harmful objective of U.S. foreign policy. He shows us the courage to walk away from it, and he shows us a path to a saner society.”
Chicago Tribune
“Fanning combines memoir, travelogue, political tract, and history lesson in this engaging account of his 3,000-mile solo walk from Virginia to California to raise money for the Pat Tillman Foundation. … Fanning’s descriptions of the hardships and highlights of the trip comprise the bulk of the book, and he infuses his left-wing politics into a narrative peppered with historical tidbits, most of which describe less-than-honorable moments in American history, such as the terrorist actions of the Ku Klux Klan and the nation’s Indian removal policies. What stands out most, though, is the selflessness and generosity — which come in the form of stories, hospitality, and donations for the foundation — of the people Fanning encountered during his journey.”
Publishers Weekly
“Blending a story of the road in the tradition of Kerouac with some politics and his search for meaning to a life after battle, Rory Fanning has composed an absorbing narrative. The writing is concise and heartfelt. The experiences he shares reveal something too many of us often forget — that the men and women in the imperial military are more than just uniforms and weapons; more than pawns to be used by a power structure that needs war to survive; and much more than so many uniforms to be manipulated by the media at sporting events and TV specials serving that power structure. The politics are subtle and personal; and ultimately an indictment of that power structure by a man who served it willingly and with conviction — until he came up against its ugly truth.”
Counterpunch
“Partly an evocation of ‘the bloody birth of the nation I now walked through’ and its often troubled history, part memoir of the author’s transformation from conservative Christian soldier to radical atheist and pacifist, part indictment of a foreign policy in which ‘Iraq felt like a bait-and-switch — and a betrayal.’ But mostly it’s about the people he met in the small towns he visited and the encouragement they gave him.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Rory Fanning’s transformation from soldier to peace pilgrim is a moving tale told with passion and eloquence. Long after the shooting stops, the soldiers who fight our wars are too often left to fight their personal battles alone. Fanning transforms his disillusionment with war and the military and strikes out for the country on a timeless journey of discovery. As he he traverses America on foot, he finds the radical heartbeat of a nation and builds bridges to people and places that have been left behind. This is a searing, honest, and ultimately hopeful tale of traveling a road from war to peace and justice.”
FROM, SOURCE
“Rory Fanning’s transformation from soldier to peace pilgrim is a moving tale told with passion and eloquence. Long after the shooting stops, the soldiers who fight our wars are too often left to fight their personal battles alone. Fanning transforms his disillusionment with war and the military and strikes out for the country on a timeless journey of discovery. As he he traverses America on foot, he finds the radical heartbeat of a nation and builds bridges to people and places that have been left behind. This is a searing, honest, and ultimately hopeful tale of traveling a road from war to peace and justice.”
David Goodman, co-author, Standing Up to the Madness
“I recommend [this] book enthusiastically … a tale told with wisdom, erudition, kindness, humor, humility, and generosity of which I think Tillman might have been proud.”
David Swanson, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union
“Worth Fighting For takes us on a journey that will live inside you long after you finish the book. It is not only the physical journey that you make with Fanning as he walks across the country, but it’s the psychological, political and spiritual journey that you accompany him on as well, as he makes sense of his experience in the U.S. military through the lens of the incredible people and history he interacts with on his trek from the Atlantic to the Pacific. With each step and every page, we experience the evolving clarity of Fanning’s politics, worldview, and purpose in life.”
Jen Marlowe, author of I am Troy Davis and The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker
“The possibility of change is central to Fanning’s message. The experience of war and leaving the military had a huge impact on Fanning: ‘I have gone from a devout Christian to an atheist and from a conservative Republican to a socialist. My time in the military and the cover-up of Pat’s death led me down a road that challenged the core of who I was. I began to question everything — and ended up here.’ What Fanning demonstrates is the thin line between people’s support for their rulers’ ideas and interests, and their rejection of it all. The possibility of social transformation lies in this ambiguity. The right wing might seem to be in the ascendant right now in the US as in Britain, but its hold upon the consciousness of millions is demonstrably a fragile one, and quite different ideas lie untapped beneath the surface.”
Counterfire
“More than anything, Worth Fighting For is about human beings’ capacity for change — the way that Pat Tillman’s story changes the people who hear it, the way that those people and their experiences transform the author as he gets closer to the Pacific, the ways that this book will impact the people who read it.”
Socialist Worker
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rory Fanning walked across the United States for the Pat Tillman Foundation in 2008-2009, following two deployments to Afghanistan with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion. He is a housing activist living in Chicago, Illinois. Rory works for Haymarket Books and this is his first book.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461394 • US $24 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 400 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Uncritically lauded by the left, and impulsively denounced by the right, the Cuban revolution is almost universally viewed one dimensionally. Farber, one of its most informed leftwing critics, provides a much needed critical assessment of the Revolution’s impact and legacy.
PRAISE:
“A courageous and formidable balance-sheet of the Cuban Revolution, including a sobering analysis of a draconian ‘reform’ program that will only deepen the gulf between revolutionary slogans and the actual life of the people.”
Mike Davis, professor, University of California, Riverside; author, Planet of Slums and In Praise of Barbarians
“Farber’s comprehensive and well-written assessment of Cuba’s experience since 1959 is rooted in history, informed by the comparative sociology of communist regimes, and rich in insightful and feisty analysis.”
Jorge I. Domínguez, Professor of Mexican and Latin American Politics and Economics, Harvard University
“‘My political roots are in the classical Marxist tradition that preceded Stalinism in the USSR,’ writes Samuel Farber at the beginning of his book. Based on that political and theoretical outlook, opposed as much to neoliberal thought as to the perversions of Stalinist and postmodern communist statism, Farber sets out to critically explore the course followed by the society, government, and power structures that emerged from the Cuban Revolution of 1959. His field of research covers the irreducible hostility of the US establishment, Cuba’s historical inheritance, and the alternatives and decisions of its leaders in the last decades, up to and including the problems and challenges they face in these times. His study ends with a careful analysis of the premises and reform proposals currently being discussed in Cuba. A necessary and suggestive reading for all of those concerned with Cuba’s future and with the threat posed by the imperial power over the entire Caribbean region.”
Adolfo Gilly, Emeritus Professor of History, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and author, The Mexican Revolution
“This important, very well written, and quite interesting book, evaluates the 52 years of the Cuban revolution under a classical Marxist (pre-Stalinist) viewpoint. Samuel Farber doesn’t pretend to be impartial: he advocates a transition toward a revolutionary, participatory socialist democracy, based on majority rule, civil rights, and liberties. And yet his book is thoroughly, painstakingly documented. He evaluates, with surprising insights, Cuba’s performance on national sovereignty, political democracy, economic growth, social welfare, race, gender, and the stand of domestic and external dissidents and critics. It is up-to-date, including an examination of the guidelines for the VI Party Congress, and ends with a good balance sheet and Marx and Engels’ views. Expect a strong reaction both from the right and the left. Don’t miss it!”
Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics and Latin American Studies, University of Pittsburgh
“Samuel Farber’s work on Cuba has long championed revolutionary democratic socialism from below. His latest book, a sophisticated and nuanced historical synthesis of the Cuban Revolution since 1959, provides an indispensable guide to the politics of a tiny island state that helped determine the history of Latin America and the dynamics of the Cold War in the latter half of the twentieth century. With a magisterial grasp of historical detail, and an incisive analytical eye, Farber offers an unparalleled cartography of the ideological debates and political outcomes of Cuba’s economic development, foreign policy, socio-cultural fluctuations in race and gender, and working-class and peasant realities under the rule of the Castro brothers. While acknowledging achievements of the revolutionary process in education and health, and defending Cuban sovereignty against imperial intervention, Farber shatters many of the idyllic myths propagated by left-wing apologists for the regime’s authoritarianism. The geriatric transition from Fidel to Raúl seems to promise a strategic shift toward a Cuban version of Sino-Vietnamese, state-led capitalism. A revolutionary democratic alternative, Farber shows, will only be possible through socialist resistance from below.”
Jeffery R. Webber, Queen Mary, University of London, author of From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation and the Politics of Evo Morales
Praise for Sam Farber’s earlier books
Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933—1960:
“A very intriguing and illuminating account of the social and political background of the Cuban revolution and its early stages. A valuable study.”
Noam Chomsky
Before Stalinism. The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy:
“When did the Russian Revolution go wrong and why? Whether one shares Samuel Farber’s views or not, his is an important, at once thoughtful and passionate, contribution to one of the major debates of our time.”
Daniel Singer, European correspondent for The Nation
“Before Stalinism is an honest and searching attempt to identify the roots of Stalinism in the pre-Stalin period. It can be recommended as a painstaking and scrupulous assessment, animated by a commitment to socialist democracy.”
Boris Kagarlitsky, Member of the Moscow Soviet
Social Decay and Transformation. A View from the Left:
“The left cannot ignore the growing social decay. It must provide rational answers for the immediate future and long-term answers leading beyond the confines of existing society. With this book, closely reasoned and well-argued but also full of contained political passion, Sam Farber makes an important contribution to our search for a radical alternative.”
Daniel Singer, European correspondent for The Nation
The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered:
“This is an excellent book. It is a first-rate synthesis and interpretation of the Cuban revolutionary experience — both the rebellion against the Batista regime and the consolidation of power in 1959-60. It is intelligent, well written, and well organized. It draws thoughtfully and well from prior scholarship on the Cuban revolution. The use of primary sources enriches the book at key points. It is a major contribution to the field of Cuban studies.”
Jorge I. Domínguez, Professor of Mexican and Latin American Politics and Economics, Harvard University
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Samuel Farber was born and raised in Marianao, Cuba, and came to the United States in February 1958. His books on Cuba include Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933-1960 and The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered. Farber was active in the Cuban high school student movement against Batista, and has been involved in socialist politics for more than fifty years.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466016 • US $16.95 • 300 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Ernesto “Che” Guevara remains a symbol to legions of young rebels and revolutionaries. Fifty years after his death, Che’s face is still emblazoned across T-shirts and posters throughout the world.
Writers remain similarly possessed, with no shortage of pages written on Guevara’s breathtaking life crossing South America by motorcycle, trekking through the jungles of Cuba, leading military units in Africa, or his death in the mountains of Bolivia. These episodes are deployed as proof that Che is either a bloodthirsty tyrant or a fearless hero. These approaches have often obscured and mystified as much as they have illuminated his political legacy.
For the first time, those curious about Che Guevara will have a way to engage with his political ideas and practical political record. The Politics of Che Guevara is aimed at dispelling many of the myths about the revolutionary leader.
This volume examines Guevara’s views on socialism, democracy, and revolution and asks what lessons can be learned by today’s activists and social movements. It will also analyze Guevara’s conduct as guerrilla commander and government administrator in Cuba, his political perspectives on revolutionary agency and his attempts to implement them in Cuba, Africa and Bolivia, as well as Guevara’s economic views.
PRAISE:
“In his previous books, the respected Marxist scholar Sam Farber has explored the paradoxes of the Cuban revolutionary experience with acute insight. Now, using sources unavailable to previous biographers, he scrupulously reconstructs the political thought of the twentieth century’s foremost revolutionary icon, illuminating the contradictions between Che’s radical egalitarianism and his austere elitism. Although he will always be revered for his heroic internationalism, Che’s ideas diverged sharply from classical Marxist conceptions of self-emancipation and workers’ democracy. Therein, as Farber shows so brilliantly, is the real tragedy of Third World revolution.”
Mike Davis, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Riverside, and author of Planet of Slums
“Across the world, Che Guevara is either branded a demon or idealized as a saint. Sam Farber chooses neither route, offering a complex and serious analysis of Guevara—a passionate and honest radical who could unfortunately never embrace socialism in its most democratic essence.”
Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin
“This book by Samuel Farber, a scrupulous historian and committed socialist, is indispensable and should be a part of the library of every young person who, impelled like Che, by a rebellious mind and a sense of justice, searches for an alternative to the inhuman, unjust, and predatory system that its high priests want to present as natural.”
Guillermo Almeyra, Argentinian columnist for the Mexican journal La Jornada
“With characteristic precision, and methodical attention to detail, Samuel Farber interrogates the writings and politics of perhaps the most widely recognized revolutionary figure of the twentieth century — Che Guevara. Farber’s biting, but measured, critique of Che’s ideas and practice, deserves to be read widely and debated at length. The unity of socialism, democracy, and revolution to which this book hopes to contribute in theory, has never been more urgently required in praxis.”
Jeffery R. Webber, author of Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia
“In this erudite, clear-headed, and unsparing account of the life and thought of one of the twentieth century’s iconic revolutionary and anti-imperialist figures, Samuel Farber writes from the left, as someone genuinely sympathetic to the stated goals of the Cuban revolution. He shows that Che Guevara’s concept of socialism included an inordinate sympathy for the single-party state of the Russian model, and that this led him to an elitist dismissal of independent trade unions and of worker’s democracy. In counterposing Guevara’s social vision to that of Karl Marx and of later anti-Stalinist leftists, Farber evokes unrealized emancipatory possibilities for Cuba in the 1960s, possibilities that have again become real for us today, in the era of Occupy and the Arab revolutions.”
Kevin B. Anderson, author of Marx at the Margins
“This is probably one of the most balanced and objective analyses that has been written about the mythical Argentinian guerrilla in recent years…. It is a very interesting and enjoyable book written with an efficient and rapid prose, which dives into one of the most complex contexts of the Cuban Revolution, the foundational decade of the sixties, and into one of the most attractive and polemical personalities of that process.”
Rafael Acosta de Arriba, Cuban Studies
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Samuel Farber was born and raised in Marianao, Cuba, and came to the United States in February 1958. He obtained a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969 and taught at a number of colleges and universities including UCLA and, most recently, Brooklyn College, where he is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science. His scholarship on Cuba is extensive and includes many articles and two previous books: Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933–1960 (Wesleyan University Press, 1976) and The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Farber was active in the Cuban high school student movement against Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, and has been involved in socialist politics for more than fifty years.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465743 • US $22 • 5 3/8 in x 8 3/8 in • 339 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Marx’s thought is being reappropriated and reinterpreted by a new generation of activists in their own struggles. This entails a return to Marx, a return that is never simple or innocent, for it demands the abandonment of a “dogmatic” approach to the texts and the willingness to strive in the present for an understanding of Marx’s analyses of capitalism.
“[T}he collection of essays presented in this volume aims to demonstrate the richness, rigour and importance of Marx’s thought for developing alternative worldviews and politics in the present. We hope the reader will find these texts interesting and useful not only in her efforts to make sense of the world that surrounds us, but also in her fight against the many forms of injustice brought about by capitalism.”
—Sara R. Farris, from the introduction
Contributors: Riccardo Bellofiore, Roland Boer, Chiara Bonfiglioli, Guglielmo Carchedi, Katja Diefenbach, Jan Drahokoupil, Peter Drucker, Sara R. Farris, Michael Heinrich, Laura Horn, Joost Kircz, Gal Kirn, Geert Reuten, Tom Rockmore, Peter D. Thomas, Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Marcel van der Linden, Jeff Webber, Frieder Otto Wolf, Steve Wright, Wei Xiaoping
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Sara R. Farris holds degrees from the University of Rome, “La Sapienza.” Sara previously taught sociology at the University of Amsterdam, University of Brunel and King’s College. She has also been a member scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science, in Princeton (2012/2013), Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Cluster of Excellence in Konstanz (2011) and at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (2009-2010).
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463961 • US $12 • 5 1/4 in x 7 1/2 in • 120 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This is the first comprehensive examination of Leon Trotsky’s view on revolutionary organizational principles and norms from 1917 to 1940. Mostly in his own words, it is grounded in Trotsky’s experience in Russia’s revolutionary movement, and as a leader of the International Left Opposition and Fourth International, examining the specifics and dynamic interplay of democratic initiative and principled centralism.
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Dianne Feeley is a socialist feminist and an editor of Against the Current. A retired autoworker from the parts industry, Feeley is a member of United Auto Workers, Local 22, and active in Detroit Eviction Defense.
Paul Le Blanc is author of a number of widely-read studies, including Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, and Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience. With Michael Yates he has written the widely-acclaimed A Freedom Budget for All Americans. He has co-edited a selection of Leon Trotsky’s Writings in Exile.
Thomas Twiss is a Liaison Librarian at the University of Pittsburgh and is the author of Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy (Historical Materialism Book Series).
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Paper • ISBN-13:9781608469482 • US $15.95 • 5.5 in x 7.5 in• 158 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
It’s 2051, and Arcadia is under attack. As the stand-alone sequel to Splinterlands begins, the sustainable compound in what was once Vermont is on high alert.
Arcadia’s defense corps is mobilized to defend against what first appears to be a routine assault, one of the many that the community repulses from paramilitary forces every year. But as sensors report a breach in the perimeter wall, even eighty-year-old Rachel Leopold shoulders a weapon and reports for duty. It’s a distraction from her urgent research: to save the world from the horrors of climate change. Rachel is in a race against time as she battles Arcadia’s enemies, the rising waters and superstorms, and her own mortality.
Frostlands takes the reader from the remaining enclaves of North America to the ruins of Europe, and what’s left of China before concluding with an explosive revelation that forces a reappraisal of all that came before
PRAISE:
“A worthy sequel to the thought-provoking Splinterlands, Frostlands is triumphant and absorbing science fiction, full of ecological and societal warnings. It is a unique and imaginative look at a future Earth scarred by environmental neglect.”
Foreword Reviews
“By taking us on a cautionary journey into a future planetary collapse where the term ‘one per cent’ is redefined in a terrifying way, John Feffer forces us to look deeply at our own society’s blindness to ecological apocalypse and greed. But the novel’s enchantment goes beyond dystopia: the quest for salvation depends on a crusty female octogenarian who would make Wonder Woman salivate with envy.”
Ariel Dorfman, Olivier Award-winning playwright
“John Feffer is our twenty-first century Jack London.”
Mike Davis
Praise for Splinterlands:
“In a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning, foreign policy analyst Feffer takes today’s woes of a politically fragmented, warming Earth and amplifies them into future catastrophe… This novel is not for the emotionally squeamish or optimistic; Feffer’s confident recitation of world collapse is terrifyingly plausible, a short but encompassing look at world tragedy.”
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Splinterlands paints a startling portrait of a post-apocalyptic tomorrow that is fast becoming a reality today. Fast-paced, yet strangely haunting, Feffer’s latest novel looks back from 2050 on the disintegration of world order told through the story of one broken family — and offers a disturbing vision of what might await us all if we don’t act quickly.”
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and Living with a Wild God, and founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project
John Feffer is a playwright and the author of several books including Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams and the novel Splinterlands. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Salon, and others. He is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594645 • US $14.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 130 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In Songlands, the stand alone finale to the Splinterlands trilogy, a poet and an AI launch a secret mission to rebuild the international community.
2052. The world is a mess. The climate change meltdown has triggered an endless cycle of natural disasters. Nationalist paramilitaries battle against religious extremists. Multinational corporations, with their own security forces, have replaced global institutions as the only real power-brokers. Waves of pandemics have closed borders with such regularity that travelhas become mostly virtual.
Aurora, a middle-aged sociologist, tries not to think about how the world has turned so chaotic and dangerous. At university, she focuses on her students. At home, it’s her children. She devotes her spare time to writing poetry. She’s relatively comfortable, but not particularly happy. And she’s angry at how small her life has become.Then one day a strange woman walks into Aurora’s life and, in an instant, the world’s chaos gets personal. Suddenly the obscure professor has a target on her back and the fate of the world in her hands. Her salvation, and that of the planet as well, lies in the mysteries locked inside the head of this enigmatic woman who has appeared on her doorstep. Unlocking those mysteries will take Aurora on a virtual journey around the fragmented globe and up against the world’s most powerful corporation.
Songlands, the stand-alone finale to the Splinterlands trilogy, describes humanity’s last shot at solving the world’s problems. Can Aurora assemble a team to reverse the splintering of the international community and avert an even more dystopian future?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Feffer is a playwright and the author of several books. He is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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Haymarket Books (December 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13:9781608467242 • US $13.95 • 264 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Julian West, looking backward from 2050, tries to understand why the world and his family have fallen apart.
Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, and part World War Z, John Feffer’s striking new dystopian novel takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. The European Union has broken apart. Great powers like Russia and China have shriveled. America’s global military footprint has virtually disappeared and the United States remains united in name only. Nationalism has proven to be the century’s most enduring force, as ever-rising global temperatures have supercharged each-against-all competition and conflict among the now three hundred–plus members of an increasingly feeble United Nations.
As he navigates the world of 2050, Julian West offers a road map for the path we’re already on, a chronicle of impending disaster, and a faint light of hope. He may be humanity’s last best chance to explain how the world unraveled—if he can survive the danger and beauty of the Splinterlands.
PRAISE FOR SPLINTERLANDS:
“In a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning, foreign policy analyst Feffer takes today’s woes of a politically fragmented, warming Earth and amplifies them into future catastrophe… This novel is not for the emotionally squeamish or optimistic; Feffer’s confident recitation of world collapse is terrifyingly plausible, a short but encompassing look at world tragedy.”
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Splinterlands paints a startling portrait of a post-apocalyptic tomorrow that is fast becoming a reality today. Fast-paced, yet strangely haunting, Feffer’s latest novel looks back from 2050 on the disintegration of world order told through the story of one broken family — and offers a disturbing vision of what might await us all if we don’t act quickly.”
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and Living with a Wild God, and founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project
“A chilling portrayal of where the politics of division could take us. Now I only hope he writes the sequel to tell us how to avoid it!”
Naomi Oreskes, co-author of The Collapse of Western Civilization
“John Feffer is our 21st-century Jack London, and, like the latter’s Iron Heel, Splinterlands is a vivid, suspenseful warning about the ultimately incompatibility between capitalism and human survival.”
Mike Davis, author, Late Victorian Holocausts
“Feffer’s book is a wild ride through a bleak future, casting a harsh, thought-provoking light on that future’s modern-day roots.”
John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. In 2012 and 2013, he was also an Open Society Fellow looking at the transformations that have taken place in Eastern Europe since 1989. He is the author of several books, including the novel Foamers, and has also written and performed four one-man shows.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781608466115• US $16 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 96 pgs.
2019 National Book Award Longlist
PEN America 2020 Awards, Open Book Award Shortlist
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Survival is just the beginning. After survival, there must be something else, something freeing that we conjure when speak our dreams and hurts aloud. Build Yourself a Boat, an innovative work by award-winning poet Camonghne Felix, explores the political and philosophical concept of post-survival, redefining our relationship to generational trauma.
Composed of threaded narratives, and a focused attention on recollection through agency and form, Build Yourself A Boat redefines the language of collective trauma, individual trauma and our approach to the lyric of the trauma. The body is not a site for revelatory shame. Assembly of self is not voyeur. This is not a collage of hurt. This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is a look at what might come next and a diagram of the waters that birth us. A look at what floats, and what, ultimately, sustains.
PRAISE
“…if Ms. Felix is any guide, I have high hopes for what the poetic can achieve as it intersects more explicitly with American politics. These days, we need all the inventive language for both political horror and political hope that we can get.”
Alissa Quart, The New York Times
“Excellent poems about trauma, self-harm, race, and womanhood. The poems that experiment with form are really interesting. I love how the footnotes and the final piece come together.”
Roxane Gay, Goodreads
“Camonghne Felix’s debut poetry collection, Build Yourself a Boat, is about the trauma and pain of black womanhood. Felix explores what it means, politically to be a black woman in a world of Trump and personally, exploring the ways heartbreak and other points of pain change a person and their body. Build Yourself a Boat was exactly what I needed to read, and revisit, this season as men decided what women should do with their bodies and as I learned to manage heartbreak.”
Electric Literature
“Centering on black, female identity, Camonghne Felix’s Build Yourself a Boat is an exquisite and thoughtful collection that should be on everyone’s TBR.”
Bustle
“Camonghne Felix uses profound language to explore the policing of the Black body, and Build Yourself a Boat bridges the gap between artistry and the world of politics, connecting Black womanhood and Felix’s coming of age in New York City.”
Blavity
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Camonghne Felix is a poet, political strategist, media junkie and cultural worker. She received an M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, and has received Fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo and Poets House. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of the chapbook Yolk, and was listed by Black Youth Project as a “Black Girl From the Future You Should Know.”
Hardcover • ISBN-13: 9781642591484 • US $26.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 400 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
With reproductive freedom under unprecedented attack, it’s time to take back the conversation. Literature has always been at the forefront of profound shifts in human consciousness, and that’s the level of shift that is needed now. It’s time for Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, the first major literary anthology of poems, stories, and literary essays about abortion.
Twenty years in the making, this book spans continents and centuries; and includes Audre Lorde, Margaret Atwood, Lucille Clifton, Amy Tan, Gloria Steinem, Ursula Le Guin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Joyce Carol Oates, Gloria Naylor, Dorothy Parker, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Anne Sexton, Ntozake Shange, Sholeh Wolpe, Ai, Jean Rhys, Mahogany L. Browne, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Frank O’Hara, Vi Khi Nao, Sharon Olds, Judith Arcana, Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, Molly Peacock, Carol Muske-Dukes, Mo Yan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Kathy Acker, Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes, Sharon Doubiago, and numerous other classic and contemporary writers including voices from Canada, France, China, India, Iran, Ireland, Kenya, and Pakistan.
PRAISE:
“The poems, essays, and stories in Choice Words prove that women’s bodies cannot be nationalized.”
Gloria Steinem
“This book is a treasure, a gift, and a long-overdue shining of light in the most secret, sometimes painful, and often defiant lives of women. I am grateful that this anthology finally exists.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, author, Eat, Pray, Love
“The anthology’s contents are confessional, funny, graphic, stolid, absurdist, cagey, heartbreaking, vitriolic and on it goes, the approaches to the subject at hand as varied as human experience.”
Shelf Awareness
“This is a captivating collection, organized and curated as only Annie Finch can do. It is a book I will cherish for years to come.”
Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author, Balm
“A powerful collection of poems, fiction, and essays on the reality of abortion. . . Finch (Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters, 2015, etc.) has drawn together writers across time (from the 16th century to the present), place, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and culture who offer stark, often wrenching revelations. . . Eloquent contributions to the literature on a deeply contested issue.”
Kirkus, starred review
“With reproductive rights under relentless assault, never has a book been more needed. Annie Finch has spanned five centuries and six continents to assemble writers who articulate a commonality of experience in every situation and emotion. Conceived and compiled with scrupulous scholarship, and with an illuminating introduction by Katha Pollitt, Choice Words will become a classic of both feminism and literature.”
Robin Morgan, activist, author, host of Women’s Media Center Live
“Choice Words is an important contribution to our movement for abortion access. It’s time to read what literary voices have been saying about abortion. As we read their voices and stories, we have more nuanced context as we navigate our own lives.”
Yamani Hernandez, Executive Director, National Network of Abortion Funds
“Silence, as much as anything, is why abortion’s such an easy target in America. Stories save lives. We need women to say, shamelessly, I had an abortion. I’m not sorry. I’m not afraid. This anthology is a valuable contribution to this work.”
Molly Crabapple, author, Drawing Blood
“Every kind of abortion you can imagine is represented here: abortions legal and illegal, safe and dangerous and fatal; abortions despite the wishes of others and abortions at the behest−the compulsion−of others; abortion as a claiming of self and abortion as an abnegation of self. There is abortion as tragedy, and also abortion as an occasion for wry comedy.”
Katha Pollitt, author, Pro
“This landmark abortion anthology is not merely words on a page, but a literary rallying cry. Choice Words gives us words to fill the silence created by decades of anti-choice rhetoric, violence and abortion stigma.”
Ash Jordan, founder of Choice Words Action
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Annie Finch is an award-winning feminist poet and writer and the author or editor of twenty books, including eight previous anthologies from publishers including University of Michigan Press, University of Arkansas Press, and Penguin/Random House. She earned a Ph.D from Stanford, has taught widely, and lives in Washington, DC.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608460656 • US $16 • 5.25 in x 7.75 in • 250 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Floodlines is a firsthand account of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans. The book weaves the stories of gay rappers, Mardi Gras Indians, Arab and Latino immigrants, public housing residents, and grassroots activists in the years before and after Katrina. From post-Katrina evacuee camps to torture testimony at Angola Prison to organizing with the family members of the Jena Six, Floodlines tells the stories behind the headlines, from an unforgettable time and place in history.
PRAISE:
“This is the most important book I’ve read about Katrina and what came after. In the tradition of Howard Zinn this could be called ‘The People’s History of the Storm.’ Jordan Flaherty was there on the front lines.”
Eve Ensler, playwright, The Vagina Monologues, activist and founder of V-Day
“Jordan Flaherty brings the sharp analysis and dedication of a seasoned organizer to his writing, and insightful observation to his reporting. He unfailingly has his ear to the ground in a city that continues to reveal the floodlines of structural racism in America.”
Tram Nguyen, author, We Are All Suspects Now:Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11
“As the floodwaters rose in New Orleans, Jordan Flaherty began to write, rescuing precious truths about the reality of racism and solidarity in his city that risked being washed away in the tide of formulaic corporate journalism. I can think of no journalist that writes with deeper knowledge or more love about this highly contested part of the United States. With a new flood threatening life on the Gulf Coast — this time made of oil, not water, but powered, as always, by greed and neglect — these remarkable stories of injustice and resistance must be heard.”
Naomi Klein, author, The Shock Doctrine
“A unique, firsthand account of race, culture and community in New Orleans, the book by award-winning N.O.-based journalist Flaherty provides a close-up of post-Katrina community organizing efforts, education and housing rights, as well as a broader view of criminal justice in ‘post-racial’ America. Widely praised, the book weaves interconnected stories of public housing residents, musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, Arab and Latino immigrants and grassroots activists.”
New Orleans Times-Picayune
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jordan Flaherty is a writer and community organizer based in New Orleans. In addition to his award-winning post-Katrina journalism, he was the first journalist with a national audience to write about the Jena Six case, and played an important role in bringing the story to worldwide attention. He has produced news segments for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now!, and appeared as a guest on a wide range of television and radio shows, including CNN’s American Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Headline News, GRITtv, Keep Hope Alive with Reverend Jesse Jackson, and both local and nationally-syndicated shows on National Public Radio.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466757 • US $17.95 • 280 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Through intimate portraits of four exonerated prisoners, investigative journalist Alison Flowers explores what happens to innocent people when the state flings open the jailhouse door and tosses them back, empty-handed, into the unknown.
From the front lines of the wrongful conviction capital of the United States—Cook County, Illinois—investigative journalist Alison Flowers recounts profoundly human stories of reclaiming life, overcoming adversity, and searching for purpose after exoneration.
As she tells each exoneree’s powerful story, Flowers vividly shows that release from prison, though sometimes joyous and hopeful, is not a Hollywood ending—or an ending at all. Rather, an exoneree’s first unshackled steps are the beginning of a new journey full of turmoil and uncertainty. Flowers also sheds new light on the collateral damage of wrongful convictions on families and communities, challenging deeper problems of mass incarceration and the criminal justice system.
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PRAISE:
“No author has covered the years after exoneration with the same depth as Flowers does in this disturbing book. She ably shows that even under the best of circumstances, exonerees struggle with family relationships, job searches, recovery from prison-related health problems, adjustments to new technologies, and more. Exoneree Diaries is a thoroughly researched, provocative book of justice gone wrong.”
Kirkus
“Exoneree Diaries is a powerful, truthful and compelling read for anyone who is interested in the world of wrongful convictions. Alison Flowers has reached into the heart of these exonerees to share their joys, triumphs and sorrows. She is perhaps the first author to delineate the deep agony experienced by exonerees after their freedom has been won.”
Gloria Killian, exoneree and author of Full Circle: A True Story of Murder, Lies, and Vindication
“Through these searing portraits, readers will witness the fissures in the criminal justice system and the damage they cause to the wrongfully convicted, their families, and their communities.”
Publishers Weekly
“At least 2.3 percent of the millions imprisoned in America did not commit the crimes for which they were convicted. Alison Flowers is the rare journalist who does not allow the people treated as collateral damage in the era of mass incarceration to remain invisible.”
Spencer Ackerman, US national security editor for The Guardian
“This book not only chronicles the struggles after freedom, but its subtext asks, to what extent does society owe them something?”
Foreword Reviews
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alison Flowers is an award-winning investigative journalist who focuses on social and criminal justice. Her yearlong multimedia series about exonerees for Chicago Public Media and NPR affiliate WBEZ was a finalist for a national Online Journalism Award in 2014. A former TV reporter, Flowers has also written for the Village Voice, VICE News, and others. She is a Social Justice News Nexus fellow and works at the Invisible Institute, a journalism production company on the South Side of Chicago.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463282 • US $19 • 5 1/4 in x 8 3/8 in • 328 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Here are Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, David Hilliard, and Fred Hampton; Kathleen Cleaver and other Panther women; the party’s court battles and acquittals; its positions on black separatism, the power structure, the police, violence, and education; as well as songs, poems, and political cartoons. This is the story behind the Black Panthers.
PRAISE:
“Philip S. Foner was a national treasure — scholar, activist and lover of justice.”
Cornel West
“The closest thing we’re going to get to a rebuttal to [the] organized attempt to destroy the Panthers’ legacy.”
Ishmael Reed
“Essential reading for those who would prefer to judge the Panther movement for themselves.”
Library Journal
“The women’s speeches and articles are notable for their concreteness and convincingness … especially [those of] Kathleen Cleaver.”
The Nation
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
Philip S. Foner was one of the most prominent Marxist historians in the United States. A prolific author and editor, he tirelessly documented the lives of workers, African Americans, and political radicals. Shut out of academic employment for a quarter century because of his political affiliations, he nonetheless helped lay the basis for the explosion of scholarship in labor and black history during the past two decades.
Barbara Ransby is a writer, historian, and longtime political activist. Ransby has published dozens of articles and essays in popular and scholarly venues. She is most notably the author of an award-winning biography of civil rights activist Ella Baker, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Race and Class. Ransby is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and African American Studies and History at University of Illinois at Chicago.
Clayborne Carson is a professor of History at Stanford University and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Selected in 1985 by the late Mrs. Coretta Scott King to edit and publish the papers of her late husband, Carson has devoted most of his professional life to studying Martin Luther King, Jr., and the movements King inspired. Under his direction, the King Papers Project has produced six volumes of a definitive, comprehensive edition of King’s speeches, sermons, correspondence, publications, and unpublished writings. Carson was a senior historical advisor for the fourteen-part, award-winning, public television series on the civil rights movement Eyes on the Prize and co-edited the Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463909 • US $18 • 8 1/8 in x 5 1/4 in • 206 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Essays and speeches from 1889-1933, long unavailable in the U.S., on women’s equality, labor, peace, socialism. In her writings, Zetkin describes the political process that ultimately allowed for “socialized reproduction” — namely the establishment by the Soviet Revolutionary government of communal kitchens, laundries and child care facilities.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
Clara Zetkin was a German Marxist theorist, activist, and advocate for women’s rights. In 1911, she organized the first International Women’s Day.
Philip S. Foner was one of the most prominent Marxist historians in the United States. A prolific author and editor, he tirelessly documented the lives of workers, African Americans, and political radicals. Shut out of academic employment for a quarter century because of his political affiliations, he nonetheless helped lay the basis for the explosion of scholarship in labor and black history during the past two decades.
Angela Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author. Davis was politically active during the late 1960s through the 1970s and was associated with the Communist Party USA, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party. Davis was a political prisoner and is now a world-renowned scholar and author of Are Prisons Necessary?
Rosalyn Baxandall (1939–2015) was a Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Old Westbury and taught at the Bard Prison Project and CUNY Labor School. Baxandall authored Words on Fire, the Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), co-authored Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, (New York: Basic Books, 2000), and co-edited of America’s Working Women, An Anthology of Women’s Work, 1620–1970, (New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1995) and Dear Sisters, Dispatches From Women Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 2000). She also wrote numerous articles, book reviews, on day care, working women, sexuality, reproductive rights and class, race and gender in suburbia.
Baxandall wrote several autobiographical articles about her women’s liberation experience in the Feminist Memoir Project, Voices from Women’s Liberation (Crown, 1998, and updated 2007, Rutgers University Press) and Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left (University of Illinois Press, 1998).
Baxandall was one of the foremothers of the women’s liberation movement in the late l960s, helped found several day care centers and was on the Mayor’s Task Force on Day Care. She was active in Red Stockings, WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), No More Nice Girls, CARASA (Coalition for Abortion and Against Sterilization Abuse), and History in Action.
Haymarket Books (Spring 2017, world English rights)
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467877 • US $22.00 • 5 1/2 in x 8 1/2 • 492 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of black workers’ contribution to the American labor movement.
PRAISE:
“Foner’s careful and detailed scholarship makes this the best one-volume study of blacks and the labor movement currently available.”
The Black Scholar
“…this book could well become a classic in its field as the complex relationship between organized labor and black Americans continues to unfold.”
Professor Ken Mommsen, University of Utah
“The standard of accuracy and reasoned argument maintained in this work should make it the standard on its subject for a long time.”
Professor David Herreshoff, Wayne State University, Journal of American History
“This readable and authoritative work represents a significant contribution to the literature of black unionism in the United States.”
Joel Hettger, U.S. Department of Labor History, Library Journal
“Foner’s book provides considerable illumination of the an important and often overlooked aspect of American labor history.”
Professor Norman Lederer, American Academy of Political and Social Science
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Philip S. Foner (1910–1994) was an American historian and professor who taught and lectured all over the world. He wrote and edited more than a hundred books, including the ten-volume History of the Labor Movement in the United States and The Black Panthers Speak.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464975 • US $11.95 • 6 3/4 in x 7 3/4 in • 110 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Radical songwriter and organizer Joe Hill was murdered by the state of Utah in 1915, but his songs continue to inspire working-class activists and musicians. This collection of letters, edited by radical historian Philip Foner (1910–1994), with new material by Alexis Buss, provides a window into the political reflections and personal struggles behind Hill’s legacy.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
Philip Foner (1910-1994) was an American historian and professor who taught and lectured all over the world. He wrote and edited more than a hundred books, including the ten-volume History of the Labor Movement in the United States and The Black Panthers Speak.
Alexis Buss served six terms as General Secretary-Treasurer of the Industrial Workers of the World and also worked as a union organizer specializing in direct action strategies. She has coedited the Solidarity Forever Labor History Calendar since 1998 and is the author of The Union on Our Own Terms, drawn from columns she wrote on solidarity unionism for the Industrial Worker for nearly a decade.
Incendiary rock guitarist and acoustic troubadour Tom Morello is a groundbreaking artist in his solo career and as an original member of the rock bands Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608469215 • US $25 • 9.5 in x 6 in • 610 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An inspiring comprehensive historical narrative featuring women who led struggles for freedom, equality, and unity on the labor front, from the first colonial trade unions to the fight for a voice in the twentieth-century labor movements.
PRAISE
“With women today making up more than half the work force, the labor movement is changing. And understanding these changes and possibilities, Foner’s exhaustive, carefully documented, and readable history is timely and invaluable.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Foner’s survey of twentieth-century developments is lively, readable, delightfully anecdotal, and unabashedly partisan…His spirited heroines are a joy; they more than recommend the book.”
Washington Post Book World
“An indispensable reference work for anyone interested in the history of the women’s movement in the United States.”
Wall Street Review
“Women and the American Labor Movement provides a valuable sourcebook as well as an intriguing stimulus to scholars who will want to expand the field.”
Journal of American History
“An impressive richness of detail…His short biographies of women labor leaders are especially commendable.”
American Historical Review
“Invaluable”
Labor Notes
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Philip Foner (1910-1994) was a prolific people’s historian whose many works include Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 16-19-1981, The Black Panthers Speak, Clara Zetkin; Selected Writings, and The Letters of Joe Hill, all published in new editions by Haymarket Books.
Annelise Orleck is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. She is the author of four books on the history of U.S. women, politics, immigration and activism. Most recent among them are Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (2005) and Rethinking American Women’s Activism (2014). She is also co-editor of The War on Poverty, 1964–1980: A New Grassroots History (2011) and The Politics of Motherhood; Activist Voices from Left to Right (1997).
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465354 • US $16 • 5 1/4 in x 8 1/4 in • 128 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Women banana workers have organized themselves and gained increasing control over their unions, their workplaces, and their lives. Highly accessible and narrative in style, Bananeras recounts the history and growth of this vital movement and shows how Latin American women workers are shaping and broadly reimagining the possibilities of international labor solidarity.
PRAISE:
“[Bananeras] is a vital accounting of the struggles still being waged.”
Margaret Randall, author of When I Look into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror, and Resistance
Dana Frank is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Beacon, 1999); Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge, 1994); Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California’s Kitsch Monuments (City Lights, 2007) and, with Howard Zinn and Robin D.G. Kelley, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Beacon, 2001). Her contribution to Three Strikes has been reprinted, with a new introduction, by Haymarket Books as Women Strikers Occupy Chain Story, Win Big (2012). Long active in labor solidarity work, since 2000 she has worked with the US Labor Education in the Americas Project (US/LEAP) in support of the banana unions in Latin America. Since the 2009 military coup her articles about human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras have appeared in The Nation, New York Times, Politico Magazine, Foreign Affairs.com, The Baffler, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and many other publications, and she has testified in both the U.S. Congress and Canadian Parliament.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13:9781608469604• US $17.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in• 290 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This powerful narrative recounts the tumultuous time in Honduras that witnessed then-President Manuel Zelaya deposed by a coup in June 2009, told through first-person experiences and layered with deeper political analysis. It weaves together two perspectives; first, the broad picture of Honduras since the coup, including the coup itself, its continuation in two repressive regimes, and secondly, the evolving Honduran resistance movement, and a new, broad solidarity movement in the US.
Although it is full of terrible things, this not a horror story: this narrative directly counters mainstream media coverage that portrays Honduras as a pit of unrelenting awfulness, in which powerless sobbing mothers cry over bodies in the morgue. Rather, it’s about sobering challenges and the inspiring collective strength with which people face them.
PRAISE:
“In her new book, The Long Honduran Night, UCSC Professor Emerita Dana Frank describes the crisis that has gripped the Central American nation in the wake of the 2009 coup, and offers a fierce indictment of US policy in Honduras. The timely publication brings much-needed political context to a US audience, an antidote to the vacuous partisan posturing that dominates the current media discourse.”
Jacobin
“[P]owerful, passionate, and meticulous in its documentation of foreign policy in Honduras, a country that has long been slighted in mainstream journalism and academic research.”
Foreword Reviews
“Dana Frank has written a searing portrait of a nation in crisis, a book that is startling, enraging, and humane all at once. Her most important accomplishment is never losing sight of the hardships and treachery that ordinary Hondurans have had to endure these last several years, nor the dignity with which they have survived it all.”
Daniel Alarcón, executive producer of Radio Ambulante, author of At Night We Walk in Circles
“The Long Honduran Night breaks the deafening silence that has followed recent American intervention in Honduras. It graphically documents the awful legacy of this intervention. By showing how directly the United States crashed into a Honduran presidential election, it also exposes the hypocrisy of our outrage at foreign interference in our own politics.”
Stephen Kinzer, award-winning author and foreign correspondent
“If you’ve any interest at all in Honduras, US foreign policy, Central America, why so many Central Americans are migrating north . . . or in a powerful, informative, and extremely good read, do pick up Dana Frank’s book, The Long Honduran Night. It’s a surprisingly readable book that tells not only the tragic story of another failed state and the forces that continue to work against establishing real democracies in Central America, but also inspires in its stories of everyday people— in Honduras and the United States—who work against difficult odds to create change, often by placing their lives at risk.”
María Martin, independent journalist
“Free from academic jargon, conversant with modern Honduran history, and steeped in passion, this testimonial book is the best primer in English about the coup, and resistance to it, that destroyed Honduran democracy on June 28, 2009…Almost ten years after the coup, Frank’s book transits seamlessly between the social fabric and the intimate lives of hundreds of Hondurans she has met personally during her many years in the country. Frank manages this while referencing key historical processes and their current legacies, an important and necessary feat on its own, but also valuable because it informs the current plight of Hondurans who flee their country into the US seeking asylum in the aftermath of the 2009 coup.”
Dario A. Euraque, professor of history and international studies, Trinity College
“I have covered Honduras ever since the 2009 coup. Dana Frank’s insightful and very human portrait of the country’s resistance is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s really going on in Honduras and why it matters.”
Adam Raney, journalist, Al Jazeera English and Univision
“I congratulate and thank Dr. Dana Frank, a North American con- cerned about Honduras, for giving us this book and for documenting the role of the United States in the long night of terror that we have lived in Honduras since the 2009 coup. Her contribution to historic memory stands as our witness.”
Bertha Oliva, general coordinator, Committee of the Families of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras
Dana Frank is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Beacon, 1999); Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge, 1994); Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California’s Kitsch Monuments (City Lights, 2007), Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (Haymarket, 2016), and, with Howard Zinn and Robin D.G. Kelley, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Beacon, 2001).
Her contribution to Three Strikes has been reprinted, with a new introduction, by Haymarket Books as Women Strikers Occupy Chain Story, Win Big (2012). Long active in labor solidarity work, since 2000 she has worked with the US Labor Education in the Americas Project (US/LEAP) in support of the banana unions in Latin America. Since the 2009 military coup her articles about human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras have appeared in The Nation, New York Times, Politico Magazine, Foreign Affairs.com, The Baffler, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and many other publications, and she has testified in both the U.S. Congress and Canadian Parliament.
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598285 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 200 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Once home to the United States’s largest plutonium production site, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state is laced with 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. The threat of an explosive accident at Hanford is all too real—an event that could be more catastrophic than Chernobyl.
The EPA designated Hanford the most toxic place in America; it is also the most expensive environmental clean-up job the world has ever seen, with a $677 billion price tag that keeps growing. Huge underground tanks, well past their life expectancy and full of boiling radioactive gunk, are leaking, infecting groundwater supplies and threatening the Columbia River.
Whistleblowers, worried that the worst is ahead, are now speaking out, begging to be heard and hoping their pleas help bring attention to the dire situation at Hanford. Aside from a few feisty community groups and handful of Indigenous activists, there is very little public scrutiny of the clean-up process, which is managed by the Department of Energy and carried out by contractors with shoddy track records, like Bechtel. In the context of renewed support for atomic power as a means of combating climate change, Atomic Days provides a much-needed refutation of the myths of nuclear technology—from weapons to electricity—and shines a spotlight on the ravages of Hanford and its threat to communities, workers and the global environment.
PRAISE:
“The vast federal Hanford (Washington state) nuclear waste site is revealed here in gripping detail as a dark corner of the continuing toxic, budget-busting, legacy of the military-industrial complex. In Atomic Days, Joshua Frank applies an investigative X-Ray to this deadly, vast, leaking nuclear waste dump near the great Columbia River. Owned by our ‘open check’ government and operated lucratively by corporate contractors, the Hanford reservation is the nightmare civilian peril produced by the nuclear arms race. Gift a copy to your local library.“
Ralph Nader
The masterfulness of Frank’s work is Pulitzer Prize award-worthy.” —New York Journal of Books
“Joshua Frank blows the lid off ‘the U.S. government’s gargantuan plutonium operation’ that ‘churned out nearly all of the radioactive fuel used in the country’s nuclear arsenal…..’ The award-winning journalist makes a compelling case that Hanford has become “the costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen, and arguably the most contaminated place on the entire planet.” He warns of a potential apocalyptic atomic catastrophe…. As some turn to nuclear power as a supposed solution to the climate emergency, Atomic Days, published in October 2022, reminds readers of the perils of nuclear waste and its difficult disposal.”
The Progressive, Best Books of 2022
“Joshua Frank’s brilliant Atomic Days, from Haymarket Books, takes us deep into the horrific clogged bowels of the failed technology that is nuclear power….Indeed, for readers truly interested in the future of atomic energy, take a good look at how it plays in Atomic Days. Then ask how soon we can cover the whole damn place with solar panels.”
Truthout
“The Hanford Site haunts the future of the Columbia River Basin, its land, people, plants, and animals. It’s a nuclear crime scene that once made atomic weaponry. Joshua Frank dissects that historical crime scene, tracing it back to the colonization of this land while also pointing to the future crimes that may have been unleashed by perpetual radioactive pollution—a silent killer that cannot be seen or smelt and takes thousands of lifetimes to fully neutralize. Frank issues an urgent call to action.”
Nick Estes (Lakota), author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
“Joshua Frank’s Atomic Daze is a brilliantly written, explosive exposé of the most toxic site in the Western hemisphere and most expensive environmental cleanup in world history. He has given us a terrifying look at the radioactive nuclear materials produced at Hanford for four decades, the environmental catastrophe left behind, and the disastrous cleanup efforts that generate huge profits for companies like Bechtel despite lies, fraud and deadly accidents that only generate more corporate profits. But Frank also lifts up the courageous actions of whistleblowers, community watchdogs and indigenous leaders who can lead the way out of this morass. Read the book and take action to end the nuclear insanity.”
Medea Benjamin
“Nuclear power’s significant carbon footprint is generated by carbon-intensive uranium mining. And what is overlooked by nuclear power boosters is the neocolonial impact of mining and refining nuclear fuel on Indigenous communities … All of this makes reading Joshua Frank’s Atomic Days more crucial than ever.”
Jacqueline Keeler
“This convinced me nuclear is bonkers.”
Dean Wareham, musician, author of Black Postcards
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joshua Frank is an award-winning California-based journalist and co-editor of the political magazine CounterPunch. He is a co-author of several books, most recently The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink (AK Press).
Katherine Franke makes a powerful case for reparations for Black Americans by amplifying the stories of formerly enslaved people and calling for repair of the damage caused by the legacy of American slavery. Repair invites readers to explore the historical context for reparations, offering a detailed account of the circumstances that surrounded the emancipation of enslaved Black people in two unique contexts, the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Davis Bend, Mississippi, Jefferson Davis’s former plantation.
Through these two critical historical examples, Franke unpacks intergenerational, systemic racism and white privilege at the heart of American society and argues that reparations for slavery are necessary, overdue and possible.
PRAISE:
“Repair revisits the revolutionary era of Reconstruction, that “brief moment in the sun” in the words of W.E. B. Du Bois, when the redistribution of land and wealth as recompense for unrequited toil could have secured genuine freedom for Black people rather than a future of racial inequality, exploitation, marginalization, and precarity. To being the road to repair, Katherine Franke makes a persuasive case for reparations as at least a first step toward creating the conditions for genuine freedom and justice, not only for African Americans but for all of us.”
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Katherine Franke argues for a type of Black freedom that is material and felt—freedom that is more than a poetic nod to claims of American moral comeuppance. Repair: Redeeming The Promise of Abolition is a critical text for our times that demands an honest reckoning with the consequences, and afterlife, of the sin that was chattel enslavement. It is bold call for reparations and costly atonement.”
Darnell L. Moore, author of No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America
“Katherine Franke is consistently one of the sharpest, most conscientious thinkers in progressive politics. In a time defined by crisis and conflict, Katherine is among that small number of thinkers whom I find indispensable.”
Jelani Cobb, New Yorker columnist and author, The Substance of Hope
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Katherine Franke is one of the nation’s leading scholars writing on law, racial justice, African American history, and sexuality. She is chair of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Her first book was Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality (2017, NYU Press). She is the Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University and Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, and chair of the board of Trustees of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Hardcover • ISBN-13:9781642591309 • US $40.00 • 10 in x 9 in • 120 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Krista Franklin draws on Pan African histories, Black Surrealism, Afrofuturism, pop culture, art history, and the historical and present-day micro-to-macro violence inflicted upon Black people and other people of color, working to forge imaginative spaces for radical possibilities and visions of liberation.
Featuring 45 poems, 40 artworks, an author statement and an interview, Too Much Midnight chronicles the intersections between art and life, art and writing, the historical and the speculative, cultural and personal identity, the magical and the mundane.
PRAISE:
“Celebrating the possibilities for extrasensory powers to resist oppressive narratives and change the minds of a society, Franklin reorders ritual and constructs fantasies.”
Matt Morris, Artforum
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Krista Franklin is a writer and visual artist whose work has appeared in Poetry, TheOffing, Black Camera, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, BOMB Magazine, Encyclopedia, Vol. F-K and L-Z, and the anthologies The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape, The BreakBeatPoets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Gathering Ground. Her chapbook of poems, Study of Love & Black Body, was published by Willow Books in 2012.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780684835587 • US $21.95 • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Hailed as “a chilling portrait” by The Boston Globe and “a crafty thriller” by Newsweek, this astonishing story of an obsessive hacker promises to change the way you look at the Internet forever.
At Large chronicles the massive manhunt that united hard-nosed FBI agents, computer nerds, and uptight security bureaucrats against an elusive computer outlaw who broke into highly secured computer systems at banks, universities, federal agencies, and top-secret military weapons-research sites. Here is “a real-life tale of cops vs. hackers, by two technology writers with a flair for turning a complicated crime and investigation into a fast-moving edge-of-your-seat story” (Kirkus Reviews, starred). At Large blows the lid off the frightening vulnerability of the global online network, which leaves not only systems, but also individuals, exposed.
PRAISE:
“An absorbing page flipper.”
Jim Taibi, Business Week
“Freedman and Mann…understand technology, computers, and security issues. Their message in At Large is clear and convincing.”
Jon Katz, The New York Times Book Review
“A thriller…spine-chilling…reads like a John Grisham novel.”
Time Digital
“A fascinating story…. Read it and you’ll never look at the Internet or your computer quite the same.”
Award-winning science writer Charles C. Mann is the author of 1493, a New York Times best-seller, and 1491, which won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Keck award for the best book of the year. A correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Wired, he has covered the intersection of science, technology, and commerce for many newspapers and magazines here and abroad, including National Geographic, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the Washington Post.
David H. Freedman is the author of Brainmakers, the senior editor of Forbes ASAP, and a contributing editor to Discover. He lives in Needham, Massachusetts.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591262 • US $26.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 450 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A powerful and wide-ranging collection examining the persistent impact of the Black Panther Party on subsequent liberation struggles.
The first book to comprehensively examine how the Black Panther Party has directly shaped the practices and ideas that have animated grassroots activism in the decades since its decline, Black Power Afterlives represents a major scholarly achievement as well as an important resource for today’s activists. Through its focus on the enduring impact of the Black Panther Party, this volume expands the historiography of Black Power studies beyond the 1960s-70s and serves as a bridge between studies of the Black Panther Party during its organizational existence and studies of present-day Black activism, allowing today’s readers and organizers to situate themselves in a long lineage of liberation movements.
PRAISE:
“Fujino and Harmachis show us that history is never done. It runs like a river, sometimes rushing, sometimes meandering, but always moving.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal, author of We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party
“Deftly side stepping well-trod ground, authors trace how the Panthers’ international engagements, artistic practices, ideological frameworks and community organizing have continued to influence new generations of activists. By locating the Panthers’ richest legacies in the work of students, poor Black folks and Black queer feminists and in the sustained commitment of political prisoners, it reminds readers of the transformative possibilities of struggle.”
Robyn C. Spencer, author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panthers Party in Oakland
“Black Power Afterlives gives us concrete insights into the continuing significance of the Black Panthers without the common iconization and stereotypes. Through carefully chosen writings and interviews we are reminded of the transformative power of movements and real people that envision a far more just and equitable future for humanity and the planet.”
Claude Marks, director, The Freedom Archives
“The vivid, engaging, and compelling testimonies that Diane C. Fujino and Matef Harmachis have collected in Black Power Afterlives offer unparalleled insights about the origins, evolution, and continuing influence and impact of the Black Panther Party. This is an indispensable book, one that demonstrates how oppositional social movement organizations fuel future struggles long after they seem to have departed from the scene.”
George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place
“Tender and determined, these meditations on the enduring afterlives of the Black Panther Party illuminate the incandescent dreams of freedom joining one revolutionary generation to another. The essays and conversations—on art and prison, ecology and the spirit—focus on the lessons rank-and-file Panthers have to offer today’s rank and file. They remind us of the eternal dedication and determination required of us all.”
Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era
“Black Power Afterlives shares important insights about the Black Panther Party and radical activism. Examining an inheritance that bridges two centuries, it explores mobilizations against poverty, exploitation, imprisonment, violence and war. Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalitions sought to wrest victories from police in order to secure “Power to the People.” With prescience, Hampton warned that he would not die slipping on icy Chicago streets, and that we either organize with radical intent or forget him. Black Power Afterlives remembers Fred and the sacrifices of those who fought and fight for their communities—especially political prisoners. Recognizing the need to free them all, and our communities, Black Power Afterlives builds an archive and a foundation for continued struggles.”
Joy James, author of Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics
“There are more stories of the deep and continuing legacy of the Black Panthers than can be contained in any one book, but Black Panther Afterlives does a good job at beginning to fill the gap. Editors Fujino and Harmachis present us with a must-read book, essential to a true understanding of the positive ways in which Panther politics can and do enrich our lives today.”
Matt Meyer, secretary-general, International Peace Research Association; co-editor and author, Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st Century Revolutions
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Diane C. Fujino is professor of Asian American Studies and former director of the Center for Black Studies Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the author or editor of several books.
Matef Harmachis is a social scientist teaching high school, a former journalist, and a long-time activist working in pan-African and Third World decolonization solidarity, education, labor, and political prisoner liberation movements.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900864 •US $21.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A landmark abolitionist primer on migration, sex work, policing, and the “anti-trafficking industry”—and a powerful argument about who is really leading the way toward justice: migrant sex workers themselves.
In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration and sex work, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy. Gallant and Lam illustrate how this movement is taking aim at the root causes of violence and abuse: the white supremacist securitization of borders, the criminalization of both migration and sex work, the patriarchial devaluation of women’s labor, and forced displacement due to climate disaster, war, and poverty—all fueled by racial capitalism.
An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration and sex work—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing. Throughout, Gallant and Lam place migrant sex workers at the center of struggles against border imperialism, carceral states, and capitalism—dispelling a range of poisonous myths and paving the way for deeper alliances across movements with the shared goal of dismantling and abolishing carceralism in all its forms.
PRAISE:
Not Your Rescue Project is a powerful indictment of the violence and injustice that Global South migrant sex workers face under the banners of rescue and saviourism. It offers forthright and compelling documentation of the struggles and humanity of such migrants who live and work in Canada and the US, while providing a searing critique of anti-prostitution, victim-centered approaches, including the anti-human trafficking industry. This is a much-needed book that brings significant depth to a growing trend in global sex worker rights research—a crucial call to action for students, researchers, and activists concerned with migrant, sexuality, and feminist and global worker justice and rights.”
Kamala Kempadoo, Professor Emerita, Social Science, York University
“You will never be the same after reading, studying, teaching, and sharing Not Your Rescue Project. Curating personalized interludes, historical analysis, and grassroots movement archiving, this book is a masterpiece composition of survival, self-defense, and liberationist testimonial strategies. Migrant sex workers are truth-tellers, solidarity organizers, community builders, and grounded critical practitioners who are permanently reshaping abolitionist, anti-imperialist, anti-violence, radical feminist, and various other streams of ‘left’ mobilization. Simultaneously creative, generous, and graceful in its layered invitations to engage in the complex challenges of ‘joint struggle,’ this foundational text calls on every justice-oriented community to engage with the incomparable radicalism of migrant sex worker praxis.”
Dylan Rodríguez, scholar, teacher, movement collaborator, and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside
“Not Your Rescue Project exposes the right-wing ‘rescue’ fraud perpetrated by the sex work prohibitionists and their carceral allies by centering the lived experience of migrant sex workers organizing for their own liberation. It is essential reading for anyone interested in pushing back against those who mobilize state violence in the guise of helping vulnerable workers.” —Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing
“Intellectually trenchant, emotionally affecting, and deeply needed, Not Your Rescue Project is absolutely essential reading for anyone involved in social justice, labor activism, human rights, migrant justice, and sex education. For far too long, misconceptions, racism, anti–sex work stigma, and blatant opportunism have shaped legislation and policy on sex work to the severe detriment of those with the most to lose. Elene Lam and Chanelle Gallant set the record straight with powerful analysis and storytelling drawn from many years of solidarity and advocacy work with migrant sex workers, exposing the exploitation and outright deception perpetrated by the so-called anti-human trafficking movement. This is one of the most important books on migrant justice, labor justice, and sex worker rights that I have read in the past decade and I am so grateful that it exists.”
Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love
“Many queer people are familiar with the saying ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’ In this rousing book on migrant sex worker struggle, the founder of the Butterfly network Elene Lam and organizer Chanelle Gallant demonstrate how the joyful labor of solidarity lifts everyone’s gaze to a just and liberated horizon for all, in stark contrast with the prevalent saviorist and humanitarian approaches to sex trafficking. When butterflies get together to extract minerals from a shallow patch of muddy water, it is called a ‘puddle club.’ Not Your Rescue Project opens our eyes to the powerful human ‘puddle clubs’ all around us, beating their wings for justice and somehow turning the mud slung at them into nourishment. This book makes joining them irresistible.”
Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms and Abolish the Family
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Chanelle Gallant is an author, activist, and movement strategist who has worked in the areas of sexuality and criminalization for over two decades. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, most recently the New York Times best-seller Pleasure Activism, Beyond Survival, and Defund, Disarm, Dismantle, and her work has been discussed in the Washington Post, the Advocate, Esquire, Vice, and every national media outlet in Canada. Chanelle is on the national board for Showing Up For Racial Justice and has helped to found or support numerous sex worker organizations. She has an MA in sociology and was a Lambda Literary Fellow.
Elene Lam is an activist, artist, community organizer, educator, and human rights defender. She has fought for sex worker, migrant, gender, labor, and racial justice for over twenty years. She is the founder of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network) and the cofounder of Migrant Sex Workers Project. She has used diverse and innovative approaches to advocate social justice for migrant sex workers, such as leadership building and community mobilization. She holds a master’s of law and master’s of social work. She is a PhD candidate at McMaster University (School of Social Work) and is studying the harm of the anti-trafficking movement. She was awarded the Constance E. Hamilton Award for Women’s Equality by the City of Toronto.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598315 • US $28.95 • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this unforgettable memoir, Emerald Garner recounts her father’s cruel and unjust murder, the immense pain that followed, the pressures of an exploitative media, and her difficult yet determined journey as an activist against police violence.
She begins with the morning of July 17, 2014—a rare day off from work, one she had hoped to enjoy with rest and family, that quickly turned her world inside out. What follows is a personal account of the suffering Emerald and her family endured: unsympathetic camera lenses, the stares and whispers of strangers, and the inability to mourn in private.
In addition to these vulnerable, personal essays, Finding My Voice includes conversations in which Emerald found inspiration, empathy, and community: with politicians, athletes, and activists like Brian Benjamin and Etan Thomas; with others surviving similarly unfathomable grief like Lora Dene King, Angelique Kearse, and Pamela Brooks; and with Emerald’s own family, Mrs. Esaw Garner and Eric Garner Jr. The book ends with a powerful call-to-action by author and daughter of Malcolm X, Ilyasah Shabazz. As calls for radical transformation and accountability grow, Emerald Garner’s memoir is a story of family and community, and the strength it takes to survive, to stand, to speak.
PRAISE:
“Emerald Garner has fought tirelessly for justice for her father Eric Garner. Her Story is one that needs to be heard.“
Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., Civil Rights Leader, Founder, Rainbow PUSH Coalition
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859660 • US $14 • 5.75 x 8.38 in • 352 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The two founding texts of the analysis of capitalism and imperialism in one volume, with annotation.
Here in one volume, with critical notes and context, are Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy. Essential for understanding the nature of imperialism and war historically — and today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Phil Gasper is professor emeritus at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California. He previously taught at Cornell University, the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Middlebury College, the University of California San Diego, and Stanford University. He currently lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin.
Gasper is co-editor of The Philosophy of Science (MIT Press, 1991), and a contributor to Explanation and Its Limits (Cambridge, 1990), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd ed., 1999), The Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket, 2002), Enduring Freedom or Enduring War? (Maisonneuve, 2005), Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice (Sage, 2007), Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Lynne Rienner, forthcoming) and Encyclopedia of Race and Crime (Sage, forthcoming). His academic publications have also appeared in The Philosophical Review, Philosophy of Science, The Radical Philosophy Review of Books and Hypatia.
He is a on the editorial board of — and writes the bimonthly “Critical Thinking” column for — the International Socialist Review, and is a contributor to Socialist Worker, CounterPunch, ZNet, and MRzine.
V. I. Lenin (1870-1924) was a leader of the Russian Revolution and wrote extensively on the issues facing the working-class movement of his time.
Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was a Bolshevik leader and intellectual, and later a Soviet politician until his execution at the hands of Stalin’s government.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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DETROIT: I DO MIND DYING
A Study in Urban Revolution
By Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin
Haymarket Books (November 2012, north American English rights)
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608462216 • 5 5/8 x 8 1/2 • US $18 • 250 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying tracks the extraordinary development of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, as they became two of the landmark political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s. Georgakas and Surkin’s account of the movement is widely heralded as one the most important books on the black liberation movement and labor struggles in US history.
PRAISE:
“First-rate and absolutely fascinating. This particular piece of American history has never been covered in such depth … everyone who is concerned with political change will learn a lot from this book.”
New York Times
“Detroit: I Do Mind Dying is a beautiful, riveting account of one of the most important radical movements of our century – a movement led by black revolutionaries whose vision of emancipation for all is sorely needed today.”
Robin D. G. Kelley
“[T]he insights offered by the League … remain as urgent and relevant today as they were in the 1970s.”
H-Net Book Review
“A historical narrative of the single most significant political experience of the 1960’s.”
Fredrick Jameson
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Dan Georgakas (1938-2021) was a writer, historian, and activist with a long-time interest in social movements. He co-edited Solidarity Forever: An Oral History of the IWW, Encyclopedia of the American Left, and The Immigrant Left in the United States, and was a longtime editor of Cineaste magazine.
Marvin Surkin is a specialist in comparative urban politics and social change. He conducts workshops on work place and community organizing, urban political economy, and urban renewal in the United States.
Trade cloth • ISBN 9780674725270 • US $29.95 • 296 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Death in the Congo is a gripping account of a murder that became one of the defining events in postcolonial African history. It is no less the story of the untimely death of a national dream, a hope-filled vision very different from what the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo became in the second half of the twentieth century.
When Belgium relinquished colonial control in June 1960, a charismatic thirty-five-year-old African nationalist, Patrice Lumumba, became prime minister of the new republic. Yet stability immediately broke down. A mutinous Congolese Army spread havoc, while Katanga Province in southeast Congo seceded altogether. Belgium dispatched its military to protect its citizens, and the United Nations soon intervened with its own peacekeeping troops. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, both the Soviet Union and the United States maneuvered to turn the crisis to their Cold War advantage. A coup in September, secretly aided by the UN, toppled Lumumba’s government. In January 1961, armed men drove Lumumba to a secluded corner of the Katanga bush, stood him up beside a hastily dug grave, and shot him. His rule as Africa’s first democratically elected leader had lasted ten weeks.
More than fifty years later, the murky circumstances and tragic symbolism of Lumumba’s assassination still trouble many people around the world. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick pursue events through a web of international politics, revealing a tangled history in which many people—black and white, well-meaning and ruthless, African, European, and American—bear responsibility for this crime.
PRAISE:
“In Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba, Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick open a wide aperture onto one of the most charged historical whodunits of the 20th century… It lays bare the entangled international actors that conspired to seal Lumumba’s fate and that of the independent Congolese nation… Death in the Congo is a riveting account.”
Caroline Elkins, The Wall Street Journal
“Death in the Congo is history for grown-ups, lucid and unsparing, alert to our infinite capacity for deceit and self-deception.”
John Wilson, The Chicago Tribune
“The story of Patrice Lumumba’s death is fascinating because it seems emblematic of the Cold War–era decolonization of Africa… What is distinctive and new in this very readable account is the authors’ unrelentingly negative portraits of all the actors involved. No one emerges unscathed: not the bumbling Congolese, not the Cold War-crazed Americans, not the petulant Europeans—and, worst of all, not even Lumumba himself, whom Gerard and Kuklick portray as a gifted speaker but also a self-promoter who was generally clueless about the exercise of power.”
Nicolas van de Walle, Foreign Affairs
“While political violence is no stranger to the Congo, what happened to Lumumba in the early 1960s still matters…. And this is where a book as calm, clear and authoritative as Emmanuel Gerard’s and Bruce Kuklick’s Death in the Congo adds true value. Novelists and filmmakers have all had a go at the Lumumba story, but here at last is history-writing at its most powerful: a work that reads in part like a charge sheet for a war-crimes prosecution and in part like a Shakespearian tragedy with farce thrown in…. But the book’s true importance lies in spelling out the roles of the various powers involved, notably America and Belgium. Individual prosecutions are now unrealistic, but Death in the Congo demonstrates (something Tony Blair and George W. Bush might ponder) that it is never too late to investigate political decisions that lead to manipulation and murder.”
Tim Butcher, The Spectator
“[Gerard and Kuklick] have bravely taken on the most important and disturbing assassination of a democratically elected leader in modern times, and an event on a par with that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for the mayhem and madness left in its wake… Rather than interpreting [Lumumba’s] downfall as the result of crude Cold War anti-communism, Gerard and Kuklick rightly argue that Cold War tensions were more contextual, feeding into a U.S. commitment to support Western interests and influence in post-colonial Africa; its sympathy for Nato and its Belgian secretary general; and the Eisenhower administration’s hatred of Lumumba.”
Joanna Lewis, Times Higher Education
“A book about an old story that has new nuances and details for its readers, who should definitely include general readers, students still in search of the truth about the assassination, and, indeed, seasoned as well as amateur Africanists.”
Dawn M. Whitehead, Africa Today
“Death in the Congo captures a striking portrait of an international crisis in the early Cold War caused by one post-colonial nationalist’s rise to power. It meticulously details the way Patrice Lumumba was subsequently ousted and how his murder was encouraged by western powers. In many ways, it is a character study of the political leaders who instigated and backed Lumumba’s murder and the men in the lower ranks who carried it out.”
Neil Thompson, International Affairs
“Outstanding… This major work of scholarship succeeds in showing how the convergence of a complex mix of interests and motivations resulted in Lumumba’s murder.”
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Journal of American History
“The authors provide wealth of detail in this worthy primer to the events that plunged the nation into decades of dictatorship under Joseph Mobuto (Mobutu Sese Seko).”
Publishers Weekly
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Bruce Kuklick is Nichols Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. His historical interests are broadly in the political, diplomatic, and intellectual history of the United States; and in the philosophy of history. He has won all the major teaching prizes given by the University, including the Senior Class Award. In 2004 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. He has written a dozen books, including Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger published by Princeton University Press in 2006; a biography of African American philosopher William Fontaine, Black Philosopher; White Academy, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2008; and a political history of America, One Nation Under God, published by Palgrave-MacMillan in 2009.
Emmanuel Gerard is a full professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Centre for Political Research, at KU Leuven – Univerisity of Leuven in Belgium. His main research interests are in the field of contemporary history. Gerard has been general director of HIVA Research Institute for Work and Society since 2013, and president of KADOC Documentation and Research Center on Religion, Culture and Society since 2007. He is Curator of the Flemish Parliament Visitor’s centre and Chairholder of the Gülen Chair for Intercultural Studies. He was Chair of the Political Science Departement from 1993 until 2000, and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences from 2003 until 2010. Gerard is the author of many books and publications.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608460939 • 5.5 x 8.5 • 260 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Migrant farmworkers are still routinely exploited, and in many cases held against their will in conditions of modern slavery. Yet in one Florida town, these workers have organized the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and launched a nation wide campaign to expose their inhuman working conditions that ultimately succeeded in bringing the biggest fast-food giants to their knees.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Silvia Giagnoni is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Dramatic Arts at Auburn University Montgomery. She has published (both in English and in Italian) journalistic and scholarly articles on popular music, film, and social movements.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642590333 • US $24.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 425 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A powerful account of the epic clash between corporate greed and militant workers in the American heartland.
This rich history details the bitter, deep-rooted conflict between industrial behemoth International Harvester and the uniquely radical Farm Equipment Workers union. The Long Deep Grudge makes clear that class warfare has been, and remains, integral to the American experience, providing up-close-and-personal and long-view perspectives from both sides of the battle lines.
International Harvester – and the McCormick family that largely controlled it – garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the 20th century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side, the militant Farm Equipment Workers (FE), whose leaders were connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II.
This evocative account, stretching back to the nineteenth century and carried through to the present, reads like a novel. Biographical sketches of McCormick family members, union officials and rank-and-file workers are woven into the narrative, along with anarchists, jazz musicians, Wall Street financiers, civil rights crusaders, and mob lawyers. It touches on pivotal moments and movements as wide-ranging as the Haymarket “riot,” the Flint sit-down strikes, the Memorial Day Massacre, the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges, and America’s late 20th-century industrial decline.
Both Harvester and the FE are now gone, but this largely forgotten clash helps explain the crisis of yawning inequality now facing US workers, and provides alternative models from the past that can instruct and inspire those engaged in radical, working class struggles today.
PRAISE:
“The Long Deep Grudge is a timely reminder of the power of our vision of militant unionism and the importance of left-wing ideas to that vision.“
UE News
“Given IH’s economic and political power, it’s amazing that the FE accomplished what it did in its short lifetime. Instead of mourning its demise, though, we should celebrate its legacy and rekindle its spirit. Reading The Long Deep Grudge is a good way to start. Read it with some friends.”
Labor Notes
“A useful labor history that could spark renewed interest in unions at a time when “activists are back at the drawing board.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A capitalist family dynasty, a radical union, and a revolution in how and where work gets done- Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge is a detailed chronicle of one of the most active battlefronts in our ever-evolving class war.”
John Sayles
“Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge is a remarkable accomplishment, which succeeds on multiple levels. The definitive history of an important but largely forgotten labor organization and its heroic struggles with an icon of industrial capitalism, this book is also a compelling and deeply moving reflection on the tragic history of radical industrial unionism in Twentieth Century America. It is essential reading for anyone who truly wishes to understand the history of labor and class struggle in this country.”
Ahmed A. White, author, The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America
“In The Long Deep Grudge, Toni Gilpin does more than simply excavate the story of a largely forgotten Midwestern union with a small but vibrant heyday more than six decades ago. This highly readable history contains important insights for those concerned with revitalizing a more activist-oriented labor movement to overcome the stark economic inequalities surrounding us today. This saga of the Farm Equipment Workers’ victories over major industrialists in 1940s Chicago and Louisville offers a vivid reminder that in a nation built on racial capitalism, the hard work of bridging long-standing racial divides and of promoting black leadership is vital to successful organizing to improve working people’s lives. Unions work best, Gilpin’s work illustrates, when they inspire their members to push past the norms around them to advance a passionate shared vision for a fairer workplace. Highly recommended.”
Catherine Fosl, Director, Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research
“Toni Gilpin brings us a vivid story of greed, revenge, and the search for justice. It’s about the McCormick family, whose passionate anti-unionism helped to bring us the Haymarket tragedy, and the multiple generations of workers who refused to forget, and finally took them on. This is a riveting labor history drama that will stir your soul. Farm Equipment workers in the 1930s reawakened the spirit of resistance, providing a model for thinking about how to get power, and how to think and act with a radical vision. They refused to concede to corporations the structuring of the workplace or the economy; they connected union rights with civil rights; and they learned how to create an effective strike. From Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky, they built an interracial coalition and defied the corporate attempt to defeat unionism through corporate decentralization. The FE fashioned a class war unionism, and for a time it seemed they would prevail. We know the costs of the red-baiting that purged this union’s legacy: today ten tiers of wages are considered normal, and the McCormick’s strategy of divide and conquer is considered normal. So there is much to learn here about how radical solidarity was created in an earlier time.”
Rosemary Feurer, author, Radical Unionism in the Midwest
“The Long Deep Grudge takes labor history to the barricades, where a small union deeply committed to class struggle on the job squares off against a corporate giant determined to enforce managerial prerogatives. This epic tale is also an entirely human-scale drama that brings to life multiple generations of radical labor leaders, rank-and-file workers, captains of industry, and public officials dedicated to the defense of private wealth. Though they won quite a few battles, the story’s s chief protagonists—communist organizers who founded the Farm Equipment Workers and unionized International Harvester when even John L. Lewis thought it couldn’t be done—ultimately lost the war, for reasons that go a long way to explain why the U.S. labor movement is so much weaker now than in was in the FE’s heyday. That labor liberals’ capitulation to anticommunism ultimately weakened unions comes across loud and clear, as does the folly of dependence on labor-management cooperation as opposed to the FE’s maxim that “a strong picket line is the best negotiator.” More important, the FE’s history teaches by example that a union can punch far above its weight when members stand ready to come out swinging, not only because they’re angry at the boss but also for love of one another and an organization that truly belongs to them. For that alone, The Long Deep Grudge ought to be required reading for every labor activist in the United States.”
Priscilla Murolo, co-author, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: An Illustrated History of Labor in the United States
“We need unions like the Farm Equipment Workers (FE), Toni Gilpin proves emphatically in her study of this left-led Midwest once-powerhouse. She shows the direct line between union leaders’ rock-hard belief that “management has no right to exist” and the way FE members organized to defend themselves, constantly, on the shop floor—with many thrilling tales of class struggle in the flesh. Without FE leaders’ socialist politics, the union could well have gone the way of its rival, the United Auto Workers, on a short path to a belief in “management’s rights” and therefore an acceptance of speed-up—and outsourcing, plant closings, and a bureaucratic grievance procedure instead of quickie strikes. No wonder the rank and file loved that union.”
Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes
“The Long Deep Grudge is a thoroughly researched work of history that reads like a great novel. In telling the story of how International Harvester workers confronted the corporation which exploited them, Toni Gilpin makes a compelling case that the aggressive shop-floor struggle conducted by rank-and-file FE members was inextricably connected to the left-wing views of their union’s leadership. Everyone who wants to build a more militant labor movement, that can improve working people’s lives on the job and in their community, should read this book.”
Carl Rosen, General President, United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE)
“The Long Deep Grudge is the gripping tale of another Heartland—a Midwest filled with militant workers who took on one of the world’s largest corporations and, for a time, won dignity, high wages, and power on the job. It is the story of the kind of radicalism that comes from fighting a corporate giant like International Harvester. Union stalwarts like Gilpin’s father fought not to improve the company’s productivity, but “to claw back as much corporate wealth as possible.” Told with vigor and wry humor, The Long Deep Grudge has lesson’s for trade unionists, radicals, and anyone struggling for a better world in the here and now.”
Tobias Higbie, faculty chair Labor Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
“Combining the expertise of a historian, detailed eye of a journalist, and flair of a novelist, Toni Gilpin breathes life into an important and fascinating story that, in lesser hands, could be as dull as dishwater. Gilpin aspires to tell no less a story that the epic battle between a corporate behemoth and the working-class radicals who—for decades—fought it tooth and nail. The plucky, interracial, leftist Farm Equipment workers union that sought to wrest control of the shop floor from the owners and managers of International Harvester is the story of America.”
Peter Cole, author, Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area
“In this highly resonant study of the farm equipment workers, Toni Gilpin reminds 21st century labor partisans of how a militant, democratic and multicultural union won power and improved the lives of thousands—and why corporate and political elites came to fear the example it set for the rest of the working-class. We need a revival of industrial unionism in the Midwest and elsewhere. Her book helps tell us how to do it.”
Nelson Lichtenstein, Director, Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Toni Gilpin is a labor historian, activist and writer. She is a co-author of On Strike for Respect: The Clerical and Technical Workers’ Strike at Yale University, and is the recipient of the 2018 Debra Bernhardt Award for Labor Journalism.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859400 • US $18 • 6.0 x 9.0 in • 540 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This moving biography presents the definitive story of the life and legacy of the most eloquent spokesperson and leader of the U.S. labor and socialist movements.
Long out of print, this impressive and detailed portrayal of socialist and labor organizer Eugene Debs is an important contribution to the history of labor and social movements in the United States.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ray Ginger was the author of many books on American history. He taught history at Harvard University and Brandeis.
Eugene Debs (1855-1926) was a railway organizer and socialist. He ran for president five times, including once while imprisoned for sedition, when he received 913,664 write-in votes in 1920.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781982142438 • US $18 • 256 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An urgent and definitive collection of essays from leaders and experts championing the Green New Deal—and a detailed playbook for how we can win it—including contributions by leading activists and progressive writers like Varshini Prakash, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Bill McKibben, Rev William Barber II, and more.
In October 2018, scientists warned that we have less than 12 years left to transform our economy away from fossil fuels, or face catastrophic climate change. At that moment, there was no plan in the US to decarbonize our economy that fast. Less than two years later, every major Democratic presidential candidate has embraced the vision of the Green New Deal—a rapid, vast transformation of our economy to avert climate catastrophe while securing economic and racial justice for all.
What happened? A new generation of leaders confronted the political establishment in Washington DC with a simple message: the climate crisis is here, and the Green New Deal is our last, best hope for a livable future. Now comes the hard part: turning that vision into the law of the land.
In Winning a Green New Deal, leading youth activists, journalists, and policymakers explain why we need a transformative agenda to avert climate catastrophe, and how our movement can organize to win. Featuring essays by Varshini Prakash, cofounder of Sunrise Movement; Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Green New Deal policy architect; Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize–winning economist; Bill McKibben, internationally renowned environmentalist; Mary Kay Henry, the President of the Service Employees International Union, and others we’ll learn why the climate crisis cannot be solved unless we also confront inequality and racism, how movements can redefine what’s politically possible and overcome the opposition of fossil fuel billionaires, and how a Green New Deal will build a just and thriving economy for all of us.
For anyone looking to understand the movement for a Green New Deal, and join the fight for a livable future, there is no resource as clear and practical as Winning the Green New Deal.
PRAISE:
“[An] urgent collection…. These incisive essays provide a clear blueprint for creating solutions regarding the climate crisis, standing up for appropriate representation, and uniting disparate forces to build a better world…. A clear demonstration that the kids are alright. Now lead, follow, or get out of their way.”
Kirkus
“By selecting contributors wisely, Prakash and Girgenti offer both a comprehensive representation of the climate movement and a practical road map for change. Young progressives will be especially affected by this impassioned and eloquent plea for progress.”
Publishers Weekly
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Guido Girgenti is a Founding Board Member of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led movement to stop climate change and win a Green New Deal. As a strategist and advisor to progressive Democrats, and formerly a campaigner at the environmental organization 350, Guido has over a decade of political organizing experiences in the movement for climate and economic justice.
Varshini Prakash is the Executive Director and co-founder of Sunrise, a movement of young people working to stop climate change, take back our democracy from Big Oil, and elect leaders who will fight for our generation’s health and wellbeing. As an undergrad at the University of Massachusetts, she took on the fossil fuel industry by pushing her university to stop investing in coal, oil, and gas. She led the campaign to victory after a 2-week long escalation involving thousands of students, alumni, and faculty. Varshini has been a leading voice for young Americans, including last fall when she helped lead a mass demonstration for the Green New Deal that went viral and put climate change on the map for Congress. Varshini‘s work has been featured in the New Yorker, Democracy Now, TeenVogue, BBC, Washington Post and more. She was recently named to the Grist Top 50 Fixers for “people cooking up the boldest, most ambitious solutions to humanity’s biggest challenges.”
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598391 • US $21.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this brave and devastatingly beautiful anthology, the illustrious poet and editor Aracelis Girmay gathers complex and intimate pieces that illuminate the nuances of personal and collective histories, analyses, practices, and choices surrounding pregnancy.
Featuring the brilliant voices of writers such as Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Patricia Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, and more, this book is a lighthouse—a tool and companion—for those navigating pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, birth, loss, grief, and love.
In So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth, pieces range from essays to poems to interviews, with a broad entanglement of various themes, from many different perspectives including Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and more. At a time when people are becoming more and more limited in their choices surrounding pregnancy and abortion, this record is increasingly urgent and indispensable.
PRAISE:
“Audre Lorde once told Joy Harjo that she imagined her poems being spoken to a circle of women gathered around a fire. In this book we find that gathering, a gathering of those of us who know our stories belong to each other. And the fire that calls us is the very fire of creation moving through us and changing us all. I recommend this book to everyone. Come for the warmth of communion, stay for the miracle of never being the same.”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines
“So We Can Know is a striking anthology of essays, poetry, and visual art on the often-harrowing experience of pregnancy for women of color. The work as a whole is thick with grief and trauma, but the graceful reflections and breadth of experiences make sticking with it more than worthwhile. This one’s not to be missed.”
Publishers Weekly. Starred Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Aracelis Girmay grew up in Southern California. She earned a degree in Documentary Studies from Connecticut College in 1999 and apprenticed in oral history work with el Centro de Derechos Humanos, Ciudadanos, y Autonómicos (CEDEHCA) on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast. She went on to earn an MFA in poetry from NYU in 2003. She is the author of the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016), Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the Isabella Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award, and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). For this work she was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize in Literature (2018). Girmay is also the author / collagist of the picture book, changing, changing (George Braziller, 2005), and, with her sister, collaborated on the picture book What Do You Know? (Enchanted Lion, 2021). She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Whiting Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. Girmay is the editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA, 2020). She is currently the Editor-at-Large for BOA Editions’ Blessing the Boats Selections, and she is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. She lives and teaches in New York City.
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Renowned scholar and cultural critic Henry A. Giroux exposes the corporate forces at play in higher education and charts a clear-minded and inspired course of action out of the shadows of market-driven policy. Championing the youth around the globe who have dared to resist the bartering of their future, he calls upon public intellectuals—as well as all people concerned about the future of democracy—to speak out and defend the university as a site of critical learning and democratic promise.
In this updated edition, Giroux puts all of this into the context of the Trump era, arguing that education remains a key battleground in the fight against authoritarianism.
PRAISE:
“No one has been better than Henry Giroux at analyzing the many ways in which neoliberalism, with its vicious and predatory excesses, has damaged the American economy and undermined its democratic processes. Now, as Giroux brilliantly explains, it is threatening one of the nation’s proudest and most important achievements — its system of higher education. This is a book that is both terrifying and essential.”
Bob Herbert, Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, and former Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times
“Henry Giroux remains the critical voice of a generation. In this devastating portrayal of the neoliberal assault on the education system, he show with clarity, precision and ethical care the real consequences of the commodification of intellectualism. Indeed, more than revealing the contours of this most violent of intellectual landscapes, Giroux dares us to reevaluate the significance of public pedagogy as integral to any viable notion of democratic participation and social responsibility. Anybody who is remotely interested in the plight of future generations must read this book.”
Dr. Brad Evans, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol
“Henry Giroux is one of our most important public intellectuals.”
David H. Price, Professor of Anthropology, St. Martin’s University
“Professor Giroux has focused his keen intellect on the hostile corporate takeover of higher education in North America. His work, meticulously researched, provides examples from popular culture to public intellectuals to demonstrate the hostility of neoliberalism to democracy, critical thinking and the academy. He is relentless in his defense of a society that requires its citizenry to place its cultural, political and economic institutions in context so they can be interrogated and held truly accountable. We are fortunate to have such a prolific writer and deep thinker to challenge us all.”
Karen Lewis, president, Chicago Teachers Union
“Henry Giroux has been the most consistent and outspoken defender and promoter of the life-prospects and human dignity of which young generations were robbed or which they were prevented to recognize as their birth rights.”
Zygmut Bauman
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present as part of Routledge’s Key Guides Publication Series.
In 2007, he was named by the Toronto Star as one of the “12 Canadians Changing the Way We Think. “His most recent books include: Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket 2014), The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights 2014),Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), America’s Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016), America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017), The Public in Peril (Routledge, 2018), American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018), and his forthcoming, The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, in press). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors. His web site is .henryagiroux.com.
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HOMEWRECKERS
How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream
Hardcover • ISBN-13: 9780062869531 • US 27.99 • 432 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In the spirit of Evicted, Bait and Switch, and The Big Short, a shocking, heart-wrenching investigation into America’s housing crisis and the modern-day robber barons who are making a fortune off the backs of the disenfranchised working and middle class—among them, Donald Trump and his inner circle.
Two years before the housing market collapsed in 2008, Donald Trump looked forward to a crash: “I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy,” he said. But our future president wasn’t alone. While millions of Americans suffered financial loss, tycoons pounced to heartlessly seize thousands of homes—their profiteering made even easier because, as prize-winning investigative reporter Aaron Glantz reveals in Homewreckers, they often used taxpayer money—and the Obama administration’s promise to cover their losses.
In Homewreckers, Glantz recounts the transformation of straightforward lending into a morass of slivered and combined mortgage “products” that could be bought and sold, accompanied by a shift in priorities and a loosening of regulations and laws that made it good business to lend money to those who wouldn’t be able to repay. Among the men who laughed their way to the bank: Trump cabinet members Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, Trump pal and confidant Tom Barrack, and billionaire Republican cash cow Steve Schwarzman. Homewreckers also brilliantly weaves together the stories of those most ravaged by the housing crisis. The result is an eye-opening expose of the greed that decimated millions and enriched a gluttonous few.
PRAISE:
“Can’t recommend this joint enough…Aaron Glantz does a great job moving through the jungle of jargon. But most importantly he implicitly raises a question that has been quietly dogging me for years: What does it mean to tell your children that their success is ultimately a matter of discipline, education, hard work, and citizenship, and then see that those factors have almost no power to explain the (financial) success of the Titans of America, that in fact, fortune, greed and malice really have won. Sorry state of things. These guys made billions by turning homeowners (disproportionately black) into renters. And then they went into government. This is an illuminating and discomfiting read.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates
“With prose that is as plainspoken as it is propulsive, Glantz explains how homeownership propelled the American Dream until 1986 only to fall, one financial scheme at a time, at the hands of billionaire money-grabbers and the failing regulators and gutless politicians who enable them.”
Beth Macy, author of Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America
“In case there was ever any doubt that the world of high finance affects American households, Aaron Glantz lays it to rest in this gripping narrative of how the foreclosure machine became a grand mechanism to convert America’s historic wealth building asset—its homes—into a commodity for financiers.”
Sarah Bloom Raskin, former deputy secretary of the US Treasury and former governor of the Federal Reserve Board
“An eye-opening account of how a cast of characters from Wall Street to Hollywood enriched themselves at the expense of American families. Glantz weaves together personal stories, historical context, and sharp and insightful analysis of how financiers created predatory products that wreaked devastation on the US economy and… countless families.”
Mehrsa Baradaran, professor of law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law
“Glantz, through exemplary journalism, reveals the new corporate landlords’ relationship to Donald Trump and their exploitation of loopholes in public policy, in combination with the endless resources of greedy bankers, to transform the 2008 foreclosure crisis into predatory renting schemes and cash in on widespread housing insecurity.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
“In this remarkable book, Aaron Glantz provides a well-researched, highly readable look at one of the nation’s most underreported stories…a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the Great Recession and the role of the voracious financial interests who would go on to put Donald Trump in the White House.”
Gwenda Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President
“This is a story that needs to be told, and Glantz tells it beautifully. Homewreckers reads like a novel, but it carries an important message: We must never let this happen again.”
Alan S. Blinder, Gordon S. Rentscher Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University, former member of the Council of Economic Advisers, Vice Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve System
“A tale of greed and corruption…A solid, useful exploration of a system that ‘needs substantial, systemic change.’”
Kirkus Reviews
“[A] cogent, infuriating exposé… lucid prose and impressive research make this an essential account of an under-the-radar housing crisis.”
Publishers Weekly
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Aaron Glantz is a Peabody Award-winning investigative reporter who produces journalism with impact. His work has sparked more than a dozen Congressional hearings, the signing of new laws, and criminal probes by the DEA, FBI, Pentagon and Federal Trade Commission. Because of his reporting, 500,000 fewer U.S. military veterans face long waits for disability compensation, while 100,000 fewer veterans are prescribed highly addictive narcotics by the government. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America and the PBS NewsHour, where he has twice been nominated for a national Emmy Award.
A senior reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and a recent JSK Fellow at Stanford University, Glantz’s previous books include How America Lost, The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans, and Winter Solider: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations, which he coauthored with Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781399601740 • US $22.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe collects the extraordinary output of Vivien Goldman from 1975 onwards; spanning a time when punk burnt its scalding flame to scorch our musical earth and clear it for new genres, like post-punk and hip-hop. One of only a handful of women writing in the Golden Age of music journalism, Vivien was the first, most elegant and passionate chronicler of reggae, funk, free jazz and Afrobeat; a pioneer when music was a wild frontier business, lawless and exhilarating, with new epiphanies emerging as the counterculture mutated.
The sheer breadth of pieces here is overwhelming, from early encounters with Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt and Can; to rebels like Britain’s first she-punks, The Raincoats and The Slits; covering British groups like the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Aswad; America’s Public Enemy, Curtis Mayfield and George Clinton; and Jamaica’s Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Dennis Brown. They rub up against contemporary profiles of New York’s downtown royalty (Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Richard Hell), alongside legendary interviews with Vivien’s friends Fela Kuti, Ornette Coleman, and Bob Marley, who reigns over this collection like a benign and timeless deity.
Vivien single-handedly changed the course of music writing and this collection reshapes some of her major pieces into a new narrative of the principal radical artists of the late twentieth century, in the process reaffirming that her reputation as ‘The Punk Professor’ will live on.
PRAISE:
“Punk! New Wave! Reggae! Vivien Goldman never fails to get the inside scoop. She is the messenger who reveals the truth about our music and ultimately, ourselves. Viva Vivien!”
Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, Talking Heads, and Tom Tom Club
“People talk ABOUT Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt, Can, Betty Davis, The Sex Pistols, George Clinton, Grace Jones all the time—but Vivien Goldman actually spoke TO them. Whilst they were making that music we are still talking about. Essential reading: the making of history as it was happening. Vivien was there (and “Launderette” is one of the best singles ever). Read it.”
Jarvis Cocker, musician, broadcaster, author
“A vivid, endlessly engrossing time capsule”
MOJO
“Goldman writes with a literary elegance… an essential collection”
Record Collector
“For those of us coming of age in the mid 70s, in love with rock and roll, our brains were lit on fire not only by new radical voices emerging from the fallout of hippie, but the writers turning us on to it all. Vivien Goldman’s byline in whatever weekly rock mag she’d set foot in would ring as significantly potent and evocative as any pop star she felt excited to share a perspective on, be it Brian Eno or The Raincoats, in fact she seemed that much cooler than the people she was scribing about. She was even cooler than Lester Bangs who duked it out on the same pages with such hip sticks of dynamite as Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. Like contemporary Patti Smith, Vivien found equal value in writing about music as she did in performing it, completely free from any creepazoid hoary old patriarchal permission. Punk was our great experiment of liberation, our forum of total communitarianism and inclusivity, and Vivien was a light which made manifest the ideals of its truth. She said it loud from the beginning – one love, one music. The power is in the words. Read them and sing out”
Thurston Moore, musician and author
“I am very happy that Island Records helped to start Vivien off on such a positive career in the 1970s, when she briefly worked on Bob Marley and the Wailers’ PR and helped make a difference. Then she became a pioneer in writing about reggae. It’s incredible how back then, reggae was still thought of as novelty music, and now it has emerged and is known and loved everywhere. Vivien definitely played a part in that. It is great to have a book like this that captures our whole lives, brings things that happened ages ago to life again and connects them with today. It connects all the threads.”
Chris Blackwell, Founder, Island Records
“No-One’s More Punk than Vivien Goldman,”
Pitchfork Magazine
Praise for Revenge of the She-Punks:
“Essential…With personal encounters running parallel with themes such as identity and protest, Goldman makes excellent points about punk’s ‘liberating aspect on the less-privileged sex,’ framing it as the ‘primal yowl of a rebellious underclass [that] has always specially belonged to girls.’”
Irish Times
“The language [in Revenge of the She-Punks] is urgent, often furious, sometimes funny and full of piquant turns of phrase…While Goldman isn’t especially interested in trying to define punk – there is plenty of literature on that already – her understanding of it is wide-ranging and determinedly global, travelling way beyond the old DIY cliches.”
Fiona Sturges, The Guardian
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Vivien Goldman is a writer, educator, broadcaster, and a musician, too. A Londoner, she has lived in Paris and Jamaica and now resides in New York. Since she started out in the vigorous British rock press of the 1970s, often working with Bob Marley (the subject of two of her books,) her can-do attitude and outernational insights have been on wide display: journalism, books, radio, television, university teaching, multi-media lecturing, museum dialogs, the recording studio, the stage, and her beat still goes on.Revenge of the She-Punks, Goldman’s award-winning sixth book, (University of Texas Press, 2019) won Rough Trade’s Book of the Year in the US and the UK, and earned her the Best Music Journalist Award from Germany’s Reeperbahn Festival. It has been translated into seven international editions
In a unique career move, Goldman released her first album, ‘Next Is Now,’ in 2021, produced by Youth (Killing Joke, The Orb, Paul McCartney, Poly Styrene.) Brooklyn Vegan made it LP of the Week and The Washington Post, Forbes magazine and Pitchfork, among others, enthused about what Lucie O’Brien called “a moving statement on love, exile, struggle and companionship.. Goldman sings with a sense of musical liberation.” (Mojo)It was a remarkable renaissance for the post-punk music Goldman made in the early 1980s as part of The Flying Lizards, and solo with members of PiL,The Raincoats, Aswad and Robert Wyatt. When this scattered work was re-issued in a 2016 compilation album, “Resolutionary,” it prompted HBO to use her cult classic “Launderette” in their series, “The Deuce.”
The Afrobeat Artist, a book on the work of Lemi Ghariokwu, the visual artist whose sleeves projected Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the creator of Nigeria’s Afrobeat sound, will be published by Hat & Beard Books in 2022. A long-time Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recording Music, Tisch, her lecturing life has taken her to London, New York, Los Angeles, Munich, Bilbao, Lagos and beyond.
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Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608469154 • US $19 • 8.5 in x 5.5 in • 200 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The first English-language biography of one of Latin America’s most important, innovative, and enduringly relevant Marxist thinkers.
José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) is widely recognized across Latin America as one of the most important and innovative Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. Yet his life and work are largely unknown to the English-speaking world. In this gripping political biography—the first written in English—Mike Gonzalez introduces readers to the inspiring life and thought of the Peruvian socialist.
As one of the first modern thinkers to discuss what Marxism has to offer, and to learn from, the struggles of Indigenous peoples, his ideas have an immediate relevance in the context of Standing Rock and other native-led fights challenging pipelines across North America
PRAISE:
“José Carlos Mariátegui was the most important and original Latin American revolutionary socialist writing in the 1920s, yet his work is too little known in the rest of the world. Reviled by the Stalinists at the time of his death, his insights into the revolutionary potential of indigenous Andean peasant cultures are assuming a new relevance in the early 21st century. Mike Gonzalez’s fine study brings the man and his life-work into sharp focus.”
Colin Barker
“It used to be said that Mariategui was the Latin American Gramsci. But today, from a perspective defined by postcolonialism, it might be more pertinent to think of Gramsci as the European Mariategui. Mike Gonzalez’s new book offers a vividly detailed, eminently readable account of Mariategui’s life and times, with special attention to the formation of his unique form of Marxism. Gonzalez argues that Mariategui remains crucially relevant to the development of forms of struggle and resistance in the Americas within the new framework of globalization.”
John Beverley, University of Pittsburgh, author of Latin America after 9/11
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mike Gonzalez is Emeritus Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the co-editor of Arms and the People (Pluto, 2012) and author of Hugo Chavez: Socialist for the Twenty-first Century (Pluto, 2014).
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859998 • 5.5 in x 7.5 in • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Amy Goodman gives voice to the heroic stories of people the corporate media exclude and ignore.
Amy Goodman began writing a weekly column, “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” for King Features Syndicate in 2006. This timely new collection gives voice to the many ordinary people standing up to corporate and government power — and refusing to be silent.
Amy Goodman is the best-known voice of independent media today; her radio and television program Democracy Now! is broadcast on over 500 stations nationwide.
These punchy, lively columns concentrate Goodman’s skill of “going where the silence is” and telling the stories the major media usually ignore.
In Goodman’s words, they are “a way to reach out to many different audiences. I think people recognize the media has failed them. People are tired of hearing the same small circle of pundits who know so little about so much, explain the world to us, and getting it so wrong. We need to break the sound barrier with other voices, with experts in their own communities, to provide a forum for people to speak for themselves.”
PRAISE:
“You can learn more of the truth about Washington and the world from one week of Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! than from a month of Sunday morning talk shows. Make that a year of Sunday talk shows. That’s because Amy, as you will discover on every page of this book, knows the critical question for journalists is how close they are to the truth, not how close they are to power.”
From the Preface by Bill Moyers
“Amy Goodman is a towering progressive freedom-fighter in the media and the world. Breaking the Sound Barrier is another expression of her vision and courage.”
Cornel West
“If you are one of the millions of people who love listening to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, and appreciate the passion, intelligence, and insight she brings to her subjects, I’ve got very good news: she’s just as compelling, thought-provoking, and fearless on the page. By bringing us the perspectives of those too often denied access to the media megaphone, Breaking the Sound Barrier is crusading journalism at its best.”
Arianna Huffington
“Amy Goodman is one of the most important voices in America. She defies the noise and clamor of celebrity gossip. She challenges the manipulation of information and dissemination of lies by the power elite. She refuses to pander to a culture where news is seen as another form of entertainment designed to bolster corporate profits. She holds steadfast to the core values of our trade. Her integrity and honesty remind us that a culture that cannot distinguish between illusion and reality dies.”
Chris Hedges
“Amy Goodman has consistently set the bar for common sense journalism. Every weekday morning Democracy Now! is the one place you can learn of events, usually straight from the horse’s mouth, and not from a ‘news model’ telling you what to think. There is no one who should be more on mainstream media, every day reminding us and giving us a glimpse of the power of one, than Amy. She will go down in history as one of the voices of democracy’s greatest champions. A collection of all of her hard work, on our behalf, is a great reference tool … and brilliantly Amy!”
Willie Nelson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Amy Goodman has been confronting the Washington establishment and its corporate sponsors while giving voice to the ordinary citizens and activists who are fighting for a better, more peaceful world.
Goodman began her career in community radio in 1985 at Pacifica Radio’s New York Station, WBAI. She produced WBAI’s Evening News for 10 years. In 1990 and 1991, Amy traveled to East Timor to report on the US-backed Indonesian occupation of East Timor. There, she and colleague Allan Nairn witnessed Indonesian soldiers gun down 270 East Timorese. Indonesian soldiers beat Amy and Allan, fracturing Allan’s skull. Their documentary, “Massacre: The Story of East Timor” won numerous awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton, the Armstrong Award, the Radio/Television News Directors Award, as well as awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In 1996, Amy helped launch Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!. Two years later, Amy and producer Jeremy Scahill went to Nigeria. Their radio documentary “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship” exposed Chevron’s role in the killing of two Nigerian villagers in the Niger Delta, who were protesting yet another oil spill in their community. That documentary won the George Polk Award, the Golden Reel for Best National Documentary from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and a Project Censored award. In 1999, Amy Goodman traveled to Peru to interview American political prisoner Lori Berenson. It was the first time a journalist had ever gotten into the prison to speak to her.
Today Democracy Now! is a daily international radio and TV show, and is carried on more than 500 stations and on http://www.democracynow.org/. It is the largest media collaboration in North American public broadcasting. Democracy Now! is more than a show — it’s a movement.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781401309893 • 7.9 in x 5 in • US $13.99 • 272 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Standing Up to the Madness not only is a timely, inspiring, and even revolutionary look at who wields the greatest power in America — everyday people who take a chance and stand up for what they believe in — but also offers advice on what you can do to help.
Where are the millions marching in the streets to defend human rights, civil liberties, and racial justice? Where is the mass revulsion against the killing and torture being carried out in our name? Where are the environmentalists? Where is the peace movement?
The answer: They are everywhere.
The award-winning sister-brother team of Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, and investigative journalist David Goodman traveled the country to detail the ways in which grassroots activists have taken politics out of the hands of politicians. Standing Up to the Madness tells the stories of everyday citizens who have challenged the government and prevailed.
As the Bush administration has waged war abroad and at home, it has catalyzed a vast groundswell of political action. From African-American residents of deluged New Orleans who are fighting racism and City Hall to regain their homes; to four Connecticut librarians who refused to spy on their patrons, challenged the USA PATRIOT Act, and won; to a group of high school students who were barred from performing a play they wrote on the Iraq War based on letters from soldiers; to the first U.S. Army officer to publicly refuse orders to deploy to Iraq, charging that his duty as an officer is to refuse to fight in an illegal and immoral war, Standing Up to the Madness profiles citizens rising to extraordinary challenges. And, in the process, they are changing the way that politics is done, both now and in the future.
In communities around the United States, courageous individuals have taken leaps of faith to stop the madness. They could only hope that if they led, others would follow. That is how movements are born. What begins as one, eventually becomes many. In that tradition, the authors have included the ways in which any individual can take action and effect change.
PRAISE FOR AMY AND DAVID GOODMAN:
”Amy Goodman has taken investigative journalism to new heights of exciting, informative, and probing analysis.”
Noam Chomsky
”Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! represent what journalism should be: beholden to the interests of people, not power and profit. Her work is invaluable.”
Arundhati Roy
”At times when people are told to ‘watch what they say,’ Amy Goodman is not afraid to speak truth to power. She does it every day.”
Susan Sarandon
“Amy Goodman has carried the great muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and I. F. Stone into the electronic age, creating a powerful counter to the mainstream media.”
Howard Zinn, historian and author of A People’s History of the United States
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Amy Goodman has been confronting the Washington establishment and its corporate sponsors while giving voice to the ordinary citizens and activists who are fighting for a better, more peaceful world.
Goodman began her career in community radio in 1985 at Pacifica Radio’s New York Station, WBAI. She produced WBAI’s Evening News for 10 years. In 1990 and 1991, Amy traveled to East Timor to report on the US-backed Indonesian occupation of East Timor. There, she and colleague Allan Nairn witnessed Indonesian soldiers gun down 270 East Timorese. Indonesian soldiers beat Amy and Allan, fracturing Allan’s skull. Their documentary, “Massacre: The Story of East Timor” won numerous awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton, the Armstrong Award, the Radio/Television News Directors Award, as well as awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In 1996, Amy helped launch Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!. Two years later, Amy and producer Jeremy Scahill went to Nigeria. Their radio documentary “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship” exposed Chevron’s role in the killing of two Nigerian villagers in the Niger Delta, who were protesting yet another oil spill in their community. That documentary won the George Polk Award, the Golden Reel for Best National Documentary from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and a Project Censored award. In 1999, Amy Goodman traveled to Peru to interview American political prisoner Lori Berenson. It was the first time a journalist had ever gotten into the prison to speak to her.
Today Democracy Now! is a daily international radio and TV show, and is carried on more than 500 stations and on http://www.democracynow.org/. It is the largest media collaboration in North American public broadcasting. Democracy Now! is more than a show — it’s a movement.
David Goodman is an award-winning investigative journalist, author of six books, and a contributing writer for Mother Jones. His articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Outside, The Nation, and numerous other publications. His reporting is included in the American Empire Project book In the Name of Democracy. He lives with his wife and two children in Vermont.
Amy and David Goodman are the authors of two previous bestselling books:
Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the U.S., Democracy Now! airs on over 500 radio and TV stations, including Pacifica, NPR, community, and college radio stations; on public access, PBS, satellite TV stations (DISH network: Free Speech TV channel 9415 and Link TV channel 9410; DIRECTV: Link TV channel 375); on the World Radio Network’s European Service and on the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia service; as a podcast, automatically downloaded to your computer or portable audio player; and streams live Monday to Friday at 8 am EST at http://www.democracynow.org/. The Democracy Now! podcast is one of the most popular on the web. In 2006, Time Magazine identified Democracy Now! along with Meet the Press as their “Pick of the Podcasts.” More than 70 radio stations throughout the US and Latin America now carry Democracy Now!’s daily Spanish headlines. More than 15,000 people signed up for Boletín, a text version of its Spanish headlines. Today, 75,000 people receive its English language Daily Digest.
Democracy Now! provides audiences with access to people and perspectives rarely heard in the U.S. corporate-sponsored media, including independent and international journalists, ordinary people from around the world who are directly affected by U.S. foreign policy, grassroots leaders and peace activists, artists, academics and independent analysts. In addition, Democracy Now! hosts real debates — debates between people who substantially disagree, such as between the White House or the Pentagon spokespeople on the one hand, and grassroots activists on the other. New stations are adding Democracy Now! to their programming schedules all the time, and there are several movements going on around the country right now to bring Democracy Now! to new communities.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781401302931 • US $23.95 • 8.3 in x 5.9 in • 352 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From the authors of the New York Times bestseller The Exception to the Rulers comes a new book that pushes back against official lies and spin and gives voice to the silenced majority.
In Static, the brother-sister team of Amy Goodman, host of the popular international TV and radio news show Democracy Now!, and investigative journalist David Goodman once again take on government liars, corporate profiteers, and the media that has acted as their megaphone. They expose how the Bush administration has manipulated and fabricated news and how the corporate media has worked hand in glove with the powerful to deceive the public. The Goodmans cut through the spin and static to offer the truth about war, torture, and government control of the media. Mixing investigative reporting and interviews, Static presents voices of dissidents, activists, and others who are too often frozen out of official debate, to shed new light on urgent issues of war and peace. Ultimately, Static is a hopeful, fighting rallying call for people to take back our government, our media,and our world.
PRAISE:
“Amy Goodman and her author brother, David Goodman, follow up their bestseller The Exception to the Rulers by again synthesizing radio interviews and commentary with secondary sources on charged issues that the corporate media too often overlook. ‘The Bush administration is obsessed with controlling the flow of information,’ the authors declare, citing examples from Iraq to Katrina. One glaring hypocrisy is the president’s claim that ‘we do not render to countries that torture’; the authors find mounds of evidence to the contrary. They also remind us of the unseemly ties between Republican Party supporters and Pentagon contracts in Iraq. In one hilarious episode — lightly reported in the U.S. media — a British activist group, the Yes Men, hoaxed the BBC regarding Dow Chemical’s apparent willingness to apologize for the Bhopal disaster. On Goodman’s show, a former U.S. Army interrogator acknowledged that 98% of those picked up in Iraq ‘had not done anything.’ A brief final section highlights those who fight back, including antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan, and a former British ambassador in Uzbekistan who blew the whistle on that regime’s human rights abuses. The book should be popular with fans of the show.“
Publisher’s Weekly
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Amy Goodman has been confronting the Washington establishment and its corporate sponsors while giving voice to the ordinary citizens and activists who are fighting for a better, more peaceful world.
Goodman began her career in community radio in 1985 at Pacifica Radio’s New York Station, WBAI. She produced WBAI’s Evening News for 10 years. In 1990 and 1991, Amy traveled to East Timor to report on the US-backed Indonesian occupation of East Timor. There, she and colleague Allan Nairn witnessed Indonesian soldiers gun down 270 East Timorese. Indonesian soldiers beat Amy and Allan, fracturing Allan’s skull. Their documentary, “Massacre: The Story of East Timor” won numerous awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton, the Armstrong Award, the Radio/Television News Directors Award, as well as awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In 1996, Amy helped launch Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!. Two years later, Amy and producer Jeremy Scahill went to Nigeria. Their radio documentary “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship” exposed Chevron’s role in the killing of two Nigerian villagers in the Niger Delta, who were protesting yet another oil spill in their community. That documentary won the George Polk Award, the Golden Reel for Best National Documentary from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and a Project Censored award. In 1999, Amy Goodman traveled to Peru to interview American political prisoner Lori Berenson. It was the first time a journalist had ever gotten into the prison to speak to her.
Today Democracy Now! is a daily international radio and TV show, and is carried on more than 500 stations and on http://www.democracynow.org/. It is the largest media collaboration in North American public broadcasting. Democracy Now! is more than a show — it’s a movement.
David Goodman is an award-winning independent journalist and the author of five books, including the critically acclaimed Fault Lines: Journeys Into the New South Africa (University of California Press, 1999; revised paperback, 2002). Archbishop Desmond Tutu hailed Fault Lines as “a searingly honest book by someone who really knows his subject.” He is also a contributing writer for Mother Jones, and his articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Outside, Washington Quarterly, Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, The Nation, Village Voice, and other publications.
Amy and David Goodman are the authors of two other recent books:
Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the U.S., Democracy Now! airs on over 500 radio and TV stations, including Pacifica, NPR, community, and college radio stations; on public access, PBS, satellite TV stations (DISH network: Free Speech TV channel 9415 and Link TV channel 9410; DIRECTV: Link TV channel 375); on the World Radio Network’s European Service and on the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia service; as a podcast, automatically downloaded to your computer or portable audio player; and streams live Monday to Friday at 8 am EST at http://www.democracynow.org. The Democracy Now! podcast is one of the most popular on the web. In 2006, Time Magazine identified Democracy Now! along with Meet the Press as their “Pick of the Podcasts.” More than 70 radio stations throughout the US and Latin America now carry Democracy Now!’s daily Spanish headlines. More than 15,000 people signed up for Boletín, a text version of its Spanish headlines. Today, 75,000 people receive its English language Daily Digest.
Democracy Now! provides audiences with access to people and perspectives rarely heard in the U.S. corporate-sponsored media, including independent and international journalists, ordinary people from around the world who are directly affected by U.S. foreign policy, grassroots leaders and peace activists, artists, academics and independent analysts. In addition, Democracy Now! hosts real debates — debates between people who substantially disagree, such as between the White House or the Pentagon spokespeople on the one hand, and grassroots activists on the other. New stations are adding Democracy Now! to their programming schedules all the time, and there are several movements going on around the country right now to bring Democracy Now! to new communities.
For more about Democracy Now! please see:
“Democracy Now: A Relief From Corporate News B.S.”
By Thomas Boothe and Danielle Follett Le Monde diplomatique (January 2007) http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/73900/
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
CD • ISBN: 9781931859677 • US $40 • 6.2 in x 5.4 in • 720 minutes
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In The Exception to the Rulers, award-winning journalist Amy Goodman, with the aid of her brother David, exposes the lies, corruption, and crimes of the power elite — an elite that is bolstered by large media conglomerates. Her goal is “to go where the silence is, to give voice to the silenced majority.” As Goodman travels around the country, she is fond of quoting Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” This book informs and empowers people to act on that principle.
The Exception to the Rulers reached #17 on the New York Times hardcover non-fiction bestseller list and #12 on the paperback bestseller list.
Democracy Now! broadcasts on more than 500 radio and TV stations, including Pacifica, NPR stations, low power fm, college and community radio stations, PBS stations and public access cable TV stations. Millions of viewers can tune into Democracy Now! through Free Speech TV and Link TV, broadcasting on both TV satellite networks, Dish Network and DirecTV.
Millions of people visit democracynow.org each month. In 2006, Time Magazine identified Democracy Now! along with Meet the Press as their “Pick of the Podcasts.” More than 70 radio stations throughout the US and Latin America now carry Democracy Now!’s daily Spanish headlines. More than 15,000 people signed up for Boletin, a text version of its Spanish headlines. Today, 75,000 people receive its English language Daily Digest.
PRAISE:
“Amy Goodman has taken investigative journalism to new heights.”
Noam Chomsky
“Amy Goodman has carried the great muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and I.F. Stone into the electronic age, creating a powerful counter to the mainstream media. Her programs have reached into homes across the country, educating a new generation of listeners on the realities of U.S. policy at home and abroad. The book she has done with her brother is a very welcome and important addition to the dissident literature of our time.”
Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States
“The Exception to the Rulers is a brilliant example of the flourishing of dissent in the United States. It’s an exciting guide book for people of conscience about how to tip the balance sooner rather than later. It’s been written by wonderful people who wake up every morning year after year, with justice on their minds. That could have been boring, or intimidating, if the stories weren’t wonderfully told. Believe me, they are. This is a wonderful, revealing book.”
Arundhati Roy, author, The God of Small Things and War Talk, from the preface to the Italian edition
“Journalist and radio host Goodman brings her hard-hitting, no-holds-barred brand of reporting to an array of human rights, government accountability and media responsibility issues, and the result is bracing and timely. Goodman isn’t about to let anyone slide by with easy explanations, not even then President Clinton when he called in on her daily Pacifica news show. And she is fierce and tireless in her commitment to dig behind official versions of the facts to get to very different stories … Instances in which newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post have published stories based on leaked reports from unnamed government sources only to have to retract the stories later as being unfounded allow Goodman to argue that sophisticated news management techniques of spin, disinformation and controlled access to sources are undermining the reliability of media reporting. How, she asks, could journalists ‘embedded’ with U.S. troops in Iraq be objective reporters of all that was occurring there, and whose interests were being served? These and other provocative questions power Goodman’s stirring call for a democratic media serving a democratic society.”
Publishers Weekly
“Goodman’s … first book, coauthored with her brother, David, recounts some of her most hard-hitting confrontations with corporate types and politicos of all persuasions, covering much of the same territory as other anti-Bush books and then some, at a compelling, breathless pace. Her real target, however, is not the oil-defense-politics Establishment, but their enablers, the media, which are cowed less by their corporate owners than by their own capacity for self-censorship in the guise of patriotism.“
Booklist
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Amy Goodman has been confronting the Washington establishment and its corporate sponsors while giving voice to the ordinary citizens and activists who are fighting for a better, more peaceful world.
Goodman began her career in community radio in 1985 at Pacifica Radio’s New York Station, WBAI. She produced WBAI’s Evening News for 10 years. In 1990 and 1991, Amy traveled to East Timor to report on the US-backed Indonesian occupation of East Timor. There, she and colleague Allan Nairn witnessed Indonesian soldiers gun down 270 East Timorese. Indonesian soldiers beat Amy and Allan, fracturing Allan’s skull. Their documentary, “Massacre: The Story of East Timor” won numerous awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton, the Armstrong Award, the Radio/Television News Directors Award, as well as awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In 1996, Amy helped launch Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!. Two years later, Amy and producer Jeremy Scahill went to Nigeria. Their radio documentary “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship” exposed Chevron’s role in the killing of two Nigerian villagers in the Niger Delta, who were protesting yet another oil spill in their community. That documentary won the George Polk Award, the Golden Reel for Best National Documentary from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and a Project Censored award. In 1999, Amy Goodman traveled to Peru to interview American political prisoner Lori Berenson. It was the first time a journalist had ever gotten into the prison to speak to her.
Today Democracy Now! is a daily international radio and TV show, and is carried on more than 500 stations and on http://www.democracynow.org/. It is the largest media collaboration in North American public broadcasting. Democracy Now! is more than a show — it’s a movement.
David Goodman is an award-winning independent journalist and the author of five books, including the critically acclaimed Fault Lines: Journeys Into the New South Africa (University of California Press, 1999; revised paperback, 2002). Archbishop Desmond Tutu hailed Fault Lines as “a searingly honest book by someone who really knows his subject.” He is also a contributing writer for Mother Jones, and his articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Outside, Washington Quarterly, Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, The Nation, Village Voice, and other publications.
Amy and David Goodman are the authors of two other recent books:
Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the U.S., Democracy Now! airs on over 500 radio and TV stations, including Pacifica, NPR, community, and college radio stations; on public access, PBS, satellite TV stations (DISH network: Free Speech TV channel 9415 and Link TV channel 9410; DIRECTV: Link TV channel 375); on the World Radio Network’s European Service and on the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia service; as a podcast, automatically downloaded to your computer or portable audio player; and streams live Monday to Friday at 8 am EST at http://www.democracynow.org. The Democracy Now! podcast is one of the most popular on the web. In 2006, Time Magazine identified Democracy Now! along with Meet the Press as their “Pick of the Podcasts.” More than 70 radio stations throughout the US and Latin America now carry Democracy Now!’s daily Spanish headlines. More than 15,000 people signed up for Boletín, a text version of its Spanish headlines. Today, 75,000 people receive its English language Daily Digest.
Democracy Now! provides audiences with access to people and perspectives rarely heard in the U.S. corporate-sponsored media, including independent and international journalists, ordinary people from around the world who are directly affected by U.S. foreign policy, grassroots leaders and peace activists, artists, academics and independent analysts. In addition, Democracy Now! hosts real debates — debates between people who substantially disagree, such as between the White House or the Pentagon spokespeople on the one hand, and grassroots activists on the other. New stations are adding Democracy Now! to their programming schedules all the time, and there are several movements going on around the country right now to bring Democracy Now! to new communities.
For more about Democracy Now! please see:
“Democracy Now: A Relief From Corporate News B.S.”
By Thomas Boothe and Danielle Follett Le Monde diplomatique (January 2007) http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/73900/
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608462315 • 5 5/8 x 8 1/2 • US $18 • 380 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In their new book, The Silenced Majority, Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan provide a vivid record of the events, conflicts, and social movements shaping our society today. They give voice to ordinary people standing up to corporate and government power across the country and across the world. Their writing and daily work at the grassroots public TV/radio news hour Democracy Now!, carried on over 1,000 stations globally and at democracynow.org, casts in stark relief the stories of the silenced majority, against the backdrop of the mainstream media’s abject failure, with its small circle of pundits who know so little about so much, attempting to explain the world to us and getting it so wrong.
PRAISE:
“Amy Goodman has taken investigative journalism to new heights of exciting, informative, and probing analysis.”
Noam Chomsky
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Amy Goodman is an internationally acclaimed journalist, and host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a daily grass-roots global news hour that broadcasts on over 1,000 radio and television stations and on democracynow.org. She is a syndicated columnist with King Features. Amy has received numerous awards for her work, including the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the George Polk Award, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism, and the Radio/Television News Directors Award, as well as awards from the Associated Press and United Press International. She is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, also referred to as “The Alternative Nobel Prize,” presented in the Swedish parliament. Amy was co-winner of the first annual Izzy Award from the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, named after legendary journalist I. F. Stone. She is the author of several books, all New York Times best-sellers, including Breaking the Sound Barrier, and, co-authored with her brother, David Goodman, The Exception to the Rulers, Static, and Standing Up to the Madness. She lives in New York City.
Denis Moynihan met the Democracy Now! team while participating in the nonviolent direct action in Seattle in 1999 that shut down the meeting of the World Trade Organization. In 2002, he helped co-found Democracy Now! as an independent production company (it had been broadcasting since 1996). Since that time, he has participated in the organization’s growth, focusing primarily on distribution, infrastructure development, and coordinating special projects, including complex live broadcasts from around the world. He lives in Denver, and is the founder of a new full-power noncommercial, community FM radio station in Colorado’s high country, as well as an avid telemark skier and mountain biker. This is his first book.
About Democracy Now!
Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program hosted by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the United States, Democracy Now! is broadcast on over 1,000 stations, including PBS and public access TV stations; Pacifica, NPR, college and community radio stations; as well as satellite TV (Free Speech TV, channel 9415 on DISH Network and channel 348 on DIRECTV, and on Link TV channel 9410 on DISH Network and DIRECTV channel 375); and on the Internet at democracynow.org. Democracy Now!’s headlines are available in Spanish in text and audio, free for radio stations to carry, as is done on over 300 stations globally. Democracy Now!’s video and audio podcasts are among the most popular on the web. Democracy Now! is listener, viewer and reader supported non-profit journalism.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642590272 • US $16.00 • 5.5 x 8.5 in • 100 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Award-winning poet and playwright Idris Goodwin interrogates and remixes our cultural past in order to make sense of our present and potential futures.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Idris Goodwin is an award-winning playwright, director, orator and educator. He is the Producing Artistic Director of Stage One Family Theater in Louisville, KY for which he penned the widely produced And In This Corner: Cassius Clay. Other widely produced plays include: How We Got On, This Is Modern Art co-written with Kevin Coval, Bars and Measures, The Raid, and Hype Man: a break beat play.
His The Way The Mountain Moved was commissioned and produced as part of Oregon Shakespeare’s American Revolutions series. He has work produced by or developed with The Actor’s Theater of Louisville, Steppenwolf Theater, The Kennedy Center, The Denver Center for The Performing Arts, Cleveland Playhouse, Seattle Children’s Theater, Nashville Children’s Theater, Boulder Ensemble Theater, TheaterWorks, Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor Program, La Jolla Playhouse, The Eugene O’Neill Center, The Lark Playwriting Center and New Harmony Project. He’s received support from the NEA, The Ford, Mellon and Edgerton Foundation, and is the recipient of InterAct Theater’s 20/20 Prize and The Playwrights’ Center’s Mcknight Fellowship. Idris is a member of The Dramatists Guild and serves on the boards of TYA/USA and The Children’s Theatre Foundation of America.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595383 • US $25.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 364 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The men and women in Invisible Hands reveal the human rights abuses occurring behind the scenes of the global economy. These narrators — including phone manufacturers in China, copper miners in Zambia, garment workers in Bangladesh, and farmers around the world — reveal the secret history of the things we buy, including lives and communities devastated by low wages, environmental degradation, and political repression. Sweeping in scope and rich in detail, these stories capture the interconnectivity of all people struggling to support themselves and their families. Narrators include Kalpona, a leading Bangladeshi labor organizer who led her first strike at 15; Han, who, as a teenager, began assembling circuit boards for an international electronics company based in Seoul; Albert, a copper miner in Zambia who, during a wage protest, was shot by representatives of the Chinese-owned mining company that he worked for; and Sanjay, who grew up in the shadow of the Bhopal chemical disaster, one of the worst industrial accidents in history.
PRAISE:
“Powerful and revealing testimony to the injustices of manual labor, infused with inspiration for global change.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Compiled and edited by lawyer Goria, these oral accounts of labor abuses and the struggles of the working poor cover most corners of the globalized economy. Stories from workers and labor activists in far-flung locations, including Mexico, Zambia, Bangladesh, China, and South Korea, convey a sobering uniformity of harsh working conditions, low wages, coerced labor, and ruthless retribution against unions and advocates for workers’ rights. Readers hear from Bangladeshi garment workers who struggled to get monthly minimum wages raised from $15 in 1994 to $43 by 2010; Indian farmers trapped in a cycle of borrowing, debt, and bankruptcy; and the Chinese factory worker whose journey to the electronics manufacturing hub of Shenzhen started with excitement and ended with an accident that cost him a hand. A more hopeful strain about the resilience of labor emerges in some narratives: ‘Never think that you’re less than the boss,’ counsels Ana Juarez, a Mexican garment worker and activist. As Kalpona Akter, a Bangladeshi labor rights advocate, says: ‘It was hard for me to tell my story for this book and to make my life so public’ but . . . ‘if it lets another woman who has faced exploitation and repression feel that she is not alone, and even encourages her to speak up, then it is worth it.”
Publishers Weekly
“This book, edited by attorney Goria, uses oral history to introduce readers to 16 disadvantaged employees working in agriculture, the garment industry, natural resources, and electronics manufacturing in countries including India, Zambia, and the United States. These workers discuss their experiences with unsafe workplace conditions, organized labor, poor wages, and immigration. The interviews serve to educate readers about the working conditions of low-wage workers around the world and draw their attention to the challenges faced by employees toiling in less than desirable—and often unsafe—conditions. The book includes a time line of modern industrialization, a glossary, historical capsules providing context for the oral histories in the book, and an overview of the global decline of garment-industry wages. Readers interested in the plight of disadvantaged workers worldwide as well as the undesirable effects of globalization will be likewise interested in this book. VERDICT: Recommended for a wide range of readers, from those served by high school libraries and public and academic ones as well.”
Library Journal
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
A DREAM FORECLOSED
Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home
By Laura Gottesdiener
Foreword by Clarence Lusane, author of The Black History of the White House
Zucccotti Park Press / Occupied Media Pamphlet Series (September 2013, world English rights)
Trade paperback • ISBN-13: 9781884519215 • 208 p. • $14.95
A DREAM FORECLOSED in also available as an E-book, ISBN: 978-1-884519-22-2
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home puts a human face on the bank-caused housing crisis with its mass evictions, inherent racism, and property appropriation. And it portrays the raw verve, commitment and civic power marshaled when neighborhoods come together to defend a neighbor’s home from foreclosure and repossession by banks. It is an extraordinary work of investigative reporting by a young journalist, Laura Gottesdiener, who Ralph Nader has called “the next Jeremy Scahill.”
Gottesdiener profiles four neighborhoods that not only challenge the big banks that threaten their neighbors with foreclosure and eviction they actually win. Her main subjects, Bertha Garrett in Detroit, Martha Biggs in Chicago, Griggs Wimbley in North Carolina, and Michael Hutchins in Tennessee, are all preyed upon by bankers and seem to embody all the American Dream gone wrong, but by challenging the system, come to represent the far-reaching possibilities that emerge when everyday people organize together in social movements. Further, Gottesdiener weaves their stories into a larger narrative about African Americans’ history of displacement and search for home, from enslavement and sharecropping to redlining and today’s mass foreclosures. New York Times bestselling author Naomi Klein calls A Dream Foreclosed “A riveting book.”
Gottesdiener reminds us that not a single Wall Street banker has been arrested for the countless acts of fraud and foreclosure abuse that have contributed to the more than ten million people being evicted from their foreclosed homes since 2007, with millions more foreclosures currently pending. That ten million people have been thrown out of their homes—the equivalent of the entire population of Michigan—with almost no coverage of their stories or perspectives is itself a testament to corporate influence over public policy and national debate.
PRAISE:
“The legislation to rescue the perpetrators of the current financial crisis included provisions for limited compensation to their victims. No need to tarry on which part of the bargain has been fulfilled. The bare statistics on foreclosures are shattering enough. But the enormity of the crime strikes home vividly in the heart-rending accounts of those who are brutally thrown out of their modest homes — for African Americans particularly, almost all they have — then survive in the streets, struggle on, and sometimes even regain something of what was stolen from them thanks to the courageous and inspiring work of the home liberation activists, now reinforced by the Occupy movement. All recounted with historical depth and analytic insight in this most valuable study.”
Noam Chomsky
“These compelling and lucidly told stories are about people unwilling to stop imagining what it means to have a secure home. They reveal that the stakes in the fight for housing justice have never been higher: home is about the kind of democracy we want to have, and even what kind of planet we want to live on. A riveting book.”
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine
“A Dream Foreclosed is a powerful combination of riveting stories about four defrauded families and their fight back together with the broader documentation of Wall Street’s corporate crimes that crashed the economy. Laura Gottesdiener, a veteran of Occupy Wall Street, has the acute eye and pen of a young progressive star with extraordinary talent. Her pages should grip you with motivational indignation.”
Ralph Nader
“A Dream Foreclosed finds beauty amidst immense pain and suffering — the beauty of people continuing to fight back against rapacious banks, the politicians they buy and the lawyers they hire. It is a work both beautiful and terrible that deserves to be read by many.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal, in Counterpunch
“Gottesdiener’s book is a welcome, mortgage-edition proof for Faulkner’s line that the past isn’t dead. It’s not even past. … The footnotes alone are worth the price of the book.”
Columbia Journalism Review
“From the time of their capture in Africa, through Emancipation and the Great Migration, to the national economic and housing crisis of today, people of African descent in the United States have been defined by their search for home. Using the dreams and aspirations of four families as her point of departure, Laura Gottesdiener narrates a beautifully crafted story about predatory lending, foreclosure abuse, the racial politics of home ownership, and the brave struggles launched by African American communities to keep their dignities and their homes. She demonstrates that amidst the greatest housing crisis the nation has seen, the current struggle among African Americans for economic equality is forcing upon our nation a redefinition of American freedom, one that challenges us to reconsider the fundamental flaw in our national security: the market-driven character of housing. With great humanity and solidarity for those on the front lines of this epic battle, Gottesdiener offers a compelling political analysis, and a way forward in a time of national crisis. A Dream Foreclosed is a powerful, impressive and page-turning testimony that ordinary people can fight back and win.”
Johanna Fernandez, author, filmmaker, organizer and professor in the Department of History at Baruch College
“A remarkable book that hits hard against the big Wall Street banks.”
Russell Mokhiber, Corporate Crime Reporter
“A Dream Foreclosed is a poignant love letter to the best part of the ‘American Dream,’ which today lies in tatters amid the wreckage of the financial meltdown: the notion of a stable place to call home. Herein we are reminded not only of the human toll of this still-unfolding crisis, but the ways in which it stands as part of a longer drama, particularly for Black America, in which neither homeownership nor personhood itself have ever been finally secure, resting as both have on the shifting sands of political fate. A brilliant and needed narrative by an insightful and inspiring author.”
Tim Wise, author of Colorblind and Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority
“Americans need the stories in this book: inspiring resistance to the serialized corporate crimes that crush not only ‘dreams’ but the capacity to thrive beyond subsistence.”
Linn Washington, author of Black Judges on Justice: Perspectives from the Bench
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Laura Gottesdiener is a writer and activist living in New York City. She has published in The Huffington Post, Ms. magazine, The Arizona Republic, The New Haven Advocate and other publications. She has organized with Occupy Wall Street and other anti-foreclosure organizations, and has lived in homes, apartments, tents and in Zuccotti Park. She is currently a precarious renter and has no aspirations to own a home. A Dream Foreclosed is her first book.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464722 • US$19 • 193 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this engaging intellectual and political biography, Doug Greene sympathetically but critically tells the story of one of the great French revolutionaries, Louis-Auguste Blanqui.
Blanqui (1805-1881) dedicated himself to the cause of working-class revolution, and his courage and conviction inspired generations of radicals. He believed that communism was the only way to fulfill the promises of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and that only communism could liberate workers and ultimately achieve liberté, égalité, and fraternité. For Blanqui, an egalitarian future could only be achieved by overthrowing the old one by force of arms. To realize that goal, Blanqui organized nearly a half-dozen failed consipracies, and spent half of his life in prison. Despite everything he endured, Blanqui refused to compromised. He stayed true to his revolutionary vision until the end of his life.
Historically, Blanqui is either remembered with derision or, at best, as a noble failure. But during his lifetime, Blanqui’s dedication and courage made him a towering figure in the eyes of both friend and foe. To the ruling classes, he embodied their nightmares of communist revolution. To the working class, he was their champion and hope. This measured consideration of his life and legacy—including his political shortcomings—is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the history of the revolutionary movement.
PRAISE:
“Those interested in the history of the socialist movement should welcome this new book by Doug Enaa Greene. Brief and accessibly written, it presents the main elements of Blanqui’s life in a perspective which is sympathetic to his revolutionary goals while being rigorously critical in its approach.”
Ian Birchall
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Doug Enaa Greene is an independent historian and writer living in the greater Boston area. His writing has appeared in many publications, such as Socialism and Democracy, International Socialist Review, LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Jacobin, Cultural Logic, and Red Wedge Magazine.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
Hardcover • ISBN-13: 9781642594508 • US $27.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In 2019, award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald writes in this gripping new book, “a series of events commenced that once again placed me at the heart of a sustained and explosive journalistic controversy.”
New reporting by Greenwald and his team of Brazilian journalists brought to light stunning information about grave corruption, deceit, and wrongdoing by the most powerful political actors in Brazil, his home since 2005.
These stories, based on a massive trove of previously undisclosed telephone calls, audio, and text shared by an anonymous source, came to light only months after the January 2019 inauguration of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, an ally of President Trump.
The revelations “had an explosive impact on Brazilian politics” (The Guardian) and prompted serious rancor, including direct attacks by President Bolsonaro himself, and ultimately an attempt by the government to criminally prosecute Greenwald for his reporting. “A wave of death threats—in a country where political violence is commonplace—have poured in, preventing me from ever leaving my house for any reason without armed guards and an armored vehicle,” Greenwald writes.
Securing Democracy takes readers on a fascinating ride through Brazilian politics as Greenwald, his husband, the left-wing Congressman David Miranda, and a powerful opposition movement courageously challenge political corruption, homophobia, and tyranny.
While coming at serious personal costs for himself and his family, Greenwald writes, “I have no doubt at all that the revelations we were able to bring to the public strengthened Brazilian democracy in an enduring and fundamental way. I believe we righted wrongs, reversed injustices, and exposed grave corruption.”
The story, he concludes, “highlights the power of transparency and the reason why a free press remains the essential linchpin for securing democracy.”
PRAISE:
“A courageous advocate for journalistic and democratic integrity strikes again.“
Kirkus
“The book is a page-turner–not a sensationalized drama, but a detailed telling of a story about the struggle for press freedoms and other rights against a crypto-fascist regime and its supporters…The book will stand beyond the moment. The issues Greenwald raises–from press freedom to individual liberty to the tactics of the extreme right–are concerns that marked the last century, shape the current one and will outlast many of us…Securing Democracy ought to be read not only by people concerned about the future of Brazil, but those concerned about the future of the media and democracy throughout the world. While the story is about one country, the issues and themes it covers transcend borders – and will for a very long time, especially in an era of rising surveillance techniques and capacities.”
Globe and Mail (Canada)
“Every whistleblower is different, but yet all are united by the common purpose of correcting an injustice. But when the system is broken, who can you trust? This is the incredible story of a journalist for whom lightning struck twice: Glenn Greenwald, who won a Pulitzer for his work with me to expose a top secret system of global mass surveillance, is contacted by a mysterious new whistleblower—and what he learns will shake a nation to its core.”
Edward Snowden
“Glenn Greenwald has provided an extraordinary contribution to democracy. Together with the team at The Intercept, he exposed the secret mechanism of an operation that, under the pretext of fighting corruption, corrupted part of the judiciary, dismantled the national construction industry and the oil and gas chain, and paved the way for the arrival of the extreme right to power. With his journalistic exposés about Lava Jato, the misdeeds of Sergio Moro, Deltan Dallagnol, and their accomplices finally came to light.”
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil
“Glenn Greenwald has helped secure Brazilian democracy by revealing the truth about our country’s recent history, which makes this book indispensable.”
Dilma Rousseff, former president of Brazil
“Perhaps the most accomplished journalist of his time.”
Dan Froomkin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer and co-founder of The Intercept and The Intercept Brasil, has earned numerous awards for his commentary and investigative journalism, including the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the George Polk Award for national security reporting and Brazil’s Vladimir Herzog Human Rights Award in 2020. His 2014 book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Security State (Metropolitan Books) was a New York Times bestseller. He currently publishes his journalism and commentary at Substack and is a columnist for the Brazilian journal Carta Capital.
Haymarket Books (Spring 2017, world English rights)
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467792 • US $24 • 5 1/2 in x 8 1/2 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Henryk Grossman was one of the best-known and most influential Marxist economists of the 20th century, and yet most of his work remains unavailable to English-speaking audiences. His most famous book, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, written while Grossman was a member of the illustrious Frankfurt School, has been a point of reference for several generations of revolutionaries discontent with both Keynesian and Stalinist claims about Capitalism’s stability.
This volume, collected and introduced by Deutscher Prize winning Grossman biographer Rick Kuhn, assembles several of the Galician Marxist’s most important essays, and serves as an accessible introduction to his project of recovering’ Marx. Throughout the collection, Grossman highlights distinctive features of Marx’s economic theory by contrasting it with the views of his forerunners, from Adam Smith to Jean Charles Sismondi. He then moves on to show how many Marxist economists import faulty assumptions from mainstream economics into their analyses, and in the process provides a unique overview of the major debates among Marxists over politics and economics between Marx’s death and the rise of Fascism in Germany.
Rick Kuhn’s invaluable introduction provides vital context for understanding the development of Grossman’s ideas and makes the case for their continued relevance to contemporary activists.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Henryk Grossman (1881–1950) was the most important Marxist economist of the 20th Century. He was a founding leader of the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and later a member of the Polish Communist Workers Party. After holding posts as a senior public servant and professor in Poland, he was a member of the Institute for Social Research in Germany and, following the Nazi takeover, in exile.
Dr Rick Kuhn is an honorary associate professor in Sociology at the Australian National University and long term socialist activist, who has written extensively on Marxist theory as well as Australian politics and political economy. His Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism won the 2007 Deutscher Prize.
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Taste is something we create, not just physically experience
Food writer, French-trained chef, and Doritos lover Arun Gupta’s first book, Apocalypse Chow—a book that aims to put taste, pleasure, and sensuality back into the politics, economics, and science of food; challenges the myth that junk food is addictive; and figures out why bitter-tasting kale turned into a rock-star vegetable and Korean tacos are the quintessential America dish and how the hamburger craze is connected to September 11.
Why do we eat what we eat? This question is at the root of our relationship to food. We live in an era of bounty that few humans could imagine a century ago. Most of us have ready access to supermarkets, health-food stores, specialty food shops, restaurants, delis, and fast-food outlets. Thanks to waves of immigration and the rise of “foodie” culture, food and cuisines from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Middle East, and Europe are now commonplace.
Over millennia, humans have discovered some 50,000 different species of plants that are edible. Applying our ingenuity we’ve bred single species of tomato, apple, and wheat into hundreds of varietals. Whereas hunter-gatherer societies usually ate a hundred or more different types of plants to compensate for scarcity, humans have never had it as good as today. We can pop into a run-of-the-mill supermarket and forage from 38,000 food and beverage items.
Yet our diets are more limited than ever. A dozen or so plant species account for more than 90 percent of our energy intake from plants which are most of what we eat. When we go food shopping our baskets are stuffed with products derived from corn, wheat, soy, beet sugar, potatoes, tomatoes, rice, onions, apples, lettuce, bananas, oranges, and carrots, in addition to meat, dairy, and seafood. The human diet was once based on diversity of plant and animal life. Now we have diversity of branded products.
Pleasure and taste are political. Through the market, food companies shape our notions of desire, pleasure, and taste. Big food not only impoverishes our health, work, and the environment, it robs us of much greater pleasures and tastes that already exist, but mostly on the margins of our food culture. When writers tell us junk food is addictive, it reinforces the idea that it’s tastier and more pleasurable than any other food. It also means we end up believing that food can be healthy or it can be tasty-but not both. The way the market has monopolized our pleasure and taste is a significant but unacknowledged reason why we eat so much industrial food despite the drawbacks. Changing it is not the matter of individual solutions. It’s like expecting that with the right type of training and encouragement a penguin can learn how to fly. If we truly want to have new ways of producing, distributing, and consuming food, we need to evolve new social systems.
The food industry’s sophisticated techniques have thwarted nearly all attempts at reform. Creating a new food culture is no mean feat. We need to alter the food environment to alter food habits. Food policies and regulations are just the first step, however. If we want to create a healthy, sustainable, and worker-friendly food culture, then we need to address how we organize work, education, and transportation, and how we conceive of community, public space, and the commons. Most important, we need food systems where tasty food is pleasurable.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Arun Gupta is an investigative reporter who has written for the Guardian, the Daily Beast, the Intercept, The Washington Post, and other publications. He is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute, cooked professionally in New York City, and is author of the forthcoming, Apocalypse Chow: A Junk-Food Loving Chef Explains How America Created the Most Revolutionary Food System in History (The New Press). Read all of Arun’s writings on Substack,
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859448 • US $16 • 5.5 in x 8.375 in • 340 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A challenge to fundamentally rethink the basis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today.
This thought-provoking analysis – written by a Palestinian and Israeli who collaborate together to challenge the dominant understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – shows how the apartheid-like conditions of Palestinians today have deep roots in the history of Israel.
The only book of its kind to be written jointly by an Israeli, who fought in the Palmach to establish the state of Israel in 1948, and a Palestinian.
PRAISE:
“Honig-Parnass … documents Israel’s determination to make a major push to destroy Palestinian resistance and nationalism and fulfill the Zionist dream of an assured Jewish majority in Palestine. … This book complements and expands upon Sara Roy’s recent book, Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, and is required reading for anyone who wants to understand why Oslo failed and why Israeli violence has since accelerated against Palestinians.”
Elaine C. Hagopian, Journal of Palestine Studies
“Between the Lines frankly makes for some painful but necessary reading. … [The book] helps us understand how the dynamics of resistance and brutal repression, although rooted in the whole history of Zionist settlement and Palestinian dispossession, have intensified during the first six years of the 21st century, especially as the Second Intifada confronted the full force of the post-9/11 reaction. Without a fundamental reversal of current trends, a reversal that requires the struggle for what the authors call ‘the full de-Zionization of the state of Israel’ and a breaking of its role as a branch office of the American Empire and military-industrial complex, the course toward Israeli national suicide and the destruction of the Middle East is set.”
David Finkel, Against the Current
“A fully engaging book, an intense read, Between the Lines provides a strong and comprehensible analysis of the al-Aqsa Intifada, its consequences, and probable future developments. … [E]xpands the library of information and consciousness concerning the occupation and ethnic cleansing that is the story of Palestine.”
Jim Miles, The Palestinian Chronicle
“The destruction of a nation is not an everyday event in history. It is being carried out before our eyes, systematically and consciously, with cruelty and self-righteousness, and with the backing of the global superpower. These acute and informed essays develop a perspective on the background and unfolding of these events that is remote from anything likely to be heard in the West. They merit close attention and thoughtful consideration.”
Noam Chomsky
”This collection provides a lucid and critical analysis of the Israeli and American policies in the Middle East. The disastrous repercussions of this unholy alliance are presented in this collection through incisive and timely contributions. In the best tradition of [the journal] Between the Lines, readers will be rewarded by this collection that unmasks and exposes what the mainstream media refuses to report or admit.”
Ilan Pappé
“This collection from the very much missed bulletin Between the Lines gives an idea of the considerable accumulated debt that all those passionately interested in the Israel-Palestine issue owe to Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad. … The long introduction alone – a masterly synopsis of the histories of Zionism, Israel, and the Palestinian people – makes the book well worth acquiring.”
Paper • ISBN: 0745322656 • US $16 • 5.25 in x 8.5 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Muslims and Arab-Americans are increasingly under attack as a result of the U.S. “war on terror” – at home, as well as abroad. Since the tragic events of September 11, Arab and Muslim Americans have faced a major assault on their civil liberties.
This powerful anthology, edited by the well-known scholar and activist Elaine Hagopian, includes essays by Samih Farsoun, M. Cherif Bassouni, Naseer Aruri, Susan Akram, Nancy Murray, Robert Morlino, and William Youmans.
“Elaine Hagopian, one of the country’s most respected analysts of Middle East affairs, has brought together a group of astute commentators, who give us a refreshingly critical view of the current demonization of Muslims and Arabs. What she and the others make clear is the deadly connection between this phenomenon and U.S. behavior in the Middle East.”
– Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States
“The ‘war on terror’ re-declared by the Bush administration after 9/11 has provided the rhetorical framework for foreign and domestic policies grounded in quite different commitments. These careful and informative inquiries provide much insight into some of the central issues of contemporary world affairs, at home and abroad.”
– Noam Chomsky, author, Hegemony or Survival
“Since September 11, U.S. media and popular culture have treated Arabs and Muslims as fanatics, terrorists, and suspects: this volume treats them as human beings. These are the forgotten victims of September 11, whose rights have been curtailed, activities monitored, and charities closed down or suppressed.”
– As’ad AbuKhalil, California State University, Stanislaus
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elaine Hagopian is professor emeritus of sociology at Simmons College.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463923 • US $16 • 8 1/8 in x 5 1/8 in • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
For too long so-called education reformers, mostly billionaires, politicians, and others with little or no background in teaching, have gotten away with using standardized testing to punish our nation’s youth and educators.
Now, across the country, students are walking out, parents are opting their children out, and teachers are refusing to administer these detrimental exams. In fact, the “reformers” today find themselves facing the largest revolt in US history against high-stakes, standardized testing.
More Than a Score is a collection of essays, poems, speeches, and interviews — accounts of personal courage and trenchant insights — from frontline fighters who are defying the corporate education reformers, often at great personal and professional risk, and fueling a national movement to reclaim and transform public education.
Along with the voices of students, parents, teachers, administrators, and grassroots education activists, the book features renowned education researchers and advocates, including Diane Ravitch, Alfie Kohn, Wayne Au, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Karen Lewis, Carol Burris, and Mark Naison.
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PRAISE:
“This collection is a must-read for everyone who is concerned about the future of America’s public education system.”
Foreword Reviews
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jesse Hagopian, teaches history and is the Black Student Union adviser at Garfield High School, the site of the historic boycott of the MAP test in 2013. He is an associate editor of Rethinking Schools, a founding member of Social Equality Educators, and winner of the 2013 “Secondary School Teacher of Year” award from the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences. He is a contributing author to Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation and 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History, and writes regularly for Truthout, Common Dreams, Socialist Worker, Black Agenda Report, and the Seattle Times Op-Ed page.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902516 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In the face of relentless attacks on antiracist education, an urgent call to defend students’ freedom to learn the truth about our history and the struggle for a better world.
In recent years, numerous states and school districts have enacted policies or laws mandating teachers lie to students about systemic racism and oppression—policies that impact nearly half of all students in the US. Thousands of books have been banned from schools. Teachers face termination, attacks, and disciplinary action. In Florida, where the official state curriculum declares slavery was of “personal benefit” to Black people, possessing a banned book can result in up to five years in jail.
Jesse Hagopian, a long-time organizer, writer, and K-12 teacher, shows how the playbook being used by the right today has roots in McCarthyism’s Red Scare and Lavender Scare. At stake is our ability to access systems of knowledge that challenge injustice. Yet the fight for liberatory education has a rich legacy, from resistance to anti-literacy laws for enslaved people, to the Black Lives Matter at School movement today.
Teach Truth is a call to defend honest education for our students, showing how we can reclaim suppressed history by creating beloved classroom communities and healthy social movements.
PRAISE:
Praise for Black Lives Matter at School:
“The educators, students, and community activists whose stories are documented here are fighting for a transformative vision of what public schools can be, and the grassroots efforts we will need to get there. Black Lives Matter at School is an essential resource for all those seeking to build an antiracist school system.”
Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Toni Morrison reminds us: ‘If you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it.’ This book helps us to imagine Black Lives Mattering in schools. With accounts from teachers across the country doing the work, along with student interviews, poems, posters, and historical background, this is a primer for anti-racist educators to see the way forward in terms of reshaping school curriculum, diversifying teacher hiring, and transforming school discipline.”
Jeanne Theoharis, author, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History
“Part documentary, part guide to this movement for racial & educational justice on school campuses”
Seattle Times
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jesse Hagopian has taught in the public schools for over 20 years, serves on the Black Lives Matter at School steering committee, organizes for the Zinn Education Project, and founded the Ethnic Studies course at Seattle’s Garfield High School. He is an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, the co-editor of Black Lives Matter at School and Teaching for Black Lives, and the editor of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High Stakes Testing.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592740 • US $21.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 250 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The memoir of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers today’s activists and readers an accessible and intimate examination of a crucial era in American radical history.
Born in 1929 New Orleans to left-wing Jewish parents, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s life has spanned nearly a century of engagement in anti-racist, internationalist political activism. In this moving and instructive chronicle of her remarkable life, Midlo Hall recounts her experiences as an anti-racist activist, a Communist Party militant, and a scholar of slavery in the Americas, as well as the wife and collaborator of the renowned African-American author and Communist leader Harry Haywood. Telling the story of her life against the backdrop of the important political and social developments of the 20th century, Midlo Hall offers new insights about a critical period in the history of labor and civil rights movements in the United States.
Detailing everything from Midlo Hall’s co-founding of the only inter-racial youth organization in the South when she was 16-years-old, to her pioneering work establishing digital slave databases, to her own struggles against cruel and pervasive sexism, Haunted by Slavery is a gripping account of a life defined by profound dedication to a cause.
PRAISE:
“What a refreshing book! Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s spunky, riveting, chronicle of a life of political activism and groundbreaking historical scholarship reminds us of the Left’s crucial role in the Black struggle against White supremacy and of her own revolutionary use of digital technology in the remaking of American history.”
Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People and Southern History Across the Color Line
“Haunted by Slavery gives us a rare, up-close look at the Black freedom struggle across the twentieth century and the massive repression Black and white radicals encountered, from a white freedom fighter-scholar who throughout her life refused to be a ‘good girl.’”
Jeanne Theoharis, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College, author, A More Beautiful and Terrible History
“Three decades after Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s groundbreaking Africans in Colonial Louisiana, what’s striking is not only how visionary it was, but also how far we have yet to go to integrate the key insights she offered about our past and our present.”
64 Parishes
“Gwen Midlo Hall is a people’s historian in the best sense of that term. Her scholarship, informed by a deep commitment to the struggle for freedom, maps the lives and struggles of oppressed and enslaved people over time and place. In her newest work, she traces her own freedom journey and offers insight into the making of a white radical anti-racist historian, whose life and work as a scholar, left wing organizer, daughter, wife and mother reveal the breadth of her humanity and remarkable accomplishments.”
Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
“In Haunted by Slavery, renowned scholar and activist Gwendolyn Midlo Hall tells her remarkable life story with the same passion, conviction, depth and beauty that has guided her work for decades. Drawing on her personal experiences and extensive knowledge of history and politics, Midlo Hall’s memoir lays bare the intricacies of race, gender, class and power.”
Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom
“Haunted by Slavery is a magnificent account of the revolutionary life of a southern Jewish woman who fought racial inequalities during one of the most dreadful times in US history. When women’s fate was to be confined to the domestic space, Gwen became a militant who challenged gender norms, escaped anti-Communist persecution, married a prominent African American activist, and raised her children across several states and countries. This memoir is an inspiring testament written by one of the most esteemed historians of slavery in the United States, who dedicated her entire life to fight for social justice, a strive that persists today.”
Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor of History, Howard University
“In the overwhelmingly male-dominated, historically conservative field of southern history, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has been a trailblazer. As an inspiration to countless women historians as well as scholar activists, Midlo Hall’s Haunted by Slavery is an intensely intimate—and at times disarmingly honest—memoir. It offers a glimpse into the life of a white Jewish woman in the Deep South, complicating our prejudices about both the region and its people. Haunted by Slavery is a must-read for anyone interested in questions of race, gender, class, and power in America. Midlo Hall is a national treasure.”
Keri Leigh Merritt, author of Masterless Men
“Like Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, this book is bold and engaging. As this white woman from the South recounts her life, we learn how she shaped history as an unrelenting civil rights activist and rewrote history as a path-breaking scholar of slavery in the Americas. All along, Dr. Midlo Hall urges us to fight for justice, seek education, and teach others. There can be no doubt that the world would be a better place if we followed her lead.”
Walter Hawthorne, Professor of African History, Michigan State University
“Dr. Hall’s memoir offers a thorough and necessary exploration of the misinformation, violence, and fear that create the circumstances for white Southerners—white Southern women and girls, in particular—to participate in segregation and enclosure even when it is against their own interests. Luckily, Hall also provides a recipe for fighting that—grit, truth, and the defiance to face down the family you are born into in order to form a more inclusive family of your own creation. Hall’s book charts a path for not just understanding Southern white identity, but a reminder that the most toxic parts of that world can be excised and new lines of relation with Black, immigrant, poor, and other dispossessed people can by drawn—if you’ve the courage to try!”
Jessica Marie Johnson, author of Wicked Flesh
“Haunted By Slavery is a beautifully written memoir. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers an inspiring life story, detailing her lifelong commitment to upending racism and white supremacy, sexism, labor exploitation and global oppression. Midlo Hall’s fascinating and engrossing personal histories illuminate the makings of a ‘revolutionary internationalist,’ radical, intellectual, and activist-historian. It provides a firsthand and fresh perspective on some of the most important political and social justice movements of the mid-to-late twentieth century. A wide-ranging political autobiography, this remarkable narrative is an intimate account of an activist’s interior life.”
LaShawn Harris, author of Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Running
“In this gripping memoir of a radical American life, the pathbreaking historian Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall draws on almost a century of living memory to tell a story that races from New Orleans to Paris, New York, Mexico, Detroit, North Carolina, New Jersey, Mississippi, and more. It’s all here. Her presence at W.E.B. Dubois’s ‘Behold the Land’ speech in 1946. Her arrest at an ‘interracial’ party in 1949. A frank account of her 30-year marriage to the brilliant and troubled Black revolutionary Harry Haywood. Her friendship with Mabel and Robert Williams. Her struggle to survive and grow as a professional historian in a bluntly sexist society. Her years-long harassment by the FBI. Her painstaking archival and pioneering database work to restore the historical identities of enslaved Africans and Black Americans. It’s not a story you’ve heard before, and it’s one you won’t forget.”
Ned Sublette, co-author of The American Slave Coast
“Dr. Midlo Hall’s memoirs tell an intriguing story of survival. It is a love story about heartbreak, courage, and scholarship. As an awarded professor with over seventy years of study in courthouses and archives, Dr. Midlo-Hall has helped countless students and scholars understand the history of Africans in Louisiana through her slave database. For the first time, readers will learn the secrets behind the life of this scholar, who as a teenager started her work as a civil rights activist and freedom fighter while working in her father’s law office in New Orleans.”
Kathe Hambrick, Founder, River Road African American Museum and Dir. of Interpretation, West Baton Rouge Museum
“The ‘Allées Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’ is a memorial built at the Whitney Plantation Museum of slavery near New Orleans and dedicated to remembering and honoring all the people who were enslaved in Louisiana. This book allows everybody to understand why the name of its author was chosen in the naming of the said memorial.”
Dr. Ibrahima Seck, director of research, Whitney Plantation Museum of Slavery
“Those who know historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall from her pathbreaking research on the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants might be surprised to learn of all the activist trailblazing she did as a young woman—building interracial coalitions against segregation in her hometown of New Orleans in the 1940s and organizing for workers’ rights through the Communist Party, all the while struggling against the sexism that kept women from positions of leadership and careers of their own. But as her fascinating memoir Haunted by Slavery makes clear, the whole of her life’s work, as an activist and a scholar, has been in the service of fighting injustice and broadcasting the stories of the oppressed, past and present.”
Mary Niall Mitchell, Ethel & Herman L. Midlo Endowed Chair in New Orleans Studies, University of New Orleans
“This autobiography is an inspiring example of the convergence of political commitment and scholarly contribution. The author’s life coincides, in youth, with the Civil Rights movement and, in the half-century that followed, with the persistence of systematic racism in the United States. Daughter of an East European immigrant who became a Civil Rights lawyer in segregated New Orleans, wife of a black Communist militant, mother of an activist physician in Mexico, she describes her fight for social justice and racial equality throughout her life. In the last five decades at Rutgers and more recently at Michigan State University, not only has she written prize-winning books and articles reflecting the paradigm shift from slaves as silent victims to resilient and resourceful actors in history, but she has also led major projects in comparative and digital history. Recounting how all this has been achieved against constraints of gender convention, racial prejudice, and petty FBI harassment makes for fascinating reading about segregated New Orleans and Louisiana, the Communist Party in postwar America, and much else besides appreciation of the noteworthy persona who is the memoir’s principal subject.”
Paul Lachance, Professor of History, University of Ottawa
“Part feminist memoir, part labor philosophy, part Louisiana history, part Civil Rights chronicle, part the academic genealogy of an African diaspora historian: Haunted by Slavery is all that one might expect of the autobiography of one of the most distinguished scholars of several generations–and in its intricate and fearless writing, the book is even more.”
Laura Rosanne Adderley, Associate Professor, Department of History, Tulane University
“Deeply moving and exceptionally current. Professor Hall has kindly opened a window and allowed us to peer through into her extraordinary life. A life full with both joys and sorrows, but more than anything, signaled by her unwavering commitment to make our world a better place.”
Manuel Barcia, Chair of Global History, University of Leeds, UK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall is Professor Emerita of Latin American and Caribbean History at Rutgers University. Born in 1929, Midlo Hall is a lifelong civil rights and Black Power essayist and activist, multi-award-winning historian, digital humanities pioneer, and outstanding public intellectual still writing indispensable works as she reaches her ninety-second year.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463893 • US $20 • 5 1/8 in x 8 3/8 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Duncan Hallas was a tireless activist, teacher and revolutionary. He not only wrote about the class struggle, but also led that movement in his life. This volume collects his writings and speeches, but also includes transcripts of some of his best speeches and additional material such as an interview about his role in leading revolt in the British army.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Duncan Hallas (1925-2002) was an internationally acclaimed British socialist author and activist. He joined the Trotskyist Workers International League during World War II and became a founding member of the Socialist Review Group, the forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) and the International Socialist Tendency.
Ahmed Shawki is an Arab American socialist activist and journalist, the editor of the International Socialist Review and a leader of the International Socialist Organization. He also serves on the steering committee of the National Council of Arab-Americans. Shawki is the author of Black Liberation and Socialism (Haymarket Books, 2006).
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859035 • US $12 • 8.3 in x 5.7 in • 202 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
No serious attempt to understand the tragedy of the Russian Revolution — and its relevance to the building of socialism today — can ignore the unique contribution made by Leon Trotsky.
Leon Trotsky was one of the major architects of the October Revolution of 1917 and an organizer of the Red Army. Ironically, it also fell to him to chronicle and analyze the degeneration and destruction of socialism in Russia under Stalin’s regime. In this introduction to the politics of Trotsky, Duncan Hallas analyzes four major strands in Trotsky’s writings.
First, the theory of “permanent revolution,” in which Trotsky elaborated a scenario for the revolution of 1917 and for understanding subsequent political developments in the underdeveloped world. Second, the first sustained attempt at a materialist analysis of the rise of Stalinism, which Trotsky spent years seeking to understand — and against which he courageously organized international opposition. Third, Trotsky’s analysis of the strategy and tactics of mass revolutionary parties in a wide variety of situations, particularly his theory of the “united front”. Fourth, his views on the relationship between the revolutionary socialist party and the working class in periods of mass upheaval as well as in periods of decline.
In addition, Trotsky’s Marxism and Other Essays includes essential writings by Duncan Hallas about the development of Trotskyism after Trotsky’s assassination by Stalin’s agents in 1940 and the need for an assessment of that tradition in building today’s struggles.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Duncan Hallas (1925-2002) was an internationally acclaimed British socialist author and activist. He joined the Trotskyist Workers International League during World War II and became a founding member of the Socialist Review Group, the forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) and the International Socialist Tendency.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463251 • US $19.95 • 6 1/4 in x 8 1/2 in • 348 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
While the outcomes of the tumultuous uprisings that continue to transfix the Arab world remain uncertain, the root causes of rebellion persist. Drawing upon extensive empirical research, Lineages of Revolt tracks the major shifts in the region’s political economy over recent decades. In this illuminating and original work, Adam Hanieh explores the contours of neoliberal policies, dynamics of class and state formation, imperialism and the nature of regional accumulation, the significance of Palestine and the Gulf Arab states, and the ramifications of the global economic crisis. By mapping the complex and contested nature of capitalism in the Middle East, the book demonstrates that a full understanding of the uprisings needs to go beyond a simple focus on “dictators and democracy.”
PRAISE FOR CAPITALISM AND CLASS IN THE GULF ARAB STATES:
“This important, original work should be read by anyone with an interest in the political economy of the Middle East.”
Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP)
“Hanieh’s groundbreaking book argues that we should not view the Gulf Arab states as anomalies in the worldwide economy.”
Arab Studies Journal
“Insightful, timely, and welcome … the analytical framework and substantial data he puts forward in the book will help readers map out the current and future processes of regional integration, class formations, and contradictions, and to situate these processes within the wider global political economy.”
International Socialist Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Adam Hanieh is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London (UK). He is author of Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859899 • 6 in x 9 in • 740 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A comprehensive history of the political and philosophical evolution of history’s most controversial revolutionary.
Neil Harding’s upends traditional, Cold War-centric interpretations of Lenin’s thought, showing how the trajectory of his theoretical, strategic, and tactical insights were informed by the process of revolutionary revolt in Russia and globally.
Caricatured as a superhuman idol in the former Communist states, the Russian revolutionary socialist V. I. Lenin has long been reversely caricatured in the West as an authoritarian elitist. In this brilliant, carefully researched analysis, Neil Harding upends these traditional Cold War interpretations of Lenin’s thought and activity. Harding shows how Lenin’s flexible and continuously changing theoretical, strategic, and tactical insights were firmly grounded in the emancipatory potential for working-class revolution in Russia and globally.
PRAISE:
“[Harding] has rehabilitated Lenin as a serious and consistent Marxist thinker who based his actions not on mere expedience but on a thoroughgoing consideration of the social and economic limitations of his time.”
Ronald Grigor Suny, Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Neil Harding is an internationally renowned scholar of Soviet history.
Considered by many Ireland’s most important revolutionary, James Connolly devoted his life to struggles against exploitation, oppression, and imperialism. Active in workers’ movements in the United States, Scotland, and Ireland, Connolly was a peerless organizer, sharp polemicist, and highly original thinker. His positions on the relationship between national liberation and socialism, revolution in colonized and underdeveloped economies, and women’s liberation in particular were often decades ahead of their time.
This collection seeks to return Connolly to his proper place in Irish and global history, and to inspire activists, students, and those interested in history today with his vision of an Ireland and world free from militarism, injustice, and deprivation.
PRAISE:
“A book that should be on school shelves, as much as those of someone who wishes for a fairer society. Essential.”
Irish Times
“There are a lot of books about James Connolly, still, 150 years after his birth and just over a century since his death, one of the most significant and influential figures in the history of the labour movement on either side of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, many tend to be quite partial and serve more to try and make Connolly’s memory serve the political agenda of the author, rather than illuminate the actual thinking of the man. For a handy alternative to this sort of thing, Haymarket books have brought out this paperback that will make an extremely good starting point for anyone who wants to know more about his real thoughts and beliefs.”
Counterfire
“James Connolly was an uncompromising fighter for Irish freedom and a socialist for all the world. He lived in tumultuous times in dire poverty in Scotland, Ireland, and the United States. Everywhere, he encircled the working class. Connolly was a teacher of socialism and a militant union organizer. He wielded words like a scimitar, slicing through the thickets of lies to get to capitalism’s noxious heart. he wrote socialist songs which can still ring the rafters today. Connolly died in the struggle for national liberation in Dublin in 1916, having never given an inch to patriots who couldn’t stand socialism. With an erudite introduction, and a glittering selection of his penetrating, polemical, incisive, inspiring writings, Shaun Harkin has produced the Connolly book which socialists across the world have been waiting for.
Eamonn McCann, civil rights veteran, and author of War and an Irish Town
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
James Connolly (1868 –1916) was a founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, a leader of the 1913 Dublin Lockout, and a key figure in the 1916 Irish Rebellion.
Shaun Harkin is an activist and writer presently based in Derry City, Ireland.
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THE LOST REVOLUTION
Germany 1918 to 1923
(Second Edition)
By Chris Harman Haymarket Books (July 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465392 • 335 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The swastika first entered modern history in the uniforms of the German counterrevolutionary troops of 1918 to 1923—and because of the defeat in Germany, Russia fell into the isolation that gave Stalin his road to power. Here, Chris Harman unearths the history of the lost revolution in Germany, and reveals its lessons for the future struggles for a better world.
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:
“Zombie Capitalism is both timely and hugely valuable. . . . This book is an essential read.”
—Socialist Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Chris Harman (1942–2009) was a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) and the editor of the newspaper, Socialist Worker for many years. He was the author of many books, articles and pamphlets, including A People’s History of the World, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe, The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After, Economics of the Madhouse, How Marxism Works, and Zombie Capitalism.
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Police are popularly understood as the “thin blue line” that “serves and protects” us from violence and crime in the pursuit of justice. In Policing a Class Society, Sidney L. Harring provides an essential corrective to the assumption that police have always been around, that they are a force for deterring crime, and that they have an interest in the pursuit of justice. Looking at the growth of the urban police forces in northern cities around the turn of the twentieth century, Harring argues that the police protected the interests of manufacturers. Operating almost as hired guns, police disciplined the working class in order to maintain the existing order of capitalist relations.
PRAISE:
“Policing a Class Society is a significant contribution to the literature on criminal justice history.”
Alexander W. Piscotta, Journal of Criminal Law and Sociology
“Sidney L. Harring’s Policing a Class Society from 1983 should be considered a classic.”
Stuart Schrader, Legal Form
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sidney L. Harring, Professor Emeritus at CUNY School of Law, is the author of more than 80 articles, chapters, and book reviews on such subjects as American and British colonial history, Native American law, indigenous rights, and criminal law. H has written four books, the third of which, White Man’s Law: Native People in Nineteenth Century Canadian Jurisprudence, was a finalist for the Donner Prize as the best book on Canadian public policy published in 1998. During the course of his career, he has received three Fellowships in Legal History from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian.
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For radicals in Europe and North America, the anti-imperialist-and Chinese-revolutions continued the great task of 1789, 1848, and 1870, the “bourgeois revolution” in Marx’s terms, and the creation of nations that would release the energies and unity of purpose to create new worlds of prosperity and freedom. The nationalist focus led to an emphasis on autarkic development-the nation, it was said, already possessed within its own boundaries all the requirements and resources to match the accomplishments of global civilization.
The overthrow of empire in the 1950s and 1960s-of which the coming to power of the Chinese Communist party in 1949 was a important part-seemed to augur a new era in world history, one in which the majority of the world’s population secured liberation. There was perhaps a sense in which this was true, but the reality for the majority was far removed from this giddy hope. And in the case of the ordinary Chinese, the newly “liberated” regime proved far more brutal and exacting than those that it had replaced (which also attained high standards of brutality and injustice). In China the great famine of 1958-62 was only the most spectacularly cruel and gratuitous product of that new order.
For the former inhabitants of the old empires, national liberation turned out to be not liberation of all, but the creation of a new national ruling class, as often as not exploiting its position at home to make fortunes then smuggled abroad.
PRAISE:
“Explodes many myths spun by development economists…. A fascinating case study of the four most successful developing economies.”
Ian Wrigglesworth The Social Democrat
“…An excellent acquisition for the interested reader….Wholeheartedly endorsed.”
James A. Cox, Bookwatch
“This new work by Nigel Harris is as provocative as its title suggests…. Harris has alerted us to some of the dramatic changes which have taken place in recent years.”
Socialist Worker Review
“Floods of migrants will steal our jobs, drive down wage levels, sponge off our welfare system, compete for public services and provoke rascism, xenophobia and ultimately political instability. Nigel Harris’s book tackles these fears head-on. . . . This book deserves to be read by all…”
Nuala Haughey, Irish Times
“Thought-provoking and refreshingly forthright”
Foreign Affairs
“Nigel Harris is always innovative and provocative…this book keeps up to his high standards.”
Lord Desai, London School of Economics
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nigel Harris is a British economist specializing in the economics of metropolitan areas. He is Professor Emeritus of the Economics of the City at University College London, and is the author of nineteen books.
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By Betsy Hartmann Haymarket Books (Fall 2016)
Paper • IBSN-13: 9781608467334 • US $19.95 • 371 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
With a new preface, this feminist classic reveals the dangers of contemporary population-control tactics, especially for women in developing countries.
Reproductive Rights and Wrongs is an important gateway into the controversial topic of population for students, activists, researchers and policymakers. It challenges the myth of overpopulation, uncovering the deeper roots of poverty, environmental degradation and gender inequalities. With vivid case studies, it explores how population control programs came to be promoted by powerful governments, foundations and international agencies as an instrument of Cold War development and security policy. Mainly targeting poor women, these programs were designed to drive down birth rates as rapidly and cheaply as possible, with coercion often a matter of course. In the war on population growth, birth control was deployed as a weapon, rather than as a tool of reproductive choice.
Threaded throughout Reproductive Rights and Wrongs is the story of how international women’s health activists fought to reform population control and promote a new agenda of sexual and reproductive health and rights for all people. While their efforts bore fruit, many obstacles remain. On one side is the anti-choice movement that wants to deny women access not only to abortion, but to most methods of contraception. On the other is a resurgent, well-funded population control lobby that often obscures its motives with the language of women’s empowerment.
Despite declining birth rates worldwide—average global family size is now 2.5 children—overpopulation alarm is on the rise, tied now to the threats of climate change and terrorism. Reproductive Rights and Wrongs helps readers understand how these contemporary developments are rooted in the longer history and politics of population control. In the pages of this book a new generation of readers will find knowledge, argumentation and inspiration that will help in ongoing struggles to achieve reproductive rights and social, environmental, and gender justice.
PRAISE:
“This is a book of conscience. Shocking, eloquent, carefully researched, it should be read—and acted upon.”
Gena Corea
“This revised edition of a feminist classic adds new information on AIDS, contraception, and the anti-abortion movement as it probes world patterns of population and reproduction control and its meaning for the future. Rapid population growth is here linked to economic and social problems in chapters which provide strong keys to understanding world population patterns.”
Midwest Book Review
“Stands out amid the rising tide of books on the population question. Hartmann’s critique of global special interests in population and the environment are must reading for students and policy analysts.”
Judy Norsigian and Norma Swenson, co-authors The New Our Bodies, Ourselves
“If I had time to read just one book to gain an understanding of the population and development link, this one would be it.”
Dianne J. Forte, National Black Women’s Health Project
“It is unusual to find such a clear explanation of the complex issues involved in population control in the modern world; Ms. Hartmann’s clarity can have come only from enormous work and deep understanding. This is a modern analysis which gives us hope.”
Jonathan Mann, director, FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard School of Public Health
“At this juncture in history when victim blaming has become more blatant and oppressive, there is a need for voices of sanity. This book is such a voice. It reflects conviction, courage, sensitivity, and deep insight.”
Mira Shiva, Asia representative, International Peoples’ Health Council
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Betsy Hartmann is a professor emerita of development studies and senior policy analyst of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her research, writing, teaching, and lecturing focus on the intersections between population, migration, environment, and security issues, and she is widely published in popular, policy, and scholarly venues. She is the author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and two political thrillers, Far Right, The Truth about Fire and Deadly Election. She is the co-author of A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village, and co-editor of the anthology Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties. In spring 2015 Hartmann was a Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair in India, where she lectured and did research on Indian and international population policy. A long-standing activist in the international women’s health movement, she is known for her work to challenge and reform population policy and promote reproductive and environmental justice. She received her BA magna cum laude in South Asian Studies from Yale University and her PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598414 • US $24.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 408 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Harm Reduction is one of the most important interventions of the 20th century, and yet a compilation of its critical stories and voices was, until now, seemingly nowhere to be found. Saving Our Own Lives, an anthology of essays from long-time organizer Shira Hassan, fills this gap by telling the stories of how sex workers, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, queer folks, trans, gender non-conforming, and two-spirit people are – and have been – building systems of change and support outside the societal frameworks of oppression and exploitation. This is a collective story of trans women of color, who were sex workers and radical political organizers, who created shared housing to ensure that young people had safe places to sleep. It is the story of clean syringes, “liberated” from empathetic doctors’ offices by activists who were punk women of color who distributed them among injection drug users in squats in the East Village, and the early AIDS activists who made sure that everyone knew how to use them. It is the story of Black Panthers and the Young Lords taking over Lincoln Park Hospital in the Bronx to demand and ultimately create community-accessible drug treatment programs; and of bad date sheets passed between sex workers in Portland, who created a data collection tool that changed how prison abolitionists track systemic violence.
At a political moment when mutual aid and harm reduction are more important than ever, this book serves as an inspiration and a catalyst for radical transformation of our world.
PRAISE:
“Saving Our Own Lives is rooted in Shira Hassan’s extensive experience and commitment to harm reduction as a liberatory practice. This is a book grounded in deep love for those who are most marginalized in our society and respectfully documents their stories and emancipatory analyses. This open-hearted book is illuminating, informative and inspiring. It will have a forever place on my bookshelf.”
Mariame Kaba
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Shira Hassan is the former executive director of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, an organizing and grassroots-movement building project led by and for young people of color that have current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. A lifelong harm reductionist and prison abolitionist, Shira has been working on community accountability for nearly 25 years and has helped young people of color start their own organizing projects across the country. Shira’s work has been discussed on National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Nation, In These Times, Bill Moyers, Scarleteen, Everyday Feminism, Bitch Media, TruthOut and Colorlines.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859301 • US $16 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Leading indpendent and Green Party activists ask: Can we break the two-party stranglehold on U.S. politics?
Ralph Nader, Peter Camejo, and other Green Party members and allies assess the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, and debate strategy for how to build a challenge to the Republicans and an increasingly corporate Democratic Party.
Contributors include: Peter Camejo, John Rensenbrink, Ted Glick, David Cobb, Sharon Smith, Norman Solomon, Mark Dunlea, Ralph Nader, Alan Maass, Walt Sheasby, Jeffrey St. Clair, Todd Chretien, Forrest Hill, Carol Miller, Dean Myerson, Matt Gonzalez, Donna Warren, Sherry Wolf, Joshua Frank, Jack Uhrich, and Steve Welzer.
PRAISE:
“We all should be appalled at our profoundly undemocratic electoral system. This volume makes a valuable contribution to our thinking about that controversial and difficult subject — the role of an opposition third party.”
Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States
“The future of the Green Party clearly depends on confronting honestly the bitter lessons of 2004. This is an invaluable sourcebook: rich in ideas and unsparing in its critique of liberal ‘lesser-evilism’.”
Mike Davis, University of California at Irvine
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howie Hawkins is a Teamster and Green activist in Syracuse, New York.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598278 • US $28.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 220 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.
Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster.
The book is an assemblage of co-authored reflections, interviews and questions that are intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.
PRAISE:
“This is a prophetic work, one that will be pressed with great urgency into the palms of friends and comrades, kin and colleagues, and anyone else ready to rise up against machineries of mass death. With great clarity and generosity, Hayes and Kaba model how participants in movements can be tough on systems while being gentle with one another and themselves, nurturing a “counterculture of care” as an integral part of building the next world.”
Naomi Klein
“Let This Radicalize You is a rich treasury of practical lessons and insights from organizers and activists across many of today’s most important sites of struggle. Through deeply moving storytelling, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba share a stirring vision of commitment and collaboration that is rooted in love, reality, and solidarity—and one that doesn’t shy away from the challenges we face, inside and outside our movements, or the high stakes. This book is a gift for everyone, no matter their level of political engagement, interested in building the new worlds of care and mutual flourishing that we need.”
Astra Taylor
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Kelly Hayes is the host of Truthout’s podcast “Movement Memos” and a contributing writer at Truthout. Kelly’s written work can also be found in Teen Vogue, Bustle, Yes! Magazine, Pacific Standard, NBC Think, her blog Transformative Spaces, The Appeal, the anthology The Solidarity Struggle: How People of Color Succeed and Fail At Showing Up For Each Other In the Fight For Freedom and Truthout’s anthology on movements against state violence, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Kelly is also a direct action trainer and a co-founder of the direct action collective Lifted Voices. Kelly was honored for her organizing and education work in 2014 with the Women to Celebrate award, and in 2018 with the Chicago Freedom School’s Champions of Justice Award. Kelly’s movement photography is featured in “Freedom and Resistance” exhibit of the DuSable Museum of African American History.
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. Mariame has co-founded multiple other organizations and projects over the years including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Love & Protect, the Just Practice Collaborative and Survived & Punished. Mariame serves on the advisory boards of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Critical Resistance and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Nation Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry and more. She co-authored the guidebook Lifting As They Climbed and published a children’s book titled Missing Daddy about the impacts of incarceration on children and families. Kaba is the recipient of the Cultural Freedom Prize from Lannan Foundation.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467778 • US $21.00 • 458 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Collecting for the first time primary source documents from a diverse array of writers and organizers, this reader provides an authentic narrative of the dynamic debates about fighting anti-Black racism and the impact of revolutionary socialist politics on the Black left. Contextual material from the editor places each contribution in its historical and political setting, making this volume ideal for both scholars and activists.
PRAISE:
“Paul Heideman’s book reconstructs for us the long flowering of anti-racist thought and organizing on the American Left and the central role played by Black Socialists in advancing a theory and practice of human liberation. Class struggle and anti-racism are two sides of the same coin in this powerful collection. At a time when the emancipation of oppressed and working-class people remain goals of progressives everywhere, Heideman’s book provides us a map to a past that can help us get free.”
Bill V. Mullen, Professor of American Studies, Purdue University
“Should white workers pursue racial supremacy to make America great again? Ignore race by practicing color-blindness and dwelling on labor and economic issues alone? Or challenge oppression, bigotry, and exploitation in all their forms, wherever and whenever they appear? These strategies may sound like ones from our own time, but they were live options for the left a century ago. We are all in Paul Heideman’s debt for compiling Class Struggle and the Color Line, a set of rare original sources that remind us of this: In the absence of sound social theory, disgusting racism can be passed off as populist rebellion. Don’t let it happen again.”
Christopher Phelps, co-author, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War
“This essential collection presents a diverse body of neglected writings which demonstrate the depth, range, and ambition of antiracist class politics in the early twentieth century…more than an important scholarly resource, it excavates a valuable radical history which speaks urgently to contemporary politics of racialization and resistance.”
Cathy Bergin, senior lecturer, University of Brighton
“By filling out the history of anti-racist socialists, Paul Heideman has given socialists access to a crucial period of our history.”
Socialist Worker
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paul Heideman is a PhD student in Sociology at New York University and is a frequent contributor to Jacobin and the International Socialist Review. He has a PhD in American Studies from Rutgers University, Newark and has written extensively about race and the history of the American left.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608469116 • US $24 • 8.5 in x 5.5 in • 380 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Indefensible offers an essential alternative to the ideology of those who claim to be anti-imperialists but oppose only Western imperialism and the despots it supports. Instead of ignoring or even supporting other imperialist nations like Russia and defending dictators such as Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Hensman takes on the question of how we got here, using important case studies of conflicts such as those in Russia, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Ukraine, and Bosnia.
Indefensible powerfully argues for a genuine internationalism that supports mass struggles for freedom and democracy, no matter what regime they are fighting against, and suggests steps that can be taken to promote democracy, end the ongoing violence, and promote human rights.
PRAISE:
“If you want to understand how to be a principled internationalist in the era of imperialism, read this book.”
Anand Gopal, author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes
“Brushing off all sorts of dogmatic beliefs, [Hensman] does not shy away from thinking out of the box, guided only by her uncompromising dedication to the values of human rights and democracy.”
Gilbert Achcar, author of Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism
“Indefensible is powerful book that will provoke much debate—as it should. It is a vital contribution to building an anti-imperialism that opposes all oppression of one nation by another.”
David McNally, author of Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism
“Hensman argues powerfully for a principled and enduring struggle against any form of authoritarianism and inequality in civil society, whether West, East, North, or South. I hope that her work will be widely read and discussed.”
Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
“Fascinating…well written…I strongly recommend this book!”
Bill Fletcher Jr., co-founder, Center for Labor Renewal, columnist and activist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rohini Hensman is a writer, independent scholar and activist working on workers’ rights, feminism, minority rights, and globalization. She has been published extensively on these issues, her most recent book being Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India.
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900833 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 192 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An incisive guide to abolitionist strategy, and a love letter to the movement that made this moment possible.
Critics of abolition sometimes castigate the movement for its utopianism, but in How to Abolish Prisons, long-time organizers Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché reveal a movement that has made the struggle for abolition as real as the institutions they are fighting against.
Drawing on extensive interviews with abolitionist crews all over North America, Herzing and Piché provide a collective reconstruction of what the grassroots movement to abolish prisons actually is, what initiatives it has launched, how it organizes itself, and how its protagonists build the day-to-day practice of politics. Readers sit in on the Winnipeg rideshares of Bar None and the meetings of the Chicago Community Bail Fund as they assess the utility of politicized mutual aid. They follow the campaigns and coalitions of Critical Resistance in Oakland and San Francisco and Survived and Punished in New York City, and learn about the prisoner correspondence projects that keep activists behind bars and outside them in constant coordination.
Abolitionist campaigns are constructing on-the-ground initiatives across North America to deconstruct carceral society and build resistant communities.Through the words, deeds, and personalities of this beautifully peopled movement, How to Abolish Prisons emerges as a stunning snapshot of a movement’s thinking in motion.
PRAISE:
“At their most effective, movements for radical change help to produce new ways of understanding the world, new epistemologies. Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché have provided an invaluable service by illuminating the part played by prison abolition activists in generating theories and practices that have the power to change our present-day realities and the potential to create lasting, radical transformations for the future.”
Angela Y. Davis
“How to Abolish Prisons is hope in action. It is right on time.”
Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us
“How to Abolish Prisons shows us that abolition is possible, because the work is already happening. This illuminating, grounded documentation of real efforts to dismantle carceral systems makes liberatory visions tangible. How to Abolish Prisons is an antidote to hopelessness. You will emerge from this book saying, ‘We can do this!’”
Maya Schenwar, co-author of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms
“How to Abolish Prisons is a needed text by and for movement organizers. This book skillfully embodies the abolitionist spirit of imagination, practice making different, and generating wisdom through collective victories and challenges. By focusing on both why and how prison abolitionists fight, this book offers a treasury of gems on abolition as a practical politics of refusal, revolution, and relationality.”
Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
“How to Abolish Prisons is a vital, necessary text on prison abolition. The authors are both scholars and practitioners in the struggle to abolish prisons, and the lessons they share are grounded in knowledge gleaned from decades of movement work. Herzing and Piché’s words highlight the urgency of the task at hand, while advancing crucial lessons for anyone wishing to build more liberatory futures.”
Robyn Maynard, co-author of Rehearsals for Living and author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present
“The global carceral regime is a genocidal, antiblack, colonial beast that will only be abolished through a proliferation of the creative forms of collaboration and revolt examined in How to Abolish Prisons. Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché offer a gift to anyone who is serious about stoking, deepening, and critically informing their abolitionist commitments and curiosities. I am profoundly grateful for the incitement and seriousness of this book.”
Dylan Rodríguez, author of the Frantz Fanon Award-winning White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide
“A vital book on the twenty-first century prison abolition movement that delves deep into the art and practice of grassroots organizing. Herzing and Piché brilliantly distill the painstaking efforts of organizers on the frontlines of abolitionist struggles throughout the United States and Canada. Energizing, clarifying, and highly readable, How to Abolish Prisons is an essential resource both for those new to and those already active in movements for transformative change.”
Emily Thuma, author of All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence
“Amid the resurgence of the racist and fascist far right, How to Abolish Prisons provides a visionary analysis of abolitionist struggles across Canada and the United States. Drawing on original interviews with organizers, Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché demonstrate how abolitionist organizations put theory into practice. In doing so, they show how movement organizers and theorists articulate distinct pathways to abolition and ‘build a new world within the grips of the old.’ An urgent intervention in this tumultuous conjuncture.”
Jordan T. Camp, author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State
“How to Abolish Prisons is filled with discerning analyses and reflections from leading organizers and intellectuals of the prison abolition movement in Canada and the United States. Offering crucial examples of strategy and tactics, unpacking thorny issues of reformism, capacity, and tension, and asking instructive questions about solidarity, scale, victory, and defeat, Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché provide urgent insights into the rigorous praxis, principled political education, and radical vision that constitute the unfinished struggle for abolition.”
Judah Schept, author of Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Rachel Herzing is an organizer, activist, and advocate fighting the violence of surveillance, policing and imprisonment for over two decades. Herzing was executive director of Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the left and progressive social movements; co-director of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex; and director of research and training at Creative Interventions a community resource that developed interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services. She lives in New York City.
Justin Piché is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Director of the Carceral Studies Research Collective at the University of Ottawa, and co-editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. He is a recipient of the Aurora Prize from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which “recognizes an outstanding new scholar who is building a reputation for exciting and original research in the social sciences and humanities.” He lives in Ottawa.
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, librarian, and prison industrial complex abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the author of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us and the co-author, with Andrea Richie, of No More Police and, with Kelly Hayes, of Let This Radicalize You.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594539 • US $12.95 • 5.25 in x 7.5 in • 128 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“In the United States, being poor and Black makes you more likely to get sick. Being poor, Black, and sick makes you more likely to die. Your proximity to death makes you disposable.”
The uprising of 2020 marked a new phase in the unfolding Movement for Black Lives. The brutal killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and countless other injustices large and small, were the match that lit the spark of the largest protest movement in US history, a historic uprising against racism and the politics of disposability that the Covid-19 pandemic lays bare.
In the midst of loss and death and suffering, our charge is to figure out what freedom really means—and how we take steps to get there.
In this urgent and incisive collection of new interviews bookended by two new essays, Marc Lamont Hill critically examines the “pre-existing conditions” that have led us to this moment of crisis and upheaval, guiding us through both the perils and possibilities, and helping us imagine an abolitionist future.
PRAISE:
“Marc Lamont Hill offers critical insights into the whirlwind pandemic and racism have reaped. We Still Here appears at a time of intense study and debate about how we got here—and, most importantly, how we get out. Politics, history, strategy, and tactics are all that our side has. Read this book, and we’ll see you in the streets.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
“Marc Lamont Hill doesn’t shy away from the difficult questions, and he is willing to tell the hard truth. In this powerful book, his insight and commitment to justice leap from every page. Read it, be informed, and feel fortified in these trying times. Hill models what Henry James called ‘perception at the pitch of passion.’”
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again
“We Still Here is a brilliant, timely, and inspirational book. Marc Lamont Hill gives a critical intersectional analysis of what got us to the present moment, but also paints a beautiful picture of possibilities for the future. This is the perfect text for students, organizers, activists, and leaders.”
Tarana Burke, founder of Me Too
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Marc Lamont Hill is the Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions at Temple University. He is the author of five books, including Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life, The Classroom and the Cell (with Mumia Abu-Jamal), and the New York Times bestseller Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, From Ferguson to Flint and Beyond. He is the host of BET News and the Coffee & Books podcast. Hill is the Owner of Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books in Philadelphia.
Frank Barat was the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. His books include Gaza in Crisis, On Palestine, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, and We Still Here.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. Her third book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, was a finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. Taylor is a Contributing Opinion Writer for the New York Times and a columnist at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642596960 • US $28.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 80 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
What is political poetry and linguistic activism? What does it mean to bear witness through writing? When language proves insufficient, how do we find and articulate a pathway forward?
Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. interrogates, subverts, and expands these questions through poems that are formally and lyrically complex, dynamic, and innovative. With rich intertextuality and an unwavering eye, Noor Hindi explores and interrogates colonialism, religion, patriarchy, and the complex intersections of her identity.
Featuring her widely circulated poem, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” this book is an incomparable force of fury and precision from a powerful and unstoppable poet. Noor Hindi’s collection is ultimately a provocation: on trauma, on art, and on what it takes to truly see the world for what it is/isn’t and change it for the better.
PRAISE:
“Noor Hindi wields her poetry with passion and righteous anger in this powerful, striking collection that touches the heart and the head, the body and the mind.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Committed
“In this powerful debut, Noor Hindi’s searing poems navigate memory, violence, and inheritance with a candid and critical eye. Filled with heartache, tenderness, love, anger, and humor, they interrogate what it’s like to be woman, Palestinian, and American in today’s world.”
Zeina Hashem Beck, author of O
“Urgent and searing, these poems are both jocular and declamatory in all the most memorable of ways–delivering crackles of energy long after you close the book.”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders
“Armed with a journalist’s heart and a poet’s mind, Noor Hindi has written blazingly towards a future where “what’s real/is us.“
Tarfia Faizullah, author of Registers of Illuminated Villages “This collection takes in history both unfolded and unfolding, yet still barrels toward the light. Where has this book been all my life? But also? Here it is. And we are so lucky.”
Jess Rizkallah, author of the magic my body becomes
“Scalding, humorous, unbearable, revolutionary, Noor Hindi’s poetry collection embodies a blind wager that poems might contribute to rendering the impassive American mind alive, at last, to Palestine.”
Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noor Hindi (she/her/hers) is a Palestinian-American poet and reporter. She is a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow is her debut collection of poems. She lives in Dearborn.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594515 • US $15.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 192 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Coronavirus did not create the stark social, financial, and political inequalities that define life for so many people, but it has made them more strikingly visible than any moment in recent history.
This brilliant collection of the most important insights from the Under The Blacklight livestream event series and Intersectionality Matters podcast, hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum, examines the intersectional dimensions of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and nationalism that have converged in the pandemic and its aftermath.
These essential thinkers shine a light on the stories and counter- stories that help us understand the past, illuminate the present, and shape the future. They also examine the historic moment of the #BlackLivesMatter rebellion, and un-pack the central role that ideological whiteness continues to play in the US re-sponse to both Covid- 19 and police violence.
The book features contributions from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Ibram X. Kendi, Arundhati Roy, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Naomi Klein, V, formerly Eve Ensler, Eddie Glaude Jr., Ai-j en Poo, Dorothy Roberts, Alicia Garza, Marc Lamont Hill, Bree Newsome, Robin D. G. Kelley, Eduardo Bonilla- Silva, and Laura Flanders, among others.
PRAISE:
“Kimberlé Crenshaw is … a national treasure.”
Kerry Washington
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Daniel HoSang is an associate professor of ethnicity, race, and migration and American studies at Yale University. He is the author of Racial Propositions, which was awarded the James A Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians
Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, is a leading authority in the areas of civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law. Her work has been foundational in two fields of study that have come to be known by terms that she coined: critical race theory and intersectionality. She cofounded and serves as the executive director of the African American Policy Forum.
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WATCHan NBA on TNT broadcast on Craig Hodges, featuring interviews with Dr. Cornel West, Van Jones, Charles Barkley, and Shaquille O’Neal, as part of their Martin Luther King Jr. Day (2017).
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Black-balled NBA champion explores the challenges and rewards of using a celebrity platform to stand up against racism and exploitation.
As a member of the 1992 world-champion Chicago Bulls, a dashiki-clad Hodges delivered a handwritten letter to President George H. W. Bush demanding that he do more to address racism and economic inequality. Hodges was also a vocal union activist, initiated a boycott against Nike, and spoke out forcefully against police brutality in the wake of the Rodney King beating.
But his outspokenness cost him dearly. In the prime of his career, after ten NBA seasons, Hodges was blackballed from the NBA for using his platform as a professional athlete to stand up for justice.
In this powerful, passionate, and captivating memoir, Hodges shares the stories—including encounters with Nelson Mandela, Coretta Scott King, Jim Brown, R. Kelly, Michael Jordan, and others—from his lifelong fight for equality for African Americans.
PRAISE:
“Long Shot tracks Hodges’s political awakening, from black-studies courses in college to his early run-ins with Donald Sterling, the notoriously racist owner of the San Diego (and later Los Angeles) Clippers. The trajectory is clear, and, despite the occasionally engrossing glimpse into the typical N.B.A. player’s home life—Hodges’s tumult involved R. Kelly—almost every detail is shared as context for his more radical turn in the late eighties and nineties.”
The New Yorker
“Hodges has told his compelling life story with fiery passion, looping around a cast of characters stretching from Jordan, Magic Johnson and Phil Jackson back to Muhammad Ali, Arthur Ashe and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, before returning to the present.”
Then Guardian
“Craig has written a very in depth portrait of his struggles and triumphs in the NBA and beyond.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
“If people who think athletes speaking out began with Colin Kaepernick read this memoir of Chicago Bulls star and activist Craig Hodges, they’ll learn that they were wrong.”
Boston Globe, “Best Books of 2017”
“A skillfully told, affecting memoir of sports and social activism.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Of all of the exiled, there is none more important in my mind than Craig Hodges. His story needs to be told and retold. Not only because it comprises a remarkable hidden history of what it was like to be a political athlete in an era when Nike had toppled Muhammad Ali as the new King of the World and undisputed champ. It matters because we now–finally–have a new generation of athletes trying to figure out how to leverage their star power to say something other than “Buy this flavored drink or swoosh-adorned crap. . . .Read this book so a new generation of NBA players and fans will know his true story. “
Dave Zirin, from the foreword
“Long Shot is a beautifully written, brutally honest book. If you loved the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls, if you love black history, or if you are fascinated by the politics of sports, I highly recommend this book. Simply put: Craig Hodges’ life is incredible and Long Shot is invaluable.”
AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHORS:
Praise for Worth Fighting For (Rory Fanning):
“[Fanning] shows us the imperial and harmful objective of U.S. foreign policy. He shows us the courage to walk away from it, and he shows us a path to a saner society.”
Chicago Tribune
“More than anything, Worth Fighting For is about human beings’ capacity for change — the way that Pat Tillman’s story changes the people who hear it, the way that those people and their experiences transform the author as he gets closer to the Pacific, the ways that this book will impact the people who read it.”
Socialist Worker
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Craig Hodges played in the NBA for 10 seasons, in which he led the league in three-point shooting percentage three times. He won two NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls in 1991 and 1992, and is a three-time Three Point Contest champion at All-Star weekend.
Rory Fanning walked across the United States for the Pat Tillman Foundation in 2008–2009, following two deployments to Afghanistan with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion. He is the author of Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, Mother Jones, Salon, TomDispatch, and others.
One of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World” (Utne), Dave Zirin is a columnist for The Nation, SLAM, and SI.com. He is host of Sirius XM’s popular weekly show Edge of Sports Radio and a regular guest on ESPN’s Outside the Lines, Democracy Now!, and on MSNBC. His previous books include The John Carlos Story, Brazil’s Dance with the Devil, and What’s My Name Fool? He lives near Washington, D.C.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461301 • US $20 • 6 in x 9 in • 350 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This book refutes the long held view of the Israeli left as adhering to a humanistic, democratic and even socialist tradition, attributed to the historic Zionist Labor movement. Through a critical analysis of the prevailing discourse of Zionist intellectuals and activists on the Jewish-democratic state, it uncovers the Zionist left’s central role in laying the foundation of the colonial settler state of Israel, in articulating its hegemonic ideology and in legitimizing, whether explicitly or implicitly, the apartheid treatment of Palestinians both inside Israel and in the 1967 occupied territories. Their determined support of a Jewish-only state underlies the failure of the “peace process,” initiated by the Zionist Left, to reach a just peace based on recognition of the national rights of the entire Palestinian people.
PRAISE:
“The Zionist Left, formerly hegemonic within Zionism and the Israeli settler state, has declined since 1977 and is now marginalized. But the myth of its ‘progressive’ nature persists among Western liberals. Based on her knowledge as a former insider, and on her familiarity with the relevant material, Tikva Honig-Parnass, a radical political activist and analyst, performs an invaluable service in forensically deconstructing the myth.”
Moshé Machover, author, Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tikva Honig-Parnass, was raised in the Jewish community of pre-state Palestine, fought in the 1948 war and served as the secretary of the then Radical Left Zionist Party of Mapam (The Unified Workers Party) in the Knesset (1951-1954). In ’60 she definitively broke with Zionism and joined the ranks of the Israeli Socialist Organization, known as Matzpen. Since then she has played an active role in the movement against the ’67 occupation as well as in the struggle for the Palestinian national rights. She is the author (with Toufic Haddad) of Between the Lines: Israel, the Palestinians, and the U.S. War on Terror.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900932 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 272 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The story of the fight against fascism across the African diaspora, revealing that Black antifascism has always been vital to global freedom struggles.
At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition is an essential book for understanding our present moment and the challenges ahead.
From London to the Caribbean, from Ethiopia to Harlem, from Black Lives Matter to abolition, Black radicals and writers have long understood fascism as a threat to the survival of Black people around the world—and to everyone.
In The Black Antifascist Tradition, scholar-activists Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen show how generations of Black activists and intellectuals—from Ida B. Wells in the fight against lynching, to Angela Y. Davis in the fight against the prison-industrial complex—have stood within a tradition of Black Antifascism.
As Davis once observed, pointing to the importance of anti-Black racism in the development of facism as an ideology, Black people have been “the first and most deeply injured victims of fascism.” Indeed, the experience of living under and resisting racial capitalism has often made Black radicals aware of the potential for fascism to take hold long before others understood this danger.
The book explores the powerful ideas and activism of Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Claudia Jones, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Walter Rodney, as well as that of the Civil Rights Congress, the Black Liberation Army, and the We Charge Genocide movement, among others.
In shining a light on fascism and anti-Blackness, Hope and Mullen argue, the writers and organizers featured in this book have also developed urgent tools and strategies for overcoming it.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Jeanelle K. Hope is the Director and Associate Professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University. She is a native of Oakland, California, and a scholar-activist, having formerly been engaged in organizing with Socialist Alternative, Black Lives Matter-Sacramento, and various campus groups, and as a current member of Democratic Socialists of America. Her work has been published in several academic journals and public outlets, including The American Studies Journal, Amerasia Journal, Black Camera, Essence, and The Forum Magazine. She lives in Houston, Texas.
Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue. He is a long-time activist and organizer. He is currently a member of the editorial collective for the United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and is a co-founder of the Campus Antifascist Network. His other books include James Baldwin: Living in Fire, Un-American: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Politics, Afro-Orientalism, and Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859653 • US $16 • 5.5 x 8.4 in • 192 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“The only way this war is going to end is if the American people truly understand what we have done in their name.”
Kelly Dougherty, executive director, Iraq Veterans Against the War
In spring 2008, inspired by the Vietnam-era ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings, Iraq Veterans Against the War gathered veterans to expose war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here are the powerful words, images, and documents of this historic gathering, which show the reality of life in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Iraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicized incidents of American brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not the isolated incidents perpetrated by “a few bad apples,” as many politicians and military leaders have claimed. They are part of a pattern, the group says, of “an increasingly bloody occupation.”
Formed in the aftermath of the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraq Veterans Against the War was founded in 2004 to give those who have served in the military since September 11, 2001 a way to come together and speak out against an unjust, illegal and unwinnable war. Today, IVAW has over 700 members in 49 states, Washington, D.C. and Canada, and on military bases overseas.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Aaron Glantz is an independent journalist who has covered the Iraq war from the front lines. He is the author of How America Lost Iraq (Tarcher) and a forthcoming book on the Iraq war from University of California Press.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859738 • US $13 • 5 x 7 in • 100 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In a country torn apart by war, a teenage girl blogs her story of family, friendship, and life under American occupation.
“I forgot what peace looks like. What the street looks like. What the sky in the night look like. What my relatives look like. Sometimes I just think that if you could see what my eyes see, if you could hear what my ears hear, you would be able to understand what I mean.”
These are the words of IraqiGirl, a teenage girl blogging from the city of Mosul, Iraq, as the chaos and violence of military occupation unfold in the after math of the American invasion. In a narrative charged with anger, IraqiGirl wants her readers to understand what life is really like under military occupation.
“Let’s go back,” she writes, “to my un-normal life.” And here IraqiGirl allows us to discover a story the Western media rarely allow us a glimpse of: the story of how the Iraq War has shattered lives and broken hearts. But we also discover, in her personal reflections on family, friendship, and community, the resilience of one girl to not only survive, but to discover, amidst the devastation of war, a future worth living for. As she writes: “For the sake of the smile that was given to no one but me, for the sake of my grandpa and for the sake of my country and for the sake of my religion and for the sake of my God … I want to know my destination.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
IraqiGirl was fifteen years old when she began blogging from her home city of Mosul, Iraq, in July 2004. The book follows her story through 2007. Presently IraqiGirl attends college and continues to struggle for a better future. The address for her blog is http://iraqigirl.blogspot.com.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859844 • US $24 • 6 in x 9 in • 550 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The story of how China’s modern development rests on the tragically suppressed struggle for a genuine socialism.
The story of contemporary China typically dates back to Mao’s 1949 revolution. But in this classic work of Marxist scholarship, historian Harold Isaacs uncovers how workers and peasants struggled for a different kind of revolution, one built from the bottom up, in the 1920s. The defeat of their heroic efforts profoundly shaped the further course of modern Chinese history.
PRAISE:
“The reprint of this classic Marxist history should be a major event. The book is not about Mao’s peasant led 1949 revolution but the story of the great worker led insurrection of 1925 to 1927. It is an extraordinary half-buried story of popular uprising and political betrayal, brilliantly told. And even though it was written in 1937 it’s a story that throws much light on China’s subsequent development. Isaacs’s book is an inspiration and a warning.”
Counterfire
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Harold Isaacs was an acclaimed Marxist historian who identified with Leon Trotsky’s critique of the Soviet Union’s degeneration under Stalinism during the 1920s. The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, his major work, is dedicated to the “martyrs” of the 1925-1927 revolution, who fought for a society based on authentic self-governance.
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English in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781556522307 • US $18.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 368 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“The power of George Jackson’s personal story remains painfully relevant to our nation today, with its persistent racism, its hellish prisons, its unjust judicial system, and the poles of wealth and poverty that are at the root of all that. I hope the younger generation, black and white, will read Soledad Brother.“ —Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States
A collection of Jackson’s letters from prison, Soledad Brother is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that failed to break his spirit but eventually took his life. Jackson’s letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled black men in America’s prisons in the 1960s. But even removed from the social and political firestorms of the 1960s, Jackson’s story still resonates for its portrait of a man taking a stand even while locked down.
PRAISE:
“The most important single volume from a black since The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”
New York Times Book Review
“The power of George Jackson’s personal story remains painfully relevant to our nation today, with its persistent racism, its hellish prisons, its unjust judicial system, and the poles of wealth and poverty that are at the root of all that. I hope the younger generation, black and white, will read Soledad Brother.”
Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States
“[George Jackson was] a talented writer, a sensitive man, a potential leader and political thinker of great persuasiveness.”
Tom Wicker, New York Times
“Jackson emerges from obscurity transformed from a precipitous, despair-ridden adolescent into a man of knowledge, passion, and control, into a demon energy of absolute commitment, into a terrible prophet.”
Washington Monthly
“When Soledad Brother was first published, many people sensed in George Jackson the successor to Malcolm X. . . . It showed Jackson, like Malcolm, developing a theory and eloquently expressing a vision of the path to African American freedom through the unity of the peoples oppressed by imperialism. This makes the book extremely dangerous—and therefore, as the author must have known (see his June 4, 1970, letter to Angela Davis), potentially his own death warrant. Though George Jackson was murdered ten months after the book was published, Soledad Brother remains a menace to the powers that killed him. “
H. Bruce Franklin, author of Prison Literature in America
“A penetrating and scathing indictment of capitalist American life.”
Ebony
“Jackson’s letters are magnificent, and a monument to candor, honesty and beauty.”
Jonah Raskin, Counterpunch
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
George Lester Jackson was a left-wing activist, Marxist, author, a member of the Black Panther Party, and cofounder of the Black Guerrilla Family while incarcerated. Jackson achieved fame as one of the Soledad Brothers and was later shot to death by prison guards in San Quentin Prison during an escape attempt.
Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief’s Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens.
Jonathan Jackson Jr. is the nephew of George Jackson, the author of Soledad Brother.
Part theory, part op-ed, The Game is Not a Game, is an affecting, sobering and unflinching examination of the good and evil of the sports industry. Both liberating and provocative, Jackson explores the role sports play in American society and also the hypocritical standards, which the athletes that play them are often judged.
The Game is Not a Game is not intended to be a “safe space.” It breaks the typical sports literary format and rules, challenging accepted ideology, and pushing the comfort zones and boundaries of mainstream sports media. Chapters explore “America’s Miseducation of LeBron James;” “The Disrespect of Serena Williams’ G.O.A.T.ness;” the duplicity of the NFL with the plight of Colin Kaepernick; the cultural bias of analytics; the power of social activism verses the power and politics of professional sports ownership− from the perspective of a writer considered one of the leading voices of social, political and racial activism in sports media
PRAISE:
“Jackson’s work is not about scores; rather, he stresses that sports are a self-contained microcosm of society at large. A thought-provoking, unfailingly insightful book.”
Booklist
“Only the legendary sports writer Robert “Scoop” Jackson could write The Game is Not a Game — a book that bristles with bracing and brutal insights that take no tea for the fever and offer no discount on truth or justice. Because he is a master of deep theory (who else could translate Michele Foucault’s notion that power doesn’t just hibernate in places of legitimacy but breaks out everywhere between all folk and situations), because he flings street vernacular like a grammatical drug dealer, because he is a savant of the history of sports in America, this book is an instant classic that reckons with the factors that make sports possible, and at the same time wrestles with the forces that make protest in sports necessary. The Game is Not a Game is intersectional cultural analysis at its best!”
Michael Eric Dyson
“Candid, riveting, informative — yet not surprising at all. This is Scoop Jackson we’re talking about, so I expected nothing less. If you care about the sports industry……..if you value a true, authentic, perspective on the world of sports — and about its participants — you’ve come to the right place. This is a treat for anyone who loves sports.”
Stephen A. Smith
“To do this work of…talking candidly about race and sports, you have to realize that it’s supposed to get a little messy.” In a conversation with the author, journalist Jemele Hill hits on just the thing that makes The Game Is Not A Game so special: Scoop Jackson is never afraid to get messy. Jackson doesn’t avoid the static, he steps into it, pushing even the most woke minds to dig deeper into and think more honestly about issues of race, gender and politics. From the NCAA to LeBron James, Serena Williams to Colin Kaepernick, Jackson uses the biggest headlines of our day to reveal that the power of sports to change the world can only be realized if the powers that run sports allow it.”
Sarah Spain, ESPN
“I’ve long said that Scoop Jackson is the Coltrane of the sports page. With The Game is Not a Game he takes his skillset to a level few sportswriters – or any writers – can match. Scoop is that rarest of commodities: an original voice.”
Dave Zirin, The Nation
“This is the book we’ve been expecting from Scoop Jackson, one of the most insightful sports journalists of our generation. With humor and brutal honesty, Scoop pulls the covers off the sports industry and the blinders off those who enable its hypocrisy.”
William C. Rhoden. The Undefeated, author, Forty Million Dollar Slaves
“Scoop’s contribution to sports journalism in the last three decades is unparalleled, and incomparable. This leap into critical literature is not only welcomed, but crucial …”
Bobbito Garcia, author/filmmaker
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465187 • US $16 • 5 1/4 in x 7 1/2 in • 150 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy, twenty scholars of Africa and its diaspora reflect on the similarities and differences between apartheid-era South Africa and contemporary Israel, with an eye to strengthening and broadening today’s movement for justice in Palestine.
Contributors include Ran Greenstein, Salim Vally, Arianna Lissoni, Andy Clarno, Bill Freund, T.J. Callie, Teresa Barnes, Marissa J. Moorman, Shireen Hassim, Kelly Gillespie, M. Neelika Jayawardane, Robin D.G. Kelley, Suren Pillay, Mahmood Mamdani, Heidi Grunebaum, and Melissa Levin.
PRAISE:
“The occupation of Palestine is the biggest moral scandal of our times, one of the most dehumanizing ordeals of the century we have just entered, and the biggest act of cowardice of the last half-century. And since all they are willing to offer is a fight to the finish, since what they are willing to do is to go all the way—carnage, destruction, incremental extermination—the time has come for global isolation.”
Achille Mbembe, from the foreword
“A South African who is not white does not need more than one day’s stay in Palestine to be thrown back to pre-1994 and realize that apartheid is very much alive under Israel as a colonial power. While governments continue to certify Israel’s blatant disregard for Palestinian life and international law, activism by ordinary citizens around the world in solidarity with the Palestinians is intensifying. Global, mass protests against Israel’s military attacks and the growth of support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign are promising steps in the right direction. The essays inApartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy powerfully remind those of us who brought down the apartheid regime in South Africa that we must join with our Palestinian brothers and sisters in their fight to bring down the apartheid regime in Israel.”
Ahmed Kathrada, Veteran antiapartheid activist and former political prisoner
“Offering more thoughtful questions than easy answers, this collection of essays aims to redefine our approach to the Israeli system of militarized racial discrimination and its relationship to South African apartheid. One of the recurring and most valuable issues probed by the collection is what the South African experience might tell us not only about the present situation in Palestine, but also about various possible paths towards a just peace.”
Saree Makdisi, author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation
“The shadow of the anti-apartheid movement hangs over the BDS movement. This edited collection gives body to that shadow, making plain the useful lessons of a successful struggle to the aggravating occupation of the Palestinians.”
Vijay Prashad, editor of Letters to Palestine
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Sean Jacobs is an assistant professor of international affairs at The New School in New York City and the founder of Africa is a Country. He is a native of South Africa. His work focuses on the relationship between popular culture, including sports, and politics.
Jon Soske is an assistant professor of modern African history at McGill University and the co-editor of One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today.
Achille Mbembe is a research professor in history and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also co-convenor of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) and a visiting professor at Duke University’s Department of Romance Studies.
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BEYOND THE GREEN ZONE
Dispatches from an Unembedded Reporter in Occupied Iraq
By Dahr Jamail
Foreword by Amy Goodman
With a new Introduction by the author
Haymarket Books (Updated paperback edition, November 2010, world English rights)
ISBN-13: 9781931859615 • 330 pg. • $16.00
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The most important unembedded U.S. reporter in Iraq takes us inside the Iraq we rarely see. Since 2001, journalist Dahr Jamail has filed indispensable reports from Iraq that have made him this generation’s chronicler of the unfolding disaster there. As the occupation of Iraq unravels, the demand for independent reporting is growing. In these collected dispatches, Jamail presents never-before-published details of the siege of Fallujah and examines the origins of the Iraqi insurgency.
PRAISE
“Very prescient … [and] brave.”
Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist
“An independent American journalist, Dahr Jamail went to Iraq several times since our invasion “to try to challenge the distortions of the mainstream media.” He succeeded brilliantly. Beyond the Green Zone is a collection of his reports on such subjects as American disinformation about how we captured Saddam Hussein, the battles of Fallujah, and the U.S. campaign to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. His observations of the gratuitous cruelty of American soldiers toward innocent Iraqis are particularly devastating.”
Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
“From the earliest days of the war, Dahr Jamail been a human conduit for the voices of Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. In the face of tremendous personal risk, his commitment to the crucial, principled task of bearing witness has never wavered, and this extraordinary book is the result.”
Naomi Klein, author, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine
“This book pierces the miasma of ignorance, mendacity and embedded egotism that has shaped most coverage of Iraq in the American press. It is a passionate and deeply insightful look at the reality of war and occupation, and also an example of international journalism at its best.”
Stephen Kinzer, New York Times correspondent
“While so much reporting from Iraq has remained embedded and wrong, Dahr Jamail’s courageous truth-telling from the frontline has been a beacon.”
John Pilger
“Dahr Jamail does us a great service, by taking us past the lies of our political leaders, past the cowardice of the mainstream press, into the streets, the homes, the lives of Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. He is a superb journalist, in the most honorable tradition of that craft, in the tradition of Heywood Broun, John Reed, I.F. Stone. If what he has seen could be conveyed to all Americans, this ugly war in Iraq would quickly come to an end.”
Howard Zinn
“Even more notable than Dahr Jamail’s extraordinary courage as an independent American journalist in wartime Iraq is his wide-open heart on the beat of the war’s central human realities. While U.S. media coverage routinely skitters along the surface of Iraqi suffering, Jamail repeatedly dives into its actual horrors — relentlessly and compassionately exploring the terrible results. Along the way, he lets us know about the inspiring kindness and unsung bravery of people who continue to endure a hellish daily ordeal. Putting major news outlets to shame, [name of book] tells us what the big American media are apparently incapable of reporting in any sustained way. For an easier spin, read the New York Times or the Washington Post. For a true story too real and awful for mainstream news, read this book.”
Norman Solomon, author, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
“Dahr Jamail is the real deal: a reporter who not only has the guts to go where the danger is but to the courage to open his heart to the people he finds there. In his radio reporting and now his new book, Jamail goes beyond the Green Zone and beyond most people’s comfort zone of denial.”
Laura Flanders, radio host and author, Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians
“By bringing us their voices, their experience, trying to project us into the lives of ordinary Iraqis, the ones who could be you or me, were we willing to exercise our imagination and put ourselves into their stories. Dahr Jamail continues to try and rescue his fellow citizens from obliviousness, folly, hubris, from the consequences of their heedlessness.”
TruthOut.org
“Dahr Jamail is that rarity in today’s journalism: An intrepid truth-teller who enters the line of fire unprotected by the planet’s greatest superpower. He may be unembedded, but his award-winning work, out now in the form of an amazing book called Beyond the Green Zone, is bulletproof with truth. And we need that more than ever.”
Morphizm blog
“Readers unsatisfied with mainstream coverage of the Iraq War will want to grab this, an up-close look at daily life in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. One of the few unaffiliated journalists in Iraq, journalist Jamail went to see the conditions for himself, and the compelling, heartbreaking stories he sent back over his eight month stay were carried in publications world-wide … This fascinating, eye-opening document of Iraq’s day-to-day has a unique perspective and moments of incredible impact.”
Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter has reported from the Middle East over the last ten years, and he has won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. He lives in Washington State.
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After nearly a decade overseas as a war reporter, the acclaimed journalist Dahr Jamail returned to America to renew his passion for mountaineering, only to find that the slopes he had once climbed have been irrevocably changed by climate disruption. In response, Jamail embarks on a journey to the geographical front lines of this crisis—from Alaska to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, via the Amazon rainforest—in order to discover the consequences to nature and to humans of the loss of ice.
In The End of Ice, we follow Jamail as he scales Denali, the highest peak in North America, dives in the warm crystal waters of the Pacific only to find ghostly coral reefs, and explores the tundra of St. Paul Island where he meets the last subsistence seal hunters of the Bering Sea and witnesses its melting glaciers. Accompanied by climate scientists and people whose families have fished, farmed, and lived in the areas he visits for centuries, Jamail begins to accept the fact that Earth, most likely, is in a hospice situation. Ironically, this allows him to renew his passion for the planet’s wild places, cherishing Earth in a way he has never been able to before.
Like no other book, The End of Ice offers a firsthand chronicle—including photographs throughout of Jamail on his journey across the world—of the catastrophic reality of our situation and the incalculable necessity of relishing this vulnerable, fragile planet while we still can.
PRAISE:
“Assiduously researched, profoundly affecting, and filled with vivid evocations of the natural world. Jamail’s deep love of nature blazes through his crisp, elegant prose, and he ably illuminates less-discussed aspects of climate disruption…A passionate, emotional ode to the wonders of our dying planet and to those who, hopelessly or not, dedicate their lives to trying to save it.”
Kirkus Reviews
“In a sane world The End of Ice would be the end of lame excuses that climate change is too abstract to get worked up about. From the Arctic to the Amazon, from doomed Miami to the Great Barrier Reef, Dahr Jamail brings every frontier in our on-going calamity into close focus. The losses are tangible. And so is the grief. This is more than a good book. It is a wise one.”
William DuBuys, author of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest and The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures
Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. Jamail has reported from the Middle East over the last ten years, and he has won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. He lives in Washington State.
Hardcover • ISBN-13: 9781931859882 • $20.00 • 5 5/8 x 7 5/8 in. • 230 pg.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An award-winning journalist tells the hidden story of American soldiers turning against an unjust war.
Despite tremendous public sentiment against the American-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, ordinary citizens and US soldiers continue to die every day. Despite promises from politicians of both parties, an unjust and un winnable war grinds on with no clear end in sight. But as award-winning journalist Dahr Jamail shows, a new generation of American soldiers is beginning to take opposition into their own hands.
As one of the first and few unembedded Western journalists to report the truth about how the United States has destroyed, not liberated, Iraqi society in his book Beyond the Green Zone, Jamail now investigates the under-reported but growing antiwar resistance of American GIs, embodied in new organizations like Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). Gathering the stories of these courageous men and women, Jamail shows us that far from “supporting our troops,” politicians have betrayed them at every turn. Finally, Jamail shows us that the true heroes of the criminal tragedy of the Iraq War are those brave enough to say no.
Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. Jamail has reported from the Middle East over the last ten years, and he has won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. He lives in Washington State.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599121 • US $17 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 80 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In their latest collection of poems, Because You Were Mine, Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Brionne Janae dives into the deep, unsettled waters of intimate partner violence, queerness, grief, and survival.
“I’ve decided I can’t trust anyone who uses darkness as a metaphor for what they fear,” poet Brionne Janae writes in this stunning new collection, in which the speaker navigates past and present traumas and interrogates familial and artistic lineages, queer relationships, positions of power, and community.
Because You Were Mine is an intimate look at love, loneliness, and what it costs to survive abuse at the hands of those meant to be “protectors.” In raw, confessional, image-heavy poems, Janae explores the aftershocks of the dangerous entanglement of love and possession in parent-child relationships. Through this difficult but necessary examination, the collection speaks on behalf of children who were left or harmed as a result of the failures of their parents, their states, and their gods.
Survivors, queer folks, and readers of poetry will find recognition and solace in these hard-wrought poems—poems that honor survivorship, queer love, mother wounds, trauma, and the complexities of familial blood.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931498555 • US $20 • 8.8 in x 6.1 in • 412 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This powerful and lyrical work, at once a beautifully poetic memoir and an exploration of the various ways we live in the world, explains violence as a pathology that touches every aspect of our lives, and indeed affects all aspects of life on earth.
PRAISE:
“Singular, compelling and courageously honest, this book is more than just a poignant memoir of a harrowingly abusive childhood. It relates the extraordinary journey of one man striving to save his own spirit and our planet’s. … His visceral, biting observations always manage to lead back to his mantra: ‘Things don’t have to be the way they are’.”
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931498562 • US $20 • 8.9 in x 5.9 in • 336 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Listening to the Land is a collection of conversations with environmentalists, theologians, philosophers, Native Americans, psychologists, and feminists, centering around the question: If the destruction of the natural world isn’t making us happy, why we are doing it? Derrick Jensen engages some of our best minds in an exploration of more peaceful ways to live on the earth.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931498456 • US $15 • 8.8 in x 5.5 in • 192 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Described in a starred review by the Library Journal as a “landmark work,” Strangely Like War features a preface by the internationally renowned environmentalist Vandana Shiva, and exposes the destructive impact of industrial forestry and the escalating global war on trees.
George Draffan is a forest activist, public interest investigator, and corporate muckraker. He is the author of The Elite Consensus, A Primer on Corporate Power, and co-author of Railroads & Clearcuts. For the past fifteen years he has provided research services and training to citizens and public interest groups that are investigating and challenging corporate power. Some of his work can be found at Endgame, a project of the Public Information Network (http://www.endgame.org/).
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931498579 • US $25 • 9 in x 5.9 in • 720 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This brilliant bestselling title offers a critical examination of the very idea of “civilization.”
One of two finalists for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, The Culture of Make Believe was cited as “a passionate and provocative meditation on the nexus of racism, genocide, environmental destruction and corporate malfeasance, where civilization meets its discontents.”
PRAISE:
“Derrick Jensen tears our illusions from us with his shocking yet graceful prose. It might numb us, but no. The Culture of Make Believe is a masterpiece. It stirs us with the excitement of being in a truer world, being our truer selves. Derrick Jensen is a public intellectual who both breaks and mends the reader’s heart.
Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780972838719 • US $19.95 • 152 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Thought to Exist in the Wild is a passionate and unflinching examination of zoos in our society. Combining elegant, stunning photos with a deep and probing essay, this book presents a critical look at these institutions, the individual animals who live in them, and of ourselves.
Author Derrick Jensen is a well known and respected environmental writer and activist with numerous award-winning books to his credit. Photographer Karen Tweedy-Holmes, also brings impressive credentials to the project, including photography for National Geographic magazine.
PRAISE:
“Finally, someone has the courage to question zoos. Animals in zoos are not ambassadors teaching us about the natural world, they’re unwilling prisoners, teaching us how we as humans seem to need to dominate every living being on the planet. This is a brave book and a much needed voice on behalf of the animals.”
Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher”
“Derrick Jensen lays bare the reality of zoos: prisons for the wild creatures whose worlds we have utterly destroyed with our ‘progress’. … Yet, there is the glint of the unbreakable spirit of life in each of these beautiful living beings’ eyes, and Jensen infuses us with hope for something better.”
Andrew Hurley, drummer, Grammy-nominated band Fall Out Boy
“Thought to Exist in the Wild is a great book. It’s beautiful; it’s true; it’s visionary; it’s clear; and it’s going to have an immense impact on the consciousness of anyone who reads it.”
John Robbins, author of Diet For A New America, The Food Revolution, and Healthy At 100
“An impassioned argument for the dissolution of zoos and a return to a lifestyle that enables man to live in equal relationship to his animal, plant, and inanimate neighbors in nature … an intelligent, well-organized debate … written in a conversational tone that engages the reader while tackling a subject encompassing psychological, social, and environmental issues … [Jensen] writes with a conviction that leads readers to think deeply about what their own beliefs are about zoos.”
ForeWord
“A heartbreaking look into the reality faced by animals in many zoos.”
Based in New York City, Karen Tweedy-Holmes has long been devoted to making black-and-white portraits of psychological depth and intensity. A critically acclaimed exhibition of her images of the male nude in 1969 was the first major gallery presentation of the subject in the United States by a woman. Her ongoing projects include sculptural details of New York City and Victorian period architecture, including landmark courthouses of the United States. Her deepest interest is the animal world and she has documented animal life in the wild and in zoos since 1970. In recent years her work has concentrated on the landscape and wildlife of the desert Southwest and on macrophotography of insects and plants. For more than thirty years she has been committed to a self-assigned project — to produce a powerful and extensive group of black-and-white images of captive animals that would compel the viewer to question the concept of wild animals’ incarceration as entertainment. Her website is http://www.tweedypix.com/.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931498487 • US $22.50 • 8.8 in x 5.8 in • 232 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Remember the days of longing for the hands on the classroom clock to move faster? Most of us would say we love to learn, but we hated school. Why is that? What happens to creativity and individuality as we pass through the educational system?
Walking on Water is a startling and provocative look at teaching, writing, creativity, and life by a writer increasingly recognized for his passionate and articulate critique of modern civilization. This time Derrick Jensen brings us into his classroom — whether college or maximum security prison — where he teaches writing. He reveals how schools perpetuate the great illusion that happiness lies outside of ourselves and that learning to please and submit to those in power makes us into lifelong clock-watchers.
Jensen’s great gift as a teacher and writer is to bring us fully alive at the same moment he is making us confront our losses and count our defeats. It is at the center of Walking on Water, a book that is not only a hard-hitting and sometimes scathing critique of our current educational system and not only a hands-on method for learning how to write, but, like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a lesson on how to connect to the core of our creative selves.
PRAISE:
“I would urge all teachers’ colleges and schools of education to get rid of their textbooks and required courses and instead give everyone preparing to be a teacher a copy of Derrick Jensen’s Walking on Water. It is a superb commentary on learning, for both teachers and students — practical and visionary at the same time.”
Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931498524 • US $18 • 8.4 in x 5.6 in • 285 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Machine-readable identity cards are issued to prisoners, workers, and schoolchildren around the world. Tiny ID chips track every car, shirt, and razor blade purchased from every corporate manufacturer in America. Chips track — and control — humans and other animals. Exoskeleton armor makes soldiers invincible; mind-altering drugs make them incapable of remorse. Scientists design swarms of nanoparticles as weapons to target specific ethnic groups. Governments and multinational corporations gather gigabytes of information on every citizen’s race, family life, credit record, telephone conversations, employment history, buying preferences, favorite TV shows.
In their new collaboration for the “Politics of the Living” series, Derrick Jensen and George Draffan reveal the modern culture of the machine, where corporate might makes technology right, government money feeds the greed for mad science, and absolute surveillance leads to absolute control — and corruption. Through meticulous research and fiercely personal narrative, Jensen and Draffan move beyond journalism and exposé to question our civilization’s very mode of existence. Welcome to the Machine defies our willingness to submit to the institutions and technologies built to rob us of all that makes us human — our connection to the land, our kinship with one another, our place in the living world.
George Draffan is a forest activist, public interest investigator, and corporate muckraker. He is the author of The Elite Consensus, A Primer on Corporate Power, and co-author of Railroads & Clearcuts. For the past fifteen years he has provided research services and training to citizens and public interest groups that are investigating and challenging corporate power. Some of his work can be found at Endgame, a project of the Public Information Network (http://www.endgame.org/).
A close-up-and-personal look at the impact of our recent wars on America’s soldiers.
Ann Jones shows the dead, wounded, mutilated, brain-damaged, drug-addicted, suicidal, homicidal casualties of our distant wars, taking us on a stunning journey from the devastating moment an American soldier is first wounded in rural Afghanistan to the return home. Beautifully written by an empathetic and critical reporter who knows the price of war.
PRAISE:
“Unsparing, scathingly direct, and gut-wrenching.”
Andrew Bacevich
“Jones writes with passion and clarity.”
Marilyn Young
“Read this book.”
Jonathan Shay
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ann Jones is a journalist, photographer, and the author of eight books of nonfiction.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592702 • US $24.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Black Lives Matter at School succinctly generalizes lessons from successful challenges to institutional racism that have been won through the BLM at School movement that began at one school in 2016 and has since spread to hundreds of schools across the country. This book will inspire many hundreds or thousands of educators to join the BLM at School movement at a moment when this antiracist work in education could not be more urgent.
Contributors include Opal Tometi who wrote a moving foreword, Bettina Love, who has a powerful chapter on abolitionist teaching, Brian Jones, who writes about centering BLM at School in the historical context of other struggles for racial justice in education and several prominent teacher union leaders from Chicago to Los Angeles and beyond who discuss the importance of anti-racist struggle in education unions. The book includes essays, interviews, poems, resolutions, and more from educators, students and parents around the country who have been building Black Lives Matter at School on the ground.
PRAISE:
“The educators, students, and community activists whose stories are documented here are fighting for a transformative vision of what public schools can be, and the grassroots efforts we will need to get there. Black Lives Matter at School is an essential resource for all those seeking to build an antiracist school system.”
Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award recipient and #1 New York Times Bestselling Author
“We need this book right now. The shadow-loving fungus of white supremacy won’t continue to send its spores to infect our children if we act now to bring the curative light of anti-racist knowledge, compassion, and justice into their lives. Built upon the Black Lives Matter at School organization’s Week of Action, this volume provides the adults in our educational institutions with inspiration, organizing principles, strategies, and examples to take ‘bold action against anti-Blackness.’ The authors – visionary educators of what is possible – call on all of us to radically reshape learning environments to make them safe, supportive, and transformative for all students (and teachers). Please read ASAP!”
Lisa Delpit, Executive Director of the Center for Urban Education and Innovation at Florida International University
“This book makes the strong case for why we need to elevate Black lives and people in our curriculum and pedagogy year-round. This book serves as a blueprint to achieve this honorable goal.”
José Luis Vilson, author, This Is Not A Test, A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education
“There is no easy way to talk about the complexities of race facing our school system in America—but we have to talk about it if we are ever going to achieve the schools our children deserve. The Black Lives Matter at School movement has been disrupting the complacency of those who, for too long, have been comfortable not having these conversations about the impact of racism in the schools. Black Lives Matter at School is a playbook for undoing institutional racism in the education system.
Michael Bennett, NFL defensive lineman, Super Bowl champion, and author, Things That Make White People Uncomfortable
“This book asserts that we are at a critical moment in time, where the racial uprisings underpin the absolute need to transform education and its foundational practices. Black Lives Matter is a movement sweeping the globe and affirms that our babies lives matter. It’s time for educators to be bold, standing up for our students and communities. Our students are looking to us to lead the fight against injustice and dismantle systemic racism as we aspire to realize the schools our students deserve.”
Cecily Myart-Cruz, UTLA President, NEA Black Caucus Chair
“Black Lives Matter at School centers the humanity of our children. It is a sharp rebuke of white supremacy—the very thing that interrupts the healthy development of Black youth. School communities must affirm Black lives. Educators have to dismantle systems of oppression—systems that we influence daily. We have to be radically different from the missionary educator depicted in popular culture. Black Lives Matter at School is essential. Period.”
Stacy Davis Gates, vice president, Chicago Teachers Union
“Toni Morrison reminds us: ‘If you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it.’ This book helps us to imagine Black Lives Mattering in schools. With accounts from teachers across the country doing the work, along with student interviews, poems, posters, and historical background, this is a primer for anti-racist educators to see the way forward in terms of reshaping school curriculum, diversifying teacher hiring, and transforming school discipline.”
Jeanne Theoharis, author, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Denisha Jones is a steering committee member of Black Lives Matter at School and Director of Teacher Education and an assistant professor in the School of Education at Trinity Washington University in Washington, DC. She is a former early childhood teacher and preschool director. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2013 and her J.D. from the University of the District of Columbia in 2018. She has been active in the fight to stop the corporate takeover of public education since 2011. She is a board member for the Badass Teachers Association, Inc., United Opt Out National, and Defending the Early Years. Her research interests include teachers and public policy, the effects of school reform mandates on low-income children, preparing culturally competent teachers, and youth civic engagement. In 2015 she was the recipient of the Bammy Award for College Professor of the Year from the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences.
Jesse Hagopian is a member of the Black Lives Matter at School steering committee and teaches Ethnic Studies at Seattle’s Garfield High School. Jesse is an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, the co-editor of the book, Teaching for Black Lives, and the editor of the book More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High Stakes Testing. Jesse is a recipient of the 2013 “Secondary School Teacher of the Year” award and the Special Achievement “Courageous Leadership” award from the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences. In 2015, Jesse received the Seattle/King County NAACP Service Award. Jesse serves as the Director of the Black Education Matters Student Activist Award.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595253 • $16.95 • 5.5in x 7.5in • 200 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
New York Times Bestseller
A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer and educator Mariame Kaba.
“Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.”
What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle.
With chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba’s work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”
PRAISE:
“Mariame Kaba is a humble phenom in the most important of traditions – abolition. What we have in these pages is a wide ranging account of abolitionist theory in action – and that is no easy feat. Through Kaba’s rigorous commitment to humanity, we are reminded that another future is possible. We are fortunate that Kaba’s praxis is accounted for in this compelling and incisive text. For those of us who are eager to bring about a world where Black lives matter, this is required reading.”
Opal Tometi, Co-Founder #BlackLivesMatter and founder Diaspora Rising
“I want to say this is a ‘generation-defining’ book, but that feels wrong because I know it will be shaping political imaginations for a century or more. It’s generations-defining. This is a classic in the vein of Sister Outsider, a book that will spark countless radical imaginations.”
Eve L. Ewing, author, 1919
“One of the most fascinating developments during this age of Black Lives Matter is how ‘abolition’ has been integrated into mainstream debates on how to change the United States. Yet there is still so much not known or understood about the history, politics and practice of abolition-informed politics. Longtime organizer and educator, Mariame Kaba, is one of the most important voices in the emergent abolitionist movement. We have all been waiting on this book! Kaba and her collaborators write with urgency, while imbuing critical insights with clarifying analyses into what it means to demand an end to the reflexive impulse toward punishment that defines much of our society.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
“Much of the vast living archive that is Mariame Kaba’s amazing career as an abolitionist-feminist organizer, people’s intellectual, movement strategist, and Black freedom fighter, is not in written form. It is inscribed in her praxis: the many campaigns she has crafted, the young people she has mentored, and the organizations she has founded. But in this unique collection of essays, interviews and transcribed speeches, we get a glimpse of that brilliant and powerful body of work, and it is awe-inspiring and instructive: a must-read for anyone serious about the struggle for freedom and justice in the 21st century.”
Barbara Ransby, historian, author, activist
“This book writes a political genealogy of one of our movement era’s most significant intellectuals and community organizers and her people into the record of a feminist and abolitionist Black Radical Tradition. Kaba invites us all into a 500-year clock through reflection, assessment, and celebration of the people who dedicate their lives to social change. Yet again, she teaches us to praise the choir, appreciate vulnerability and be disciplined in service of transforming ourselves and the world in which we live.”
Charlene A. Carruthers, author, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
“Mariame Kaba isn’t trying to save the world. Instead, this collection of liberatory practice serves as a building block for a new kind of world, filled with the hum only evolved humanity can sound. Kaba returns questions unanswered; Kaba spirits the flame untethered; Kaba is the water well in the middle of a thirsty town. And in her unyielding abolition work, Mariame Kaba reveals our reflection’s purpose. She is generous in offering us a blueprint to save ourselves.”
Mahogany L. Browne, author, Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice
“So many of us have been introduced to abolition – or invited into a deeper understanding and practice of abolitionist politics – through Mariame Kaba’s words, work, and vision, as well as her brilliant sense of humor, skillful use of Twitter, love of poetry, practice of hope, and appreciation of art. For those of us new to abolition, this book is the primer we need. For those of us who have been on an abolitionist journey, it is full of the reminders we need. No matter where and how you enter the conversation, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us brings all of us infinitely closer to creating a world premised on genuine and lasting safety, justice, and peace.”
Andrea J. Ritchie, author, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color
“Anyone and everyone who has had the privilege of learning from Mariame Kaba has been transformed into a better thinker, organizer, artist, and human. What Kaba does is light the path to abolition and liberation with equal parts intelligence and compassion, experience and hope. This book brings together the scattered pieces of her wisdom she has shared publicly in different venues so that those who don’t have the pleasure of sitting and learning with her can absorb a small part of what makes Kaba one of the most impressive and important thinkers and organizers of our time. Let this work fortify those who are already engaged in the struggle and be an energetic spark for those just starting out on this path to freedom.”
Mychal Denzel Smith, author, Stakes is High: Life After the American Dream
“Mariame has the rarest of gifts: the ability to imagine a better future, the skills to help construct it, and the courage to demand it. For years, Mariame has been thinking through some of the toughest questions about society’s addiction to punishment, and We Do This ‘Til We Free Us showcases the extraordinary depths of her knowledge about our criminal legal system. This book could not arrive at a better time –as more people become familiar with abolition, Mariame’s words are especially critical. But it is not just a book about systems. It’s a book about people, the powerful and the struggling. And, ultimately it is a book about each of us— the values we possess and the choices we make. Mariame has the uncanny ability to illuminate the murky and complicated elements of who we are and give them voice. As an abolitionist, Mariame is not just calling for the destruction of old systems, but the creation of a new world. This book will change the way you think about your community, your relationships, and yourself.”
Josie Duffy Rice, writer
“Mariame Kaba is a people’s historian, an ultra-practical problem solver, and a visionary prophet whose work dreams and builds a world made by collaboration and healing where putting people in cages is unimaginable. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us is packed with Kaba’s brilliant insights and detailed examples of how the work of abolition is put into practice in grassroots campaigns. Kaba’s boundless creativity is rooted in her rigorous study of resistance and inspiration, and the wisdom of her words is woven through with poetry, literature, history and music, so that her offerings are both grounded in practical discernment and inclined toward our most robust imagination of what freedom could mean. This book will be both a practical tool and a source of comfort in hard times for change-makers and world-builders.”
Dean Spade, author, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
“This suite of essays and interviews blends the verve, insight, skill, and generosity of one of the most brilliant abolitionist thinkers, curators, and organizers of our time. Marked by lush imagination, care, and strategic acumen, We Do This ’Til We Free Us is a manual for all those who want to create new collectivities and new futures from the ashes of entire systems of carcerality, racism, sexism, and capitalism. Always teaching us how to ‘have each other,’ there is no wiser or more inspirational figure in the fight for justice than Mariame Kaba.”
Sarah Haley, author, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
“We Do This ‘Til We Free Us is an organizer’s gift: a vision of abolition that is also a practice of it and a roadmap. Essay by essay, Mariame Kaba guides us through the abolitionist futures she has created in real time by turning questions into experiments, learning from failures as much as successes, and doing everything with other people. Let her words radicalize you, let them unlock your imagination, let them teach you how to practice hope, and let them show you why the everyday is the terrain of our greatest abolitionist creations. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us is not a book to be read; it is a portal to a collective project of liberation that literally requires every last one of us.”
Laura McTighe, Front Porch Research Strategies and Assistant Professor, Florida State University
“In her new book, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us Mariame Kaba demonstrates the ways that discipline—in intellect, in practice, in relationship—leads not to despair, but to hope. The far-ranging series of essays and interviews draws on her deep practice as a seasoned organizer who persistently distills the questions surrounding abolition to basic human decisions about the world we want to inhabit and how we will go about building it. Abolition, as Mariame sees and practices, is fundamentally both generous and pragmatic and her writing will move both seasoned abolitionists and those just now asking these questions for the first time to join in her conclusion that ‘your cynicism is unrealistic.”
Danielle Sered, author, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair
“Mariame’s wisdom trues my restorative justice compass. The restorative justice movement has much to learn from Mariame’s steadfast commitment to protecting our approaches to harm and healing from state cooptation and control. Her unwavering belief in ‘we got us’ offers powerful inspiration to imagine, ground, and elevate our practice. What a gift!”
Sujatha Baliga, Restorative Justice Practitioner
“The intertwined analysis and collective organizing archived in this invaluable collection provides crucial entry points in the everyday work of abolition. Engaging the most pressing questions of our time with clarity and commitment, as always, Mariame makes abolition irresistible, and as imperatively, doable.”
Erica R. Meiners, author, For the Children: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State
“For the last 25 years, prison abolitionists have been treated like the Don Quixote’s of social justice movements, chasing an impossibly unrealistic vision. In We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, Kaba demonstrates through her work as an organizer and scholar, that putting an end to the carceral state is not only necessary but possible. This collection offers a remarkable history of abolitionist organizing, and a roadmap for the work we must do to make a new world and transform ourselves in the process.”
Kenyon Farrow, Co-Executive Director, Partners for Dignity & Rights
“We Do This ’Til We Free Us is a beacon, a watch fire, a guidepost for all of us who are seeking transformational and life-giving change in a death-dealing society, Mariame Kaba is a force of nature, unafraid to step into great storms of violence. As this long-awaited collection of abolitionist essays, interviews, and conversations demonstrates, Kaba knows that relationships are at the center of everything; that new possibilities and insights arise from the organized efforts of ordinary people; that only collective endeavor can move us forward. This isn’t simply a book. It’s a portal.”
Kay Whitlock, co-author Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States
“Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us exudes her brilliance as an organizer, educator, and visionary. A primer in abolition as an organizing vision, strategy and practice, this collection of essays is rooted in a structural analysis of policing, incarceration, and surveillance while uplifting collective strategies, actions, and practices that lend themselves toward ending these systems. The collection shares some of the amazing abolitionist projects she’s initiated, organized, and nurtured, and is a testament to the power of collectivity and community. This is a book for those who have never thought about abolition and for those who have thought about it for years. Through the lens Mariame Kaba offers, the possibilities for abolition become quite tangible, possible, even inevitable.”
Ann Russo, author, Feminist Accountability: Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power
“If ever there was a time we needed Mariame Kaba’s words and insights all in one place, it is now! Principled, pragmatic and, most of all, visionary, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us not only casts an unflinching light on our violent carceral system, but illuminates real pathways towards justice and freedom. This book should be read, studied, and acted upon by everyone committed to seeding new worlds amidst the ruins of the old.”
Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University
“We Do This Til We Free Us” is a series of essays that operate as gifts, reflections, and political interventions from the humbly prolific organizer Mariame Kaba. Whether contending with abolitionist organizing, the application of transformative justice, or relationships as survival, she creates necessary guideposts for all of us. This is a deliciously nuanced read, one that you will pick up multiple times, and receive something new each time. And, this is a book designed to accompany your political endeavors, inspiring you to deepen your activism and organizing, and insisting that you, alongside Mariame, have a place in the creation of a more liberatory society.”
Ejeris Dixon, organizer, strategist, facilitator, and co-editor of Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies of the Transformative Justice Movement
“Brimming with organizing insights and burning questions, this collection is a must-read for those engaged in, or looking to learn more about the movement to abolish the prison-industrial complex. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us so clearly and beautifully shows us that the road to abolition is paved in collective struggle, solidarity, accountability, love, and ‘a million different little experiments.”
Emily Thuma, author, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence
“This long-awaited collection of the works of Mariame Kaba is what the movement for abolition needs right now. Kaba blends radical critique, historical analysis, ground theory and practical application to help guide organizers building an abolitionist future. There are very few scholars and/or organizers who are able to seamlessly bring abolitionist and transformative justice theory with practical organizing strategies as Kaba so successfully does. Kaba’s essays also demonstrate the transformation our movements need to make so that they are guided by principles of love and care that can sustain our communities into a different world. She teaches how to build the discipline necessary so that we can be guided by hope rather than despair. Kaba’s work is a true gift to the movement.”
Andrea Smith, Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Riverside
“Mariame Kaba is a political genius and truth-teller for our times, as an abolitionist, political organizer, educator, and writer, she is audacious in her dreams for our Black future freedoms. This book says what needs to be said in this political moment as we reckon with abolition in response to police brutality, white supremacy, and a pandemic that is disproportionately killing People of Color globally. Each chapter is a beautiful and archival testimonial to the lineage of Black organizing, especially Black feminists, that have led us to this political and cultural moment of mass uprisings creating resilient, abolitionist, and transformative strategies in the face of police brutality, massive incarceration, and the genocidal state response to COVID19. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us is a remedy for our collective survival, and a manifesto for responding to harms and violence for our future.”
Cara Page, founder of Changing Frequencies
“Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us is a treasure trove of essays and interviews which shares her knowledge, insights, and wisdom developed over decades of organizing against the prison industrial complex and supporting survivors of violence. In this book, Kaba recounts scores of campaigns, projects, collaborations, and activists that brought us to historic moments in 2020 and beyond, and provides concrete steps people can take on the path to abolition. A brilliant organizer, educator, political theorist, and preeminent abolitionist of the 21st century, Kaba succinctly breaks down the anti-Black foundations of the U.S. criminal legal system and makes the case for abolition and transformative justice. This book is a must read for anyone striving for more peace and justice in this world.”
Joey Mogul, co-author, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States
“This collection of writings embodies Mariame’s gifts to the abolitionist movement, not only in content but in format. As readers, we are invited into the conversations Kaba has been having for decades as she lifts up countless stories that belong to the larger movement of which she is an essential leader. We are offered Mariame’s personal and also collaborative writing that highlights a central message running throughout the book; we will not achieve liberation alone. While there are no blueprints for abolition, this text is a guiding light that offers crucial answers and an expansive invitation for all to join in the work.”
Rev. Jason Lydon, Second Unitarian Church of Chicago
“We Do This ‘Til We Free Us outlines an approach to transformative politics that we have been hungry for: brilliant strategies that are at once practical and prophetic. For decades, Mariame Kaba’s pathbreaking leadership has steered us towards a horizon of radical freedom that, as she has repeatedly demonstrated, is within our reach. This remarkable collection is a powerful map for anyone who longs for a future built on safety, community, and joy, and an intellectual home for those who are creating new pathways to get us there.”
Alisa Bierria, co-founder and co-organizer, Survived and Punished
“Mariame Kaba’s living example continuously teaches me that accountability and abolition are daily internal and external practices. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us is both timely and timeless. This compelling collection is an offering of Kaba’s thoughtful experiential perspectives and insights about the strenuous, compassionate, and rewarding work to not harm in response to witnessing and/or experiencing harm. Kaba’s words are a sacred roadmap for an embodied praxis that invites all of us to imagine, envision, and work collectively to co-create a society without violence.”
Aishah Shahidah Simmons, creator, NO! The Rape Documentary and author, Love WITH Accountability
“We Do This ‘Til We Free Us has so much wisdom to offer, particularly at this unprecedented moment. Kaba not only challenges the corrosive notions that only policing and prisons keep us safe, but invites us to see abolition not as a far-away goal, but an everyday adventure that we can embark upon in our daily lives. Mariame Kaba is a galactic treasure. Her passion, dedication and commitment to abolition, safety and accountability are unparalleled. Read this book.”
Victoria Law, author, Prison by Any Other Name
“Mariame Kaba is one of the foremost grassroots intellectuals of our time. She is a strategic, brilliant and practical genius whose intellectual and on-the-ground-work is foundational to the past twenty years of transformative justice and abolitionist theory and practice. She’s someone whose work I urge anyone to read who is curious about exactly why and how we are going to dismantle prisons and build the different future we need. I am so happy to have this book in the world, collecting so many of my favorite pieces, to give to new and old comrades alike.”
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
“The miracle is Mariame’s collaborative, accountable, future-facing, legacy-bearing presence in our movements and her intentional practice of evaluating how she can contribute to our collective future. This book, which documents some of Kaba’s most important interventions, crucial conversations and paradigm shifting ideas makes this ongoing miracle shareable, teachable, and available for study in community. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us is a necessary offering towards the possibility of our intentional participation in the actions that will create a more loving and live-able world. Read this book, hold this archive, share this journey, to nurture your own presence, practice and collaborations towards the freedom we already deserve.”
“Beautiful and timely, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us is more than a book. It is a gathering: a conversation, a coming together, a call to be not only our best selves, but together in struggle. It is a how-to gift for all who believe in freedom from violence. In a wide ranging series of essays, interviews, and speeches, inveterate organizer Mariame Kaba shares strategic wisdom from the abolitionist frontlines. Read it, pass it on, and get to work!”
Dan Berger, author, Rethinking the American Prison Movement
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba is the recipient of the 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship, for her work as a leading voice in the Mutual Aid movement. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. Mariame has co-founded multiple other organizations and projects over the years including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Love & Protect, the Just Practice Collaborative and Survived & Punished. Mariame serves on the advisory boards of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Critical Resistance and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Nation Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry and more. She co-authored the guidebook Lifting As They Climbed and published a children’s book titled Missing Daddy about the impacts of incarceration on children and families.
From New York Times Bestselling Author Mariame Kaba, a poignant, beautifully illustrated story of a little girl’s worries when her Mama goes to jail, and the love that bridges the distance between them. Even though I’m away, My love is always here to stay. See you soon, Queenie. Love, Mama
Queenie loves living with Mama and Grandma Louise. Together, they go to the grocery store, eat ice cream, and play games in the park. Mama braids Queenie’s hair and helps her with her homework.
Sometimes, when Mama is sick, she has to go away. One day, Queenie and Grandma ride the bus with Mama to the county jail.
Queenie is worried about what will happen when Mama goes to jail. She’s afraid to ask questions, and overcome with feelings of worry and sadness. Does Mama have a warm bed to sleep in? When will Queenie see her again?
Soon after she and Grandma return home, Queenie opens a letter from Mama, and savors every word. She knows her Mama loves her, and looks forward to their upcoming visit.
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba is the recipient of the 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship, for her work as a leading voice in the Mutual Aid movement. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. Mariame has co-founded multiple other organizations and projects over the years including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Love & Protect, the Just Practice Collaborative and Survived & Punished. Mariame serves on the advisory boards of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Critical Resistance and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Nation Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry and more. She co-authored the guidebook Lifting As They Climbed and published a children’s book titled Missing Daddy about the impacts of incarceration on children and families.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900574 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 220 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“White supremacists are attempting to control our people’s future by erasing our past. But we won’t let them. The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike against our very worth, brilliance, and value. We’re ready to fight back. And when we fight, we win.” —Colin Kaepernick
Since its founding as a discipline in 1969, Black Studies has been under constant attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it.
Florida is the frontline of an increasingly pitched battle taking place in schools and communities across the country. State legislatures are introducing laws to remove work by Black scholars like Angela Davis, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, James Baldwin, and many others from classrooms, libraries, and curricula.
Books are tools—sources of knowledge and inspiration, especially in the hands of young people and organizers—to challenge the world and imagine something better. This barrage of attacks by the state represents something more chilling and insidious than a dismissive “culture war” headline: it’s an attempt to hide our radical history from future generations. And Black Studies as a field of knowledge and inquiry is by necessity radical. It came into being in undaunted opposition to the racial status quo. That’s what makes it dangerous. It refuses to accept the world as it is—a world of premature Black death and vulnerability, a world of lethal doses of racial inequity, a world where Black people are rendered less than human. To the contrary, Black Studies has always been integral to the struggle for human liberation.
The assault on Black Studies is an assault on movements fighting for a better future. It signals a disturbing truth about the US political landscape: the so-called “war on woke” is far from over. It’s just beginning, and it needs to be confronted head-on.
Co-published by Haymarket Books and Kaepernick Publishing, Our History Has Always Been Contraband collects critical voices from the Black radical tradition. Edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Colin Kaepernick, Our History Has Always Been Contraband gives students and non-students alike access to a history and tradition that is being suppressed.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Colin Kaepernick is a Super Bowl quarterback and New York Times bestselling author who fights oppression globally. He founded the Know Your Rights Camp, which advances the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown people through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization, and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is author Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She is a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others. She is a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times. In 2016, she was named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. In 2018 Essence Magazine named her among the top one hundred “change makers” in the county. She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians. Taylor is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608462520 • 5 5/8 x 8 1/2 • US $15.95 • 303 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The pieces in this volume voice the rage and helplessness sweeping through the Kashmir Valley, while offering rare insights into the lives of those caught in the crossfire. With contributions from journalists, academics, and artists, this book is a timely collection of some of the most exciting writing that has recently emerged from within Kashmir, and about it.
PRAISE:
“Here is a book that rips through the falsehoods and false noise that has deepened the silence about Kashmir.”
Arundhati Roy
“A brave and resourceful new generation of Kashmiris is finally shattering the Valley’s long solitude.”
Pankaj Mishra
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Sanjay Kak is an independent documentary filmmaker. His film “In the Forest Hangs a Bridge” received the “Golden Lotus” for Best Documentary Film at the 1999 National Film Awards in India.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465248 • US $16 • 4 1/4 in x 8 3/8 in • 80 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Remi Kanazi’s poetry presents an unflinching look at the lives of Palestinians under occupation and as refugees scattered across the globe. He captures the Palestinian people’s stubborn refusal to be erased, gives voice to the ongoing struggle for liberation, and explores the meaning of international solidarity.
In this latest collection, Kanazi expands his focus outside the sphere of Palestine and presents pieces examining racism in America, police brutality, US militarism at home and wars abroad, conflict voyeurism, Islamophobia, and a range of other issues.
PRAISE:
“Remi Kanazi is one of the most courageous voices of this generation.”
Marc Lamont Hill, CNN commentator and host of HuffPost Live and BET News
“This book of poetry was devastating to pick up and impossible to put down.”
Dave Zirin, The Nation
“His rhymes and rhythms, filled with sharp wit, irony and deep empathy…tackle some of the most urgent political struggles of our day.”
Ali Abunimah,co-founder of Electronic Intifada and author of the Battle for Justice in Palestine
“Each verse made me sink deeper into my chair and helped unleash a cascade of relieving tears: in anger, in mourning, and in hope.”
Noura Erakat, George Mason University and Human Rights Attorney
“A poetic…personal journey into the past and present of Palestine that will resonate with anyone concerned with the land and its people.”
Ilan Pappé, bestselling author of the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
“Kanazi’s haunting poems are not written to be consumed. They reserve a place in one’s conscience, in one’s memory, and — hopefully — in one’s praxis.”
Omar Barghouti,Palestinian human rights activist and co-founder of the BDS movement
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Remi Kanazi is a poet, writer, and organizer based in New York City. He is the author of Poetic Injustice: Writings on Resistance and Palestine and the editor of Poets For Palestine. His political commentary has been featured by news outlets throughout the world, including Salon, Al Jazeera English, and BBC Radio. Kanazi has toured hundreds of venues across the United States, Canada, Europe and the Middle East, and he has appeared in the Palestine Festival of Literature as well as Poetry International. He is a Lannan Residency Fellow and an Advisory Committee member for the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
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A refreshing, unapologetic intervention into ongoing conversations about the line between sexual freedom and sexual exploitation.
Women’s sexuality is used as a weapon against them. In this stunning debut, Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, sexuality, reclamation, and power, in a world that refuses Black Queer women permission to define their own lives and boundaries.
PRAISE:
“A deft exploration of sexuality and pleasure with a refreshing and much-needed candidness.”
Teen Vogue
“As mesmerizing as a spell or a psalm, Kapri’s stanzas are undeniably and refreshingly bold. Black Queer Hoe is the feminist gospel that so many have been waiting for.”
Signature Reads
“This brazen debut is good medicine and a needed shout in the world. Black Queer Hoe makes it clear Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a poet we must pay attention to, taking up the reigns of many spoken word and literary ancestors and charging forward into poetics unafraid to be ratchet and bare.”
Danez Smith, from the foreword
“Britteney Black Rose Kapri’s voice and perspective are super unique. Her poetry is like the confessionalism of SZA meets the badassness of Cardi B.”
Jamila Woods, editor of The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a Chicago performance poet and playwright. Currently she is an alumna turned Teaching Artist Fellow at Young Chicago Authors. She is also contributer for Black Nerd Problems and Pink Door Retreat Fellow. She is a 2015 Rona Jaffe Writers Award Recipient.
Danez Smith is a Black, queer, poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead, a finalist for the National Book Award, and [insert] boy, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award & the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry.
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A humorous put passionate look at the criminal silliness of the U.S. political system.
The 2012 election is a bummer. A loud, angry, expensive bummer.
In four years Americans have gone from hoping Obama could fix the country’s enormous problems to praying he can just hold off the Romney Ryan creep show. What happened?
The problem, according to Danny Katch, is that the real decision making authority resides in institutions from Wall Street to the Pentagon that are literally mad with power. In this raucous irreverent book, Katch diagnoses the various mental disorders peculiar to those who have way too much money and power – and the politicians who work for them. He shows how the very elections that are supposed to be our way of bringing about change have become a tool to get us to accept the insane status quo.
Combining a Marxist’s critical perspective with a stand up’s comic timing, Katch ridicules the fundamental assumptions of our political system from the perspective of one who is stuck like everybody else inside that system with no short term alternative.
For anybody with a basic sense that something is very wrong with the system, regardless of how they plan to vote in November, America’s Got Democracy! can help them maintain perspective, sanity, and humor during the silliest and scariest final months of the campaign.
PRAISE:
“Danny Katch has better comic bomb sights than Jon Stewart: his outrageous, passionate sarcasm always falls exactly on target. The Democratic Party, as we used to say in the day, is the killing joke.”
Mike Davis, author, In Praise of Barbarians
“The funniest, smartest, and most dangerous political writer you never heard of is Danny Katch. You’ll laugh. You’ll get pissed off. You’ll disagree. And you’ll wonder how you read this terrific book in one sitting. A welcome antidote to what passes for political writing in an election year.”
Dave Zirin, sports editor, The Nation magazine, author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States
“From Cocoa Puffs to melting ice caps, Danny Katch’s America’s Got Democracy gets to the heart of how and why our political establishment creates economic, social, and environmental crapification, and he does it with a flair even the most disaffected café barista with a PhD will love. But if you enjoy reading dry, abstract political works in which the words go clopping across the page on little wooden feet, don’t read Katch’s book. I chuckled so much while reading it on the F train that not only did everyone around me ask what it was, but I was so engrossed I missed my stop.”
Sherry Wolf, author, Sexuality and Socialism
“Guess what? It’s even more boringer reading it than talking about it.”
Lila Katch, seven years old
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Danny Katch is an activist and humorist often accused of not knowing the difference. He has contributed chapters to Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America and 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History and is the author of Socialism . . . Seriously! and Why Bad Governments Happen to Good People. When he is not coming up with absurdly long book titles, he writes regularly for Socialist Worker.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598322 • US $16.95 • 250 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A sharp, funny, and engaging introduction to socialist ideas, movements, and solutions for a world in crisis.
Now with 50% more socialism! Socialism…Seriously is a warm and witty introduction to the radical traditions of protest and politics that stretch from Karl Marx through today’s movements for democracy, equality, and a livable planet. In this thoroughly revised and expanded edition, Danny Katch uses humor and imagination to take an unflinching look at the rising threats posed by climate change, billionaire oligarchs, and the far right—and makes a compelling case that a socialist world is both necessary and possible.
Katch separates the lies spun by capitalism’s defenders from the system’s brutal realities, and is candid about debates and challenges facing the socialist movement today. This book is for people who want to take a deeper look at what socialism is… but maybe not that deep.
Sincere, irreverent, informative, and playful, Socialism… Seriously is a unique and timely contribution to our movements for justice.
PRAISE:
“Socialism… Seriously is a refreshing embrace of socialism as an alternative to the greed, inequality, racism and xenophobia of the capitalist world we are living in.” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
“Give this book to your grandma, your mailman, to everyone except your boss—it’s the most fun and accessible introduction to socialist ideas I’ve ever read.” Anand Gopal, author of No Good Men Among the Living
“Read Socialism… Seriously, then pass it on to a friend. It’s the perfect gateway drug to becoming the full-throttled socialist organizer that you’ve been waiting for.” Hadas Thier, author of A People’s Guide to Capitalism “Capitalism was a system built to be skewered. But to do it right, you need the political chops and you need to know how to make the jokes. Danny Katch checks every box and his Socialism….Seriously is a necessary book.” Dave Zirin, author of The Kaepernick Effect
“Danny Katch has done the impossible: he makes socialism sexy. Socialism… Seriously is eye-opening, inspiring, and funny. Warning to all Democrats, Republicans, and libertarians: this book might turn you into a closet socialist.”
Judah Friedlander, World Champion
“The most hilarious book about socialism since Karl Marx and his brother Harpo wrote their joke book.”
Hari Kondabolu
“If socialism is such a great idea, why don’t we have it yet? This book explains why with plain language, humor and common sense. If enough people read it, it might spark the revolution.”
Howie Hawkins, 2014 Green Party candidate for governor of New York
“If the Communist Manifesto and America’s Funniest Home Videos had a baby, it would be Danny Katch’s new book. It’s a hilarious and fun way to think about what’s wrong with our world, how it could be different, and how we might get there. Keep an extra copy of Socialism…Seriously in your bag and hand it to the next person who asks you what socialism is all about—as long as that person is not your boss… seriously.”
Brian Jones, educator and socialist activist
“I’ve been waiting for someone to write this book—a light-hearted easy read that packs an intro course on socialism into a short volume. With jokes that made me laugh out loud, and a lot of heart. Socialism is for lovers, indeed.”
Sarah Jaffe, independent journalist and host, Dissent magazine’s “Belabored” podcast
“Danny Katch brings the socialist vision to life — Socialism … Seriously is incredibly readable.”
Bhaksar Sunkara, Jacobin
“Just read Socialism…Seriously by Danny Katch. Dazzling introduction to revolutionary road. Terrific read.”
Bill Ayers
PRAISE FOR AMERICA’S GOT DEMOCRACY:
“Danny Katch has better comic bomb sights than Jon Stewart: his outrageous, passionate sarcasm always falls exactly on target.”
Mike Davis, author, In Praise of Barbarians
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Danny Katch is an activist and humorist often accused of not knowing the difference. He has contributed chapters to Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America and 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History and is the author of America’s Got Democracy! The Making of the World’s Longest Running Reality Show and Why Bad Governments Happen to Good People. When he is not coming up with absurdly long book titles, he writes regularly for Socialist Worker.
“Imagine coming out of a long coma and finding out that a worm is now in charge of your country. Not a metaphorical worm but an actual giant night crawler—one that can stand upright, wear a suit, and tweet, but otherwise a typical worm that has no eyes to see beauty or suffering and no ears to listen to the wisdom of other points of view. Instead this thing that is now president is equipped only with the primal fear of the unknown shared by all living things, plus a set of chemoreceptors all over his slimy skin that pick up even the faintest scents of money and celebrity that he’s been crawling toward throughout his dim and miserable life.
“If you woke up in this strange world, your first question wouldn’t be about the damn worm, but about what the hell had happened to everything else to get to this point. This book aims to give some answers.”
—From Chapter 1
PRAISE:
“This is a moment when politics and laughter are both necessities for survival. Without them we would be lost. Now we have a book that gives us both. When political ideas and humor come together, as they do here under the pen of Danny Katch, it is nothing less than a compass out of the wilderness.”
Dave Zirin, Sports Editor, The Nation Magazine
If your world seems to be spinning off into the surreal, if you arise every morning sleepily expecting to be freed from an ongoing, unthinkable nightmare only to discover that things are even worse today than yesterday, and if your waking hours are punctuated with sudden shudders of political vertigo, Danny Katch is the antidote. Katch is a rib-tickling radical—two words that rarely go well together— the clown prince of socialism, who provides sparkling new insights as well as therapeutic laughs on every page. In the tradition of Abbie Hoffman and George Carlin, Sarah Silverman and Dave Chappelle, Katch’s generous, embracing humor is deployed to uncover the deepest truths of our predicament. Why Bad Governments Happen to Good People is a necessary handbook for the struggles to come—don’t miss it.
Bill Ayers, author of Demand the Impossible!: A Radical Manifesto
It’s horrible, tragic, ridiculous, and full of suspense. But enough about the White House. This book will make you laugh out loud, learn something about our world, and get inspired to change it.
Brian Jones, Green Party candidate for Lt. Governor of New York, 2014
“Danny Katch brings his signature combination of pointed humor, righteous anger and political insight to bear on the election of Trump and, more importantly, its root causes. If you or your friends and family have been shocked and horrified since Election Day, Katch will calm you down, cheer you up, and get you ready to fight.”
Sarah Jaffe, author, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt
Danny Katch’s Why Bad Governments Happen to Good People is a critical argument that the election of Trump is indicative of a crisis of democracy in the United States. The perpetual choice between the corrupt Republican Party or the inept Democratic Party has left millions of people without a real alternative in the contests that are supposed to determine our political representation. With wit and clarity, Katch argues for social movements, political activism, and socialism as the alternatives we need to win the world we want. Get this book!
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
Danny Katch is an activist and humorist often accused of not knowing the difference. He has contributed chapters to Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America and 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History and is the author of Socialism . . . Seriously! and America’s Got Democracy! The Making of the World’s Longest Running Reality Show. When he is not coming up with absurdly long book titles, he writes regularly for Socialist Worker.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781629639406 • US $17.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 384 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Jack Proctor, a celebrated older writer and curmudgeon, goes off to residency where he is to be an honored part of teaching and giving public readings but soon finds that the atmosphere of the literary world has changed since his last foray into the public sphere. Unknown to most, unable to work on his own writing, surrounded by a host of odd characters, would-be writers, antagonists, handlers, and members of the elite House of Art and Aesthetics, Proctor finds himself driven to distraction (literally in a very tiny car). This is a story of a man attempting not to go mad when forced to stop his own writing in order to coach others to write. Proctor’s tour of rural places, pubs, theaters, fancy parties, where he is to be headlining as a “Banker Prize winner” reads like a literary version of This Is Spinal Tap. Uproariously funny, brilliantly philosophical, gorgeously written, this is James Kelman at his best.
PRAISE:
“God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena is electric. Forget all the rubbish you’ve been told about how to write, the requirements of the marketplace and the much vaunted ‘readability’ that is supposed to be sacrosanct. This is a book about how art gets made, its murky, obsessive, unedifying demands and the endless, sometimes hilarious, humiliations literary life inflicts on even its most successful names.”
Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians
“James Kelman is an extraordinary writer—smart and incisive, witty and warm, with prose so alive it practically sparks off the page. God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena is one of the wisest, funniest and most brutally honest books I’ve read in ages. I loved it.”
Molly Antopol, author of The Unamericans
“Probably the most influential novelist of the post-war period.”
The Times
“Kelman has the knack, maybe more than anyone since Joyce, of fixing in his writing the lyricism of ordinary people’s speech … Pure aesthete, undaunted democrat—somehow Kelman manages to reconcile his two halves.”
Esquire
“The greatest British novelist of our time.”
Sunday Herald
“A true original … A real artist … it’s now very difficult to see which of his peers can seriously be ranked alongside [Kelman] without ironic eyebrows being raised.”
Irvine Welsh, Guardian
“A writer of world stature, a 21st century Modern.”
The Scotsman
“The real reason Kelman, despite his stature and reputation, remains something of a literary outsider is not, I suspect, so much that great, radical Modernist writers aren’t supposed to come from working-class Glasgow, as that great, radical Modernist writers are supposed to be dead. Dead, and wrapped up in a Penguin Classic: that’s when it’s safe to regret that their work was underappreciated or misunderstood (or how little they were paid) in their lifetimes. You can write what you like about Beckett or Kafka and know they’re not going to come round and tell you you’re talking nonsense, or confound your expectations with a new work. Kelman is still alive, still writing great books, climbing.”
James Meek, London Review of Books
“The greatest living British novelist.”
Amit Chaudhuri, author of A New World, Frieze Magazine
“What an enviably, devilishly wonderful writer is James Kelman.”
John Hawkes, author of The Blood Oranges
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
James Kelman was born in Glasgow, June 1946, and left school in 1961. He traveled and worked various jobs, and while living in London began to write. In 1994 he won the Booker Prize for How Late It Was, How Late. His novel A Disaffection was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1989. In 1998 Kelman was awarded the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award. His 2008 novel Kieron Smith, Boy won the Saltire Society’s Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year. He lives in Glasgow with his wife Marie, who has supported his work since 1969.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781608469253• $22 • 7 in x 5 in • 260 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An inspiring speaker and brilliantly sophisticated theorist, Michael Kidron was a leading figure in the International Socialist tradition from the 1950s until his death in 2003. Never satisfied with merely restating the assumed tenets of Marxism, Kidron insisted that theory must evolve alongside a changing world. This undoctrinaire commitment to theoretical openness was also evident in Kidron’s period as an editor with Pluto Press in the 1970s and 1980s, when the publisher became a crucial forum for developing socialist ideas and bringing them to a wider audience.
This collection includes a number of Kidron’s most important essays: “Reform and Revolution” offers a critique of postwar social democracy, written several decades before its collapse into neoliberalism; “The Permanent Arms Economy” succinctly lays out what is perhaps Kidron’s best-known theoretical contribution; “Black Reformism” both provides an analysis of the imperialism of Kidron’s day, and attacks the then-common assumption that Third World revolutions opened a road to world socialism. In recognition of Kidron’s commitment to constantly re-examining theory, this volume also includes his 1977 essay ‘Two Insights Don’t Make a Theory’, in which he criticises and updates his own earlier work in light of historical developments.
Edited and introduced by Richard Kuper, who worked alongside Kidron at Pluto, this volume is the best introduction to one of the most original Marxist thinkers of recent times.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Michael Kidron (1930-2003) was a founding member of the International Socialism group, which later became the Socialist Workers Party. His sophistication and originality as a thinker were evident both in his own writings—including Western Capitalism Since the War, Capitalism and Theory, and the acclaimed The State of the World Atlas— and in his editorship of Socialist Review, International Socialism, and at Pluto Press.
Richard Kuper worked alongside Kidron for many years as an editor at Pluto Press.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900918 • US $19.99 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 304 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A critical anthology exploring the debates, conundrums, and promising practices around abolition and social work in academia and within impacted communities.
Within social work—a profession that has been intimately tied to and often complicit in the building and sustaining of the carceral state—abolitionist thinking, movement-building, and radical praxis are shifting the field. Critical scholarship and organizing have helped to name and examine the realities of carceral social work as a form of “soft policing.” For radical social work, abolition moves beyond critique to the politics of possibility.
Featuring a foreword by Mariame Kaba, Abolition and Social Work offers an orientation to abolitionist theory for social workers and explores the tensions and paradoxes in realizing abolitionist practice in social work—a necessary intervention in contemporary discourse regarding carceral social work, and a compass for recentering this work through the lens of abolition, transformative justice, and collective care.
Contributors include Autumn Asher BlackDeer, Ramona Beltran, Danica Brown, Charlene A. Caruthers, Angela Y. Davis, Alan Dettlaff, Tanisha “Wakumi” Douglas, Annie Zean Dunbar, Angela Fernandez, Kassandra Frederique, María Gandarilla Ocampo, Claudette L. Grinnell-Davis, Sam Harrell, Justin S. Harty, Shira Hassan, Leah A. Jacobs, Nev Jones, Joyce McMillan, Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work, Dorothy Roberts, Sophia Sarantakos, Katie Schultz, and Stéphanie Wahab.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608468997 • US $18 • 8.5 in x 5.5 in • 386 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Long Term Offenders, or LTOs, is the state’s term for those it condemns to effective death by imprisonment. Often serving sentences of sixty to eighty years, LTOs bear the brunt of the bipartisan embrace of mass incarceration heralded by the “tough on crime” agenda of the 1990s and 2000s. Like the rest of the United States’ prison population—the world’s highest per capita—they are disproportionately poor and non-white. The Long Term brings these often silenced voices to light, offering a powerful indictment of the prison-industrial complex from activists, scholars, and those directly surviving and resisting these sentences. In showing the devastation caused by a draconian prison system, the essays also highlight the humanity and courage of the people most affected. This striking collection of essays gives voice to people both inside and outside prison struggling for liberation, dismantles claims that the “tough on crime” agenda and LTO sentencing keep us safe, and reveals the white supremacism and patriarchy upon which the prison system rests. In its place, the contributors propose a range of far-reaching reforms and raise the even more radical demand of abolition, drawing on the experience of campaigns in the United States and beyond.
PRAISE:
“This book is sunshine. A work of co-creation committed to destroying all forms of confinement, this powerful collection of critical essays, personal reflections, conversations, poetry, theater, art, war stories, love stories, and manifestos expose long-term caging for what it is: a drawn out execution. It also advances an abolitionist vision dedicated to interrogating and dismantling the institutions, practices, and ideologies that harm us, and imagining (and enacting) new ways of living, learning, and loving–new feminist freedoms. Inspiring, sobering, illuminating, terrifying, The Long Term, in other words, refers not just to the sentence but also to the struggle. As you read each page, remember that sunshine is life and power.”
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“The Long Term is a powerful collection of voices, curated and edited by a powerful line-up of veteran organizers and radical thinkers. The writers in this collection make a compelling and eloquent case against ‘the prison nation’ and give us a glimpse of the resistance and the alternatives that are already in the works.”
Barbara Ransby, historian, writer, activist and Distinguished Professor of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago
“The Long Term is a book for your favorite armchair: powerful reflections from the formerly incarcerated, the currently incarcerated, and those who work for their release from behind bars. From the front lines, it will inflame and inspire you to be part of this powerful wave of prison abolition and liberation.”
Bernardine Dohrn, co-author, Race Course Against White Supremacy
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Alice Kim, Erica Meiners, Jill Petty, Audrey Petty, Beth Richie, and Sarah Ross are members of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project, which has been working with inmates in Chicago’s maximum security Stateville prison since 2011. Committed to radical, intersectional feminism, the project seeks stronger and safer communities without further enhancing policing, prisons, and borders.
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859127 • US $20 • 8.9 in x 6.3 in • 496 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The American Socialist Party, at the height of its influence, had more than a hundred and fifty thousand members, published hundreds of newspapers, won almost a million votes for its presidential candidate, elected more than one thousand of its members to political office, secured passage of a considerable body of legislation, won the support of one-third of the American Federation of Labor, and was instrumental in organizing the Industrial Workers of the World. It counted in its ranks some of the most talented organizers, able thinkers, and colorful personalities of their generation, conducted an immense propaganda effort, and, for a time, multiplied its support and influence at an astounding pace.
The rise and decline of the Socialist Party constitutes a most important and instructive chapter in American history. Few books have more to offer to the student of the movement than this one.
PRAISE:
“This is the epic story of the struggle to build a mass socialist movement in ragtime America. Kipnis was a brilliant historian and this is his enduring gift to activists.”
Mike Davis, author, Dead Cities and Planet of Slums
“The American Socialist Movement 1897-1912 scrutinizes the rise and decline of the American Socialist Party, which at its height had more than a hundred and fifty thousand members and almost a million votes for its presidential candidate. A classic history first written in the mid-twentieth century, The American Socialist Movement discusses socialist ideology in the early 1900’s, party propaganda, the influences of Christianity and immigration, attacks on constructive socialism, the repercussions of factionalism, the recall of Bill Haywood and much more. An extensively researched and documented account ideal for scholarly study and reference, and a welcome addition to college library and reference shelves.”
Midwest Book Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ira Kipnis taught political science, American history and constitutional law at the University of Chicago. In 1953, he invoked the Fifth Amendment during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings on communist activity rather than testify about the political views of colleagues. He subsequently resigned from the University faculty and entered law school. Kipnis died in 2002.
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“This is one attempt to uncover how we got to this surreal political moment. It is also an attempt to predict how, under cover of shocks and crises, it could get a lot worse. And it’s a plan for how, if we keep our heads, we might just be able to ip the script and arrive at a radically better future.”
– Naomi Klein, from the introduction
Donald Trump’s takeover of the White House is a dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises. His reckless agenda—including a corporate coup in government, aggressive scapegoating and warmongering, and sweeping aside climate science to set off a fossil fuel frenzy—will generate waves of disasters and shocks to the economy, national security, and the environment.
Acclaimed journalist, activist, and bestselling author Naomi Klein has spent two decades studying political shocks, climate change, and “brand bullies.” From this unique perspective, she argues that Trump is not an aberration but a logical extension of the worst, most dangerous trends of the past half-century—the very conditions that have unleashed a rising tide of white nationalism the world over. It is not enough, she tells us, to merely resist, to say “no.” Our historical moment demands more: a credible and inspiring “yes,” a roadmap to reclaiming the populist ground from those who would divide us—one that sets a bold course for winning the fair and caring world we want and need.
This timely, urgent book from one of our most influential thinkers offers a bracing positive shock of its own, helping us understand just how we got here, and how we can, collectively, come together and heal.
PRAISE:
“This year’s most immediately useful political book.”
Publishers Weekly, “Best Books of 2017”
“In No Is Not Enough, Naomi Kleinanatomizes the roots of Trump in the already dystopian world of corporate-ruled America and predicts the ]’end run around democracy”. A clear and readable guide to action, if it is action you are contemplating.”
Paul Mason, The Guardian
“The desire to radically challenge capitalism is widespread and growing. Klein’s new book is an important contribution to that project.”
Jacobin
“An ordinary person’s guide to hope. Read this book.”
Arundhati Roy
“A genuine page-turner—highly engaging and provocative.”
Michelle Alexander, author, The New Jim Crow
“Naomi Klein is one of the few revolutionary public intellectuals of great integrity and vision.”
Cornel West
“Essential and gripping . . . this is the book to read.”
Bill McKibben, author, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist
“Incites us brilliantly to stiffen our lip, to overcome . . . and to interweave our No with a programmatic Yes.”
Yanis Varoufakis, former Finance Minister of Greece
“Urgent, timely, and necessary”
Noam Chomsky
“Who better than Naomi to make sense of this madness, and help us find a way out? This book is a top-of-the-stack summer must-read.”
Michael Stipe
“An urgent intervention . . . a critical contribution to the developing opposition to Trump and the economic disorder that produced him.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
“A compelling book we all need to read and act on . . . an essential handbook for all people, especially young people.”
Danny Glover
“[A] brilliant and layered analysis applied with lightning precision, and a compelling vision of the Yes to come.”
Eve Ensler
“Naomi Klein constructs a common story that allows us to withstand the effects of being shocked. We can act upon that, with intelligence and happiness, to recover our world and the use of adjectives.”
Gael García Bernal
“Ceaselessly illuminating, daring, and indispensable. As accessible as it is brilliant . . . essential.”
Owen Jones, author, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It
“Klein is an essential voice for our time. No is Not Enough is her reaction to the Trump presidency and her cry to oppose it. Drawing on her own personal experiences, Klein encourages resistance, not just refusal. An intense, probing analysis that asks how we got here, and now what?”
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and author of the New York Times and international bestsellers The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough, and On Fire. A Senior Correspondent for The Intercept, reporter for Rolling Stone, and contributor for both The Nation and The Guardian, Klein is a member of faculty at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Geography and the inaugural Faculty of Arts Chair in Climate Justice at the Centre for Climate Justice. She is co-founder of the climate justice organization The Leap. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Her most recent book, with Rebecca Stefoff, is How to Change Everything: A Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other.
Twenty years after No Logo, and five years after This Changes Everything, On Fire explains how the bold ideas and action within the Green New Deal could avert climate catastrophe and be a blueprint for a just and thriving society.
Naomi Klein’s seventh book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal gathers for the first time Naomi’s impassioned reporting from the frontlines of climate breakdown, and pairs it with new material on the high stakes of what we choose to do next.
Published in hardcover in the US, UK and Canada in 2019, it was an instant New York Times bestseller and was serialized in The Guardian UK and in the Covering Climate Now news syndicate worldwide. Naomi completed a multi-country book in 2019/early 2020. The paperback was released in 2020 with a new foreword written during the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Jane Fonda said, “I didn’t know this [book] would change my life. It told me what I had to do, and it motivated me to do it.”
Watch the Emmy nominated viral video “Message from the Future” produced by Naomi about the Green New Deal, co-written and narrated by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
For more than a decade, Naomi Klein has documented the movement of the climate crisis from future threat to a burning emergency. She has been among the first to make the case for what is now called the Green New Deal – a vision for transforming our economies to battle climate breakdown and rampant inequality at the same time. In our era of rising seas and rising hate, she argues that only this kind of bold, roots-up action has a chance of rousing us to fight for our lives while there is still time.
On Fire’s long-form essays, based on her extensive research and reporting, show Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one as well. Delving into the clash between ecological time and our culture of “perpetual now”; the soaring history of rapid human change in the face of grave threats; rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of “climate barbarism” and more, this is a rousing call to transformation – and a dire warning about what awaits if we fail to act.
With dispatches from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef to the smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican waking up to the case for radical change, recognizing that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced this crisis — On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the fiery energy of a global movement demanding a catalytic Green New Deal.
PRAISE:
“If I were a rich man, I’d buy 245 million copies of Naomi Klein’s On Fire and hand-deliver them to every eligible voter in America…because it makes a strong case for tackling the climate crisis as not just an urgent undertaking, but an inspiring one.”
Jeff Goodell, The New York Times
“It’s an urgent book that never surrenders hope, committed to the idea that we can act and insistent that we must. Klein’s message could not be more timely, because the time for action is now.”
Cory Doctorow, Los Angeles Times
.”..she sets out her argument with a precision that matches her passion….This is a scorching volume for a heated time. The fire next time, it turns out, is now.”
Boston Globe
“Naomi Klein is the intellectual godmother of the Green New Deal —which just happens to be the most important idea in the world right now”
Bill McKibben
“Naomi Klein’s work has always moved and guided me. She is the great chronicler of our age of climate emergency, an inspirer of generations.”
Greta Thunberg, climate activist
“A critically important thought-leader in these perilous times, a necessary voice as a courageous movement of movements rises from the ashes.”
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
“Naomi is like a great doctor—she can diagnose problems nobody else sees.”
Alfonso Cuarón, Academy Award-winning director of Roma
“Naomi Klein applies her fine, fierce and meticulous mind to the greatest, most urgent questions of our times. . . . I count her among the most inspirational political thinkers in the world today.”
Arundhati Roy, Man Booker Prize-winng author of The God of Small Things
“Naomi Klein is a precious gift: every time I read her words, my heart leaps from sadness and anger to action. She takes us deep, down to the roots of what is wrong—and then up, up to a height from which we can see what must be done. Everything we love is at stake now: these writings are our best and brightest hope.”
Emma Thompson
“The greatest theorist of climate change.”
Amitav Ghosh, author of The Hungry Tide
“Masterful. . .What separates Klein from many other advocates for a Green New Deal is her balanced combination of idealism and politics-based realism. . .Another important addition to the literature on the most essential issue of our day.”
Kirkus Reviews
Klein’s passion for action reflects the political, social, and scientific gridlock that makes such sweeping, transformational legislation imperative. Her zeal and eloquence will inspire, engage, and motivate those who are concerned about the planet’s future to become even more involved in taking any and all possible steps to curb or reverse further disruption and destruction.”
Booklist
“For a quarter century, now, Naomi Klein has been an outspoken and fearless voice on that which late-stage hyper-capitalism has wrought upon the world: income inequality, overreaching corporate power, for-profit empire building and, of course, the consequent climate crisis. Honestly, we don’t deserve her, and looking back at her seven books one can’t help but think of Cassandra, her warnings ever accurate yet unheeded… with her eighth book, On Fire, Klein collects her longform writing on the climate crisis—from the dying Great Barrier Reef to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico—and somehow manages to strike a hopeful note as she calls for a radical commitment to the Green New Deal, the kind of collective mobilization that saved us from the brink in WWII, and might be our only hope now.”
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and author of the New York Times and international bestsellers The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough, and On Fire. A Senior Correspondent for The Intercept, reporter for Rolling Stone, and contributor for both The Nation and The Guardian, Klein is a member of faculty at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Geography and the inaugural Faculty of Arts Chair in Climate Justice at the Centre for Climate Justice. She is co-founder of the climate justice organization The Leap. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Her most recent book, with Rebecca Stefoff, is How to Change Everything: A Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463572 • US$9.95 • 96 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In the rubble of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans and ultrarich “Puertopians” are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island. In this vital and startling investigation, bestselling author and activist Naomi Klein uncovers how the forces of shock politics and disaster capitalism seek to undermine the nation’s radical, resilient vision for a “just recovery.”
All royalties from the sale of this book in English and Spanish go directly to JunteGente, a gathering of Puerto Rican organizations resisting disaster capitalism and advancing a fair and healthy recovery for their island. For more information, visit http://juntegente.org/.
PRAISE:
“We are in a fight for our lives. Hurricanes Irma and María unmasked the colonialism we face in Puerto Rico, and the inequality it fosters, creating a fierce humanitarian crisis. Now we must find a path forward to equality and sustainability, a path driven by communities, not investors. And this book explains, with careful and unbiased reporting, only the efforts of our community activists can answer the paramount question: What type of society do we want to become and who is Puerto Rico for?”
Carmen Yulín Cruz, Mayor of San Juan
“Naomi Klein concisely reveals to us what Puerto Rico has faced, shock after shock, before Hurricane Maria and after it and also the voices of people who believe and build a future for Puerto Rico from the strength of their communities.”
Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, feminist, human rights activist, former president of the Puerto Rico Bar Association
“Like so many of my generation, I’ve been a reader of Naomi Klein’s since the late 90s, always finding something to learn from her rigorous reporting and thoughtful analysis. There’s no-one better to tell the story of Hurricane Maria and its global significance than Naomi. In the face of speculation, exploitation and climate crisis, this book calls on us to recognize Puerto Rico’s struggle for democracy, justice, and human life itself, as our own.”
Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona, Spain
“What ‘shocks’ in this work is the resilient spirit del pueblo boricuá. They become the metaphor, the meaning and the maker of possiblity. And one is left immeasurably hopeful.”
Cherríe Moraga, Las Maestras Center for Chicana Indigenous Thought & Art Practice, UCSB
“A gripping and timely account of classic ‘shock doctrine’ being perpetrated in Puerto Rico. Naomi Klein chronicles the extraordinary grassroots resistance by the Puerto Rican people against neoliberal privatization and Wall Street greed in the aftermath of the island’s financial meltdown, of hurricane devastation, and of Washington’s imposition of an outside control board over the most important U.S. colony.”
Juan González, co-host of Democracy Now! and author of Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America.
“Against the rampant greed of disaster capitalism, only radical solidarity can provide the way forward for Puerto Rico. To build it, our approach must be grounded in uncovering and combating the strategies that have been developed to deprive an entire nation of its human rights and its ability to defend itself. Klein’s work does precisely this, inspiring a unified vision to create the Puerto Rico we need.”
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and author of the New York Times and international bestsellers The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough, and On Fire. A Senior Correspondent for The Intercept, reporter for Rolling Stone, and contributor for both The Nation and The Guardian, Klein is a member of faculty at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Geography and the inaugural Faculty of Arts Chair in Climate Justice at the Centre for Climate Justice. She is co-founder of the climate justice organization The Leap. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Her most recent book, with Rebecca Stefoff, is How to Change Everything: A Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other.
An empowering, engaging young readers guide to understanding and battling climate change from the expert and bestselling author of This Changes Everything and On Fire, Naomi Klein.
Warmer temperatures. Fires in the Amazon. Superstorms. These are just some of the effects of climate change that we are already experiencing.
The good news is that we can all do something about it. A movement is already underway to combat not only the environmental effects of climate change but also to fight for climate justice and make a fair and livable future possible for everyone. And young people are not just part of that movement, they are leading the way. They are showing us that this moment of danger is also a moment of great opportunity—an opportunity to change everything.
Full of empowering stories of young leaders all over the world, this information-packed book from award-winning journalist and one of the foremost voices for climate justice, Naomi Klein, offers young readers a comprehensive look at the state of the climate today and how we got here, while also providing the tools they need to join this fight to protect and reshape the planet they will inherit.
PRAISE:
“Based on her work as an eco-activist How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other by Naomi Klein with Rebecca Stefoff is an excellent introduction to the climate crisis but also “a call to arms to young people to get involved. Klein and Stefoff do an excellent job not only providing the historical background of the climate movement and the science behind it but also introducing a host of young people who have been active in the fight for climate justice.”
The Globe and Mail
“Klein’s journalistic credentials and Stefoff’s vast experience writing nonfiction for young readers merge to create an engaging account of how and why we find ourselves confronted with these urgent issues as well as how and why we might find our way out—if we work quickly. With its wide focus and pull-no-punches real talk, this book stands out among climate change books for its uniquely inclusive perspective that will inspire conviction, passion, and action. If you can get only one climate change book for youth, let it be this one.”
Kirkus Reviews – starred review, December 2020
“[Klein’s] well-presented ideas are engaging and comprehensible. She reminds readers there is no Planet B…. A necessary purchase to educate teens on the seriousness of climate change and the imperative to enact change now.”
School Library Journal, February 2021
“Every young person deserves the chance to read this book.”
Naomi Kleinis an award-winning journalist, columnist, and author of the New York Times and international bestsellers The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough, and On Fire. A Senior Correspondent for The Intercept, reporter for Rolling Stone, and contributor for both The Nation and The Guardian, Klein is a member of faculty at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Geography and the inaugural Faculty of Arts Chair in Climate Justice at the Centre for Climate Justice. She is co-founder of the climate justice organization The Leap. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Rebecca Stefoff has devoted her career to writing nonfiction books for young readers and is the author of over 200 books. She has also adapted a number of landmark works in history and science, including Charles C. Mann’s 1491 and Howard Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608462117 • 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 • US $17 • 220 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In response to the events of 9/11, the Bush administration launched a “war on terror,” ushering in an era of anti-Muslim racism, or Islamophobia. However, 9/11 did not create the image of the “Muslim enemy.” This book examines the historic relationship between anti-Muslim racism and the agenda of empire building.
In this comprehensive book, Kumar begins her analysis in the eleventh century and the context of the Crusades. In prose that is clear and free of jargon, she offers a sweeping historical analysis of the changing views of Islam and Muslims in the West, examining the ways that ruling elites throughout history have used the specter of a “Muslim enemy” to justify their imperial projects.
She then goes on to show how the language of Islamophobia that was developed in the context of the European colonization of Middle East continues to thrive today in the United States. The focus of the book is on the United States; Kumar expertly exposes and debunks various myths about Muslims and Islam which have become widely accepted in the US.
She then analyzes the US’s checkered attitude towards the parties of political Islam, outlining how it has treated Islamists as both allies and enemies. By further examining local conditions that have allowed for the growth of Islamists, Kumar shows that these parties are not inevitable in Muslim-majority countries but are rather a contemporary phenomenon similar to the rise of Christian, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalisms.
The final section of the book sheds light on how the use of Islamophobia in justifying foreign policy necessitates political repression at home. The attacks on Muslim Americans have spread to attacks on dissent in general. Kumar concludes by making a powerful case for a grassroots movement that challenges anti-Muslim racism and the project of empire.
PRAISE:
“This is a timely and crucial book. From historical roots to ideological causes, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire is studied in a holistic, profound and serious way. The reader will understand why we need to stop being both naive and blind. There will be no peaceful and just future in our democratic societies if we do not fight this new type of dangerous racism.”
Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies, Oxford University
“Deepa Kumar’s Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire could not be more timely. In this deftly argued book, Kumar unearths a genealogy of colonial construction that goes back to the earliest contacts between Muslims and Europeans. But the real power of her argument is when she grabs the politics of ideological domination by the throat and, with an astonishing moral and intellectual force, sets the record straight as to who and what the players are in turning a pathological fear of Muslims into a cornerstone of imperial hegemony. This is a must read on both sides of the Atlantic, where from mass murderers in Europe to military professors at the US military academies are in the business of manufacturing fictive enemies out of their fanciful delusions. Deepa Kumar has performed a vital public service.”
Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
“This important book sets out to debunk Orientalist myths in particular that historical encounters between Islam and the West can be understood through a clash of civilizations framework. The author explores the specific historical and political contexts of this relationship from the Crusades to Obama providing a nuanced and extensive analysis. Kumar presents these arguments with a force and passion that is supported by a wealth of evidence. A must for scholars of Islam, social and political science and international relations.”
Elizabeth Poole, author of Reporting Islam: Media Representations of British Muslims
“In this remarkable primer Deepa Kumar expertly shows how racism is central to contemporary US imperial politics in ways similar to previous imperial wars, including the one that constituted the United States over the dead bodies of indigenous ‘redskins.’ An antiracist and antiwar activist, as well as a model scholar-teacher, Kumar has written a comprehensive and most readable guide to exposing and opposing the hatred of Islam.”
Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies & International Relations, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
“Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire will be indispensable to anyone wanting to understand one of the most persistent forms of racism in the US and Europe. Kumar demonstrates that Islamophobic myths did not arise spontaneously after the end of the Cold War but are rooted in centuries of conquest and colonialism, from the Crusades to the ‘War on Terror.’ Arguing with precision and clarity, she shows how these myths have been systematically circulated by liberals as much as conservatives, and usefully lays bare the complex ways in which the US foreign policy establishment has, in different contexts, instrumentalized Islamic political movements and exploited anti-Muslim racism. Kumar’s text will be a crucial corrective to those who fail to see that the origins of the ‘Islam problem’ lie in empire not sharia.”
Arun Kundnani, author of The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain
“Deepa Kumar’s book Islamophobia is powerful, necessary and a true work of solidarity.”
Ali Abunimah
“A much-needed handbook on the history of Islamophobia … Crucial as it is for its historical immediacy as an ethical response to fear-mongering, Islamophobia is also an insightful analysis of the workings of a transnational and transhistorical white empire.”
Race & Class
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Deepa Kumar is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University and the author of Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike. Kumar has contributed to numerous outlets including the BBC, USA Today, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900932• US $24.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 400pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A groundbreaking anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarity between Black and Asian feminists, helping us make sense of the world we’re in and the world we must imagine and build.
For many in the US and abroad, calls to #SayHerName, the uptick in violence against Asian Americans throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings remain raw and unhealed. Black & Asian Feminist Solidarities contextualizes a cross-racial feminist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Taken together, the pieces remind us that wherever there is struggle against oppressive systems, there is great possibility for empathy, respect, and solidarity.
A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, this unprecedented work brings together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, introducing readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism. The anthology wrestles with contemporary feminism through a multitude of angles—from the Combahee River Collective to nail salons and massage parlors, from misogynoir to the model minority myth.
Edited by co-founders of BWR and AAFC—Rachel Kuo, Jaimee Swift, and Tiffany Diane Tso—the anthology features poetry, critical essays, interviews, creative nonfiction, and other contributions by/with Barbara Smith, Tamara Nopper, Franny Choi, Sonya Renee Taylor, and several other vital, radical, feminist voices.
Rachel Kuo is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective. Her writing on racial politics, social movements, and technology have been published in New Media & Society, Social Media and Society, Journal of Communication, Political Communication, Teen Vogue, and Truthout.
Jaimee Swift is the creator, founder, and executive director of Black Women Radicals, a Black feminist advocacy organization dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender expansive people’s radical activism in Africa and in the African Diaspora. She is also the creator and founder of The School for Black Feminist Politics (SBFP), the Black feminist political education arm of Black Women Radicals. The mission of the SBFP is to empower Black feminisms in Black Politics by expanding the field from transnational, intersectional, and multidisciplinary perspectives.
Tiffany Diane Tso is a feminist writer, editor, and cultural producer based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). She has written extensively on Asian American issues, sex work, Black-Asian conflict and solidarities, and labor, and has been published in HuffPost, Refinery29, Slate, Allure, and more. Along with Kate Zen, Tiffany co-edited But I Am Here, an anthology of New York City sex worker organizers, activists, writers, and artists. She is also a cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, a community gardener, and a love evangelist.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595864 • US $16 • 6 in x 9 in • 100 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Rifqa is Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd’s ode to his late grandmother, and to the Palestinian struggle for liberation. ‘Jerusalem is ours.’
Each day after school, Mohammed El-Kurd’s grandmother welcomed him at the door of his home with a bouquet of jasmine. Her name was Rifqa—she was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resilience. With razor-sharp wit and glistening moral clarity, El-Kurd lays bare the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism. His poems trace Rifqa’s exile from Haifa to his family’s current dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the cyclical and relentless horror of the Nakba. El-Kurd’s debut collection definitively shows that the Palestinian struggle is a revolution, until victory.
PRAISE:
“May these poems challenge and awaken you. May they shake you into action. May they help you find the words for what you already know to be true… These words remind me that home is a series of shared memories, not brick and mortar. Home is where we go to remember and revisit who we’ve always been. Mohammed El-Kurd’s poetry is a home returned to us.”
Aja Monet, from the foreword
“Rooted in Palestine and ranging across the world, these are poems that hurl themselves at the boundaries of what poems can do; lyrics that put a premium on anger, that reflect the serrated edges of living in the world today, that gift new and powerful phrases to the lexicon of liberation.”
Ahdaf Soueif, author of Cairo: My City, Our Revolution
“Rifqa is an absolute marvel, and El-Kurd is precisely the kind of poet— Palestinian or otherwise—we need right now: unafraid of the truth. The legacy of his grandmother, the eponymous Rifqa, flits across these poems, and with it comes wisdom, hope, and, most crucially of all, memory … El-Kurd doesn’t flinch from the violence and death that comes with dispossession. But make no mistake. These are the poems of the defiantly, unapologetically, wholly alive.”
Hala Alyan, author, The Arsonists’ City
“Rifqa is an admixture of the most intimate violence—wounds that are as difficult to reveal as they are to heal—together with song and dance that beseech the sun to sustain this life and these lands that ensure it. Rifqa El-Kurd lives in Mohammed and Mohammed breathes life into us, scented with fire and jasmine flowers, so that we may know her, and the victory she embodied, too.”
Noura Erekat, author, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
“Rifqa is the collision of strength and vulnerability. Earnest in its exploration of the grave realities in one corner of the globe, it is a banging on the doors of the world. It illustrates the wit that is necessary to weave together the tragic with the hopeful and the painful with the joyful. Rifqa is a testament to overcoming fear in expression, a book that will resonate with you, one you hold and return to over and over again.”
Mariam Barghouti, journalist, researcher, activist, and commentator
“Palestinians have long fought with poetry. Napoleon’s army in Palestine was defeated by warrior poets. El-Kurd’s words are part of this long and dazzling lineage. An elegy to our ancestors, maternal, whose resistance we hope to honor, each poem is a rock hurled at the occupier and the oppressor. A beautiful and important book.”
Randa Jarrar, author, Love Is an Ex-Country
“Mohammed El-Kurd weaves the ancestors and Land into every breath of these poems. ‘Every grandmother is a Jerusalem,’ El-Kurd reminds us, in jasmine-scented memory, in liminal space and punch line, in auto- and anti-biography. Here is poetry the whole of us can turn and return to—even in grief, even in contradiction. Liberating itself from respectability & other colonialist gazes weaponized against Palestinians, here is poetry insistent on truths we’ve carried for generations. JERUSALEM IS OURS. El-Kurd writes this with its whole chest, knowing our lives—the whole & future of us—depend on it.
George Abraham, author, Birthright “El-Kurd’s poems are attuned to language as a terrain of struggle. Refusing the myriad euphemisms that conceal and authorize Israel’s ongoing violence, he insists on a clarity that emplots each act in a field of history … But if El-Kurd’s poems witness the relentless reiterations of settler colonial violence, they also document the rebuttals and tendernesses—Mahfoutha Ishtayyeh chaining herself to a tree, “olive skin on olive skin,” in the face of an Israeli bulldozer; Rifqa El-Kurd welcoming her grandson home from school each day with jasmine wrapped in Kleenex—seeds of other futures nestled within the present.”
Jewish Currents
“Paying powerful homage to his Palestinian people’s lives and struggles, while elegantly educating the reader, Mohammed El-Kurd’s debut poetry collection, Rifqa, is a symbolic masterpiece … The poet understands politics is as much about emotion as it is logic, and his devastating way with words lets him deploy this knowledge in full.”
The New Arab
“Like other Palestinian poets, from Fadwa Tuqan to Rashid Hossein to Mahmoud Darwish, Kurd has a significant role to play in forging an international front against settler-colonialism and imperialism around the world … We should be grateful that this is Kurd’s first book rather than his last, and that we can look forward to many decades of poetic innovation from this extraordinarily multifaceted and politically engaged poet.”
Middle East Eye
‘At 24, Mohammed El-Kurd is already a poet of note. He is also a visual artist, and an activist like Rifqa. He has synthesized and overcome his American education in poetry. He no longer feels like he has to hide in his words.’
The Markaz Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mohammed El-Kurd is an internationally touring and award-winning poet, writer, journalist, and organizer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine. In 2021, He was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time. He is best known for his role as a co-founder of the #SaveSheikhJarrah movement. His work has been featured in numerous international outlets and he has appeared repeatedly as a commentator on major TV networks. Currently, El-Kurd serves as the first-ever Palestine Correspondent for The Nation. His first published essay in this role, “A Night with Palestine’s Defenders of the Mountain,” was shortlisted for the 2022 One World Media Print Award. Rifqa, his debut collection of poetry, published by Haymarket Books, was named “a masterpiece” by The New Arab and a “remarkable debut” by the Los Angeles Review of Books. The book was one of Middle East Eye’s “Best Books of 2021” and was shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for “Best First Collection.” El-Kurd holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College (CUNY) and a BFA in Writing from Atlanta’s Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). He is the Culture Editor at Mondoweiss.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902646 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 272 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A damning account of the latest transformation in mass incarceration, revealing how powerful nonprofits and so-called progressives used the language of social movements to build new jails.
In 2019, after unyielding pressure from activists, New York City seemed poised to close the detested Rikers Island penal colony. The local press dutifully reported that the end of Rikers was imminent, and New Yorkers celebrated the closure of the country’s largest urban jail, condemned as a moral stain on an otherwise great city. The problem, however, was that the city had not actually committed to closing Rikers. And at the same time, it laid the groundwork for the construction of more jails, a network of skyscraper facilities amounting to the largest carceral construction the city has seen in decades.
How did this happen?
In Skyscraper Jails, scholars and organizers Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti detail how progressive forces in New York City appropriated the rhetoric of social movements and social justice to promise “downsized” and “humane” jails. The principal advocates of these new jails were not right-wing politicians, but prominent city activists and progressive non-profit organizations.
As the political coalition that campaigned for the new jails fans out across the United States, the story at the heart of Skyscraper Jails is at once a case study and a cautionary tale for what will be coming to cities and towns across the United States and beyond.
PRAISE:
Praise for Captives
“Shanahan, who personally experienced Rikers’ violence, has crafted a masterpiece of synthesized social observation, analytic history and political critique. Now that the city has a new mayor who loudly champions the jailers and bad cops, Captives is urgent and obligatory reading.”
Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums
“Captives is more than a history of the notorious Rikers Island; it is a riveting, caged bird’s eye view of the tumultuous shift from postwar liberal dreams of penal reform to neoliberal punishment, police power, and the rise of the carceral state. Ultimately, it is a book about class struggle – how we got from build better to lock ’em up to shut it down.”
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
“Captives is an important and timely book that vividly depicts how decades of class struggle and oppression, especially along the lines of race and gender, shaped the rise of Rikers Island as we know it today. A must read!”
Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch
“Shanahan’s lively must-read explains the power politics shaping New York City’s municipal lockup frenzy.”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography and Golden Gulag
“Captives is a long, hard look at the role of human cages within New York City politics and the reform efforts that birthed Rikers. His account reads like a page out of L.A. Confidential rewritten with corrupt guards in place of cops, from an unaccounted $2 million discovered posthumously in the safe of the guards’ union president to rebel prisoners at the Manhattan Tombs hanging burning sheets out of windows.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“Shanahan makes it possible to answer the immediate and pressing question-why did an agenda of jail reform fail so drastically, producing in the process one of the most notorious penal colonies in the United States?”
The Nation
“A scrupulously researched history showing nearly a century of dysfunction of one of the world’s largest correctional institutions. And the inescapable conclusion that, whatever the justice is in shipping people to Rikers, there is little justice once they arrive.”
New York Daily News
“A vivid, vital, and terrifying volume”
Jacobin
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ALL OUR RELATIONS
Native Struggles for Land and Life
By Winona LaDuke Haymarket Books (2015)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466290 • US $19 • 243 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A thoughtful and in-depth account of Native resistance to environmental and cultural degradation, All Our Relations features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community.
PRAISE:
“A brilliant, gripping narrative … I urge that everyone read [All Our Relations] … which describes the ravages of corporations and government activity on the reservations for our first natives. This is a beautifully written book…. As Winona LaDuke describes, in moving and often beautiful prose, [these] misdeeds are not distant history but are ongoing degradation of the cherished land of Native Americans.”
Ralph Nader
As Winona LaDuke’s All Our Relations shows, a vital Native American environmentalism is linking indigenous people throughout North America and Hawaii in the fight to protect and restore their health, culture, and the ecosystems on their lands. LaDuke herself is a member of the Anishinaabeg nation and was Ralph Nader’s Green Party running mate in 1996. These Native American activists take inspiration from their forebears’ responsible treatment of natural systems, based on reverence for the interconnectedness of all life forms.”
The Nation
In this thoroughly researched and convincingly written analysis of Native American culture . . . LaDuke demonstrates the manner in which native people face a constant barrage of attacks that threaten their very existence.”
Choice
“[LaDuke] presents strong voices of old, old cultures bravely trying to make sense of an Earth in chaos.”
Whole Earth
‘With a good ear and sharp eye, LaDuke introduces us to Native activists and records gross environmental abuse and creative resistance. By placing people in the center of industrial soup, LaDuke tells a story that has not been told before in this way.”
Radcliffe Quarterly
“A rare perspective on Native history and culture.”
Sister to Sister
“One of the pleasures of reading All Our Relations is discovering the unique voices of Native people, especially Native women, speaking in their own Native truths.”
Women’s Review of Books
“LaDuke unabashedly confronts spiritual and political grassroots missions with a tenacity that, as she explains, springs up from devotion to the land.”
City Pages
“A thoughtful, candid, in-depth account of Native resistance to environmental and cultural degradation … La Duke provides a unique understanding of Native ideas … offering a beautiful and daring vision of political, spiritual … transformation.”
Midwest book Review
“…as Winona LaDuke describes, in moving and often beautiful prose, [these] misdeeds are not distant history but are ongoing degradation of the cherished lands of Native Americans.”
Public Citizen News
“Hers is a beautiful and daring vision of political, spiritual, and ecological transformation. All Our Relations is essential reading for everyone who cares about the fate of the Earth and indigenous peoples.”
Winds of Change
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Winona LaDuke became involved with Native American environmental issues after meeting Jimmy Durham, a well-known Cherokee activist, while she was attending Harvard University. At the age of 18, she spoke in front of the United Nations regarding Native American rights and has since become one of the most prominent voices for American Indian economic and environmental concerns throughout the United States and internationally. She is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg, who lives and works on the White Earth Reservations. LaDuke is the Executive Director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project and Honor the Earth, where she works on a national level to advocate, raise public support, and create funding for frontline native environmental groups. In 1994, Winona was named by TIME magazine as one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age. In both 1996 and 2000 she was Ralph Nader’s running mate in his Presidential campaigns, appearing on the Green Party ticket. A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, Winona has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues. She is a former board member of Greenpeace USA and serves as co-chair of the Indigenous Women’s Network, a North American and Pacific indigenous women’s organization. She is the author of six books, including The Militarization of Indian Country (2011); Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming (2005); the non-fiction book All our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999, South End Press); and a novel—Last Standing Woman (1997, Voyager Press), LaDuke continues to spread her message and is arguably the most well-respected authority on Native American culture in the world.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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RECOVERING THE SACRED
The Power of Naming and Claiming
(Second Edition)
By Winona LaDuke Haymarket Books (2015)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466276 • US $20 • 294 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Recovering the Sacred is a seminal work with a wealth of research and hundreds of interviews with indigenous scholars and activists, from a leading Native American historian.
Under what conditions can traditional beliefs be best practiced? Only the power to define what is sacred—and access it—will enable Native American communities to remember who they are. The indigenous imperative to honor nature is constantly undermined by federal laws approving resource extraction through mining and drilling. Formal protections exist for Native American religious expression, but not for the places and natural resources integral to ceremonies. Winona LaDuke examines the connections between sacred objects and the sacred bodies of her people—past, present and future.
PRAISE:
“Through the voices of ordinary Native Americans, writer and full-time activist Winona LaDuke is able to transform highly complex issues into stories that touch the heart.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Indigenous People’s History of the United States
“In this powerful book, LaDuke explores issues that go way beyond the desecration of the environment and into the heart of insidious crimes against the very DNA of Native peoples.”
Amy Ray, musician/activist
“A fascinating read that puts Native American communities struggle for justice into historical and environmental context. Winona’s fierce dedication to the indigenous environmental and women’s movement infuse her analysis with a first-person understanding—deep and powerful on many levels. Winona’s fierce dedication to the indigenous environmental and women’s movement infuses her analysis with a first-person understanding—deep an powerful on many levels.”
Bonnie Raitt, musician/activist
“A damning account of current and past injustices committed against the indigenous tribes of North America… [LaDuke] uses a combination of personal testimony and interviews mixed with historical research and government records to make the case that racism and stealing is still occurring, but in new forms such as biopiracy and historical revisionism.”
Race and Place
“No ragtag remnants of lost cultures here. Strong voices of old, old cultures bravely trying to make sense of an Earth in chaos.”
Whole Earth
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Winona LaDuke became involved with Native American environmental issues after meeting Jimmy Durham, a well-known Cherokee activist, while she was attending Harvard University. At the age of 18, she spoke in front of the United Nations regarding Native American rights and has since become one of the most prominent voices for American Indian economic and environmental concerns throughout the United States and internationally. She is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg, who lives and works on the White Earth Reservations. LaDuke is the Executive Director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project and Honor the Earth, where she works on a national level to advocate, raise public support, and create funding for frontline native environmental groups. In 1994, Winona was named by TIME magazine as one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age. In both 1996 and 2000 she was Ralph Nader’s running mate in his Presidential campaigns, appearing on the Green Party ticket. A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, Winona has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues. She is a former board member of Greenpeace USA and serves as co-chair of the Indigenous Women’s Network, a North American and Pacific indigenous women’s organization. She is the author of six books, including The Militarization of Indian Country (2011); Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming (2005); the non-fiction book All our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999, South End Press); and a novel—Last Standing Woman (1997, Voyager Press), LaDuke continues to spread her message and is arguably the most well-respected authority on Native American culture in the world.RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859431 • US $16 • 5.75 in x 8.375 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The inside story of Argentina’s remarkable movement to create factories run democratically by workers themselves.
The worker-run factories of Argentina offer an inspirational example of a struggle for social change that has achieved a real victory for working people confronting corporate globalization. Sin Patrón gives an insider’s account of this important movement.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Lavaca is an editorial and activist collective, formed in 2001 in Buenos Aires, with the aim of chronicling, sharing the experiences of, and building solidarity with social movements in Argentina and beyond.
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of the international best seller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Translated into 27 languages and with over a million copies in print, The New York Times called No Logo “a movement bible.” In 2000, The Guardian Newspaper short-listed it for its First Book Award, and in 2001, No Logo won the Canadian National Business Book Award, and the French Prix Mediations. Naomi Klein writes an internationally syndicated column for The Nation, The Guardian and The Globe and Mail. A collection of her work, entitled Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate was published in October 2002. In 2004, she released The Take, a film about Argentina’s occupied factories, co-produced with director Avi Lewis. She is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and is presently the Freda Kirchway Fellow of the Nation Institute. She lives in Toronto, Canada
Avi Lewis is one of Canada’s most controversial and eloquent media personalities. His first feature documentary, The Take, follows Argentina’s new movement of worker-run businesses. An emotional story of hope and resistance in the global economy, The New York Times called it “a stirring, idealistic documentary”. It was nominated for 4 Gemini Awards, and won the International Jury prize at the American Film Institute festival in Los Angeles.
In the late 90s, as the host and producer of counterSpin on CBC Newsworld, he presided over more than 500 nationally televised debates in three years. In the early 1990s, he hosted City TV’s landmark music journalism show “The New Music”, and was MuchMusic’s Political Specialist, pioneering political “uncoverage” for a youth audience and winning a Gemini Award for best Special Event Coverage.
His new television series, The Big Picture with Avi Lewis, combines hard-hitting documentaries and town hall debates. It will debut on CBC Newsworld in Fall 2006.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467631 • US $18.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 220pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Poet, educator and social activist Gwendolyn Brooks was a singular force in American culture.
The first Black woman to be named poet laureate, Brooks’ poetry, fiction, and social commentary shed light on the beauty of humanity, the distinct qualities of Black life and community, and the destructive effects of racism, sexism, and class inequality.
A collection of thirty essays combining critical analysis and personal reflection, The Whiskey of Our Discontent, presents essential elements of Brooks’ ouevre—on race, gender, class, community, and poetic craft, while also examining her life as a poet, reporter, mentor, sage, activist, and educator.
PRAISE:
“[A] superb tribute…[an] essential collection.”
Booklist
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
Quraysh Ali Lansana is the author of eight poetry books, two children’s books, a book of pedagogy and editor of six anthologies. He teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent titles include The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop.
Georgia A. Popoff is a poet, educator, editor, whose third collection is Psalter: The Agnostic’s Book of Common Curiosities. She coauthored Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy, & Social Justice in Classroom & Community, with Quraysh Ali Lansana.
Sonia Sanchez is a poet, playwright, professor, activist, and one of the foremost leaders of the Black Studies movement. She is the author of more than 16 books, and her many honors and awards include the PEN Writing Award, the American Book Award for Poetry, the National Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the National Education Association Award. She has received the Peace and Freedom Award from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Robert Creeley Award, the Harper Lee Award, and the National Visionary Leadership Award.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642590319 • US $17.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 214 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This is the first comprehensive book from a radical left perspective on the rising power of the Silicon Valley tech sector, and above all the five dominant empires of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. An ocean of liberal ass-kissery dominates analysis of these giants, along with some right-wing scorn for their less-than-arch-conservative vetting of News Feed sources and Google Search algorithms.
Every day we grow more dependent on our phones and apps to do our chores, our jobs, and our socializing. And every quarter the enormous corporate giants of Big Tech take over more sectors of the economy. With the growing reliance on this industry it’s time crack the code of the economic dynamics that drive these companies to become near-monopolies very early, and the unique forms of “platform power” each once possesses.
As Silicon Valley rises to become co-dominant with Wall Street in the halls of corporate power, this book playfully dissects the tech monopolies with humor and a plan to secure our privacy and expand our freedom—socializing the Big Tech platforms.
PRAISE:
“Highly informed, lively and readable, this is a badly needed study of the giant high tech corporations that increasingly dominate the means of work and social interaction, amass and scrutinize the details of our lives, seek to shape attitudes and behavior, and like the great virtual monopolies of the past both rely on state power and heavily influence it. Beyond exposing the nature of this awesome and threatening system, Larson goes on to outline how it can, and should, be brought under popular control. A most valuable contribution to understanding and guide to action.”
Noam Chomsky
“Bit Tyrants is an important primer to an age spinning out of control.”
Rob Larson is Professor of Economics at Tacoma Community College and author of Bleakonomics and Capitalism vs. Freedom from Zero Books. He writes for a variety of venues including Jacobin, In These Times, Current Affairs and Dollars & Sense.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900857 •US $22.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Economist Rob Larson combines wit, righteous anger, and clear-eyed analysis as he dissects the lifestyle, moral bankruptcy, and stupidly large sums of money hoarded by the disgustingly wealthy.
The fact that we live in one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world is becoming common knowledge. And while lists of “richest people in x country” may be easy to come by, how much do we really know about the billionaires who sit atop our global economic system? Who are they, really? How did they accumulate their ill-gotten gains? And what kind of depravities do they use to maintain their positions?
Turning their own weapons of class-war against them—from the fawning profiles found in the Mansion section of the Wall Street Journal to the national income data buried in white papers meant solely for investors and technocrats—Larson crunches the numbers so you don’t have to.
But he doesn’t stop there, because appreciating the sheer scale of the global wealth gap doesn’t even touch on all the ways the ruling class are making us miserable, breaking our society to pieces, and destroying the planet in their pursuit of ever-increasing power and profit. As we behold whole continents on fire, pandemics thrashing public health systems to smithereens, and declining lifespans for the vast majority, Larson argues that the only way forward is to yank on the emergency break and give capitalism the boot.
PRAISE:
Praise for Bit Tyrants:
“Highly informed, lively and readable, this is a badly needed study of the giant high tech corporations that increasingly dominate the means of work and social interaction, amass and scrutinize the details of our lives, seek to shape attitudes and behavior, and like the great virtual monopolies of the past both rely on state power and heavily influence it. Beyond exposing the nature of this awesome and threatening system.”
Noam Chomsky
“Today’s tech giants control technologies that have suffused our lives, and they have generated a self-glorifying mythology and hype to match. Rob Larson’s Bit Tyrants helps puncture this ideological reality-distortion field, providing a guide to monopolistic giants like Amazon and Google, as they transform labor, politics, war and more. He does all this with a sarcastic wit that will bring a smile to anyone who has cursed the malign influence of these companies and their plutocratic rulers on 21st Century life.”
Rob Larson is the author of Bleakonomics and Capitalism vs. Freedom from Zero Books, as well as Bit Tyrants (Haymarket, 2020). He writes for Jacobin, In These Times, Current Affairs and Dollars & Sense.
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“WHEN THE WELFARE PEOPLE COME”
Race and Class in the US Child Welfare System
Don Lash Haymarket Books (Spring, 2017)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467433 • US $17 • 222 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Malcolm X, describing his childhood experience of “when the welfare people came” and introduced him to the US child protection system, called it “legal, modern slavery—however kindly intentioned.” That shocking characterization obscures some of the complexities of the state response to childhood poverty, but it reflects sentiments that are common among communities of color, where child welfare investigations are most concentrated. A radical assessment of institutional racism in the child welfare system is needed now more than ever.
In this sweeping look at the history and politics of the US child welfare system, “When the Welfare People Come” exposes the system—from the “orphan trains” and Indian boarding schools to current practices in child protective investigations, foster care, and mandated services—arguing that it constitutes a mechanism of control over poor and working-class parents and children. Don Lash reveals the system’s role in the regulation of family life under capitalism and details the deep and continuing consequences of what happens “when the welfare people come.” Including first-person vignettes of parents, children, and workers in the US child protection system, Lash also offers practical and cogent ideas for its improvement and transformation.
PRAISE:
“This book’s description and analysis of child welfare is terrific. Though I’ve worked in the field of child welfare for four decades, I learned not only new information but also found new, resonant analyses. The book is best when describing the operations of the child welfare system in New York City and the nation both recently and historically. The book critiques the neo-conservative view that blames the individual and punishes the victims of societal racism and income inequality. It is equally harsh, perhaps more so, in its critique of neo-liberalism that also blames the individual and provides treatment as the remedy. The book is written from a neo-Marxist perspective. And since we’ve seen the failure of both neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinking, we would be well served to try a new paradigm presented in this book.”
David Tobis, Ph.D, Author of From Pariahs to Partners: How Parents and Their Allies Changed New York City’s Child Welfare System; Senior Partner, Maestral International
“Lash’s excellent overview of the child welfare system makes a compelling case for its role in the maintenance of capitalism as a social system. He illuminates the various ways that child welfare plays both a practical and ideological role through intervening in families that struggle with poverty and the ravages of racism, sexism, ableism, and other forms of inequality. Most importantly, he provides a discussion of how to create true change, not through incremental reform, but through a radical questioning of how inequality itself creates harm for children and families and how all families can be supported.”
Tina Lee, University of Wisconsin-Stout, author of Catching a Case: Inequality and Fear in New York City’s Child Welfare System?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Don Lash is an attorney who has practiced in the areas of disability rights, education and child welfare for over 20 years. He worked within New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services for more than 8 years.
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Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902561 • US $19.99 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 288 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Tracing the lives of five incarcerated individuals, Corridors of Contagion speaks to the devastating impact of surviving the pandemic inside prison walls.
Corridors of Contagion brings to light the experiences of five people incarcerated across the United States as they navigate the initial terrors of the pandemic—and the many months, stretched into years, that followed. Journalist Victoria Law combines this storytelling with a trenchant analysis of the structural failures of the US carceral system that made prisons uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks, from overcrowding to insufficient healthcare to life sentences.
The book portrays the horrors of continual lockdowns not in the comfort of one’s own home, but in prisons where routine violence and chaos is made even more unimaginable by the complete lack of control over protection from a terrifying and lethal new virus. The pandemic provided an opportunity for lawmakers and policy makers to rethink the nation’s addiction to perpetual punishment. Instead, US jails and prisons doubled down on punishment under the guise of pandemic protections. As a result, people behind bars experienced increased stress, mental health challenges, increased violence, and higher rates of deaths, many of which could have been prevented.
While the pandemic emergency has been declared over, we are continuing to learn more about the extent of its destruction. Corridors of Contagion reminds readers about both the particular horrors experienced by people in cages and the continued role of the US as the world’s prison nation.
PRAISE:
“With her characteristic evocative storytelling, compelling prose, and razor sharp analysis, Victoria Law delivers another searing look inside the nation’s systems of punishment. Law turns an unflinching eye on the cruel operation of structures of punishment in the context of a global pandemic, in which the prison, jailers, and systemic denial of the most basic forms of health care, information, and agency exacerbate their death-making and disabling functions. Law surfaces critical lessons along with defiant acts of humanity, love, and resilience, inviting readers to not turn away from the horrors of prisons but instead to turn toward futures free of them.”
Andrea J. Ritchie, co-lead COVID19 Policing Project, co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization, and co-author of No More Police: A Case for Abolition
Corridors of Contagion is an expertly reported account of the malice and incompetence that defined how US prisons and jails responded to the pandemic. Guided by the voices of incarcerated people, journalist Victoria Law shows incontrovertibly what abolitionists on both sides of the walls insisted in March 2020: prison is incompatible with public health.”
Dan Berger, author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey
“Victoria Law has meticulously and compassionately documented the often-ignored ways in which the pandemic, in tandem with the brutality of the criminalization system, has wreaked havoc on incarcerated people. Powerfully written and deeply reported, Corridors of Contagion is both a heartbreaking chronicle of injustice and a profound celebration of how people take care of each other in dire times. This book is an essential tool in our struggle to avoid repeating a lethal chapter in history.”
Maya Schenwar, co-author of Prison by Any Other Name
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Victoria Law is an author and freelance journalist focusing on the intersections of incarceration, gender and resistance. Her books include Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reform, and “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE U.S. WORKING CLASS
From Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century
By Paul Le Blanc Illustrations by Mike Alewitz Haymarket Books (March 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466252 • US $17 • 205 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Noting that standard accounts of US history often pay little attention to the working class, labor historian Paul Le Blanc presents a colorful, fact-filled history that concentrates on the struggles and achievements of that often-neglected laboring majority. Employing a blend of economic, social, and political history, Le Blanc shows how important labor issues have been and continue to be in the forging of our nation’s history. Within a broad analytical framework he highlights issues of class, gender, race, and ethnicity, and includes the views of key figures of US labor, including Cesar Chavez, Eugene V. Debs, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Samuel Gompers, Woody Guthrie, “Big Bill” Haywood, Langston Hughes, Mary “Mother” Jones, Martin Luther King Jr., George Meany, A. Philip Randolph, and Carl Sandburg.
In addition to the main narrative, a bibliographical essay directs readers to classic works and cutting-edge scholarship in the field of US labor history as well as to relevant fiction, poetry, and films for further exploration or study. The book’s substantial glossary offers clear definitions and thought-provoking mini-essays for almost two hundred terms, from the most basic to the most complex and technical.
PRAISE:
“[An] exceptional book…not just for scholars or even for students, but for the working class. Such books are rare.”
Labor Notes
“Le Blanc displays a radical optimism throughout his book. . . . Paul Le Blanc’s book is a good teacher; it is our duty to see to it that the right students read it.”
Monthly Review
“Although most books that consider the ‘working class’ are usually devoted to studying or portraying the poor, Le Blanc’s book takes a much broader view. For Le Blanc, working class and labor are synonymous. His aim is to make the history of labor in the U.S. more accessible to students and the general reader. He succeeds by outlining major events in the history of the US, then showing the role of labor in shaping them or describing their impact on labor. Le Blanc’s primer not only informs but should also prove to be a helpful resource.”
Booklist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paul Le Blanc is author of a number of widely-read studies, including Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, and Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience. With Michael Yates he has written the widely-acclaimed A Freedom Budget for All Americans. He co-edited a selection of Leon Trotsky’s Writings in Exile.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467853 • $19 • 5 in x 8 in • 312 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This engaging and rich collection of essays and readings concentrates on the connections between racial justice and economic justice, but also explores the dynamic intersections of race, class, and gender oppression.
Paul Le Blanc skillfully introduces and analyzes primary source texts from important figures in African American radical history: Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, C. L. R. James, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Ella Baker, and others. The combination of these voices from history and Le Blanc’s insightful commentary makes this an invaluable resource for activists and scholars alike.
PRAISE:
“A timely weapon in the fight against racism.”
Chris Clement, Against the Current
Praise for Lenin and the Revolutionary Party:
“A work of unusual strength and coherence, inspired not by academic neutrality but by the deep conviction that there is much to learn from the actual ideas and experiences of Lenin and the revolutionary party he led.” —Michael Löwy
Praise for Revolution, Democracy, Socialism:
“We desperately need the resurrection and revival of the kind of strategic thinking and principled commitment that Lenin epitomized in the era of 1917, and all that it promised. For those interested in this rebirth of the politics of alternative to capitalism, Paul Le Blanc’s account of the democratic, socialist, and revolutionary Lenin will prove indispensable. Reading it is a reminder that what is, need not be, and that what has, seemingly, failed, can be reconstituted anew.” —Bryan Palmer
Praise for Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience:
“Looking back at the tumultuous events associated with revolutionary Marxism in the past century, Paul Le Blanc offers us an insightful, sympathetic, and even-handed assessment of the sources of its dynamism as well as the causes of its decline.” —Walden Bello
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paul Le Blanc is a professor of History at La Roche College, has written on and participated in the U.S. labor, radical and civil rights movements, and is author of such books as Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience, and Lenin and the Revolutionary Party.
FROM MARX TO GRAMSCI
A Reader in Revolutionary Marxist Politics
Second Edition
By Paul Le Blanc Haymarket Books (April 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466238 • US $22 • 404 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From Marx to Gramsci offers a readable introduction to the historical contexts, lives, and revolutionary ideas of six central thinkers in the Marxist tradition—Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, V. I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Antonio Gramsci. A clear and well-documented introduction demonstrates how their varied contributions represent a revolutionary Marxist synthesis, providing an understanding of capitalist development, a theory of the labor movement, a strategy for revolution, and a conception of the transition to socialism. The bulk of the volume provides a representative sampling of Marxist writings offering insights into the dynamics of history, politics, society, and economics, with an emphasis on struggles for social change. From Marx to Gramsci concludes with a searching discussion, drawing from various critics of Marxism and realities of the late twentieth century, of whether revolutionary Marxism actually has a future.
PRAISE:
“This is an extremely valuable volume. It gathers in one place material from various sources and makes it accessible to the serious student. The scholarly apparatus—bibliography, short biographies, and introductory essays—makes it especially useful both for the general reader and for teachers in the field. It should make a useful contribution in our struggle for human freedom.”
Dennis Brutus, South African poet and revolutionary activist
“The power of this book lies in Le Blanc’s excellent selection and presentation of some of the most fundamental ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Gramsci. His choice of references and the framework for his selection rest on the premise that the central pivot of Marxism is ‘proletarian revolutionary practice.’”
Gill Hubbard, International Socialism
“The best available tool for revitalizing the consideration of socialist practice in our study groups and classrooms.”
Alan Wald, Radical Teacher
“A most welcome and needed introduction to Marxist politics from a revolutionary viewpoint . . . for students
and activists.”
Michael Löwy, Monthly Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paul Le Blanc is author of a number of widely-read studies, including Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, and Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience. With Michael Yates he has written the widely-acclaimed A Freedom Budget for All Americans. He has co-edited a selection of Leon Trotsky’s Writings in Exile.
By Paul Le Blanc Haymarket Books (Spring 2017)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466825 • $22.00 • 304 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Animated by the conviction that the Left is “as American as apple pie,” this rich collection of essays highlights radical traditions that helped to shape US history in the direction of genuine “liberty and justice for all.”
These essays—touching on the Marxist-tinged anarchism of the Haymarket martyrs to the predecessors and heirs of the Occupy Wall Street movement—give a vibrant sense of the central role of the Left in social movements and struggles of the past and present that generated remarkable transformations. Left Americana considers both the limitations and successes for activists from the Socialist and Communist parties, Christian Socialists, Maoists, Trotskyists, and the “New Left” activists of the 1960s and ’70s in creating profound social and political change.
PRAISE:
“In Left Americana, a distinguished scholar-activist offers a fascinating field trip through territory too often treated as a factional battlefield or neglected and forgotten.”
Paul Buhle, retired lecturer, Brown University, and author of Marxism in the United States
“The future of the radical past is in good hands with Paul Le Blanc. His new collection of writings is a marvelous stroll through the landscape of the Left, a feat of historical reconstruction around an ambitious spectrum of themes.”
Alan Wald, author of American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War
“Left Americana offers an open-minded overview of select experiences and thinkers in the context of “what is to be done” in America. Le Blanc does not seek or offer a formula; he simply asks that leftists think anew about what kind of revolutionary organization can overcome the global triumph of capitalism. How can an organization be thoroughly democratic yet disciplined enough to be successful without just replicating the authoritarian society it wishes to replace? What specific national factors must American radicals take into account? The only given in Le Blanc’s view is that a viable American left must exemplify the values and governance of the new society it advocates.”
International Socialist Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paul Le Blanc, Professor of History at La Roche College, is author of A Short History of the U.S. Working Class; Work and Struggle: Voices of U.S. Labor Radicalism; and Choice Award winner A Freedom Budget for All Americans.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464647 • US $24 • 5 3/4 in x 8 3/4 in • 381 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
For generations, historians have debated the best way to understand V. I. Lenin’s role in shaping the Bolshevik party in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. At their worst, these studies locate his influence in the forcefulness of his personality. At their best, they show how Lenin moved other Bolsheviks through patient argument and political debate. Yet, remarkably few have attempted to document the ways his ideas changed, or how they were in turn shaped by the party he played such a central role in building.
In this thorough, concise, and accessible introduction to Lenin’s theory and practice of revolutionary politics, Paul Le Blanc gives a vibrant sense of the historical context of the socialist movement (in Russia and abroad) from which Lenin’s ideas about revolutionary organization spring. What emerges from Le Blanc’s partisan yet measured account is an image of a collaborative, ever adaptive, and dynamically engaged network of revolutionary activists who formed the core of the Bolshevik party.
PRAISE:
“A work of unusual strength and coherence, inspired not by academic neutrality but by the deep conviction that there is much to learn from the actual ideas and experiences of Lenin.”
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467815 • US $19.00 • 5 1/2 in x 8 1/2 • 240 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Revolutionary Studies is an insightful and accessible volume that explores the critical interrelationships between revolutionary theory and practice.
This collection of essays examines key concepts in Marxist thought through the ideas of significant twentieth-century revolutionary figures and movements. The book delves into definitions of the working class, social identities, democracy, capitalism, and socialism, among other concepts. Paul Le Blanc also applies these understandings to the Russian, Chinese, Nicaraguan, Indian, and South African revolutionary and postrevolutionary experiences and draws out common themes from these movements that serve as lessons for the struggles of today.
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:
Praise for Lenin and the Revolutionary Party:
“A work of unusual strength and coherence, inspired not by academic neutrality but by the deep conviction that there is much to learn from the actual ideas and experiences of Lenin and the revolutionary party he led.” Michael Löwy
Praise for Revolution, Democracy, Socialism:
“We desperately need the resurrection and revival of the kind of strategic thinking and principled commitment that Lenin epitomised in the era of 1917, and all that it promised. For those interested in this rebirth of the politics of alternative to capitalism, Paul Le Blanc’s account of the democratic, socialist, and revolutionary Lenin will prove indispensable. Reading it is a reminder that what is, need not be, and that what has, seemingly, failed, can be reconstituted anew.” Bryan Palmer
Praise for Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience:
“Looking back at the tumultuous events associated with revolutionary Marxism in the past century, Paul Le Blancoffers us an insightful, sympathetic, and even-handed assessment of the sources of its dynamism as well as the causes of its decline.” Walden Bello
Praise for A Short History of the US Working Class
“Exceptional book . . . not just for scholars or even for students, but for the working class. Such books are rare.”
Labor Notes
“Le Blanc’s primer not only informs but should also prove to be a helpful resource.”
Booklist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paul Le Blanc is a professor of History at La Roche College, has written on and participated in the U.S. labor, radical and civil rights movements, and is author of Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience, as well as Lenin and the Revolutionary Party and many other books on socialist theory.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642590340 • US $20.00 • 6 x 9 in • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Rosa Luxemburg, brilliant early 20th century German revolutionary, comes alive in a rich set of essays on her life, ideas, and lasting influence. The essays deal not only with her remarkable contributions to political, social and economic theory, but also touch on her vibrant personality and intimate friendships.
This collection, the fruit of more than four decades of involvement with Luxemburg’s work, simultaneously showcases her penetratingly intellectual, political and deeply humanistic qualities.
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:
Praise for Lenin and the Revolutionary Party:
“A work of unusual strength and coherence, inspired not by academic neutrality but by the deep conviction that there is much to learn from the actual ideas and experiences of Lenin and the revolutionary party he led.”
Michael Löwy
Praise for Revolution, Democracy, Socialism:
“We desperately need the resurrection and revival of the kind of strategic thinking and principled commitment that Lenin epitomized in the era of 1917, and all that it promised. For those interested in this rebirth of the politics of alternative to capitalism, Paul Le Blanc’s account of the democratic, socialist, and revolutionary Lenin will prove indispensable. Reading it is a reminder that what is, need not be, and that what has, seemingly, failed, can be reconstituted anew.”
Bryan Palmer
Praise for Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience:
“Looking back at the tumultuous events associated with revolutionary Marxism in the past century, Paul Le Blanc offers us an insightful, sympathetic, and even-handed assessment of the sources of its dynamism as well as the causes of its decline.”
Paul Le Blanc is a professor at La Roche College and the author of many books including October Song, Left Americana and From Marx to Gramsci and is the editor of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Lenin was perhaps the greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century, leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the central founder of modern Communism. These clearly written essays offer a succinct account of his life and times and a stimulating engagement with his ideas.
PRAISE:
“For more than a century Lenin has been a constant source of inspiration for workers and revolutionaries striving to shape democratic and equitable societies throughout the world. Unfinished Leninism is a powerful and stimulating guide to Lenin’s political thought and abiding legacy that is essential reading for students and activists who are striving to realize an ethical and revolutionary democratic society today.”
Immanuel Ness, Ours to Master and To Own and Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest.
“Illuminating much misunderstood aspects of Lenin’s legacy with flair and originality, Paul Le Blanc breathes new vigor into a century-old approach to social transformation. A major addition to our understanding of twenty-first century socialism.”
John Riddell, editor, Toward the United Front
“One doesn’t have to be a Leninist to read and appreciate Paul Le Blanc’s brilliant essays. This is indeed an outstanding study of Lenin’s ideas, his relation to Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, as well as his unfinished democratic revolutionary legacy.”
Michael Löwy, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.
“Paul Le Blanc likes to “spin his remarks around quotations”, and luckily he is a great quoter. He finds eloquent comments from a century’s worth of activists and historians, and engages with them passionately. He lets us have our own voice (I say “us” because I am honored to be among those quoted) and yet weaves all the quotations into a searchingly individual view of what it means to be a leftist and a self-proclaimed Leninist in the twenty-first century. And indeed, his conception of the way forward for the left centers on listening, and then on presenting one’s own view forthrightly — on conducting an adult conversation about life-and-death issues. To read his book is to join in his questing interrogation of past, present, and future.”
Lars Lih, author Lenin Rediscovered
“Unfinished Leninism is a stimulating book on the life and ideas of Lenin but also on the history and future of the doctrine connected with his name.”
Ron Blom, De Socialist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paul Le Blanc is a professor of History at La Roche College, and has written widely on radical movements.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642590302 • US $17.00 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 170 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An in-depth look at Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the pre-existing crisis that conditioned this historic disaster.
The concept of aftershocks is often used in the context of earthquakes to describe the jolts felt after the initial quake, but truly no disaster is ever a singular event. This volume documents the many shocks that Puerto Ricans endured before, during, and after Hurricane Maria. Bringing together scholars, activists, artists, and journalists, Aftershocks of Disaster examines not just the effects of the wind and rain, but also the impact of what followed: state failure, social abandonment, capitalization on human misery, and the collective trauma produced by a botched federal response
PRAISE:
“In this gripping collection of essays, poems and photos, Aftershocks of Disaster captures both the roots of Puerto Rico’s current crisis in its continuing colonial status and the determination of the island’s people to persevere and forge a better future.”
Juan González, author of Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, and co-host of Democracy Now!
“Broad in scope, passionate, and urgent, Aftershocks is a necessary anthology of Puerto Ricans telling the story not just of Maria but of resistance to colonialism, austerity and disaster capitalism.”
Molly Crabapple
“Hurricane Maria was a major disaster. It is also, potentially, a transformative event. The contributors to this powerful volume explain how big structural forces – climate change, colonialism, corruption, and capitalism – contributed to the devastation, but they also chart a radical path forward, towards a more just and sustainable world.”
Eric Klinenberg, author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
“For those of us who were forced out of Puerto Rico and who watched the hurricane from outside, this book provides beautiful and painful clarity about how we got here and the struggles behind our survival.”
Rossana Rodríguez Sánchez, Boricua Activist, artist and Chicago Council member
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Yarimar Bonilla is a political anthropologist, professor, and contributing writer to the New York Times. Both an accomplished scholar and a prominent public intellectual, Yarimar is a leading voice on questions of Caribbean and Latinx politics. She is a regular columnist in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día and a frequent contributor to publications such as The Washington Post, The Nation, and The New Yorker. Bonilla is a professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. Her website is https://yarimarbonilla.com.
Marisol LeBrón is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching focus on social inequality, policing, violence, and protest. She is the author of Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico, which examines the growth of punitive governance in contemporary Puerto Rico.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642597028 • US $17.99 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 120 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From liberal to the economy the terms used by pundits and politicians to explain our civic structures tend to obscure as much as they reveal about the reality they ostensibly describe. Yet the enduring vocabulary of radical movement-building can be equally opaque when filtered through both the distortions of the status quo and the partisan interests of the activist left. How do we make sense of terms like socialism and intersectional that are so routinely used and abused by such a wide array of commentators from across the political spectrum?
Keywords for Capitalism is a probing and insightful guide designed to equip readers with the tools to do just that. Leary takes a wit-sharpened scalpel to the evasions, neologisms, and half-truths that crowd ‘the discourse’ and reveals the ideology of the mainstream political media that lies just below the surface. In the process he also carefully leads readers through the very real debates about the words that really do mean something, attentively distinguishing the substance worth preserving from the froth that should be dismissed.
This masterful dressing down of corporate media jargon is accompanied by over thirty illustrations that amplify and augment Leary’s searing words.
PRAISE:
“John Patrick Leary is our most valuable lexicographer of capitalism, a cross between Ambrose Bierce, whose Devil’s Dictionary kept wry track of the action words that concealed the hypocrisies of power, and Raymond Williams, whose original Keywords helped sharpen the terms of critical theory. Leary’s previous book, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism mordantly skewered neoliberalism’s linguistic conceits. In his follow-up, Keywords for Capitalism, Leary is still filleting vanities. But he’s also given us a serious and much needed handbook to help those who want to challenge capital to avoid falling into its semantic sand traps.”
Greg Grandin
Praise forKeywords: The New Language of Capitalism:
“A sharp recent book.”
The New York Times
“Leary’s Keywords is definitely stimulating and well worth a read….”
Naked Capitalism
“The extent to which the language of the market has appropriated so many aspects of our lives is both fascinating and troubling. Because it’s so ubiquitous we use this language without questioning its deeper meaning, some of which, as Leary illustrates, is less than benign.”
The Independent, Santa Barbara
“As [Leary] explores what our language has looked like, and the ugliness now embedded in it, [he] invites us to imagine what our language could emphasize, what values it might reflect. What if we fought ‘for free time, not ”flexibility”; for free health care, not “wellness”; and for free universities, not the “marketplace of ideas”?’ His book reminds us of the alternatives that persist behind these keywords: our managers may call us as ‘human capital,’ but we are also workers. We are also people. ‘Language is not merely a passive reflection of things as they are,’ Leary writes. ‘[It is] also a tool for imagining and making things as they could be.‘’
The Outline
“[Leary] has written a clever, even witty examination of the manipulation of language in these days of neoliberal or late stage capitalism. Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism reminds the reader that those who control the language can more easily control the culture while also providing that reader with the tools needed to decipher the capitalist class’s manipulation of the words we use.”
John Patrick Leary is the author of A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the U.S. Imagination (2016) and Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (2018). He is the author of “Loose Talk,” a column on language and culture in The New Republic.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608469628• US $13.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in• 265 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism chronicles the rise of a new vocabulary in the twenty-first century. From Silicon Valley to the White House, from primary school to higher education, and from the factory floor to the church pulpit, we are all called to be innovators and entrepreneurs, to be curators of an ever-expanding roster of competencies. Think of the zealotry of the disruptive entrepreneur and the resilience of the agile thought-leader for a sense of the ideal personality traits of our time: flexible, inexhaustible, and never not at work. Many of these words have a secret history that informs their modern usage in surprising ways—innovation was once “false prophecy,” and before “stakeholder” crossed the lips of a single non-profit director it was used by conservative economists opposed to the New Deal.
In a series of short essays on terms like “entrepreneur,” “sustainability,” “artisanal,” and “synergy,” Keywords uses the vocabulary of neoliberalism to discover the contemporary spirit of capitalism. Each entry chronicles the penetration of market logic into the nearly every aspect of our everyday branded lives—even realms like church and summer camp that were once secure from the rat-race of market-driven competition. Each entry explores a popular term that displays an affinity for hierarchy, competition, “the marketplace,” and the virtual technologies of our time. The keywords all share a celebration of decisive “leadership,” dreamy artistry, prophetic “vision,” and an inexhaustible commitment to work: the pillars of an ideal innovative self.
PRAISE:
“John Patrick Leary’s bracing study of the market regime’s signature catchphrases and word clouds allows us to see how the dogmas of late capitalism increasingly shape not merely the taken-for-granted order of things but also the very language we might otherwise employ to challenge that order. Still, even as Leary’s dogged philology points us toward grim conclusions, his critical voice also showcases the best uses our common tongue can serve—calling out the lies and cruelties of the patois of the capitalist market for what they are. Keywords is a worthy successor to the groundbreaking work of Raymond Williams, and deserves just as wide a readership.”
Chris Lehmann, author of Rich People Things
“John Patrick Leary has written a history of the present in the form of lexicon of its keywords. Resilience, flexibility, passion, wellness, synergy, and dozens more – he explains the political work done by words that fuel and beset our imaginations, that hail and exhort us to keep working and buying things and paying our debts in times of crisis, decline, and uncertainty about the future. We don’t have nearly enough bulwarks against despair. This book is it!”
Sarah Brouillette, author of Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace
“In this masterful dissection of capitalism’s modern lexicon, John Patrick Leary elucidates the ideas—and ideology—shaping our contemporary political moment.”
Nicole Aschoff, author of The New Prophets of Capital
“If you feel like you’re drowning in the endless torrent of capitalist bullshit, turn to this excellent glossary which explains what all those terms really mean. Dip into it, use it as a reference, or read it cover to cover – however you approach it, you’ll find it immensely clarifying (and sanity-restoring).”
Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer
“Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism reminds the reader that those who control the language can more easily control the culture while also providing that reader with the tools needed to decipher the capitalist class’s manipulation of the words we use.”
John Patrick Leary is Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. and Latin American literature. He is the author of A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the U.S. Imagination (2016) and numerous scholarly articles and essays.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859905 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • $14.95 • 191 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was hiding from the police during the 1917 Russian Revolution while he finished State and Revolution. Lenin’s most widely read—and most misunderstood—book describes the “monstrous oppression of the working people by the state” and how capitalism transforms whole areas of the globe into “military convict prisons for workers.” State and Revolution defends Marx and Engels’s argument that workers must dismantle, or “smash” capitalist states through revolution from below, and replace them with radically democratic states.
The new edition features an introduction and hundreds of explanatory annotations by Tood Chretien that place Lenin’s work in its historical context. Chretien provides insight into some of the book’s most controversial points, many of which are still being debated in movements today, from the Arab Spring revolutions to upheavals in Greece and Venezuela, to the fight against mass incarceration in the United States.
State and Revolution is an indispensable guide to confronting the political and bureaucratic structures that stand between humanity and the creation of a socialist world based on fulfilling human need. No revolutionary should be without it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
V.I. Lenin (1870-1924) was a leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution and wrote extensively on the issues facing the socialist movement of his time.
An activist in San Francisco for many years, Todd Chretien has been involved in numerous movements for social justice, including those for immigrant rights and opposition to the death penalty.
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Hardcover • ISBN-13: 9780865719545 • US $34.99 • 15 in x 22 in • 464 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
As our civilization careens toward climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. The dominant worldview of disconnection, which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world, has been invalidated by modern science.
Award-winning author, Jeremy Lent, investigates humanity’s age-old questions – Who am I? Why am I? How should I live? – from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom.
The result is a breathtaking accomplishment: a rich, coherent worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world. It offers a compelling foundation for a new philosophical framework that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on a flourishing Earth.
The Web of Meaning is for everyone looking for deep and coherent answers to the crisis of civilization.
PRAISE:
“One of the most brilliant and insightful minds of our age, Jeremy Lent has written one of the most essential and compelling books of our time. The Web of Meaning invites us to rethink at the deepest level who we are as a species and what we might become.”
David Korten, author, When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
“The Web of Meaning is both a profound personal meditation on human existence and, as its title implies, a tour-de-force weaving together of historic and contemporary world-wide secular and spiritual thought on the deepest question of all: why are we here?”
Gabor Maté M.D., author, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
“We need, now more than ever, to figure out how to make all kinds of connections. This book can help-—and therefore it can help with a lot of the urgent tasks we face.”
Bill McKibben, author, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
“The Web of Meaning is a book of radical and profound wisdom. We are in a desperate need of an inspiring and an integrated new worldview, appropriate for the Age of Ecology. This book adequately answers that need. This book is a magnificent manifesto for a regenerative culture and for an ecological civilisation. Jeremy is showing us a way out of the old story of separation and disconnection. He leads us towards a new story of interconnection. The book beautifully addresses some of the most complex questions of life. I found the book like a friend and a companion in the journey of transformation.”
Satish Kumar, Editor Emeritus, Resurgence & Ecologist and Founder of Schumacher College.
“There are so many ways to understand the world, and so many levels to be integrated, that everyone can use the guidance of Jeremy Lent. Moving from the ancient Tao to modern neuroscience and everything in between, he boldly weaves deep insights together to envision a better world.”
Frans de Waal, author, Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
“A widely ranging, deeply penetrating, and healingly prescriptive consideration of how to reposition humanity within the world. Lent’s ideas, drawn from all around the globe from antiquity to the present, provide a vision for a better shot at survival and a life that is worthwhile for our time—and for the rest of time.”
Carl Safina, author, Beyond Words and Becoming Wild
“It is hard to build new regenerative narratives that honor the old without being in extractive relation to non-western lands and peoples, but this book is a damn good start. This book is a good place to sit for anybody interested in binding the wounds of thoughtless progress and allowing the emergence of new patterns of being.
Tyson Yunkaporta, author, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
“With clarity, scholarship and passion Jeremy Lent rejects the ill-founded ideological cynicism of neoliberal capitalism, which is causing the unfolding planetary-wide ecological and social catastrophes that we are all witnessing. Based on solid science, the book is a long argument that offers a viable and hopeful alternative – an integrated, practical approach for constructing a new ecological civilization that draws on Buddhist, Neo-Confucian and Indigenous philosophies and stresses the interconnectedness of all life. It is a wide-ranging synthesis written for all those who have not given up on a moral stand and can be spurred into action.”
Eva Jablonka, author, Evolution in Four Dimensions
“At this precarious moment in time, science has finally advanced beyond the separation of mind and matter. The Web of Meaning lays the foundation for a true world culture which is solidly scientific, yet profoundly spiritual, telling a contemporary story of a meaningful universe that includes and embraces humankind. This book is a landmark work for a time that urgently needs to understand that the cosmos is our home and not our enemy to be conquered.”
Andreas Weber, author, The Biology of Wonder
“The Web of Meaning is a call for recognizing what both our newest science and our oldest spiritual traditions tell us: that we are all inextricably interconnected with one another and with nature. This thoughtful and passionate work is an important contribution to the urgently needed cultural shift from domination to partnership.”
Riane Eisler, author, The Chalice and the Blade, The Real Wealth of Nations, and Nurturing Our Humanity
“The Web of Meaning is a profound book of wisdom. If we are ever to remember how to live lives of meaning and grace, it will be in great measure because of books like this one.”
Derrick Jensen, author, The Myth of Human Supremacy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jeremy Lent is the award-winning author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning and Requiem of the Human Soul. A former internet company CEO, he is founder of the non-profit Liology Institute dedicated to fostering an integrated, life-affirming worldview. He lives in Berkeley, California.
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Paper • ISBN 9780679740490 • US $19.95 • 496 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A mesmerizing challenge to orthodox cosmology with powerful implications not only for cosmology itself but also for our notions of time, God, and human nature — with a new Preface addressing the latest developments in the field.
Far-ranging and provocative, The Big Bang Never Happened is more than a critique of one of the primary theories of astronomy — that the universe appeared out of nothingness in a single cataclysmic explosion ten to twenty billion years ago. Drawing on new discoveries in particle physics and thermodynamics as well as on readings in history and philosophy, Eric J. Lerner confronts the values behind the Big Bang theory: the belief that mathematical formulae are superior to empirical observation; that the universe is finite and decaying; and that it could only come into being through some outside force. With inspiring boldness and scientific rigor, he offers a brilliantly orchestrated argument that generates explosive intellectual debate.
PRAISE:
“Lerner does a fine job poking holes in Big Bang thinking and provides a historical perspective as well, linking scientific theories to trends in philosophy, politics, religion and even economics…a most readable book.”
Chicago Tribune
“From Steven Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, numerous science popularizations have expounded the Big Bang Theory for the origin of the universe as indisputable fact. Readers of those books will find this one startling and intriguing. Lerner, a plasma physicist, points out flaws in the Big Bang model and proposes an alternative theory: an eternal, self-sustaining “plasma” universe where electromagnetic fields within conducting gases provide other, simpler explanations for observed phenomena. His contention that the Big Bang is merely a repackaged creation myth is presumptuous, but well argued. To present a current scientific controversy to a general audience risks, on one hand, misleading the public and, on the other, circumventing the peer review process. This book, however, makes valid points in a convincing manner and does neither.”
Gregg Sapp, Library Journal
“Plasma physicist Lerner opens one of science’s inner rooms to a popular audience in this headline-making history of time, space and the humanistic sociology of science.”
Publishers Weekly
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Eric J. Lerner is a scientist, president of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Inc., and an author of numerous works of popular science and peer-reviewed scientific papers.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464609 • US $15.95 • 5 5/8 x 7 7/8 in • 166 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Hanna Lévy-Hass, a Yugoslavian Jew, emerged a defiant survivor of the Holocaust. Her observations, recorded in her own incomparable voice, shed new light on the lived experience of Nazi internment. Lévy-Hass stands alone as the only resistance fighter to report on her own experience inside the camps, and she does so with unflinching clarity in dealing with the political and social divisions inside Bergen-Belsen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Born in Sarajevo in 1913, Hanna Lévy-Hass became involved in the clandestine Communist movement while studying in Belgrade in the 1930s. There, she was instilled with a passion for freedom and equality, which would guide her work and her perspective throughout the rest of her life. She was taken from Montenegro by the Nazis to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944. Her diary has been published in many languages.
Amira Hass, the daughter of Hanna Lévy-Hass, is an Israeli journalist who is best known for her columns in Ha’aretz. She is the only Israeli journalist living and writing from with Occupied Territories. She is also the author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza and the recipient of many awards for her writing. Here she offers a substantial introduction to her mother’s work that addresses the meaning of the Holocaust for Israelis and Palestinians today.
PRAISE:
“A compelling document of historic importance which shows, with remarkable composure, that ethical thought about what it means to be human can be sustained in the most inhuman conditions. Hanna Lévy-Hass teaches us how a politics of compassion and justice can rise out of the camps as the strongest answer to the horrors of the twentieth century.”
Jacqueline Rose, Queen Mary University of London; author, The Question of Zion
“Diary of Bergen-Belsen is a poignant testimonial whose direct and clear-eyed observations on life in Hell belong in the select company of Primo Levi and Margarete Buber-Neumann, whose recently translated Under Two Dictators is the only comparable account in English of the female experience at Bergen-Belsen. Hannah Lévy-Hass was clearly a quite extraordinary woman — brave, honest, and undiminished in her idealism and hopes: qualities that also characterize her daughter Amira, a fearless Israeli journalist who introduces the Diary with a moving account of her mother’s life and death.”
Tony Judt, University Professor and Director of The Remarque Institute, New York University; historian and author of, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
“Diary of Bergen-Belsen vividly captures the tempestuous spirits of one of the darkest places on earth during one of the darkest times in history. Hanna Lévy-Hass writes with captivation of unthinkable brutality. Her careful writings have created an unforgettable and indispensable chronicle that will live on for generations. She will help us remember, and to never forget.”
Edwin Black, author, IBM and the Holocaust
“Hanna Lévy-Hass’s Diary of Bergen-Belsen is a document of extraordinary authority, gripping and moving in equal measure. There are other diaries from the Nazi camps and ghettos, all of which require us to confront the writer’s experience in its merciless immediacy. But no other diary carries quite the same lessons of moral courage and political urgency as Lévy-Hass’s does, with her repeated attempts to salvage some form of solidarity out of the abyss of depravity and selfish individualism that engulfed Belsen’s inmates. This new edition includes a powerful foreword and afterword by Lévy-Hass’ daughter, Amira, who, without sentimentality or false analogy, links the struggles of her own present with those of her mother’s past.”
Jane Caplan, Professor of Modern European History, University of Oxford
“There are many testimonies of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, but very few have the quality and the strength of this diary from Bergen-Belsen by Hanna Lévy-Hass. A Jew and a member of the Resistance, Lévy-Hass belongs to the group of detainees that — as Primo Levi emphasized in The Drowned and the Saved — had the resources to preserve their humanity against the planned annihilation by the Nazi machine. You will find no resignation in these pages written at Bergen-Belsen in 1944-45 and describing the Nazi hell to which Hanna was able to escape by miracle. One regrets that, after this poignant text, Lévy-Hass did not write anything else, especially a full autobiography. But Hanna was and remained a fighter all her life. This volume features also and introduction and a long afterword by Lévy-Hass’ daughter, Amira. Amira Hass is internationally appreciated for her writings against the Israeli oppression of Palestine. Here she sketches a beautiful portrait of the exceptional woman that was her mother: cosmopolitan, cultivated, and politically involved. Lévy-Hass was first in the Yugoslavian Resistance, then in the Israeli communist movement, and finally she became a feminist activist. The history of the Holocaust is often reduced to a simple conflict between the persecutors and their victims, but it was a much more complex process. It was also the history of the struggle against the barbarism of twentieth century: and that is the reason why this diary is so important to us.”
Enzo Traverso, author, The Origins of Nazi Violence
“Bergen-Belsen represents the final stage of the Holocaust. At the end of the war, forced laborers too weak to work, Jews from neutral countries, and survivors of death marches from Auschwitz and other camps were dumped together under impossible conditions. After the gas chambers in the death camps were closed down, mass murder continued at Bergen-Belsen through other means. In March 1945, the final month before liberation, nearly 20,000 prisoners died there. Lévy-Hass described this form of genocide in her diary: ‘the slow, vile, calculated destruction by hunger, violence, terror, and deliberately sustained epidemics.’ Her rare description of the final months of the Holocaust is marked by political consciousness, moral understanding, and perceptive observation. Lévy-Hass has much to tell us of death and survival.”
Steve Hochstadt, Illinois College, author, Sources of the Holocaust
“This remarkable diary was composed by Hanna Lévy-Hass amidst the desolation of the universe of the Nazi concentration camps, eloquent testimony to the ethics of socialism that hardwired its author’s humanist resilience. Newly framed by her daughter’s moving memoirs of her parents, Diary of Bergen-Belsen documents both the passing of a generation and the continuities it leaves behind.”
Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History, Professor of History and German Studies, University of Michigan; author, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902493 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From the author of Abolish the Family, a provocative compendium of the feminisms we love to dismiss and making the case for the bold, liberatory feminist politics we’ll need to stand against fascism, nationalism, femmephobia, and cisness.
In recent years, “white feminism” and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that leaning in won’t make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need.
Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today’s anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategizing that is truly antifascist.
At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism.
PRAISE:
“Where would we be without Sophie Lewis? In a more impoverished political world. This book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in a rough and compelling vision of the feminist past, present, and future. Honest, brutal, historically comprehensive, and brilliant.”
Judith Butler, author of Who’s Afraid of Gender?
“Enemy Feminisms is a compelling, provocative, ferocious book that shreds one received wisdom after another in a poised balance of incisive argument and elegant writing. Sophie Lewis has become an indispensable thinker for our era.”
Torrey Peters, author of Detransition Baby
“Lewis’s Enemy Feminisms evidences the need for animosity between feminists and the histories of violence through which fascistic and reactionary accounts of feminism emerge. They warn us against the falsity of sisterhood, examining how and why we must be prepared to break with this myth in order to assert what feminism can and should do. With daring and inventive prose, they remind us that if ours is a liberatory vision, we must be able to identify our enemies.”
Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism Interrupted
“Lewis treats feminism not as an inherent moral good but as a thick tangle of partial, contradictory practices that must be judged on their material effects—and shows us how we might cut our way through. Fearsome and deeply needed.”
Andrea Long Chu, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic at New York magazine
“Sophie Lewis is sharp, bold, compassionate and fearless.”
Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex
“Enemy Feminisms expertly and painstakingly parses the historical and contemporary landscapes of reactionary fascist feminisms for our sake, and for the sake of a struggle we simply need to win.”
Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sophie Lewis is a writer. Her books, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, have been translated into nine languages. Sophie grew up in France, half-British, half-German, but now lives in Philadelphia and teaches online courses on utopian theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She also has a visiting affiliation with the Center for Research on Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She studied English Literature at Oxford University before pursuing graduate and postgraduate study in environmental theory, political science, and human geography, respectively at Oxford, the New School, and Manchester University. However, Lewis now counts herself an ex-academic. Although her writing still appears in journals like Feminist Theory, TSQ, and Signs, she is making her living writing free-lance for magazines like n+1, Harper’s, and the LRB, newspapers like the New York Times, and art websites like e-flux.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467273 • US $19 • 322 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Not In Our Genes provides a bold and biting critique of biological determinism and sociobiology. In refuting the claim that what individuals can and cannot do is fixed, in essence, by their genetic makeup, the authors offer an important reply to an argument raging far beyond the scientific world and widely affecting our society and our lives. This edition features a new introduction by the authors.
PRAISE:
“Informative, entertaining, lucid, forceful, frequently witty . . . never dull . . . should be read and remembered for a long time.”
New York Times Book Review
“The authors argue persuasively that biological explanations for why we act as we do are based on faulty (in some cases, fabricated) data and wild speculation..It is debunking at its best.”
Psychology Today
“An important and timely book”
Stephen Jay Gould
“This is a rip-roaring dismantling of the recent rise of biologistic interpretations of why we behave as we do. The three authors are among the most distinguished in their respective fields of expertise—genetics, neuroscience, and psychology. It is, without question, the best book of its kind and should be required reading for every responsible citizen.”
Ashley Montagu
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Richard C. Lewontin (1929-2021) was an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, academic and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the application of techniques from molecular biology, to questions of genetic variation. He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change and Biology as Ideology, and the co-author of The Dialectical Biologist (with Richard Levins).
Steven Rose is emeritus Professor of Biology and Neurobiology at the Open University and Gresham College, London. He established the Brain and Behavior Research Group and has focused his research on understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms of learning and memory. His research in this area has led to the publication of some 300 research papers and various international honors and medal awards including the Sechenov and Anokhin Medals (Russia) and the Ariens Kappers medal (The Netherlands). In 2002 he was awarded the Biochemical Society medal for excellence in public communication of science.
Leon J. Kamin is an American psychologist known for his contributions to learning theory and his critique of estimates of the heritability of IQ. He studied under Richard Solomon at Harvard and discovered several important facts about conditioning, including the “Kamin Effect” and the “blocking effect.” Kamin was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and had to find employment in Canada, where he chaired the Psychology Department at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. When he was removed from the blacklist in 1968, he returned to the US and chaired Princeton University’s Department of Psychology and later the Psychology Department at Northeastern University in Boston, MA.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595857 • US $16.95 • 5.25 in x 7.5 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Speaking Out of Place asks us to reconceptualize both what we think “politics” is, and our relationship to it. Especially at this historical moment, when it is all too possible we will move from Trump’s fascistic regime to Biden’s anti- progressive centrism, we need ways to build off the tremendous growth we have seen in democratic socialism, and to gather strength and courage for the challenges, and opportunities that lie ahead.
PRAISE:
“Months after the most historic protests in our lifetimes, we continue to confront the same stubborn inequities, crises and catastrophes. This stubborn continuity compels us to reevaluate our common assumptions about the nature of the problem. It compels us to renew our political commitments to change but not necessarily in the same ways that we have before. Most of all, the ongoing suffering and despair in our societies compel us to think anew and creatively for effective, sometimes new and sometimes drawing on the historical ways that ordinary people have confronted the powerful. It compels us to be radical by grabbing hold at the root of our problem—a neoliberal, capitalist world order built on human suffering and abject inequality. David Palumbo-Liu’s Speaking Out of Place is a deeply moral and utterly human meditation on the nature of our despair but the means by which it can be transformed. Most of all, he argues that what is missing is our sense of place, belonging and mutuality that, when intact, showcases our connection and potential for solidarity in our shared struggle for a humane and just world. Is the exact book we need for the troubled historical moment through which we are living.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
“In the face of accelerating fascism and a planet on fire, David Palumbo-Liu provides a road map for finding our political voices by speaking “out of place.” This is an urgent call to seize the moment before it’s too late.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Not “A Nation of Immigrants,” Settler-Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion
“It’s not enough to be against the rising tide of authoritarianism and climate chaos. David Palumbo-Liu examines how only through “a positive obsession with justice” and a collective willingness to learn to speak a new language and remake the places do we have a chance at saving the planet and building the world we all need.”
Nick Estes, author of Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
“David Palumbo-Liu’s Speaking Out of Place is a wake-up call to the twin dangers of fascism and a no-less cruel and ecocidal neoliberalism. Brilliant, clear-eyed, wide-ranging and erudite without being esoteric, this book is a vital assault on the repressive amnesia that obliterates the memory of even our most recent struggles. Palumbo-Liu reminds us that we already have all that we need to reimagine our societies and ourselves, to re-forge the solidarity necessary to get us through such catastrophic times, to make this planet a place where voices clamor outside of the violent control of capital, loudly and freely, alive.”
Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks: A Roadmap for the End of Time and The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine
“Speaking Out of Place is a radical and original reassessment of democratic deliberation and political transformation. Instead of treating “free speech” in simplistic terms, Palumbo-Liu examines the triad of voice, place, and space. This holistic analysis helps us understand who gets heard, where, and why. True democracy, Palumbo-Liu shows, is a raucous polyphony, a chorus emanating from specific communities and contexts and struggles that reverberates widely, unsettling and challenging those accustomed to controlling the terms of the debate.”
Astra Taylor, author of Remake the World
“David Palumbo-Liu’s most recent work is a clarion call, an incisive commentary on our times, and an impressive work of passion and moral clarity. Focusing on forms of contemporary oppression and new social movements, Palumbo-Liu insists upon the centrality of voice and place to the most pressing issues of our time. His writing draws on social and political theory, poetry, activist writing, to show us that the ideologies that still clutch us have as their primary concern “the individual” as economic actor, and “the market” and its profit-driven values as a poor way to define the public sphere. In contrast, he allies with those who are generating the value of human and humane interdependence, of commonly shared goods, and ideals of social and economic equality so often brutally dismissed as fairy tales. But in this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times. This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”
Judith Butler
“Fearless, timely, and necessary. In this bracing, multivalent analysis of our troubled political culture, David Palumbo-Liu offers us a clarion call to action. Reading it, I feel emboldened, encouraged, and powerfully amplified.”
Ruth Ozeki, author of Booker Finalist novel, A Tale for the Time Being“In Speaking out of Place David Palumbo-Liu has brought to the fore the type of text that is rare in our current culture. There is a sort of transversal vector in play that brings with it the unexpected and at the same time the familiar. It is a gem. I loved reading it.”
Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy
“David Palumbo-Liu gives us hope for a world on fire. Digging deep into our common humanity, he urges us to speak, to organize and to fight for justice wherever we live, and to stand down reaction wherever it resides. From Palestine to the Amazon, Palumbo-Liu reminds us to take back the planet that belongs to us, to love ourselves, and each other.“
Bill V. Mullen
“David Palumbo-Liu masterfully paints a global picture of the daunting challenges to our very survival. Rather than use the weight of that challenge to terrify us into action or to crush our hope, he pieces together the most quotidian stories of courage and resistances to show us that revolution is latent within us and that the technologies of our salvation are ones that we have long known and fiercely protected. Speaking Out of a Place is profoundly humane, self-aware in its humility, and generous in its thoughtful offerings. Palumbo-Liu reminds us that the horizon before us is not an end but an opportunity for new beginnings.”
Noura Erakat, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
“The historical and contemporary stories in Speaking Out of Place are as instructive as they are inspiring. Palumbo-Liu gives us a global landscape of many dimensions, pulling us into the infinite number of spaces we can disrupt, reshape, and build when we find the courage to insert our “unauthorized” voices,. The activists in this book, both well known and not, speak in words, in dance, in pictures, in food and even in silence. Read this, and raise your voice.”
Rinku Sen
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, and Professor of Comparative Literature, at Stanford University. Besides his academic books on race, culture, ethics and politics, he writes for Jacobin, Truthout, The Nation, the Guardian and other venues.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461899 • US $19 • 6 x 9 in • 215 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This collection of lively and insightful essays—including several translated into English for the first time—covers a wide range of topics and figures too often neglected by the dominant trends in Marxist literature. Löwy offers a unique exploration of the role of romanticism as one of the key sources of the Marxist critique of capitalist civilization. And he shows how Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, and Walter Benjamin all share an understanding of socialism as the only truly human alternative to the modern forms of exploitation and oppression found in a capitalist society. Similar themes are pursued in the engaging essays on religion, utopia, and other topics.
PRAISE:
“Only the Stalinist gospel of convenient quotations is dead, not Marxist writing. Michael Löwy illustrates the vitality of the latter. His collection of essays, combining scholarship with passion, impresses by its sweep and scope. It ranges from liberation theology to the problem of ‘progress’ in Walter Benjamin. And, since it tackles such issues as utopia and nationalism, the book is also highly topical.”
Daniel Singer, author, Deserter from Death
“Michael Löwy is unquestionably a tremendous figure in the decades-long attempt to recover an authentic revolutionary tradition from the wreckage of Stalinism, and these essays are very often powerful examples of this process.”
Dominic Alexander, Counterfire
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael Löwy is Research Director in Sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. He is the author of many books, including The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development (Haymarket Books, 2010) and, with Olivier Besancenot, Che Guevara: His Revolutionary Legacy.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608460687 • US $18 • 8.25 in x 5.25 in • 140 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Löwy’s book is the first attempt to analyze, in a systematic way, how the theories of uneven and combined development, and of the permanent revolution — inseparably linked — emerged in the writings of thinkers such as Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. Such radical reflections permit us to understand modern economic development across continents as a process of ferocious change, in which “advanced” and “backward” element fuse, come into tension, and collide — and how the resulting ruptures make it possible for the oppressed and exploited to change the world.
PRAISE:
“Thirty years ago Michael Löwy wrote a brilliant and accessible analysis of the emergence and application of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. This new edition of his book is even more relevant read in the context of the revolutionary uprisings in the Middle East today.”
Counterfire
“For newcomers and experienced scholars alike, the book serves as an effective short introduction to both the emergence of the [theory of permanent revolution], and it’s longer-term consequences in the twentieth century.”
Marx and Philosophy Review of Books
“Reading The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution by Marxist sociologist/philosopher Michael Löwy was at first like trying to find my way through the Grand Canyon at night: with lost brainwaves traversing the echo-chasms of my mind, bouncing back and forth, unclaimed. But after a short season of intense acclamation to the Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Bourgeoisie and Proletariat, I found myself secretly becoming a closet neo-Trotskyite. The book, first published in 1981 but shortened considerably for this latest version, is an in-depth look at Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and how it pertains to different Marxist revolutions through time.”
Karl Travis, Chico News & Reviews
“A painstaking analysis of the opposing concepts of ‘permanent revolution’ and ‘socialism in one country.’
The American Historical Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael Löwy is Research Director in Sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. He is the author of many books, including On Changing the World (Haymarket Books, 2012) and, with Olivier Besancenot, Che Guevara: His Revolutionary Legacy.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781933354354 • US $16.95 • 160 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Lydia Lunch relays in graphic detail the true psychic repercussions of sexual misadventure. From New York to London to New Orleans, Paradoxia is an uncensored, novelized account of one woman’s assault on men.
Lydia Lunch was the primary instigator of the No Wave Movement and the focal point of the Cinema of Transgression. A musician, writer, and photographer, she exposes the dark underbelly of passion confronting the lusty demons whose struggle for power and control forever stalk the periphery of our collective obsessions.
PRAISE:
“Paradoxia reveals that Lunch is at her best when she’s at her worst . . . [and] gives voice to her sometimes scary, frequently funny, always canny, never sentimental siren song.”
Barbara Kruger, Artforum
“Paradoxia is compelling, exhilarating, and infinitely readable.”
Paper
“Hubert Selby, Jr. famously said that he grew up feeling like a scream without a mouth. Lydia Lunch, one of his most celebrated—and most uncompromising—literary progeny, delivered scream, mouth, teeth, blood, hair, sperm, knife, and adrenaline in her purgatorial masterpiece Paradoxia.”
Jerry Stahl, from the Introduction
“Lydia Lunch is an American icon.”
Austin American-Statesman
“One of the 10 most influential performers of the 90’s.”
Boston Phoenix
“Miss Lunch was always an effective vocal performer. But rock has grown complacent again— even the underground rock that has borrowed so much from Miss Lunch’s various bands over the years. Perhaps it’s time for her to administer it a few more rude shocks.”
Robert Palmer, New York Times
“Lunch has defined the underground music and art scene for over thirty years. Predictable only in her unpredictability, she has exploited every creative outlet at her disposal, from film to books, photography to poetry.”
SF Weekly
“Lydia Lunch is one of your dumb-ass country’s greatest fucking commentators, period. Lydia, I totally salute you!’
Everett True, The Stranger
“Before Marilyn Manson, before Courtney Love and before all the MTV lightweights made rage and controversy mere cheap commodities, there was punk poet queen of extremities Lydia Lunch…and her volatile narratives on life, death and all the bits in between. Unmissable.”
Angela Lewis, The Independent (UK)
“On Queen of Siam, Lydia Lunch . . . surprises her fans and a legion of japing nonbelievers by delivering a record that covers all the bases so well that it’s beyond words like calculated . . . Lunch stays busy by proving she can ‘sing’ (for those who care about such irrelevancies) and conjuring up memories of various grotesques like Peggy Lee, Nancy Sinatra, Petula Clark and Marlene Dietrich (though camp she ain’t). Lunch’s lyrics, while sometimes suffused with Catholic guilt, recognize the absurdity of that guilt’s flagellant trappings. Lydia Lunch isn’t sleazy, and sports a sense of humor about her persona and her music that collects increments of charm through successive cuts. Queen of Siam is a class act all the way.”
Hailed by Time Out as “one of the greatest New York performers of all time,” Lydia Lunch defies categorization. Few contemporary artists have forged a unique and varied artistic vision as successfully, or forcibly, during her long and notorious career.
Since bursting onto the late 1970s New York City music scene at the age of 16 with her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Lunch has released over two hundred music recordings, either as a solo artist, in collaborations, or as guest artist. The poster-girl for the Whitney Museum of Art’s Underground Film Festival, she has appeared in more than fifty films, including the infamous, gut-wrenching films of director Richard Kern, with whom she worked in the 1980s. As a writer, she has published numerous works of literature, such as her 2007 novel Paradoxia (Akashic), which has been translated into 12 languages.
Lunch continues to record and tour the world with numerous music and spoken word projects, film work, and art exhibitions, and is the subject of “Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over,” a forthcoming feature documentary by acclaimed underground filmmaker Beth B.
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781609809430 • US $15.95 • 112 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“So Real It Hurts is the perfect title for this collection. It’s a mission statement. A few bleeding slices straight from the butcher shop. A sampler from an enormous archive of work that will, no doubt, be pored over by grad students, book lovers, film historians, music nerds and straight-up perverts a hundred years from now.”
—Anthony Bourdain, from the Introduction
Through personal essays, interviews, and poetic verse, punk musician and cultural icon Lydia Lunch claws and rakes at the reader’s conscience in this powerful, uninhibited feminist collection. Oscillating between provocative celebrations of her own defiant nature and nearly tender ruminations on the debilitating effects of poverty, abuse, and environmental pollution, along with a visceral revenge fantasy against misogynistic men, Lydia Lunch presents her exploits without apology, daring the reader to judge her while she details the traumas and trials that have shaped her into the legendary figure she’s become.
Inserted between these biting personal essays, Lunch’s thoughtful cultural insights convey a widely-shared desire to forestall inevitable cultural amnesia and solidify a legacy for her predecessors and peers. Her interview with Hubert Selby Jr. and profile of Herbert Hunke, her short unromanticized histories of No Wave and of the late Sixties, and her scathing examination of the monetization of counterculture (thanks, Vivienne Westwood!) all serve to reinforce the notion that, while it may appear that there are no more heroes, we are actually just looking for heroes in the wrong places. The worthy idols of the past have been obscured by more profitable historical narratives, but Lunch challenges us to dig deeper.
So Real It Hurts pulls the reader into a world that is entirely hers—one in which she exacts vengeance against predators with an enviable ease and exerts an almost-sexual dominance over authority, never permitting those with power to hold on to it too tightly.
PRAISE:
“Lunch holds nothing back, providing rebellious, raunchy personal stories, scorching perspectives on the notion of mandatory motherhood, a purging glimpse at the nightmare of insomnia, and other themes. Amid these punchy personal revelations, the author layers honed essays with a broader scope. . . [It] seethes with the kind of urgency that reflects Lunch at her strongest. Lunch fans will enjoy her unleashed musings and the healthy rage that abound in these fierce essays.”
Kirkus Reviews
“So Real It Hurts proves that more than 40 years into her career, [Lydia Lunch]’s lost none of her blistering anger and astringent eloquence. . . This slim collection of potent essays, profane rants and astute cultural critiques sometimes reads like the writings of a hypnotic Beat poet. . . they are confrontational, confessional, electrifying and unforgettable.”
Shelf Awareness
“Lunch’s work is defiant, thrilling and unflinching. Her latest release, So Real It Hurts, is just so: an anthology of new and established writings that include everything from violent feminist revenge fantasies to diatribes on pollution and politics (and yes, Trump) in the Anthropocene epoch. . . [Her] sense of humour is dark, delightful and revelatory.”
The Guardian
“Lydia Lunch’s new book is a feminist snapshot of our times…A feminist-anarchist manifesto that documents and critiques the modern age with a caustic, deliciously poisonous humor.”
i-D
“The collection is personal, it’s political, it’s self-indulgent, it’s empathic, it’s wise, its funny. It’s totally Lydia.”
The Pittsburgh Current
“Her prose is incantatory—a point is made, made again, sharpened, and stabbed. She delivers dark sermons of death, perversity, and need with relish. . . So Real It Hurtsmakes it obvious that Lunch has always been more than a heckler. She is a journalist at heart, a documentarian of the darkest impulses, unafraid to catalogue ugliness, to be ugly, and to mock.”
Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Lunch most definitely still works her dark magic via humour, horror and healing. . . It’s a full-on predatory psychic attack.”
Dazed
“Lydia Lunch is a legend unlike any other. The performance artist, writer and musician is a firework unto herself. . . she has an uncanny ability to fuse words together like bullets. She doesn’t hold back. She’s the author of over ten books and she’s now releasing So Real It Hurts, a collection of essays published with Seven Stories Press, which includes 20 essays from diaristic rants to political scribes, with an introduction written by Anthony Bourdain.”
The Face
“Calling the writing of Lydia Lunch ‘transgressive fiction’ falls way short of effectively categorizing the brutal, raw, obscene and honest words she bleeds. She has created her own genre of nonfiction and at present is its sole inhabitant.”
Michael Imperioli, actor and author of The Perfume Burned His Eyes
“Lydia Lunch’s utterly sane visionary madness goes right to the rotten core.”
Mark Cunningham, musician (Mars and Blood Quartet)
“Do read Charlotte Richardson Andrews’s interview with Lydia Lunch, in The Guardian. It may get you to order Lunch’s new collection of essays and other written material, ‘So Real It Hurts.”
The New York Times
“Her excoriating, confrontational writing and spoken word performances remain determinedly counter-cultural, never straying far from the anti-lineage of Céline, Burroughs, Bukowski and Selby Jr. ”
The Quietus
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR
“Lydia Lunch is an American icon.”
Austin American-Statesman
“One of the 10 most influential performers of the 90’s.”
Boston Phoenix
“Miss Lunch was always an effective vocal performer. But rock has grown complacent again— even the underground rock that has borrowed so much from Miss Lunch’s various bands over the years. Perhaps it’s time for her to administer it a few more rude shocks.”
Robert Palmer, New York Times
“Lunch has defined the underground music and art scene for over thirty years. Predictable only in her unpredictability, she has exploited every creative outlet at her disposal, from film to books, photography to poetry.”
SF Weekly
“Lydia Lunch is one of your dumb-ass country’s greatest fucking commentators, period. Lydia, I totally salute you!’
Everett True, The Stranger
“Before Marilyn Manson, before Courtney Love and before all the MTV lightweights made rage and controversy mere cheap commodities, there was punk poet queen of extremities Lydia Lunch…and her volatile narratives on life, death and all the bits in between. Unmissable.”
Angela Lewis, The Independent (UK)
“On Queen of Siam, Lydia Lunch . . . surprises her fans and a legion of japing nonbelievers by delivering a record that covers all the bases so well that it’s beyond words like calculated . . . Lunch stays busy by proving she can ‘sing’ (for those who care about such irrelevancies) and conjuring up memories of various grotesques like Peggy Lee, Nancy Sinatra, Petula Clark and Marlene Dietrich (though camp she ain’t). Lunch’s lyrics, while sometimes suffused with Catholic guilt, recognize the absurdity of that guilt’s flagellant trappings. Lydia Lunch isn’t sleazy, and sports a sense of humor about her persona and her music that collects increments of charm through successive cuts. Queen of Siam is a class act all the way.”
Hailed by Time Out as “one of the greatest New York performers of all time,” Lydia Lunch defies categorization. Few contemporary artists have forged a unique and varied artistic vision as successfully, or forcibly, during her long and notorious career.
Since bursting onto the late 1970s New York City music scene at the age of 16 with her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Lunch has released over two hundred music recordings, either as a solo artist, in collaborations, or as guest artist. The poster-girl for the Whitney Museum of Art’s Underground Film Festival, she has appeared in more than fifty films, including the infamous, gut-wrenching films of director Richard Kern, with whom she worked in the 1980s. As a writer, she has published numerous works of literature, such as her 2007 novel Paradoxia (Akashic), which has been translated into 12 languages.
Lunch continues to record and tour the world with numerous music and spoken word projects, film work, and art exhibitions, and is the subject of “Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over,” a forthcoming feature documentary by acclaimed underground filmmaker Beth B.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859363 • US $12 • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This new, authoritative introduction to Rosa Luxemburg’s two most important works presents the full text of Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike, with explanatory notes, appendices, and introductions.
One of the most important Marxist thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg is finding renewed interest among a new generation of activists and critics of global capitalism.
PRAISE:
“In this period of crisis, reevaluation, and renewal within the Left, the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg assume a greater vitality and relevance than ever before.”
Paul Le Blanc, author, Rosa Luxemburg: Reflections and Writings
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish-born revolutionary, was a leader of the socialist movement in Germany until her murder by counter-revolutionary troops in 1919.
Helen Scott is a professor of postcolonial literature at the University of Vermont.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
Language/Territory
Publisher
English in India
Daanish Books
Greek/worldwide
Polytropon
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
ISBN-13: 9781608462223 • Trade paper • 5.5 x 8.5 • US $16 • 297 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
How did a city long dominated by a notorious Democratic Machine become a national battleground in the right-wing war against the public sector? In Mayor 1%, veteran journalist Kari Lydersen takes a close look at Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and his true agenda.
With deep Wall Street ties from his investment banking years and a combative political style honed in Congress and the Clinton and Obama administrations, Emanuel is among a rising class of rock-star mayors promising to remake American cities.
But his private-sector approach has sidelined and alienated many who feel they are not part of Emanuel’s vision for a new Chicago — and it has inspired a powerful group of activists and community members to unite in defense of their beloved city.
Kari Lydersen is a Chicago-based journalist who has worked in the Midwest bureau of the Washington Post and is the author of three previous books. She is also a journalism instructor at several Chicago colleges.
PRAISE:
“Lydersen demonstrates that journalism still has the power to sway both hearts and minds.”
Brian Awehali, LiP Magazine
“This book provides deep insight into the political career of Rahm Emanuel. Painstakingly researched, Mayor 1% provides the reader with the ability to understand the hard-line ne- oliberal mindset that blinds the man to the harsh realities of entrenched poverty and dis- enfranchisement. The relentless attacks on Chicago’s working class, from the janitors at O’Hare to the librarians, mental health workers, and members of the Chicago Teachers Union have shown the true nature of a man who will have plenty of money from the bil- lionaires to run his re-election campaign, but none of the love of the people who will not pull the lever for him. Kari Lydersen ends on a hopeful note: that Mayor 1%’s brutal reign can actually lead to a better Chicago as people get up, stand up and fight the ‘power.’”
Karen Lewis, president, Chicago Teachers Union
“While banks and corporations continue to enjoy record-breaking profits, working families across Chicago continue to face school closings, foreclosures, and devastating privatization. Lydersen’s book lifts up the extraordinary power of everyday people to stand up, fight back, dream big, and join together to make transformative change. Rarely does a journalist do such justice to the in the trenches organizing work that is vital to undermining oppressive city policies and abusive corporate influences.”
“In Mayor 1% Kari Lydersen surveys the expansive and deeply contested first-term record of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. Her work touches every flashpoint of Emanuel’s kinetic drive to govern the city as he sees fit. Along the way, Lydersen admirably and poignantly gives voice to the activist community that has become the mayor’s fiercest critic, while calling out his staunchest business allies.”
Robert Bruno, University of Illinois at Chicago
“Lydersen’s book demonstrates the type of thorough investigative journalism we need in Chicago to keep all politicians and public servants accountable. It exposes the public policy that the city of Chicago and its constituents didn’t expect from a Democratic mayor of the “City that Works.” Lydersen’s book shows the real Rahm Emanuel, leading the race to the bottom by killing off good middle-class jobs instead of upholding job standards that help build a strong workforce and the robust economy our city desperately needs.”
Tom Balanoff, President, SEIU Local 1
“If you want to understand how a Democrat became so reviled among the middle and working class citizens in modern day Chicago, please read this book. This is the story of organized money vs. organized people in the Second City, and the impact of what happens here ripples across the nation in our public schools, in our healthcare centers, and in our streets. It might be that Obama brought the Windy City to the Potomac, but Emanuel attempts the reverse in Chicago, and as Lydersen notes in great detail, “Rahm” might be a master at fundraising and manipulating the image of his public office, but confrontations are unavoidable when a city manager doesn’t respect his electorate.”
Adam P. Heenan, Chicago Public Schools Civics Teacher
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kari Lydersen has worked since 1997 as a Chicago-based journalist, in the Midwest bureau of The Washington Post and currently with The Chicago News Cooperative, specializing in environment, energy, labor and immigration. She is the author of Out of the Sea and Into the Fire: Latin American-US Immigration in the Global Age, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, and Revolt on Goose Island: The Chicago Window Factory Takeover and What it Says About the Economic Crisis. She teaches journalism at Columbia College.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461509 • US $20 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 326 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The trials and tribulations of firebrand union organizers, from the 1930s to the 1970s, are brought to life here in their own words.
Stories of dozens of working-class heroes are chronicled in this long out-of-print oral history classic. From founding unions, to responding to sexism, safety violations, and fear in the ranks, Rank and File brings the militancy of union organizers, across six decades, to life.
PRAISE:
“A skillful compilation of interviews with working-class organizers … not just an oral history but a chronicle of modern political events ignored in mainstream labor history and journalistic commentary. The value lies in what it will tell future generations about today.”
History Workshop Journal
“One of the best works of oral history produced by radical historians. … For readers who want to see an alternative view to official trade union history, in which labor leaders take the center stage, Rank and File is the place to begin. These personal histories of rank and file organizers show how ordinary working-class men and women made their own history.”
The Nation
“The stories, which are replete with heroism, doubledealing, hope, and suffering, make a vital contribution to an understanding of American labor’s struggle for recognition and united strength.”
Library Journal
“The first serious installment in … radical labor history.”
Labor History
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Alice and Staughton Lynd are retired labor lawyers and writers who have co-edited Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians and Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History. Together, they served as co-counsel in a major class action that went to the United States Supreme Court, Wilkinson vs. Austin. Now being applied in other states, their case established procedural standards for prisoners in supermax prisons. The Lynds have three children and seven grandchildren, and are based in Youngstown, Ohio. As a labor lawyer, Alice helped organize unions and assist workers in obtaining benefits, along with litigating employment discrimination cases. Before entering law, Staughton taught American history at Spellman College and Yale University. Staughton also served as director of Freedom Schools in the Mississippi Summer Project in 1964 and later chaired the first march against the Vietnam War in Washington DC. Staughton is the coauthor of Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History and the author of Lucasville: The Untold Story Of A Prison Uprising, along with numerous other books.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463886 • US $17 • 5 1/2 in x 8 3/4 in • 170 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In Doing History from the Bottom Up, Staughton Lynd laments the passing of David Montgomery, E.P. Thompson, Alfred Young, and Howard Zinn. He challenges academics to see history through the eyes of Native Americans, slaves, and rank-and-file workers. Lynd offers an account of the decline of trade unionism based on the narratives of workers and on his efforts as a lawyer to assist them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Staughton Lynd is an American conscientious objector, Quaker, peace activist and civil rights activist, tax resister, historian, professor, author and lawyer.
Edward F. Countryman is University Distinguished Professor in the William P. Clements Department of History at Southern Methodist University. He its he author of Enjoy the Same Liberty: Black Americans and the Revolutionary Era, The American Revolution, and A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790, among other works.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598476 • US $29.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 600 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Staughton Lynd was one of the principal intellectuals and activists making the radical argument that the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was illegal under domestic and international law. Lynd was uncompromising in his courageous stance that the U.S. should immediately withdraw from Vietnam, and that soldiers and draftees should refuse to participate in the war based on their individual conscience and the Nuremberg Principles of 1950.
Lynd did not just write about opposing the war, he was one of the chief proponents of direct action and civil disobedience to confront the war machine at the university, in the halls of power, and in everyday life through refusing to pay income taxes.
As Staughton Lynd’s speeches, writings, statements and interviews demonstrate, there were coherent and persuasive arguments against the war in Vietnam based on U.S. and international law, precedents from American history, and moral and ethical considerations based on conscientious objection to war and an internationalism embraced by American radicals which said: “My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind.”
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608460731 • US $12 • 5 in x 7 in • 160 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Growing numbers of people are disgusted by the disaster of poverty, war, oppression, and environmental destruction caused by global capitalism. But is there an alternative? Author Alan Maass argues that socialism — a democratically planned economy based on workers’ control — is rational, necessary, and possible. With an afterword by Howard Zinn.
PRAISE:
“Amid the wreckage of the Bush/Clinton/Bush imperium, many leftists have surrendered to a kind of smug fatalism, content to be sideline critics of the machine. Not Alan Maass. In vivid and urgent prose, he chronicles the grotesque depredations of the neolibs and neocons alike, then gets down to the real work of illuminating a path out of the sucking abyss. His book charts a game plan for realistic radicals, who haven’t given up hope for making revolutionary changes in a society that finds itself in the grip of a remorseless political entropy. Take cheer: History isn’t over. In fact, it’s hardly even begun for us. Read Maass. Then go out and make some.”
Paper (2013) • ISBN 9780520275928 • US $28.95 • 278 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this engrossing and accessible book, Doug Macdougall explores the causes and effects of ice ages that have gripped our planet throughout its history, from the earliest known glaciation—nearly three billion years ago—to the present. Following the development of scientific ideas about these dramatic events, Macdougall traces the lives of many of the brilliant and intriguing characters who have contributed to the evolving understanding of how ice ages come about. As it explains how the great Pleistocene Ice Age has shaped the earth’s landscape and influenced the course of human evolution, Frozen Earth also provides a fascinating look at how science is done, how the excitement of discovery drives scientists to explore and investigate, and how timing and chance play a part in the acceptance of new scientific ideas.
Macdougall describes the awesome power of cataclysmic floods that marked the melting of the glaciers of the Pleistocene Ice Age. He probes the chilling evidence for “Snowball Earth,” an episode far back in the earth’s past that may have seen our planet encased in ice from pole to pole. He discusses the accumulating evidence from deep-sea sediment cores, as well as ice cores from Greenland and the Antarctic, that suggests fast-changing ice age climates may have directly impacted the evolution of our species and the course of human migration and civilization. Frozen Earth also chronicles how the concept of the ice age has gripped the imagination of scientists for almost two centuries. It offers an absorbing consideration of how current studies of Pleistocene climate may help us understand earth’s future climate changes, including the question of when the next glacial interval will occur.
PRAISE:
“Offers authoritative speculation and explanations of future climate changes, their causes, and their impact on both the natural world and human civilization.”
Forecast
“Packed with detailed information … Macdougall’s engaging style makes it a pleasurable and thought-provoking read.”
Library Journal
“It was not until the 1800s that close observers of the countryside were able to supply a kind of forensic geology to the scars left behind by flowing ice, and thereby reconstruct the chronology of glaciations past. Doug Macdougall . . . tells an enlightening tale of how that knowledge came to be, and what the science of geology has discovered about the causes and consequences of the ice ages in recent years.”
Natural History
“Frozen Earth is a comfortable-to-read ecotale, exactly the right present to keep a liberal granny quiet in the post-Hanukkah, post-Christmas longueurs before the world begins again in 2005. Denied North by Northwest again, while the kids soak in neo-reality reloading The Matrix, she can lose herself in a palaeo-world by the fireside. Who knows, she might rise up on wings of an eagle and force them to watch The Day After Tomorrow.”
Nature
“A remarkable story. . . . Nowadays, with climate change acknowledged in the media, perhaps the causes and consequences of past changes will once again become truly popular issues. This book may help make them so.”
New Scientist
“Lucid and informative . . . accessible to the interested layperson.”
Publishers Weekly
“Frozen Earth . . . should be required reading for anyone interested in the future of the planet.”
Times Higher Ed Supplement
“This is a highly readable account of the nature of ice ages throughout earth’s history and the evolution of their scientific understanding since the introduction of the term by Louis Agassiz in the 1830s. The shifts in opinion on the merits of the various explanations of ice ages traced by Macdougall make fascinating reading.”
Roger Barry, Director, National Snow and Ice Data Center
“Frozen Earth is a thorough and compelling account of the history of ice on earth and of the scientists who uncovered the extraordinary role that ice ages have played in shaping our world.”
Gabrielle Walker, author of Snowball Earth
“Macdougall takes us on a fascinating journey through the realm of ice age science. He deciphers some of the basic mysteries of the bitter climatic regimes that have gripped the earth in the past and will probably grip it again in the future. This engrossing book has important lessons for anyone concerned with global warming and future climatic change.”
Doug Macdougall is a writer and geoscientist and a professor emeritus of Earth Schiences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Meteoritical Society, and he has written four previous non-fiction trade books as well as one novel. See his website here: www.dougmacdougall.com
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Paper (2009) • ISBN 9780520261617 • US $34.95 • 288 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“Radioactivity is like a clock that never needs adjusting,”writes Doug Macdougall. “It would be hard to design a more reliable timekeeper.” In Nature’s Clocks, Macdougall tells how scientists who were seeking to understand the past arrived at the ingenious techniques they now use to determine the age of objects and organisms. By examining radiocarbon (C-14) dating—the best known of these methods—and several other techniques that geologists use to decode the distant past, Macdougall unwraps the last century’s advances, explaining how they reveal the age of our fossil ancestors such as “Lucy,” the timing of the dinosaurs’ extinction, and the precise ages of tiny mineral grains that date from the beginning of the earth’s history. In lively and accessible prose, he describes how the science of geochronology has developed and flourished. Relating these advances through the stories of the scientists themselves—James Hutton, William Smith, Arthur Holmes, Ernest Rutherford, Willard Libby, and Clair Patterson—Macdougall shows how they used ingenuity and inspiration to construct one of modern science’s most significant accomplishments: a timescale for the earth’s evolution and human prehistory.
PRAISE:
“Rich in historical tidbits, this book is a delightful study of how scientists figured out analytical techniques that revealed the history of the earth.”
New Scientist
“Science buffs from all fields along with general readers will find this a helpful handbook on how we are now able to travel to the distant past.”
Publishers Weekly
“The heart of the book reveals ingenious science.”
Doug Macdougall is a writer and geoscientist and a professor emeritus of Earth Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Meteoritical Society, and he has written four previous non-fiction trade books as well as one novel. See his website here: www.dougmacdougall.com
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Volcanic dust, climate change, tsunamis, earthquakes—geoscience explores phenomena that profoundly affect our lives. But more than that, as Doug Macdougall makes clear, the science also provides important clues to the future of the planet. In an entertaining and accessibly written narrative, Macdougall gives an overview of Earth’s astonishing history based on information extracted from rocks, ice cores, and other natural archives. He explores such questions as: What is the risk of an asteroid striking Earth? Why does the temperature of the ocean millions of years ago matter today? How are efforts to predict earthquakes progressing? Macdougall also explains the legacy of greenhouse gases from Earth’s past and shows how that legacy shapes our understanding of today’s human-caused climate change. We find that geoscience in fact illuminates many of today’s most pressing issues—the availability of energy, access to fresh water, sustainable agriculture, maintaining biodiversity—and we discover how, by applying new technologies and ideas, we can use it to prepare for the future.
PRAISE:
“What you will find in this clearly written and instructive book is a summary of what geologists do (it isn’t just dig for oil or other valuables), how they have come to understand the immense range of times involved in Earth’s creation and transformation into our livable world, and most importantly how geology, thought of as the dusty study of ancient ages, is key to understanding the most important of the resource and environmental issues that will confront us in the future. It is a wonderful primer on geology, and a clear explanation of how the science is done.”
Rob Hardy, Columbus Dispatch
“MacDougall has given us a gem, a book that removes emotion and apocalyptic hyperbole from the equation and provides a sober analysis of why most scientists have come to the conclusion they have about how human activity has started to play a role in the Earth’s climate.”
Jim Trageser, North County Times
“[Macdougall] addresses ways to apply geology to questions . . . and presents all in an enjoyable reading stye.”
Choice
“In an entertaining and accessibly written narrative, Macdougall gives an overview of Earth’s astonishing history based on information extracted from rocks, ice cores, and other natural archives.”
Scienceblogs.com/The Guardian
“Macdougall does a masterful job of exploring the questions, dilemmas, and insights that have led to today’s scientific understanding of the composition of our planet. His approach is not ‘rocks on a shelf’ science; it’s a compelling, interdisciplinary peek at Earth’s prehistory—including those processes that support so much of modern civilization.”
Ernest Zebrowski, author of Global Climate Change and Category 5: The Story of Camille
“The story of Earth is told in such geologic forms as rock strata, volcanic eruptions, meteor craters, fossils, ocean currents, and ice flows. Macdougall gives these disparate elements voice and puts them into a perspective that emphasizes why Earth science is important in our understanding of both the planet’s history and our role in its tomorrow.”
Jeff Kanipe, author of The Cosmic Connection: How Astronomical Events Impact Life on Earth
Doug Macdougall is a writer and geoscientist and a professor emeritus of Earth Schiences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Meteoritical Society, and he has written four previous non-fiction trade books as well as one novel. See his website here: www.dougmacdougall.com
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461486 • US $24 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Collected here are the essays of lifelong activist Moshé Machover, written as an Israeli socialist in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Comprising analysis and polemics, these essays cover diverse aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli society. Two inter-related themes run throughout: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a regional context, and the connection between Palestinian liberation and the struggle for socialism.
PRAISE:
“This collection of Moshé Machover’s writings from the mid-1960s to today brings together a coherent and consistent vision of Zionist colonialism and the dispossession and discrimination which have been its hallmarks throughout the whole period. Machover is a veteran Marxist academic, activist, writer, whose writing is uncompromising in facing the grim realities of his area. It is a valuable book in its historical reach, accessible style, and forthright debunking of the ‘peace process’ and other lazy myths, and also for the book review section in which he points readers forward to essential further reading on the subject, such as Greg Philo and Mike Berry’s Bad News from Israel, and Shlomo Sands’ The Invention of the Jewish People.”
Victoria Brittain, former associate foreign editor of the Guardian. Her books include Hidden Lives, Hidden Deaths and Death of Dignity.
“Moshé Machover has been consistent in his belief that socialism provides the best framework for the organization of human affairs and this governs his perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict. While many have internalized the nation state as the most sublime form of social and political organization, he remains undaunted in his rejection of nationalism. He unflinchingly declares that he is no peace activist, and that only a socialist transformation in the Arab Mashrik can bring about peace and an equitable social and political order to the the peoples of the region.”
Musa Budeiri, author of The Palestine Communist Party, 1919-1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for Internationalism; Program in Democracy and Human Rights at the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Birzeit University.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Moshé Machover is an Israeli mathematician and lifelong socialist activist. He lives in London.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780691027937 • US $46 • UK £34.95 • 6 x 9 in • 368 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post-independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism’s legacy—a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either “direct” (French) or “indirect” (British), with a third variant—apartheid—as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a “customary” mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa.
Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.
PRAISE:
“This theoretically adventurous work by a prominent Ugandan academic attempts to shift away from current paradigms constructed around themes of ethnic identity and the role of civil society. . . . This is an original book that offers a new angle of vision and is likely to stir up lively debate.”
Foreign Affairs
“This book explores a provocative and original thesis about African politics, with the vigor and rigor that readers of Professor Mamdani’s earlier work will expect. Anyone who cares to understand the state in contemporary Africa—anyone who wants to understand the current situation on the continent at all—would do well to read this new book. Whether you agree or disagree, this is a book to learn from.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Harvard University
“Mahmood Mamdani is one of the most original thinkers writing about Africa today. His skills in comparative analysis and conceptual refinement are strikingly illustrated in this volume.”
Ali A. Mazrui, Institute for Global Studies, SUNY-Binghamton
“Citizen and Subject is going to be a very necessary book. Mamdani’s exposition, of a rare clarity, offers us a broadness of vision based upon experience and knowledge always informed by his profound perceptiveness.”
Breyten Breytenbach
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mahmood Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda. A political scientist and anthropologist, he is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University. Mamdani received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and previously taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, Makarere University, and the University of Cape Town.
From 1998 to 2002, Mamdani served as President of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa). In 2001 he presented one of the nine papers at the Nobel Peace Prize Centennial Symposium, and was listed as one of the Top 20 Public Intellections by Foreign Policy (US) and Prospect (UK) magazines in 2008. His previous books include Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Saviors and Survivors, and When Victims Become Killers, and his writing has appeared in New Left Review and the London Review of Books, among other publications. He lives in New York City and Kampala with his wife and son.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780375422850 • US $24 • 5.8 in x 8.4 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this brilliant look at the rise of political Islam, the distinguished political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen?
Mamdani dispels the idea of “good” (secular, westernized) and “bad” (premodern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are “good” Muslims readily available to be split off from “bad” Muslims masks a failure to make a political analysis of our times. This book argues that political Islam emerged as the result of a modern encounter with Western power, and that the terrorist movement at the center of Islamist politics is an even more recent phenomenon, one that followed America’s embrace of proxy war after its defeat in Vietnam. Mamdani writes with great insight about the Reagan years, showing America’s embrace of the highly ideological politics of “good” against “evil.” Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the “moral equivalents” of America’s Founding Fathers. The era of proxy wars has come to an end with the invasion of Iraq. And there, as in Vietnam, America will need to recognize that it is not fighting terrorism but nationalism, a battle that cannot be won by occupation.
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a provocative and important book that will profoundly change our understanding both of Islamist politics and the way America is perceived in the world today.
Watch a lecture by Mamdani given at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in February 2005 here.
PRAISE:
“Mamdani strips open the lies, stereotypes, and easy generalizations on which U.S. policy toward the Muslim world is founded. Dismaying but essential reading.”
J. M. Coetzee
“This provocative and thoughtful inquiry raises hard and serious questions. It is a valuable contribution to the understanding of some of the most important developments in the contemporary era.”
Noam Chomsky
“Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a brief, readable plea to Americans to stop listening to the shuck and jive about a ‘clash of civilizations’ and start learning some practical political history.”
The Village Voice
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mahmood Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda. A political scientist and anthropologist, he is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. His previous books include Citizen and Subject and When Victims Become Killers. In 2001 he presented one of the nine papers at the Nobel Peace Prize Centennial Symposium. He lives in New York City and Kampala with his wife and son.
Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities.
In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe—from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.
The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence.
Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors—victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries—based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.
PRAISE:
“[A] provocative, elegantly written new book”
Fara Dabhoiwala, The New York Review of Books
“Linking the histories of the United States, Nazi Germany, and apartheid South Africa, Mahmood Mamdani’s forthcoming book, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities … demonstrates how a broad rethinking of political issues becomes possible when Western ideals and practices are examined from the vantage point of Asia and Africa.”
Pankaj Mishra, The New York Review of Books
“Mahmood Mamdani’s new book, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, is a densely packed study of the modern nation state that proposes a shift away from what one might call narrow identity politics…An important book demands many readings. An initial review – a reading and rereading – can barely scratch. I hope readers will do what I intend: to read it again. An important book raises questions. This book raises many, and not least whether we can really be free of the majority-minority and settler-native dichotomies that vex many states. Mamdani proposes that they can be overcome.”
New Frame
“Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities makes an urgent intervention in contemporary politics. In a searing critique of the nation-state, Mamdani persuasively argues that there will be no decolonisation, no democracy, no peace until we de-link the association between the “nation” and state power.”
The Wire (India)
“This book compels the reader to rethink the origin and development of the nation-state and its replication as inseparable from European colonialism, beginning with the establishment of the Spanish state through racialized ethnic cleansing and the 1492 deportations of Jews and Moors. In elegant prose with no wasted words or jargon, this original and brilliant work persuasively argues that the United States created the template for settler-colonialism, providing the model upon which the South African apartheid regime and the Israeli state were patterned, and also used by the Nazi regime that adopted US race theory and catastrophic ethnic cleansing. The book provides not only profound historical analysis but also deeply researched thick descriptions of the current US and Israeli regimes of settler-colonialism and more.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“Brilliant! Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native is nothing less than a deeply learned account of the origins of our modern world. Situating the beginnings of the nation-state in the settler-colonial practice of creating permanent minorities, Mamdani illustrates how this damaging political logic continues into our own era, resulting far too often in today’s extraordinary political violence. Through his own elegant contrarianism, Mamdani rejects the current focus on human rights as the means to bring justice and accountability to the victims of this colonial and postcolonial bloodshed. Instead, he calls for a new kind of political imagination, one that will pave the way for a truly decolonized future. Joining the ranks of Hannah Arendt’s Imperialism, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and Edward Said’s Orientalism,Neither Settler nor Native is destined to become a classic text of postcolonial studies and political theory.”
Moustafa Bayoumi
“A powerfully original argument, one that supplements political analysis with a map for our political future.”
Faisal Devji, University of Oxford
“Neither Settler Nor Native analyzes seemingly disparate political histories to illuminate the intertwined logic of colonial statecraft and nation-building, the legacy of which was the violent manufacture of permanent majorities and minorities the world over. This is a masterwork of historical comparison and razor-sharp political analysis, with grave lessons about the pitfalls of forgetting, moralizing, or criminalizing this violence. Mamdani also offers a hopeful rejoinder in a revived politics of decolonization, not as romantic revolution but a renewed art of politics. Decolonization uses the tools of political engagement and negotiation to unsettle inherited identities, to convert perpetrators and victims into survivors, natives and settlers into citizens, nation-states into inclusive democracies.”
Karuna Mantena
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University and Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala. He is the author of Citizen and Subject, When Victims Become Killers, and Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.
SAVIORS AND SURVIVORS
Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror
Mahmood Mamdani
Three Rivers Press (2010, North America, Philippines, and British Commonwealth English language rights)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780385525961 • US $17 • 5.2 x 8 in. • 416 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim comes an important book, unlike any other, that looks at the crisis in Darfur within the context of the history of Sudan and examines the world’s response to that crisis.
In Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani explains how the conflict in Darfur began as a civil war (1987—89) between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the south, triggered by a severe drought that had expanded the Sahara Desert by more than sixty miles in forty years; how British colonial officials had artificially tribalized Darfur, dividing its population into “native” and “settler” tribes and creating homelands for the former at the expense of the latter; how the war intensified in the 1990s when the Sudanese government tried unsuccessfully to address the problem by creating homelands for tribes without any. The involvement of opposition parties gave rise in 2003 to two rebel movements, leading to a brutal insurgency and a horrific counterinsurgency—but not to genocide, as the West has declared.
Mamdani also explains how the Cold War exacerbated the twenty-year civil war in neighboring Chad, creating a confrontation between Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi (with Soviet support) and the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) that spilled over into Darfur and militarized the fighting. By 2003, the war involved national, regional, and global forces, including the powerful Western lobby, who now saw it as part of the War on Terror and called for a military invasion dressed up as “humanitarian intervention.”
Incisive and authoritative, Saviors and Survivors will radically alter our understanding of the crisis in Darfur.
PRAISE:
“Mahmood Mamdani . . . is one of the most penetrating analysts of African affairs. In Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, he has written a learned book that reintroduces history into the discussion of the Darfur crisis and questions the logic and even the good faith of those who seek to place it at the pinnacle of Africa’s recent troubles . . . [An] important book . . .”
Howard W. French, The New York Times
“Say ‘Darfur’ and horrific images leap to mind: Janjaweed, rape, genocide. But most of us would be hard-pressed to explain the violence there, beyond the popular notion that it’s ethnic cleansing of Africans by Arabs. Columbia University scholar Mahmood Mamdani’s brilliant new book, Saviors and Survivors, explains why this assumption is faulty, and why it’s foiling peace efforts.”
Katie Baker, Newsweek
“Mahmood Mamdani . . . demonstrates just how politically charged the word ‘genocide’ has become, and how many shady agendas it can serve, even among those purporting to act in the name of universal values . . . His extensively documented study of the political and media circus that came to surround the hitherto uncelebrated province of Darfur is a vivid demonstration of the predictably calamitous results of outsiders meddling in places whose history, politics, and culture they can hardly be bothered to read up on.”
Benjamin Moser, Harper’s Magazine
“Very few books on the Darfur crisis have provided such a good analysis of what is happening in the region and very few voices have attempted to understand the crisis in its local, regional, and international context. Very few books have attempted to discuss the crisis in its historical and geopolitical context. In reality discovering such an insightful book is like finding a needle in the sea.”
Al-Quds al-Arabi (London)
“[A] sweeping history of Darfur . . . Mamdani argues that calling the events in Darfur genocide is inaccurate and irresponsible . . . He believes that the West’s concern with Darfur is a preferred distraction from the failed U.S. occupation in Iraq, offering Western citizens a means to reclaim the moral high ground . . . [P]rovide[s] valuable historical and cultural background to recent events in Darfur and the sure-to-continue scholarly debate on genocide.”
Veronica Arellano, Library Journal
“A brilliantly argued and profoundly challenging critique of liberal support for humanitarian intervention in Darfur. Beyond this, Mamdani sets forth an alternative approach to such catastrophic situations. This book should be required reading for the Obama foreign policy team.”
Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur and Professor Emeritus, Princeton University
“An incisive and challenging analysis. Framing both Darfur’s war and the ‘Save Darfur’ movement within the paradigm of the West’s historic colonial encounter with Africa, Mahmood Mamdani challenges the reader to reconsider whether Darfur’s crisis is ‘genocide’ warranting foreign military intervention.”
Alex de Waal, Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and author of War in Darfur
“Mahmood Mamdani has turned his fearless independence of mind on Darfur, Sudan, and the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ producing a book that is as passionate and well-informed as it is intelligent and (for those used only to surface orthodoxies) challenging.”
Conor Gearty, Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics
“Mamdani (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim) continues to challenge political and intellectual orthodoxies in his latest book, a bold, near brilliant re-examination of the conflict in Darfur…. The book’s introductory and closing chapters are essential reading for those interested in the topic.”
Publishers Weekly
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mahmood Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda. A political scientist and anthropologist, he is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University. Mamdani received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and previously taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, Makarere University, and the University of Cape Town.
From 1998 to 2002, Mamdani served as President of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa). In 2001 he presented one of the nine papers at the Nobel Peace Prize Centennial Symposium, and was listed as one of the Top 20 Public Intellections by Foreign Policy (US) and Prospect (UK) magazines in 2008. His previous books include Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Saviors and Survivors, and When Victims Become Killers, and his writing has appeared in New Left Review and the London Review of Books, among other publications. He lives in New York City and Kampala with his wife and son.
Paper (2006 and 2011) • ISBN 9781400032051 • US $17.00 • 576 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.
PRAISE:
“A journalistic masterpiece.”
The New York Review of Books
“Marvelous. . . . A sweeping portrait of human life in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. . . . A remarkably engaging writer.” The New York Times Book Review
“Fascinating. . . . A landmark of a book that drops ingrained images of colonial American into the dustbin, one after the other.”
The Boston Globe
“A ripping, man-on-the-ground tour of a world most of us barely intuit. . . . An exhilarating shift in perspective. . . . 1491 erases our myth of a wilderness Eden. It replaces that fallacy with evidence of a different genesis, exciting and closer to true.”
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Mann tells a powerful, provocative and important story. . . . 1491 vividly compels us to re-examine how we teach the ancient history of the Americas and how we live with the environmental consequences of colonization.” The Washington Post Book World
“Engagingly written and utterly absorbing. . . . Part detective story, part epic and part tragedy.”
The Miami Herald
“Provocative. . . . A Jared Diamond-like volley that challenges prevailing thinking about global development. Mann has chronicled an important shift in our vision of world development, one out young children could end up studying in their text books when they reach junior high.” San Francisco Chronicle
“Marvelous. . . . A revelation. . . . Our concept of pure wilderness untouched by grubby human hands must now be jettisoned.” The New York Sun
“Monumental. . . . Mann slips in so many fresh, new interpretations of American history that it all adds up to a deeply subversive work.” Salon
“Concise and brilliantly entertaining. . . . Reminiscent of John McPhee’s eloquence with scientific detail.” Los Angeles Times
Charles C. Mann, a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired, has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post, as well as for the TV network HBO and the series Law & Order. A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he is the recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. His 1491 won the National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year.
Unabridged Audiobook • US $35.00 • 17 hours and 51 minutes
Narrated by Robertson Dean
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A deeply engaging new history of how European settlements in the post-Columbian Americas shaped the world, from the bestselling author of 1491. Presenting the latest research by biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Mann shows how the post-Columbian network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City—where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted—the center of the world. In this history, Mann uncovers the germ of today’s fiercest political disputes, from immigration to trade policy to culture wars. In 1493, Mann has again given readers an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination.
PRAISE:
“Fascinating. . . . Lively. . . . A convincing explanation of why our world is the way it is.” The New York Times Book Review
“Even the wisest readers will find many surprises here. . . . Like 1491, Mann’s sequel will change worldviews.” San Francisco Chronicle
“Exemplary in its union of meaningful fact with good storytelling, 1493 ranges across continents and centuries to explain how the world we inhabit came to be.” The Washington Post
“Engaging . . . Mann deftly illuminates contradictions on a human scale: the blind violence and terror at Jamestown, the cruel exploitation of labor in the silver mines of Bolivia, the awe felt by Europeans upon first seeing a rubber ball bounce.” The New Yorker
“Revelatory.” Lev Grossman, Time Magazine
“Compelling and eye-opening.” Publishers Weekly Top 100 Books of 2011
“A book to celebrate. . . A bracingly persuasive counternarrative to the prevailing mythology about the historical significance of the ‘discovery’ of America. . . 1493 is rich in detail, analytically expansive and impossible to summarize. . . [Mann’s book] deserves a prominent place among that very rare class of books that can make a difference in how we see the world, although it is neither a polemic nor a work of advocacy. Thoughtful, learned and respectful of its subject matter, 1493 is a splendid achievement.”
The Oregonian
“Mann’s excitement never flags as he tells his breathtaking story. . . There is grandeur in this view of the past that looks afresh at the different parts of the world and the parts each played in shaping it.” Financial Times
“A muscular, densely documented follow-up [to Mann’s 1491]. . . As a historian Mann should be admired not just for his broad scope and restless intelligence but for his biological sensitivity. At every point of his tale he keeps foremost in his mind the effect of humans’ activities on the broader environment they inhabit.” The Wall Street Journal
“Evenhandedness, a sense of wonder, the gift of turning a phrase. . . Mann loves the world and adopts it as his own.” Science
“Charles C. Mann glories in reality, immersing his reader in complexity. . . . The worn clichés crumble as readers gain introductions to the freshest of the systems of analysis gendered in the first post-Columbian millennium.” Alfred W. Crosby, author of The Columbian Exchange
“Fascinating. . . Convincing. . . A spellbinding account of how an unplanned collision of unfamiliar animals, vegetables, minerals and diseases produced unforeseen wealth, misery, social upheaval and the modern world.” Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A fascinating survey. . . A lucid historical panorama that’s studded with entertaining studies of Chinese pirate fleets, courtly tobacco rituals, and the bloody feud between Jamestown colonists and the Indians who fed and fought them, to name a few. Brilliantly assembling colorful details into big-picture insights, Mann’s fresh challenge to Eurocentric histories puts interdependence at the origin of modernity.” Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Spirited. . . One thing is indisputable: Mann is definitely global in his outlook and tribal in his thinking. . . Mann’s taxonomy of the ecological, political, religious, economic, anthropological and mystical melds together in an intriguing whole cloth.” The Star-Ledger
“Mann has managed the difficult trick of telling a complicated story in engaging and clear prose while refusing to reduce its ambiguities to slogans. He is not a professional historian, but most professionals could learn a lot from the deft way he does this. . . 1493 is thoroughly researched and up-to-date, combining scholarship from fields as varied as world history, immunology, and economics, but Mann wears his learning lightly. He serves up one arresting detail after another, always in vivid language. Most impressive of all, he manages to turn plants, germs, insects and excrement into the lead actors in his drama while still parading before us an unforgettable cast of human characters. . . . The Columbian Exchange has shaped everything about the modern world. It brought us the plants we tend in our gardens and the pests that eat them. And as it accelerates in the 21st century, it may take both away again. If you want to understand why, read 1493.” The New York Times Book Review
“Mann is trying to do much more than punch holes in conventional wisdom; he’s trying to piece together an elaborate, alternative history that describes profound changes in the world since the original voyage of Columbus. What’s most surprising is that he manages to do this in such an engaging way. He writes with an incredibly dry wit.” Austin American-Statesman
“Mann’s book is jammed with facts and factoids, trivia and moments of great insight that take on power as they accumulate.” The Washington Post
“Although many have written about the impact of Europeans on the New World, few have told the worldwide story in a manner accessible to lay readers as effectively as Mann does here.” Library Journal
“Almost mind-boggling in its scope, enthusiasm and erudition. . . Almost every page of 1493 contains some extraordinarily provocative argument or arrestingly bizarre detail. . . Ranging freely across time and space, Mann’s book is full of compelling stories. . . A tremendously provocative, learned and surprising read.” The Times of London
Charles C. Mann, a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired, has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post, as well as for the TV network HBO and the series Law & Order. A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he is the recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. His 1491 won the National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year.
Hardcover • ISBN 9780307961693 • US $28.95 • 464 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From the best-selling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493–an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow’s world.
In forty years, Earth’s population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups–Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug’s cry. Only in that way can everyone win!
Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces–food, water, energy, climate change–grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author’s insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.
Charles C. Mann, a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired, has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post, as well as for the TV network HBO and the series Law & Order. A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he is the recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. His 1491 won the National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780684835587 • US $21.95 • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
No drug in the world outsells aspirin. With billions of dollars at stake, and no medically significant differences among the hundreds of brands around the globe, rival drug makers have been driven to the extremes of corporate warfare. Authors Mann and Plummer look inside this world of relentless competition to show the ploys, the battles, the bursts of extraordinary marketing, advertising and litigation that have resulted—and relate the unique and little-known medical history of the drug itself. The Aspirin Wars penetrates the wilder shores of capitalism to reveal the essence of business competition at its canniest.
PRAISE:
“Starting with an 1886 accident in Alsace (then part of Germany), science writers Charles Mann and Mark Plummer use The Aspirin Wars to reveal behind-the-scenes machinations in both laboratory and boardroom…. The Aspirin Wars has the answers to questions I never thought to ask…. Business needs, it seems, are as crucial as laboratory research in determining what ends up on the drugstore counter. Whatever the formula, I suspect I will never innocently swallow another analgesic again.”
Bettyann Kevles, Los Angeles Times
“Science writer Charles C. Mann and economist Mark Plummer have pooled their talents in an ambitious effort to record the saga of the discovery of aspirin and its uses, as well as the no-hold-barred conflicts over the production and marketing of the popular painkiller and the medicines that might substitute for it. The story they tell turns out to be epic in scope…. Aspirin Wars provides readers with a broad historical perspective… [and] raises important questions and invites fresh thinking about both unfettered competition and government regulation, neither of which emerges from the book in a particularly attractive light.”
Award-winning science writer Charles C. Mann is the author of 1493, a New York Times best-seller, and 1491, which won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Keck award for the best book of the year. A correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Wired, he has covered the intersection of science, technology, and commerce for many newspapers and magazines here and abroad, including National Geographic, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the Washington Post.
Mark Plummer was a distinguished economist and former Discovery Institute fellow. He worked for many years in the Conservation Biology Division of the National Marine Fisheries Service of NOAA. He co-authored two books with Charles C. Mann, Aspirin Wars and Noah’s Choice.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Hardcover • ISBN 9781416949008 • US $24.99 • 128 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A companion book for young readers (grades 3–7) based on 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, the groundbreaking bestseller by Charles C. Mann.
PRAISE:
“In this beautifully illustrated and concise adaptation of 1491, Mann paints a superb picture of pre-Columbian America. In the process, he overturns the misconceived image of Natives as simple, widely scattered savages with minimal impact on their surroundings. Well-chosen, vividly colored graphics and photographs of mummies, pyramids, artifacts, and landscapes as well as the author’s skillful storytelling will command the attention of even the most reluctant readers. Eye-catching sidebars and oversize chapter headings seem to pop from the pages. Mann constructs the narrative around three crucial questions that continue to confound historians today: Was the New World really new? Why were the Europeans successful? What ecological impact did Natives have on their surroundings? From the pre-Columbian genetic engineering of maize to the existence of pyramids older than the Egyptian variety, Mann’s lucid answers to these questions represent current scholarly opinion and point the way toward future exploration and discovery. Students and teachers will benefit greatly from this engaging exploration of America’s most overlooked and misunderstood historical periods.”
Charles C. Mann, a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired, has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post, as well as for the TV network HBO and the series Law & Order. A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he is the recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. His 1491 won the National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year.
Rebecca Stefoff has devoted her career to writing nonfiction books for young readers. She has adapted a number of landmark works in history and science. Visit her website here: http://rebeccastefoff.com/
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Provides a systematic overview of the best sources, both electronic and print, that go far beyond the coverage of Google and Wikipedia
Demonstrates why brick-and-mortar research libraries are more important than ever
Teaches, with multiple concrete examples, how to find the best search terms to use in searching databases
New to this Edition:
Explains in greater detail six important differences between the thousands of specialized subject encyclopedias that exist and Wikipedia, and provides an updated sample listing of the former
Discusses in detail scores of major subscription databases that did not exist in 2005, or whose earlier versions were not discussed
Provides the best explanations of how to find the right search terms for any inquiry
Provides the only current discussion of the essential differences between keyword relevance ranking (as in Google) vs. conceptual categorization (as in library catalogs)
Provides new instructions (and examples) on how to zero in immediately on literature review articles
Provides additional examples of what can be found via published bibliographies that cannot be found via online sources
Provides expanded coverage of sources for statistical information
Lists free websites that reference librarians find to be particularly useful
PRAISE:
“A masterful summary of the main techniques and resources for conducting ‘serious’ research at postgraduate level and above.”
Reference Reviews
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Thomas Mann has been a general reference librarian in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress for more than thirty years.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465118 • US $19.95 • 5 1/4 in x 8 1/2 in • 372 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Marable offers profound insight into the deeply intertwined problems of race and class in the United States historically and today.
How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America dispenses impeccably comprehensive research to expose the realities of African American poverty, health, employment, and education, as well as other demographics. Marable’s conclusions prove an undeniable connection between the oppression and exploitation of Black America and capitalism.
PRAISE:
“How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America is one of those paradigm-shifting, life-changing texts that has not lost its currency or relevance — even after three decades. Its provocative treatise on the ravages of late capitalism, state violence, incarceration, and patriarchy on the life chances and struggles of black working-class men and women shaped an entire generation, directing our energies to the terrain of the prison-industrial complex, anti-racist work, labor organizing, alternatives to racial capitalism, and challenging patriarchy—personally and politically. When I first picked up the book and scanned the Preface, Manning Marable’s profound words stopped me in my tracks: ‘The intellectual who makes a public commitment to transform society, to smash white racism and the inherently exploitative system laughingly described as “free enterprise” by its defenders, cannot plead his/her case in muted grey tones. For the Black masses to “return to their own history,” we must begin by rewriting that history — but not in the language, style or outlook of the system.’”
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Manning Marable was a dear friend and one of my generation’s most gifted and profound historians, whose brilliance, rigor, and abiding commitment to truths that spoke to power are sorely missed in today’s ‘conversation on race.’ Now, in this new edition of his classic text, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, replete with probity and learning, Marable can challenge a new generation to find solutions to the problems that constrain the present but not our potential to seek and define a better future.”
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
“Manning Marable never stopped wrestling with this landmark volume, and neither should we. Ranging widely across time, spheres, and data, this work, at once polemical and analytical, continues to offer an account of inequality at the intersection of class, gender, and race that has yet to be matched. Some three decades on, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America remains a book that provokes, informs, and motivates.”
Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University
“The reissue of Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America confirms that this is a classic work of political history and social criticism. Unfortunately, Marable’s blistering insights into racial injustice and economic inequality remain depressingly relevant. But the good news is that Marable’s prescient analysis – and his eloquent and self-critical preface to this new edition – will prove critical in helping us to think through and conquer the oppressive forces that remain.”
Michael Eric Dyson, author of I May Not Get Therewith You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.
“A cohesive portrait of black America.”
Cornel West
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:
“Manning was an unflinching and breathtakingly prolific scholar whose commitments to racial, economic, gender, and international justice were unparalleled. … There are two generations of African-American scholars who will remember him as much for the mentor he was to us as for the research legacy he leaves. … When I think of Manning himself it is as a great well — possessing reserves of energy, intellect and commitment I have never before witnessed.”
Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC
“A groundbreaking historian … one of America’s truest public intellectuals.”
John Nichols, The Nation
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
Manning Marable (1950-2011) was a professor of public affairs, history and African-American Studies at Columbia University. Marable authored fifteen books including Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for History.
Leith Mullings (1945-2020) was a distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center CUNY. She was an anthropologist, author, lecturer and educator. She served as president of the American Anthropological Association from 2011 to 2013. Much of her work focuses on the analysis of inequality and she was involved in research projects in Africa, the United States and Latin America. Through the lens of feminist and critical race theory, she analyzed a variety of topics including kinship, representation, gentrification, health disparities and social movements. Mullings had a strong commitment to producing scholarship that addresses timely social issues, undertaken in collaboration with research subjects and sought to empower communities through knowledge. Her web site is: http://leithmullings.com.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
ISBN-13: 9781608462940 • Trade paper • 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 • US $18 • 280 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
On September 21, 2011 Troy Anthony Davis was put to death by the State of Georgia. Davis’ execution was protested by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, and Pope Benedict XVI, President Jimmy Carter, and 51 members of Congress all appealed for clemency. How did one man capture the world’s imagination, and become the iconic face for the campaign to end the death penalty?
I Am Troy Davis, coauthored by Jen Marlowe and Davis’ sister Martina, tells the intimate story of an ordinary man caught up in an inexorable tragedy. From his childhood in racially-charged Savannah; to the confused events that led to the 1989 shooting of a police officer; to Davis’ sudden arrest, conviction, and two-decade fight to prove his innocence; I Am Troy Davis takes us inside a broken legal system where life and death hangs in the balance. It is also an inspiring testament to the unbreakable bond of family, to the resilience of love, and that even when you reach the end of justice, voices from across the world will rise together in chorus and proclaim, “I am Troy Davis,” I stand with you.
PRAISE:
“Here is a shout for human rights and for the abolition of the death penalty. This book, I Am Troy Davis, should be read and cherished. It will inspire courage in the heart of those who are willing to use their efforts to save lives and increase the quality of life for all people.”
Dr. Maya Angelou, author, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
“Like Trayvon Martin’s monumental murder, the execution of Troy Davis was a historic awakening for this country — an awakening of the deadly consequences of white supremacy. Don’t miss this book!”
Cornel West, Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice, Union Theological Seminary
“Read this book about Martina Davis-Correia and Troy Anthony Davis. The lives of this sister and brother were tragically cut short, one by cancer, the other through a cruel injection of a lethal chemical cocktail in the final act of a profoundly unjust criminal justice system. This book captures their unflagging courage in confronting the challenges thrust upon them. More than history, more than eulogy, I Am Troy Davis is an urgent call to action.”
Amy Goodman, Host and Executive Producer, Democracy Now!
“Martina and Troy are heroes from a family of heroes. This story of their lives is also a call to action. It asks each of us to pick up where they left off by ending the death penalty once and for all so the risk of executing an innocent person is finally eliminated in America.”
Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO, NAACP
“I Am Troy Davis is a painful yet very important book, one that will bring you face to face with the human impact of the death penalty system, prompt you to think deeply about the flaws in our criminal justice system, and inspire you to stand with all those who have been wrongfully placed on death row.”
Susan Sarandon
“I Am Troy Davis is heart stopping proof that the death penalty didn’t just kill an innocent Troy Davis and break and bury his gorgeous family, but it charred the soul of America. This book will devastate you, piss you off and then inspire you to work with your life to the end the death penalty forever.”
Eve Ensler, author and playwright
“Riveting … essential for those interested in the U.S. justice system in general and the death penalty in particular.”
Library Journal, Starred Review
“The extraordinary struggle for the life of Troy Davis that helped shake public consciousness about the death penalty was possible because the Davises invited the world to be part of their family. I Am Troy Davis takes readers on the journey of a remarkable family whose faith, love, integrity, and convictions propelled their fight for their loved one and a larger cause. Jen Marlowe’s careful and sensitive collaboration with the Davises has yielded a narrative that will surely inspire readers to pick up the torch that Martina Davis Correia so bravely carried for social justice and human dignity with every ounce of her being and every day of her life.”
Laura Moye, former Amnesty International USA Death Penalty Abolition Campaign Director
“Martina Correia’s heroic fight to save her brother’s life while battling for her own serves as a powerful testament for activists. In finishing this book, Jen Marlowe has fulfilled a promise, ensuring that our memories of Troy and Martina – and the lessons they taught us – live on.”
Liliana Segura, The Nation
“A must-read book. The searing, heartbreaking story of a strong and loving family caught in the vortex of a dysfunctional criminal justice system.”
Anne Emanuel, Georgia State University Law Professor and ABA Georgia Death Penalty Assessment Chair
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Jen Marlowe, a Seattle-based human rights activist, writer, and filmmaker, is the author of The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker and Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival. Jen’s award-winning documentary films include One Family in Gaza, Rebuilding Hope: Sudan’s Lost Boys Return Home and Darfur Diaries.
Martina Davis-Correia was the older sister of Troy Anthony Davis, a leader in the campaign to abolish capital punishment, and a steadfast supporter and public organizer in the campaign to free Davis.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781583226865 • US $16.95 • TK in x TK in • 336 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Bob Dylan’s lyrics are at once abstruse and evocative, urgent and timeless. But, as Mike Marqusee’s compelling new book makes clear, behind the anarchy and playfulness of Dylan’s imagery lie meanings that are often highly charged with political and social concerns.
It was blues and folk songs that first led Bob Dylan to politics. But it was politics that unlocked his own astonishing songwriting ability, evidenced by dazzling responses in the early 1960s to the civil rights movement and the threat of nuclear war. Marqusee traces the young song-writer’s subsequent reluctance to be pigeonholed, his rejection of “protest,” and his turn to electric rock at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He shows the way folk tradition, modernism, and commercial popular culture are sublimely fused in Dylan’s masterworks of the mid-1960s, notably on the albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and discusses the artist’s quest for American identity-amid the continuing carnage in Vietnam and growing chaos at home — in The Basement Tapes.
Following his acclaimed study of Muhammad Ali, Redemption Song, Mike Marqusee again demonstrates an engaging ability to fuse biography and politics, storytelling and original insight.
PRAISE:
“In this remarkable reflection on the culture of the sixties, Mike Marqusee restores the forgotten moral and political contexts of Dylan’s supernova years. In doing so, he rescues one of the most urgent poetic voices in American history from the condescension of his own later cynicism.”
Mike Davis, author, City of Quartz
“[Wicked Messenger] offers a fascinating and detailed analysis of the forces that shaped the politics of the folk revival, and argues, I think convincingly, against the cynical interpretations Dylan later put on his own contributions to the civil rights movement — the most famous instance of which was his claim that he wrote ‘Masters of War’ because he knew it would sell. Marqusee carefully considers the vastly different commercial contexts of the first and second waves of folk: while Guthrie wrote for those dispossessed and poverty-stricken by the Great Depression, and his recordings never achieved particularly wide distribution, Dylan’s fast-growing audience consisted largely of the affluent offspring of the Cold War — middle-class non-conformists sickened by corporatism, mutually assured destruction, and the various discontents of the new consumer society. Dylan’s journey from the world of earnest folk-protest to the iconoclastic, hallucinatory energies of his mid-1960s music provides as good a perspective as any on the origins and birth of the counterculture.”
Mark Ford, Times Literary Supplement
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mike Marqusee (1953–2015) was born in the United States and emigrated to Britain in 1971. He was the author of a novel, Slow Turn, and five nonfiction books: Defeat from the Jaws of Victory (with Richard Heffernan), Anyone But England and War Minus the Shooting. Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties is due soon in a new edition from Verso. He was a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Sport Development Research at Roehampton Institute, London, and wrote on politics and popular culture for the Guardian (London) and the Hindu (India).
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642597431 • US $16.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 80 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Marshall’s poems traverse familial mythography to investigate contemporary politics, Blackness, and reproductive justice, and the stakes of race and interracial partnership, queerness and love. With an unflinching seriousness she interrogates womanhood, meditates on race, queerness, and considers the monetary, mental, and physical costs of adopting or birthing a Black child.
PRAISE:
“All the Blood Involved in Love is at once the most Southern, most feminist, and Blackest book I have ever read. Maya Marshall witnesses the way we used that word in the old church, through a language so polished and exact that we feel cleansed by it as readers. This is a beautiful debut from a game-changing poet.”
Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition
“All the Blood Involved in Love is a lyrical work of psychological and temporal complexity gripped by questions of freedom, trauma, desire, imagination, and possibilities of Black girlhood and womanhood in the U.S. It is at once sensuous and terrifying, taut and lush, as in: ‘Do these trees know? / Do these trees know the grazing hem, the line / between sweet heat and deep sweat? // The woman(’s) sex. Her hanging. They must. / Her hair is made of them.’ I’m saying, this stunningly shiftful, strange, and exact book interrogates the histories with which our blood and time are written. It insists that there is power in such scrutiny. I’m saying, her Eye’s on this: ‘To save my life, I undress this disarray.’”
Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria
“Maya Marshall’s All the Blood Involved in Love sounds the breadth and depth of embodied Black womanhood. This poet holds her pen to the fire and writes in flame, lines that are passionate, yet brutally precise. Black women move through the poems in relation to their various families—biological, chosen, longed for, remembered, imagined, or barely escaped. Hear me: Marshall’s poetry collects and confronts some of our knottiest questions, our hardest truths. But it also illuminates the connections that buoy and strengthen us, the knowing that enables us to thrive.”
Evie Shockley, author of semiautomatic
“Intimate and understated in unflinching private, public mourning, All the Blood Involved in Love courses with an undeniable steady intensity throbbing at its tender jugular. Delivered with unnerving focus— almost unbearable—declarative observations, we don’t just read Maya Marshall’s poems, we breathe with them, and bleed with them: Tenderness is the impulse to protect /what you know you could destroy. /This is the gift of my father’s neck. This is a harrowing and illuminating book surging with intelligence and pulsing with new music. Maya Marshall writes with life force.”
Robyn Schiff, author of Revolver
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Maya Marshall is the author of the debut full-length poetry collection All the Blood Involved in Love and the chapbook Secondhand .
A long-time Chicagoan, she currently lives in Decatur, Georgia, where she serves as faculty for Emory University. Formerly, she served as faculty for Northwestern University and Loyola University Chicago. She’s earned fellowships from MacDowell, and Cave Canem, among others.
Marshall is a cofounder of underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Academy of American Poets’s Poem-a-Day, Crazyhorse, Best New Poets 2019, Callaloo, and elsewhere.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599787 • US $15.95 • 7.5 in x 6.0 in • 224 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The definitive introduction to history’s most influential and controversial political document, updated for a new generation of readers.
Since it was first written in 1848, The Communist Manifesto has been translated into more languages than any other modern text. All across the world—in countless places and idioms—it has been debated, shared, brandished, invoked, banned, burned, and even declared “dead.” But in an era of escalating political, economic, health, and environmental crises, Marx and Engels’ fierce indictment of capitalism is more relevant than ever, and their Manifesto remains required reading from the classroom to the picket line.
Scholar Phil Gasper draws on his decades of teaching and organizing experience to produce a beautifully organized edition of the Manifesto that brings the text to life. By fully annotating the Manifesto with clear historical references and explication, a glossary, and including additional related texts, Gasper provides an accessible and comprehensive reference edition suited to first-time readers and dedicated partisans alike.
PRAISE:
“Phil Gasper’s new edition of The Communist Manifesto comes at a critical moment in world history, when a global capitalism which Marx described with amazing accuracy a hundred and fifty years ago shows all the signs of disarray that he predicted. What Gasper does is to remind us how relevant the Manifesto is to our world today. His Introduction and Afterword are useful guides to the Manifesto and to its importance in our time. His notes give us fascinating tidbits of information which a thoughtful reader of the Manifesto will find extremely valuable. Gasper brings alive one of the great classics of modern political thought, an indispensable addition to anyone’s library.”
Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States
“The more those in power reject and ignore Marx and his ideas, the more the world comes to resemble the barbaric social system Marx predicted capitalism was in the process of becoming. Therefore, Marx’s ideas are becoming more and more relevant to understand what we see before us. This new edition of The Communist Manifesto, with its excellent informative notes and commentaries, enables the reader to appreciate this document both historically and theoretically, both in relation to its own time and in relation to the realities around us.”
Allen Wood, Stanford University
“Distinguished from all other English-language editions currently in print in two critical ways: (1) it is a fully annotated edition, and (2) it provides much needed corrections to the 1888 Samuel Moore translation supervised by Engels. Gasper has also Americanized the spelling and modernized the punctuation and capitalization. In addition to the text of the Manifesto itself and the annotations, the book includes a clear, accessible introduction by Gasper entitled ‘History’s Most Important Political Document’ and a useful afterword, also by him, entitled ‘Is the Manifesto Still Relevant?’ In the latter he replies to criticisms of the Manifesto (some emanating from the left) and demonstrates its continuing relevance. The numerous appendices to the book include all the prefaces to the Manifesto, Engels’s ‘Principles of Communism’, and a generous collection of extracts from Marx and Engels’ writings.”
Monthly Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Phil Gasper is professor emeritus at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California. He previously taught at Cornell University, the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Middlebury College, the University of California San Diego, and Stanford University. He currently lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin.
Gasper is co-editor of The Philosophy of Science (MIT Press, 1991), and a contributor to Explanation and Its Limits (Cambridge, 1990), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd ed., 1999), The Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket, 2002), Enduring Freedom or Enduring War? (Maisonneuve, 2005), Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice (Sage, 2007), Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Lynne Rienner, forthcoming) and Encyclopedia of Race and Crime (Sage, forthcoming). His academic publications have also appeared in The Philosophical Review, Philosophy of Science, The Radical Philosophy Review of Books and Hypatia.
He is a on the editorial board of — and writes the bimonthly “Critical Thinking” column for — the International Socialist Review, and is a contributor to Socialist Worker, CounterPunch, ZNet, and MRzine.
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Paper • ISBN: 9780226509785 • US $38.00 • 377 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Although books on the comedies of the silent era abound, few have attempted to survey film comedy as a whole—its history and evolution, how the philosophical visions of its greatest artists and directors have shaped its traditions, and how these visions have informed both the meaning and manner of their work.
Blending information with interpretation, description with analysis, Mast traces the development of screen comedy from the first crude efforts of Edison and Lumière to the subtlety and psychological complexity of Annie Hall. As he guides the reader through detailed discussions of specific films, Mast reveals the structures, the values, and the cinematic techniques which have appeared and reappeared in comic cinema.
The second edition of The Comic Mind treats the comic developments of the 1970s in terms of the traditions of film comedy set forth in the first edition, including a discussion of the evolution of Jacques Tati and the emergence of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen as the two greatest American comic stylists of the seventies.
PRAISE:
“The most comprehensive study of film comedy yet written in English. . . .The book’s extensive index with references to companies from which 16mm prints of many of the cited films may be rented will be of great value to the film teacher and audiovisual librarian.”
Gerald Mast was an author, film historian, and chairman of the English department at the University of Chicago. Dr. Mast joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1978 after teaching at New York University, Oberlin College, and the City University of New York. His writings on film history are credited with helping establish the subject as a serious academic discipline, and his many works are used extensively in film courses across the United States.
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For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
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Paper • ISBN 9780205755578 • US $163.80 • 784 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An updated version of the most widely adopted film history textbook
The eleventh edition of A Short History of the Movies continues its long-standing tradition of scrupulously accurate details, up-to-date information, and jargon-free writing style that has made it the most widely adopted film history textbook.
This edition offers students a panoramic overview of the worldwide development of film. From the early experiments with motion photography, through the American studio years of the 1930’s and 1940’s, from Neorealism and the New Wave, up to the present age of digital cinema, A Short History of Film provides a comprehensive presentation of the history of cinema. This eleventh edition has been revised and updated to include current scholarship, recent industry developments, and new films and filmmakers.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Bruce Kawin is the author of film criticism, film history, literary theory, and poetry, and was a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder from 1975 to 2015 in the English Department and Film Studies Program. He received an AB in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia (1967), an MFA in Creative Writing and Filmmaking from Cornell (1969), and a PhD in Modern British and American Literature and Film Aesthetics from Cornell (1970). His many books include Telling It Again and Again, Mindscreen, The Mind of the Novel, Horror and the Horror Film, and two books of poetry.
Gerald Mast was an author, film historian, and chairman of the English department at the University of Chicago. Dr. Mast joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1978 after teaching at New York University, Oberlin College, and the City University of New York. His writings on film history are credited with helping establish the subject as a serious academic discipline, and his many works are used extensively in film courses across the United States.
Paper • ISBN 9780205210626 • US $110.60 • 480 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This is the essential core of Mast and Kawin’s classic in a streamlined volume: the most accurate, carefully updated account of cinema today in a clear and lively text.
Building on Mast’s astute and lively history of cinema, Kawin has refined and updated the fascinating story of cinema’s evolution from its earliest beginnings to the digital age. Probing deeper than most movie texts, he takes us into the studio vaults, corrects the record, discloses what goes on inside the industry, clarifies the mysteries of movie technology, and offers a precise, thoroughly researched account. Kawin’s analysis is witty and engaging, rich in instructive insights and entertaining illustrations of the art, history, technology, business, and fun of film. Now the essentials of Mast and Kawin’s classic text are available in a compact version, judiciously streamlined for today’s student at an even trimmer price.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Bruce Kawin is the author of film criticism, film history, literary theory, and poetry, and was a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder from 1975 to 2015 in the English Department and Film Studies Program. He received an AB in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia (1967), an MFA in Creative Writing and Filmmaking from Cornell (1969), and a PhD in Modern British and American Literature and Film Aesthetics from Cornell (1970). His many books include Telling It Again and Again, Mindscreen, The Mind of the Novel, Horror and the Horror Film, and two books of poetry.
Gerald Mast was an author, film historian, and chairman of the English department at the University of Chicago. Dr. Mast joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1978 after teaching at New York University, Oberlin College, and the City University of New York. His writings on film history are credited with helping establish the subject as a serious academic discipline, and his many works are used extensively in film courses across the United States.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599718 •US $22.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A first-hand account of the death penalty’s wholly destructive nature.
In Witness, Lyle C. May offers a scathing critique of shifts in sentencing laws, prison policies that ensure recidivism, and classic “tough on crime” views that don’t make society safer or prevent crime. These insightful and analytical essays explore capital punishment, life imprisonment, prison education, prison journalism, as well as what activism from inside looks like on the road toward abolishing the carceral state.
No outside journalist can adequately report what happens inside death row or what it is like to live through thirty-three executions of people you know. May’s grounded writings in Witness challenge the myths, misconceptions, and misinformation about the criminal legal system and death in prison, guiding readers on a journey through North Carolina’s congregate death row, where the author has spent over twenty years of his life.
With a foreword by activist, lawyer, and professor Danielle Purifoy, and drawing on the work of Angela Y. Davis, Mariame Kaba, and other abolitionist scholars, Witness shows there is more to life under the sentence of death than what is portrayed in crime dramas or mass media. Lyle C. May’s life, journalism, and activism are a guidebook to abolitionism in practice.
PRAISE:
“Lyle May has written a powerful, must-read book for those embedded in the struggle for freedom, justice, and abolition. Witness is essential reading.”
Mariame Kaba
With fierce beauty, Witness brilliantly chronicles the everyday and intimate layers of life on death row in a US prison. May’s detailed reporting – and, as powerfully, his critical analysis of the prison industrial complex – illuminates crucial pathways to strengthen our movements for healing and liberation for all.”
Erica R. Meiners, co-editor of The Long Term and co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now.
“Lyle May is a voice for the voiceless. He draws the reader into his experiences and perspectives as a man living with others condemned to death. Remarkably circumspect, he explores ineffective and deadening attempts to deal with crime and criminals that do not redeem the lost and forgotten. Whether or not you agree with him, it is important for us to listen to him. There are some passages in this book that may touch your soul.”
Alice Lynd, co-author with Staughton Lynd of Moral Injury and Nonviolent Resistance: Breaking the Cycle of Violence in the Military and Behind Bars
“From death row, May not only presents a searing, unflinching and damning first-hand examination of North Carolina’s death row, but also walks the reader through the decades of punitive policies that have built this house of hopelessness.”
Victoria Law, journalist and author of “Prisons Make Us Safer” & 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lyle C. May is a prison journalist, abolitionist, and Ohio University Alum currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in sociology, with a criminology major. He is a member of the Alpha Sigma Lambda Honor Society and the Author’s Guild. Lyle’s writings have appeared in Scalawag Magazine, Perspectives on Politics, The Intercept, America Magazine, Inside Higher Ed, and elsewhere. Lyle is also a coauthor of Inside: Voices from Death Row (Scuppernong Editions, 2022) and contributor to Right Here, Right Now: Life Stories from America’s Death Row (Duke University Press, 2021). He routinely lectures to high school and university students, church groups, and community organizations on the politics, policies, and experiences of mass incarceration. As he pursues every legal avenue to overturn his wrongful conviction and death sentence, Lyle advocates for greater access to higher education in prison.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608469741• US $16.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 330 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Eamonn McCann’s account of what it is like to grow up a Catholic in Northern Ireland under British rule—first published in 1974—quickly became a classic.
The author was at the center of events in Derry, which first brought Northern Ireland to world attention. He witnessed the gradual transformation of the civil rights movement from a mild campaign for “British Democracy” to an all-out military assault on the British state.
McCann argues—against both Republican and Loyalist orthodoxies—that the ideals that inspired the early civil rights movement continue to be the only way out of the bloody mess of politics in Northern Ireland.
This edition features a new introduction by McCann in which he argues that the “ideas of internationalism and revolt from below which animated young people fifty years ago” are even more relevant and needed today.
PRAISE:
“An essential reference work for those interested in the roots of the conflict in the North.”
Irish Post
“Few could quarrel with the publisher’s description of this as a classic.”
Books Ireland
“There is no denying the powerful ways in which McCann recounts the events of those early years of the troubles.”
Robert Fisk, The Times
“So honest, so human and so readable.”
Irish Times
“[A] powerful memoir…The value of the book lies in its capturing sharply a particular viewpoint that ended up being highly consequential.”
Richard Bourke, Five Books, “The Best Books on Modern Irish History”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Eamonn McCann has been campaigning for social justice in Derry for more than 40 years. A lifelong socialist and trades unionist, he is a member of the National Executive of the NUJ and of the Northern Ireland Committee of the ICTU. He has campaigned against militarism and war since the days of CND and the Vietnam protests, and was among those who successfully took non-violent direct action against the bomb-makers Raytheon. He is chairman of the Bloody Sunday Trust and a member of Amnesty International and of the Rail lobby, Into the West.
In a completely original analysis, award-winning historian Alfred McCoy explores America’s rise as a world power, from the 1890s through the Cold War and its bid to extend hegemony deep into the twenty-first century through a fusion of cyberwar, space warfare, trade pacts, and military alliances. McCoy then analyzes the marquee instruments of US hegemony—covert interventions, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance.
Alfred McCoy’s 2009 book Policing America’s Empire won the Kahin Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.
PRAISE:
“In the Shadows of the American Century is a valuable contribution to geopolitical discourse that draws important lessons from history.”
Foreword Reviews
“[McCoy] persuasively argues for the inevitable decline of the American empire and the rise of China… Let’s hope that Americans will listen to his powerful arguments.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, prize-winning author of The Sympathizer
“Alfred McCoy offers a meticulous, eye-opening account of the rise, since 1945, and impending premature demise of the American Century of world domination. As the empire’s political, economic, and military strategies unravel under cover of secrecy, America’s neglected citizens would do well to read this book.”
Ann Jones, author of They Were Soldiers
This book “joins the essential short list of scrupulous historical and comparative studies of the United States as an awesome, conflicted, technologically innovative, routinely atrocious, and ultimately hubristic imperial power.”
John Dower, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Embracing Defeat, War Without Mercy, and The Violent American Century
“Sobering reading for geopolitics mavens and Risk aficionados alike…”
Kirkus
“What is the character of this American empire?” Alfred McCoy asks at the outset of this provocative study. His answer not only limns the contours of the American imperium as it evolved during the twentieth century, but explains why its days are quite likely numbered. This is history with profound relevance to events that are unfolding before our eyes.
Andrew J. Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History
“While McCoy prefaces his argument by acknowledging the inherent difficulties of prognosticating world events, the case he makes for a precipitous decline in U.S. power over the next decade is compelling. If trends continue, by 2030 the American Century — proclaimed with such confidence not long ago — could be “all over except the finger-pointing.”
The Intercept
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alfred McCoy holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He is author of The Politics of Heroin, the classic study of drug trafficking that the CIA tried to suppress, and In the Shadows of the American Century.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595789 • US $28.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 380 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In a sweep through seven centuries from 1350 to 2050, the work explains how catastrophes– pandemics, wars, and climate crisis–have shaped the destiny of empires and world orders.
In a tempestuous narrative that sweeps across five continents and seven centuries, this book explains how a succession of catastrophes—from the devastating Black Death of 1350 through the coming climate crisis of 2050—has produced a relentless succession of rising empires and fading world orders.
During the long centuries of Iberian and British imperial rule, the quest for new forms of energy led to the development of the colonial sugar plantation as a uniquely profitable kind of commerce. In a time when issues of race and social justice have arisen with pressing urgency, the book explains how the plantation’s extraordinary profitability relied on a production system that literally worked the slaves to death, creating an insatiable appetite for new captives that made the African slave trade a central feature of modern capitalism for over four centuries.
After surveying past centuries roiled by imperial wars, national revolutions, and the struggle for human rights, the closing chapters use those hard-won insights to peer through the present and into the future. By rendering often-opaque environmental science in lucid prose, the book explains how climate change and changing world orders will shape the life opportunities for younger generations, born at the start of this century, during the coming decades that will serve as the signposts of their lives—2030, 2050, 2070, and beyond.
PRAISE:
McCoy is one of the most eminent scholars in the world on the abuse of power and authority, on surveillance and repression, on the historical evolution of state-sanctioned torture in the US and elsewhere, and, more recently, on the rapidly declining state of the US empire…McCoy’s latest book To Govern the Globe is a formidable work of scholarship spanning an incredible arc of world history. Yet it is a gripping and fast-paced read that manages to distill the complex history of the rise and fall of world empires into a gripping narrative that is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. The book’s scope is so massive that only a scholar of McCoy’s skill could even consider attempting to capture it. McCoy’s meticulous understanding of the past and present failures and excesses of empires gives him the rare credibility to offer a detailed, damning picture of the grim realities humankind faces as history transforms into our future. After reading To Govern the Globe, however, I must conclude that embedded within McCoy’s book is a ray of hope demanding to be seen by us all before it’s truly too late.”
Jeremy Scahill, investigative journalist and author of Blackwater and Dirty Wars
“To Govern the Globe is history on an epic scale—sweeping, provocative, and unsparing in its judgments. Alfred McCoy’s immensely readable narrative spans centuries, charting the rise and fall of successive world orders down to our own present moment shaped by China’s emergence as a great power and the blight of climate change.”
Andrew Bacevich, author of After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed
Alfred McCoy holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His 2009 book Policing America’s Empire won the Kahin Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. In 2012, Yale University awarded him the Wilbur Cross Medal for work as “one of the world’s leading historians of Southeast Asia and an expert on…international political surveillance.”
THE MANY FACES OF EROS A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Human Sexuality
Joyce McDougall
W.W Norton & Company (October 1995, world rights, including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth and the European Union)
Trade Cloth • ISBN 9780393702156 • US $30.00 • 257 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
‘Human sexuality is inherently traumatic,’ begins this fascinating study by one of the world’s most distinguished writers in this field. Joyce McDougall convincingly demonstrates that the psychic conflicts arising from the tensions between the inner world of primitive instinctual drives and the constraining and denying forces of the external world begin in earliest infancy and have ramifications throughout life.
PRAISE:
“A mature, considered presentation of [McDougall’s] current thinking on sexuality . . . simultaneously impassioned and dispassionate, erudite and plain-spoken, conservative in her insistence on basic psychoanalytic assumptions and radical in her celebration of intimate human diversity.”
Contemporary Psychology
“‘Human sexuality is inherently traumatic,’ begins The Many Faces of Eros (1996). As McDougall demonstrated convincingly, the psychic conflicts arising from the tensions between the inner world of primitive drives and the constraining and denying forces of the external world begin in earliest infancy, but have ramifications throughout life.”
Joyce McDougall was an internationally renowned psychoanalyst, who made original theoretical and clinical contributions to understanding sexuality, perversions, psychosomatic symptoms, addictions, and creativity. As The Guardian wrote upon her death, “Her clinical insights, theoretical originality, open-mindedness and lack of dogmatism made her unique throughout her 60-year career and enabled her to create a valuable link connecting the Anglo-Saxon and French psychoanalytical schools.” McDougall was a supervising and training analyst at the Paris Psychoanalytic School, and was an honorary member off the Association for Psychosomatic Medicine in New York, the New York Freudian Society, and teacher at the Object Relations Institute of New York. Her many books, including the landmark Theaters of the Body, were translated into 10 languages. McDougall died in 2011.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
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THEATERS OF THE BODY A Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosomatic Illness
Joyce McDougall
W.W Norton and Company (September 1989, worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth)
Paper • ISBN 9780393700824 • US $22.95 • 192 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Theaters of the Body is a landmark contribution to the study of the psychosoma by one of the world’s most important psychoanalytic thinkers and clinicians.
In this book, Joyce McDougall presents a bold and exciting recasting of the psychoanalytic approach to the fascinating question of the relationship between the mind and the body. McDougall looks at people who react to psychological distress through somatic manifestations, and at the psychosomatic potential of individuals in those moments when habitual psychological ways of coping are overwhelmed, and the body pantomimes the mind’s distress.
PRAISE:
“A landmark contribution to the study of psychosomatics” The Guardian
“A mature, considered presentation of [McDougall’s] current thinking on sexuality . . . simultaneously impassioned and dispassionate, erudite and plain-spoken, conservative in her insistence on basic psychoanalytic assumptions and radical in her celebration of intimate human diversity.” Contemporary Psychology
“‘Human sexuality is inherently traumatic,’ begins The Many Faces of Eros (1996). As McDougall demonstrated convincingly, the psychic conflicts arising from the tensions between the inner world of primitive drives and the constraining and denying forces of the external world begin in earliest infancy, but have ramifications throughout life.” The Guardian
Joyce McDougall was an internationally renowned psychoanalyst, who made original theoretical and clinical contributions to understanding sexuality, perversions, psychosomatic symptoms, addictions, and creativity. As The Guardian wrote upon her death, “Her clinical insights, theoretical originality, open-mindedness and lack of dogmatism made her unique throughout her 60-year career and enabled her to create a valuable link connecting the Anglo-Saxon and French psychoanalytical schools.” McDougall was a supervising and training analyst at the Paris Psychoanalytic School, and was an honorary member off the Association for Psychosomatic Medicine in New York, the New York Freudian Society, and teacher at the Object Relations Institute of New York. Her many books, including the landmark Theaters of the Body, were translated into 10 languages. McDougall died in 2011.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Paper • ISBN 9780876306482 • US $56.95 • 314 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK
Praise from the New York Times:
“All of us harbor a secret theater of the mind with a favorite scenario that we repeat in fantasy as well as in life, according to Joyce McDougall, a psychoanalyst in Paris.
“These psychic scenarios, Dr. McDougall says, take their scripts from the calamities of childhood—for example, the discovery that one’s parents are sexual or the reaction to the birth of a sibling. Dr. McDougall writes that the inevitable frustrations surrounding such experiences lead to a life drama whose plot reveals itself to be repetitive. She draws on her own cases to show how people can recruit mates who enact the roles their inner scripts dictate. The case material sometimes reads like a subplot from “Dynasty”: one patient, who yearned for a mother-substitute, managed to find and marry an older woman who craved a younger man for her lover, because—in Dr. McDougall’s analysis—she actually was attracted to the young man’s mother. Dr. McDougall’s psychoanalytic outlook shares much with that of Melanie Klein, and her remarkable use of language suggests uniquely French sensibility. She covers familiar terrain—from neurosis to narcissism, perversion to psychosis—in a fresh way, avoiding the often turgid jargon of psychoanalysis. Dr. McDougall’s simple and direct style recommends her book not just to the specialist but to anyone fascinated by the primitive dramas that drive us all.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joyce McDougall was an internationally renowned psychoanalyst, who made original theoretical and clinical contributions to understanding sexuality, perversions, psychosomatic symptoms, addictions, and creativity. As The Guardian wrote upon her death, “Her clinical insights, theoretical originality, open-mindedness and lack of dogmatism made her unique throughout her 60-year career and enabled her to create a valuable link connecting the Anglo-Saxon and French psychoanalytical schools.” McDougall was a supervising and training analyst at the Paris Psychoanalytic School, and was an honorary member off the Association for Psychosomatic Medicine in New York, the New York Freudian Society, and teacher at the Object Relations Institute of New York. Her many books, including the landmark Theaters of the Body, were translated into 10 languages. McDougall died in 2011.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608468645 • US $19.95 • 270 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
C.L.R. James was one of the most influential Marxists of his generation. His important contributions ranged from the subjects of Black liberation, to contemporary philosophy, and even touched on the anti-colonial potential of cricket. In this collection of hard-to-find articles and essays, his towering intellect and engaging style touches on a diverse array of topics.
Scott McLemee is the editor of C.L.R. James and “the Negro Question”. He writes the weekly column “Intellectual Affairs” for Inside Higher Ed and serves on the editorial board of New Politics.
Paul Le Blanc is a professor of History at La Roche College, has written on and participated in the U.S. labor, radical and civil rights movements, and is author of such books as Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience, and Lenin and the Revolutionary Party.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591330 • US $20.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In most accounts of the origins of money we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money’s origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Money’s emergence and its transformation are shown to be intimately connected to the buying and selling of slaves and the waging of war. Blood and Money demonstrates the ways that money has “internalized” its violent origins, making clear that it has become a concentrated force of social power and domination. Where Adam Smith observed that monetary wealth represents “command over labor,” this paradigm shifting book amends his view to define money as comprising the command over persons and their bodies.
PRAISE:
“This fascinating and informative study, rich in novel insights, treats money not as an abstraction from its social base but as deeply embedded in its essential functions and origins in brutal violence and harsh oppression.”
Noam Chomsky
McNally builds a powerful, richly documented argument that unchecked capitalism prioritizes greed and violence over compassion….[T]his searing academic treatise makes a convincing case.”
Publishers Weekly
“David McNally’s new book makes an important contribution to the growing critical literature on such basic components of contemporary capitalism as markets and money. His historical perspective makes the contribution especially insightful.”
Richard D. Wolff, author, Democracy at Work
“Blood and Money is an ambitious and challenging account of the nexus between money, war, slavery and, eventually, capitalism—across vast swathes of history. At the heart of the book lies a crucial argument about the pivotal role of war finance in the emergence of modern banking, carefully laid out both in McNally’s superlative chapter on the early decades of the Bank of England and in the condensed and fascinating synopsis of American capitalism with which the study concludes. These chapters alone should make the book indispensable reading for anyone seriously interested in the longer-term sources of modern capitalism as we know it today
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David McNally is the Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston (UH) and Director of the Center for the Study of Capitalism. He is the author of Monsters of the Market, as well as six other books.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599749 • US $24.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 480 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Colonialism is at the heart of making sense of Irish history and contemporary politics across the island of Ireland. And as Robbie McVeigh and Bill Rolston argue, Ireland’s experience is central to understanding the history of colonization and anti-colonial politics throughout the world.
Part history, part analysis, Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution charts the centuries of Irish colonial history, from England’s proto-imperial engagement with Ireland in 1155 to the Union in 1801, and the subsequent struggles for Irish independence and the legacies of partition from 1921. A century later, the plate tectonics of Irishness are shifting once again. The Union is in crisis and alternatives to partition are being seriously considered outside the Republican tradition for the first time in generations. These significant structural changes suggest that the coming times might finally see the completion of the decolonization project – the finishing of the revolution. In the words of the revolutionary Pádraig Pearse: Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh – now the summer is coming.
PRAISE:
“This book brilliantly analyzes the history and legacy of colonialism and resistance in Ireland and beyond. In this moment where the whole planet is in flux, this powerful account offers indispensable insights for us all.”
Barbara RansbyProfessor of Black Studies and History, University of Illinois, and author of Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century
“An excellent and critically important book…The empire has no clothes and stands naked, ugly, bloated, blood-stained and exposed – which side are you on? Reading this fine book might help you pick one.”
Dr Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh, Irish News
“Teaching any course on Ireland, Irish history, race and Ireland, as well as colonialism and decolonization without using this crucially necessary book as a key text will from now on be impossible; it is theoretically complex, comprehensive and a practical guide for Marxists wishing to finish Ireland’s unfinished decolonization.”
Ronit Lentin, Race & Class
“…one of the finest works of Irish and anti-imperialist historiography written to date.”
Chris Beausang, Liberated Texts
“Timely, vital and necessary, a most powerful and captivating account of the continuing pull of colonialism – and its dark, lingering legacies.”
Philippe Sands International Human Rights lawyer, and author of East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity.
‘With an 800 year history of harsh and often murderous foreign domination, Ireland provides ample evidence for the interplay of imperialism, colonialism and colonial state structure, along with race, class, and religion, topics explored here with subtlety and insight both in Ireland’s specific colonial experience and quest for decolonization, and in global history more generally. A very impressive contribution to understanding our world, how it arose, and why it must dramatically change.
Noam Chomsky Social critic and political activist, and author of Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance
‘The election of Joe Biden as President of the United States reminds me of the old adage that Ireland is the only country in the world where English is spoken and the Irish don’t rule. Biden’s term in office will focus minds on Ireland and its peace process. Why such a peace process was necessary, why it needs protection, and why the authors believe that ultimately Ireland’s future depends on breaking the colonial link, is at the core of this audacious and fascinating book.’
Albie Sachs Anti-Apartheid activist and former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and author of The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Bill Rolston is an emeritus professor at Ulster University and former director of the Transitional Justice Institute. He has researched and written on a wide range of topics over the years, from media reporting of conflict to political wall murals, from reproductive rights to political imprisonment, and from unemployment to justice for victims in the North of Ireland. He has also been active on connected extracurricular issues including organizing, with others, debates and discussions at the annual Feile an Phobail/West Belfast Festival and acting as chair of the victims’ group Relatives for Justice.
Robbie McVeigh is a researcher and writer based in Edinburgh. He has published extensively, with a particular focus on race and equality. He has worked with statutory and community organizations across Ireland on issues of education, human rights and racism and sectarianism. He has also worked internationally on issues of race, equality, peace and independence including research on Roma Rights across the EU and self-determination in Papua New Guinea. His most recent research publication is Irish Medium Education and the ‘Statutory Duty’ in NI: A rights perspective (CAJ and Conradh na Gaeilge 2022).
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he Sentences That Create Us draws from the unique insights of over fifty justice-involved contributors and their allies to offer inspiration and resources for creating a literary life in prison. Centering in the philosophy that writers in prison can be as vibrant and capable as writers on the outside, and have much to offer readers everywhere, The Sentences That Create Us aims to propel writers in prison to launch their work into the world beyond the walls, while also embracing and supporting the creative community within the walls.
The Sentences That Create Us is a comprehensive resource writers can grow with, beginning with the foundations of creative writing. A roster of impressive contributors including Reginald Dwayne Betts (Felon: Poems), Mitchell S. Jackson (Survival Math), Wilbert Rideau (In the Place of Justice) and Piper Kerman (Orange is the New Black), among many others, address working within and around the severe institutional, emotional, psychological and physical limitations of writing prison through compelling first-person narratives. The book’s authors offer pragmatic advice on editing techniques, pathways to publication, writing routines, launching incarcerated-run prison publications and writing groups, lesson plans from prison educators and next-step resources.
Threaded throughout the book is the running theme of addressing lived trauma in writing, and writing’s capacity to support an authentic healing journey centered in accountability and restoration. While written towards people in the justice system, this book can serve anyone seeking hard won lessons and inspiration for their own creative—and human—journey.
PRAISE:
“Offering pragmatic advice and helpful writing exercises, The Sentences That Create Us is not only an urgent handbook for incarcerated writers and their allies, but a craft book that will instruct and challenge any writer.”
Poets & Writers
“This is one of the best books on writing that I’ve ever read. I couldn’t put it down. There are millions of stories locked behind bars, along with the millions of people our nation has caged. This astonishing book has the power to set those stories free. And I believe the truths contained in those stories just might free us all.”
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
“When I was inside, I had no access to this manual. It didn’t exist. And so, I scraped along the best way I could. I talked to friends who plotted out novels by riffing on rap albums. I talked to friends who’d written hundreds of pages, by hand, fantasy novels that only they and I and those walking the yard would read. And we were all writers. But had we had this book—we would have been better writers.”
Reginald Dwayne Betts, from the foreword “The Sentences That Create Us feels like a cosmic reminder that the most radical, life-giving art is created and received from the inside to the inside(s). This book, unlike any other I’ve read, takes seriously the beating hearts and curious minds behind the bars of a nation obsessed with punishing the most vulnerable.”
Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
“A book rich with craft and the vitality of necessity. An essential collection and a gift to the world.”
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black
“The Sentences That Create Us offers an illuminating array of tutorials and testimonials, reckonings and brass tacks. But above all, this volume is an homage to the power of writing to deliver each of us from our individual confines into the soaring infinity of our imaginations.”
Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad
“Not only a powerful guidebook for all who are curious about developing a writing practice, this radical collection also demonstrates how people surviving and resisting the prison industrial complex reimagine and rebuild our world. With entries including narratives of writing lives and communities behind bars, definitions of key concepts and terms, and samples and examples across genres (from poetry to journalism and more), this fierce resource equips readers with all the tools to write ourselves into freedom.”
Erica R. Meiners, co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now.
“Having taught college-level English courses in prison for more than a decade, I am thrilled for a volume like this one: chock full of prose that is not only beautiful, inspirational and wise, but hugely helpful in a pedagogical sense—a perfect addition to all syllabi that involve writing in the carceral space.”
Baz Dreisinger, author of Incarceration Nations
“The Sentences That Create Us, PEN America’s new handbook, is both metaphor for the system and means of reinterpreting it. These writers—made on the inside—reveal the many ways that denial of a creative intellectual life on the outside is one of the pillars of our current carceral dependency. Shooting stars on every page, this book is instructional beyond its promise. Through it, we may just learn that we have always had better solutions than bars and walls.” —Gina Dent, co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now.
“The Sentences That Create Us is a wonderful immersive guide into the world of writing (and reading) that will explain, reinterpret and transform genres you thought you knew. It is a profound reminder that writing, when nurtured by those denied, has redemptive power not only to examine and interpret our lives, but also to change them.”
Donna Murch, author of Assata Taught Me
“Take advantage of every word, Caits Meissner tells readers of this powerful anthology. Its authors certainly have. The Sentences That Create Us is a practical tool of the ways currently and formerly incarcerated people and their allies, gifted writers all, seize the written word to do what prison refuses: celebrate the human. Here is a moving, hands-on guide to freedom writing.”
Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Founded in 1922, PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 centers worldwide that comprise the PEN International network. Our membership forms a nationwide community of writers and literary professionals, as well as devoted readers and supporters who join with them to carry out PEN America’s mission. PEN America advocates for writers under threat worldwide and public policies that bolster freedom of speech; celebrates the literature of eminent and emerging writers through awards, publications, festivals, and public programming; produces original research on pressing threats to free expression; and offers platforms to lift up the work and views of those whose voices have too often gone unheard or been ignored. PEN America’sPrison and Justice Writing Program, founded in 1971 in the wake of the Attica riots, advances the transformative possibilities of writing, and has offered many thousands of incarcerated writers free access to literary resources, skilled writing mentors, and audiences for their work. Our program extends PEN America’s mission of supporting free expression, and encourages the use of the written word as a legitimate form of power.
Caits Meissner is the Director of Prison and Justice Writing at PEN America. She is also the author and illustrator of hybrid poetry book Let It Die Hungry (The Operating System, 2016). A multidisciplinary creator, Meissner’s written and visual work has been published in venues including The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Medium’s Human Parts, The Literary Review, Narrative, Adroit, Drunken Boat, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, [Pank], The Journal and The Offing, among others.
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There Are Trans People Here is a testament to the healing power of community and the beauty of trans people, history, and culture.
In this highly- anticipated collection, H. Melt focuses on the resilience of trans communities, as well as trans joy. This book will help readers better understand the connections between trans activism and other movements for liberation. Tender and fierce, this work pushes against the belied silence of folks who want to live fully and uninterrupted. With humor, sarcasm, and direct language, here is the hand joined by the many: ancestors and comrades.To lead us out of the dark.
History and the intimate converse, knowing one is nothing without the other. What does it mean to live and fight at the intersections of binary gender, capital-ism and consumption? And yes, the love of the Midwest. The love of friendship and joy. In conversation with Lou Sullivan’s radical work, H. Melt proves that resistance work in building a new world cannot be done without the groundwork laid before us. In care. In absolute acceptance, H. Melt abolishes borders and invokes the all- knowing magic we possess.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
H. Melt is a poet, artist and educator who celebrates trans liberation. They are the author of The Plural, The Blurring and editor of Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. Lambda Literary awarded them the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers.
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Working-Class Unity in Belfast’s 1932 Outdoor Relief Riots
By Seán Mitchell Haymarket Books (Fall 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466788 • US $16.99 • 250 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In October 1932, the streets of Belfast were gripped by vicious and widespread rioting that lasted for the best part of a week. From the ‘Green’ districts along the Falls to the ‘Orange’ districts of the Shankill, thousands of unarmed demonstrators pitched battles against heavily-armed police. Unemployed workers and, indeed, entire working-class communities, dug trenches and built barricades to hold off the police assault. The panicked Unionist government imposed a curfew and for a few heady days the question of which side would prevail was up in the air.
The event became known as the Outdoor Relief Riot—one of a very few instances in which class sympathy managed to trump sectarian loyalties in a city famous for its divisions. Deeply researched but written in a clear and popular style, this book tells for the first time the full story and background of this extraordinary episode, revealing hitherto unknown stories of working-class heroism and cross-community solidarity in the process. It provides a detailed and critical account of the unemployment agitation of that year, explaining how the activity of local communists acted as a focal point around which a mass movement of Catholics and Protestants emerged, providing the impetus for a city-wide ferment that shook the state to its core and brought the government to its knees. Finally, the book engages with the politics of the period, and examines the lessons it holds for socialist politics today.
PRAISE:
“Mitchell’s is by far the most thorough and well researched account yet of a few weeks in Irish history which shook the ruling Unionist Government probably more deeply than any other single event, or sequences of events until 1968.”
Geoff Bell, History Ireland
“The ultimate message of this timely and absorbing book – that a class-based politics has operated in Northern Ireland, and thus might operate again – is in itself a useful reminder that the past can, given half a chance, offer lessons for the future.”
Irish Times
“In October 1932, Belfast’s sectarian divisions were transcended by class politics. Sean Mitchell’s book Struggle or Starve had a fascinating account of what became known as the ‘relief riots’, Catholic and Protestant workers coming together to protest against a harsh state relief programme. Shared need, albeit briefly, eclipsed religious divisions.”
Belfast Telegraph
“Struggle or Starve by Seán Mitchell is an important book that deserves the widest readership among those interested in promoting progressive politics in the North of Ireland. Best of all though, this book provides a rich but readable text to stimulate the necessary discussion, debate and deliberations that socialists and republicans must have rich but readable text to stimulate the necessary discussion, debate and deliberations that socialists and republicans must have.”
Irish Marxist Review
“This is an important story to tell, part of our lost history. It shows that the interests workers share far outweigh the artificial divisions of sectarianism. It is brilliant that Seán Mitchell has brought these great events backs to life. It will be an inspiration to unite again in today’s struggles.”
Ken Loach
“All the binary stereotypes of Belfast’s history are challenged in this extraordinary account of how a small group of working-class Communists led an uprising of tens of thousands of Protestant and Catholic unemployed in October 1932. As Séan Mitchell so vividly shows, the Outdoor Relief Movement shook the sectarian Northern Ireland statelet to its very foundation.”
Mike Davis, author, Late Victorian Holocausts
“What happened in Belfast in 1932 contradicts just about everything conventional history tells us about relations between Catholics and Protestants in the North. Only a decade into the existence of the new state, the plain people of the Shankill and the Falls linked arms to fight on picket lines and in the streets for common working-class interests. The events have either been written out of history or sentimentalized so as to drain them of all political relevance. The lesson drawn by Séan Mitchell from the tumult of the time is that the North sloughs off sectarianism when people come together on a basis which has nothing to do with the community they come from but everything to do with the class they belong to. Only class politics offers a practical alternative to communal division. This is history from below, raucous, sprawling, unconstrained by the imposition of an Orange/Green paradigm on events which arose from an entirely different aspect of Belfast’s social being, bristling with intimations of a different way of political life. If the North is ever to deal with the past in a way which doesn’t divide us further, we must bring the Belfast of 1932 back into focus. Séan’s book makes a major contribution to this vital work.”
Eamonn McCann, civil rights veteran, and author of War and an Irish Town
“This book will make a huge contribution to the debate about the future for politics in the North of Ireland and elsewhere. As we face increasingly turbulent times and a discredited Stormont regime in the North, Seán’s book shows a different type of politics is possible, one that is very much part of our shared history and socialist traditions. Across Ireland and internationally we can all draw on this story and learn lessons for today.”
Bríd Smith, Member of the Irish Parliament
“Mitchell’s book is an outstanding testimony to the centrality of united working class struggle, just as relevant today in the light of the Good Friday power sharing agreement which has institutionalised the sectarian divide.”
Socialist Review
“Seán Mitchell, in crisp prose and with an eye for telling details, provides a gripping account of events in Belfast in October 1932.”
An Phoblacht
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Seán Mitchell is a socialist activist based in Belfast. A founding member of People Before Profit, he was the first person to stand for election under the party’s banner. He currently lives in Andersonstown in West Belfast, and works in Coláiste Feirste. He writes for the Irish Marxist Review.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608468993 • US $18 • 8.5 in x 5.5 in • 190 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Feminist Freedom Warriors tells the stories of women of color from the Global South, weaving together cross-generational histories of feminist activism across national borders. These engaging interviews with sister comrades will inform, inspire, and activate the imagination to explore what a just world might look like.
Each woman’s story illustrates their lifelong commitment to challenging oppressive practices and forming solidarities across borders to transform unjust structures around the globe. The book features interviews with activists from movements spanning the last seven decades in the United States, India, Mexico, Palestine, Nigeria, South Africa, and beyond.
PRAISE:
“There are some books that will make a genuine difference because they are drawn from the experiences of those who have made a genuine difference. This is one of those books. By offering reflections from, and conversations between, feminist freedom warriors, this book is a reminder of just how much we need revolutionary, decolonial, anticapitalist, and antiracist feminism; how in fighting against structures, we are fighting for our lives. Each of these accounts of becoming and being feminists committed to radical transformation teaches us just how much we can do from what has been done; how we can make use of our imaginations, words, memories, knowledge, feelings, connections, and alliances in the project of building a more just world. This is a deeply inspiring and inspired collection.”
Sara Ahmed, author of Living a Feminist Life
“Feminist Freedom Warriors is a provocation and an inspiration. The political and intellectual life stories of an amazing cohort of radical feminist takes us through five decades of dynamic history and spans the globe.Their stories, ideas, fortitude and courage provide a powerful guide to the freedom-making work of the mid 20th through the early 21st centuries. The book is yet another gift of insight and critical feminist praxis from Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Linda Carty, sister-scholars and collaborators whose own collective passion and commitments are also in every page of this collection.”
Barbara Ransby, author, historian, activist and President of the National Women’s Studies Association, (2016-2018)
“This collection brings together feminist visionaries to think deeply about how we sustain our movements, each other, and ourselves in and through ongoing feminist struggle. Mohanty and Carty’s dialogues with the contributors reveal crucial insights into building and theorizing multi-issue movements that rely on intersectional, anti-racist, transnational feminisms. The collaborative endeavor illuminates the persistent intellectual capaciousness and radical hope of these scholar-activists. The contributors’ complex engagements with feminist theory and praxis across geopolitical frameworks reaffirm coalitional possibilities so necessary in these turbulent times.”
T. Jackie Cuevas, author of Post-Borderlandia
“In Feminist Freedom Warriors liberation is historicized, imagined, and enacted as contested struggle and dialogue. The intellectual-activist thinkers within explain that feminist praxis—poetics, pedagogies, and activism—is an ongoing refusal of global capitalism and colonialism. Comprising stories and interviews, Feminist Freedom Warriors shows that engendering political change, across racial and sexual identifications, is tied to the uneasy work of imagining solidarities outside our present (neoliberal) system of knowledge. What stands out, beautifully and urgently, is the praxis of sharing how to refuse infrastructures of violence. Feminist Freedom Warriors captures how sharing and talking and learning, and the struggle to collaborate, is tied to the grounded work of building new futures.”
Katherine McKittrick, Associate Professor, Department of Gender Studies, Queen’s University, Ontario
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Linda E. Carty is a Black feminist scholar-activist and educator in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University. Carty’s activist and research work spans Black labor struggles, migration, and sexuality in Canada,the Caribbean, and the United States.
Chandra Talpade Mohantyis a feminist scholar-activist and educator in theDepartment of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. Mohanty’s activism, scholarship, and teaching focus on transnational feminist theory, anti-capitalist feminist praxis, antiracist education, and the politics of knowledge
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859172 • US $12 • 7.9 in x 5.6 in • 250 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Here in their own words are the stories of the Desterrados, or “dispossessed” — the thousands of Colombians displaced by years of war and state-backed terrorism, funded in part through U.S. aid to the Colombian government.
These gripping stories show the human face of those who suffer the effects of the U.S. “Plan Colombia” and of a state that serves the interests of wealthy landlords instead of the poor.
PRAISE:
“This book is proof that today’s Latin American literature reaches far and digs deep. Alfredo Molano isn’t a novelist or poet, but rather a sociologist who realizes that “the way to understand wasn’t to study people but to listen to them.” The testimonies that Molano collects are a point of departure for a work that knows how to relate, like few others can, Colombia’s pain in a language that has more colors than the rainbow.”
Eduardo Galeano, author, Open Veins of Latin America
“The people whose stories Molano tells are not social activists. They do not provide political or structural explanations of their lives; they do not tell stories of coming to consciousness. Yet, together, their stories add up to a powerful analysis of today’s Colombia and should indeed inspire U.S. readers to challenge the U.S. policies that continue to kill, impoverish, and displace the people of Colombia.”
From the foreword by Aviva Chomsky
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alfredo Molano is a columnist for the newspaper El Espectador in Colombia. He currently lives in exile in Spain, and is also a visiting scholar at Stanford University.
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By John Molyneux Haymarket Books (July 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465729 • 192 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this book, John Molyneux examines the contributions made by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky and Antonio Gramsci. Molyneux takes as his central theme the concern of these revolutionaries with the relationship between the party and the working class.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Molyneux (1948–2022) was a socialist, activist and writer. Formerly a lecturer in Art History at Portsmouth University, he lived in Dublin where he was a member of People Before Profit. His many books include What is the Real Marxist Tradition? (Haymarket), Rembrandt and Revolution (Redwords), Lenin for Today (Bookmarks), Will the Revolution be Televised? (Bookmarks), and Marxism and the Party (Haymarket). He was a founder of the Global Ecosocialist Network.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591316 • US $24.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
To the question of “what is art?” it is often simply responded that art is whatever is produced by the artist. For John Molyneux, this clearly circular answer is deeply unsatisfying. In a tour de force spanning renaissance Italy and the Dutch Republic to contemporary leading figures, The Dialectics of Art instead approaches its subject matter as a distinct field of creative human labour that emerges alongside and in opposition to the alienation and commodification brought about by capitalism. The pieces and individuals Molyneux examines — from Michelangelo’s Slaves to Rembrandts Jewish Bride to the vast drip paintings of Jackson Pollock – are presented as embodying the social contradictions of their times, giving art an inherently political relevance.
In its relationship of creative and dialectical tension to prevailing social relationships and norms, such art points beyond the existing order of things, hinting at a potential future society not based on alienated labour in which creative production becomes the property and practice of all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Molyneux (1948–2022) was a socialist, activist and writer. Formerly a lecturer in Art History at Portsmouth University, he lived in Dublin where he was a member of People Before Profit. His many books include What is the Real Marxist Tradition? (Haymarket), Rembrandt and Revolution (Redwords), Lenin for Today (Bookmarks), Will the Revolution be Televised? (Bookmarks), and Marxism and the Party (Haymarket). He was a founder of the Global Ecosocialist Network..
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599732 •US $17 • 6 in x 9 in • 80 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An exciting debut collection of sonically playful, formally inventive poems that explore the life of a young Filipino-American man reckoning with incarceration.
American Inmate: the album is a rigorous and defiant collection of poetry that subverts contemporary discourse and representations of incarceration, of hip-hop, and of Asian American culture and literature. Justin Rovillos Monson’s poetic voice is sharp and irreverent—improvisational yet thoughtful, musical, and tender, achieving a range of lyrical registers woven seamlessly throughout the book from the first to last poem. Monson’s work challenges his readers with uncomfortable but essential, urgent, and necessary questions: What does it mean to be in the world and yet live apart from it? What happens to the minds and bodies of
those locked away? What happens to the minds and bodies of their loved ones? How can America get free? Braiding personal narrative with contemporary rap lyrics and institutional language, Monson deepens the nuances and dimensions of and within Asian American poetics, prison poetics, and hip-hop poetics with his deft and experimental writing style. American Inmate speaks through cages, bars, walls, and borders, collapsing widespread misconceptions and stereotypes regarding incarceration, and shrinking the distance between readers on the outside and the complex interiority of an incarcerated human being. Sometimes slipping, sometimes soaring, sometimes laughing, sometimes dying, Monson’s fiery debut is a fresh, moving, elucidative work that will challenge readers to think more critically about the systems that govern our lives, to imagine with compassion and inclusivity, and to settle for nothing less than a truly free future that is liberatory for all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Justin Rovillos Monson, a first generation Filipino-American artist, was the winner of the inaugural 2017 Kundiman/Asian American Literary Review/Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center Mentorship in poetry. A love poet, he seeks in his writing to catalog the body incarcerated, to misbehave, and, most of all, to conjure a poetics of reaching. He was born and raised outside of Detroit, Michigan, in Oakland County, and is currently serving a sentence in the Michigan Department of Corrections, from which he hopes to be released in 2027.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642597011 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 250 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Kim Moody provides a masterful analysis of the political impasse which has shaped the rise of a new socialist movement in the United States: recurring economic and political crises, sharp inequality, state violence, and climate catastrophe proceed apace as the right ascends across the world, while the US political scene remains defined and dominated by two capitalist political parties. Moody situates the historic electoral campaigns of Democratic Socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as the growth of organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, in this context, and incisively assesses the revived movement’s focus on electoral strategies.
Offering an important account of left attempts to intervene in the American two-party electoral system, Moody provides both a sobering historical corrective and an alternative orientation for the future, arguing that the socialist movement should turn its attention toward a politics of mass action, anti-racism, and independent, working-class organizing.
PRAISE:
“A major contribution to the renewed debates on socialist strategy in the US.”
Charles Post
“Kim Moody breaks new ground in his brilliant, readable, breathtakingly comprehensive analysis that upends conventional thinking about this fraught moment in history.”
Lois Weiner
“Essential reading for those interested in understanding and joining the mass upsurge of workers and others oppressed by the predatory, global, capitalist system.”
Michael Goldfield
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kim Moody is a founder of Labor Notes in the US and is the author of several books on labor and politics, including Tramps and Trade Union Travelers: Internal Migration and Organized Labor in Gilded Age America, 1870-1900 and On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping The Battleground Of Class War. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Westminster in London, and a member of the University and College Union and the National Union of Journalists.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463268 • US $22 • 5 1/8 IN x 8 1/4 in • 326 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Kim Moody, one of the world’s most authoritative and recognized labor writers, analyzes the past, present, and future of unions in the US. With a sharp understanding of Marxist theory and labor history, Moody charts a wellreasoned course for the future of the rank-and-file.
Kim Moody was a founder of Labor Notes and author of several books on the U.S. labor movement, including On New Terrain: How Capitalism is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket Books, 2017), In Solidarity: Essays on Working-Class Organization in the United States (Haymarket Books, 2014) and U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition (Verso, 2007). He has a PhD from the University of Nottingham.
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An insightful and timely analysis of how global economic restructuring will impact workers’ struggles in the U.S.
Activist, scholar, and labor journalist Kim Moody analyzes how changes in global capitalism have altered both the composition of the working class and the economic and political ground on which it struggles. From the logistics revolution to the unprecedented concentration of business and wealth in the hands a shrinking few, Moody examines the impact of this new economic terrain on potential working class resistance movements.
PRAISE
“The best recent work on the history and the contemporary promise of the move from Ford to Tesco is Kim Moody’s On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War.”
Red Pepper
“On New Terrain makes a convincing case for revolutionary politics, not on the basis of hope and conjecture, but concrete evidence and history. Read this book, discuss it with others and follow through on its conclusions.”
Socialist Worker
“This is a detailed and provocative study of how capital has changed since the 1980s and its effects on the working class and political parties in the USA and across the world.”
Scottish Left Review
“Despite the election of Trump and the rise of the alt-right, the huge support for Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the 2016 Democratic Presidential nomination, the Black Lives Matter movement and the wave of teachers’ strikes show that there is plenty of anger among US workers. Moody’s welcome and important book shows that they still have the power to resist and how socialists can build a mass movement of opposition to neoliberalism in its heartland.”
Kim Moody was a founder of Labor Notes and author of several books on the U.S. labor movement, including In Solidarity: Essays on Working-Class Organization in the United States (Haymarket Books, 2014) and U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition (Verso, 2007). He has a PhD from the University of Nottingham.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781608467556 • US $22 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 330 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Why is there no independent labor party in the United States? While many would assert “American exceptionalist” arguments, which point to lackluster class-consciousness among American workers as the problem, Moody uses archival research to argue that despite divisions, workers in the Gilded Age had strong traditions of class consciousness and political radicalism. He contends that internal migration during the late 1800’s created instability in organizations of workers and that over time, this has undermined the ability to build an independent labor political party.
PRAISE:
“This terrific book by Kim Moody offers an entirely original take on the primordial question of why American labor was virtually unique in failing to build its own political party. But there’s much more: in investigating labor migration and the ‘tramp’ phenomenon in the Gilded Age, he discovers fascinating parallels with today’s struggles of immigrant workers.”
Mike Davis, author, Prisoners of the American Dream
“Kim Moody’ s Tramps and Trade Union Travelers is a seminal contribution to the ongoing discussion of the absence of independent working class politics in the US. Moody’s analysis goes beyond the factors that are usually cited to explain US working class formation– racial, ethnic and gender divisions—that existed in most capitalist societies. Instead, Moody roots the specific trajectory of labor politics in the US in the specific form of capitalist development in the US—the continental expansion of a thoroughly capitalist agro-industrial frontier in the antebellum period. The constant geographic mobility of both capital and labor in gilded age America becomes the key to explaining ‘why the US working class is different.'”
Charles Post, author of The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, c. 1620-1877
“Kim Moody takes apart ‘American exceptionalism’ to show that the 19th century U.S. working class produced no labor party not because of a deficit of class consciousness. There was plenty of that, as shown in the plethora of strikes. Nor was it because American workers had it too good, or could homestead out West, or could rise into the middle class. Rather, it’s because their constant movement from job to job and state to state, generated by the instabilities of capitalism, made it difficult to build unions that lasted long enough and were strong enough to also construct working class political institutions. It’s sobering reading in this time of mass worldwide migration and precarious work.”
Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes
“In this richly-detailed analysis, Kim Moody highlights how American workers in the Gilded Age were perpetually on the move — by necessity, not by choice — a reality that destabilized early trade unions and undermined political initiatives. So, Moody stresses, it was not some exceptional lack of working class consciousness that explains why no labor party arose in the United States in that earlier era, but rather a set of organizational challenges posed by the specifics of nineteenth century capitalist development on the vast American landscape. Moody’s meticulous study, therefore, should be of vital interest not only to historians but to activists seeking to promote independent political activity generated by and for the working class today.”
Toni Gilpin, author of The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland
Kim Moody was a founder of Labor Notes and author of several books on the U.S. labor movement, including On New Terrain: How Capitalism is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket Books, 2017), In Solidarity: Essays on Working-Class Organization in the United States (Haymarket Books, 2014) and U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition (Verso, 2007). He has a PhD from the University of Nottingham.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595734 • US $16 • 6 in x 9 in • 100 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The Billboard is about a fictional Black women’s clinic in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood on the South Side and its fight with a local gadfly running for City Council who puts up a provocative billboard: “Abortion is genocide. The most dangerous place for a Black child is his mother’s womb,” spurring on the clinic to fight back with their own provocative sign: “Black women take care of their families by taking care of themselves. Abortion is self-care. #Trust Black Women.” The book also has a foreword and afterword and Q&A with a founder of reproductive justice. As a play and book, The Billboard is a cultural force that treats abortion as more than pro-life or pro-choice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Natalie Y. Moore is an award winning Chicago-based author and journalist. Her last book “The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation” won the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction. She is a 2021 USA Fellow. The Pulitzer Center named her a 2020 Richard C. Longworth Media Fellow for international reporting.
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Comic book • ASIN: 9781608461738 • US $1 • 32 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From Dark Horse Comics, Orchid is an epic fantasy story set in a dystopian future infused with Morello’s worldview and the politics of street terrorism. Part Suicide Girl, part Joan of Arc – Orchid is the tale of a 16-year-old street prostitute who learns that she is more than the role society has imposed upon her.
When the seas rose, genetic codes were smashed. Human settlements are now ringed by a dense wilderness from which ferocious new animal species prey on the helpless. The high ground belongs to the rich and powerful that overlook swampland shantytowns from their fortress-like cities. Iron-fisted rule ensures order and allows the wealthy to harvest the poor as slaves.
Orchid features a variant cover by the well-known and influential street artist Shepard Fairey, with interior art by Scott Hepburn (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic). Orchid will be released over the course of twelve issues with the first issue on sale October 12, 2011. The series will eventually be collected into a graphic novel.
Morello has written a score for the series which will serve as a soundtrack to the story. Each song will be distributed as a free, downloadable track available with the purchase of each issue.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Morello, in addition to his career as a critically acclaimed solo artist, is a founding member and guitarist of the rock bands Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave. The two bands are responsible for multiple Grammy Awards and a combined 30 million albums sold worldwide.
Widely known for his unique voice as a master electric guitarist, his compositions as Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman have been primarily based around the acoustic guitar.
Recognized by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the “100 Greatest Guitar Players of All-Time (#26),” Morello is one of only two guitarists featured as a playable animated character in the overwhelmingly popular Activision video game Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.
As a producer, Morello has worked with The Crystal Method, Anti-Flag, Puff Daddy, and many more. He has also scored compositions for major motion pictures such as the 2008 hit Iron Man (in which he can also be seen as an actor), The Matrix, Collateral, Charlie’s Angels, Talladega Nights, and XXX: State of the Union.
Tom Morello graduated from Harvard University with honors as a Political Science major and has been a widely recognized political activist throughout his career. In 2006, he was the recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award. Morello’s family has been a constant source of political and social inspiration as his great-uncle, Jomo Kenyatta was the first president of Kenya, and his mother, Mary Morello, founded Parents for Rock and Rap, an anti-censorship counterweight to Tipper Gore’s PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center). With System of A Down’s Serj Tankian, Morello formed Axis of Justice, an organization whose purpose is to bring together musicians, music fans, and grassroots political organizations to fight for social justice and hosts its inspired radio show, The Axis of Justice Radio Network.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465705 • US $16 • 4 3/8 in x 7 5/8 in • 202 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A new generation of activists working for economic and environmental justice, and against war and poverty, confronts critical questions. Why is the world so unjust and crisis-prone? What kind of world should we fight for? How can we win? In this panoramic yet accessible book, Umair Muhammad engages with these and other urgent debates. He argues that individual solutions like “buying green” are dead ends, and that hope for the future lies in a radical expansion of democracy and the transformation of the economy from one based on profit to one that can meet human needs
PRAISE:
“What [Umair] provides is an opening statement in an important discussion that activists must have…. A must-read book for today’s activists.”
Ian Angus, co-author, Too Many People?
“Decades ago, I and my friends agonized over…our first steps in radical politics. But it was much easier then to find answers than it is now in the context of the relentlessly individualistic culture of neoliberalism. Muhammad has done well in his original and effective argument for commitment to collective and transformative social action.”
John Riddell, author, Toward the United Front
“This book will force activists to check their intentions. I wasn’t even halfway done before I wanted to share it with everyone I knew.”
Maryama Ahmed, Toronto-based Community Organizer
“A highly recommended read for those who are interested in working together to transform society.”
Chelsey Rhodes
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mohammad Umair’s research focuses on the political economy of climate change. Umair has been involved in anti-poverty and environmental activism for six years. He is a member of the editorial team of Delusions of Development, and a member of Jane and Finch Action Against Poverty.
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Trade paper • ISBN: 9781642594140 • US $15.95 • 7.5 in x 5.25 in • 250 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Racial, gender, and environmental justice. Class war. Militarism. Interpersonal violence. Old age security. This is not the vocabulary many use to critique the prison-industrial complex.
But in this series of powerful lectures, Ruth Wilson Gilmore shows the only way to dismantle the systems and logics of control and punishment is to change questions, categories, and campaigns from the ground up.
Abolitionism doesn’t just say no to police, prisons, border control, and the current punishment system. It requires persistent organizing for what we need, organizing that’s already present in the efforts people cobble together to achieve access to schools, health care and housing, art and meaningful work, and freedom from violence and want.
As Gilmore makes plain, “Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything.”
Change Everything is part of the new “Abolitionist Papers” book series, edited by Naomi Murakawa.
PRAISE:
“Ruthie has always been very clear that prison abolition is not just about closing prisons. It’s a theory of change.”
Michelle Alexander, author, The New Jim Crow
“In three decades of advocating for prison abolition, the activist and scholar has helped transform how people think about criminal justice.”
New York Times Magazine
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press). Recent publications include “Beyond Bratton” (Policing the Planet, Camp and Heatherton, eds., Verso); “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence” (Futures of Black Radicalism, Lubin and Johnson, eds., Verso); a foreword to Bobby M. Wilson’s Birmingham classic America’s Johannesburg (U Georgia Press); a foreword to Cedric J. Robinson on Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (HLT Quan, ed., Pluto); and, co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke). Forthcoming projects include Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso). Gil more has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. In April 2019 novelist Rachel Kushner profiled Gilmore in the New York Times Magazine. Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).
Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and the carceral state. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. She is the editor of the Abolitionist Papers book series at Haymarket Books.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595161 • US $18.95 • 5 1/2 in x 8 1/2 in • 224 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Assata Taught Me offers a fresh historical perspective on the fifty years since the founding of the Black Panther Party, in which the world’s largest police state has emerged.
Black Panther and Cuban exile Assata Shakur has inspired generations of radical protest, including the contemporary movement for Black lives. Drawing its title from one of America’s foremost revolutionaries, this collection of thought-provoking essays by award-winning Panther scholar Donna Murch explores how social protest is challenging our current system of state violence and mass incarceration.
Murch exposes the devastating consequences of overlapping punishment campaigns against gangs, drugs, and crime on poor and working-class populations of color. Through largely hidden channels, these punishment campaigns generate enormous revenues for the state. Under such conditions, organized resistance to the advancing tide of state violence and mass incarceration has proven difficult.This timely and urgent book shows how a youth-led political movement has emerged in recent years to challenge the bipartisan consensus on punishment and looks to the future through a redistributive, queer, and feminist lens. Murch frames the contemporary movement in relation to earlier struggles for Black Liberation, while excavating the origins of mass incarceration and the political economy that drives it.
PRAISE:
“Assata Taught Me is a masterclass on the Black Radical Tradition. From the extractive structures of the world’s largest police state to the revolutionary resistance, Donna Murch meticulously traces the history and contours of the current Movement for Black Lives. This is a seminal book like its namesake, Assata Shakur.”Ibram X. Kendi, author, How to Be an Antiracist“Donna Murch is one of our most brilliant thinkers and a committed scholar activist. In Assata Taught Me, she offers powerful insights about the Black freedom movement and Black radical politics, past and present. I always learn and am inspired when I read her work. This book is essential reading for historians, organizers and people interested in making sense of this historical moment, and more importantly, in changing the world.” Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement“To feel anything other than fatalistic about the moment in which we currently live, and to see the future as anything less than perilous, might seem utterly foolish—unless, that is, one has sat with Donna Murch’s latest. With her rigorous rescuing, remembering, and reckoning with past histories of trauma, struggle, and resistance that current pundits and progressives alike too easily forget, as well as her searing reminders of present-day possibilities for a better world, Murch, like Assata Shakur before her, teaches us much we desperately need to learn in this time of momentous upheaval.” Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 of 1971 and its Legacy “Donna Murch is one of the sharpest, most incisive, and elegant writers on racism, radicalism, and struggle today. In this collection of essays assessing the most current contours of the contemporary movement against racism in the United States, Murch combines a historian’s rigor with a cultural critic’s insights and the passionate expression of someone deeply engaged with the politics, debates, and key questions confronting activists and organizers today. This is a smart and sophisticated book that should be read and studied by everyone in search of answers to the profound crises that continue to confront this country.”Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation“”Assata Shakur was a prisoner of war. Donna Murch understands this profoundly, which is why she wrote a book about a half century of overlapping domestic wars in the United States. Each essay forcefully drives home the point that to be Black in America—to be Black in the world—is to live in a state of war under a warfare state. She writes history with fire, burning through decades of liberal obfuscation to reveal a world, not of ‘activists’ and ‘interest groups,’ but of combatants, collateral damage, refugees, and POWs. Assata HAS taught all of us, and her key lessons are found in these pages.”Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination“In this essential collection of essays, Donna Murch sheds new light on the relationship between the Movement for Black Lives and the earlier practices and ideals of Black Power. She shows how the emergence of the largest police state with its spectacular and mundane violence in the intervening years has shaped the demands, organizations, and futures etched under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Written with verve and clarity, this is a book for our times.”Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination“Donna Murch is one of the most astute, fearless, and brilliant US historians working today. These essays are necessary to understand who we are now and how we got here.” Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Donna Murch is associate professor of history at Rutgers University. Her newest book, Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives, was released in March 2022 from Haymarket Books. In October 2010, Murch published the award-winning monograph Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California with the University of North Carolina Press, which won the Phillis Wheatley prize in December 2011. Professor Murch is currently completing a new trade press book entitled Crack in Los Angeles: Policing the Crisis and the War on Drugs. She has written for the Sunday Washington Post, Guardian, New Republic, Nation, Boston Review, Jacobin,Black Scholar, Souls, the Journal of Urban History, Journal of American History, Perspectives and New Politics and appeared on BBC, CNN, Democracy Now and in Stanley Nelson’s documentary, Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599664 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 288 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An eye-opening reckoning with the care economy, from its roots in racial capitalism to its exponential growth as a new site of profit and extraction.
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, care work has been thrust into the national spotlight. The notion of care seems simple enough. Care is about nurturing, feeding, nursing, assisting, and loving human beings. It is “the work that makes all other work possible.” But as historian Premilla Nadasen argues, we have only begun to understand the massive role it plays in our lives and our economy.
Nadasen traces the rise of the care economy, from its roots in slavery, where there was no clear division between production and social reproduction, to the present care crisis, experienced acutely by more and more Americans. Today’s care economy, Nadasen shows, is an institutionalized, hierarchical system in which some people’s pain translates into other people’s profit.
Yet this is also a story of resistance. Low-wage workers, immigrants, and women of color in movements from Wages for Housework and Welfare Rights to the Movement for Black Lives have continued to fight for and practice collective care. These groups help us envision how, given the challenges before us, we can create a caring world as part of a radical future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Premilla Nadasen is a Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. She served as president of the National Women’s Studies Association (2018-2020) and is currently co-Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Born in South Africa, Nadasen has been involved in social justice organizing for many decades and published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing. Among her many awards and fellowships are the Fulbright Visiting Professorship, the John Hope Franklin Prize, and the inaugural Ann Snitow Prize for feminist intellectual and social justice activism. Her books include Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement. She lives in the Bronx.
This collection of important and much needed essays on education and youth activism draws from Naison’s research on Bronx History and his experiences defending teachers and students from school reform policies which undermine their power and creativity. Naison’s focus is identifying teaching and organizing strategies that have worked effectively in New York, and could be implemented in impoverished communities elsewhere.
PRAISE:
“There was an era when educators were feared by the corporate establishment. As Time magazine wrote in 1963, ‘The U.S. teacher used to be afraid to smoke, chew, cuss or ask for a raise. Now he denounces crowded classrooms, upbraids lawmakers, and goes on strike almost as readily as a dockworker.’ Mark Naison’s Badass Teachers Unite brings back the attitude we need to back down the corporate reform bullies and retake our schools.”
Jesse Hagopian teaches history and is the Black Student Union adviser at Garfield High School, the site of the historic boycott of the MAP standardized test,and is an associate editor for Rethinking Schools magazine
“In this powerful collection of essays, education activist and historian Mark Naison offers teachers, parents, students, and anyone else concerned with the health of public schools in this country some invaluable tools in the fight against corporate education reform. Badass Teachers Unite is a clarion call for all of us to reclaim public education in the name of social justice.””
Wayne Au, Associate Professor, University of Washington-Bothell, Editor, Rethinking Schools, co-editor, Pencils Down: Rethinking High-Stakes Testing and Accountability in Public Schools
“Mark Naison has woven a series of provocative essays into a powerful book. No traditional scholarly treatise, Badass Teachers Unite! is an Education Manifesto for the people’s school reform movement. With clarity, verve, and passion, Naison outlines the challenges we face transforming public schools and he forges a guide to our actions. This book is must reading for anyone concerned about the plight of public schools in the USA today.”
Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., Director, UB Center for Urban Studies, University at Buffalo
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mark Naison is professor of African American studies and history at Fordham University. He is author of many books and articles including Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. The founder of the Bronx African American History project, Naison has emerged in the last five years as a passionate defender of America’s public school teachers and students, founding groups like Dump Duncan, the Teachers Talk Back Project, and most recently, the Badass Teachers Association.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9780316735490 • US $13.67 • 320 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This widely acclaimed memoir transports us to the remote reaches of the Himalayas, to a place the Chinese call “the country of daughters,” to the home of the Moso, a society in which women rule. According to local tradition, marriage is considered a foreign practice; property is passed from mother to daughter; a matriarch oversees each family’s customs, rituals, and economies. In this culture a young girl enjoys extraordinary freedoms—but the impulsive, restless Namu is driven to leave her mother’s house, to venture ut into the larger world, defying the tradition that holds Moso culture together.
Leaving Mother Lake is a book filled with drama, strangeness, and beauty. Yet Namu’s story is a universal tale of mothers and daughters—the battles that drive them apart and the love that brings them back together.
PRAISE:
“I find this book beautiful, the Moso people inspiring, and Yang Erche Namu’s own spirit refreshing, to say the least.”
Alice Walker
“Gorgeously crafted. . . . It’s refreshing to discover an autobiography that tells the story of a truly exciting and unusual life.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Haunting. . . . In many ways, Leaving Mother Lake is a fairy tale in which a girl from nowhere becomes a star. But it is also a historical document of a unique time and place and the universal tale of a mother’s fierce love and a daughter’s attempt to straddle two worlds.”
Jill Wolfson, San Jose Mercury News
“With the help of anthropologist Mathieu, singer Namu describes growing up on the Chinese-Tibetan border in Moso country, ‘the Country of the Daughters.’… [Namu] sheds light on the unique matrilineal Moso culture, with its ‘walking marriages,’ where women take as many lovers as they want and the men continue to reside in their mothers’ homes. The interweaving of the customs of this remote part of China-where “a man and a woman may sing to each other from the peaks of two mountains, but they will need to carry food for three days if they want to meet halfway”—with Namu’s determination to have a worldly life despite her family’s poverty and her own inability to read and write lend this tale poignancy. . . . [T]he book brims with vivid descriptions of a fascinating culture.”
Publishers Weekly
“This memoir vividly conveys the bitter cold of mountain nights and strained relationships, along with the warmth of hearth, hospitality, and deep understanding. A fascinating glimpse at a unique culture and the melding of two worlds in a journey to adulthood.”
School Library Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Yang Erche Namu is a professional singer. She lives in Beijing and San Francisco.
Christine Mathieu completed her doctoral study on Moso culture and history. She divides her time between San Francisco and Australia.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902585 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 304 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A collection of interviews with some of the world’s leading progressive thinkers on the movement for Palestinian liberation and its connections to struggles for justice across the globe.
As more and more people align themselves with the Palestinian people, Palestine in a World on Fire provides the global perspective and analysis needed to inform how we forge ahead on this path of newfound solidarity. Editors Ilan Pappé and Katherine Natanel have gathered a collection of interviews that are intimate, challenging, and rigorous—many of them conducted before October 7th but still startlingly prescient. The interviewees connect the struggle for Palestinian liberation to various liberatory movements around the world, simultaneously interrogating and recontextualizing their own positions given the ongoing aggression in Palestine. This incredible group includes Angela Y. Davis, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Nadine El-Enany, Gabor Mate, Mustafa Barghouti, Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Gilroy, Elias Khoury, Gayatri Spivak, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.
Palestine in a World on Fire highlights the centrality of Palestine in struggles shared across the world: capitalism, imperialism, misogyny, neo-colonialism, racism, and more. Each conversation tackles urgent events and unfolding dynamics, and the scholar-activists interviewed here provide invaluable perspectives and insights, illuminating the richness and relevance of recent scholarship on Palestine.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Ilan Pappé is a Professor of History and the Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies (ECPS) at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. He has written 22 books to date, including Our Visions for Liberation (with Ramzy Baroud), On Palestine and Gaza in Crisis (with Noam Chomsky), and the best-seller The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Katherine Natanel is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. She is the author of Sustaining Conflict: Apathy and Domination in Israel-Palestine and serves as the Executive Editor for Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP).
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595833 • US $24.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 368 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A landmark volume showcasing the vital writing of revolutionary women during the 1930s. This comprehensive collection of fiction, poetry, and report-age by revolutionary women lays to rest the charge that feminism disappeared after 1920. Among the thirty- six writers are Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Walker, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, Tess Slesinger, Agnes Smedley, and Meridel Le Sueur. Other voices may be new to readers, including many working- class Black and white women. Topics covered range from sexuality and family relation-ships, to race, class, and patriarchy, to party politics. Toni Morrison writes that the anthology is “peopled with questioning, caring, socially committed women writers.”
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859646 • US $17 • 6 x 9 in • 324 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The classic historical biography reissued for the 150th anniversary of Brown’s celebrated uprising against slavery.
On October 16, 1859, John Brown led a historic attack on the Harper’s Ferry Armory. Nelson narrates the incredible events that unfolded that day and explodes the conventional dismissal of John Brown as a fanatic, presenting him as a revolutionary who, at the cost of his own life, helped bring an end to slavery.
After his execution, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said of Brown, “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. … Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm, the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone — the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union — and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century.”
PRAISE:
“Truman Nelson’s biography of John Brown is a refreshing and eloquent corrective to the common misconceptions about the character and actions of this extraordinary American hero.”
Howard Zinn
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Truman Nelson (1911-1987) was the author of numerous books, including The Surveyor and The Right of Revolution.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461196 • US $19 • 6 in x 9 in • 400 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and have gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. Looking at specific examples drawn from every corner of the globe and every period of modern history, this pathbreaking volume comprehensively traces this often under-appreciated historical tradition.
Ripe with lessons drawn from historical and contemporary struggles for workers’ control, Ours to Master and to Own is essential reading for those struggling to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
Contributors: Immanuel Ness, Dario Azzellini, Elaine Bernard, Alberto Bonnet, Sheila Cohen, Patrick Cuninghame, Pietro Di Paola, Andy Durgan, Donny Gluckstein, Ralf Hoffrogge, Marina Kabat, Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski, David Mandel, Goran Music, Henrique T. Novaes, Peter Robinson, Maurício Sardá de Faria, Gabriela Scodeller, Arup Kumar Sen, Samuel J. Southgate, Jafar Suryomenggolo, Alan Tuckman, and Victor Wallis.
PRAISE:
“Ours to Master and Own is the most substantive and comprehensive work on workers control and self management today providing an essential account of labor movements in the process of insurrection, direct action, and factory occupations under a range of institutional circumstances. I strongly recommend this work, which provides examples drawn from throughout the world of workers struggling for justice and power from the Paris commune to the present.”
Gary Younge, columnist, The Guardian and The Nation; author of Who We Are and Should It Matter in the 21st Century (Penguin/Viking 2010)
“Excellent! A very complete, serious and inspiring account of the movements for workers’ control and their difficulties. There is no doubt that it should become a standard point of reference for future discussions, and actions. A great source of information and reflection.”
John Holloway, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at The Autonomous University of Puebla; author of Crack Capitalism and Change the World Without Taking Power
“Long overdue, this book is the first comprehensive worldwide compilation of the struggle of workers to gain control of their work environments. It is a must-read for all who are interested in the past and future of working-class struggles and insurgencies.”
Michael Goldfield, coauthor of Labor, Globalization, and the State
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Immanuel Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a founding member of the Lower East Side Community Labor Organization, an autonomous activist organization in New York City. His research and writing focuses on social and revolutionary movements, labor militancy, and migrant worker resistance to oppression. Ness has just completed Guest Workers, Corporate Despotism and Resistance,(forthcoming University of Illinois Press) a book that examines the rise of guest workers from the global South in the US and labor opposition to employer abuses. He is author of numerous books including an anthology of contemporary labor: Real World Labor, with Amy Offner and Chris Sturr (Dollars & Sense). He edits the peer-review quarterly journal, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, and has also edited several reference works, including The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell 2009), and, with Aaron Brenner and Bejamin Day, The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History (Sharpe 2009).
Dario Azzellini is a writer, documentary director and political scientist and lecturer at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. He splits his time between Berlin and Caracas. His research and writing focuses on social and revolutionary militancy, migration and racism, people’s power and selfadministration, and workers control, with extensive case studies in Latin America. He served as Associate Editor for the The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present, and was primary editor for Latin America, the Spanish Caribbean, and the New Left in Italy. He serves as Associate Editor for WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society and for Cuadernos de Marte, an academic publication about war sociology released by the University of Buenos Aires. He has published several books, among them The Business of War (Assoziation A 2002), about the privatization of military services. His latest documentary, “Comuna under construction,” (2010) examines worker councils in Venezuela. More information on his publications and work is available at http://www.azzellini.net/.
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Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
Language/Territory
Publisher
English in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780872864863 • US $16.96 • 225 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A compelling account of U.S. immigration and border enforcement told through the journey of one man who perished in California’s Imperial Valley while trying to reunite with his wife and child in Los Angeles. At a time when Republicans and Democrats alike embrace increasingly militaristic border enforcement policies under the guise of security, and local governments around the country are taking matters into their own hands, Dying to Live offers a timely challenge to such prescriptions and puts a human face on the rapidly growing crisis. Moreover, it provides a valuable perspective on the historical geography of U.S.-Mexico relations, and immigration and boundary enforcement, illustrating its profound impact on people’s lives, and deaths. Joseph Nevins and Mizue Aizeki spent several years working on the book, researching and documenting life in southern California, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and central Mexico. In the end, the authors offer a provocative, human-rights-based vision of what must be done to stop the fatalities and injustices endured by migrants and their loved ones.
Dozens of stunning photos by Mizue Aizeki complement the text.
“In Dying to Live, Joseph Nevins and Mizue Aizeki have produced an important and visually moving book that adds to our knowledge of the border and its place in history. Nevins’ painstaking research documents the development of the Imperial Valley — its industrial agriculture, its divided cities, and the chasms between rich and poor, Mexican and anglo, that have marred its growth. Through the valley runs the border, and Nevins’ accounts of the growth of border enforcement on the U.S. side, and the racism of its legal justifications, will be a strong weapon for human rights activists. Mizue Aizeki takes her camera and tells the story of Julio Cesar Gallegos, who died in the desert trying to make it across. Her images of the stacked bodies of border crossers held in refrigerator trucks, and the barrenness of the ocotillo cactus on the flat hardpan are eloquent testimony to the terrible risks and human costs imposed on migrants. Her beautifully composed portraits of Gallegos’ family make a direct appeal to the heart in a way that words cannot. And her documentation of border protests and immigrant rights demonstrations, including the rows of jugs of water put out in the desert to save lives, are all compelling evidence that there is a struggle going on to halt the human rights crisis she and Nevins document.”
David Bacon, author of Communities Without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration
“Joseph Nevins blows the red-neck cover off the right wing engineered scapegoating of “illegal” immigrants by meticulously and grippingly compiling the history of why so many try to come to the US, and, tragically, why so many die. His important work forces us to go beyond the simple debate of legal versus illegal and instead focus on the current government policy that is literally killing thousands. Nevins strikes at our very moral core when he asks: are we a nation that will continue to allow thousands of innocent people to die and do nothing to reverse this grave injustice?”
Deepa Fernandes, author of Targeted, Homeland Security and the Business of Immigration
“A fierce and courageous denunciation of the foul politics of immigration and the two-thousand mile tragedy of the Mexican border, snaking its way between two worlds, two nations, separated at birth but forever joined at the hip. Starting from one man’s blackened corpse, the tale wends its way across the desert of racial amnesia to reveal the sources of America’s reactionary (and futile) attempt at closure of a porous frontier. Deftly stitching together disparate times and places — from the Imperial Valley to Zacatecas to Mexicali and back to East L.A. — Nevins and Aizeki weave a memorial quilt to the hundreds of innocents in unmarked graves.”
Richard Walker, Professor of Geography, UC Berkeley, and author of The Conquest of Bread and The Country and the City
“Dying to Live is a compelling, perceptive and invaluable book for our times. Our new apartheid, as explored here, is as bleak and hostile as the landscapes in which people lose their lives trying merely to survive. Those lives delineated here are unforgettable.”
Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales and Highwire Moon
“Invisible in life, like most exploited immigrants, Julio Cesar Gallegos now judges us from the hour of his terrible death. He reminds us — thanks to the passionate investigations of Nevins and Aizeki -— that the eyeless corpses in the Imperial Valley are murder victims: abandoned to heat, thirst, and anonymous graves by a border politics compounded of historical ignorance and contempt for human rights.”
Mike Davis, author of author of A Planet of Slums and In Praise of Barbarians
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Joseph Nevins is an associate professor of geography at Vassar College, and the author of A Not-so-distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor, and Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary.
Mizue Aizeki is a documentary photographer and activist on issues of workers rights and immigrant detention and deportation.
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Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
State Power and the Rise of People’s Movements in the Global South
By Trevor Ngwane, Luke Sinwell, andImmanuel Ness Haymarket Books (Spring 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467136 • US $19.95 • 210 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Through detailed case studies, Urban Revolt unravels the potential and limitations of urban social movements on an international level.
The urban poor and working class now make up the majority of the world’s population. Much of the population growth results from the displacement of rural peasants to mega-cities. The proliferation of informal settlements and slums, particularly in the Global South, have created the conditions ripe for social upheaval as people seek to improve their living conditions and win basic human rights. Drawing from case studies in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, the various chapters in this book map and analyze the ways in which the majority of the world exists and struggles in the contemporary urban context.
PRAISE:
“What emerges from this collection is a complex picture of resistance, which nevertheless provides nuanced hope for a universalist project of social transformation…The result is often a refreshing and accessible journey into urban revolts with which the reader may have less familiarity.”
Leo Zeilig, author, African Struggles Today: Social Movements Since Independence
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHORS:
Praise for Ours to Master and to Own (Immanuel Ness):
“Ours to Master and to Own is the most substantive and comprehensive work on workers control and self management today. I strongly recommend this work, which provides examples drawn from throughout the world of workers struggling for justice and power.”
Gary Younge, Columnist, The Guardian and The Nation. Author, Who We Are and Should It Matter in the 21st Century
“The seemingly logical and just idea that workers themselves should make the decisions regarding and reap the benefits of their labor has always been a fraught concept with the potential to topple or reform whole societies … This ambitious, copiously researched and clearly written text provides a sweeping diversity of examples, analyzed with cool detachment from the specific politics but with underlying passion for the larger concept.”
Kari Lydersen, author of Revolt on Goose Island: The Chicago Factory Takeover and What it Says About the Economic Crisis
“The beauty of these case studies lies in their rigorous telling by these talented authors. Each city has new tales and lessons for the next generation of urban rebels, as well as for others who have comparative ambitions. I cannot think of a better book in recent years, to pick up those stories with the voices of the participants as well as the clean, cool arguments of analysts who, as Cabral appealed to his own revolutionaries, ‘tell no lies and claim no easy victories.'”
Patrick Bond, professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand, author of Looting Africa.
“Read this to be inspired by stories of city-based resistance in some of the most difficult conditions possible.”
Socialist Review
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Trevor Ngwane is a scholar activist who is active in the Socialist Group, Democratic Left Front and United Front, organizations that seek a pro-working class pro-poor future for South Africa and the world.
Immanuel Ness is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He has authored and edited of many books including: Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class (Pluto, 2015) and Ours to Master and to Own: Worker Control from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket 2011). Ness is editor of the peer-review quarterly journal, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society.
Luke Sinwell is a Senior Researcher with the South African Research Chair in Social Change, University of Johannesburg. He is a co-author of Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer (Jacana 2012, Bookmarks and Ohio University Press 2013) and the co-editor of Contesting Transformation: Popular Resistance in Twenty-First Century South Africa (Pluto Press 2012).
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781788734301 • 5.5 in x 8.2 in • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A highly engaging tour through progressive history in the service of emancipating our digital tomorrow.
When we talk about technology we always talk about tomorrow and the future — which makes it hard to figure out how to even get there. In Future Histories, public interest lawyer and digital specialist Lizzie O’Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and progressive social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O’Shea constructs a “usable past” that can help us determine our digital future.
What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources–like the Internet–in common? How can Frantz Fanon’s theories of anti colonial self-determination help us build digital world in which everyone can participate equally? Can debates over equal digital access be helped by American revolutionary Tom Paine’s theories of democratic, economic redistribution? What can indigenous land struggles teach us about stewarding our digital climate? And, how is Elon Musk not a future visionary but a steampunk throwback to Victorian-era technological utopians?
In engaging, sparkling prose, O’Shea shows us how very human our understanding of technology is, and how when we draw on the resources of the past, we can see the potential for struggle, for liberation, for art and poetry in our technological present. Future Histories is for all of us–makers, coders, hacktivists, Facebook-users, self-styled Luddites–who find ourselves in a brave new world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lizzie O’Shea is a lawyer, writer, and broadcaster. An experienced lawyer in Australia and internationally, specializing in human rights and Aboriginal rights in Australia, she has represented refugees, activists, and people targeted by national security legislation. O’Shea is regularly featured on national television programs and radio to comment on law, digital technology, corporate responsibility, and human rights, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, and The Sydney Morning Health, among others. An experienced lawyer in Australia and internationally, specializing in human rights and Aboriginal rights in Australia, O’Shea has represented refugees, activists, and people targeted by national security legislation. She holds degrees from the University of Melbourne and an Masters in Law from Columbia University, specializing in corporate responsibility and digital technology, and sits on the boards of numerous non-profit community organizations, including Digital Rights Watch Australia.
Citizen Illegal is a revealing portrait of life as a first generation immigrant, a celebration of Chicano joy, a shout against erasure, and a vibrant re-imagining of Mexican American life.
In this stunning debut, poet José Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between. Combining wry humor with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in. Olivarez has a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch.
PRAISE:
“Olivarez steps into the ‘inbetween’ standing between Mexico and America in these compelling, emotional poems. Written with humor and sincerity, each page looks at immigration, race, gender and class, and how it’s all playing out amid the polarizing relationship between America, Mexico and those who inhabit both.”
Newsweek, “Best Books of 2019 So Far”
“The son of Mexican immigrants, Olivarez celebrates his Mexican-American identity and examines how those two sides conflict in a striking collection of poems.”
USA Today
“José Olivarez’s indispensable debut poetry collection, Citizen Illegal, is a boisterous, empathetic, funny-yet-serious (but not self-serious) celebratory ode to Chicanx life in the contemporary United States.”
Chicago Tribune
“This striking collection of poems is a testament to art’s power to shine a light on the beauty and nuance of family life and the plight of oppressed populations.”
NPR, “Best Books of 2018”
“José Olivarez’s work shines a spotlight on the often-overlooked stories of Mexican-Americans in the Midwest. This identity is illustrated throughout Citizen Illegal in all of its complexities—the connections between Mexican-Americans and labor and the all too familiar feeling of being ni de aqui, ni de alla (not from here, nor there).”
Remezcla
“A high-octane take on the rhythms and contradictions of life as a first-generation child of Mexican parents.”
Booklist
“Incredible… Olivarez gives us the poem as incantation, using language to transcend the limits of social constructions and the physical, temporal world.”
The Rumpus
“A book of poems by Mexican American poet José Olivarez, ties together memory, experience, and humanity. This collection makes the reader sit with the idea of nationhood, assimilation, and how white people are granted immediate access to privileges denied to people of color, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.”
Yes! Magazine
“Citizen Illegal is not only a commentary on timely and complicated issues of race, immigration, and ethnicity, but also a celebration, a journey toward a self and a family identity that is grounded not merely in geography but in the veined map of the heart.”
Rhino Poetry
“Poets like José Olivarez, a son of Mexican immigrants, are vital to keeping this nation from tearing apart—if only we could get Citizen Illegal, his debut collection, into the hands of the anti-immigrant crowd.”
Foreword Reviews
“A poet never arrives ahead or behind schedule, but rather at just the right moment. Through his masterful demonstration of control over the pen, Olivarez has established himself as not only a voice to be reckoned with and mindful of, but also one that deserves to be respected.”
Cultural Weekly
“In this collection of poems, Olivarez traces the lines between the country of his parents’ birth and the Mexican-American communities that have formed an integral part of Chicago’s identity. With equal measures of playfulness and razor-sharp critique, he writes of ‘gentefication,’ an imagined process in which the city’s neighborhoods are returned unto the hands that wrought them.
Eve Ewing, Publishers Weekly
“Citizen Illegal is a fearless, instrumental, honest collection of poetry. In other words, the book is fire. Skilled, tender, funny, yet undecorated, Olivarez’s poetry navigates the razor sharp duality and utter contradiction of citizenship. These poems helps us carry the weight of biases, the absurdity of our prejudices; they help us seek documentation for our humanity which cannot, by any means, be dictated by policy makers. Let it be said that these poems are also love poems. Olivarez chooses to use his voice, sometimes brutal, sometimes bloody and blistered, to confront our monstrosity, yet he never shies away from love, even when he exposes the lies we keep in order to live. Keep an eye out for José Olivarez: he might be the poet you need when it’s time to cross a line, destruct borders, and still come out on the other side with your dreams intact.”
Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
“Citizen Illegal is a stunning piece of artwork from beginning to end. A vivid journey on José’s real life experiences which open-heartedly allows you to discover many of the things people don’t often talk about: love, anxiety, fear, and hopefulness. This book is inspirational and culturally rich, giving you all types of feelings with first hand insight on what it feels like to be Latino. Poets like José and books like Citizen Illegal are essential to our community.”
Luis Carranza, poet & member of Young Chicago Authors 2017 Bomb Squad
“When I read this book, I can hear José reading these poems out loud to me, into a microphone, in conversation. There is not one time that I read his collection that I didn’t cry. I cried of joy, of sadness, of just seeing and feeling the printed celebration and exploration of what it means to be a first-generation Mexican-American. If and when I need to be reminded of the love I have for being a first generation Mexican American, I am able to turn to these moments in this collection: a neighborhood in which we can be as open and loud and soft as we want to be. In this neighborhood, I can also find all the deafening shame and heart- breaking fear my family and I have tried to hide. José pulls this love and this family and these secrets onto a platform we, as a community, can celebrate, acknowledge, laugh, and cry juntitos. Muchísimas gracias a José por siendo tan valiente y integro. Llevaré estas poemas conmigo por siempre.”
Vicky Peralta, poet & member of Young Chicago Authors 2017 Bomb Squad
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and won the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize.
Hard cover • ISBN-13: 9781642598377• US $29.95• 5.5 in x 8.5 in• 120 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A visual and verbal narrative of the grit and gentleness in Southwestern Latinx communities through photography by Antonio Salazar and poetry by José Olivarez, author of Citizen Illegal.
Guns, tattoos, pit bulls, and cars appear alongside a tender aubade, a couple holding hands, a baby bathing in a kitchen sink; landscapes and skylines in Phoenix and Los Angeles show palm trees and messy garages; long white socks and acrylic nails of younger generations meet the smiles and traditions of elders. In a society that would rather disappear or ignore its own grittier dimensions, Salazar’s work is both a refusal to be silenced and a love letter to the communities that sing, dance, live, and love, in their own beautiful and dangerous ways.
Alongside Salazar’s powerful visual narrative, a series of poetry by José Olivarez appears throughout the book. Each poem “speaks” in its own way—to, of, with, and beyond the subjects of Salazar’s photos—with humor, honesty, and compassion. These artists together in Por Siempre are a force: expanding and lifting each other’s best parts, as those in sincere and caring communities often do.
Praise for Citizen Illegal:
PRAISE:
“Olivarez steps into the ‘inbetween’ standing between Mexico and America in these compelling, emotional poems. Written with humor and sincerity, each page looks at immigration, race, gender and class, and how it’s all playing out amid the polarizing relationship between America, Mexico and those who inhabit both.”
Newsweek, “Best Books of 2019 So Far”
“The son of Mexican immigrants, Olivarez celebrates his Mexican-American identity and examines how those two sides conflict in a striking collection of poems.”
USA Today
“José Olivarez’s indispensable debut poetry collection, Citizen Illegal, is a boisterous, empathetic, funny-yet-serious (but not self-serious) celebratory ode to Chicanx life in the contemporary United States.”
Chicago Tribune
“This striking collection of poems is a testament to art’s power to shine a light on the beauty and nuance of family life and the plight of oppressed populations.”
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and won the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize.
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Including speeches by and interviews with: Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Emile de Antonio, and Angela Davis and commentary by Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, Harry Belafonte, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Robin Kelley, Abiodun Oyewole, Sonia Sanchez, Bobby Seale, and Questlove.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608462964 • US $29.95 • 8 3/8 x 10 7/8 • 100 color photos • 192 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Featuring images only recently discovered in the archives of Swedish television, here is the Black Power movement as you’ve never seen it. Based on the award-winning documentary of the same name, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 presents powerful interviews with Stokely Carmichel, Angela Davis and others who shaped the struggle of their day. Mixed with the contemporary reflections of leading activists, musicians and scholars, this book aims to introduce a new generation to the legacy of Black Power.
About the film:
From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, a group of Swedish journalists covered the Black Power movement in the United States and filmed all that they saw. Thirty years later this lush collection of 16mm footage was found in a basement. With the early support of co-producers Danny Glover and Joslyn Barnes, the footage has been beautifully edited into a powerful chronicle of the birth and life of a movement.
With never before seen interviews with Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis and the addition of commentary by artists and activists who were influenced by the struggle-from Harry Belafonte to Erykah Badu-filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson shows us our own history through a global lens, which makes it fresher and, in many cases, truer, than what we remember.
Modeled on the 1970s “mixtape” format, this feature documentary examines the evolution of the Black Power Movement from 1967-75. Combining amazing 16mm footage that had been lying undiscovered in Swedish archives for the past 30 years, with music and contemporary commentary from artists, intellectuals, musicians and activists, Mixtape presents an insightful and startlingly fresh portrait of the people, society, culture and styles that fuelled a change.
The documentary that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and was recently acquired for distribution by Sundance Selects.
Official Selection 2011 SilverDocs
Official Selection 2011 Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival
Official Selection 2011 Miami International Film Festival
Official Selection 2011 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
Official Selection 2011 MoMA/Film Society of Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films
Official Selection 2011 True/False Fest
Official Selection 2011 Berlin International Film Festival – Panorama
World Cinema Documentary Editing Award, 2011 Sundance Film Festival
Official Selection 2011 Sundance Film Festival – World Documentary Competition
“Addressing what might be thought of as standard historical and contemporary subjects with startlingly radical means … Göran Hugo Olsson’s ‘Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975’ is a collage of archival footage recorded in America, mostly by Swedish journalists, in the era of African-American militancy. The images, accompanied by present-day voice-over reflections from historians, rappers, artists and veterans of the era’s racial politics, offer revelations about events and personalities we thought we understood completely.”
The New York Times, reviewing The Black Power Mixtape documentary
“This powerful book linked to the poignant film is a grand contribution to our understanding of contemporary America.”
Cornel West
“We have much to learn from these visionary organizers who sought to redefine and re-imagine democracy, whose sense of empowerment derived from the belief that the people could be the architects for change.”
Danny Glover, from the Foreword
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Danny Glover is an actor, producer and humanitarian, He has been a presence on screen and television for more than 25 years. As an actor, his film credits range from the Lethal Weapon franchise to smaller independent features, some of which Glover also produced, as he did The Black Power Mixtape film.
Göran Olsson was born in Sweden in 1965, and studied film in Stockholm. He subsequently worked as a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer. The Black Power Mixtape is his third feature film.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465323 • US $19.95 • 6 1/8 in x 9 1/4 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An unblinking portrait of the anticolonial struggles of the 1960s, Concerning Violence combines more than one hundred and fifty arresting color and black and white photographs from Göran Hugo Olsson’s award-winning documentary, with passages from Frantz Fanon’s classic The Wretched of the Earth. Concerning Violence is a powerful commentary on the history of colonialism and struggles for self-determination, whose echoes remain with us today, and will introduce a new generation to Fanon, whom Angela Davis has called “this century’s most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism.”
PRAISE:
“By grounding colonial brutalities and the responses to those injustices in the visual, the phenomenon of colonialism attains a larger and more global significance. Olsson’s interest is in decolonization—that short yet potent moment at the tail end of an anti-colonial war followed by the transfer of power when the new nation comes into being. This has often proven to be one of the most violent episodes in post-colonial history, and [Frantz] Fanon is its most articulate philosopher. . . . Olsson’s investment [is] in making Fanon’s theory relevant and up-to-date.”
The Guardian
“Concerning Violence [is] a postcolonialist montage . . . [an] illustration of Fanon’s 1961 anticolonialist broadside, The Wretched of the Earth, abridged and sharpened to its ferocious point.”
New York Times
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Sophie Vukovic is a Stockholm-based filmmaker. Her short films have screened at Swedish and international festivals. She has also worked as an assistant director and editor.
Göran Hugo Olsson is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and author. He is the director of four feature films, including The Black Power Mixtape: 1967–1975 and Concerning Violence. This is his second book.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She has been an activist in rural education and feminist and ecological social movements since 1986. She is the author of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, among many other critically acclaimed works.
Joslyn Barnes is a producer of more than thirty independent feature documentary and art house fiction films. She is the co-founder, together with Danny Glover, of US-based independent production company Louverture Films. Concerning Violence is her second collaboration with filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888903667 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 288 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A sweeping history of Disney’s rise to cultural dominance that pulls all the skeletons from the corporate closet and playfully decodes the hidden political messages in all of your favorite childhood movies.
In The Extended Universe, Vicky Osterweil takes us on a quest to discover the black magic by which Disney has successfully made its image synonymous with not only youthful splendor, but pop culture itself. Their “imagineers” have made it impossible to reflect on the wonders of growing up without immediately thinking of Disney’s movies, Disney’s amusement parks, and various other bits and bobs of related Disney merchandising. What Osterweil unearths are reactionary political commitments and maleficent legal maneuvers—from fighting to protect the patent on the COVID vaccine, to breaking early efforts at an animator’s union—so cartoonishly evil they would make one of Walt’s own animated villains blush.
Along the way, Osterweil braids together Disney’s corporate history, an economic accounting of capitalism’s dependency on IP, and deeply engaging (and not entirely unsympathetic) analysis of some of Disney’s most famous movies, including Snow White, The Lion King (animated and live action!), Black Panther, and more. The result is an entertainingly woven and convincing case that Disney’s entire business model has been built upon a ruthless and fanatical defense of intellectual property rights—from Steamboat Willie to Infinity Wars and beyond!
PRAISE:
Praise for In Defense of Looting
“Osterweil debuts with a provocative, Marxist-informed defense of looting as a radical and effective protest tactic…a bracing rethink of the goals and methods of protest.”
Publishers Weekly
“A reflection on violence as a form of social protest that can lead to social change.”
New York Journal of Books
“[In Defense of Looting] is as much an argument for the possibilities of a riot as it is a reckoning between history as it happens and history as it is read…. [Osterweil’s] readings of history lend the book its exhilarating quality and make anything seem possible.”
Frieze
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Vicky Osterweil is a writer, organizer, and brick-mason based in Philadelphia. Her first book, In Defense of Looting , was an account of historical struggles for liberation in the United States. She is currently the in-house film critic for AJ+, and cohosts a popular movie review podcast, Cerise and Vicky Rank the Movies . She has written about the intersections of film, politics and culture for a variety of outlets, including The Paris Review, Art in America, Al Jazeera America, The Baffler, Dissent, Lux Magazine , and The New Inquiry , where she was also a culture editor for many years. Her series on the political economy and cultural role of videogames, “Well Played,” which ran in Real Life Magazine from 2019-2020, won her the Blogger of the Year award from prestigious video game criticism outlet Critical Distance.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591286 • US $14.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 100 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
With the historic parties of the left and center-left largely discredited amidst neoliberalism’s multiple economic, ecological, and migration crises, political space has opened up for the far right and its ultra-nationalist, racist, sexist and homophobic agendas. Yet it has also restored some credibility to the socialist case for transcending capitalism altogether.
Amidst a significant shift from “protest” to “politics” on the contemporary left, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin provide an essential historical, theoretical, and critical perspective for understanding the potential as well as the limits of three important recent phenomena: the Sanders electoral insurgency in the USA; the Syriza experience in Greece; and Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party in the UK.
Presenting a powerful argument for transcending earlier social democratic and communist practices, Panitch and Gindin stress the need for renewing working-class politics through new kinds of socialist parties. Most important, they insist, will be to foster the development of strategic and practical capacities to democratically transform state structures so as to render them fit for realizing collective democracy, social equality, sustainable ecology and human solidarity. This is the central challenge for democratic socialists today.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Leo Panitch is a Senior Scholar and Emeritus Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. Editor of the annual Socialist Register for over three decades, his book (with Sam Gindin), The Making of American Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso Books, 2012), was awarded the Deutscher Book Prize in the UK and the Davidson Book Prize in Canada.
Sam Gindin was the Research Director of the Canadian Autoworkers (now UNIFOR) from 1974-2000. Over the next decade he was the Packer Chair in Social Justice at York University. He is the co-author, with Leo Panitch, of The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso Books, 2012).
Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591347 • US $24.00 • 360pp
ABOUT THE BOOK:
As we enter what some term the “fourth industrial revolution” and both mainstream commentators and the left grapple with the implications of rapid technological development, this volume is a timely and crucial resource for those looking to build a political strategy attentive to sweeping changes in how we produce goods and live our lives.
The Socialist Register has been at the forefront of intellectual enquiry and strategic debate on the left for five decades. This expertly curated collection analyzes technological innovation against the backdrop of the recurrent crises and forms of class struggle distinctive to capitalism.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599138 • US $17 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 90 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This stunning debut moves from family history and the heartbreaks of navigating a predominantly white high school into adulthood, exploring the ways the poet’s experiences echo those of an expansive and intricate history of Black girls and women.
In this beautiful debut from an exciting new poet, Alexa Patrick’s Remedies for Disappearing memorializes Blackness in its quiet and unexpected forms, bringing the peripheral into focus. These poems muddy Black life and death, observe lineage and love stories, and question what “disappearing” teaches about Blackness and bodies.
Remedies for Disappearing is gritty, sharp, and formally inventive, demonstrating Patrick’s imaginative curiosity, lyrical restraint, and confidence in her handling of language. Moments of aphoristic confession are balanced out by imagistic precision as the speaker recounts the ways her aunties, sisters, and even herself have disappeared in order to survive. The collection moves from family history and the heartbreaks of navigating a predominantly white high school into adulthood, as she discovers the ways her experiences echo those of an expansive and intricate history of Black girls and women.
Patrick’s poetry is haunting and hopeful, striving to provide readers with the tools and context to acknowledge, define, and honor the complexity of Black girl/womanhood. This collection connects Black girls and women to each other and to their own histories, and insists that they be fully and wholly seen.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463237 • US $22 • 5 1/4 in x 8 1/2 in • 450 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This book sheds crucial new light on the epochal US interventions in Southeast Asia after World War II. Antiwar activist Fred Branfman describes the tragic lives of Laotian peasants under US bombing. Cambodia scholar Ben Kiernan and colleague Owen Taylor illuminate the course of Cambodian history after unprecedented US bombing. The book also includes classic works by Noam Chomsky, Nick Turse, and Edward Herman
PRAISE
Extremely important and pertinent…. The importance of the historical events and arguments made in this book cannot be overstated; the government of the United States waged war against the three countries of Indochina for years, even though none had harmed the United States or were vital to American security or geopolitical interests. In the course of those wars, massive atrocities were committed, undoubtedly war crimes. The United States has never taken responsibility for those actions nor has it punished the criminals who committed these acts… Moreover, the extent of these atrocities have been kept from the American public and the lack of historical awareness of these events prevents Americans from learning important lessons about how their government acts in their names and precludes learning important lessons to prevent any other occurrences such as these.”
Critical Asian Studies.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mark Pavlick is an independent editor. He was active in the U.S. movement against the Indochina wars in volunteer work with the Indochina Mobile Education Project and the Indochina Resource Center in Washington, D.C.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595680 • US $14.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 120 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia.
Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, the author invites readers—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures.
García Peña argues that the classroom is key to freedom-making in the university, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls “teaching in freedom”: a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.
PRAISE:
“A life-saving and life-affirming text, Community as Rebellion offers us the trenchant analysis and fearless strategy radical scholar-activists have long needed. But Lorgia García Peña’s intervention is especially valuable at this moment, as we collectively consider how our most important social institutions might be reimagined beyond the strongholds of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism more broadly.”
Angela Y. Davis
‘’Lorgia García Peña is one of the few courageous and brilliant intellectuals grounded in rigorous and visionary grassroots education. This pedagogical guide for genuine freedom struggles is so badly needed in our neo-fascist times!”
Cornel West
“Community as Rebellion is a must read for anyone serious about confronting institutional racism, sexism, and elitism, Lorgia García Peña, one of her generation’s most brilliant scholar-activists, challenges us to confront academia as a ‘colonial and colonizing’ space as the first step toward resistance and transformation. Her own experiences undergird her analysis and serve as a powerful call to action.”
Barbara Ransby, author, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
“Unflinching, brilliant, and absolutely necessary. In these pages, Lorgia Garcia Peña shares her experiences – and others’- to reflect on what it means to be “the stranger” in academia: that sole symbol for diversity that still remains an outsider. Unwavering in its clarity and compassion, this powerful book reminds us that true belonging comes from actively building communities unafraid to center care and rebellion. Everyone should read this.”
Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize
“With characteristic clarity, courage, and conviction, Lorgia Garcia-Peña draws on her remarkable history as an engaged scholar and committed activist to demonstrate the necessity of living in community and accompanying others as keys to both personal liberation and social transformation.”
George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
“What does it mean to teach for freedom?’ Dr. García Peña asks and boldly beckons us toward its practice across the policed borders of discipline, nation, theoretical traditions, and entrenched racial categories. A capacious thinker, rigorous researcher, brilliant activist, and path-breaking scholar, Dr. García Peña calls on us not simply, as she writes, to “mind the historical gaps” for long-subjugated stories but alerts us to the ways these gaps have been historically mined in extractive ways in the service of colonial projects and neoliberal calls for diversity. Her astonishing work gathers us under its broad canopy to plot and persevere toward communal rebellion and renewal.”
Deborah Paredez
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lorgia García is a first generation Latinx Studies scholar. Dr. García Peña is the Mellon Associate Professor of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora Studies at Tufts University. She studies global Blackness, colonialism, migration and diaspora with a special focus on Black Latinidad. Dr. García Peña is the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia and of Archives of Justice (Milan-Boston). Her book The Borders of Dominicanidad (Duke University Press 2016) won the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize, the Isis Duarte Book Award in Haiti and Dominican Studies and the 2016 Latino/a Studies Book Award. She is the author of Translating Blackness (Duke University Press) and the co-editor of the Texas University Press Series Latinx: The Future is Now. She is a regular contributor to The Boycott Times, Asterix Journal and the North American Council on Latin America (NACLA).
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467617 • US $19.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 271 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this illuminating collection of essays curated by Jewish Voice for Peace, a broad range of activists, movement theorists, and public figures engage with critical questions about contemporary antisemitism.
How do we define antisemitism in the present moment? What is the relationship between antisemitism and other forms of bigotry and oppression? How have false charges of antisemitism been used to stifle criticism of Israeli policy and support for Palestinian human rights? This book provides an essential tool for Palestine solidarity activists, teachers, and Jewish communities.
Featuring contributions from Omar Barghouti, Judith Butler, and Rebecca Vilkomerson, as well as other activists, scholars, students, and cultural workers, On Antisemitism includes the voices of those who are often marginalized in mainstream discussions of antisemitism.
PRAISE:
“On Antisemitism…couldn’t have come out at a better time…[The book] provides helpful context for this confusing political moment by showing how right-wing apologists for Israel have systematically redefined antisemitism to include anti-Zionism to silence and intimidate advocates for justice in Palestine.”
Truthout
“A must-read for all involved in the struggle to build solidarity with the Palestinians today.”
Socialist Review
“[T]he old-fashioned forms of Jew-hatred have not disappeared, even as new questions of anti-Semitism, real and imagined, and its uses and misuses become ever more complex. All the better time, then, to continue the discussion and expand it—as this vital book does in a most timely fashion.”
Solidarity
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is a national, grassroots organization inspired by Jewish tradition to work for a just and lasting peace according to principles of human rights, equality, and international law for all the people of Israel and Palestine. JVP has over 200,000 online supporters, over 60 chapters, a youth wing, a rabbinic council, an artist council, an academic advisory council, and an advisory board made up of leading U.S. intellectuals and artists.
“Jewish Voice for Peace is emerging as one of the most important progressive organizations in the country.”
Angela Davis
“Jewish Voice for Peace has been instrumental in unpacking the politicization and misuse of anti-Semitism—a term often deployed to punish advocates of Palestinian liberation. Illustrating that conflation of the Jewish people with the state of Israel is a troublesome proposition, the essays collected here show that a more generous engagement with the politics of Palestine is possible—and necessary. “
Steven Salaita, author of Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463947 • US $36 • 5 7/8 in x 8 7/8 in • 463 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Wilhelm Liebknecht and German Social Democracy is the most comprehensive collection available in English of the speeches and writings of Wilhelm Liebknecht, founder and leading voice of the German Social Democratic Party in the nineteenth century.
This collection of Liebknecht’s writings and speeches is a representative sampling of his most renowned and influential work. Each piece is prefaced by concise and informative introduction situating the material in its context. Where possible, the selections are presented unedited, making this collection an important research tool for political and labor historians and others concerned with the development of mass movements in 19th and 20th century Europe.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. William A. Pelz is an academic historian who specializes in European and comparative labor history. His previous books include The Eugene V. Debs Reader: Socialism and Democracy (2014), Karl Marx: A World to Win (2012), Against Capitalism: The European Left on the March (2007); The Spartkusbund and the German Working Class Movement (1988). His articles and reviews have appeared in the American Historical Review, Film & History, German History, German Studies Review, International Labor and Working Class History, International Review of Social History, Labor Studies, Journal of European Studies, Science & Society, Soviet Studies, Sozialismus, JahrBuch fuar Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, and International Labor History Yearbook, among others. Pluto Press (London) will publish his forthcoming book, A People’s History of Modern Europe in 2015.
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Hardcover • ISBN-13: 9781642594638 • US $16.00• 6 in x 9 in • 80 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Smoking Lovely is one of the foundational texts of anti- gentrification Nuyorican literature, inspiring a whole generation of poets in their attempts to survive and subvert the neoliberal city.
Smoking Lovely explores the neoliberal city at the intersection of community and commodity. In this radically revised new edition, Perdomo shifts the poem into mostly second person, thereby further accentuating its self- reflexive and complex exploration of self- and/as- other, and of the simultaneous othering, commodification, and spectacularization of Afro- diasporic bodies and cultural forms
PRAISE:
“Willie Perdomo is an electric poet. His poems crackle with energy. The poet knows his beloved barrio, what to celebrate and what to condemn. He also has the courage to confront his own demons. There is raw pain in this voice, and much more: humor, irony, music, intelligence.”
Martín Espada
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Willie Perdomo is the author of The Crazy Bunch, The Essential Hits of Shorty BonBon, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of the International Latino Book Award, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, Poetry, Bomb Magazine, and African Voices. He is currently a Lucas Arts Program Literary Fellow and teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598391 • US $22.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 340 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A trenchant history of community organizing, and a must-read for the next generation of organizers seeking to learn from the successes, failures, and contradictions of the past.
Since Obama entered the national stage in 2004, the term “community organizer” has been hammered by the right and claimed with pride by the left. But the organizer’s place in our movements and politics is long overdue for reexamination.
As scholar and activist Clément Petitjean argues, we need to understand the unique history of the community organizing tradition. With de Tocqueville-style critical distance, Petitjean traces that history, from its roots in the Progressive Movement to its expansion and diverging paths during the social movements of the 60s and 70s, when Saul Alinsky became the most popular “professional radical” in America and groups like SNCC and SDS understood organizers as horizontal, anti-hierarchical spadeworkers—those who do the work as part of the community, rather than standing apart from it.
But in the years since, the professionalization of the organizing class — characterized by organizers’ presumed expertise, their refusal to espouse political or ideological opinions, their wariness of class antagonisms, and their dependence on philanthropy — has only increased, despite the critiques. The result, Petitjean shows, is a role that has gained institutional and political legitimacy — but at a cost to the people it purports to represent.
Only by grappling with the limitations of the professionalization of organizing, Petitjean insists, can we learn to build durable, effective organizations for change.
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Saddle-stiched • ISBN-13: 9781608462162 • 5.5 x 8.5 • US $5 • 20 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“We’ve been at war for decades now – not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Devastating as it’s been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed – until now.”
– Frances Fox Piven
In this new pamphlet, Frances Fox Piven writes about the immense possibility and creativity of the Occupy movement, and explores how it can learn from the lessons of past struggles of working and poor people for social change.
PRAISE:
“Piven, throughout her career as an activist and academic, has embodied the best of American democracy. It has been her life’s work to amplify the voices of the disenfranchised through voter registration drives, grassroots organization and, when necessary, street protest. The way economic injustice warps and erodes our democracy has been a central preoccupation. But passive lament has never been her game. Recognizing the leverage that oppressed groups have – and working with them to use it – is her special genius.”
The Nation
“It is hard to read [Piven] without recognizing that our system, has been historically skewed in favor of more privileged voters and vote influencers.”
The New York Review of Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of several books that draw on the social history of the Great Depression, including Regulating the Poor, Poor People’s Movements, and Why Americans Still Don’t Vote, all co-authored with Richard Cloward. More recently, she has written The War at Home, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, and, together with Lorraine Minnite and Margaret Groarke, Keeping the Black Vote Down. Her newest book is Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven? She also wrote prefaces to the Haymarket Books reissues of Irvin Bernstein’s classic books The Lean Years and The Turbulent Years.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642596908 • US $15.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Two brilliant and influential minds look beyond capitalism, and chart a roadmap for a planet ravaged by pandemics, a climate crisis, and wars.
Frank Barat, who has co-authored books with such luminaries as Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky, sits down with renowned author and academic Vijay Prashad, to explore topics such as debt cancellation, a wealth tax, austerity, the pandemic, the arms industry, the climate crisis, socialism, working-class social movements and much more.
Barat and Prashad take an honest look at the challenges involved in overcoming the grip the neoliberal world order has on the planet; and the ability of the wealthy elite to continue to carry out policies that are destroying the lives of millions. Yet, they don’t leave the reader in despair, Barat and Prashad masterfully show us a path towards hope and liberation by highlighting the often ignored worker’s struggles and victories that are taking place around the world in countries such as: India, Kenya, Peru, Tunisia, and Argentina.
PRAISE:
“An essential, brilliant revolutionary post pandemic conversation and primer about everything that matters and how we can move from the devastation of capitalism to a living breathing working socialism. Informative and profoundly inspirational.”
V (formerly Eve Ensler), author of The Vagina Monologues and The Apology
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter, and Editor at LeftWord Books. He won the Muzaffar Ahmad Memorial Prize in 2009 for his book Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World.
Frank Barat was the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. His books include Gaza in Crisis, On Palestine, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, and We Still Here.
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Haymarket Books (April 2016) Paper • IBSN-13: 9781608465934 • US $17 • 280 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, the debt crisis that began with the 2008 global recession helped trigger severe austerity measures–which only worsened economic conditions.
In response, something happened that few outsiders expected: A massive wave of resistance erupted across Europe. With mainstream parties largely discredited by their support of austerity measures, room opened for radicals to offer a left-wing alternative.
Europe in Revolt examines the key parties and figures behind this insurgency, with insider coverage of the roots of the social crisis–and the radicals seeking to reverse it–in Cyprus, England, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden.
Contents
Introduction: Europe in Revolt
Catarina Príncipe
1. Syriza: The Dream That Became a Nightmare
Panagiotis Sotiris
2. Greece: Turning “No” into a Political Front
Stathis Kouvelakis
3. Cyprus at the Crossroads
Leandros Fischer & Daphnos Economou
4. The Left and the “Swedish Model”
Petter Nilsson & David Zachariah
5. The Iceland Myth
Vidar Thorsteinsson
6. Resurrecting the Italian Left
David Broder
7. What Happened to the French Left?
Clément Petitjean
8. The Dutch Socialist Party: From Sect to Mass Party
Alex de Jong
9. Germany: In the Eye of the Storm
Mark Bergfeld
10. The Adaptable Sinn Féin
Daniel Finn
11. The Making of Jeremy Corbyn
Hilary Wainwright
12. The Deferred Portuguese Revolution
Catarina Príncipe
13. From the Indignados to Podemos?
Luke Stobart
PRAISE:
“There could hardly be a better guide to Europe, its crises, and its radicals. After so many promising starts that went awry, from Rifondazione Comunista to Syriza, there is an urgent need to take stock of the situation. This volume of brilliant, incisive texts—curated and edited by two of the best minds on the radical left—contains the answers we need.”
Richard Seymour, author of Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics
“Is permanent austerity going to be the new normal for Europe? For more than two decades, it certainly seemed so. But now, in the streets and factories, at the ballot box and in mass rallies, the European working class is starting to come together around a strategy of resistance. Sunkara and Príncipe have marshaled a superb collection charting the contours of the fightback, in both the center and the periphery of European neoliberalism. Nobody interested in the struggle for a more humane Europe can ignore it.”
Vivek Chibber, author of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
“Bhaskar Sunkara and Catarina Príncipe bring us this vital, necessary survey of the politics of the new radical left electoral formations in Europe—analyzing everything that went right and everything that went wrong. Ammo for the struggles ahead, not to be ignored.”
Susan Weissman, author of Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Catarina Príncipe is a social movement activist from Portugal. She is a member of Bloco de Esquerda (Portugal) and Die Linke (Germany) and a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine, where she writes frequent dispatches on the European situation.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin magazine. He is a regular contributor to The Nation and In These Times magazine.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Mark Bergfeld, David Broder, Alex de Jong, Daphnos Economou, Daniel Finn, Leandros Fischer, Stathis Kouvelakis, Petter Nilsson, Clément Petitjean, Catarina Príncipe, Panagiotis Sotiris, Luke Stobart, Vidar Thorsteinsson, Hilary Wainwright, and David Zachariah
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595130 • US $17.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 144 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A beautifully illustrated graphic novel about resilience, forgiveness, hope, and what it means to find your own voice behind prison walls
After guards find a book in his cell containing the pencilled name of a suspected gang member, Rodrigo Santiago is “validated” for gang affiliation and sent to indefinite solitary confinement in the Pelican Bay State Prison Secure Housing Unit, or SHU.
Life in the SHU is monotonous, isolating, and enraging. It literally drives prisoners insane. Rodrigo resolves to survive. He struggles to maintain a connection to his daughter, Luz, through letters that are his only happiness. As Luz grows up, though, she presses Rodrigo for more insight into his daily life. She wants the real him. Willing to give her anything she asks, but finding himself at a loss for words, Rodrigo makes a mistake that threatens to destroy the trust between them. Meanwhile a bold, state-wide hunger strike in California prisons gathers force. Gang enmities are set aside. Improbable alliances are forged. Activists and prisoner families organize on the outside. Finding herself increasingly politicized over this issue, Luz fears she can never help her dad. Rodrigo fears he’s lost his daughter forever. On opposite sides of the prison walls they fight to end the torture of endless isolation.
Based on the events of the historic 2013 California prison hunger strike, Flying Kites is a story about resilience, forgiveness, hope, and what it means to find your own voice.
PRAISE:
“One of the best pieces of graphic storytelling I have read in a while, on top of being about a topic close to my heart. Truly, it was brilliant.”
Thi Bui, author of The Best We Could Do
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9780811712729 • US $19.95 • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A popular history of Joshua Chamberlain, a college professor from Maine who became a decorated Union Army officer known for his leadership in the Battle of Gettysburg, and went on after the war to serve as Republican governor of Maine and president of Bowdoin College.
PRAISE:
“Joshua Chamberlain was much more than a war hero, and Pullen’s thoughtful book fills out the picture of his remarkable life. An entertaining and inspiring story.” Senator George J. Mitchell
“Pullen’s book is a worthy tribute to Chamberlain’s lasting legacy.”
Charles F. Herberger, Civil War Book Review
“Pullen’s presentation is more complete in revealing a complicated character, without diminishing the almost mythic status he has assumed.”
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780811735247 • US $23.95 • 352 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“We went into the fight with 386, all told—358 guns. Every pioneer and musician who would carry a musket went into the ranks. Even the sick and footsore, who could not keep up in the march, came up as soon as they could find their regiments, and took their places in line of battle, while it was battle, indeed.” – Col. Joshua Chamberlain
The fascinating story of Joshua Chamberlain and his volunteer regiment, the Twentieth Maine, is reprinted with a new foreword by Civil War historian and UCLA professor Joan Waugh. Pullen’s classic and highly acclaimed book tells how Chamberlain and his men fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville on their way to the pivotal battle of Gettysburg. There, on July 2, 1863, at Little Round Top, they heroically saved the left flank of the Union battle line. The Twentieth Maine’s remarkable story ends with the surrender of Lee’s troops at Appomattox.
Considered by Civil War historians to be one of the best regimental histories ever written, this beloved standard of American history is now available in a new Stackpole edition. Includes maps, photographs, and drawings from the original edition.
PRAISE:
“[M]agnificent. . . . Although The Twentieth Maine reads like a historical novel, it is documented like a history textbook. Its wide sale is eveidence not only of the excellence of the writing but also of the everlasting appeal of the book’s heroes, both named and unnamed.”
Robert M. Cross, The New England Quarterly
“For all its age, it is a tale that continues to fascinate.”
Robert Scribner, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608467938 • US $19.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 432 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In the months following the collapse of the tsarist regime in war-torn Russia, the Bolshevik Party emerged from obscurity to overthrow the Provisional Government and establish the world’s first communist government.
Marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution with a new introduction by the author, historian Alexander Rabinowitch refutes the Soviet myth that the party’s triumph in the October revolution was inevitable. In The Bolsheviks Come to Power, he challenges the long-held view of many Western historians that the Bolsheviks won primarily because of their unity, discipline, and responsiveness to Lenin’s revolutionary leadership. Exploring the changing situation and aspirations of workers, soldiers, and Baltic fleet sailors in Petrograd, Rabinowitch’s classic account reveals the critical link between the party’s revolutionary tactics and the Petrograd masses.
This new edition, published on the occasion of the centenary of the Russian Revolution, features a new foreword by Rabinowitch.
“The best volume on the Russian Revolution in years … What is so valuable about the book is that it undoes both rigid stereotypes: that Leninism is inherently and always ‘correct’, pointing straight toward revolutionary triumph, and that of Leninism as always rigidly authoritarian, pointing straight toward dictatorship. A first-rate piece of work.”
Irving Howe
“Alexander Rabinowitch … has written what is perhaps the fullest and most reliable account of the Bolshevik seizure of power currently available in English … Based on a solid command of the sources, it is scholarly and well documented yet accessible to the general reader, with its clear and vigorous style and interesting illustrations … Should be read by every person interested in the Russian Revolution.”
Paul Avrich, Russian Review
“The Bolsheviks Come to Power remains the best book on the 1917 Russian Revolution — a seminal study of events that shaped history for decades and continues to do so even today. Both political and social history, it greatly expands on our detailed knowledge of the turbulent events of that year, while deepening and revising our understanding of the Bolshevik Party and the social factors that brought it to power.”
Stephen F. Cohen, Professor of Russian Studies and History, New York University
“[A] brilliant, convincing, and exciting book.”
Stanley Plastrik, Dissent
“Essential reading … told with a narrative skill which all too few historians could match.”
Robert M. Slusser, Baltimore Sun
“[Rabinowitch] draws together the sequence of events in Petrograd, the mass moods there, and the role of the party, all the while demonstrating the reciprocal effects of each set of factors on one another. … [A] vivid picture of politics in 1917.”
Louis Menasche, Radical History Review
“Five crucial months in the history of the Russian Revolution are portrayed here with a wealth of new data. The Bolsheviks, lifting themselves up from a seemingly fatal slump in their fortunes in July 1917, moved to their successful bid for power in October…. Quite a number of preconceptions are dispelled in this work by Rabinowitch…. We see the Bolsheviks in action-debating, hesitating, deeply disagreeing on policies, fiercely contesting Lenin’s ideas—a far cry from the monolithic avant-garde some writers still believe the Party to have been.”
Moshé Lewin
“Notable… for its soundness of judgment, clarity of expression, and wealth of illuminating detail. Our understanding of what happened in 1917 has been significantly enhanced by Rabinowitch’s careful research. The Bolsheviks Come to Power should be read by every person interested in the Russian Revolution.”
Paul Avrich
“Rabinowitch comes to several conclusions: First, the Bolshevik program of land, peace, and bread had widespread support among the masses; he states that ‘as a result, in October the goals of the Bolsheviks, as the masses understood them, had strong popular support’…. Second, the Bolshevik program achieved this popularity precisely because of the inability-or lack of desire-of other political parties to respond to these demands. Third, moderate socialist parties’ continued support of Kerensky and the Provisional Government undermined their credibility in the eyes of the masses. And fourth, ‘In Petrograd in 1917 the Bolshevik Party bore little resemblance to the by-and-large united, authoritarian, conspiratorial organization effectively controlled by Lenin depicted in most existing accounts’…; rather, the party was successful precisely because it was flexible and responsive to the moods of the populace, and Rabinowitch ‘would emphasize the party’s internally relatively democratic, tolerant, and decentralized structure and method of operation, as well as its essentially open and mass character.’”
Slavic Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alexander Rabinowitch is Professor Emeritus of Russian history at Indiana University, author of Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising, and coeditor of Russia in the Era of NEP. His many seminal essays on the history of the revolutionary period have appeared in the United States, Russia, and Europe.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595826 • US $16.95 • 5.25 in x 7.5 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Eslanda “Essie” Cardozo Goode Robeson was a woman of unusual accomplishment— an anthropologist, a prolific journalist, a tireless advocate of women’s rights, an outspoken anti- colonial and antiracist activist, and an internationally sought- after speaker.
PRAISE:
“This long overdue biography of a bold scholar- activist emerging from the shadow of her famous husband is a gift, and such are Ransby’s narrative skills that I wept when, in her final pages, the vibrant Essie died, two days shy of 70. This is a major contribution to her glorious reclamation project.”
Joan Steinau Lester, Ms. Magazine
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Barbara Ransby is an historian, writer, and longtime political activist. Ransby has published dozens of articles and essays in popular and scholarly venues. She is most notably the author of an award-winning biography of civil rights activist Ella Baker, entitled Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, (University of North Carolina, 2003). She serves on the editorial board of the London-based journal, Race and Class, and a number of non-profit civic and media organizations.
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A new edition of John Reed’s classic eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution, 100 years since its first publication.
Ten Days That Shook the World is an undisputed classic of political reportage. A stunning first-hand account overflowing with urgency and immediacy, Reed’s masterpiece lives and breathes the streets, meeting halls, posters and pamphlets of the revolution he witnessed. Like no other work, it places the reader shoulder to shoulder with the people’s militias, factory committees, propagandists and crowds which thronged St Petersburg’s squares to protest, celebrate, and strike. Rather than a coup orchestrated by a select few, the revolution here emerges in all its true energy, chaos, and creativity as a mass struggle from below for liberation, equality, and socialism.
A hundred years after its initial publication, Ten Days That Shook the World remains an unparalleled account of one of the twentieth century’s most seminal events.
PRAISE:
“From its opening page, Ten Days has a tempo and a voice that sets it apart, in an era when reportage as a genre was still in its infancy.”
Robert McCrum, The Guardian
“Rises above every other contemporary record for its literary power, its penetration, its command of detail…[ Ten Days That Shook the World] remembered when all others are forgotten.”
George F. Kennan
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Reed (1887–1920) was an author, journalist, and activist.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465224 • US $19.95 • 5 1/4 in x 8 1/4 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
China has been the fastest-growing major economy in the world for three decades. It is also home to some of the largest, most incendiary, and most underreported labor struggles of our time.
China on Strike, the first English-language book of its kind, provides an intimate and revealing window into the lives of workers organizing in some of China’s most profitable factories, which supply Apple, Nike, Hewlett Packard, and other multinational companies. Drawing on dozens of interviews with Chinese workers, this book documents the processes of migration, changing employment relations, worker culture, and other issues related to China’s explosive growth.
PRAISE
“As these vivid case-studies illustrate, the real sleeping dragon—China’s enormous factory proletariat—is wide awake and fighting back on all fronts. Indeed, here is first-hand evidence that Chairman Xi Jinping may soon confront the largest labor rebellion in history.”
Mike Davis, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Riverside, and author of Planet of Slums
“China on Strike is a much-needed, detailed account of labour struggle in the Pearl River Delta region, China’s manufacturing industrial heartland. It is a story brilliantly told from migrant workers’ own perspectives, about all that keeps this factory of the world moving.”
Hsiao-Hung Pai, author of Scattered Sand: The Story of China’s Rural Migrants
“China’s rise as a global economic power has been paralleled by a growing militancy among its working class. In this unfolding process, workers are gaining the confidence, experience, and tenacity to strike and to win. Censorship and political repression by the country’s ruling party makes first-hand accounts of these struggles–especially in English–extremely rare. China on Strike fills that gap through eye-opening and compelling narratives of China’s new generation of worker-militants and strike leaders. It’s a must-read.”
Paul Mason, economics editor for Channel 4 News, author of Postcapitalism, and Live Working or Die Fighting
“This book breathes authenticity. China on Strike is a collection of oral histories created by a network of workers, students, students become workers, and intellectuals practicing in related fields, whose underlying concern is to make known what is really happening on the ground in China. The scenes they describe very much resembles the rank-and-file self-organization of workers in the United States in the early 1930s. Let us hope that as our Chinese comrades become more organized and powerful they are able to retain the wonderful vitality of the early actions described in this remarkable book.”
Staughton Lynd, labor historian and editor (with Alice Lynd) of Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers
“This book provides an exhaustive and vivid account on migrant workers’ strikes in China. Many authors of this book are young, well-educated and passionate labor activists. Through the eyes and hearts of these organic intellectuals, readers can feel how a new working class is creating itself in struggles. It will inspire imagination about the future of China, globalization and labor movement.”
Chris King-Chi Chan, City University of Hong Kong
“China is not only the elephant in the room of global capitalism, but the site of one of the world’s greatest on-going labor upheavals. China’s working class in formation has mounted mass strikes against all odds—a one-party dictatorship, ‘unions’ controlled by the Communist Party, waves of internal migration, and, of course, global capital itself. Yet, China’s mostly young workers rebel in growing numbers forcing concessions from the bureaucratic state as well as from giant corporations. China on Strike provides a unique view of the developing consciousness and actions of these daring workers as the strike movement of recent years took shape. This is a book that should be read by all those who care about the future possibilities of working class power everywhere.”
Kim Moody, author of In Solidarity: Essays in Working Class Organization in the United States
“China has become not only the ‘workshop’ of the capitalist world but also the epicenter of the global class struggle. The workers in China are making history. This is the time to read China on Strike, a book about ordinary workers and worker-activists and how they fight for a better world tomorrow.”
Minqi Li, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Utah
“Workers throughout the world are fighting wage cuts, bad working conditions, and runaway shops. Without rights or protections taken for granted elsewhere, Chinese workers have struck thousands of times over these and other issues. China On Strike gives voice to factory struggles rarely reported in the U.S. and confirms the central role played by a new generation of rank-and-file leaders. Their inspiring exercise of shop floor power is worthy of close study by labor activists here.”
Steve Early, former CWA organizer and author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches From a Movement in Distress
“China on Strike provides the most detailed and vivid accounts of migrant workers’ struggles in the Pearl River Delta, the powerhouse of China’s reform and industrialization. The struggles of these workers shed light on the future of labor movement not only in China, but worldwide. A must-read book for readers concerned with labor activism and international solidarity!”
Pun Ngai, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, author of Made in China and Migrant Labor in China
“Over the past two decades China has emerged as an industrial powerhouse, and the country’s explosive growth has been a defining feature of the global economy. Now China’s workers are taking center stage. China on Strike paints a vivid, first-hand picture of working conditions in the heart of China’s ‘manufacturing miracle,’ the impetus for tens of thousands of job actions and labor disputes each year. The stories featured in China on Strike put to rest the notion that today’s factory workers are helpless victims. On the contrary, they demonstrate that it’s still possible to fight back at work and win, even against the world’s most powerful corporations and an unbending, one-party state. The book is testament to the enduring power of solidarity, and the creativity that bubbles up when workers stand up and fight back.”
Mark Brenner, Labor Notes
“A remarkable book that introduces us to the Chinese worker…what is most impressive about this book is that it is not only a remarkably informative book about Chinese capital and labor, but it is also a kind of organizing manual that might be profitably read—as it was designed to be—not only by workers in China but by workers almost anywhere in the world, including here in the United States.”
New Politics
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Hao Ren became interested in Chinese labor rights while she was in university, and after graduating went to work for a labor NGO in the Pearl River Delta. After leaving the organization in 2010, she supported herself by taking a variety of jobs in factories throughout coastal China, where she conducted interviews for China on Strike.
Zhongjin Li is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Renmin University of China and a Master’s degree in Economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her main research focus is political economy of development, economic crises, and labor politics in Asia.
Eli Friedman is Assistant Professor of International and Comparative Labor at Cornell University. His primary areas of interest are China, development, globalization, social movements, theory, urbanization, and work and labor. He is the author of Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China, published by Cornell University Press (2014). His peer reviewed articles have appeared in ILR Review, Theory and Society, British Journal of Industrial Relations, and Mobilization, among others. He is also a regular contributor to Jacobin.
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Paper • ISBN-13:: 9781608469680 • US $16.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 230 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In 1990, Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture was the first book to uncover the contours, beliefs, leaders, and wider influence of the American racist far right movement. It told their story from the inside out, complete with interviews, recruiting pamphlets, cartoons, rants, sermons, threats, police reports, and more. The accompanying analysis by veteran investigative reporter James Ridgeway detailed the movement ‘s volatile history and its expansion beginning in the 1980s, insisting that the groups making up this “fringe” culture were too powerful–and too much a part of American culture–to be ignored or dismissed.
When the book ‘s prescience about the dangers of the racist far-right became manifest in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, a second edition of Blood in the Face was released with a new introduction charting the rise of the Militia Movement to which Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators were connected. Since then, both the book and the documentary film that accompanied its release (also titled Blood in the Face), have earned cult followings.
In the past 25 years, Ridgeway ‘s final warning–that the “fringe was becoming part of the fabric” of American politics and culture, have come to chilling fruition in the rise of the Tea Party, the racist backlash against the presidency of Barack Obama, the resurgence of anti-immigrant Nativism, the growth of racist far-right media, and the election of Donald Trump with the thunderous support of white nationalists.
PRAISE:
“[A] guidebook through the nether regions of the racist universe.”
New York Times
“Ridgeway is a skilled guide through the bewildering and amorphous network of racists, radical tax resisters, skinheads, Nazis and Klansmen that composes what he terms ‘an organized and, at times, violent, new far-right movement.'”
Los Angeles Times
“[A] comprehensive view of racist politics in the United States (with some reference to Western European politics).”
Library Journal
“With startling detail, this volume sets forth the violent histories of such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1866 by six former Confederate soldiers; the John Birch Society, an anti civil rights group masquerading as an anti Communist force; and the Posse Comitatus, whose members gather in posses to “protect” the white race from the scourge of Jews, blacks and other minorities. Examining their influence on the political climate of the U.S., Ridgeway profiles such leaders as David Dukes, the former head of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana who ran for the Senate in 1990. Readers may feel overwhelmed by the amount of information this fascinating book imparts…”
Publisher’s Weekly
“Clear and comprehensive.”
Kirkus
“Paints a worrying picture of groups and ideologies that inspire Dylann Roof.”
The Guardian
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
James Ridgeway (1936–2021) was senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones, and co-editor of Solitary Watch. A veteran investigative reporter and the author of 16 books, he has written for the Village Voice, the Nation, the New Republic, Ramparts, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. He was a Soros Justice Media Fellow.
Jean Casella is a co director of Solitary Watch. She is coeditor, with James Ridgeway and Sarah Shourd, of Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement.
Katie Rose Quandt is a writer and editor at Solitary Watch. Her work has appeared in Slate, Mother Jones, The Village Voice, The Appeal, The Nation, Vice, and In These Times.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608462537 • 7 x 9 • US $22.95 • 234 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Provocative and prolific, Boots Riley has written lyrics as the frontman of underground favorites The Coup and and Street Sweeper Social Club, as well as solo artist, for more than two decades. An activist, educator, and emcee, Riley’s singular lyrical stylings combine hip-hop poetics, radical politics, and wry humor with Bay Area swag. Tell Homeland Security-We Are the Bomb: Collected Lyrics and Writings brings together his songs, commentary, and backstories with compelling photos and documents.
PRAISE:
“In an industry built on ego, Boots has made a career of self-effacement-of working for something bigger than fame, and bigger than hip-hop.”
Adam Mansbach, from the foreword
“Every line of Boots Riley’s work brims with the grit of the underdog, burns with rage, wit, and tenderness. It’s no secret he is one of the most influential poets and thinkers of this generation.”
Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop, Wont Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
“Boots lyrics contain the wit and satire to match their venom and their potent political punch. His intricate yet relatable rhymes are like a combination of a Richard Pryor sketch and a guerrilla warfare manual.”
Tom Morello
“Boots’s unparalleled lyrics are here, but there’s so much more, too-all of it bearing Boots’s trademark combination of revolutionary politics, absurdist humor, and rare lyricism. This is a great book about a great man.”
Dave Eggers
“Boots Riley refuses to die, but he also refuses to apologize for being alive. Since I was a wee lad watching videos on Rap City till now, Boots Riley has been invading my conscious with his funky, revolutionary words, music, and actions. Revolutionary, poet, rock star, and champion of the people, Boots Riley will not be ignored.”
Talib Kweli
“No mere compendium of rhymes, Tell Homeland Security-We Are the Bomb: Collected Lyrics and Writings is his Red Book-at once a manifesto, a work of art, an archeology of knowledge, a genealogy of revolutionary funk, and a window onto a world of injustice and joy, pain, and possibility. Dig it!”
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk
“The very existence of a person like Boots Riley is a miracle: he unites profound theoretical insights into the deadlocks of global capitalism, authentic political engagement in the Occupy movement, and wonderful musical performances.”
Slavoj Žižek
“It’s not every day that you have a poet from Oakland kick start a political hip-hop movement, but that’s what Boots Riley specializes in: bringing the concentrated, undiluted vision of his area to the world. Oakland flow, y’all. Check it.”
DJ Spooky
“I’ve always respected and admired Boots’ unique style as a lyricist. He is at once a storyteller, agitator, educator, comedian, poet, and emcee with a degree in authenticity and a double major in empathy. All Bob Marley ever had was redemption songs-and all Boots ever wrote are lyrics of liberation!”
STIC of dead prez
“For more than two decades, the music of Boots Riley and The Coup has been my soundtrack: a spicy synthesis of filthy funk and prophetic political fire. Tell Homeland Security-We Are the Bomb: Collected Lyrics and Writings is an epic achievement: twenty-five years of genius between two covers. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.”
Dave Zirin, author, What’s My Name, Fool?
“Boots Riley is the voice of his generation. There is anger here for a heartless system, but there is also a great deal of compassion and hope for the future of humanity. Inside these lyrics and these sentences can be measured the heart rate of Occupy, BlackLivesMatter, Anonymous, Dreamers, Dream Defenders.”
Vijay Prashad, author, The Poorer Nations
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Boots Riley is an American poet, rapper, songwriter, producer, screenwriter, humorist, political organizer, community activist, lecturer, and public speaker-best known as the lead vocalist of The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club. He lives in Oakland, California.
Adam Mansbach is the author of the instant New York Times bestsellers Go the Fuck to Sleep and You Have to Fucking Eat. His latest novel, Rage is Back, was named a Best Book of 2013 by NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle and is currently being adapted for television; his previous novels include the California Book Award-winning The End of the Jews and the cult classic Angry Black White Boy. Mansbach is the recipient of a Reed Award, a Webby Award, and a Gold Pollie from the American Association of Political Consultants for his 2012 campaign video “Wake The Fuck Up,” starring Samuel L. Jackson. He was the 2009-11 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University, a 2012 Sundance Screenwriting Lab Fellow, and a 2013 Berkeley Repertory Theater Writing Fellow, and will be the 2015 Artist in Residence at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Believer, Salon.com, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He is currently writing an original screenplay about a young Barack Obama for director Vikram Gandhi. He lives in Berkeley, California.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464685 • US $19 • 5 1/4 in x 8 3/8 in • 347 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Setting out from an unapologetically Marxist perspective, The Long Depression argues that the global economy remains in the throes of a depression. Making the case that the profitability of capital is too low, and the debt built up before the Great Recession too high, leading radical economist Michael Roberts persuasively presents his case that this depression will persist until the profitability of capital is restored through yet another slump.
PRAISE:
“A coherent, well-argued and informed book accomplishing many tasks.”
History of Economic Thought and Policy Journal
“This book is a tour de force analysis of the current global economic crisis and the preconditions and prospects for recovery in the years ahead. Based largely on empirical data and Marx’s theory of the falling rate of profit, Roberts argues that the world economy is in a long depression due to a falling rate of profit and a massive increase of debt. He argues further that a full recovery and a return to more prosperous conditions requires a prior even more severe depression, characterized by widespread bankruptcies, which would devalue capital and restore the rate of profit and would also wipe out much of the debt. He argues that a much better alternative would be to wipe out capitalism and construct a more democratic and egalitarian economy that is not vulnerable to recurring depressions.”
Fred Moseley, professor of economics, Mount Holyoke College
“With great clarity, Michael Roberts explains capitalism’s necessary proneness to profound economic crises and surveys the course of the current and previous depressions. Extensive use of empirical evidence, very accessibly presented, make his own main, Marxist argument and refutations of rival explanations persuasive. This book is at once an engaging read and a powerful political weapon.”
Rick Kuhn, honorary associate professor at the Australian National University and winner of the 2007 Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize
“Since the global economic crisis, Michael Roberts’s blog has become the indispensable source for those on the left seeking to understand and challenge capitalism. This book presents, with admirable clarity, the ideas drawn from Marxist political economy upon which his analysis rests. Anyone who wants to understand how we ended up here, where we are going, and what we should do about it must read The Long Depression.”
Joseph Choonara, author of Unravelling Capitalism: A Guide to Marxist Political Economy
“Michael Roberts has established himself as one of the foremost bloggers and theoreticians of classical Marxism. Here he takes on the economic orthodoxy, both Keynesian and neoclassical, as to the causes of the Great Recession and of depressions in capitalism going back to the nineteenth century. [While] ‘the new normal’ and ‘secular stagnation’ have be[come] clichés rather than explanations for the slow growth in the world economy since the 2008 crash, Michael Roberts reaches deep into the history of capitalism to set out a Marxist explanation for recent developments.”
Mick Brooks, author of Capitalist Crisis: Theory and Practice
“The Long Depression is an impressive review of the global economic crisis. Marshaling a wide range of evidence, Michael Roberts counters the facile explanations of establishment commentators and many ‘alternative’ economists, showing instead how the origins of this crisis, and other historical examples, have clear links to declining capitalist profitability. Covering a wide range of topics, from stagnant productivity growth and high unemployment to the prospects for the BRICS countries, robots, and climate change, this book will educate readers about the outlook for capitalism today.”
Tony Norfield, author of The City: London and the Global Power of Finance
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael Roberts has worked as an economist for over 30 years in the City of London financial centre. He is the author of The Great Recession: a Marxist View, published in 2009.
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Paper • ISBN-13:9781608469666 • US $21.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 330 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“This is an indispensable guide to globalization and the resistance to it by an indispensable thinker.”
—Walden Bello, from the Foreword
In this critical new work, sociologist William I. Robinson offers an engaging and accessible introduction to his theory of global capitalism. He applies this theory to a wide range of contemporary topics, among them, globalization, the transnational capitalist class, immigrant justice, educational reform, labor and anti-racist struggles, policing, Trumpism, the resurgence of a neo-fascist right, and the rise of a global police state.
Taken as a whole, these ten essays provide an urgently needed perspective for those who want to understand the backdrop to today’s headlines. Sure to spark debate, this is a timely contribution to a renewal of critical social science and Marxist theory for the new century. It is an indispensable tool for social justice advocates and scholars in these times of global crisis and transformation.
PRAISE:
“Robinson has by now accumulated an extraordinary mix of knowledges about global capitalism. Having worked in very diverse areas of the world, he brings to it a kind of wisdom, and this enables the reader to grasp the breadth of instances of the global in today’s world.”
Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of Expulsions
“Know your enemy and know yourself…’ is how the iconic Sun-tzu began his famous command. William Robinson offers those engaged in the struggle against global capitalism a remarkable and compelling insight and framework in order to both understand our opponents as well as better grasp the strengths and weaknesses of the oppressed and dispossessed. This is the book for which I have been waiting and I could not put it down.”
Bill Fletcher, Jr., former president of TransAfrica Forum; coauthor of Solidarity Divided and author of They’re Bankrupting Us: And Twenty Other Myths About Unions
“William Robinson’s Into the Tempest is a timely account of global gentrification. While most scholars concentrate on the city, Professor Robinson covers its global impact that has resulted in environmental destruction, social inequalities, and displacement of billions of people around the world. This has led to forced mass migrations. As in the case of micro gentrification society is entering the final stages of inequality accelerating a global collapse of modern civilization. Few realize that the state after gentrification is a Blade Runner world – a dystopian society devoid of human emotion and a collective historical memory.”
Rodolfo F. Acuña, Professor Emeritus, Chicana/o Studies Department, California State University Northridge
“William Robinson’s Into the Tempest is a collection of his essays on the emergence of a global police state and the nature of 21st century Fascism. It applies a trenchant structural analysis of the world-system with a Gramscian effort to theorize and mobilize liberatory social movements that challenge the reactionary forces emerging during the contemporary period of crisis. Robinson is the one of the best macrosociologists of his generation. His comparative and temporally deep perspective drives a synthesis of the global capitalism and world-system perspectives in a way that allows us to see through the fog of globalization.”
Chris Chase-Dunn, Sociology, University of California-Riverside
“This book is a treasury of big-picture insight from our leading theorist of the emerging system of global capitalism. Robinson’s project – to understand the political economy in order to change it–stands as the preeminent successor to Marx’s project from an earlier epoch. For readers perplexed about our changing world and apprehensive about its future, here is your primer and call to action.”
Paul Raskin, author of Journey to Earthland
“Robinson’s brilliant and courageous research has culminated in this pathfinding work of political reconnaissance that traces capitalism’s virulent history, exposes its contradictions, locates its capacity to reorganize and digitally reconfigure itself as the fulcrum upon which the survival of the transnational ruling elite rests, and presents an alternative social logic and transgressive strategies for transcending the proliferation of injustices wrought by the existing social order. A masterpiece!”
Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, Chapman University; Chair Professor, Northeast Normal University, China
“Into the Tempest challenges us to look at the big picture, to examine without blinders the dramatic changes that have re-shaped 21st century capitalism and led to a true crisis of human civilization. Without flinching, it goes on to present theoretical and political analyses that help inform our quest for strategic clarity as we fight for a different world.”
Max Elbaum, author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
William I. Robinson is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He worked for a decade prior to entering academia as an investigative journalist in Central America and has lectured widely at universities around the world on the topics of the global economy, international politics, and contemporary world affairs. Among his many award-winning books are: Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (2014), Latin America and Global Capitalism (2008), and A Theory of Global Capitalism (2004).
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Hardcover • ISBN-13: 9781642597516 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 120 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A landmark account of a key radical feminist organization, offering lessons for today’s women’s liberation movement.
Activist members of the radical feminist organization Boston Female Liberation provide an inside account of the group’s history, strategy, and legacy in this compelling contribution to the historiography of Second Wave feminism.
Boston Female Liberation member Nancy Rosenstock expertly weaves together the reflections of her fellow-activists, describing how they became feminists, recounting the breadth of their organizing work, and linking their achievements and experience to contemporary struggles against gender-based oppression.
The book also includes ten radical feminist documents crucial to contextualizing the activity and thinking of the organization and its members.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nancy Rosenstock, feminist and socialist activist for five decades, was a member of Boston Female Liberation, and served on the national staff of the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition in 1971. She continues to fight for abortion to be safe, legal, and accessible.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902523 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 224 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Both a forceful polemic and a practical guide, Abolish Rent takes aim at one of the foremost engines of inequality and injustice.
Rent is a wealth transfer from the poorest to the richest, the most vulnerable to the least, a monthly tribute that drives millions to debt, despair, and into the streets. In the context of a permanent housing crisis and governments in the pocket of real estate interests, Abolish Rent reorients the politics of housing around tenants themselves: political actors who can, through organizing, direct action, and collective bargaining, bring about a housing system that meets their needs.
Abolish Rent is the first book-length engagement with the resurgent tenant movement. Authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis—cofounders of Los Angles’s many thousand member tenant union—offer a deeply-reported account centering poor and working class tenants who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. They take us to trilingual strategy meetings, raucous marches against gentrification, and daring eviction defenses where immigrants put their lives on the line.
If rent abolition is our aim, tenant power must be the means—built through everyday resistance in our buildings and on our blocks. This is the revolutionary project we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Tracy Rosenthal is a writer and co-founder of the L.A. Tenants Union. Their work has been published in The New Republic,The Nation and The LA Times among others. They serve on the advisory board of Housing the Third Reconstruction with UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy. They are now on rent strike in New York City.
Leonardo Vilchis has been organizing tenants in Boyle Heights for more than thirty years. Trained in liberation theology, he co-founded Union de Vecinos in 1996 to stop the demolition of the Pico Aliso public housing projects, winning the right of return for two hundred and fifty families. In 2015, he co-founded the L.A. Tenants Union to organize tenant power at a citywide scale. Merging with LATU in 2019 to form the Union de Vecinos Eastside Local, Union de Vecinos has maintained a leadership role defending the long-term community against gentrification and displacement. Vilchis was activist-in-residence at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy in 2020 and now serves on the advisory board of its Housing the Third Reconstruction research endeavor. He lives in Los Angeles.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466863 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations.
The essays range in analysis from the theoretical to the topical, including but not limited to: the emergence of disability as a “human category” rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism and the transformation of the conditions of work, family, and society corresponding thereto; a critique of the shortcomings of a purely “civil rights approach” to addressing the persistence of disability oppression in the economic sphere, with a particular focus on the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; an examination of the changing position of disabled people within the overall system of capitalist production utilizing the Marxist economic concepts of the reserve army of the unemployed, the labor theory of value, and the exploitation of wage-labor; the effects of neoliberal capitalist policies on the living conditions and social position of disabled people as it pertains to welfare, income assistance, health care, and other social security programs; imperialism and war as a factor in the further oppression and immiseration of disabled people within the United States and globally; and the need to build unity against the divisive tendencies which hide the common economic interest shared between disabled people and the often highly-exploited direct care workers who provide services to the former.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Marta Russell (December 20, 1951 – December 15, 2013) was an American writer and disability rights activist. She was involved with disability rights organizations such as ADAPT and Not Dead Yet, and engaged in protests against economic oppression, war, and racial discrimination. Her writings have earned the praise of such disability theorists as Vic Finkelstein and Mike Oliver who pioneered the social model of disability. Politically, Russell was heavily influenced by intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Frances Moore Lappé, Angela Davis, and Karl Marx. Her writings have appeared in both academic and activist sources such as the Journal of Disability Policy Studies, Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, New Mobility, Socialist Register, and Monthly Review. In 1994 she produced an award-winning documentary, “Disabled and the Cost of Saying ‘I Do’,” on the structural injustices faced by couples with disabilities. Her 1998 book, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract, analyzed the relationship between ableism, Social Darwinism, and economic austerity in the era of neoliberal capitalism.
Keith Rosenthal is a socialist writer and activist. He is a frequent contributor to the International Socialist Review magazine on the topics of disability, capitalism, and revolution.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900994 • US $22.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From the organizers of the Palestine Festival of Literature, this anthology of essays connects Palestinian resistance with global freedom struggles against settler colonialism and calls on us to think more concretely about the practice of solidarity.
The Palestine Festival of Literature, or PalFest, was created in 2008 as “a cultural initiative committed to the creation of language and ideas for combating colonialism in the 21st century.” The annual festival brings authors from around the world to convene with readers, artists, writers, and activists in cities across Palestine for cross-pollination of radical art, ideas, and literature.
These efforts resulted in Their Borders, Our World, an anthology thoughtfully arranged and introduced by PalFest cocurator Mahdi Sabbagh. Contributors include: Yasmin El-Rifae, Jehan Bseiso, Keller Easterling, Dina Omar, Tareq Baconi, Samia Henni, Omer Shah, Kareem Rabie, Ellen Van Neerven, Omar Robert Hamilton, and Mabel O. Wilson.
Each piece grapples with the questions: How do we confront the need to take inevitable and often difficult political stances? How do we make sense of the destruction, uprooting, and pain that we witness? And given our seemingly impossible reality, how is mutuality constructed?
PRAISE:
“Edward Said once remarked Palestinians had been denied the permission to narrate their own histories and experiences. Much has changed since then. Their Borders, Our World brings together writers from PalFest, the international cultural solidarity initiative that defies the bans, borders, and bigotry aimed at snuffing out the vibrant Palestinian literary tradition. In the shadow of a Western-backed annihilationist campaign against Gaza and Palestinians, this volume does more than grant the permission to narrate: It is, without permission or apology, a call to liberate.”
Nick Estes, author, Our History is the Future
“From exploring settler colonialism’s banality to the violence of architecture, this timely highly-recommended book explores through ten innovative essays new insights into ways of understanding and building solidarities with Palestine.”
Raja Shehadeh
“All around the world the cry from the street is ‘Free Palestine.’ This vital and varied collection reveals some of the global solidarities that lie beneath that united cry, and in doing so asks us to consider what connections we can make, and what histories we might re-shape—together.”
Kamila Shamsie
“Their Borders, Our World arrives as a meteor, incandescent, a signal of determination and solidarity in a dark time, assuring that Palestine will be free.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mahdi Sabbagh is a writer, architect, and urbanist from Jerusalem. He is a co-curator of PalFest, the Palestine Festival of Literature. His work has been published in the Journal of Public Culture, Jerusalem Quarterly, Architecture of the Territory (Kaph Books, 2022), Open Gaza (AUC Press, 2021), The Funambulist, Arab Urbanism, and PLATFORM. He is a 2023 Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. Mahdi is a PhD student at Columbia University and holds a Masters in Architecture from Yale.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465774 • US $22.95 • 243 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In the summer of 2014, renowned American Indian studies professor Steven Salaita had his appointment to a tenured professorship revoked by the board of trustees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Salaita’s employment was terminated in response to his public tweets criticizing the Israeli government’s summer assault on Gaza.
In Uncivil Rites, Salaita combines personal reflection and political critique to shed new light on his controversial termination. He situates his case at the intersection of important issues that affect both higher education and social justice activism.
PRAISE:
“Uncivil Rites reveals Steven Salaita’s deep humanity and integrity. Despite the efforts of the University of Illinois to silence him, Salaita continues to speak out courageously for Palestinian rights. His case is a reminder to us all of the need to defend academic freedom and to protect those who challenge the powerful.”
Glenn Greenwald, author, No Place to Hide and With Liberty and Justice for Some
“Steven Salaita’s astute meditations on racism, settler colonialism, anti-Semitism, and Israeli apartheid skillfully convert the inauspicious conditions surrounding his ousting by the Trustees of the University of Illinois into an opportunity to elevate the campaign for Palestine solidarity to a new level. As U.S. anti-racist consciousness grows broader and deeper, this book argues for the internationalization of that consciousness and for Palestine as a polestar of our struggle.”
Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Uncivil Rites is Steven Salaita’s most important work to date. Using his unjust dismissal from University of Illinois as the backdrop, Salaita exposes the intellectual, moral, and political contradictions of the 21st century neo-liberal university. He also spotlights the dangers of conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, resistance with terrorism, and righteous outrage with incivility. This book only reinforces Salaita’s well-deserved reputation as one of the most honest, courageous, and incisive scholars of our generation.”
Marc Lamont Hill, Distinguished Professor of African America Studies, Morehouse College
“Out of the experience of McCarthyism came a literature of memoir and protest that was too good for the history that produced it. Steven Salaita’s Uncivil Rites is also too good for the events that produced it. A kind of travelogue of the unbound mind, Uncivil Rites offers a palimpsest of Salaita’s experiences on the road and his reflections—part literary, part historical, part familial—on the politics and personalities of his firing. ‘An autobiographical story that is anything but personal,’ it is by turns tender, thoughtful, enraging, and often laugh-out-loud funny. Many books feel like a duty; this was sheer pleasure.”
Corey Robin, Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
Steven Salaita currently holds the Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut. Author of sixbooks, he is a regular columnist for Electronic Intifada and a member of the Organizing Committee of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859141 • US $12 • 7.1 in x 5.0 in • 208 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Whether standing up to British occupiers, the monarchy they installed, or the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein — who for many years was a friend and ally of the United States — the workers’ movement and the Left in Iraq have a rich history of fighting for a more democratic society.
This is the only book of its kind on the history of the Left and workers’ movements in Iraq. It includes a valuable analysis of the Iraqi Communist Party, and sheds light on the “other Iraq,” that of the working classes and their struggles, an Iraq that was completely ignored by the media and by the left wing during the dramatic days of preparations for war by the U.S.-British coalition. The present volume attempts to reconstruct the history of the Iraqi Communist Party and the Iraqi workers’ movement, an essential part of the country’s past that remains largely unknown.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ilario Salucci is an Italian activist and journalist who has spent years studying the hidden history of resistance in Iraq.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
Language/Territory
Publisher
Italian/worldwide
Cooperativa Colibri Societa
Turkish
Agora Kitapligi
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
It’s 1897. Gold has been discovered in the Yukon. New York is under the sway of Hearst and Pulitzer. And in a few months, an American battleship will explode in a Cuban harbor, plunging the U.S. into war. Spanning five years and half a dozen countries, this is the unforgettable story of that extraordinary moment: the turn of the twentieth century, as seen by one of the greatest storytellers of our time.
Shot through with a lyrical intensity and stunning detail that recall Doctorow and Deadwood both, A Moment in the Sun takes the whole era in its sights—from the white-racist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina to the bloody dawn of U.S. interventionism in the Philippines. Beginning with Hod Brackenridge searching for his fortune in the North, and hurtling forward on the voices of a breathtaking range of men and women—Royal Scott, an African American infantryman whose life outside the military has been destroyed; Diosdado Concepcíon, a Filipino insurgent fighting against his country’s new colonizers; and more than a dozen others, Mark Twain and President McKinley’s assassin among them—this is a story as big as its subject: history rediscovered through the lives of the people who made it happen.
PRAISE:
“In his most spectacular work of fiction to date, filmmaker Sayles combines wonder and outrage in a vigorous dramatization of overlooked and downright shameful aspects of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century America. Fascinated by the roiling nation’s multicultural spectrum and human impulses corrupt and altruistic, Sayles re-creates the ferment and conflicts of the Yukon gold rush, hobo life, New York’s sweatshops, the race riot and white supremacist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the covered-up horrors of the Philippine-American War (the focus of Sayles’s forthcoming film, Amigo). Real-life figures appear, including President McKinley and his assassin and anti-imperialist Mark Twain, but it is Sayles’ vital invented characters who rule, from sweet, hapless Hod, who survives the brutality of mines, the boxing ring, jail, and the military without losing his faith in romance, to his wry Native American road buddy, Big Ten; the Luncefords, a cultured African American family that suffers an appalling reversal of fortune; Mei, a Chinese woman forced into prostitution; and Diosdado, a young Filipino rebel. Crackling with rare historical details, spiked with caustic humor, and fueled by incandescent wrath over racism, sexism, and serial injustice against working people, Sayles’ hard-driving yet penetrating and compassionate saga explicates the ‘fever dream’ of commerce, the crimes of war, and the dream of redemption.”
Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Though known best as a filmmaker (Eight Men Out), Sayles is also an accomplished novelist (Union Dues), whose latest will stand among the finest work on his impressive résumé. Weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages, the behemoth recalls E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Pynchon’s Against the Day, and Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, tracking mostly unconnected characters whose collective stories create a vast, kaleidoscopic panorama of the turn of the last century. Hod Brackenridge is a miner who gets swindled in the Alaskan gold rush, is strong-armed into a boxing match, and ends up on the run after his opponent dies in the ring. Diosdado, son of a Spanish diplomat, turns against his country and the United States to fight for independence in the Philippines. The most emotionally connected story line involves the black American soldiers who breeze through fighting in Cuba but get stuck in a quagmire in the Philippines while their families back home in Wilmington, N.C., endure a campaign of murder and intimidation that forces an affluent and educated black family out of their home and into poverty in New York City. Naturally, there are cameos — Mark Twain, president McKinley — and period details aplenty that help alleviate the occasional slow patches — indeed, Hod’s story line loses steam toward the end — but the flaws and muck of this big, rangy novel are part of what make it so wonderful.”
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Sayles combines these narratives skillfully so they refresh the reader’s curiosity, have plausible literal intersections and build to a comprehensive representation of American political violence at home and abroad. … In its scale, multiple plots, rigorous attention to setting and technology, colloquial exactitude, race consciousness and suspicion of political power, A Moment in the Sun is admirably Pynchonian. … Sayles is a master of both architecture and affect. … He is also a master of the set piece. … But its true importance lies not in its rearview relevance but in its commitment to recalling in heroic detail a little-known and contradictory historical moment, a sunny time of American pride but also of hubris in sun-beaten locales.”
New York Times Book Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Sayles works as a fiction writer, screenwriter, actor and feature film director. His novel Union Dues (1978) was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Critics’ Circle Award. He has written over a hundred screenplays and was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has directed 18 feature films, with another, I Passed This Way, currently in progress. His films Matewan and Lone Star, as well as his previous novel A Moment in the Sun, are often used for instruction in History and American Studies courses.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781560256328 • US $13.95 • 9.0 in x 6.0 in • 252 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Before John Sayles was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and celebrated independent filmmaker, he was a National Book Award-nominated writer of fiction. Now John Sayles has written his first short story collection in twenty-five years.
The keynote story—”Dillinger in Hollywood”—is populated by leftovers from the Golden Age of Hollywood who live in a nursing home catering for “below-the-line” talent—dancers, stunt doubles, horse wranglers, stand-ins, studio drivers—who now wait for death and dementia, playing cards, breaking hips, busting ribs, and telling tall tales of days gone by. During one hot summer, Casey, a long-term resident, confesses that he “used to be John Dillinger. In the flesh.”
The supposed John Dillinger, a legendary outlaw who had been popped at the Biograph Theater, was simply a “stand-in.” Sayles’s stories, like his movies, are panoramic in scope, weaving together disparateelements, where the past has a powerful claim on the present, where the characters are down on their luck, struggling to make ends meet.
Ultimately, John Dillinger in Hollywood showcases Sayles’s uncanny ear for language, his skill at crafting character, humor and atmosphere, and shows why he is the winner of the John Steinbeck Award, the O. Henry Award, and others.
PRAISE:
“Sayles has a winning way with the short story.”
New York Times
“In this engaging collection, his first in 25 years, he reminds us of his skill in shorter forms. … Humor leavens the social conscience in many of these tales, and Sayles’s exceptional dialogue is reason enough to appreciate this collection. ”
Publishers Weekly
“Filmmaker Sayles … is also a highly imaginative short story writer with a sure ear for dialogue, a keen eye for group dynamics, a flair for quickly establishing intriguing mise-en-scènes, and the ability to animate a great spectrum of flinty characters … Sayles expresses his compassion and concern for those who struggle with poverty and prejudice, seeking both to provoke and entertain.”
Booklist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Sayles works as a fiction writer, screenwriter, actor and feature film director. His novel Union Dues (1978) was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Critics’ Circle Award. He has written over a hundred screenplays and was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has directed 18 feature films, with another, I Passed This Way, currently in progress. His films Matewan and Lone Star, as well as his previous novel A Moment in the Sun, are often used for instruction in History and American Studies courses.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781560256465 • US $15.95 • 8.3 in x 5.6 in • 473 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A critically acclaimed novel that explores fifty years of Cuban-American relations.
Set in Miami in 1981, Los Gusanos is the vivid and moving account of one extended family’s life in Cuban and the United States. With pathos and understanding, Sayles introduces us to a memorable range of characters — young, old, black, and white — all of whom are struggling to make a new life in their adopted country while haunted by the memories of Cuba. Taking as its title the derogatory term Castro used to describe those who fled to Miami after he came to power, Los Gusanos is beautifully rendered study of who will be the casualty and who the survivor in a time of political upheaval.
PRAISE:
“In the early 1980s, Marta de la Pena, a beautiful, otherworldly Cuban exile living in Miami, dreams of avenging the death of her brother Ambrosio, who was killed in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion 20 years earlier. Spurned by the mainstream anti-Castro groups in town, Marta sets out to assemble her own guerrilla strike force from Miami’s large population of gun-toting idealists, madmen, and soldiers of fortune. Sayles … brings a cinematic eye to historical fiction. Focusing on the vicissitudes of Marta’s extended family in both Havana and Miami, he reviews 50 years of Cuban-American relations. An exciting, instructive, and highly readable novel.”
Library Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Sayles works as a fiction writer, screenwriter, actor and feature film director. His novel Union Dues (1978) was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Critics’ Circle Award. He has written over a hundred screenplays and was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has directed 18 feature films, with another, I Passed This Way, currently in progress. His films Matewan and Lone Star, as well as his previous novel A Moment in the Sun, are often used for instruction in History and American Studies courses.
Paper • ISBN: 1550255560 • US $15.95 • 8.5 in x 6.5 in • 258 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Pride of the Bimbos, with its outrageous plot and cast of outlandish characters, is both funny and profound. It is about a man who refuses to admit he’s a freak: Pogo Burns, midget and former private eye. Pogo plays for the Brooklyn Bimbos, a cross-dressing circus sideshow softball team, and is pursued by an evil superpimp named Dred, whom he once shot in order to rescue the woman he loved.
The tale of Pogo’s rise, fall and eventual immortality is narrated with wit and depth. This remarkable book marked the start of legendary filmmaker John Sayles’s career as a novelist.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Sayles works as a fiction writer, screenwriter, actor and feature film director. His novel Union Dues (1978) was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Critics’ Circle Award. He has written over a hundred screenplays and was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has directed 18 feature films, with another, I Passed This Way, currently in progress. His films Matewan and Lone Star, as well as his previous novel A Moment in the Sun, are often used for instruction in History and American Studies courses.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781560256311 • US $16.95 • 9.0 in x 6.3 in • 481 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Legendary filmmaker John Sayles has been called the “conscience of the independent film world” in the United States, and the “screenwriter’s screenwriter.” Silver City and Other Screenplays is a collection of his greatest work, including Sunshine State, the Oscar-nominated Passion Fish and his film written for the U.S. election year in 2004, Silver City.
Set in Colorado, the core of America’s “New West,” during the state’s gubernatorial race, Silver City is a spirited lampoon and a timely, toxic warning about the present state of American democracy. The grammatically challenged, born-again candidate for governor is the scion of a formidable right-wing political dynasty. He is fumbling his way toward elected office when an unexplained corpse emerges to threaten his campaign, the family empire and the special interest groups who pull his strings.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Sayles works as a fiction writer, screenwriter, actor and feature film director. His novel Union Dues (1978) was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Critics’ Circle Award. He has written over a hundred screenplays and was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has directed 18 feature films, with another, I Passed This Way, currently in progress. His films Matewan and Lone Star, as well as his previous novel A Moment in the Sun, are often used for instruction in History and American Studies courses.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781560256915 • US $15.95 • 8.3 in x 5.5 in • 313 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Before John Sayles was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, he was a National Book Award-nominated writer of fiction. The Anarchists’ Convention is Sayles’s first, celebrated short story collection, and includes the widely anthologized, O. Henry award-winning “I-80 Nebraska.” Infused with humor and compassion, diverse in scene and character, each narrative captures the idioms and matter-of-fact strength of the homeless, restless, and eternally hopeful.
These American originals range from a kid on the road headed westward; a lonely woman temping in Boston; anthropologists in the field; bums on the beach; and speed-addled truckers gabbing over the CB radio — and of course the anarchists of the title, ancient septuagenarian political die-hards who find strength for a noble last stand.
PRAISE:
“Many writers can render credible characters in a credible world, but only a few can do so with a warmth and a humor that is as wise as it is true.”
Chicago Sun-Times
“[Sayles’s] ancestry is more like the reportorial vigor Jack London on one side and a little of the sweet impressionism of Stephen Crane on the other.”
The New York Times
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Sayles works as a fiction writer, screenwriter, actor and feature film director. His novel Union Dues (1978) was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Critics’ Circle Award. He has written over a hundred screenplays and was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has directed 18 feature films, with another, I Passed This Way, currently in progress. His films Matewan and Lone Star, as well as his previous novel A Moment in the Sun, are often used for instruction in History and American Studies courses.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781560257301 • 8 in x 5.6 in • $15.95 •385 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The setting is Boston, Fall 1969. Radical groups plot revolution, runaway kids prowl the streets, cops are at their wits end, and work is hard to get, even for hookers. Hobie McNutt, a seventeen year old runaway from West Virginia drifts into a commune of young revolutionaries. It’s a warm, dry place, and the girls are very available. But Hobie becomes involved in an increasingly vicious struggle for power in the group, and in the mounting violence of their political actions.
His father Hunter, who has been involved in a brave and dangerous campaign to unseat a corrupt union president in the coal miners union, leaves West Virginia to hunt for his runaway son. To make ends meet, he takes day-labor jobs in order to survive while searching for him.
Living parallel lives, their destinies ultimately movingly collide in this sprawling classic of radicalism across the generations, in the vein of Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and Richard Price.
Union Dues was nominated for a National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Sayles works as a fiction writer, screenwriter, actor and feature film director. His novel Union Dues (1978) was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Critics’ Circle Award. He has written over a hundred screenplays and was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has directed 18 feature films, with another, I Passed This Way, currently in progress. His films Matewan and Lone Star, as well as his previous novel A Moment in the Sun, are often used for instruction in History and American Studies courses.
Hardback • ISBN-13: 9781642590210 • US $28.00 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in• 528 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Rich layers of shale oil are discovered under Yellow Earth, North Dakota and the neighboring Three Nations Indian reservation. All hell breaks loose.
The population of the area triples overnight, with most of the newcomers young men without women. County Sheriff Will Crowder and the chief of reservation police, Danny Two Strike, are overwhelmed, while the chairman of the Three Nations council, Harleigh Killdeer, has visions of ‘sovereignty by the barrel’. Local residents have to deal with the invading oil-drillers and their opportunistic camp followers and the land itself is transformed.
With characteristic lyrical dexterity, insight, and wit, John Sayles introduces us to a memorable cast of characters, weaving together narratives of competing agendas and world views through masterful storytelling.
Set shortly before Standing Rock would become a symbol of historic proportions of the brutal confrontation between native resistance and the forces of big oil and law enforcement, the fate of Yellow Earth serves as a parable for our times.
PRAISE:
“Few fiction writers understand the ripple effect that big industry can have on a community with as much depth and empathy as John Sayles….His latest novel, Yellow Earth, might be his most deeply felt work yet.”
The Stranger
“Densely textured, overtly political fifth novel [in which] the acclaimed director and screenwriter recounts what happens when shale oil is discovered beneath an Indian reservation in the North Dakota badlands and crowds of outsiders descend.”
New York Times Book Review (New and Noteworthy)
“Mr. Sayles writes with such verve and colloquial humor that even the most esoteric issues brighten with fascination….Mr. Sayles superbly dramatizes the man-made disruptions in his novel’s small pond, but in a book motored by anarchy the most unsettling section occurs when the boom goes bust, bringing “Yellow Earth” to a surprisingly quiet conclusion: the depiction of a modern-day ghost town.”
Wall Street Journal
“Without falling prey to false “both sides” equivocation, Sayles masterfully balances and gives fair hearings to competing agendas and doesn’t shy away from the ugly side of human nature; by the same token, he doesn’t give in to cynicism or despair. What animates his fiction is curiosity about different kinds of people and their experiences, and an imagination expansive enough to portray their inner lives. He doesn’t fetishize diversity, but his stories are naturally diverse as a result of his engaged interest in the world around him. Now entering the fifth decade of his career, Sayles remains a standard-bearer for the American novel.”
Slant Magazine
“Filmmaker Sayles…is also a highly imaginative short story writer with a sure ear for dialogue, a keen eye for group dynamics, a flair for quickly establishing intriguing mise-en-scènes, and the ability to animate a great spectrum of flinty characters…Sayles expresses his compassion and concern for those who struggle with poverty and prejudice, seeking both to provoke and entertain.”
Booklist
“Sayles’s scrawl achieves a sensational pace. It is the impressive result of a comprehensive portrayal of all four stages and an incredible amount of layering, symbolism, and ideology. There is an urgency to Yellow Earth, and Sayles wastes no words….The magic of Yellow Earth is that it doesn’t feel didactic or like an overdone parable. Rather, Sayles fills his work with contradictions. The competing perspectives and ideologies manifest through the characters’ colloquial conversations, inner dialogue, and motivations.”
Chicago Review of Books
“John Sayles has created a tale of people and place bewitched and bedeviled by money and power, ultimately convinced to join in the destruction of their lands and their lives. Not only is his story believable, it could easily be a work of non-fiction, so accurately does he portray the possibilities of an energy extraction project on the lives of men and women in the US heartland.”
CounterPunch
“Many writers can render credible characters in a credible world, but only a few can do so with a warmth and a humor that is as wise as it is true.”
Chicago Sun-Times
“[Sayles’s] ancestry is more like the reportorial vigor Jack London on one side and a little of the sweet impressionism of Stephen Crane on the other.”
The New York Times
“John Sayles is one of the most important public historians of our generation.”
William Cronon, President of the American Historical Association
“John Sayles is the very paradigm of the contemporary independent filmmaker. By raising much of the funding for his films himself, Sayles functions more independently than most directors, and he has used his freedom to write and produce films with a distinctive personal style and often clearly expressed political positions. From The Return of the Secaucus Seven to Sunshine State, his films have consistently expressed progressive political positions on issues including race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability.”
University of Illinois Press
“Sayles is a terrific writer. His breathtaking precision and attention to detail can make E.L. Doctorow’s historical novels look puny and slapdash by comparison. His ability to map the intersections of scores of plots and hundreds of fictional and real- life characters is truly stunning.”
John Sayles works as a fiction writer, screenwriter, actor and feature film director. His novel Union Dues (1978) was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Critics’ Circle Award. He has written over a hundred screenplays and was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has directed 18 feature films, with another, I Passed This Way, currently in progress. His films Matewan and Lone Star, as well as his previous novel A Moment in the Sun, are often used for instruction in History and American Studies courses. Yellow Earth is his fifth novel.
BLACKWATER The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army
By Jeremy Scahill
Nation Books (updated and expanded paperback, June 2008, North American English rights)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781568583945 • $19.99 • 550 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
On September 16, 2007, machine gun fire erupted in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, leaving seventeen Iraqi civilians dead, among them women and children. The shooting spree, labeled “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday,” was neither the work of Iraqi insurgents nor U.S. soldiers. The shooters were private forces working for the secretive mercenary company, Blackwater Worldwide.
This is the explosive story of a company that rose a decade ago from Moyock, North Carolina, to become one of the most powerful players in the “War on Terror.” In his gripping bestseller, award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill takes us from the bloodied streets of Iraq to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans to the chambers of power in Washington, to expose Blackwater as the frightening new face of the U.S. war machine.
Read Scahill on Blackwater in The Nation magazine:
“The biggest book of the year…an amazingly researched and well-told story”
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive
“Jeremy Scahill’s exposé of the Blackwater mercenary firm forcefully demonstrates the grave dangers of outsourcing the government’s monopoly on the use of force.”
Joseph Wilson, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq
“If the Republicans lose in 2008, they will leave office armed and dangerous. Blackwater is the utterly gripping and explosive story of how the Bush Administration has spent hundreds of millions of public dollars building a parallel corporate army, an army so loyal to far right causes it constitutes nothing less than a Republican Guard. The most important and chilling book about the death throes of U.S. democracy you will read in years and a triumph of investigative reporting.”
Naomi Klein, The Guardian
“Jeremy Scahill skillfully chronicles the birth of America’s frightening Praetorian Guard, one that has been unleashed — 25,000-strong — in Iraq. These hired guns, with their black uniforms and automatic weapons, appeared on the streets of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. They operate, at home and abroad, beyond the bounds of legal constraints and are controlled by secretive puppet masters, such as Erik Prince, who have close ties to the radical Christian Right. Should our nation enter a period of instability following another terrorist attack on American soil, an economic collapse or a series of environmental disasters the tyranny groups such as Blackwater impose on others could become the tyranny they impose on us. The rise of this unchecked mercenary force, as Scahill understands, could presage the final stage in the collapse of American democracy.”
Chris Hedges
“From Belgrade to Baghdad, from Nigeria to New Orleans, Jeremy Scahill leads a new generation of muckraking journalists. With trademark courage and conviction, Scahill is exposing the dark, violent and secretive world of the neo-mercenaries Washington is increasingly deploying in its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and at home in the US. This is an explosive book!”
Amy Goodman, Host, Democracy Now! and co-author of The Exception to the Rulers
“Thanks to Jeremy Scahill and other reporters of conscience and courage, ‘independent journalist’ is not an oxymoron. Scahill’s thirst for truth and justice is not far below the surface as he trains his investigative sights on war profiteers like Blackwater, who stop at nothing to turn a fast buck. Katy Helvenston, mother of one of the four Blackwater contractors killed in Fallujah, calls their employers ‘the whores of war.’ Hats off to Scahill for showing us why she is right.”
Ray McGovern, 27-year Veteran CIA Analyst and co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jeremy Scahill is one of the three founding editors of The Intercept. He is an investigative reporter, war correspondent, and author of the international bestselling books Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield and Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere across the globe. Scahill has served as the national security correspondent for The Nation and Democracy Now!.
Scahill’s work has sparked several congressional investigations and won some of journalism’s highest honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award, in 1998 for foreign reporting and in 2008 for Blackwater. Scahill is a producer and writer of the award-winning film Dirty Wars, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.
A New York Times bestseller
A Washington Post bestseller
Named the top investigative journalism book of 2013 by Nieman Reports
Selected as one of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Books of 2013
In Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times best-seller Blackwater, takes us inside America’s new covert wars. The foot soldiers in these battles operate globally and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture, or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies.
Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former Blackwater and other private security contractors, the CIA’s Special Activities Division, and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), these elite soldiers operate worldwide, with thousands of secret commandos working in more than one hundred countries. Funded through “black budgets,” Special Operations Forces conduct missions in denied areas, engage in targeted killings, snatch and grab individuals, and direct drone, AC-130, and cruise missile strikes. While the Bush administration deployed these ghost militias, President Barack Obama has expanded their operations and given them new scope and legitimacy.
Dirty Wars follows the consequences of the declaration that “the world is a battlefield,” as Scahill uncovers the most important foreign policy story of our time. From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia, and beyond, Scahill reports from the frontlines in this high-stakes investigation and explores the depths of America’s global killing machine. He goes beneath the surface of America’s covert wars, conducted in the shadows, outside the range of the press, without effective congressional oversight or public debate. And, based on unprecedented access, Scahill tells the chilling story of an American citizen marked for assassination by his own government.
As US leaders draw the country deeper into conflicts across the globe, setting the world stage for enormous destabilization and blowback, Americans are not only at greater risk — we are changing as a nation. Scahill unmasks the shadow warriors who prosecute these secret wars and puts a human face on the casualties of unaccountable violence that is now official policy: victims of night raids, secret prisons cruise missile attacks and drone strikes, and whole classes of people branded as “suspected militants.” Through his brave reporting, he exposes the true nature of the dirty wars the United States government struggles to keep hidden.
PRAISE:
“[A] courageous and exhaustive examination of the way a number of clandestine campaigns—full of crimes, cover-ups, and assassinations—became the United States’ main strategy for combating terrorism.”
Teju Cole, The New Yorker, Best Books of 2013
“There is no journalist in America, in the world, who has reported on what the war on terror actually looks like under the Obama administration better than … Jeremy Scahill. His amazing, comprehensive chronicle of the Obama war on terror [is] the new book Dirty Wars.. .. A film, which is incredible and a must-see, of the same name… is probably the most comprehensive account to date of what America’s global battlefield looks like, a battlefield that was constructed with each new mission and the deployment of special forces and each new drone strike and each new frontier, the product of hundreds of individual decisions made under duress in reaction to an uncertain world that now add up to a global battlefield without frontlines or clearly marked boundaries. This book is an unbelievable accomplishment. The movie is an incredible accomplishment … Whatever your politics, you should read this book. It is an incredibly carefully reported book. People who come to this book expecting a polemic, I think will be surprised to a find a book that really in many ways lets the facts speak for themselves. What this book does is show a side of our unending wars that we haven’t seen. … I think every member of Congress should read this book.”
Chris Hayes, All In, MSNBC
“Dirty Wars is not politically correct. It is not a history of the last decade as seen from inside the White House, or from the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. Scahill’s book takes us inside Dick Cheney’s famed ‘dark side’ and tells us, with convincing detail and much new information, what has been done in the name of America since 9/11.”
Seymour Hersh
“Dirty Wars is the most thorough and authoritative history I’ve read yet of the causes and consequences of America’s post 9/11 conflation of war and national security. I know of no other journalist who could have written it: For over a decade, Scahill has visited the war zones, overt and covert; interviewed the soldiers, spooks, jihadists, and victims; and seen with his own eyes the fruits of America’s bipartisan war fever. He risked his life many times over to write this book, and the result is a masterpiece of insight, journalism, and true patriotism.”
Barry Eisler, novelist and former operative in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations
“There is no journalist in America who has exposed the truth about US government militarism more bravely, more relentlessly and more valuably than Jeremy Scahill. Dirty Wars is highly gripping and dramatic, and of unparalleled importance in understanding the destruction being sown in our name.”
Glenn Greenwald, New York Times best-selling author and Guardian columnist
“Dirty Wars will earn its place in history as one of the most important pieces of literature related to over a decade of failed American foreign policy strategy that continues to exist to this day. It’s also one of the most grounded and thoroughly researched books I’ve read on the subject of covert U.S. operations in the twenty-first century. A must read for anyone that cares about this country and the direction we are heading.”
Brandon Webb, retired member of Navy SEAL Team Three, former lead sniper instructor at the US Naval Special Warfare Command and author of the New York Times best-seller The Red Circle
“[One] of the best intelligence reporters on the planet … Scahill has covered the worldwide wanderings of JSOC task forces and their intersection for years, and he takes a deeper look at their expanded post 9/11 mission set. He has incredible sources…”
Jeremy Scahill is one of the three founding editors of The Intercept. He is an investigative reporter, war correspondent, and author of the international bestselling books Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield and Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere across the globe. Scahill has served as the national security correspondent for The Nation and Democracy Now!.
Scahill’s work has sparked several congressional investigations and won some of journalism’s highest honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award, in 1998 for foreign reporting and in 2008 for Blackwater. Scahill is a producer and writer of the award-winning film Dirty Wars, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.
“A crackling exposé of the secretive military contractor Blackwater.”
Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review
“So scary and so illuminating.”
Bill Maher, host of HBO’s Real Time
“Scahill is a one-man truth squad.”
Bill Moyers
“[An] utterly gripping and explosive story.”
Naomi Klein
“Scahill’s page-turning collection of intrigue and insight into the underworld of privatized warfare is well researched, thoroughly documented and, as a result, extremely frightening.”
Globe and Mail
“Meticulously researched and fascinating.”
Sunday Times (London)
“Revelatory.”
Guardian
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WHO DO YOU SERVE, WHO DO YOU PROTECT?
Police Violence and Resistance in the United States
Edited by Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré, and Alana Yu-lan Price Introduction by Alicia Garza. A Truthout Book. Haymarket Books (June 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466122 • US $18 • 207 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young black people in the US fit into the historical and global context of anti-Blackness?
This collection of reports and essays (the first from Truthout in collaboration with Haymarket Books) explores police violence against black, brown, indigenous and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures. It also makes a compelling and provocative argument against calling the police.
Contributions cover a broad range of issues including the killing by police of black men and women, police violence against Latino and indigenous communities, the treatment of pregnant women and people with mental illness by law enforcement, and the impact of racist police violence on parenting, as well as specific stories such as a Detroit police conspiracy to slap murder convictions on young black men using police informants, and the failure of Chicago’s much-touted Independent Police Review Authority, the body supposedly responsible for investigating police misconduct.
Contributors include William C. Anderson, Candice Bernd, Aaron Cantú, Thandi Chimurenga, Ejeris Dixon, Kelly Hayes, Rachel Herzing, Adam Hudson, Victoria Law, Mike Ludwig, Sarah Macaraeg, Andrea Ritchie, and Roberto Rodriguez.
PRAISE
“Would some communities be safer without police? That’s the question at the heart of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, a collection of essays and reportage penned by some of Truthout’s most compelling and enlightened thinkers—including #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Alicia Garza. With heartbreaking, glass-sharp prose, the book catalogs the abuse and destruction of black, native, and trans bodies. And then, most importantly, it offers real-world solutions.”
Chicago Review of Books
“Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an urgently necessary book, one that deepens and complicates thinking around police violence without waiting for a fresh on-camera brutality to restart the national conversation.”
New City
“This brilliant collection of essays, written by activists, journalists, community organizers and survivors of state violence, urgently confronts the criminalization, police violence and anti-black racism that is plaguing urban communities. It is one of the most important books to emerge about these critical issues: passionately written with a keen eye towards building a world free of the cruelty and violence of the carceral state.”
Beth Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation
“Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is a powerful collection of essays by organizers, legal activists and progressive journalists that take us beyond the ‘few bad apples’ theory of police violence, insisting that we interrogate the essential role and purpose of police and policing in our society. These writers have highlighted some of the critical questions that the anti-state violence movement is wrestling with.”
Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
“This timely and essential set of essays written by activists, organizers and journalists offers a window into our particular historical moment centered on an ongoing struggle against state violence. As a long-time organizer immersed in the current Movement for Black Lives, I read the contributions hoping to learn and to be inspired. I found the essays to be informative, illuminating and challenging. The book covers topics ranging from police torture and the fight for accountability to how we might best engage in transformative organizing that could lead to a word without police. I cannot recommend this anthology any more highly. It’s an indispensable primer for anyone who wants to understand the current rebellions and uprisings against police impunity.”
Mariame Kaba, founder and director of Project NIA
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Alicia Garza is a writer and Oakland-based activist. Garza is one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, an organization founded in 2013 after the shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin.
Maya Schenwar is Truthout’s editor-in-chief and the author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better. Her work has appeared in Truthout, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Salon, Mother Jones, Ms. Magazine and elsewhere.
Joe Macaré is Truthout‘s Publisher. He has written multiple articles published at Truthout and elsewhere.
Alana Yu-lan Price is Truthout‘s content editor. She has written multiple articles in Tikkun Magazine, the Chicago Defender and Madison Times.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888902554 •US $19.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 288 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A vital anthology exploring the intersections between caregiving and abolition Abolition has never been a proposal to simply tear things down. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks, “What if abolition is something that grows?” As we struggle to build a liberatory, caring, loving, abundant future, we have much to learn from the work of birthing, raising, caring for, and loving future generations. In We Grow the World Together, abolitionists and organizers Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson bring together a remarkable collection of voices revealing the complex tapestry of ways people are living abolition in their daily lives through parenting and caregiving. Ranging from personal narratives to policy-focused analysis to activist chronicles, these writers highlight how abolition is essential to any kind of parenting justice. Contributors include: Beth Richie Harsha Walia EJ, 6 years old Dorothy Roberts Ruth Wilson Gilmore Dylan Rodríguez Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn Shira Hassan Victoria Law Mariame Kaba The PDX Childcare Collective adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown
PRAISE
Praise for Prison by Any Other Name: “Important reading for anyone involved in the criminal justice system.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A cogent critique. . . . Their impassioned yet evidence-based polemic exposes flaws in much of the perceived wisdom around the issue. Policy makers and criminal justice reform advocates should consider this bracing account a must-read.”
Publishers Weekly
“Necessary reading for any critic of mass incarceration seeking to understand the myriad policy alternatives and the path to lasting liberation.”
Library Journal
“In this timely work‚ Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law offer us exciting new perspectives that reveal abolition to be the most reasonable path toward a just future.” Angela Y. Davis
“A clear-eyed reality check. Essential reading for anyone who wants to know how all Americans can become more safe and more free.”
Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black “Reminds us powerfully‚ soberingly, and unequivocally, that we simply can’t end today’s carceral crisis by calling for reforms that are still‚ fundamentally‚ punitive.”
Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Maya Schenwar is Truthout’s editor-in-chief, author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better, and co-editor of Who Do You Serve, Who Do you Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859547 • US $16 • 8.5 in x 5.5 in • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Michael Schwartz gets behind the headlines, revealing the real dynamics of the Iraq debacle and its legacy.
In this razor-sharp analysis, TomDispatch.com commentator Michael Schwartz turns every mainstream conclusion about Iraq on its head. He shows how U.S. occupation is fueling civil war in Iraq and beyond and how U.S. officials dismantled the Iraqi state and economy, helping to destroy rather than rebuild the country.
In a popular style, reminiscent of the best writing against the Vietnam War, he punctures the myths used to sell the U.S. public the idea of an endless “war on terror” centered in Iraq. Schwartz shows how the real U.S. interests in Iraq were rooted in the geopolitics of oil and the expansion of a neoliberal economic model in the Middle East — and around the globe — at gunpoint.
War Without End also reveals how the failure of the United States in Iraq has forced U.S. planners to fundamentally rethink the imperial dreams driving recent foreign policy.
This book is the third in a series of very successful books published in cooperation with TomDispatch.com, including the New York Times bestseller United States v. George W. Bush et al. by Elizabeth de la Vega (Seven Stories Press).
PRAISE:
“Michael Schwartz pushes beyond ‘Iraq fatigue’ to paint a big, bold picture of the geopolitical forces that brought us to war, then fills in the details with heart-breaking description of the human reality of occupation. A courageous contribution from one of the best Iraq analysts writing today.”
Naomi Klein, author, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
“Informed, cogent, and sharply analytical, Michael Schwartz probes aspects of the war in Iraq that are usually ignored. Read this book to know how total the catastrophe really is.”
Frances Fox Piven, author, The War at Home
“Americans have all along needed a sociologist, not a general, to help them understand Iraq. They need to know about social movements, not just militias, and about oil politics, not just personalities in the news. We have the incredible good fortune that the perspicacious Michael Schwartz boldly stepped forward to cast floods of illumination on the Iraq War and its tragic social costs.”
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
“As a radical American sociologist, Michael Schwartz continues the critical and committed tradition best illustrated by C. Wright Mills half a century ago. In the so-called ‘Information Age,’ Schwartz remarkably shows that, even for a country so far away from the United States and as opaque and out of reach as Iraq is, critical intellectuals can gather enough information through the Internet to exert their duty as citizens. They can read into the actual policies of their government and decipher the hypertext of its hypocritical statements in order to alert their fellow citizens to the horrors perpetrated in their name. This book is Michael Schwartz’s own equivalent of C. Wright Mills’s Listen, Yankee, based on virtual forays into Iraq and an acute grasp of the machinery of U.S. empire.”
Gilbert Achcar, author (with Noam Chomsky), Perilous Power
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael Schwartz received a Ph.D. in Sociology at Harvard in 1971, where he worked with Harrison White, the pre-eminent mathematical sociologist, and Thomas Pettigrew, a seminal figure in the development of scholarly analysis of the Civil Rights movement. He has taught at Harvard, UCLA, Edinburgh University, Chuo University in Tokyo, and — for the last 35 years — at the State University of New York at Stony Brook., where he was the founding director the Institute for Social Analysis. He was a pioneer in the development of historical sociology and in the application of network analysis to economic phenomena, and was instrumental in establishing Stony Brook as an internationally known center for economic sociology.
In addition to historical and economic sociology, Professor Schwartz has undertaken research projects in the areas of social movements, business structure, class structure, behavior genetics, homelessness, industrial decline, and — most recently — the current war in Iraq.
In all areas in which he has worked, Professor Schwartz has been noted for his eclectic methodological orientation. He was an innovator in the application of historical methods in sociology, and has also utilized large survey methodologies as well as focus groups and ethnographic interviews. His quantitative work has included developing and utilizing the most advanced techniques available, and applying these methods to address previously intractable issues. His publications include pioneering methodological works in network analysis, quantitative history, the application of logistical regression to industrial location analysis, and the first application of sophisticated time series analysis to homeless trajectories.
Professor Schwartz has published five books and over 50 articles, including the widely acclaimed Radical Protest and Social Structure, a pioneering work in historical sociology and social movement analysis; The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz), an award winning analysis of American business structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo), a collection that analyzed the resiliency of the conservative move in American politics during the Clinton years.
Professor Schwartz has written extensively on the war in Iraq since its inception, analyzing topics as diverse as American military strategy, the nature of the insurgeny, and the impact of the war on Iran’s position in Middle East politics. His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous internet sites, including TomDispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET; and in print in Contexts, Cities, and Z Magazine.
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BUILDING GLOBAL LABOR SOLIDARITY IN A TIME OF ACCELERATING GLOBALIZATION
Edited by Kim Scipes Haymarket Books (April 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465996 • US $19 • 280 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Since the 1980s, the world’s working class has been under continuous assault from the forces of neoliberalism and imperialism. In response, new labor movements have emerged across the Global South—from Brazil and South Africa to Indonesia and Pakistan.
Building Global Labor Solidarity in a Time of Accelerating Globalization is a call for international solidarity to resist the assaults on labor’s power. This collection of essays by international labor activists and academics examines models of worker solidarity, different forms of labor organizations, and their relationships to social movements and civil society.
Contributors include: David Bacon, Bruno Dobrusin, Jenny Jungehülsing, Katherine Nastovski, Timothy Ryan, Kim Scipes, and Michael Zweig.
PRAISE:
“An insightful and edifying discourse on global labor issues, Building Global Labor Solidarity in a Time of Accelerating Globalization shines both a practical and theoretical light on how labor movements are unifying workers across the globe to create a more independent economy loosening itself from corporate restraints. Even as the United States elects anti-union, anti-worker candidates, countries formerly paying slave wages like the Bangladesh, Mexico and the Philippines are developing unions and worker centers. Building Global Labor Solidarity is a must read for labor educations, activists, union organizers and anyone interested in the global labor market and how those markets can be transformed.”
Karen Ford, Former 3rd Vice President, National Writers Union UAW 1981 and author of, Thoughts of a Fried Chicken Watermelon Woman
“Kim Scipes has toiled long and hard to bring a thoughtful analysis of true international solidarity to American workers. He has exposed the duplicity of many in the US labor bureaucracy who have sided with corporate American internationally in the betrayal of workers struggles. This anthology of some of the finest thinkers on this topic is a must-read.”
Peter Olney, Retired Organizing Director International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)
“Kim Scipes has lived and breathed global labor solidarity for decades, and in this collection he presents essays from some of the most incisive thinkers he has met along the way. From multifaceted standpoints of solidarity, they move beyond critiques of the barriers we face to challenge us to achieve a world of justice, health and planetary survival.”
Todd Jailer, Workers’ Guide to Health and Safety
Praise for AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers:
“It belongs in every library in the country.”
Online Journal
“A welcome, overdue, and highly informed expose of U.S. labor imperialism and its nefarious effects both in the “third” or ‘developing’ world…. Scipes’ knowledge of the secondary academic and journalistic literature on American labor’s foreign policy record is encyclopedic.”
Z-Net, Global Research
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Kim Scipes is a former rank and file member of the Graphic Communications International Union, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers, and is currently a member of the National Writers Union/UAW. He teaches sociology at Purdue University.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461929 (Previous ISBN: 9781931859554) • US $16 • 5 5/8 x 8 1/2 in • 296 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This revised and updated edition of The Democrats: A Critical History brings the analysis up to the eve of the 2012 presidential election season. Not only is the text revised in light of developments since 2008—most importantly, the financial and economic crisis that emerged full-blown during the 2008 presidential campaign—but it offers an unsparibg look at the Obama administration’s domestic and foreign policies. The book explains why Obama and the Democrats dashed progressives’ hopes in 2006 and 2008.
PRAISE:
“A smart, readable history of the Democrats that reminds us of the party’s allegiance to capital.”
Indypendent
“Lance Selfa has written one book that should be mandatory reading for everyone concerned with politics in the United States. The Democrats: A Critical History systematically debunks the notion that the Democratic Party is a progressive force, and that it can be pushed to the left by its voting base. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Selfa’s conclusion, he presents a case that cannot be ignored.”
Robert W. McChesney, co-author, The Death and Life of American Journalism
“The Democratic Party, Lance Selfa demonstrates, is the graveyard of American social movements, its grassy knolls entombing the disappointed carcasses of Populism, Progressivism, Labor, and the Green movement. The Democrats should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand why Barack Obama turned out to be the undertaker of reform.”
Roger D. Hodge, author, The Mendacity of Hope
“With a new, duly-deserved chapter on the Obama Era, Lance Selfa’s The Democrats reveals the many ways in which the establishment Democratic Party has not just dashed progressive hopes over centuries but served as a distraction from the desperately needed business of making real change in this country. Writing dismal history like this is dirty work, but somebody’s got to do it and Seifa’s straight talk actually lifts ones spirits.”
Laura Flanders, host of The Laura Flanders Show
“At a time when our political discourse has reached its basest depths, and many are left scratching their heads as to why corporate America is stronger than ever while the rest of us reel in this recession, Lance Selfa’s timely book helps us understand clearly why the Democratic Party is its own worst enemy. With solid and meticulous research to back his claims, Selfa’s analysis is crucial to progressive understanding of the state of American politics.”
Sonali Kolhatkar, host, Uprising Radio, KPFK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lance Selfa is an editor of International Socialist Review and The Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket, 2002). He is also a regular contributer to Socialist Worker newspaper, based in Chicago.
With chapters by Anthony Arnove, Naseer Aruri, David Barsamian, Paul D’Amato, Phil Gasper, Toufic Haddad, Tikva Honig-Parnass, Rania Masri, Mostafa Omar, Tanya Reinhart, Edward W. Said, Lance Selfa, Ahmed Shawki, and Hadas Thier.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859004 • US $14 • 7.7 in x 5.5 in • 256 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this important new collection of essays, leading international solidarity activists offer insight into the ongoing struggle for Palestinian freedom and for justice in the Middle East.
After years of being told that a U.S.-brokered “peace process” would bring them a better life and their own state, Palestinians today are worse off than they have ever been. Israel’s illegal settlements have doubled.
Unemployment and poverty have risen dramatically. And Palestinians face the daily humiliations and brutality of life under military occupation.
The Struggle for Palestine gets behind the headlines and myths about the occupation and the “peace process” to expose the role of the U.S. government in sponsoring Israel’s war against the Palestinians. It documents the efforts of Palestinians to win their freedom, most recently in the Al Aqsa Intifada. And it presents a clear vision of a real solution: the creation of a secular, democratic state in all of Palestine.
With maps, detailed notes, a detailed bibliography, and resources for further information and action.
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Lance Selfa is a researcher and author based in Chicago, Illinois. An editor and contributor to the International Socialist Review, Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History (Haymarket, 2008).
Paper • ISBN-13:9781608468539 • US $14.95 • 234 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Right up until November 8, 2016, few predicted Donald J. Trump, who ran an openly misogynist, racist, and xenophobic campaign, would make it into the White House. Since that dreadful day, the nation has reeled through an unbroken sequence of political scandals, outrages and crises.
In these timely essays, leading socialist scholars and activists take up urgent but often overlooked questions to understand the political climate marked by both the least popular president and the largest popular protests in US history. Critically, they argue that Trump’s ascension is not a radical departure from the past, but an all-too-logical outcome of a political duopoly in which both parties vie for the support of the 1 percent and leave the majority of the population behind. Situating the rise of Trumpism in the broader direction of US politics isn’t a cause for despair. It’s a call to break from the undemocratic institutions that led us here and instead imagine a radically different politics of justice and liberation.
PRAISE:
“To successfully wage political struggles, we must first understand the terrain on which we stand. This collection contains everything we need to understand the world that gave us Trump, and to arm ourselves for the battles to come.”
Sarah Jaffe, author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.
“This brilliant collection shows how the dismal neoliberalism of the corporate Democrats combined with the dark genius of the right to put a malignantly narcissistic, racist, sexist, and nativist white-nationalist mogul in the White House. The contributors point the way to an independent and genuinely Left politics beyond what contributor Nancy Fraser rightly calls “the Hobson’s choice between reactionary populism and progressive neoliberalism.”
Paul Street, author of They Rule: The 1 Percent v. Democracy
“US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty is a must-read for anyone serious about understanding the nation’s political affairs in a deep and historically astute way that goes beneath and beyond the endless soap opera and superficial coverage of the reigning media-politics culture.”
Lance Selfa is an editor of International Socialist Review and the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of The Struggle for Palestine. He is also a regular contributor to Socialist Worker newspaper, based in Chicago.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461417 • US $17 • 5 1/4 in x 8 3/8 in • 230 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From Mark Twain, to the movement against the war in Vietnam, this is the story of ordinary Americans challenging empire.
All empires spin self-serving myths, and in the U.S. the most potent of these is that America is a force for democracy around the world. Yet there is a tradition of American anti-imperialism which gives the lie to this mythology. Seymour examines this complex relationship from the Revolution to the present-day.
PRAISE:
“Seymour’s obsessively researched, impressive first book holds its place as the most authoritative historical analysis of its kind.”
Resurgence
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Richard Seymour is a socialist writer and runs the blog Lenin’s Tomb. He is the author of The Liberal Defense of Murder. His articles have appeared in the Guardian and New Statesman.
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Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900840 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 256 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Drawing from over twenty years of on-the-ground activism, this striking book offers an organizer’s perspective on the fight for immigrant rights, making a bold case for prison abolition.
In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama’s record-level deportations, Trump’s immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuilding Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform; our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition.
Unbuilding Walls dives into the last 40 years of US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, showing how the prison industrial complex and detention enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah’s personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement’s strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings. She highlights the limitations of reformist tactics, explaining how the “good” vs. “bad” immigrant paradigm has undermined the broader movement for racial justice and advanced fear-mongering around the US-Mexico border. Through challenging criminalization and embracing abolition, immigrant justice advocates have been able to reduce detention and deportations of immigrants in the US. Ultimately, Unbuilding Walls is an expansive and radical intervention in that discourse, bridging the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.
PRAISE:
“[An] illuminating and eloquent book.”
Booklist
“Shah’s intersectional approach to the immigrant justice struggle will interest those interested in immigration reform as well as individuals working on behalf of any marginalized community disproportionately affected by the current carceral system.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Unbuild Walls provides a crystal clear, readable, story-based account of what the immigration enforcement system is, how the migrant justice movement has been fighting it, and why we must fight to abolish it, not fix it. Based in decades of her front line work to stop imprisonment and deportation of criminalized migrants, stop the opening of new prisons and close existing ones, Silky Shah provides a grounded survey of the complex political terrain on which the fight to abolish border enforcement and imprisonment of all kinds takes place. This book is an essential tool to build abolitionist analysis within the migrant justice movement, and to bring people who are already mobilizing for police and prison abolition into the fight for migrant justice. Anyone interested in social change and in the most pressing questions about social movement tactics needs to read this book.”
Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
“Silky Shah’s excellently crafted book, Unbuild Walls, refreshingly busts through the persistent and predictable debates about border and immigration enforcement. Shah builds off of her years of experience as director of the Detention Watch Network, applying first-hand knowledge of the immigration detention apparatus in the US. Shah details the innards of the enforcement apparatus like no one else can, and the wins that movements have achieved against them. This fast-paced read is well-written, well-researched, often personal and insightful, and is a must for anyone concerned about immigration and connections to struggles for economic and racial justice. Shah offers an insightful solution to immigration detention, not only sharing creative, new ideas, but also a concrete proposal for how to implement an abolitionist perspective to the concurrent degrading and inhumane system of immigration enforcement.”
Todd Miller, author of Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Silky Shah has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2009, she joined the staff of Detention Watch Network (DWN), a national coalition building power to abolish immigrant detention in the United States, and now serves as its executive director. In her time at DWN, she has helped transform the organization into a leader in the immigrant rights movement, resulting in significant victories against immigrant detention. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Truthout, Teen Vogue, Inquest, and The Forge. She is regularly interviewed by national media outlets including The Washington Post, NPR, and The Nation, and she has appeared on MSNBC.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9780312573010 • US $16 • 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names — and opened their pocketbooks — in hopes of stopping the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why aren’t we doing more to tame one of our oldest foes? And how does a pathogen that we’ve known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly one million of them?
In The Fever, journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer those questions, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its influence on human lives. Through the centuries, she finds, we’ve invested our hopes in a panoply of drugs and technologies, and invariably those hopes have been dashed. From the settling of the New World to the construction of the Panama Canal, through wartimes and the advances of the Industrial Revolution, Shah tracks malaria’s jagged ascent and the tragedies in its wake, revealing a parasite every bit as persistent as the insects that carry it. With distinguished prose and original reporting from Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, India, and elsewhere, The Fever captures the curiously fascinating, devastating history of this long-standing thorn in the side of humanity.
For more on the history and effects of malaria, see Sonia Shah’s TED lecture at:
“Sonia Shah’s tour-de-force history of malaria will convince you that the real sound track to our collective fate [is] the syncopated whine-slap, whine-slap of man and mosquito duking it out over the aeons.”
The New York Times
“An often rollicking read . . . Shah has put together an engrossing cast of doctors, malariologists, and historical figures.”
Time Magazine
“An insightful book explores the human struggle with malaria not just from a scientific angle, which is cogently detailed without being overwhelming, but also from sociological and anthropological perspectives. . . . Shah is to be commended.”
The Boston Globe
“Brilliant.”
The Wall Street Journal
“The Fever is a vivid and compelling history with a message that’s entirely relevant today.”
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
“I didn’t just read The Fever — I inhaled it. It’s a fascinating book, elegantly written and superbly well researched: a poignant and important reminder of malaria’s relentless human toll.”
Nina Munk, author of Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner
“A thrilling detective story, spanning centuries, about our erratic pursuit of a villain still at large and still a threat to mankind. The Fever is rich in colorful detail and engagingly told. An astonishing array of characters has joined the fray, and you can only be amazed at the deviousness and skill of the archenemy.”
Malcolm Molyneux, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
“Extremely well-researched, The Fever provides a highly gripping account of one of mankind’s worst diseases. Highly recommended.”
Bart Knols, malariologist and managing director, MalariaWorld.org
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sonia Shah is an investigative journalist and the critically acclaimed author of The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients and Crude: The Story of Oil. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, New Scientist, The Nation, and elsewhere.
Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
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Exclusive English language rights in US and territories, Canada, Republic of Philippines; non-exclusive rights in English language in all other parts of the world, except for:Ascension, Australia, Bangladesh, Botswana, British West Indies, Brunei, Burma, Cocos Island, Cyprus, Falkland Islands, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, Gibraltar, India, Iraq, Irish Republic, Jamaica, Kenya, Kuwait, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta (including Gozo and Comino), Mauritius (including Rodriguez), Namibia, New Zealand (including Ross), Nigeria and the Cameroons, Pacific Islands, Pakistan, St Helena, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Sikkim, Somali Republic, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tanzania, Tasmania, Trinidad and Tobago, Tristan de Cunha, Uganda, United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Channel Islands), Zambia, Zimbabwe
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598384 • US $17.00 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 72 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Diamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where the speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free? Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout these poems, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the “Other Side,” as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police.
Sharp’s poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies as she struggles to find a place and time where she can live safely and freely. With her skillful use of repetition, particularly in her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within Sharp’s lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859264 • US $12 • TK in x TK in • 168 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A sharp and insightful analysis of historic movements against racism in the United States — from the separatism of Marcus Garvey, to the militancy of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, to the eloquence of Martin Luther King, Jr., and much more — with essential lessons for today’s struggles.
In the forty years since the civil rights movement, many gains have been made — but there is still far to go to win genuine change. Here is a badly needed primer on the history and future of struggle against racism.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ahmed Shawki is the editor of the International Socialist Review. A member of the National Writers Union, he is also a contributor to The Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket 2001). He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Haymarket Books (Upated paperback edition, September 2010, world English rights)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608460021 • 5.5 in x 7.5 in • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Probing essays and observations by acclaimed actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, in his first nonfiction collection.
In these beautiful essays, Wallace Shawn takes us on a revelatory journey in which the personal and political become one. He grasps contradictions, even when unpleasant, and also finds humor in the political and personal challenges of everyday life.
Whether writing about the genesis of his plays, such as Aunt Dan and Lemon, or discussing how the privileged world or arts and letters takes for granted the work of the “unobtrusives,” the people who serve our food or deliver our mail, or describing his upbringing in the sheltered world of Manhattan’s cultural elite, Shawn reveals a unique ability to step back from the appearance of things to explore their deeper social meaning. He grasps contradictions, even when unpleasant, challenges us to look, as he does, at our own behavior in a more honest light, and also finds the pathos in the political and personal challenges of everyday life.
With a sharp wit, remarkable attention to detail, and the same acumen as a writer of prose as he is a playwright, Shawn invites us to look at the world with new eyes, the better to understand — and change it.
ForeWord BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST 2009
PRAISE:
“[Shawn is] the American theatre’s most insistent class traitor.”
The New Yorker
“Wallace Shawn’s career as a playwright has been uncompromisingly devoted to proving, again and again, that theater is an ideal medium for exploring difficult matters of great consequence. The qualities that make his dramatic work so challenging, startling, unsettling, sensual, mind-and-soul expanding, so indispensible, are equally in evidence in the marvelous political and theatrical essays collected here. The basic faith of politically progressive people, that human beings are full of decent impulses perverted by political and economic malevolence, is in Shawn’s writing held up to the liveliest, sharpest scrutiny imaginable; not, as in so much reactionary art, to shift blame from oppressor to oppressed, or from artifice to Nature, not to insist that we’re innately, inescapably incapable of change, but rather as a scrupulous accounting of the slippery ethics, dream logic, fear-ridden resistance to progress, disturbing desires, of the greatest problem confronting all our hopes for a better, transformed world: Us, the actors in our collective drama. His essays are without sentiment and entirely resistant to the easy comforts of despair. Complexities are rendered delightfully plain, obfuscations are unsnarled and illuminated, clarity and rational thought are organized to plumb mysteries, and mysteries are respected and celebrated. Shawn’s language, his unmistakable, original voice, felicitous, is unadorned, elegant, immediate, true. He’s also a brilliant interviewer, as everyone who’s seen My Dinner With Andre (which is just about everyone) knows. And, of course, he’s very funny.”
Tony Kushner
“Wallace Shawn writes in a style that is deceptively simple, profoundly thoughtful, fiercely honest. His vocabulary is pungent, his wit delightful, his ideas provocative.”
Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States
“Wallace Shawn is a bracing antidote to the op-ed dreariness of political and artistic journalism in the West. He takes you back to the days when intellectuals had the wit and concentration to formulate great questions – and to make the reader want to answer them.”
David Hare, playwright
“Wally Shawn’s essays are both powerful and riveting. How rare to encounter someone willing to question the assumptions of class and the disparity of wealth that grows wider every year in this country. To have such a gentle and incisive soul willing to say what others may be afraid to is considerably refreshing.”
Michael Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Wallace Shawn is an Obie Award-winning playwright and a noted stage and screen actor. His plays The Designated Mourner and The Fever have recently been produced as films, and his translation of Threepenny Opera was recently performed on Broadway. He is co-author of My Dinner with Andre, and the author of Aunt Dan and Lemon, among other works. A major retrospective of his work is being performed, starting in 2009, at the Royal Court Theatre in London. He lives in New York City.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608468126 • US $12.95 • 5 1/2 in x 7 1/2 in • 96 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Writer and actor Wallace Shawn’s probing, honest, and self-critical take on civilization and its discontents.
In this stirring rumination, Wallace Shawn considers justice, inequality, blame, revenge, eleventh-century Japanese court poetry, decadence, Beethoven, the relationship between the Islamic world and the West and the possibility that a better world could be created.
“I do believe it’s possible — barely possible obviously,” he writes, “that the mistake of civilization might ultimately be fixed using civilization’s own discoveries and fruits … and that a human society could be created in which no one was subjugated and everyone was treated with respect because we all actually respected each other. Each of us probably has his own picture of what such a society would look like. In my picture we all would work part of each month in the sewers and for part of each month we’d lounge on pillows writing poetry on perfumed paper of many different colors.”
PRAISE:
“[Shawn is] the American theatre’s most insistent class traitor.”
The New Yorker
“Acerbic yet compassionate, Shawn’s writing epitomizes qualities he admires—curiosity, thoughtfulness, sharp logic, deep emotion—and sees society turning away from.”
Publishers Weekly, “Best Books of 2017”
“[P]erceptive and forcefully argued.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A compelling diagnosis of the world’s injustice but also a very personal response to that injustice.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Shawn has a way of pulling the reader into conversation, making the experience of Night Thoughts feel like more than moving through an extended essay by an important American playwright and actor. Somewhere, as one reads it, the feeling of friendship appears, as if Shawn has known you for years, and now, late in his life, he’s decided to tell you what it’s all about.”
Shelf Awareness
“[L]ike riffs of free-form jazz.”
New York Journal of Books
“With wit and wisdom to spare, Night Thoughts is a subversive gem of an essay, which ought to appeal beyond those who already convinced that radical change is needed. Even for those people, a well judged and cleverly argued piece such as this can be restorative and inspiring. Either way, it would surely be beneficial to us all if it received the very wide audience that it deserves.”
Counterfire
Praise for Essays:
“Lovely, hilarious and seriously thought-provoking. I enjoyed it tremendously.”
Toni Morrison
“Wallace Shawn’s essays are both powerful and riveting. To have such a gentle and incisive soul willing to say what others may be afraid to is considerably refreshing.”
Michael Moore
“As an actor and playwright, Shawn’s eccentric style is like no one else’s. And in his collection of ‘Essays’… that inimitable inquiring voice, which takes absolutely nothing for granted, can be heard loud and clear… For anyone within an interest in listening to a unique writer respond to the crises and culture of his age, this gathering of short pieces and interviews will invite both argument and agreement.”
The Los Angeles Times
“From a low-earning playwright’s troubles to reflections on why the Palestinians are justified in their resentment of Israel. Wallace Shawn: Fearless!”
GQ, Best Books of 2009
“The qualities that make [Shawn’s] dramatic work so challenging, sensual, mind-and-soul expanding, so indispensible, are equally in evidence in the marvelous political and theatrical essays collected here.”
Tony Kushner
“Full of what you might call conversation starters: tricky propositions about morality… politics, privilege, and art as a force for change… It’s a treat to hear him speak his curious mind.”
O, The Oprah Magazine
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Wallace Shawn is an Obie Award-winning playwright and a noted stage and screen actor (Star Trek, Gossip Girl, The Princess Bride, Toy Story). His plays The Designated Mourner and Marie and Bruce have recently been produced as films. He is co-author of the movie My Dinner with Andre and author of the plays The Fever, The Designated Mourner, Aunt Dan and Lemon, and Grasses of a Thousand Colors. His book Essays was published by Haymarket Books. His play Evening at the Talk House premiered at Socialism 2014.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461288 • US $16 • 5 1/4 in x 7 7/8 in • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
While corporate funded scientists continue their effort to spread doubt about global climate change, for one native village in Alaska the price of further denial could be the complete devastation of their homes and culture. Kivalina must be relocated to survive, but neither the oil giants nor the government have proven willing to take responsibility.
PRAISE:
“Best Book of 2011: Kivalina: A Climate Change Story … [Shearer’s] extraordinary chronicle of a native Alaskan village’s demise and inevitable relocation due to climate changes, a breakthrough lawsuit for accountability, and the harrowing legacy of misinformation and deceit by multinational corporations ranks as one of the most timely and important books to be published in 2011 – and in the past decade. Written with the verve of an investigative journalist and the insight of a scholar, Kivalina should be required reading for all power brokers in the climate change debate.”
Jeff Biggers, Huffington Post
“Christine Shearer’s Kivalina: A Climate Change Story is a fast and bumpy ride that begins with the history of outrageous corporate deceptions through public relations and legal campaigns, continuing with building of the coal-and-oil empire to fuel progress in the United States, leading to the horrendous politics of climate crisis, and fi nally arriving at its destination, a ground-zero of climate refugee, Kivalina — an Inupiat community along the Chukchi Sea coast of arctic Alaska. I was angry when I turned the last page. I urge you to get a copy, read it, share the story, and join the now global climate justice movement.”
Subhankar Banerjee, photographer, writer, activist, and author of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land
“This story is a tragedy, and not just because of what’s happening to the people of Kivalina. It’s a tragedy because it’s unnecessary, the product, as the author shows, of calculation, deception, manipulation, and greed in some of the biggest and richest companies on earth.”
Bill McKibben, author Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
“Shearer pulls no punches in this extraordinary account of one Alaskan village’s confrontation with the violence of climate change…. The casualties are adding up and they include public health, ecosystems, and our democracy. So where is the hope in all of this? It lies in the simple fact that the people of Kivalina fought back and struggled for a better world for themselves and for all of us.”
David N. Pellow, author, Resisting Global Toxics, board of directors, Greenpeace USA
“The climate catastrophe is real and growing, and this is the story of some of its first known victims, with many millions more to follow. This is an important tale of greed and propaganda, scientific corruption, and the bill coming due for our allowing a corporate elite to control and dictate our energy and environmental policies.”
John Stauber, founder, Center for Media and Democracy
“The Inupiat are not responsible for the greenhouse gases that cause climate change, and they are determined not to be its victims. … They are fighting for our future.”
Al Gedicks, author, Resource Rebels
“Kivalina is a harbinger of what our failure to control our technology and our greed will be bringing to coastal communities and cities across the planet.”
Robert Gramling, coauthor, Blowout in the Gulf
“Shearer, a journalist and academic educated in sociology, tells a moving, infuriating, ominous story of a remote Alaskan Native community’s struggle to relocate its village, Kivalina, which is being lost to flooding and erosion due to climate change-induced melting permafrost and retreating sea ice. Kivalina’s residents originally moved to this narrow island in the early 20th century, when the U.S. government ordered them to settle permanently on the island or face imprisonment. The villagers, who ‘are able to survive in the harsh Arctic region through an understanding of and close connection to the cycles and rhythms of the land,’ first noticed erosion of the island in the 1950s, voted to relocate in 1992, and chose a new site by 1998. Their attempts to relocate were frustrated by U.S. agencies who contradicted their knowledge of the area, so the community filed a climate change lawsuit. Shearer provides an impressively concise and comprehensive history of the growth of corporate power in America; its influence on, entwinement with, and corruption of government; corporate obfuscation of industrial hazards, culminating in the fossil fuel industry’s frighteningly successful campaign to prevent regulatory action on increasingly confirmed global warming; and the cultural disconnect between Native Alaskans and American agencies whose clumsy, often patronizing management of Kivalina’s dire situation has only exacerbated the community’s problem.”
Publishers Weekly
“Shearer presents the human and environmental evidence of frustration and devastation of this ancient Inupiat Eskimo village in a detailed and compelling fashion.”
Harvard Ayers, professor emeritus, anthropology, Appalachian State University
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Christine Shearer is a writer, journalist, activist, and academic. She is the environment and ecology editor of EconomyWatch, and Managing Editor of the online progressive magazine Conducive. She is also a contributor to Coalswarm, part of the online corporate watch website Sourcewatch.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608469093 • US $16.94 • 190 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Striking to Survive documents struggles by Chinese workers to hold on to their jobs, pensions,and livelihoods.
Countering the popular myth that Chinese workers are “stealing American jobs,” Striking to Survive documents a recent wave of factory closures in China’s Pearl River Delta and struggles by workers there to persevere through grave economic insecurity.
The struggles of these workers in China’s industrial centers are shaping the future of labor and democracy not only in China but throughout the world. These vivid stories of workers at factories that supply the multinational corporations Walmart and Uniqlo, compiled by worker-activists and circulated underground, provide a unique on-the-ground perspective on the most recent wave of militancy of China’s enormous working class.
PRAISE:
“This is a unique book that is a must-read for anyone concerned with the fate of Chinese workers.”
Anita Chan, editor of The China Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Fan Shigang was born into a family of workers for state-owned enterprises in a northern Chinese city. He has worked as a basic-level employee in several machining factories. He is a contributor to the underground labor periodical Factory Stories, conducting interviews with factory workers in southern China and documenting their lives, work, and struggles.
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598421 • US $24.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 500 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win tells the fascinating true story of an individual radical organizer turned independent Chicago city council member, and her forty year struggle for justice in Chicago.
Helen Shiller went from radical anti-war activist in Wisconsin, to a member of a collective of white allies of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, to an elected city council person who helped break the back of the racialized opposition to Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor.
Shiller participated, when few others did, in the historic fight against the gentrification of a unique economically and racially mixed Chicago community on the Northside. With insight into historic community organizing and political battles in Chicago from the 1970s through 2010, this book details numerous policy fights and conflicts in Chicago during this time, illuminating recurrent political themes and battles that remain relevant to this day.
Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win is a compelling, insightful, must-read for all those struggling for a better world today.
PRAISE:
“I salute my good friend and comrade Helen Shiller for the broad vivid picture of her extraordinary life’s journey, filled with personal challenges, and her decades of exceptional social justice work with and for the poor and oppressed communities. Helen worked tirelessly with the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and its Intercommunal Survival Committee for racial and social justice during the 1970’s. She is as a true servant of the people.“
Emory Douglas, Revolutionary Artist/Minister of Culture, The Black Panther Party 1967/1980 “As a journalist who has covered Helen Shiller, off and on, throughout her half-century of community activism, I have long wondered how she would tell her own epic story. Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win answers that question poignantly and powerfully. Her epic journey takes us from the era of SDS, Black Panthers and school desegregation, through both Mayors Daley to the rise of Mayor Harold Washington, President Barack Obama and finally her own election to Chicago City Council—for 24 years. From outside agitator to insider alderperson, Shiller earned respect even from her political rivals for her savvy and resilience. For those who wonder whether they can “buy in” to the system without selling out, this story is a great place to start.”
Clarence Page, Pulitzer-prize-winning columnist and editorial board member at the Chicago Tribune
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Helen Shiller, raised by migrant Jewish parents, was radicalized by the anti-war and civil rights movements. Shiller was in a collective of whites aligned with the Black Panther Party in Chicago. Beginning in 1987, Shiller was a radical Chicago alderperson for 24 years.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888903711 •US $21.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 272 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An anthology of poetry on Nikkei incarceration, written by descendants of the WWII prisons and camps A tribute to the 150,000 people harmed by the United States and Canada during WWII, this anthology is the first of its kind. The poetry expresses a range of experiences and perspectives from the afterlife of this historical yet enduring injustice. With a foreword by acclaimed poet, activist, and concentration camp survivor, Mitsuye Yamada, and an introduction by the editors, poets Brynn Saito and Brandon Shimoda, The Gate of Memory explores intergenerational trauma as the contributors, all of whom are descendants of those who were incarcerated, sift through an intimate record of wartime incarceration. Contributors to this anthology include poets of Japanese American, Japanese Canadian, Okinawan American, Okinawan Canadian, Japanese Hawaiian, Alaska Native, mixed race Nikkei, and Japanese descent. Their poems reimagine, reinhabit, and retell the story of incarceration while embodying its many legacies, through a diversity of modes and themes, creating a panoramic portrait of anti-Asian racism, assimilation, loyalty, resistance, and redemption. The anthology illuminates individual perspectives and reveals collective experience. It insists upon the imperative of poetry in the processes of solidarity and transgenerational healing.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Brandon Shimoda is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023), The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His next book is on the afterlife of Japanese American incarceration, and is forthcoming from City Lights in 2024. His writing has been published in BOMB, Brick, Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Times, and Poetry, among other venues. Brynn Saito is the author of Under a Future Sky (2023), Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She has received grant support from Densho, Hedgebrook, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times and American Poetry Review and she was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Brynn lives in the traditional homelands of the Yokuts and Mono peoples (also known as Fresno, CA), where she teaches in the MFA program at California State University, Fresno.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461424 • US $17 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 200 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“Workers’ rights are not defined by law or contract. Workers’ rights are defined by struggle.”
In an industry under constant attack, a veteran autoworker offers his take on the collapse of the American Dream. These biting shop-floor bulletins chronicle a decade of autoworker resistance to ever-expanding concessions pressured upon them by union bureaucrats and company men alike. Offering a take-down of both the union-management partnership approach and the “bankruptcy as a business plan,” Autoworkers Under the Gun summons a rank-and-file call to action for a new generation crashing the gates of recession-racked American Dream.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gregg Shotwell, a machine operator turned rebel writer, worked 30 years at General Motors. His shop-floor fliers grew legs of their own, distributed by rank-and-filers and cited by auto industry analysts.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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UNDIVIDED RIGHTS
Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice
Second Edition
Edited by Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena Gutierrez
Haymarket Books (April 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466177 • US $19 • 300 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Undivided Rights captures the evolving and largely unknown activist history of women of color organizing for reproductive justice—on their own behalf.
Undivided Rights presents a textured understanding of the reproductive rights movement by placing the experiences, priorities, and activism of women of color in the foreground. Using historical research, original organizational case studies, and personal interviews, the authors illuminate how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies. Undivided Rights shows how women of color—-starting within their own Latina, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities—have resisted coercion of their reproductive abilities. Projected against the backdrop of the mainstream pro-choice movement and radical right agendas, these dynamic case studies feature the groundbreaking work being done by health and reproductive rights organizations led by women of color.
The book details how and why these women have defined and implemented expansive reproductive health agendas that reject legalistic remedies and seek instead to address the wider needs of their communities. It stresses the urgency for innovative strategies that push beyond the traditional base and goals of the mainstream pro-choice movement—strategies that are broadly inclusive while being specific, strategies that speak to all women by speaking to each woman. While the authors raise tough questions about inclusion, identity politics, and the future of women’s organizing, they also offer a way out of the limiting focus on “choice.”
Undivided Rights articulates a holistic vision for reproductive freedom. It refuses to allow our human rights to be divvied up and parceled out into isolated boxes that people are then forced to pick and choose among.
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Jael Silliman was a tenured associate professor of Women Studies at the University of Iowa from 1996 to 2002, where she worked on issues of race, reproductive rights and health, and gender and the environment in the United States and South Asia. She has published widely on these issues. Jael served as Program Officer for Reproductive Rights and Women’s Rights at the Ford Foundation in New York (2003–2009). She has been an activist in the transnational women’s movement for four decades and served on the boards of many women’s organizations. She is currently an independent scholar and writer documenting her community, the Bagdadi Jews of Calcutta, and has curated http://www.jewishcalcutta.in.
Marlene Gerber Fried (PhD, Brown) is known nationally and internationally as a writer, lecturer, and advocate for reproductive justice. She was founding president of the National Network of Abortion Funds,served on the board of the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights, and was Interim President of Hampshire College in 2010–2011. She is currently Faculty Director of CLPP (Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program). She edited From Abortion to Reproductive Freedom:Transforming a Movement and is a co-author of Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice. She received the first Marlene Gerber Fried Abortion Access Vanguard Award (NNAF, 2015), the Felicia Stewart Advocacy Award (APHA, 2014), and a Warrior Woman Award from SisterSong (2014).
Loretta J. Ross was the National Coordinator of the Sister Song Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective from 2005 to 2012. She has appeared on CNN, BET, Lead Story, Good Morning America, The Donahue Show, the National Geographic Channel, and Charlie Rose. She has been interviewed in the New York Times, Time, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, among others. She helped create the theory of reproductive justice in 1994 and led a rape crisis center in the 1970s. She co-authoredUndivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice in 2004.
Elena R. Gutiérrez is an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois–Chicago. She is author of Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproduction and curator of the Reproductive Justice Virtual Library. She is committed to reproductive justice advocacy and documenting the activism of women of color.
PRAISE:
“Undivided Rights is the most complete account of the vital contribution made by women of color to the contemporary reproductive rights movement. By giving these organizers the attention they deserve, the authors illuminate a distinctive vision for reproductive health and freedom that demands an end to social inequities. Essential reading for anyone committed to the struggle for reproductive justice.”
Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
“For most women of color in the United States, our herstories are grounded in the sobering fact that our foremothers and our mothers didn’t have control over their reproductive freedom. And yet, many valiantly resisted. I am a generational beneficiary of that resistance.Undivided Rights is a necessary and compelling documentation of African-American/Black, Indigenous/Native American, Latin@, Asian and Pacific Islander women health activists’ radical organizing, which resulted in the reproductive justice movement. Moving beyond the important question of “choice,” this groundbreaking text demonstrates how reproductive justice is “theory, a lived practice, and a strategy,” which focuses on all aspects of women of color reproductive health and lives. It squarely places those women who are the most marginalized front and center of any dialogue or movement that is focused on all women’s health. Undivided Rights is as timely in 2016 if not more so now than it was when it was first published in 2004.”
Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Producer/Writer/Director, NO! The Rape Documentary
“A thorough and impassioned history of the too-often hidden activism of women of color, Undivided Rights is a welcome and necessary addition to feminist literature.”
Sonia Shah, Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire
“What is unique about Undivided Rights is that it demonstrates that women of color have always been central in the struggle for reproductive rights and corrects the white-dominated narratives of the history of reproductive rights movements. Because it focuses on women of color organizing, it helps decenter the ‘pro-choice’ paradigm and situates reproductive justice within a larger framework of social, political, and economic justice.”
Andrea Smith, founding member, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
“Undivided Rights offers an impressive account of specific African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latina organizations that have fought to make a variety of reproductive health rights a reality for women of color. It demonstrates the overlaps and differences between issues of reproductive health as they arise in various communities of color and documents both historical and contemporary contours of community struggles for reproductive justice. An accessible and important resource for anyone who wishes to understand the ways in which women of color have both practically and theoretically expanded the terrain of feminist concerns about reproductive rights and justice.”
Uma Narayan, author, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism
“Undivided Rights brings together stories of victory and challenge of women of color reproductive rights organizing. It documents the foundation of our current work and provides newer organizations and younger activists with lessons learned and with the inspiration to continue the struggle for reproductive justice. This book is a much needed and long awaited contribution to women’s history.”
Silvia Henriquez, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781560256427 • US $17.95 • 8.3 in x 6.2 in • 352 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A self-described “deserter from death,” Polish-born Daniel Singer narrowly escaped the Holocaust to become one of the European left’s leading social and political commentators. From the Algerian crisis in the late fifties, through the world-shaking events of May ‘68, to the post-Reagan, post-Thatcher era, this is an effervescent social history of the past half-century.
Deserter from Death collects Singer’s writing from when he was a young reporter for The Economist to his final years as the Nation magazine’s celebrated European correspondent. This is the first major collection of Singer’s work to be published since his death in December 2000.
PRAISE:
“I can think of no journalist more versed, more hip to what is happening in Europe today than Daniel Singer.”
Studs Terkel
“There is an alternative to rampant inequality and the corruptions of power, and — ever so modestly and persuasively — Daniel Singer points the way.”
Barbara Ehrenreich, author, Nickel and Dimed
“If there was one insistent note in his political analysis, it was that movements for independence, peace, and social justice must be based, if they are to fulfill their moral promise, on the mass mobilization of people, and not on the leadership of an individual or a party.”
From the foreword by Howard Zinn
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Daniel Singer was born in Warsaw in 1926, and was educated in France, Switzerland and England. He was a contributor to The Economist, The New Statesman, the Tribune and The Nation (where he was Europe correspondent for twenty years), and appeared as a commentator on NPR, “Monitor Radio,” and the BBC, as well as Canadian and Australian broadcasting.
He was the author of Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Hill & Wang, 1970; expanded ed., South End Press, 2001), The Road to Gdansk: Eastern Europe on the Move (Monthly Review Press, 1981), Is Socialism Doomed? The Meaning of Mitterrand (Oxford, 1988) and Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (Monthly Review Press, 1999).
ISBN-13: 9781608462735 • Trade paper • 5 1/2 x 8 3/8 • US $19 • 434 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Though often remembered as a student revolt, the events of May 1968 in France also saw what was up to that point the largest general strike in history. Singer offers an insightful and compelling account of how the radical student movement lit the powder keg of discontent at the heart of French society, triggering an explosion that sent shockwaves through Europe and beyond.
Singer’s unrivaled eye for detail—both political and anecdotal—delivers a masterpiece of partisan journalism. Prelude to Revolution is a modern classic filled with relevant lessons for a new generation of radicals.
PRAISE:
“If Marx had been living in Paris during May 1968, he might have written [Prelude to Revolution].”
New Republic
“His narrative…is lively and accurate, the background of student politics, labor union organization, and economic conditions carefully brushed in”
New York Times
“Daniel Singer is the left’s most brilliant arsonist. He sets ablaze whole forests of dessicated cliches about ’the end of history’ and ‘the triumph of the market’ in order to light the way forward for the next generation of radical thinkers and activists.”
Mike Davis
“Daniel Singer is the premier progressive interpreter of European affairs. His courageous vision and sophisticated analysis gives us hope even in this ice age of fashionable neoliberalism and conservatism.”
Cornel West
“I can think of no journalist more versed, more hip to what is happening in Europe today than Daniel Singer.”
Studs Terkel
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Daniel Singer (September 26, 1926 – December 2, 2000) was a socialist writer and journalist. He was best known for his articles for The Nation in the United States and for The Economist in Britain, serving for decades as a European correspondent for each magazine. Gore Vidal described Singer as “one of the best, and certainly the sanest, interpreters of things European for American readers,” with a “Balzacian eye for human detail.”
OCCUPYING LANGUAGE
The Secret Rendezvous with History and the Present
By Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini
Zuccotti Park Press / Occupied Media Pamphlet Series (September 2012, world English rights)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781884519093 • US $9.95 • 116 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Occupying Language is an open conversation. Through it, Sitrin and Azzellin invite readers to join them listen to insurgent movements that have been organizing in Latin America over the past twenty years, and to connect key concepts and language from those struggles with movements in the United States today.
“Language is not neutral,” write Azzellini and Sitrin, “words transport and express concepts and ways of thinking. They can consolidate and perpetuate hierarchies, domination and control just as they can underline equality and strengthen consciousness.” Among the concepts explored in Occupying Langauge are Territory, Assembly, Rupture, Popular Power, Horizontalism, Autogestión (self-administration), and Protagonism. Examples of each term are drawn from different Latin American communities of struggle, from the spreading of Horizontalidad with the popular rebellion in Argentina, and the concept of Territory seen in Bolivia and Mexico, to the construction of Popular Power in the Consejos Comunales in Venezuela, and the vision of interconnected human diversity articulated in the call for “one world in which many worlds fit” by the indigenous Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico.
PRAISE:
“Occupy Language uses the vocabulary of new and emergent movements around the world to highlight the striking similarities of the practices and visions. Movements from the Zapatistas in Mexico and mobilizations for popular control in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil, to the Arab Spring, the European and Israeli Summer, and Occupy, have made inclusiveness a priority and have insisted that the voice of every participant be heard and treated with respect. They have pursued a vision of democracy as based on direct participation and on solidarity among the vast majority, cognizant of social and national divisions but creating a unity among differences. Those who identify with these movements should read this book for its beautiful and insightful evocation of an emergent radical perspective and for the hope that this book conveys that a new movement of movements can play a pivotal role in bringing about urgently needed change. This book is also crucial reading for those who would like to understand why so many in the new movements are more interested in occupying public spaces and insitutions, and remaking them through democratic participation, than in making demands on governments dominated by remote and resistant elites.”
Barbara Epstein, University of California, Santa Cruz
“There are words that are rocks. Rocks, like geological layers, which have accumulated over decades of struggles, and are colored with meanings irreducible to capitalist power. Rocks heavy with hope. Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzeellini show how these rocks are moved – rolling them against masters, police, and the ideologists of neoliberalism. Occupy language!”
Antonio Negri
“A fascinating new book … Anti-capitalism, this book reminds us, is a politics of walking and of love.”
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Huffington Post
“By occupying language, we can expose how educational, political, and social institutions use language to further marginalize oppressed groups; resist colonizing language practices that elevate certain languages over others; resist attempts to define people with terms rooted in negative stereotypes; and begin to reshape the public discourse about our communities, and about the central role of language in racism and discrimination. As the global Occupy movement has shown, words can move entire nations of people – even the world – to action. Occupy Language, as a movement, should speak to the power of language to transform how we think about the past, how we act in the present, and how we envision the future.”
The New York Times
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Dario Azzellini is an activist, writer and film maker. His latest film is ‘Comuna Under Construction’ about local self government in Venezuela, and latest book, together with Immanuel Ness, Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present. He is a lecturer at the Institute for Sociology at the Johannes Kepler University in Austria.
Marina Sitrin is a participant in the Occupy movements, the editor of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina and author of the forthcoming, Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization and Social Change. (marinasitrin.com)
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900963 • US $19.99 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 208 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A collection of illuminating interviews with leading abolitionist organizers and thinkers, reflecting on the uprisings of summer 2020, the rise of #defund, and the work ahead of bridging the divide between reform and abolition.
The 2020 uprisings against police violence launched a nation conversation about defunding the police and prisons, propelling the #defund movement into the spotlight. The backlash has been swift, beating back efforts to reallocate public funds away from police and other punitive carceral systems and into social welfare programs that provide care, stability, and community.
But as Calvin John Smiley reveals through pointed conversations with academics, activists, and system-impacted individuals, #defund was always more than a brief moment; it is part of an ongoing struggle against white supremacy, capitalism, police state-sanctioned violence, and mass incarceration.
Through interviews with Marisol LeBrón, Dan Berger, Zellie Imani, and Olayemi Olurin, among others, Smiley considers how #defund can bridge the divide between reform and abolition, becoming a catalyst to help organizers realize abolitionist visions. Along the way, these rich conversations illuminate the long histories of systems of repression and protests against them; how policing serves as a colonial project in Puerto Rico and beyond; why creativity and music-making are essential to movement-building; and much more.
Giving voice to those committed to abolitionist praxis, Defund is an essential tool for organizers as we imagine how defund goes from a hashtag to a movement to a reality.
PRAISE:
“These conversations offer us an opportunity to interrogate the promise and process of defunding the police from a variety of perspectives. A new world is possible, but this volume reminds us that we have a lot of thinking and organizing to do to achieve it.”
Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing
Praise for Purgatory Citizenship
“Smiley’s new book Purgatory Citizenship is a much-needed exploration of postincarceration reentry from the point of view of the people experiencing it firsthand, offering important insights into this often ignored and misunderstood part of our carceral system. This is an important addition to the growing canon of works trying to understand and dismantle the prison industrial complex.”
Hugh Ryan, author of The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison “Purgatory Citizenship powerfully juxtaposes the humanity of people navigating reentry with the inhumanity of the varying parts of the criminal legal system (e.g., police, courts, halfway houses). The narratives of individuals ‘doing’ reentry poignantly describe their lives prior to, during, and after incarceration, while placing them squarely in historical, legal, political, and psychological contexts and legacies. The multiple, overlapping, and often insurmountable quagmires Smiley documents explain to any reader why reentry is so difficult. Smiley closes with a detailed description of what abolition requires and would mean. This is ethnography at its best, addressing the harrowing, complicated, significant, and timely problem of reentry with stunningly beautiful writing.”
Joanne Belknap, author of The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and Justice
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Calvin John Smiley is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College-City University of New York (CUNY). Smiley is the author of Purgatory Citizenship, published by University of California Press. His writing has appeared in the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, The Prison Journal, and Punishment & Society, and his research has been featured in the Washington Post, the Guardian, Toronto Star, and Le Monde. Outside of writing, Smiley works with incarcerated youth and young men in New York City. He lives in Queens, New York.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592757 • US $19.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease, once thought to be near-eliminated, affects miners at rates never before recorded.
Digging Our Own Graves sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault, begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of America and the collective power of rank-and-file coal miners in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. This destruction of militancy and working class power reveals the unacknowledged social and political roots of a health crisis that is still barely acknowledged by the state and coal industry.
Barbara Ellen Smith’s essential study, now with an updated introduction and conclusion, charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of the Black Lung Movement in 1968 to the present-day importance of demands for environmental justice through proposals like the Green New Deal. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to dig their own graves.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Barbara Ellen Smith is professor of women’s and gender studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
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ISBN-13: 9781608462667 • Trade paper • 5.5 x 8.5 • US $15 • 191 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Imagine Karl Marx as a cartoonist, ready to set the record straight about his much maligned classic, Das Kapital. Impossibly difficult? Not in the least. Hopelessly outdated? Far from it. Though first published in 1867, Capital remains keenly relevant. Society continues to run on investment and profit, labor and technology. And predictions that once might have seemed rash — global economic crisis, societies nearing bankruptcy — are now simply facts. Capital remains the fullest attempt to explain these facts, and Marx’s Capital Illustrated brings this attempt to vibrant life, proceeding all the way from the ABCs to the pertinence of Marx’s theory of crisis for today’s global woes.
Fresh, funny, and copiously illustrated, this book is for everyone who wants better insight into Capital and capitalism. Readers of Marx, unite! You have found your starting point.
PRAISE:
“[Marx’s Kapital Illustrated is] valuable and in some respects more so than all the interpretations and popularizations I have read.”
C.L.R. James
“[Marx’s Capital Illustrated] is very, very good, a brilliant exposition and a really creative relationship between image and explanation.”
John Berger
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
David N. Smith is the editor of a forthcoming English-language volume of Marx’s Notes on Global Capitalism and Non-Western Culture for Yale University Press. His publications include articles in many scholarly journals, including Sociological Theory, Rethinking Marxism, The American Psychologist, and Current Perspectives in Social Theory.
Phil Evans is a longtime political cartoonist based in England. He has illustrated Marx’s Kapital for Beginners and Understanding Economics, among many other books.
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George Orwell is one of the most celebrated of all 20th-century literary figures, yet he is frequently misunderstood, largely because his expositors have seldom fully grasped his sophisticated left-wing anti-Stalinism. This illustrated narrative is uniquely accessible and provides the insight needed to understand Orwell, with the same kind of light touch that Orwell himself adored.
PRAISE:
“An outstanding introduction of George Orwell’s politics that has certainly stood the test of time, and the artwork is tremendous.”
Socialist Review
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
David Smith is editing Marx’s notes on globalization and non-Western cultures for Yale University Press. The author of Marx’s Capital Illustrated (Haymarket, 2014, illustrated by Phil Evans), Smith is a professor and department chair at the University of Kansas.
Artist-adventurer Mike Mosher, Professor of Art/Communication Media Administration, wrote and illustrated two English textbooks published in Japan explaining American youth through rock lyrics; organized community murals in California and Michigan; produced onscreen instructional animation in Silicon Valley, helps edit and produce Bad Subjects: Political Education in Everyday Life.
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608469178 • US $16 • 8.5 in x 5.5 in • 220 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This updated critical history of the US labor movement examines the hidden history of workers’ resistance from the nineteenth century to the present.
Workers in the United States have a rich tradition of fighting back and achieving gains previously thought unthinkable, from the weekend, to health care, to the right to even form a union. But in 2005, the number of workers organized in unions reached a 100-year low in both the public and private sector, even though more and more people would like the protection of a union, and real wages for most workers have stagnated or declined since the early 1970s.
Smith explores how the connection between the US labor movement and the Democratic Party, with its extensive corporate ties, has repeatedly held back working-class struggles. And she closely examines the role of the labor movement in the 2004 presidential elections, tracing the shrinking electoral influence of organized labor and the failure of labor-management cooperation, “business unionism,” and reliance on the Democrats to deliver any real gains.
Smith shows how a return to the fighting traditions of US labor history, with their emphasis on rank-and-file strategies for change, can turn around the labor movement. Subterranean Fire brings working-class history to light and reveals its lessons for today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sharon Smith is the author of Women and Socialism: Essays on Women’s Liberation (Haymarket, 2005), as well as numerous articles on women’s equality and the politics of the U.S. working class. She is a regular contributor to Socialist Worker newspaper and the International Socialist Review. Her work has also appeared in the journal Historical Materialism, as well as in the collections Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War and Women and the Revolution. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608461806 (Previous ISBN: 9781931859110) • US $16 • 7.0 in x 5.0 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
More than forty years after the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, women remain without equal rights. If anything, each decade that has passed without a fighting women’s movement has seen a rise in blatant sexism and the further erosion of the gains that were won in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet liberal feminist organizations have followed the Democratic Party even as it has continually tacked rightward since the 1980s.
This fully revised edition examines these issues from a Marxist perspective, focusing on the centrality of race and class. It includes chapters on the legacy of Black feminism and other movements of women of color and the importance of the concept of intersectionality. In addition, Women and Socialism: Class, Race, and Capital explores the contributions of socialist feminists and Marxist feminists in further developing a Marxist analysis of women’s oppression amid the stirrings of a new movement today.
PRAISE:
“An excellent resource for anyone concerned with women’s liberation and an antidote to the mystification which permeates gender politics today. Its attention to the oppressions visited on women generally-the denial of abortion rights and the dead hand of organized religion-make it a fresh and immediate read. It very effectively arms us with the necessary arguments and ideas to set about this business of ending women’s oppression.”
Socialist Democracy
“Sharon Smith’s work, spanning decades of events affecting women, provides a valuable and uncommon perspective on the oppression and liberation of women. The book covers both theory of women’s oppression and the history and politics of women’s movements. Her understanding of the grounding of women’s oppression in class society, her vision of solidarity among women and men, and her critique of ideologies of sexism and the rollback of the gains of the women’s movement are tremendously important contributions to women’s studies. More than that, the accessible writing and incisive assessment of the movements gains and losses are indispensable for activists for women’s liberation today.”
Dana Cloud, Associate Professor, University of Texas, Austin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sharon Smith is the author of Subterranean Fire: A History of Working Class Radicalism in the United States (Haymarket, 2006), as well as numerous articles on women’s liberation and the politics of the U.S. working class. She is a regular contributor to Socialist Worker newspaper and the International Socialist Review. Her work has also appeared in the journal Historical Materialism, as well as in the collections Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War and Women and the Revolution. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Changing the world means changing the story, the names, and the language with which we describe it. Calling things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness in the face of injustice and violence.
In this powerful and wide-ranging collection, Solnit turns her attention to battles over meaning, place, language, and belonging at the heart of the defining crises of our time. She explores the way emotions shape political life, electoral politics, police shootings and gentrification, the life of an extraordinary man on death row, the pipeline protest at Standing Rock, and the existential threat posed by climate change.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of the international bestseller Men Explain Things to Me, among other books. Called “the voice of the resistance” by the New York Times, she has emerged as an essential guide to our times, through her incisive commentary on feminism, violence, ecology, hope, and everything in between.
PRAISE:
“Solnit’s essay collection is essential reading for anyone living in America today.”
Brooklyn Rail
“A searing and super smart call-to-arms.”
Poets & Writers
“Solnit [is] a powerful cultural critic: as always, she opts for measured assessment and pragmatism over hype and hysteria.”
Publishers Weekly
“These essays are a rallying cry, a balm, and a sparkling manifesto, all rolled into one. Solnit’s voice is the call to resistance that we need.”
Foreword Reviews
“Solnit is careful with her words (she always is) but never so much that she mutes the infuriated spirit that drives these essays.”
Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“This is precisely what is needed to face our possibly grim future with eyes wide open.’
Shelf Talker
“Rebecca Solnit is a treasure.”
Marketplace
“Solnit’s exquisite essays move between the political and the personal, the intellectual and the earthy.”
ELLE
“Rebecca Solnit is the voice of the resistance.”
New York Times Magazine
“No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.”
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org
“Rebecca Solnit is essential feminist reading.”
New Republic
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and the advisory boards of Dayenu and Third Act.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598971 • US $28.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 200 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An energizing case for hope about the climate, from Rebecca Solnit (“the voice of the resistance”—New York Times), climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment.
Not Too Late brings strong climate voices from around the world to address the political, scientific, social, and emotional dimensions of the most urgent issue human beings have ever faced. Accessible, encouraging, and engaging, it’s an invitation to everyone to understand the issue more deeply, participate more boldly, and imagine the future more creatively.
In concise, illuminating essays and interviews, Not Too Late features the voices of Indigenous activists, such as Guam-based attorney and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists, among them Jacquelyn Gill and Edward Carr; artists, such as Marshall Islands poet and activist Kathy Jeñtil-Kijiner; and longtime organizers, including The Tyranny of Oil author Antonia Juhasz and Emergent Strategy author adrienne maree brown.
Shaped by the clear-eyed wisdom of editors Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and enhanced by illustrations by David Solnit, Not Too Late is a guide to take us from climate crisis to climate hope.
Contributors include Julian Aguon, Jade Begay, adrienne maree brown, Edward Carr, Renato Redantor Constantino, Joelle Gergis, Jacquelyn Gill, Mary Annaise Heglar, Mary Anne Hitt, Roshi Joan Halifax, Nikayla Jefferson, Antonia Juhasz, Kathy Jetnil Kijiner, Fenton Lutunatabua & Joseph `Sikulu, Yotam Marom, Denali Nalamalapu, Leah Stokes, Farhana Sultana, and Gloria Walton.
PRAISE:
“Whether you’re already heavily involved in the climate movement or a complete newcomer, the essays are an energizing read that will undoubtedly give you hope – the active type, not the passive kind – for the future.”
Vogue
“If the endless worrying statistics have you feeling anxious or concerned, Not Too Late will help you to put you a little more at ease. Exactly as it promises on the cover, this book changes the narrative from despair to possibility, giving hope to anyone feeling overwhelmed by climate crisis and what our future may look like.”
Harper’s Bazaar
“A book that provides some brightness, passion, and intelligence in dark times.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Absolutely beautiful, absolutely necessary, and absolutely right! Two of our greatest climate voices have rounded up many more realistic and determined colleagues who help us see the path ahead much more clearly!”
Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet and founder of Third Act
“A powerful anthology of dispatches from the front lines of the struggle over the future of the planet, by some of the most important activist voices of our time. That such a collection could be assembled is itself a cause for hope.”
Amitav Ghosh, author of The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis “Not Too Late is the exact message we need today. Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua have gathered voices from around the world, each living proof that one can understand grim climate science, understand the scale of political obstacles and still know that a better future is not out of reach. It’s late, but not too late. Grab this book, read up and let’s get to work.”
Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA
“Giving up on humanity by giving up on solving the climate crisis is not an option. This book uniquely provides strategic direction on how we can create the future we need, the future we all want. It also gives us the imaginative and emotional prowess to strengthen our courage and creativity along the way.”
Don Cheadle, award winning actor, climate activist, and Board member of The Solutions Project
“The future will be decided by a race between two powerful forces — the mounting impacts of climate change, which are becoming more apparent every day, and the accelerating power of climate solutions and climate activists around the world. We can still win this race, although we only have a narrow window of time to do so. But we get no mulligans, no do-overs, and no time to spare. We get only one shot at it. This amazing volume reminds us that we can still win this race — if we come together and try. Rather than accept defeat on climate change, these authors show us what’s possible. They inspire us to imagine a better world — a world where we stop climate change, restore nature, improve human wellbeing, address long-standing problems of equity and justice, and leave our descendants a world we can be proud of. This should be required reading for anyone who cares about the world and its future.”
Dr. Jonathan Foley, Executive Director, Project Drawdown
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and the advisory boards of Dayenu and Third Act.
Thelma Young Lutunatabua is a digital storyteller and activist. She is the co-founder of Not Too Late. She currently works at The Solutions Project. Before that she’s worked in various roles supporting the global climate movement, as well as other human rights endeavors around the world. She calls Fiji and Texas home.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9786073183475 • US $16.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 193 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In a crime that stunned the world, on September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexican police kidnapped 43 student teachers from the Ayotzinapa college. There is still no trace of them.
This graphic novel, originally published in Spanish, illustrates this cruel moment in Mexican history through first person testimonies by the young men who dodged bullets, the parents who tirelessly search for their missing children and the brave journalists who report on the case.
Ayotzinapa is an open wound where reality surpasses fiction. This mass disappearance revealed the failures of the “war on drugs” and the ongoing battle for public education while inspiring thousands of people across the globe to demand that the students who were TAKEN ALIVE, be brought home, ALIVE.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Andalusia Knoll Soloff is a multimedia journalist based in Mexico City. Her reporting focuses on human resilience and dignity in the face of disappearances, state violence, land struggles and gender-based murders in Latin America. She is a freelance video producer for Al Jazeera, VICE News, Democracy Now!, HBO, ZDF, and NBC Latino. Her work has also appeared in The Intercept, Teen Vogue, Latino USA, and New York Magazine. On the daily, she attempts to explain Mexican current events in 140 characters via her twitter handle @andalalucha and as a correspondent for radio and television stations in Turkey, The United Kingdom, Canada, France, India and China. She was awarded the Intercept/Double Exposure/ Screening Group Investigative Film Grant, The Adelante Fellowship with the IWMF, The Leonard C. Goodman Fellowship and the PRENDE Judicial Reporting scholarship at the Iberoamerican University. Knoll Soloff published the first extensive English language article on the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students in 2014 and has been reporting on it ever since.
Marco Parra is a graphic novel illustrator from Mexico City. His projects are inspired by the social transformation that is currently happening in Mexico. He has participated in the independent graphic collectives, Editorial Perro Muerto (2017-2019) and La Puntita Magazine (2018). He has been awarded with a grant by the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes to make his comic book series Pax Mexicana (2020).
Anahi Hernandez Galaviz, is a visual artist who studied at the UNAM. She has participated in more than 10 group exhibitions and two individual ones, including the individual exhibition Genealogy of Suffering at Casa Galería in 2015, and collective exhibition “The Cause of Causes” at the Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition “Suprema Felicidad” with the ARID collective of which he is a member and founder. She was Project Coordinator at Casa Galería (2015-2016). She is currently the director of educational outreach at TACO Talleres de Arte Contemporáneo and director of the independent publishing house Atópica Editorial, under which she teaches workshops and self-publishing clinics.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780143109426 • US $17.00 • 416 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A powerful and unflinching account of the enduring impact of nuclear war, told through the stories of those who survived.
On August 9, 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a small port city on Japan’s southernmost island. An estimated 74,000 people died within the first five months, and another 75,000 were injured.
Published on the seventieth anniversary of the bombing, Nagasaki takes readers from the morning of the bombing to the city today, telling the first-hand experiences of five survivors, all of whom were teenagers at the time of the devastation. Susan Southard has spent years interviewing hibakusha (“bomb-affected people”) and researching the physical, emotional, and social challenges of post-atomic life. She weaves together dramatic eyewitness accounts with searing analysis of the policies of censorship and denial that colored much of what was reported about the bombing both in the United States and Japan.
A gripping narrative of human resilience, Nagasaki will help shape public discussion and debate over one of the most controversial wartime acts in history.
PRAISE:
“A poignant and complex picture of the second atomic bomb’s enduring physical and psychological tolls. Eyewitness accounts are visceral and haunting. . . . But the book’s biggest achievement is its treatment of the aftershocks in the decades since 1945.”
The New Yorker
“Nagasaki illuminates an absence in our own history. Far beyond a reductionist argument about whether to use nuclear weapons, this is a profound inquiry into the extremes of human violence and what it does to both victim and victimizer. It is essential reading in our hyper-violent time.”
“Scrupulous, passionate, and compassionate history at its very best.”
John W. Dower, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake ofWorldWar II
“Magnificent and necessary… Reading [Nagasaki] is a powerful way to engage with the moral conundrums surrounding our country’s use of atomic weapons…. Let us hope that many will read this important book.”
Los Angeles Times
“Nagasaki is a devastating read that highlights man’s capacity to wreak destruction, but in which one also catches a glimpse of all that is best about people.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“An intimate chronicle of individual lives: like a good documentary film-maker, Southard allows her subjects, with all their attractive and quirky qualities, to speak for themselves.”
Financial Times
“Thoughtful and deeply affecting…A damning indictment of nuclear weapons and an inspiring reminder that some people prevail, even in the face of impossible odds.”
The Christian Science Monitor
“Southard’s vivid stories of five Nagasaki survivors powerfully illustrates the second atomic bombing and seventy years of life in the nuclear age. This book is the most extraordinary account ever written by an American author.”
Dr. Tomonaga Masao, former Director of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Hospital
“[Nagasaki] provides the material and personal stories of one of the darkest days in human history…. One of the definitive histories of the end of World War II. Essential.”
Library Journal, starred review
“The merits of Southard’s book are clear. It was bad enough for the Americans to have killed so many people, and then hide the gruesome facts for many years after the war. To forget about the massacre now would be an added insult to the victims. Southard has helped to make sure this will not happen yet.”
New York TimesBook Review
“American politicians debating the nuclear deal with Iran would do well to spend some time with Southard’s Nagasaki. It does not tell us what to do. It only reminds us of the stakes.”
Washington Post
“Southard performs a great service in rescuing their stories from extinction. Seventy years on, as our memories fade, this book horrifyingly and sometimes beautifully brings the events and their aftermath alive again—and forces us to reexamine the supposed rationale for inflicting such misery.”
David Pilling, Asia Editor,Financial Times and author of Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival
“Grimly excellent…the grace and resilience of these survivors actually works to infuse the latter portions of her book with an air of the last thing readers might expect from a book of this kind: hope.”
The National
“Southard offers valuable new information and context, and her work complements John Hersey’s 1946 classic, Hiroshima.”
Publishers Weekly
“Intense, deeply detailed, and compassionate account of the atomic bomb’s effects on the people and city of Nagasaki, then and now…. A valiant, moving work of research certain to provoke vigorous discussion.”
Kirkus, starred review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Susan Southard holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and was a nonfiction fellow at the Norman Mailer Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Southard’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times,Politico, and Lapham’s Quarterly. She has taught nonfiction classes at Arizona State University’s Piper Writers Studio and the University of Georgia, and directed creative writing programs for incarcerated youth and at a federal prison for women outside Phoenix. Southard is the founder and artistic director of Essential Theatre.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859608 • US $18 • 6 x 9 in • 470 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The story of the soldiers who spoke their conscience and helped end the war in Vietnam.
The Vietnam War left an indelible mark on those who took part in it and spawned an antiwar movement more popular than any other in U.S. history. In all that has been written about the war, rarely do the worlds of the Vietnam veteran and the antiwar demonstrator come together. Yet in a small but articulate organization known as Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the two made common cause.
Winter Soldiers recovers this moving chapter in the history of the Vietnam War era. Bringing together the voices of more than thirty former and current members of the VVAW, oral historian Richard Stacewicz offers an eloquent account of the impact of the war on the lives of individuals and the nation.
PRAISE:
“Winter Soldiers is an immensely valuable contribution to the history of the Vietnam War. It brings to life, through the words of the veterans themselves, the journey each individual made, through the crucible of combat, from warrior to protester.”
Howard Zinn
“Stacewicz has captured the simple, rough-hewn elegance of the voices of Vietnam veterans. As in other wars, the ordinary soldier always has the most extraordinary words for history.”
Stanley Kutler, editor of The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War
“By turns irreverent and painfully sincere, Winter Soldiers will transform stereotyped views of both veterans and the antiwar movement.”
Marilyn Young
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Richard Stacewicz is coordinator of the Honors Program and a professor of social science and history at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois. He joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1993 and works today with the Chicago chapter.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 97811608462209 • 5 5/8 x 8 1/2 • US $16 • 208 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Though widely recognized as one of the Industrial Workers of the World’s leading members, and one of its most prominent militants, this is the first book length biography of Frank Little. Stead focuses on his activities among miners and other itinerate workers in the west, and chronicles Little’s role in the I.W.W.’s free speech fights, the strikes he led, as well as the anti-War agitation he carried out against the first world war. Famously lynched by Pinkertons for his pro-union activities, Little’s life offers innumerable lessons for working class people facing many of the same economic injustices in today’s world.
PRAISE:
“[I]today’s working class and left movement, which is only yet regaining the confidence to strike and struggle in isolated pockets, Stead’s words hit the nail on the head. And so does Frank Little’s story.”
Socialist Worker
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Arnold Stead, Ph.D. in English Literature (University of Missouri-Columbia ’93), is a poet, fiction writer, historian, playwright, jazz and film critic. He lives in Minneapolis, MN with his wife and family.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13:9781481462495 • US $25.99 • 176 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking On the Origin of Species is now available in an accessible, illustrated edition for young readers that includes an introduction, glossary, modern insight and information, and more!
Charles Darwin’s famous theory of natural selection shook the world of science to its core, challenging centuries of orthodox beliefs about life itself. Darwin’s boundary-shattering treatise was captured in On the Origin of Species, originally published in 1859, a groundbreaking and detailed study on ecological interrelatedness, the complexity of animal and plant life, and the realities of evolution.
This Young Reader’s Edition makes Darwin’s cornerstone of modern science accessible to readers of all ages. Meticulously curated to honor Darwin’s original text, this compelling edition also provides contemporary insight, photographs, illustrations, and more. This adaptation is a must-have for any reader with a curious mind and the desire to explore one of the most influential books of our time.
PRAISE:
“This attractive, oversize adaptation of Charles Darwin’s classic work of science has been shortened, updated, and streamlined for clarity and readability. Stefoff’s introduction provides biographical detail about Darwin and how the naturalist’s excursions on the HMS Beagle were instrumental to his theory’s development. She also describes the fundamental concepts behind Darwin’s “Big Idea” as well as its significant controversy. Vocabulary words appear in bold throughout the text, while sidebars and supplemental sections delve into related topics: myths and misinterpretations of evolution; how modern research has deepened scientific understanding of evolutionary processes; and the concept of “artificial selection” as it applies to modern dogs. Bright photographs and illustrations of plants, animals, and habitats provide an expansive and inviting visual element. With valuable modifications and enhancements, Stefoff preserves the richness of Darwin’s content for contemporary young readers.”
Publishers Weekly
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rebecca Stefoff has devoted her career to writing nonfiction books for young readers. She has adapted a number of landmark works in history and science. Visit her website here: http://rebeccastefoff.com/
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Akashic Books (September 2011, world English rights)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781617750236 • US $23.95 • Hardcover • 128 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Photographer Michael Stipe followed friend and fellow musician Patti Smith on tour for two weeks in 1995. Two Times Intro is his intimate and evocative visual diary of her return to live performance, along with portraits of other cultural celebrities, such as Allen Ginsberg, who appeared with her. From 1975’s Horses to 2007’s Twelve, Smith’s creative vision has been a singular, explosive catalyst for artists and musicians worldwide–including Stipe. As William S. Burroughs writes in the introduction, Patti Smith’s “effect on the audience is electric, comparable to voodoo or umbanda rituals, where the audience members become participants, and are literally lifted out of themselves.”
In addition to text by Stipe (including a brand-new introduction for 2011), William S. Burroughs, and Patti Smith, there is also commentary from Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lenny Kaye, Tom Verlaine, and others who have been inspired by Smith’s work.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael Stipe is a singer, photographer, film producer, and activist. He lives in Athens, Georgia, and New York City. R.E.M. formed in 1980 in Athens, Georgia, and is composed of Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe. Heralded by Rolling Stone as ““America’s Best Rock and Roll Band,” R.E.M. rose from cult college radio status to sell more than seventy million albums worldwide and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Stipe is also a contributor to (and the subject of) the book R.E.M.: Hello.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599749 • US $17 • 6 in x 9 in • 80 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A collection of moving and tender poems that delves into questions of masculinity, fatherhood, home, and learning to live in and love one’s own body.
In his second full-length poetry collection, Chicago-born poet Dan “Sully” Sullivan considers the male body— its momentum and privilege when moving through the world, but also its softness and vulnerability. Through these intimate, well-crafted, introspective poems, Sully reveals a speaker who is unwaveringly honest, fragile, and self-conscious regarding his relationship to his body and how it is perceived in the world. As the poems unfold and questions unravel, the book challenges wider social systems that uphold patriarchal notions of masculinity, seeking to achieve a new register of compassion, of self-love.
O Body is also a migration narrative, navigating the physical distances between cities—the speaker’s movement between Chicgao and his new home in Bloomington—and beyond that, the expansive, immeasurable distances within the self. Cityscapes come alive on the page and relationships bloom and deepen as Sully explores love, fatherhood, and family; here, traditional assumptions regarding masculinity and beauty are called into question through the speaker’s tenderhearted wondering. As more and more people awaken to the realization that the patriarchy oppresses people of all genders, Sully’s work in O Body offers a much-needed narrative of that shifting perspective. This deeply self-aware and big-hearted book holds space for reflecting on one’s physical body and interiority: the complex relationship between the two as well as their intricate and often fraught connections to the wider community and the places we call home.
PRAISE:
“Dan “Sully” Sullivan’s O Body is a feat of tenderness, an act of profound, sweet wondering, the word I mean is care, not only for the home of one’s own body, but for the homes one’s body might offer other bodies. The shelter we might make of each other. He gets there by going deep with his sorrow and his shame. He gets there through humor and music and story. And when he emerges, he brings with him devotion. To a city, a home, a partner, a daughter, all of them with their own luminous and permanent rooms in this wondrous, this accidental, this precious, O body.”
Ross Gay, author of Be Holding: A Poem
“The voice in Sully’s book O Body is intimate and tender—these are tavern style poems to be shared with friends and strangers over beer and pizza. I could tell you about the voltas in these poems, how the language of images build in the poems and then throughout multiple poems, and it’s all true, but mostly, I want you to know I read O Body in one sitting. I laughed and gasped and cussed because of how good these poems are.”
José Olivarez, Author of CITIZEN ILLEGAL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dan “Sully” Sullivan holds an MFA & MA from Indiana University. His poems & performances have been featured on HBO Def Poetry Jam, WGN Morning News, & National Public Radio. Sully is a three-time Chicago Poetry Slam Champion, a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, the Earl S Ho Award for Excellence in Teaching Creative Writing, & an Indiana University Writer in South Asia Recipient. His poems have recently appeared in Habitat Lit Mag, Southside Weekly, & The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. Sully’s first full-length book of poems, The Blue Line Home, is available from EM-Press.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599817 • US $17 • 6 in x 9 in • 272 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An essential record from the Second International, expertly curated by Under the Socialist Banner editor Mike Taber.
At its height, the Second International (1889-1916) represented the majority of organized workers in the world, and the largest of its affiliated parties counted over a million members. Its congresses drew delegates from across the globe, and its major victories—like the eight-hour work day—have long outlasted the organization itself.
In this important collection of debates and resolutions from the Second International, Reform, Revolution, and Opportunism captures the International’s vibrancy and gives a snapshot of its strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions. Socialist militants turned to the Second International to deliberate on how best to combat the latest deprivations and excesses of capitalism, which was stretching beyond national boundaries for the first time. These new issues and the debates about how to respond to them—surging immigration; what to say about colonialism; how to relate to burgeoning struggles for women’s rights; the drive to intern-imperialist war—remain deeply contested over a hundred years later. Taken together with Under the Socialist Banner, Reform Revolution, and Opportunism offers a rounded view of the Second International and its legacy, showing it to be a living, breathing movement with crucial insights for contemporary radicals.
PRAISE:
“Dan “Sully” Sullivan’s O Body is a feat of tenderness, an act of profound, sweet wondering, the word I mean is care, not only for the home of one’s own body, but for the homes one’s body might offer other bodies. The shelter we might make of each other. He gets there by going deep with his sorrow and his shame. He gets there through humor and music and story. And when he emerges, he brings with him devotion. To a city, a home, a partner, a daughter, all of them with their own luminous and permanent rooms in this wondrous, this accidental, this precious, O body.”
Ross Gay, author of Be Holding: A Poem
“The voice in Sully’s book O Body is intimate and tender—these are tavern style poems to be shared with friends and strangers over beer and pizza. I could tell you about the voltas in these poems, how the language of images build in the poems and then throughout multiple poems, and it’s all true, but mostly, I want you to know I read O Body in one sitting. I laughed and gasped and cussed because of how good these poems are.”
José Olivarez, Author of CITIZEN ILLEGAL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mike Taber has edited and prepared numerous books on the history of the revolutionary and working-class movements—from collections of documents of the Communist International under Lenin to works by figures such as Leon Trotsky, Malcolm X, and Che Guevara. Most recent books include Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International, 1889–1912; The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920–1922; The Communist Movement at a Crossroads: Plenums of the Communist International’s Executive Committee, 1922–1923; and Clara Zetkin: Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594676 • US $15.95 • 6 in x 9 in • 170 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Recent years have seen a massive growth of interest in socialism, but few are fully aware of socialism’s revolutionary history. For this reason, an appreciation of the Second International is particularly relevant. The resolutions of the Second International helped disseminate and popularize a revolutionary aim: the overturn of capitalism and its replacement by the democratic rule of the working class, as a first step toward socialism.
This book is the first English- language collection ever assembled of all the resolutions adopted by congresses of the Second International in its Marxist years..
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mike Taber has edited and prepared a number of books related to the history of revolutionary and working- class movements.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465200 • US $19 • 5 1/4 in x 8 1/2 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A classic account of low-wage workers’ organizing that the US Department of Labor calls one of the “100 books that has shaped work in America.”
As low-wage organizing campaigns have been reignited by the Fight for 15 movement and other workplace struggles, Poor Workers’ Unions is as prescient as ever.
PRAISE:
“This is a wonderfully sunny history of recent efforts to bring the social justice commitments and tactical innovations of community organizing to the labor movement, and especially to the ranks of low wage workers.”
Frances Fox Piven, co-author of Poor People’s Movements
“This updated and revised edition of Poor Workers’ Unions provides entry into a multi-racial and multi-ethnic multitude of struggles inside and outside the union movement. It remains essential reading for students, scholars, and people who want to make their own history by organizing.”
Michael Honey, author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign
“Poor Workers’ Unions is a much-needed reinterpretation of the labor movement since the 1960s. Vanessa Tait offers an expansive notion of both the meaning of labor and labor organizing—those who worked in traditional and nontraditional venues, for pay or not, nearly all of whom understood class as intimately bound up with race, gender and ethnicity. This book offers hope and a vision for building a broad-based workers’ movement. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about social justice or the future of the labor movement.”
Premilla Nadasen, author of Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement
“As working people seek to envision a new labor movement, they will find invaluable inspiration in the hidden history of social justice unionism revealed in Vanessa Tait’s Poor Workers’ Unions.”
Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike! and Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival
“This updated edition of Poor Workers’ Unions more than provides a useable past for today’s ‘Alt-labor’ taxi drivers, domestic workers, freelancers, fast food servers, retail clerks, and day laborers. Vanessa Tait shows that another labor movement is possible, one rooted in racial, gender, immigrant, and economic justice, that bridges community and workplace. In offering strategic lessons and inspiring stories, she envisions a brighter future for the people made by the people for all.”
Eileen Boris, co-author of Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State
“Vanessa Tait’s Poor Workers’ Unions, upon its original publication a classic of incisive history and lucid interpretation, now reappears at a crucial moment, as the demographic transformation of the working class accelerates. The threat of worsening conditions stands alongside the urgency and the possibility of new organizing. Tait’s thorough revisions, Fletcher’s foreword, and Tzintzun’s afterword add vital updates and reminders. Buy this book and give it to your friends.”
Paul Buhle, labor historian and editor of a dozen radical comic books
“With gripping tales of grassroots experiments in social justice unionism from the 1960s to the present, Vanessa Tait cracks wide open our concept of what a labor movement looks like, and shows how it can be part and parcel of movements for racial and gender justice. In the process, she does a stunning job of helping us imagine workers’ movements that are creative, democratic, and, above all, build power from below—pointing the way to a vibrant future for labor.”
Dana Frank, UC Santa Cruz
“Poor Workers’ Unions makes a critical contribution to the current debate about how unions can survive, in open shop conditions, as voluntary membership organizations. Vanessa Tait emphasizes the importance of building workplace power through grassroots organization and rank-and-file control. This book reminds us that greater ‘participatory democracy’—a concept that animated progressive activism in the 1960s—should be the goal of labor and community organizing today.”
Steve Early, former organizer for the Communications Workers of America and author of Save Our Unions
“While the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions desperately try to figure out how to rebuild and energize the labor movement, Vanessa Tait reveals in this exceptional book that poor workers have been showing the way for the past forty years. Tait examines and analyzes in meticulous detail a wide range of movements organized by poor workers to improve their circumstances and build a more just society. She demonstrates that these movements were founded and developed upon principles of rank-and-file control, democracy, community involvement, and solidarity and aimed to improve all aspects of workers’ lives. These are precisely the principles and aims upon which a new labor movement must be based but which the official labor movement has been slow to embrace. Both labor activists and labor historians will learn much from this book.”
Michael Yates, author of The Great Inequality and Why Unions Matter
“As existing unions continue to bottom out and search fitfully for an answer to declining power and influence, Vanessa Tait’s Poor Workers’ Unions reveals the significance of successful labor organizational forms that demand our attention and understanding. Tait demonstrates that organizations with deep roots in communities are essential in paving the way for a more robust union movement in the United States. Bill Fletcher Jr. provides a compelling new foreword assessing challenges ahead as the US working class and trade unions seek to build a counterforce to the rapacious capitalist system. Poor Workers’ Unions is essential reading for organizers and students of the American labor movement.”
Immanuel Ness, author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class and professor at City University of New York
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
Journalist and labor activist Vanessa Tait received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writings have appeared in New Labor Forum, Critical Sociology, the Boston Phoenix, and the Guardian. Her radio work appears regularly on KPFA/Pacifica.
Bill Fletcher Jr. has been an activist since his teen years. Upon graduating from college he went to work as a welder in a shipyard, thereby entering the labor movement. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice; and the author of ‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty Other Myths About Unions. Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.
Cristina Tzintzún is the executive director of Workers Defense Project (WDP), a statewide, membership-based workers’ rights organization that is winning better working conditions for Texans. At WDP, Tzintzún has spearheaded efforts to ensure safe and dignified jobs for the nearly 900,000 construction workers that labor in the state. She also coedited Presente!: Latin@ Immigrant Voices in the Struggle for Racial Justice / Voces Inmigrantes Latin@s en la Lucha por la Justicia Racial.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Upon its first publication, A Different Mirror was hailed by critics and academics everywhere as a dramatic new retelling of our nation’s past. Beginning with the colonization of the New World, it recounted the history of America in the voice of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States—Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and others—groups who helped create this country’s rich mosaic culture.
Now, Ronald Takaki has revised his landmark work and made it even more relevant and important. Among the new additions to the book are:
– The role of black soldiers in preserving the Union
– The history of Chinese Americans from 1900-1941
– An investigation into the hot-button issue of “illegal” immigrants from Mexico
– A look at the sudden visibility of Muslim refugees from Afghanistan
This new edition of A Different Mirror is a remarkable achievement that grapples with the raw truth of American history and examines the ultimate question of what it means to be an American.
PRAISE:
“In a vibrantly rich, moving multicultural tapestry, Takaki provides a fresh slant on American society by tracing the interwoven histories of Native Americans, Africans, Chinese, Japanese, Chicanos, Irish and Jewish immigrants. We see how 17th-century white planters, anxious to weaken an armed, politicized, white proletariat, enslaved an unarmed black workforce, with explosive consequences. We follow Chicano struggles as an integral part of America’s westward expansion and learn how Jewish-black solidarity extends back to John Brown’s uprising in 1856 against slavery in Kansas, an insurrection in which Jews participated. We see how oppression of the Irish (the first people the English called “savages”) foreshadowed the subjugation of Native Americans. Interweaving voices from all points on the ethnic rainbow, Takaki, ethnic studies professor at UC Berkeley, has produced a brilliant revisionist history of America that is likely to become a classic of multicultural studies.”
Ronald Takaki (1939–2009) was an award-winning scholar and writer, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. A third-generation American of Japanese heritage, Takaki designed and led the Ethnic Studies Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkley until his retirement in 2004. His many books address the history of racial ideas and diverse groups in the American past, including Strangers from a Different Shore and A Different Mirror. Takaki was the recipient of the Association of Asian American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.
Paper • ISBN: 9780316831697 • US $15.00 • 384 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Acclaimed historian Ronald Takaki presents a fascinating and very human record of the American experience, as told by the diverst voices of the people who have lived it.
A Larger Memory brings together letters, diaries, and oral histories from Americans of a wide variety of backgrounds, from the eighteenth century to yesterday’s headlines. Ronald Takaki gathers the diverse voices of workers, shopkeepers, women, children, and others, and allows them to speak side by side, across ethnic borders.
The young slave Frederick Douglass tells how he learned to read; the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the daughter of Irish immigrants, gives her first speech at a labor rally; a Native American performs as an “Indian” in a Wild West show; Seattle high-schooler Monica Sone spends World War II in an internment camp for Japanese Americans; a Chinese teenager struggles with her father’s “old world” expectations; a Mexican immigrant gives up her dream of becoming a singer to provide a future for her son; a young African American man escapes from the inner city to Duke University through affirmative action.
Connected by Takaki’s sensitive historical narration, this multitidue of voices becomes a dynamic conversation about the lives and dreams of diverse Americans.
PRAISE:
“Through this collection of essays, oral histories and primary source material, Takaki challenges what he describes as “the master narrative of American history, the ethnocentric story told from the perspective of the English colonists and their descendants” by illuminating the contributions that America’s numerous ethnic groups have made to the nation’s history. One of the country’s premier multiculturalist scholars, Takaki (A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America) eschews the angry, jargon-ridden ideological polemics that make up the usual artillery of the curriculum wars, opting instead to let America’s diverse peoples speak for themselves in excerpts that are both informative and moving. . . . Rather than balkanize America, scholarship of this caliber serves to bring Americans together in a greater appreciation of the diverse origins of our common heritage.”
Publishers Weekly
“Takaki. . . has gathered a collection of first-person testimonies from a variety of sources. . . . The effect of these ‘voices,’ augmented by Takaki’s insightful commentaries, is not to inspire division or the building of psychological enclaves. Rather, it is to broaden the sense of our shared and wonderfully diverse heritage.”
Ronald Takaki (1939–2009) was an award-winning scholar and writer, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. A third-generation American of Japanese heritage, Takaki designed and led the Ethnic Studies Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkley until his retirement in 2004. His many books address the history of racial ideas and diverse groups in the American past, including Strangers from a Different Shore and A Different Mirror. Takaki was the recipient of the Association of Asian American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Paper • ISBN 9780316831567 • US $15.95 • 304 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this highly praised book, America’s preeminent multicultural historian scrutinies the contradictions of the “good war” and—through the stories and voices of ordinary, ethnically diverse Americans—reveals how World War II represented a “double victory” against fascism abroad and prejudice at home.”
PRAISE:
“An inspiring collection of first-person accounts of men and women, at war and at home, who fought to make America as good as its promise. . . . These words tear at the heart.”
Washington Post Book World
“Takaki delivers on his promise of an ‘eye-level view’ of the war, bringing to life the experiences and suffering of men and women whose stories have too often been overlooked in monochromatic histories of the ‘good war.’ Takaki’s swift account is rich in humanity and inclusiveness.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Double Victory reconsiders some of the war’s most troubling questions . . . . Takaki’s portraits of Roosevelt, having to be prodded into doing th right but politically risky thing and then doing it halfheartedly, and of President Harry S. Truman, his ‘buck-stops-here” facade hiding his genuine terror over the A-bombing, are convincingly nuanced.”
Michael Harris, Los Angeles Times
“The war against fascism, presumably for democracy, was tarnished by the racist treatment of Asians, Mexicans, and African Americans and by the official coldness in the face of the Jewish Holocaust. Takaki writes with undisguised passion, and lets us hear again and again the eloquent voices of those who fought the double fight, against the enemy abroad, for justice at home.”
Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States
Ronald Takaki (1939–2009) was an award-winning scholar and writer, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. A third-generation American of Japanese heritage, Takaki designed and led the Ethnic Studies Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkley until his retirement in 2004. His many books address the history of racial ideas and diverse groups in the American past, including Strangers from a Different Shore and A Different Mirror. Takaki was the recipient of the Association of Asian American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
The bombing of Hiroshima was one of the pivotal events of the twentieth century, yet this controversial question remains unresolved. At the time, General Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and chief of staff Admiral William Leahy all agreed that an atomic attack on Japanese cities was unnecessary. All of them believed that Japan had already been beaten and that the war would soon end. Was the bomb dropped to end the war more quickly? Or did it herald the start of the Cold War? In his probing new study, prizewinning historian Ronald Takaki explores these factors and more. He considers the cultural context of race—he ways in which stereotypes of the Japanese influenced public opinion and policymakers—and also probes the human dimension. Relying on top secret military reports, diaries, and personal letters, Takaki relates international policies to the individuals involved: Los Alamos director J. Robert Oppenheimer, Secretary of State James Byrnes, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, and others… but above all, Harry Truman.
PRAISE:
“The until now unwritten story of the bombing of Hiroshima … explodes the myth of its ‘military necessity.”
Studs Terkel, author of The Good War
“Lively, complex, multi-dimensional, and wonderfully undogmatic.”
Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University and author of Just and Unjust Wars
“Short, graceful, and generally evenhanded.”
New York Times Book Review
“A provocative addition to the unresolved debate over the dropping of the atomic bombs.”
Publishers Weekly
“Admirably concise … his strong emphasius on the deep roots of anti-Japanese racism, as well as President Truman’s psychological makeup, add new dimension to this tragic tale.”
John Dower, emeritus professor of Japanese history at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology and author of War Without Mercy
“An eloquent perspective on the atomic bombings, unusual for its simple focus on getting the facts right instead of blaming or exonerating those responsible for the decision.”
Ronald Takaki (1939–2009) was an award-winning scholar and writer, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. A third-generation American of Japanese heritage, Takaki designed and led the Ethnic Studies Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkley until his retirement in 2004. His many books address the history of racial ideas and diverse groups in the American past, including Strangers from a Different Shore and A Different Mirror. Takaki was the recipient of the Association of Asian American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Paper • ISBN 9780316831307 • US $18.00 • 640 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In an extraordinary blend of narrative history, personal recollection, and oral testimony, the author presents a sweeping history of Asian Americans. He writes of the Chinese who laid tracks for the transcontinental railroad, of plantation laborers in the canefields of Hawaii, of “picture brides” marrying strangers in the hope of becoming part of the American dream. He tells stories of Japanese Americans behind the barbed wire of U.S. internment camps during World War II, Hmong refugees tragically unable to adjust to Wisconsin’s alien climate and culture, and Asian American students stigmatized by the stereotype of the “model minority.” This is a powerful and moving work that will resonate for all Americans, who together make up a nation of immigrants from other shores.
PRAISE:
“A grand human panorama. . . . Impassioned and perceptive.”
New York Times Book Review
“Takaki effortlessly weaves the stories of thousands of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian Americans into a single tale of discovery, endurance, and courage.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Takaki marshals an impressive array of details in his history of Asian Americans. . . . Personal passion shines through this scholarship.”
Chicago Tribune
“Takaki, descended from a Japanese-American family who labored on Hawaiian plantations, and now an ethnic studies professor at UC Berkeley, has written a vibrant, rich history that gives back a voice to countless ‘invisible Americans.’ His broad, multi-ethnic survey is peopled with real individuals, allowing us to experience their loneliness, separation from families, struggles for survival.”
Publishers Weekly
“This is fascinating reading, highly recommended.”
Ronald Takaki (1939–2009) was an award-winning scholar and writer, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. A third-generation American of Japanese heritage, Takaki designed and led the Ethnic Studies Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkley until his retirement in 2004. His many books address the history of racial ideas and diverse groups in the American past, including Strangers from a Different Shore and A Different Mirror. Takaki was the recipient of the Association of Asian American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598407 • US $24.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 288 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“Black women writers and critics are acting on the old adage that one must speak for oneself if one wishes to be heard.” —Claudia Tate, from the introduction
Long out of print, Black Women Writers at Work is a vital contribution to Black literature in the 20th century.
Through candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis De Veaux, Nikki Giovanni, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams, the book highlights the practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after.
Responding to questions about why and for whom they write, and how they perceive their responsibility to their work, to others, and to society, the featured playwrights, poets, novelists, and essayists provide a window into the connections between their lives and their art.
Finally available for a new generation, this classic work has an urgent message for readers and writers today.
PRAISE:
“This compilation of interviews with literary legends like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde is a crucial resource for any person trying to be creative in our current moment of political and economic chaos. Originally published in 1983, the book feels surprisingly timely: Each woman’s discussions of struggles to balance their craft, families, friends, and political visions mirrors the commonly discussed difficulties of work-life balance today. That the innermost thoughts of these literary giants have been collected in one place already makes this book a critical cultural artifact.”
New York Magazine, “Best Books of 2023 (So Far)”
“First published in 1984, this collection gathers Tate’s conversations with notable writers, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Toni Morrison, in interviews that focus on their audiences, responsibilities and the overlap between their work and lived experiences as Black women in America.”
New York Times Book Review
“Black Women Writers at Work features conversations with 14 Black writers from across the bounds of literary form. Tate pulls together Black women playwrights, novels, poets, and essayists to compile one of the most textured collections in the 20th century. Writers like Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, and Toni Morrison share space under one cover thanks to Tate’s editorial creativity. Black Women Writers at Work joins works like The Black Woman, Homegirls, and But Some of Us Are Brave as a landmark Black feminist text featuring the words of some of the most notable literary figures in the tradition.”
Baltimore Beat
“When this classic collection was published in 1984, the writers Claudia Tate interviewed were engaged in the creative work that produced new Black feminist terrains. Today Black Women Writers at Work serves as a much-needed reminder that the imagination always blazes trails that lead us toward more habitable futures.”
Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom is a Constant Struggle
”This is a gorgeous and essential collection of writings from a group of the most important Black women writers. I have turned to repeatedly over the past thirty years and I’m thrilled that Haymarket has republished it for another generation to treasure.”
Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine
”[A] rare, rich source books for writers, readers, teachers, students—all who care about literature and the creation of it… This collection transcends its genre. It becomes a harbinger book, a book of revelation, of haunting challenge, opening on to central concerns not only of writing, but of life, of living, today.”
Tillie Olson, from the Foreword
“Tate’s probing, provocative and insightful questions set a new standard for the interview as a genre.”
Valerie Smith, Princeton University
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Claudia Tate was a professor of English and African-American studies at Princeton University, known for her innovative contributions to African-American literary criticism. Black Women Writers at Work was Tate’s first book.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594546 • US $17.95 • 5.5 in x 7 in • 200 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An incisive collection of essays from an author who is consistently ahead of the curve.
Over the last decade, author and activist Astra Taylor has helped shift the national conversation on topics including technology, inequality, indebtedness, and democracy. The essays collected here reveal the range and depth of her thinking, with Taylor tackling the rising popularity of socialism, the problem of automation, the politics of listening, the possibility of rights for the natural and non-human world, the future of the university, the temporal challenge of climate catastrophe, and more. Addressing some of the most pressing social problems of our day, Taylor invites us to imagine how things could be different while never losing sight of the strategic question of how change actually happens.
Curious and searching, these historically informed and hopeful essays are as engaging as they are challenging and as urgent as they are timeless. Taylor’s unique philosophical style has a political edge that speaks directly to the growing conviction that a radical transformation of our economy and society is required.
PRAISE:
“Blending big-picture thinking with the history of the populist struggle in America, this impressive collection makes a strong case that the time for change is now.”
Publishers Weekly
“A trenchant analysis of contemporary problems…Stirring essays reveal an intelligent and pragmatic voice for change”
Kirkus
“Astra Taylor has been remaking the world with her powerful thought and prophetic action for years. This wide-ranging book is a courageous and visionary embodiment of her deep commitment to fundamental transformation!”
Cornel West
Astra Taylor’s Remake the World is a valuable log of a militant’s journey through our troubled times. Beautifully written in a warm, humorous, autobiographical style, it helps us think beyond the classic divisions in the left, while questioning whether anti-capitalists can work within the state without compromising their political integrity and whether reform is always necessarily opposed to revolution. Whatever answer we give to these questions, this is a book we should read.
Silvia Federici
“Astra Taylor is a rare public intellectual, utterly committed to asking humanity’s most profound questions yet entirely devoid of pretensions and compulsively readable.”
Naomi Klein
“One of the most incisive thinkers on participatory politics today.”
Molly Crabapple
“Astra Taylor’s crystalline writing is on full display in this collection of penetrating and profound essays, curated and necessary for these troubled times.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
“From the ‘dads of tech’ to debt and democracy, Astra Taylor takes on the big issues of the day, always with a willingness to dwell in the contradictions and a sharp eye for where to stick a wrench in the gears. To steal a line from Marx, Taylor writes not simply to describe the world, but to change it.”
Sarah Jaffe, author, Work Won’t Love You Back
“Whenever I read Astra Taylor, I never want to stop. Affable and curious, she invites readers with her on a relentless exploration of the most crucial questions facing the left, and really humanity, today. But don’t let the congeniality fool you, Taylor is a radical working to remake our world. She writes for us, the ordinary and hungry public, searching for ideas that make sense of our desires for a better world. Rooted in rigorous study, deep questioning and powerful and persuasive argument, Taylor latest, Remake the World, is further evidence that she is the people’s public intellectual.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Praise for Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone:
“Astra Taylor will change how you think about democracy… She unpacks it, wrestles with it, with the question of who gets included and how…she excavates the invisible assumptions that have been bred into our idea of democracy… Taylor’s work is alive to paradoxes, ambiguities, and hard questions that don’t offer easy answers.”
Ezra Klein, host, The Ezra Klein Show
“We live in an age that demands that we rethink democracy from the roots―and teach ourselves to think again as citizens. Smart and engaging, Astra Taylor’s Democracy May Not Exist makes a formidable contribution to meeting those pressing generational challenges.”
Danielle Allen, author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality
“What a lot of trouble democracy has been! Over the years it’s been hijacked by its enemies, its reforms have backfired, it has evaded challenges, it has refused to heed its prophets. But as Astra Taylor reminds us in this timely and sagacious book, there is no substitute. The fate of the world depends on it.”
Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal
“What is this thing called Democracy? Google the question and you will exceed one million hits. But for an honest and illuminating answer, read this book―every single word. Searching, lucid, visionary, Astra Taylor takes a deep oceanic dive into the history, meaning, uses, and promise of democracy―moving from Plato’s Greece to Syriza’s Greece, from the Global South to post-Communist East, from slavery to fascism, liberalism to neoliberalism, Occupy to the Commons. She knows what most political scientists don’t: that democracy is a promise unfulfilled, and in our strivings to achieve it nothing is guaranteed. But we can’t live without it.”
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Moths never reach the moon, but they navigate by it; we humans may never reach democracy, Astra Taylor tells us, but we navigate by its ideals. This is a beautiful, revelatory book about ideas and how they matter in everyday life, by the only writer who could herself navigate so gracefully among factory workers, contemporary economics, and ancient Athenian history.”
Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me
“Astra Taylor weighs in on the legacy of Occupy, the organizing capacity of debt resistance, and our prospects for achieving something resembling democracy…out of her experiences at Occupy, Taylor recognized a possibility to organize people around indebtedness. To do so is an economic necessity, a means to address inequality and social control. But resisting debt also provides an opportunity to “bridge the personal and political.’…Remake the World is a useful companion for that Left as we organize, listen, and continue to grow.”
Jacobin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She is the director, most recently, of What Is Democracy? and the author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone and the American Book Award winning The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. She is co-founder of the Debt Collective, a union for debtors, and contributed the foreword to the group’s new book, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition.
With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-ups within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city’s corrupt political machine.
The Torture Machine takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-years of litigation that followed—through the dogged pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects.
Joining forces with community activists, torture survivors and their families, other lawyers, and local reporters, Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD officers and the City of Chicago. As the struggle expanded beyond the torture scandal to the ultimately successful campaign to end the death penalty in Illinois, and obtained reparations for many of the torture survivors, it set human rights precedents that have since been adopted across the United States
PRAISE:
“a riveting account…a forensic analysis of decades of collusion between judges, politicians, prosecutors and the police to engage in systemic human rights violations.”
Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now!
“In this compelling book, Taylor details the high-profile Black Panther case and the 31 years the PLO pursued another notorious situation, the use of torture by Chicago police to secure false confessions. The legal pursuit of Chicago police detective Jon Burge and his accomplices crossed paths with the ambitions of Chicago politicians, including mayors Jane Byrne and Richard M. Daley. Taylor chronicles the winding course of the investigation and prosecution, including conflicts with a biased judge, surreptitious help from a police officer PLO dubbed Deep Badge, and the unveiling of the police practice of “street files,” unofficial reports not made available to defense attorneys as required by the U.S. Constitution, files that might have exonerated the accused. Through a long series of attempts in a quest that gathered more and more accusers, the PLO steadily built a case that ultimately triumphed with numerous exonerations and a far-reaching influence on international human rights.”
Booklist, Starred Review
“Taylor’s The Torture Machine is a sad but necessary reminder of how citizens can be victimized by those who are supposed to protect them and how that abuse can poison entire neighborhoods. But it is also a story of a hard-won hope that resulted in some degree of justice for victims and an effort to remind children of what once happened in the hope that it won’t be repeated. The book is a chronicle of tenacity and hope alongside brutality and injustice, and in that way it is a profoundly Chicago story.”
Psychology Today
“‘The Torture Machine offers a critical piece of Chicago history. Written in a straightforward style by someone on the front lines of a 50-year fight, the book recounts the courageous persistence of both the lawyers fighting for victims of state-sanctioned abuse and the victims themselves, who had to replay the worst moments of their lives over and over in court proceedings…The story of state-sponsored crimes in Chicago is powerful enough without embellishment, and Taylor lets it speak for itself. It’s a terrifying tale of justice lost, and eventually found.”
Chicago Tribune
“[A] harrowing tale of the author’s 13-year crusade with the PLO….Sparing no details, Taylor reveals the police force’s reign of terror and the Gestapo-like interrogation tactics administered by Lt. Jon Burge and his squad of ‘confederates.’ Taylor illuminates in graphic detail the scars caused by some of the worst elements of law enforcement in a city perpetually beset by violence.”
Kirkus
“The Torture Machine describes the action and the drama. It takes us inside the lawyer’s mind in many momentous civil rights cases. It shows the dedication, ingenuity, strategic thoughtfulness, and persistence shown by its author and his colleagues in the People’s Law Office, in the face of concerted state resistance, for so many years, with such outstanding results. Truly, he has vindicated—as have others—the audacity shown fifty years ago, when with some trepidation, he and his youthful cohorts, including the reviewers here, determined to call themselves The People’s Law Office, and set about trying to live up to that name. Flint Taylor has done it, beyond measure, and the proof is here.”
National Lawyers Guild
“Flint Taylor’s powerful new book…is a must read.”
Bryan Stevenson
“Flint Taylor’s searing memoir is a chilling reminder of American law enforcement’s enduring commitment to silencing black voices and torturing black bodies in the name of “order.” It is also a most powerful and moving account of the courageous community members, activists, and movement lawyers who have given their lives to make sure that those same voices are heard, and that some measure of justice can be had. From the moment, fifty years ago, when law enforcement murdered 21-year-old Fred Hampton as he slept in bed, to the more recent fight to hold Jon Burge and the Chicago PD accountable for brutalizing hundreds of people in their custody over the last thirty years, Torture Machine is essential reading for all who care about this country—past and future.”
Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy
“If it was not for Flint Taylor I would still be languishing in prison. He brought hope to a hopeless place.”
Darrell Cannon, torture survivor
“If you want to understand what actually happened to those Jon Burge tortured read this book.”
Anthony Holmes, torture survivor
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Flint Taylor is a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago. He is one of the lawyers for the families of slain Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and has represented many survivors of Chicago police torture over the past thirty-one years. Taylor was also trial counsel in the landmark civil rights case against the KKK, Nazis, and Greensboro, North Carolina police for the 1979 murder of five anti-Klan demonstrators. A lawyer for the people, Taylor has spent nearly fifty years fighting for justice, from the courtrooms of Cook County to the US Supreme Court.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642594553 • US $19.95 • 4 3/8 in x 7 3/8 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against Black people and punctured the illusion of a postracial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists.
In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.
PRAISE:
“From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is the text that can guide us toward an intelligent engagement with structural racism and efficacious paths of resistance.”
Angela Y. Davis, from the Foreword
“If you haven’t read From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, you should. It has already found its place as essential reading on the intersection of race and class in recent US history.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is a must-read for those interested in understanding racism and inequality in modern society. It offers both an historical and a contemporary view of racism that is accessible and comprehensible for people of all higher-educational backgrounds, and all individuals with a keen interest in social justice and reform. It is a superb source of information regarding the struggles and realities of racism and systemic discrimination imposed upon black people in America.”
Ethnic and Racial Studies
“This book is a masterful treatment of racism, economic exploitation, and the hope of new movements for racial and economic justice in the United States.”
Erica Chenoweth,The Journal of Human Rights
“This brilliant book is the best analysis we have of the #BlackLivesMatter moment of the long struggle for freedom in America. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has emerged as the most sophisticated and courageous radical intellectual of her generation.”
Cornel West, author, Race Matters
“Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s searching examination of the social, political, and economic dimensions of the prevailing racial order offers important context for understanding the necessity of the emerging movement for black liberation.”
Michelle Alexander, author, The New Jim Crow
“Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has written a sweeping yet concise history not just of the Black Lives Matter movement, but of the past seven years under the first black president and of how the 20th century led to our current state of woke uprising. It’s full of gems of historical insight and it fearlessly tackles what black liberation looks like when it happens in a black-governed city 40 miles from a black-occupied White House.”
The Guardian
“Class matters! In this clear-eyed, historically informed account of the latest wave of resistance to state violence, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor not only exposes the canard of color-blindness but reveals how structural racism and class oppression are joined at the hip. If today’s rebels ever expect to end inequality and racialized state violence, she warns, then capitalism must also end. And that requires forging new solidarities, envisioning a new social and economic order, and pushing a struggle to protect Black Lives to its logical conclusion: a revolution capable of transforming the entire nation.”
Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor of History & Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in United States History, UCLA
“From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is a profoundly insightful book from one of the brightest new lights in African American Studies. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor invites us to rethink the postwar history of the United States and to place the actions of everyday people, including the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who participated in the urban rebellions and wildcat strikes of 1960s and 1970s, at the forefront of American politics. By doing so, she offers up a ‘usable past’ for interpreting the current anti-state sanctioned violence movement sweeping the United States in the early twenty-first century. This timely volume provides much needed analysis not only of race and criminalization in modern American history, but of the specific roles played by a bipartisan electoral elite, the corporate sector, and the new black political class in producing our current onslaught of police killings and mass incarceration in the years since the Voting Rights Act’s passage. Taylor’s fluent voice as historian and political theorist renders legible the accomplishments and, perhaps most importantly, the expansive possibilities of a new generation of black youth activism.”
Donna Murch, author, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California
“With political eloquence, intellectual rigor, and an unapologetically left analysis, the brilliant scholar-activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has provided a powerful contribution to our collective understanding of the current stage of the Black freedom struggle in the United States, how we arrived at this point, and what battles we need to fight in order to truly achieve liberation. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is a must read for everyone who is serious about the ongoing praxis of freedom.”
Barbara Ransby, author, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
“Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor brings the long history of Black radical theorizing and scholarship into the neoliberal 21st century with From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Her strong voice is deeply needed at a time when young activists are once again reforging a Black liberation movement that is under constant attack. Deeply rooted in Black radical, feminist and socialist traditions, Taylor’s book is an outstanding example of the type of analysis that is needed to build movements for freedom and self-determination in a far more complicated terrain than that confronted by the activists of the 20th century. Her book is required reading for anyone interested in justice, equality and freedom.”
Michael C. Dawson, author of Blacks In and Out of the Left
“Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor has given us an important book, one that might help us to understand the roots of the contemporary policing crisis and build popular opposition capable of transforming the current, dismal state of affairs. Equal parts historical analysis and forceful polemic, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation provides a much-needed antidote to the post-racial patter that has defined the Obama years, but it also serves as a proper corrective for the ‘new civil rights movement’ posturing of some activists. Against such nostalgic thinking, Taylor reminds us of the new historical conditions we face, and the unique challenges created by decades of African American political integration. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation sketches a politics that rightly connects anti-police brutality protests and a broader anti-capitalist project. Everyone who has grown sick of too many undeserved deaths at the hands of police and vigilantes should read and debate this book.”
Cedric G. Johnson, author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics
“This book should be read widely. It’s a powerful, concise account of why the Black Lives Matter movement has erupted and why it’s needed. The chapter on the limits of electoral politics is one of the best in the book. The section on the connections between municipal finance and criminal justice, of the way fines and fees compound the problem mass incarceration, is also extremely useful and lucid. This is a clear-eyed and morally righteous work informed by a deep understanding of history and social policy, one that patiently and painstakingly illustrates the ways racism and capitalism are intertwined. Ultimately Taylor presents a powerful argument for social movements, for building power outside of electoral politics that can take on structural inequities. I found myself underlining something on almost every page.”
Astra Taylor, author, The People’s Platform
“Ultimately, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is an essential read for anyone following the movement for Black Lives. The text chronicles a portion of history we rarely ever see, while also bringing together data and deep primary source research in a way that lucidly explains the origins of the current moment.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“This new book from activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor gives an in-depth history and analysis of the movement for racial justice, and how the recent fight against police violence is propelling the cause. Repeatedly hailed as a must-read for anyone who wants to participate in the movement, this book will give you great perspective about the #BlackLivesMatter movement and beyond.”
Bustle
“The classic example is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. When The New Press published this book, it was not initially reviewed in the New York Times and did not make its way onto the bestseller list until after the paperback edition was released two years later. Here is a case where a book’s argument proved so strong, so timely, and so necessary that the audience grew up to meet it. Another more recent crossover success is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which sacrifices no historical precision as it speaks simultaneously to academic, activist, and general audiences.”
The American Historian
“Taylor’s short but powerful and provocative book is a vital read for those wrestling with how to understand the rise of this phase of the black struggle, and where it can and should go from here.”
Monthly Review
“As an academic who has fastidiously examined black political and social struggle in this country, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has been able to aptly show the keen connection between state violence and poverty (“Perhaps American violence is most acutely evident in the extreme inequality that exists here,” she wrote). In her recently released book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Taylor has absconded from the ivory tower to break down the current Movement for Black Lives, arguing that it holds the potential to reignite a broader push for black liberation. The outspoken writer and professor indeed uses her mind. Perhaps if we listen, our free can/will follow.”
The Root
“Keeanga-Yammahta Taylor’s brilliant and stirring From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket, 2016) provides a synoptic historical account of U.S. White supremacy, counter insurgency, and the betrayals of the black elite. It’s hard-headed in its diagnosis of the obstacles confronting anti-racist and radical politics while insisting on the new possibilities of struggle illuminated by Black Lives Matter.”
Africa Is a Country
“This vital book challenges readers to carefully study and engage with the history of antiracist struggle against policing, prisons, and poverty. Ultimately, it compels us to respond to the rise of Trump by building multiracial solidarity and articulating alternative futures.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for History, and of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction in 2018. She is an assistant professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker.
The Combahee River Collective, a trailblazing group of radical Black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the anti-racist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s. In this collection of interviews, edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles.
PRAISE:
“[How We Get Free] was published to critical acclaim, but it’s likely much of its direct impact is yet to come, as it serves as a literal roadmap to revolution for a new generation of political activists ready to challenge mainstream feminism”
Vogue, “5 Game-Changing Feminist Books That Are Still Essential Reading”
“This new collection of a four-decades-old text reminds us that black women have long known that America’s destiny is inseparable from how it treats them and the nation ignores this truth at its peril.”
The New York Review of Books
“If you consider yourself a womanist or a Black feminist, then this book should be on your list.”
LitHub
“The Combahee River Collective, a Black lesbian feminist organization active in the ’70s and early ’80s is revisited in How We Get Free, a book that contextualizes the movement via interviews with the organization’s key players, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, and reflects on its legacy. Two of our panelists recommended this contemporary work by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, with Williams saying the interviews with Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and other commentary make the work relative to the current moment. Williams also recommends reading ‘The Combahee River Collective Statement,’ on which the book is based, and then reading it a second time: “Every person — regardless of race, gender, sexuality, and generation — who believes in feminist theory and practice should read it. “It teaches us why Black (lesbian) women’s experiences are key to building an anti-racist and feminist world,” says Williams. “It also helps us to revisit the principles of Black feminism,” says Sawyer, who believes it’s important to recirculate those ideas for the current generation”.
NY Mag, “The Best Books for Budding Black Feminists, According to Experts”
“For feminists of all kinds, astute scholars, or anyone with a passion for social justice, How We Get Free is an invaluable work.”
Ethnic and Racial Studies
“A striking collection that should be immediately added to the Black feminist canon.”
Bitch Media
“An essential book for any feminist library.”
Library Journal
“The publication of How We Get Free marks the 40th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective statement, which is often said to be the foundational document of intersectional feminism. As white feminism has gained an increasing amount of coverage, there are still questions as to how black and brown women’s needs are being addressed. This book, through a collection of interviews with prominent black feminists, provides some answers.”
The Independent (UK), “10 Best New Non-Fiction Feminist Books”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for History, and of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction in 2018. She is an assistant professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker.
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Paper • ISBN: 9780684818450 • US $16.99 • 384 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Popol Vuh, the Quiché Mayan book of creation, is not only the most important text in the native languages of the Americas, it is also an extraordinary document of the human imagination. It begins with the deeds of Mayan gods in the darkness of a primeval sea and ends with the radiant splendor of the Mayan lords who founded the Quiché kingdom in the Guatemalan highlands. Originally written in Mayan hieroglyphs, it was transcribed into the Roman alphabet in the sixteenth century.
This new edition of Dennis Tedlock’s unabridged, widely praised translation includes new notes and commentary, newly translated passages, newly deciphered hieroglyphs, and over forty new illustrations.
PRAISE:
“Popol Vuh is one of the great books about the creation of the world. It is the Mayan Bible.”
Carlos Fuentes
“The volume is required reading for everyone seriously interested in Native American literature or in Meso-American cultural history. Its publication is a major event.”
Los Angeles Times
“Dennis Tedlock’s splendid version…[is] the work of a brilliant anthropologist who is also a true ‘poet of performance,’ himself trained by a native Quiché master. . . . Superb notes and glossary . . . . An event of quite exceptional importance.”
William Arrowsmith, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, Emory University
“Tedlock’s translation is sensitive, precise, and illuminating. It will greatly help the Popol Vuh achieve its rightful place as a masterpiece of religious writing, familiar to all those who seek a message that transcends ordinary concerns.”
Vine Deloria, Jr., author of Custer Died for Your Sins
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dennis Tedlock was the McNulty Professor of English and Research Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he co-founded the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics program. He was a coeditor of American Anthropologist and author of several books.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
A Moment on the Clock of the World is a “mixtape” of artists, public intellectuals, community organizers and activists, journalists, and cultural theorists around the complexities of making lives of meaning in and with the world—in particular at the intersection of art and social justice.
This book captures a moment on the eternal continuum of such inquiry. It is inspired by the twenty-four years of public inquiry pursued by the award-winning Foundry Theatre whose critically- acclaimed productions and public dialogues have featured some of the most innovative artists and thinkers of the past quarter century: Claudia Rankine, Taylor Mac, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Naomi Klein, Cornel West, Grace Lee Boggs, and Barbara Ehrenreich, to name but a few.
PRAISE:
“This beautiful volume, celebrating the uncompromising vision of New York’s Foundry Theatre, reminds us that the impossible is possible through creative courage and the conviction of one’s deepest principles.”
Los Angeles Times
“The Foundry Theatre is the great exemplar of artistic excellence, political courage, and visionary hope of American theatre in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.”
Cornel West, (from the Foreword)
“These stunning essays, interviews, incantations, manifestations are by the best radical thinkers in the U.S. A. This collection is a manifesto filled with bold ideas, magic and poetry, a living record of the best of what is still called the ‘un-American tradition’ in theater. This is political and creative courage at its best and the voices inside this work are not only subversive but reach to the very root of why we make theater, why we keep coming back. Best of all, this book wrenches apart neoliberal notions of what ‘resistance’ truly is, and redefines and reconstructs them from the root up. And the root is the only place where the radical still lives. And there also lives The Foundry theater.”
Naomi Wallace
“The Foundry Theatre has quietly been responsible for some of the most artistically ambitious work seen in New York in recent years.”
The New York Times
“The Foundry has a long history of pushing plays beyond the boundaries of traditional theatre in terms of form, content, and location.”
Time Out
“The Foundry has long had the passion for mixing artistic rigor with social activism.”
The Brooklyn Rail
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
The Foundry is an ongoing performance of ideas — created by rigorous theatrical works, public dialogues and community engagement — that invites as many people as possible to consider what it means to be citizens of a world that we ourselves create.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642591699 • US $20.00• 6 in x 9 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Pundits, politicians, and other enlightened commentators regularly tell us that Capitalism is the greatest economic system ever to grace the planet. With the same breath they sing its praises and implore the lay observers to leave the job of understanding the magical powers of the market to the “experts” and professionals.
Yet, despite the efforts of these mainstream economists and their boosters, increasing numbers of people have begun to question why the system has produced such vast inequality and wanton disregard for its own environmental destruction. Answering these questions requires a radical theory of economics.
A People’s Guide to Capitalism offers exactly that in the form of an accessible, engaging, and refreshingly enraged introduction to how capitalism works, or rather doesn’t work for the vast majority of the world’s population. Drawing upon the ideas of Karl Marx, this book provides invaluable critical tools for activists who want to understand and dismantle the world of the 1%—a world that exploits, disenfranchises, oppresses, and dispossesses the many for the sake of the few.
Where conventional analysts see economics as numbers ticking off stock values and growth rates, A People’s Guide to Capitalism stirringly reminds us that the workings and failures of the economy are fundamentally about human beings, and should thus be of interest to everyone.
PRAISE:
“When Marxist economics becomes usable by the people most threatened by capitalism—that is when it becomes great and dangerous. Hadas Thier’s urgently needed book strips away jargon to make Marx’s essential work accessible to today’s diverse mass movements.”
Sarah Leonard, contributing editor to the Nation
“As the world descends into a financial and public health crisis, the savage inequalities of capitalism are being laid bare. Hadas Thier’s new book A People’s Guide to Capitalism, has arrived right on time to clearly explain why the poor and working class always bear the brunt of capitalism’s crises. Erudite and sharp, Thier unpacks the mystery of capitalist inequality with lucid and accessible prose. As we all enter into a world of new realities, we will need books like A People’s Guide to help us make sense of the root causes of the financial crises that shape so many of our struggles today.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
“Economists have every incentive to mystify their craft and to dress up their political judgments as scientific fact. Hadas Thier’s A People’s Guide to Capitalism is a thorough and accessible corrective, and sure to be an important primer for generations of activists.”
Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin
“A People’s Guide to Capitalism is a breath of fresh air on the left. Avoiding the obscure jargon of economics, Hadas Thier provides a rich, accessible introduction to how capitalism works. Ranging from exploitation at work to the operations of modern finance, this book takes the reader through a fine-tuned introduction to Marx’s analysis of the modern economy. Along the way, Thier combines theoretical explanation with contemporary examples to illuminate the inner workings of capitalism. In addition, A People’s Guide to Capitalism reminds us of the urgent need for alternatives to a crisis-ridden system.”
David McNally, Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston
“Times of economic instability, pandemics, and rising fascism have people looking for understanding. Luckily, radical traditions offer helpful tools. Hadas Thier’s book offers a brisk and manageable introduction to many of these ideas, and is unusually playful about it. A great book for proletarian chain-breaking.”
Rob Larson, Economics professor and author of Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley
“It is not easy explaining relatively complex ideas in a simple and clear manner. Ask any teacher. It’s a skill lacking in many. Hadas Thier has brilliantly succeeded in that challenge with her book introducing Marxist economics. She has delivered a clear, straightforward and entertaining explanation of all Marx’s basic theoretical insights into the nature and development of capitalism. And she has done so using modern examples that help the reader to understand why Marxist political economy is so clinical in its analysis of the reality of modern capitalist economics. I would say no one has done it better.”
Michael Roberts, author of The Long Depression: Marxism and the Global Crisis of Capitalism
“Thier’s book is a valuable introduction to Marxist concepts which helps us to see how Marxism can be used to deepen our knowledge of capitalism, beyond the level of mere appearance.”
Daniel Saunders, Bias Magazine
“A People’s Guide to Capitalism is a tremendous contribution to the understanding of economics today…It will be very useful both to veteran Marxists and people new to the subject. Everyone interested in this topic, and indeed anyone interested in fundamentally changing the world, should read this book.”
Steve Leigh, New Politics
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Hadas Thier is an activist, writer, and socialist based in New York.
ISBN-13: 9781608462711 • Trade paper • 6 x 9 • US $18 • 220 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Voices of the Future allows young people to express their opinions, beliefs, and thoughts to the world. Broken down by subject matter, each section begins with a selection from an interview between NBA star Etan Thomas and political sportswriter Dave Zirin, followed by a Thomas poem and the writings of a young author.
PRAISE:
“[Voices of the Future is] so necessary a book that it truly deserves the term fantastic.”
Chuck D, of Public Enemy
“Etan Thomas is this generation’s athlete with a moral conscience and a voice.”
Kevin Powell, author of Who’s Gonna Take The Weight?
“The Poetic voice of his generation.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
“Many of our youth are very concerned with what’s happening and what’s not happening now. They have vision and a lot more understanding than given credit for. This effort by Etan Thomas is a testament to that fact.”
Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets
“Etan Thomas is breaking it down for our young minds on how to be a vital part of this challenging world we all live in. Let’s give it up for Etan.”
Spike Lee
“Etan Thomas is a leader not only on the basketball court but off the court as well. He encourages young people to speak and write about the most crucial issues of our time.”
Amy Godman
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Etan Thomas is a recipient of the 2010 National Basketball Players Association Community Contribution Award as well as the 2009 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Foundation Inc Legacy Award. His body of work includes a collection of poems released in 2005 called More Than An Athlete, and Fatherhood: Rising to the Ultimate Challenge. His writings have appeared in CNN, the Huffington Post, Hoopshype.com and slamonline.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859288 • US $16 • 5.375 in x 8.312 in • 224 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Indonesia’s most celebrated writer speaks out against tyranny and injustice in a young and troubled nation.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer helps us understand a land whose history has been corrupted and distorted both by Western intervention and internal strife. Toer here discusses personal and political topics he could never before address in public, in a book completed just before his death in early 2006.
“What Pram says is moving, and at times painfully so. Following everything he has experienced, from his beginnings as a writer under Dutch imprisonment in the late 1940s through the period of his exile on Buru Island under the ‘New Order’ regime, it is striking to learn that Indonesia’s greatest living writer still describes his present condition as one of ‘internal exile’.”
Chris GoGwilt, Fordham University
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
André Vltchek is an American filmmaker and journalist. He worked as a war correspondent in Peru, Colombia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Mexico, East Timor and Bosnia. His most recent book is Western Terror : From Potosi to Baghdad (Common Courage Press). Vltchek is also a regular contributor to ZNet.
Rossie Indira is the production manager and translator of the documentary Terlena: Breaking of a Nation. Her father was imprisoned with Toer and was one of his closest confidants.
Nagesh Rao is Assistant Professor of English at The College of New Jersey, where he teaches Postcolonial Studies. His research on postcolonial literature and theory has appeared in several journals, including Race and Class, South Asian Review and Postcolonial Text.
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Saddle-stitched • ISBN-13: 9781608462544 • 8 5/8 x 11 1/4 • US $4.95 • 60 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
As the financial crisis continues to shake the global economy it has begun to expose cracks in the ideological edifice long used to justify neo-liberal policies of privatization and austerity. This informed and accessible primer drives a wedge into these cracks, allowing the non-experts among the 99% to understand the flaws in the economic philosophy of the 1%.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Eric Toussaint is president of the Committe for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debts, and author of numerous books on economic policy.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642597134 • US $12.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 120 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Personal narratives from farmworkers, sex workers, the undocumented, the incarcerated, and more—covering the first year COVID swept across the United States.
Unheard Voices of the Pandemic reveals through first-person narratives what happened the year the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the United States.
The seventeen stories included in this collection speak to the precarity, uncertainty, and injustice of that year, but also to bravery, solidarity, and generosity. Although the shadow cast by the COVID-19 pandemic is long, the insights gleaned through listening can last longer.
Dao X. Tran was born in Mỹ Tho and grown in Philadelphia, where she was active in antiracist and youth organizing. She is managing editor of the Voice of Witness oral history book series. In her former role as senior editor at Haymarket Books, she coedited with Michele Bollinger 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History. She is based in Brooklyn where she lives with her high schooler, Quyên, and dog, Paisley.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859165 • US $16 • 8.3 in x 14.5 in • 300 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A new, annotated edition of Leon Trotsky’s classic study of the relationship of politics and art. Trotsky penned this engaging book to elucidate the complex way in which art informs — and can alter — our understanding of the world. This new edition features an essay and full explanatory notes from Brown University English professor William Keach.
PRAISE:
“Roll over Derrida: Literature and Revolution is back in print. Nothing in the postmodern canon comes close to the intellectual grandeur of Trotsky’s vision of art and literature in an age of revolution, or his extraordinary meditations on the popular ownership of culture.”
Mike Davis, author,City of Quartz
“Re-reading Trotsky on literature forty years later is a delight. Literary critics of every persuasion could learn a great deal from this book. His defense of the classics and criticism of the avant-garde will surprise some, but when he mocks narcissism and says of the writer that he ‘is always preoccupied with his own self, tells stories about his own self, walks around his own self, sniffs at his own self, and licks his own self,’ many contemporary writers and columnists come to mind.”
Tariq Ali, author, The Clash of Fundamentalisms
“It will be a pity if the truculent tone of this book should deter readers from studying it closely, particularly as Trotsky’s argument grows more significant and less partisan as we advance. … His book has the vices and virtues of crude power ranging itself indiscriminately against self-conscious culture. Nevertheless his studies of particular authors are often as brilliant in analysis as they are violent in abuse; and the suggestiveness of much of his materialist dialectics is undeniable.”
Times Literary Supplement
“Trotsky displays as a critic not only, what one might perhaps expect, a kind of brilliant ferocity, but also considerable subtlety.”
Leonard Wolf
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Leon Trotsky was a leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution and is the author of My Life, The History of the Russian Revolution, and The Revolution Betrayed.
William Keach is Professor of English at Brown University. He is editor of Coleridge’s Complete Poems (Penguin, 1997) and author of Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics (Princeton, 2004).
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A work eighty years in the making, Leon Trotsky’s unfinished masterpiece: Stalin.
On 20th August 1940 Trotsky’s life was brutally ended when a Stalinist agent brought an ice pick crashing down on his head. Among the works left unfinished was the second part of his biography of Stalin.
Trotsky’s Stalin is unique in Marxist literature in that it attempts to explain some of the most decisive events of the 20th century, not just in terms of epoch-making economic and social transformations, but in the individual psychology of one of the protagonists in a great historical drama. It is a fascinating study of the way in which the peculiar character of an individual, his personal traits and psychology, interacts with great events.
How did it come about that Stalin, who began his political life as a revolutionary and a Bolshevik, ended as a tyrant and a monster? Was this something pre-ordained by genetic factors or childhood upbringing? Drawing on a mass of carefully assembled material from his personal archives and many other sources, Trotsky provides the answer to these questions.
In the present edition we have brought together all the material that was available from the Trotsky archives in English and supplemented it with additional material translated from Russian. It is the most complete version of the book that has ever been published.
PRAISE:
“A book on Stalin by Trotsky would be an event under any circumstances.”
Michael Karpovich, The New York Times
“Trotsky’s Stalin is sometimes brilliant and at all points highly informative and revealing”
Bertram D. Wolfe,The American Mercury
“Trotsky shows conclusively that Soviet historiography has become an arsenal of falsifications constructed to defend … Stalin’s regime”
Waldemar Gurian, TheAmerican Historical Review
“As an historian and biographer, Trotsky treats facts, dates and quotations with almost pedantic conscientiousness.”
Isaac Deutscher, Times Literary Supplement
“Because of his intimate participation in the events which he describes, Trotsky’s writings are always historically important.”
Orville Prescott, The NewYork Times
“This book will take its place among the great Marxist classics not simply as a brilliant biography but as a powerful weapon in the struggle for the communist future of man.”
John G. Wright, FourthInternational
“Like most of Trotsky’s writings, Stalin is a literary tour de force.”
Cloth • ISBN-13: 978080700348 • US $27.95 • 5.5 in x 8 in
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A celebration of the Black and Latinx LGBTQ underground subculture, uncovering its abundant legacy and influence in popular culture and queer rights.
What is Ballroom? Not a song, a documentary, a catchphrase, a TV show, or an individual pop star. It is an underground subculture founded over a century ago by LGBTQ African American and Latino men and women of Harlem. This unique intersectional culture transcends identity, acting as an unparalleled response to the systematic marginalization of minority populations.
Written directly from within the community, Ricky Tucker reveals the complex cultural makeup and ongoing relevance of House and Ballroom, a space where trans lives are respected and applauded. With each chapter framed as a “category” (Vogue, Shade, Pride, et al), And the Category Is offers an impressionistic point of entry into this subculture, its deeply integrated history, and how it’s been appropriated for mainstream audiences. Each category features an exclusive interview with an LGBTQ/POC Ballroom member—Lee Soulja, Benjamin Ninja, Twiggy Pucci Garçon, and more—whose life, work, and activism drives home that very category. At the height of its public intrigue and awareness thanks to TV shows like FX’s Pose, Tucker’s compelling narratives help us understand its relevance in pop culture, dance, public policy with regards to the queer community, and so much more.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ricky Tucker is a North Carolina native, storyteller, educator, lead creative and art critic. His work explores the imprints of art and memory on narrative, and the absurdity of most fleeting moments. He has written for The Paris Review, The Tenth Magazine, and Public Seminar among others and performed for reading series including The Moth Grand SLAM, Sister Spit, Born: Free, and Spark London. He received his BA from The New School as a Riggio: Writing and Democracy scholar, and a Writer/Teacher MA at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2017 he was chosen as a LAMBDA Literary Emerging Writer Fellow for creative nonfiction. Connect with him online at thewriterrickytucker.com.
NEXT TIME THEY’LL COME TO COUNT THE DEAD
War and Survival in South Sudan
By Nick Turse Haymarket Books (2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608466481 • US $15.95 • 220 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A dramatic, true story of men and women trapped in the grip of war, Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead is modern crisis reporting at its best.
For six weeks in the Spring of 2015, award-winning journalist Nick Turse traveled on foot as well as by car, SUV, and helicopter around war-torn South Sudan talking to military officers and child soldiers, United Nations officials and humanitarian workers, civil servants, civil society activists, and internally displaced persons–people whose lives had been blown apart by a ceaseless conflict there. In fast-paced and dramatic fashion, Turse reveals the harsh reality of modern warfare in the developing world and the ways people manage to survive the unimaginable.
Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead isn’t about combat, it’s about the human condition, about ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, about death, life, and the crimes of war in the newest nation on earth.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
“‘Horror shows are plentiful in a country at war,’ Nick Turse writes in this painful, chilling account of the rapid descent of South Sudan from the birth of a new country, resurrected from the ashes of bitter conflict, to utter despair and possible genocide. ‘But some are grimmer than others,’ he adds, finding them wherever he turns in this vivid, gripping account of inhuman cruelty, laced with rays of hope and courage and dignity amidst the horrors.”
Noam Chomsky
“The average journalist follows the herd of others. A bold one like Nick Turse goes to where the herd isn’t. His searing reporting in this book brings alive the suffering of a country that the United States, midwife to its birth, has largely forgotten.”
Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 and King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa
“Turse gives a sobering account of the horrific crimes against ordinary people that define South Sudan’s conflict. He shows how efforts to count the dead, investigate the crimes, and bring perpetrators to justice have so far failed. His compelling account reminds us why accountability is both urgent and necessary.”
Kenneth Roth, executive director, Human Rights Watch
“Nick Turse, alone among war reporters, is the wandering scribe of war crimes. Reading Turse will turn your view of war upside down. In South Sudan, troops run amok, desperate civilians shelter in squalid UN camps, international officials fail to record evidence of atrocities, while military and political bigwigs battle for power at the cost of their country. No glory here in Turse’s pages, but the clear voices of people caught up in this fruitless cruelty, speaking for themselves.”
Ann Jones, author of They Were Soldiers
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:
“Gripping and meticulous, Nick Turse’s reporting on Africa sheds much-needed light on shadowy missions the U.S. military would rather keep secret. His investigations of U.S. military missions in Africa in Tomorrow’s Battlefield reveal a secret war with grave implications for Africans and Americans, alike.”
Glenn Greenwald
“A dogged and intrepid journalist who won’t take ‘no comment’ for an answer, Nick Turse has done a fantastic job of exposing the U.S. military’s expansion into Africa and the proliferation of its secret missions on the continent.”
Craig Whitlock, Pentagon correspondent, Washington Post
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com, a contributing writer reporting on national security and foreign policy for The Intercept, and a fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, Village Voice, and many other publications. He has received a Ridenhour Prize for Investigative Reporting, a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and a Guggenheim Fellowship
The Changing Face of Empire is a devastating anatomy of the U.S. military’s new six-point program for twenty-first-century war. Following failures in Iraq and Afghan, as well as “military lite” methods and counterinsurgency, the Pentagon is now pioneering a new brand of global warfare predicated on special ops, drones, spy games, civilian soldiers, cyberwarfare, and proxy fighters.
From the Greater Middle East and Africa to Asia and Latin America, this new American style of warfare is already spreading around the world as secret drone bases expand, proxy armies are trained, and the CIA is further militarized. For the first time, Turse brings to the forefront an emerging way of war that few have noticed, but is sure to be in tomorrow’s headlines.
It may sound like a safer, saner brand of war-fighting – a panacea for America’s national security ills. In reality, it will prove anything but, as Nick Turse’s pathbreaking reportage makes all too clear. It’s a guarantee of global blowback.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at The Nation Institute. A 2014 Izzy Award winner, he has reported from the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa, and his pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse’s New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam received a 2014 American Book Award.
TOMORROW’S BATTLEFIELD
U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa
Nick Turse
Haymarket Books (2015, world English rights)
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608464630 • US $15.95 • 5 5/8 in x 7 5/8 in •156 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
You won’t see segments about it on the nightly news or read about it on the front page of America’s newspapers, but the Pentagon is fighting a new shadow war in Africa, helping to destabilize whole countries and preparing the ground for future blowback. Behind closed doors, U.S. officers now claim that “Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today.” In Tomorrow’s Battlefield, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Nick Turse exposes the shocking true story of the U.S. military’s spreading secret wars in Africa.
PRAISE:
“Gripping and meticulous, Nick Turse’s reporting on Africa sheds much-needed light on shadowy missions the US military would rather keep secret. His investigations of U.S. military missions in Africa in Tomorrow’s Battlefield reveal a secret war with grave implications for Africans and Americans, alike.”
Glenn Greenwald
“Nick Turse’s investigative reporting has revealed a remarkable picture of evolving US military operations in Africa that have been concealed from view, but have ominous portent, as he demonstrates vividly and in depth.”
Noam Chomsky
“In the first book length account of AFRICOM’s operations, Nick Turse chronicles how in a very short time, Africa went from the margins of US foreign policy—to be not just the warzone of tomorrow, but of today.”
Sean Jacobs, international affairs faculty at The New School and founder of Africa is a Country
“US military training missions, joint exercises, military aid operations in many different countries, most ruled by repressive regimes… sound like the Middle East? The Arabian Peninsula? Think again. The indispensable Nick Turse introduces us to the rapidly expanding American military footprint in Africa. It is astounding how few other journalists have paid attention to this highly important story.”
Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 and King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa
“A dogged and intrepid journalist who won’t take ‘no comment’ for an answer, Nick Turse has done a fantastic job of exposing the U.S. military’s expansion into Africa and the proliferation of its secret missions on the continent.”
Craig Whitlock, Pentagon correspondent, Washington Post
“Tomorrow’s Battlefield is an urgently needed resource for all those seeking ways to end military intervention in Africa.”
Lee Sustar, Socialist Worker
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com, a contributing writer reporting on national security and foreign policy for The Intercept, and a fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, Village Voice, and many other publications. He has received a Ridenhour Prize for Investigative Reporting, a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
SOUTHERN LADY, YANKEE SPY
The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy
Elizabeth R. Varon
Named one of the Top 5 Books on the South for 2003 by the Raleigh News & Observer
Named one of the Best Books of 2003 by the Richmond Times-Dispatch
Winner of the Richard Slatten Award for Excellence in Virginia Biography given by the Virginia Historical Society
Winner of the “People’s Choice Award” sponsored by the James River Writers Festival and Library of Virginia
Paper • ISBN: 9780195179897 • US $19.99 • 336 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Northern sympathizer in the Confederate capital, daring spymaster, postwar politician: Elizabeth Van Lew was one of the most remarkable figures in American history, a woman who defied the conventions of the nineteenth-century South. In Southern Lady, Yankee Spy, historian Elizabeth Varon provides a gripping, richly researched account of the woman who led what one historian called “the most productive espionage operation of the Civil War.” Under the nose of the Confederate government, Van Lew ran a spy ring that gathered intelligence, hampered the Southern war effort, and helped scores of Union soldiers to escape from Richmond prisons.
Varon describes a woman who was very much a product of her time and place, yet continually took controversial stands—from her early efforts to free her family’s slaves, to her daring wartime activities and beyond. Varon’s powerful biography brings Van Lew to life, showing how she used the stereotypes of the day to confound Confederate authorities (who suspected her, but could not believe a proper Southern lady could be a spy), even as she brought together Union sympathizers at all levels of society, from slaves to slaveholders. After the war, a grateful President Ulysses S. Grant named her postmaster of Richmond—a remarkable break with custom for this politically influential post. But her Unionism, Republican politics, and outspoken support of racial justice earned her a lifetime of scorn in the former Confederate capital. Even today, Elizabeth Van Lew remains a controversial figure in her beloved Richmond, remembered as the “Crazy Bet” of Lost Cause propaganda.
Elizabeth Varon’s account rescues her from both derision and oblivion, depicting an intelligent, resourceful, highly principled woman who remained, as she saw it, true to her country to the end.
PRAISE:
“An accomplished and engaging biography of a remarkably resourceful and determined woman, whose story shed considerable light on the role of southern Unionism in undermining the Confederate war effort, military and otherwise, and on the women who embodied and actively sustained that cause.”
Civil War History
“A thrilling detective story filled with clandestine meetings, cloak-and-dagger intrigue, disguises, surveillance and undercover work. While such well-known Civil War women spies as Belle Boyd and Rose O’Neal Greenhow remain shrouded in partisan mythology, Varon has unearthed hard evidence that establishes Van Lew as a genuine heroine of the Civil War era.”
Raleigh News & Observer
“A rich account of a complex and important figure in wartime Richmond…. Highly readable.”
Civil War Book Review
“Groundbreaking and altogether remarkable…. as accessible to the lay reader as a novel.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This is a wonderfully readable and engaging book. Varon brings Van Lew out of the realm of myth and into the much more interesting domain of history, offering us a woman who as spy, abolitionist and woman’s rights advocate was at once larger than life and at the center of her time.”
Drew Gilpin Faust, President of Harvard University and author of Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War and This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
“Detailed, astute and convincing.”
Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elizabeth R. Varon is the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History and Associate Director of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of many books.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9798888900956 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 336 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
What does the politics of solidarity look like in practice, and how can left-wing organizations grow—in numbers and power—while remaining accountable to the broader movements of which they are a part?
Against enormous odds and in the face of fierce pushback, the Palestine solidarity movement has succeeded in transforming the landscape of American politics. The movement has catapulted Palestine from being an untouchable topic in even liberal political circles to a central rallying cry in grassroots progressive organizing, one that is championed by some of the highest profile and beloved members of Congress.
In the fall and winter of 2023, with the attention of the world focused on Israel’s unprecedented aggression against the people of Gaza, millions across the globe mobilized in solidarity with Palestinians and their struggle for liberation. Jewish progressives in the US played a highly visible role in denouncing Israel’s actions and US complicity in them: leading mobilizations and disruptions from the US Capitol to Grand Central Station.
In this book, two key leaders and former staff of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) —Rebecca Vilkomerson and Rabbi Alissa Wise—focus on the important role of anti-Zionist Jewish organizing within the broader Palestine solidarity movement, reflecting on their decade of leadership of JVP and drawing lessons especially relevant to those organizing from a position of solidarity.
Against the backdrop of rapid and often devastating political developments, they explore how JVP grew larger as the organization shifted to the left and helped to alter the public narrative about Palestinian liberation, while also navigating the tensions of organization-building and creating a space for Judaism liberated from Zionism. Their insights help contextualize the intense suppression of activism for Palestinian freedom, while illuminating the roots of today’s flourishing Jewish solidarity with Palestinians worldwide.
In addressing their shortcomings and failures no less than their inspiring successes, Vilkomerson and Wise deliver an account of JVP’s organizing during the 2010s that offers crucial strategic lessons for anyone engaging in the collective work of building organizations and fighting for justice as our movements evolve over time.
PRAISE:
“A complex, beautiful, challenging picture of a decade in building a quintessentially Jewish movement that through thought, principles, and consistent strategic practice engages in effective, meaningful solidarity with Palestinians in our liberation struggle.”
Omar Barghouti, from the foreword
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Rebecca Vilkomerson has worked in social justice movement building for several decades, as an organizer, fundraiser, organizational development consultant and strategist. From 2009-2019 she was the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace. In 2022, the Solidaire Network published her report “Funding Freedom: Building Support for the Palestinian Freedom Movement in Philanthropy.” She is currently the Co-Director of the Funding Freedom project.
Rabbi Alissa Wise is a West Philadelphia-based organizational consultant, community organizer, educator, and ritual leader with over two decades of movement-building experience. Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian commentator and human rights activist. He is a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University, NY, and a master’s degree in philosophy (ethics) from Tel Aviv University.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
José Luis Vilson writes about race, class, and education through stories from the classroom and researched essays. His rise from rookie math teacher to prominent teacher leader takes a twist when he takes on education reform through his now-blocked eponymous blog, TheJoseVilson.com. He calls for the reclaiming of the education profession while seeking social justice.
PRAISE:
“José Luis Vilson has written a spellbinding book that explains the joys and burdens of teaching. The joys are the kids, with all their heartaches and dreams. The burdens are the politicians and careerists who snuff out the spirits of children and teachers. Read this book!”
Diane Ravitch, author, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools
“José Vilson writes from a place of authority about the intersection of race, class and America’s education system. His straight talk about the absurdity of America’s test obsession, its failure to meet or even acknowledge the needs of an increasingly diverse student population, and a reform movement that has reformed nothing, failed at much, and distracted from students’ very real needs is a telling portal on what’s really going on in American education today. Those who can relate to Vilson’s experiences as a student or a teacher will welcome his unvarnished honesty and reflections. And those for whom this is terra incognita will find an insightful and illuminating window on the educational experiences of America’s emerging majority — students of many hues and languages, whose families struggle every day, for whom education may be the only way up, yet who too often are failed by systems ill-equipped to foster their success. Vilson’s visceral accounts remind us of the humanity of teachers — their struggles and triumphs, their frustration with forces outside their classroom walls and, above all, their devotion to their students. By telling his own story and those of his students, Vilson shows why ‘teacher voice’ is essential to shedding the failures of the past and to reclaiming the promise of public education.”
Randi Weingarten, president, American Federation of Teachers
“Drawing from his own insight as a teacher, José Vilson hits right between the eyes, exposing how hardscrabble poverty and the pernicious effect of racism distort young lives. In This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education, Vilson argues for more teachers of color, more time for teachers to support each other, and more ways for teachers to shape policy. Bristling at the ‘cold calculus’ of tests, This Is Not a Test calls for practices that engage imagination and respect students as people. In gripping language, Vilson sends students an urgent message: ‘When we find our passions, we must enter into them boldly’ and believe in the value and gift of ourselves.’”
Dennis Van Roekel, president, National Education Association
“In its telling, José Vilson’s evocative collection of essays is ferociously honest and, as expected from someone whose creative impulses are informed by hip-hop, unapologetic and lyrical. A thoroughly engaging narrative about the intersection of race and culture, identity, economic disparity, and education, This Is Not a Test is a must-read for parents and educators who want to understand, truly and deeply, the challenges inner-city students face. It was, after all, written by one of those children, a young man from a marginalized community, who grew up and bum-rushed the system he dedicated his life to changing from within.”
Raquel Cepeda, author, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
“José’s autobiographical journey offers a big window for seeing why our nation must blur the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead them. With powerful prose and poetry, his narrative as student and then, later, an NYC teacher leader, loving father (and husband), and advocate for children paints a portrait of what public education can and must be for American society. José’s last chapter, ‘Why Teach,’ offers a hopeful vision for the future of the profession, in spite of wrongheaded policymakers who seek to control teachers rather than listen to and learn from them. José represents so many teachers across the United States whose pedagogical skills and leadership acumen have yet to be tapped in the transformation of teaching and learning. Read This Is Not a Test now!”
Dr. Barnett Berry, CEO and founder, Center for Teaching Quality
“Too many books about teaching read like dull academic treatises, condescending how-tos, or simplistic Hollywood scripts. José Vilson’s This Is Not a Test avoids these traps with a narrative that is by turns passionate and funny, angry and vulnerable, and full of keen insight born of on-the-ground experience in schools. Whether referencing Jay-Z or John Dewey, discussing corporate school reform or the intimacy of one-on-one interactions with students, Vilson is a bold and fearless writer, weaving his own story and struggles into broader conversations about race, equity, and the future of public schooling. His singular, urgent voice is one we all need to hear.”
Gregory Michie, author, We Don’t Need Another Hero: Struggle, Hope, and Possibility in the Age of High-Stakes Schooling
“José Vilson is a teacher of the highest order. Through the powerful narrative of his life both inside and outside of the classroom, José teaches us important lessons on every page of This Is Not a Test. José teaches us about the intersection of education, race, class and activism while calling all of us to do better—to be better—as we strive along with him to be the educators all our children need us to be. This book is a must-read for educators, soon-to-be educators, parents, students, and anyone who cares about education and the children of this country.”
Chris Lehmann, founding principal, Science Leadership Academy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
José Luis Vilson is a middle school math educator for in the Inwood / Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. He writes for Edutopia, GOOD, and TransformED / Future of Teaching, and his work has appeared in Education Week, CNN.com, The Huffington Post, and El Diario / La Prensa, NY.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642596977 • US $28.95 • 6 in x 9 in
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Hope Wabuke weaves together a coming-of-age narrative: a Black girl child of immigrants fleeing from genocidal terror to America.
This visceral and revelatory poetry collection tells the story of a family’s journey to flee the murderous reign of Uganda’s Idi Amin only to land in a racist American landscape. Wabuke digs deeply into a personal and ancestral history to bring these poems to life, articulating what it means to live in a Black female body navigating a diaspora haunted by British colonization and American enslavement.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Hope Wabuke is a Ugandan American poet, essayist, and writer. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir Please Don’t Kill My Black Son Please. Hope has published in The Guardian, The Root, Los Angeles Review of Books, and NPR, among others. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln, and a founding board member and former Media & Communications Director for the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
In Border and Rule, one of North America’s foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation.
Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule. Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, Border and Rule breaks through American exceptionalist and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world.
Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how racial violence is escalating deadly nationalism in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere.
A must-read in these difficult times of war, inequality, climate change, and global health crisis, Border and Rule is a clarion call for revolution. The book includes a foreword from renowned scholar Robin D. G. Kelley and an afterword from acclaimed activist-academic Nick Estes.
PRAISE:
“Harsha Walia’s work is a must-read for anyone interested in issues of immigration…The activist, author, and educator’s brand-new book, Border & Rule, explores how borders around the globe divide the working class, empower the ruling class, and criminalize refugees, along with the ways in which state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism are all connected.”
VICE
“This is a book of unsparing truth and dazzling ambition, providing readers with desperately needed intellectual ammunition to confront the inherent violence of borders. An enormous contribution to our movements.”
Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
“Read Harsha Walia and your understanding of the world will shift.”
Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone and The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
“In this exceptional book, Harsha Walia takes us on a stunning and terrifying tour of the Great Wall of Capitalism, the border killing zone where viral fascism feeds on the bodies of the poor and persecuted. Hell is already here.”
Mike Davis, co-author of No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border and Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties
“Harsha Walia’s decades of visionary leadership in border abolition and migrant justice work, along with her relentless intellectual rigor, is apparent in this immensely important book, arriving right when we need it most.”
Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next) and Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law
“We know that borders are violence. We know that violence numbs our collective imagination. We know that imagination is a muscle that must be exercised daily to prevent atrophy. This book is the workout. Border and Rule works us. With rigor, precision, and care, Harsha Walia pushes us beyond false solutions, rainbow imperialisms, and exclusionary projections. What a privilege to think with her, to build movement muscle for a world free of borders.”
Shailja Patel, author of Migritude
“This indispensable, deeply researched, and beautifully written book is the first and most in-depth global analysis of borders and immigration, wars and displacement, imperialism and western white nationalism. Always with her ear to the ground and paying close attention to the people whose lives are wrecked or lost, Walia demands action and offers real solutions.”
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion and An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
“Harsha Walia’s deeply thoughtful and well-written book makes creative connections that other writers have preferred to ignore. It offers a lucid, insightful survey of the most difficult political issues that we face.”
Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness and Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One Is Illegal and Women’s Memorial March Committee.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599657 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 368 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A collection of compelling, hard-hitting first-person essays, poems, and photos that expose what our punitive social systems do to so many Americans.
Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom “economic precarity” is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara Ehrenreich, who conceived of EHRP, once described as “the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling professionals.”
One essayist and grocery store worker describes what it is like to be an “essential worker” during the pandemic; another reporter and military veteran details his experience with homelessness and what would have actually helped him at the time. These dozens of fierce and sometimes darkly funny pieces reflect the larger systems that have made writers’ bodily experiences, family and home lives, and work far harder than they ought to be.
Featuring introductions by luminaries including Michelle Tea, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Astra Taylor, Going for Broke is revelatory. It shows us the costs of income inequality to our bodies and our minds—and demonstrates real ways to change our conditions.
PRAISE:
“The subjects’ voices jump from the page with pain and hope. More than that, they’re a provocation to the reader to consider the fine line between the lives of the “middle precariat” and their own, if there is one. Whether it’s the ironies of telling working people not to smoke when the system does precious little to secure basic health care, an underpaid adjunct instructor handing her EBT card to her student clerking at the local grocery store, or a person with hearing impairments whose doctor thinks that hiding her condition as a “surprise” for a medical student is a hilarious joke, the editors position the voices of the disadvantaged as compelling, worth listening to, and valuable.”
Booklist, Starred Review
“These emotionally charged and heart-wrenching narratives are both wide-ranging and powerfully rendered… A penetrating collection that is certain to challenge the readers’ views of those living in poverty.”
Kirkus
“Going for Broke is a gut punch, a collective portrait of precarity, a book of testimony and astonishing courage. This is a book with a pulse. It’s angry, as it must be, and often beautiful, and always brilliant with the illumination of injustice. These essays and memoirs and poems and pictures—this documentary art—is vital, intimate, and necessary. Please, read this heartbreaking, heart-mending volume.”
Jeff Sharlet, New York Times-bestselling author of The Undertow and The Family
“Going for Broke is an illuminating compendium of essays, poetry, photos and illustrations about the impact of inequality, bias, and poverty on the lives and careers of professional mediamakers. These deeply personal accounts deliver keen critiques of fractured and dehumanizing systems, but they also offer unexpected solutions and reveal the depth of human resilience. Going for Broke is ultimately a powerful example of why diversity in media matters—that journalism informed by a variety of lived experiences leads us to a more profound understanding of our disjointed, dynamic world.”
Bernice Yeung, author of In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers
“This moving anthology breaks down the barriers between experience and interpretation. Its contributors explore the underside of American society from many angles. But they do more than document hardship—they show how ordinary people who’ve been exploited and left behind forge understanding and solidarity out of the experience.”
Gabriel Winant, author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
“What the informative, insightful, nuanced, and gut-wrenching stories in Going for Broke show, over and over, is that the only difference between the haves and the have-nots is opportunity…. An eloquent plea…. As both EHRP and Going for Broke argue, policy and reporting will only be effective when informed by – if not actually driven by – the people that know what they’re talking about.”
—PopMatters
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Alissa Quart is the Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, created with her close collaborator, the late Barbara Ehrenreich. She is also the author of five acclaimed books of nonfiction including the forthcoming Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, Squeezed, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids, and Branded. She has written for many publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and TIME. She has also produced a number of documentary films, including “Jackson.” Quart has won an Emmy, an SPJ award, and received a Nieman fellowship, among other honors. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.
David Wallis is the Managing Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. He previously served as opinion editor of the Forward and deputy editor of The New York Observer. He has contributed to the New Yorker, Slate, The Washington Post and The New York Times, and has edited two critically acclaimed books, Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot To Print and Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression. In 2000, he founded Featurewell.com, an online syndication service that pays the majority of proceeds to contributors.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595420 • US $25.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 390 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Millions of people have fled from conflicts and persecution in all parts of this Northeast African country, and many thousands more have been enslaved as human spoils of war. In this book, refugees and abductees recount their escapes from the wars in Darfur and South Sudan, from political and religious persecution, and from abduction by militias. In their own words, they recount life before their displacement and the reasons for their flight. They describe life in the major stations on the “refugee railroads:” in the desert camps of Khartoum, the underground communities of Cairo, the humanitarian metropolis of Kakuma refugee camp, and the still-growing internally displaced persons camps in Darfur. NARRATORS INCLUDE:
ABUK, a native of South Sudan now living in Boston, who survived ten years as a slave after being captured by an Arab militia.
MARCY AND ROSE, best friends who have spent the vast majority of their lives in a refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. They remember almost nothing of their former homes in Sudan.
MATHOK, who struggled to find opportunities as a refugee in Cairo, but eventually fell into a world of gangs and violence.
JOHN, a teacher fighting to keep a school for Sudanese refugees alive in a poverty-stricken slum in Nairobi.
PRAISE:
Many of those who do survive escape with nothing but their story, something this essential collection of oral testimony records and, in a realistic way, celebrates… Time and again in this book, lives balance precariously between extraordinary acts of cruelty and lifesaving gestures of kindness.”
SFGate
“By telling the stories of a few of the millions of southern Sudanese refugees in their own words, and taking the time to get to know these people instead of portraying them as sad faces in a CNN video clip, editor Craig Walzer succeeded in bring these refugees’ often harrowing stories to light in a realistic, nuanced way.”
Maggie Fick, for the Enough Project
“This riveting collection of 17 narratives puts a human face on the human-rights tragedy of Sudan. Students of global studies and international relations will find an abundance of research information in the excellent appendices, but the heart and soul of the book is most certainly in the heart-wrenching narratives of these people.”
Paula Dacker,School Library Journal
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Trade paper• ISBN-13: 9798888900727•5.5 in x 8.5 in•304 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A beautifully-written, broadly accessible, and forthright argument for a solution to the migration crisis: open the gates.
Because of restrictive borders, human beings suffer and die. Closed borders force migrants seeking safety and dignity to journey across seas, trudge through deserts, and clamber over barbed wire. In the last five years alone, at least 60,000 people have died or gone missing while attempting to cross a border. As we deny, cast out, and crack down, we have stripped borders of their creative potential — as lines of contact, catalyst, and blend — turning our thresholds into barricades.
Brilliant and provocative, The Case for Open Borders deflates the mythology of national security through border lockdowns by revisiting their historical origins; it counters the conspiracies of immigration’s economic consequences; it urgently considers the challenges of climate change beyond the boundaries of narrow national identities.
This book grounds its argument in the experiences and thinking of those on the frontlines of the crisis, spanning the world to do so. In each chapter, through detailed reporting, journalist and translator John Washington profiles a character impacted by borders. He adds to those portraits provocative analyses of the economics and ethics of bordering, concluding that if we are to seek justice or sustainability we must fight for open borders.
In recent years, important thinkers have begun to urge a profoundly different approach to migration, but no book has made the argument as accessible or as compelling. Washington’s case shines with the multitudinous voices of people on the move, a portrait in miniature of what a world with open borders will give to our common future.
PRAISE:
“John Washington makes a strong, eloquent and even inspiring case for the relaxation and ultimately the abolition of border controls.”
JM Coetzee, recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature
“The Case for Open Borders offers an accessible and passionate case against border controls. Highlighting the complex stories and lived experiences of displaced and immobilized migrants in the crosshairs of violent bordering regimes, Washington shows how borders structure global difference across economies and ecosystems and ends with a multi-faceted and air-tight 21 arguments for open borders for people across the political spectrum.“
Harsha Walia
“John Washington provides us with an essential evidence based, politically sophisticated, and ethically compelling tool to address one of the most important issues of our time.”
Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing
The Case for Open Borders reveals the extent to which today’s global borders have become, at their very core, irredeemably inhumane. Through riveting reporting and wide-ranging citations and case studies, John Washington deconstructs a host of broken metaphors, facile analogies, and fallacious arguments—deconstructing modern notions of scarcity, enforcement, and “order.” This is essential reading, a powerhouse manual for re-imagining a world without walls.”
Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River
“John Washington’s The Case for Open Borders is a compelling, empathetic argument, a far-reaching look into the origins of borders. Washington is one of our most thoughtful, creative, and humane journalists, and this new work will make people think differently about what they think they already know, about what divides and unites the world in new, surprising ways. Highly recommended.” —Greg Grandin
“Perhaps the most profound book you’ll read this year. Washington cleaves through all the cruel obfuscations and militaristic cant that derange our border and immigration politics and offers a better human alternative. Borders will not save us, or our rapidly broiling planet, but Washington’s reportorial courage and ethical clarity just might.”
Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“The Case for Open Borders is eloquently written and packed with arguments and examples in the United States and beyond, reframing the issue in a way that undermines the familiar, tedious border bluster. If you hunger for new visions, new ways of doing things, and understand that the current situation is not inevitable, or even desirable, this book is for you.”
Todd Miller, journalist, and author of Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Washington is a staff writer at Arizona Luminaria, a community-focused media outlet where he writes about the border, climate change, democracy, and more. He has written for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Intercept, and other outlets. His first book, “The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexico Border and Beyond,” was published in 2020 by Verso Books. Washington is also a translator of books by Anabel Hernandez, Sandra Rodriquez Nieto, and others. His most recent translations include The Hollywood Kid, by Óscar Martínez and Juan Martínez, and Blood Barrios, by Alberto Arce, which won a PEN Translates Award. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781788734721 • US $116.99 • 352 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The first comprehensive, in-depth book on the Trump administration’s assault on asylum protections
Arnovis couldn’t stay in El Salvador. If he didn’t leave, a local gangster promised that his family would dress in mourning—that he would wake up with flies in his mouth. “It was like a bomb exploded in my life,” Arnovis said.
The Dispossessed tells the story of a twenty-four-year-old Salvadoran man, Arnovis, whose family’s search for safety shows how the United States—in concert with other Western nations—has gutted asylum protections for the world’s most vulnerable. Crisscrossing the border and Central America, John Washington traces one man’s quest for asylum. Arnovis is separated from his daughter by US Border Patrol agents and struggles to find security after being repeatedly deported to a gang-ruled community in El Salvador, traumatic experiences relayed by Washington with vivid intensity.
Adding historical, literary, and current political context to the discussion of migration today, Washington tells the history of asylum law and practice through ages to the present day. Packed with information and reflection, The Dispossessed is more than a human portrait of those who cross borders—it is an urgent and persuasive case for sharing the country we call home.
PRAISE:
“In an era of massive and unprecedented human migration, John Washington documents in his poignant book how the poverty and violence powerful nations inflict on poor countries is a major reason so many flee their lives and families. Offering expansive historical analysis of how ancient religions, cultures, and societies understood the imperative of welcoming the outsider, particularly those seeking safety from harm or death, and contrasting it with our current world order, Washington has written one of the most important books of our time on one of the most dire systematic injustices on our planet. I read this book in one sitting because I simply couldn’t put it down.”
Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars
“The Dispossessed is one of the most beautiful and wrenching books I’ve read in a long time. We are becoming a stateless world, as the combined effects of climate change, war, and struggles of resources push people from their land and their homes. John Washington’s book offers no easy answers, but in its empathy, it is a guide for how we confront the crisis with decency.”
Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
“John Washington delivers an absorbing, harrowing, and deeply moving reportage that renders the most thorough and critical assessment of the US asylum system that I have ever read.”
Todd Miller, author of Empire of Borders
“John Washington is a rarity in the world of Central American migration. He doesn’t parachute into tragedy. He travels with humility and seeks to understand, not to reaffirm his hypotheses. This is a book from someone who has been understanding for a long time. I’ve been covering migration in Central America, Mexico, and the United States for thirteen years, and I can say with complete conviction: Read this book.”
Óscar Martinez, author of The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail
“The Dispossessed is one book that you will not soon forget.”
Skye Anderson, Patch
“Even if so much of what makes the book riveting is patently awful or evil, Washington’s narrative is a crucial read for anyone interested in immigration policy or border dynamics.”
Russell Crandall, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Washington is a writer, translator, and activist. A regular contributor to The Nation magazine and The Intercept, he writes about immigration and border politics, as well as criminal justice, photography, and literature. Washington is an award winning translator, having translated Óscar Martinez, Anabel Hernández, and Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, among others. A long term volunteer with No More Deaths, he has been working with activist organizations in Mexico, California, Arizona, and New York for more than a decade. He is currently based in Brooklyn.
Evo Morales rode to power on a wave of popular mobilizations against the neoliberal policies enforced by his predecessors. Yet many of his economic policies bare striking resemblance to the status quo he was meant to displace. Based in part on dozens of interviews with leading Bolivian activists, Jeff Webber exams the contradictions of Morales’ first term in office.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jeffery R. Webber is Senior Lecturer, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Red October and From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia. With Todd Gordon, he is co-author of Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America.
PRAISE:
“Jeffery Webber has become one of the shrewdest chroniclers of political developments in Latin America. In this exciting new book, Webber looks at the history of the political movements in Bolivia over the last decade, and in particular the MAS movement of President Evo Morales. As the Left attempts to find escape routes from neoliberalism, there is a need for sober assessments of what is being accomplished. This book does just that for Bolivia, and makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the new Andean Left.”
Gregory Albo, Professor of Political Economy, York University, Toronto. Co-author with Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch of In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives (2010)
“From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia offers a critical examination of complex political processes in Bolivia since 2000 and challenges existing views of Evo Morales’ government. The analysis is characterized by exceptional rigor and clarity. Amidst widespread romanticism and ideological confusion, this book is a welcomed expression of sincere and realistic critique from the Left – an excellent example of constructive solidarity with anti-imperialist, socialist, and indigenous liberationist struggles. Webber offers a comprehensive, nuanced, and provocative account of the economic agenda, political reforms, foreign policy, intellectual currents, and social movement activity under the Morales administration. It is a valuable book for those who want to understand the contradictions within what has been described as the ‘Left tide’ in Latin America.”
Jasmin Hristov, author of Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia
“Webber’s book cuts bravely against the grain of the fashionable left-wing romanticizing of Evo Morales and the Bolivian process. It meticulously documents the extent to which neoliberalism still shapes Morales’s economic policies, and it successfully theorizes the contradictions of attempting to overlay an older model of state-led development—ECLAC’s structuralism, or import substitution—on top of an intact neoliberal foundation dominated by the export of non-value-added raw materials. The result is a ground-breaking expansion and application of the concept of ‘neostructuralism’ to the Bolivian experience, an analysis that also has implications for Venezuela and Brazil.”
Tom Lewis, co-author with Oscar Olivera of ¡Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia.
“For a decade now, social movements in Bolivia have been in the forefront of struggles for global justice, and no commentator has more perceptively mapped this process than Jeffery Webber. In this exciting new study, Webber brings together his deep knowledge, critical powers and social justice commitments to provide a stunning overview of Bolivia’s movement from rebellion to reform. Everyone concerned with contemporary social movements and class struggles urgently needs this book. Not only does From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia bring us up to speed about what is happening in the heart of the Bolivian struggle — it also offers enormous lessons for struggles for global justice across the planet.”
David McNally, Professor of Political Science, York University
“Jeff Webber’s striking critique from the left of Evo Morales’s MAS government is a position that needs to be heard and absorbed. In a spirit of politically engaged analysis, Webber ably and admirably exposes the difficult contradictions that must be grappled with if what Bolivians call the ‘process of change’ — the effort to move beyond the neoliberal regime of domination — is to advance.”
Sinclair Thomson, History Department, New York University
“Webber’s study focuses on the mass movements ‘from below’ of 2000–2005 and how these have been canalised into parliamentary reform by Evo Morales’ MAS government. Where the general strikes and mass demonstrations of the first half of the decade displayed an epic degree of participation, radicalism and popular empowerment, the Morales government has been marked by cautious change initiated by the state apparatus alone… a major strength of the book is that the author punctures the myth that Morales’ critics are mere ‘armchair revolutionaries’. He portrays a vibrant and continuing movement from below, for instance the Huanuni miners’ struggles, and the mass resistance to the oligarchs’ September 2008 coup attempt at a time when the government merely preached ‘calm’.”
David Broder, Red Pepper (UK)
“To Webber, it was the influx of mestizo intellectuals (personified by current Vice-President Álvaro García Linera) into the party after the unexpectedly strong showing in the 2002 elections that led to the transformation of the MAS into a reformist party bent on the achievement of a ‘re-constituted neo-liberalism’—due to the class interest that it serves. Much of his book is taken up with an unabashed Marxist critique of the MAS government for its ‘new’ reformist course; for failing even to reduce appreciably the acute levels of poverty among indigenous people at a time of high national income from gas exports; and for allowing the ‘re-articulation of rightwing forces’…. [Of the three books under review] Webber offers the most informative account of the confrontations of 2008, which many observers at the time predicted would lead either to secession or to civil war.”
Philip Chrimes, International Affairs
“Jeffery Webber makes a provocative argument about contemporary Bolivian political economy. He says that, despite all its anti-neoliberalism rhetoric, Evo Morales’ government has continued many of the features of Bolivia’s neoliberal past, instituting what he calls ‘reconstituted neoliberalism’. The liberatory potential of the early 2000’s, when indigenous and radical Left forces combined in mass mobilisations to overcome both racial and class exploitation, has been lost as Morales’ MAS party has moved away from mass politics to electoral politics. Webber catalogues a disappointing slide to reformism, arguing that the ‘revolutionary epoch’ did not produce a true social revolution, but rather a ‘neo-structuralist’ development model that reinforces existing class and capitalist structures…. Webber is aware that his interpretation of events in Bolivia will go against the grain for many on the Left, who hoped Morales would bring about the ‘cultural and democratic revolution’ he promised. Yet he argues forcefully for a reading that goes beyond discourse and rhetoric to a careful accounting of what the Morales government has actually done…. This book will be a significant intervention to the ongoing scholarly discussion about post-neoliberalism…. Clearly, the Morales revolution is being contested at every level. Webber’s book gives us more to think about as we observe this fascinating political process.”
Nancy Postero and Devin Beaulieu, Journal of Latin American Studies
“The advantage of a focus on contemporary El Alto… is that this is an ongoing struggle, and therefore open to continuous political interrogation and analysis. There already exist some excellent contemporary studies upon which to base interim conclusions. Jeffery Webber, for example, provides a compelling interpretation of events in Bolivia over the last decade or so. He views the years 2000–05 as a genuinely revolutionary epoch in a situation of deep cleavage between elite and popular classes. Popular rejection of neoliberal policies with respect to the use of treasured natural resources on the part of a state ruled by a traditional elite (and backed by the forces of international capital) fused with a long-standing struggle for liberation from racial repression by an indigenous, largely peasant population. The violence of the neoliberal regime provoked uprisings that led to Morales’s election in 2005…. While Morales’s political strategy after his election has helped to consolidate the power of the indigenous movements, according to Webber he effectively abandoned the class-based revolutionary perspective that emerged in 2000-05 in favor of a negotiated and constitutional compromise with landed and capitalist elites (as wells as accommodation to outside imperial pressures). The result, Webber argues, has been a ‘reconstituted neoliberalism’ (with ‘Andean characteristics’) after 2005, rather than any movement towards an anti-capitalist transition. The idea of a socialist transition has been postponed many years into the future.”
David Harvey, in Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012)
In a penetrating volume, Jeffery Webber explains the political dynamics and conflicts underpinning the contradictory evolution of left-wing governments and social movements in Latin America in the last two decades.
Throughout the 2000s, Latin America transformed itself into the leading edge of anti-neoliberal resistance in the world. What is left of the Pink Tide today? What is their relationship to the explosive social movements that propelled them to power? As China’s demand slackens for Latin American commodities, will governments continue to rely on natural resource extraction?
Webber grounds his study in an analysis of trends in capitalist accumulation from 1990 to 2015, throughout Latin America and particularly in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela. He explains inequality there today with a de-colonial Marxist framework, rooted in a new understanding of class and its complex associations with racial and gender oppression. Webber also discusses indigenous and peasant resistance to the expansion of private mining, agro-industry, and natural gas and oil activities. The book concludes with chapters on “passive revolution” in Bolivia under Evo Morales (2006-2015) and debates around dual power and class composition during the era of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (1999-2013).
PRAISE:
“Webber’s book is a welcome but sobering contribution to a literature on the existential crisis of what some in the last quarter century called the left and others referred to, following the EZLN, as ‘civil society.”
Heather Williams, Latin American Perspectives
“Over the past few years, Jeffery Webber has been one of the most prolific leftist critics of progressive or ‘Pink Tide’ governments in 21st-century Latin America. [The Last Day of Oppression and the First Day of the Same] is strong on both theory and empirical content…he presents cogent arguments in a cohesive way, and backs them up with a wealth of empirical evidence.”
Steve Ellner, Science and Society
“If you have ever wondered what happened to the beacon of hope that was, until recently, Latin America, this is the book to turn to. With supreme grasp of the continent’s politics, Jeffrey R. Webber unpacks the contradictions of the Left governments that once inspired dreams of a twenty-first century socialism. Most importantly, he shows how they banked on extracting natural resources for the global market and then distributing the crumbs to the masses – and how dismally that strategy failed. Weaving together GDP data and traditions of anticolonial resistance, individual biographies and debates in Marxist theory, always with a pulse of street movements running through the text, this is concrete analysis of the conjuncture as it should be done.”
Andreas Malm, author, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming
“At a time when most scholars of contentious politics have abandoned political economy, Jeffery Webber’s latest book is a breath of fresh air. He shows how the rise of the new Latin American Left was linked to a regional crisis of neoliberal capitalism at the turn of the millennium. And he shows how the delayed effects of the global economic crisis of 2007–2008 pushed Left and Center-Left governments to adopt a politics of austerity, creating new opportunities for the Right. Webber’s analysis is also sensitive to the class and other struggles within and between Left parties and movements, struggles which shaped how these formations would react to changing material circumstances. In all, this is simply the best book we have on the rise and current crisis of the new Latin American Left. It’s also a model for how to analyze contentious politics.”
Jeff Goodwin, New York University
“Combining Marxist and decolonial theoretical frameworks, Webber brings us much more than a study on economic policies: an insightful assessment of class struggles against the capitalist oligarchies and the market dictatorship in Latin America. In a brilliant discussion of José Carlos Mariátegui, he brings to the fore the relevance, for the present popular, peasant, and indigenous rebellions, of a utopian-revolutionary dialectic between the precapitalist past and the socialist future.”
Michael Löwy, author, Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe
“A lucid, incisive and indispensable contribution for understanding the rise and fall of left and center-left governments associated with Latin America’s ‘pink tide.’ Webber validates the superiority of a critical Marxian and decolonial approach for slicing through the thick layers of the center-left’s self-serving rhetoric and for clearly identifying the tactical and strategic tasks popular movements have confronted in recent years. In the context of a fleeting commodities boom, the center-left’s embrace of extractivism, compensatory state politics, as well as its penchant for servicing the interests of domestic and foreign capital while demobilizing social movements, lie at the core of its ultimate defeat. His meticulously-crafted analysis examines the ebb and flow social movements in diverse Latin American countries, and spans the critical years that opened up with Venezuela’s 1989 Caracazo and are seemingly being brought to a close by right-wing resurgence evidenced most clearly in the 2016 institutional coup against Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff. The end of the cycle of progressive governments poses new historical challenges. If they are to be successfully navigated, Latin American scholars (and societies) must overcome the stultifying effects of prevailing liberal conceptions about democracy, markets, capitalism and the root causes of inequality; Jeffery Webber’s book unflinchingly and brilliantly shows us ‘why’ but also ‘how’ to begin doing so.”
Fernando Leiva, author, Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jeffery R. Webber is Senior Lecturer, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Red October and From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia. With Todd Gordon, he is co-author of Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America.
Paper • ISBN-13:9781608468478 • US $19.95 • 155 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“Class War, USA is a rich collection of stories about ordinary people who resisted oppression and exploitation against all odds. Brandon Weber’s succinct and vivid essays capture crucial moments of struggle when working-class people built movements of hope and defiance. Evocative imagery, archival photographs, and descriptive text make history come alive in these pages.”
PRAISE:
“Brandon Weber knows how to tell a good story, and he has a knack for labor history. There are stories here you’ve never heard of and ones that you have—but read them all. They’ll light a fire under you!”
Mrill Ingram, editor of the Progressive
“At a time when unions face the possibility of extinction, Brandon Weber’s Class War, USA shows us that working-class struggle is the only strategy that has ever advanced the labor movement historically—and is also the only way forward today. This book is indispensable reading for today’s generation of young workers who—through no fault of their own—have no knowledge of the US working class’ vast tradition of struggle, or its relevance for the future. At the same time, Class War, USA is just as valuable for those who have withstood the relentless assault on unions over the last four decades—and will undoubtedly find tremendous inspiration in the history Weber so convincingly tells. It is also worth noting that Weber also recounts the stories of working-class struggles far beyond the realm of the official union movement, including the Stonewall Rebellion that launched the gay liberation movement in 1969 and the Attica prison uprising in 1971. At fewer than 150 pages, written in accessible language, illustrated with an abundance of original photographs, this book should be on the coffee tables of all those invested in returning to a tradition of class struggle in the US.”
Sharon Smith, author of Subterranean Fire
“Brandon Weber’s Class War USA isn’t just a retelling of well-known and not-so-well-known strikes. Weber has done for a new generation of social and labor activists what Sid Lens did for an earlier one: bring to life the hard scrabble union, social, and political struggles of working class people from the past to the present. And by the way, in case you ever wondered why Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” never became the national anthem, Weber has the answer.”
Kim Moody, a founder of Labor Notes and author of On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War
“Brandon Weber does a masterful job at succinctly bringing to life many gripping and insightful episodes from the rich history of American labor, allowing readers to draw invaluable lessons for today’s struggles. Yes, this was, and is, class war. In his colorful collection, Weber vividly shows that people working together can, against all odds in a culture that fetishizes individualism, bring about social progress. Now, let’s get these stories and lessons into the hands of those who buy into the
prevailing divisiveness and tribalism, so that they too can unite across racial, ethnic, gender and other barriers and be heard!”
Dr. Thomas Greven, Freie Universität Berlin/Germany
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Brandon Weber (1963-2020) was a member and activist in dozens of unions, and was raised in a United Auto Workers family. He most recently wrote for the online news site Upworthy, where he built a large readership for his labor history and current events pieces.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Throughout the world, teachers, parents, and students are experiencing wrenching changes in how schools are run, who teaches, and what may be taught. Corporate chiefs, politicians in their thrall, and foundations that receive funding from billionaires who profit from pro-business education policies are turning schools into factories that will produce minimally educated workers who compete for low-wage jobs. The noose of standardized testing is tightening, turning education into test preparation.
In The Future of Our Schools, Lois Weiner, an internationally known authority on urban teaching, teacher education, and teacher unions, advises today’s teachers about how to reverse this chilling agenda. She explains why teachers who care passionately about teaching and social justice need to unite the passion for teaching to efforts to democratize and transform teacher unions. Drawing on research and her experience as a public school teacher and union activist, this scholar/activist explains how to create the teachers unions public education desperately needs.
PRAISE FOR LOIS WEINER:
“Weiner has written a book that is informative, jarring in its analysis of prevailing assumptions about preparing urban teachers, and constructive in its designs for improved programs… She knows well the dilemmas of teacher education and the joys and difficulties of daily teaching. Few books on teacher education carry such authority of experience, blending analysis and passion, as this one does.”
Larry Cuban
“As a teacher who is currently working in an urban setting, I owe a lot of my success to Lois Weiner.”
Joe Bailey, English as a Second Language teacher
“If you are a teacher and have ever wondered who it is that is pulling your strings, and how and why they are doing it, you’ll find this book fascinating and frightening in equal measure.”
Phil Beadle, Guardian columnist and UK teacher, reviewing The Global Assault on Teaching, Teachers, and Their Unions: Stories for Resistance
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lois Weiner (http://www.loisweiner.org/) began her career in education as a high school teacher of English, journalism, and home economics, and for fifteen years taught in public schools in California, suburbs of New York, and New York City itself. After receiving her doctorate from Harvard Graduate School of Education, she began teaching education at New Jersey City University, where she now coordinates a graduate program for experienced urban teachers.
Her first book, Preparing Teachers for Urban School was honored by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for its contribution to research on teacher education. To bring her research to a wider audience, Dr. Weiner wrote Urban Teaching: The Essentials, which has been called a “classic” and is used in programs of teacher education throughout the U.S. and Canada. She is the author of dozens of articles on urban teaching and school reform and is well-known in teacher education as a scholar/activist committed to social justice.
A life-long teacher union activist, she has served as an officer of three different union locals. She served as President of the AERA Special Interest Group on teachers’ work and teachers unions. She and Mary Compton co-edited a path-breaking collection of essays, The Global Assault on Teaching, Teachers, and Their Unions: Stories for Resistance. The book is unique in combining an international perspective on the attacks on public education with analysis about the role of teacher unions in developing global resistance.
Professor Weiner completed her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Stockholm, Sweden and received her M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a member of the editorial board of New Politics, for which she blogs on education and politics.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608468515 • US $19.00 • 340 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A piercing historical explanation of poverty and inequality in African societies today and the social impact of resource-driven growth, Extracting Profit explains why Africa, in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, has undergone an economic boom. Rising global prices in oil and minerals have produced a scramble for Africa’s natural resources, led by investment from U.S., European and Chinese companies, and joined by emerging economies from around the globe. African economies have reached new heights, even outpacing rates of growth seen in much of the rest of the world. Examined through the lens of case studies of the oil fields of the Niger River Delta, the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline and the East African infrastructure boom, this period of “Africa rising” did not lead to the creation of jobs, but has instead fueled the extraction of natural resources, profits accruing to global capital, and an increasingly wealthy African ruling class.
Extracting Profit argues that the roots of today’s social and economic conditions lie in the historical legacies of colonialism and the imposition of so-called “reforms” by global financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The chokehold of debt and austerity of the late twentieth century paved the way for severe assaults on African working classes through neoliberal privatization and deregulation. And while the scramble for Africa’s resources has heightened the pace of ecological devastation, examples from Somalia and the West African Ebola outbreak reveal a frightening surge of militarization on the part of China and the U.S.
Yet this “new scramble” has not gone unchallenged. With accounts of platinum workers’ struggles in South Africa, Nigerian labor organizing and pro-democracy upheavals in Uganda and Burkina Faso, Extracting Profit offers several narratives of grassroots organizing and protest, pointing to the potential for resistance to global capital and fundamental change, in Africa and beyond.
PRAISE:
“Lee Wengraf’s Extracting Profit provides a breathtakingly detailed account and analysis of some of the major socioeconomic ills that have been plaguing Africa for centuries.”
Review of African Political Economy
“The history of resource frontiers everywhere is always one of lethal violence, militarism, empire amidst the forcing house of capital accumulation. Lee Wengraf in Extracting Profit powerfully reveals the contours of Africa’s 21st century version of this history. The scramble for resources, markets, and investments have congealed into a frightening militarization across the continent, creating and fueling the conditions for further political instability. Wengraf documents how expanded American, but also Chinese, presence coupled with the “war on terror,” point to both the enduring rivalry among global superpowers across the continent and a perfect storm of resource exploitation. Wengraf offers up a magisterial synopsis of the challenges confronting contemporary Africa.”
Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley
“Lee Wengraf’s Extracting Profit is at once historical and contemporary. It unpacks ongoing resource crimes by analytically exposing its historical roots and pointing to ways by which the oppressed can cut off the bonds that lock in their subjugation.”
Nnimmo Bassey, Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation
“Extracting Profit provides a great arch of scutiny from the earliest carve-up of the African continent, through colonialism, war, imperialism, to the recent neoliberal take- over. The book demonstrates the continued importance of Marxist analysis on the continent, asserting the centrality of class analysis and a project of revolutionary change. Wengraf provides us with a major contribution, that highlights contemporary developments and the role of China on the African continent that has perplexed and baffled scholars. An indispensable volume.”
Leo Zeilig, author of Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution
“One of the most well-known stylized facts of Africa’s recent growth experience is that it has been inequality-inducing in ways that previous growth spurts were not. Lee Wengraf, in her new book Extracting Profit, expertly utilises the machinery of Marxian class analysis in making sense of this stylized fact. Along the way we learn much about Africa’s historical relationship with imperialism and its contemporary manifestations. This book should be required reading for all those who care about Africa and its future.”
Grieve Chelwa, Africa Is A Country
“In recent years countries in the African continent have experienced an economic boom—but not all have benefited equally. Extracting Profit is a brilliant and timely analysis that explodes the myth of “Africa Rising,” showing how neoliberal reforms have made the rich richer, while leaving tens of millions of poor and working class people behind. Lee Wengraf tells this story within the context of an imperial rivalry between the United States and China, two global superpowers that have expanded their economic and military presence across the continent. Extracting Profit is incisive, powerful, and necessary: If you read one book about the modern scramble for Africa, and what it means for all of us, make it this one.”
Anand Gopal, author, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.
“Extracting Profit is a very important book for understanding why the immense majority of the African population remain pauperised, despite impressive growth rates of mineral-rich countries on the continent. Reading Extracting Profit would be exceedingly beneficial for any change-seeking activist in the labor movement within and beyond Africa.”
Baba Aye, Health and Social Services Policy Officer of Public Services International
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lee Wengraf is a writer and activist based in New York City. Her articles have appeared in International Socialist Review, Socialist Worker, Pambazuka News, and the Review of African Political Economy.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Cloth • ISBN-13: 9781608465910 • US $17.95 • 225 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Tomas Young’s War is the tragic yet life affirming story of a paralyzed Iraq War veteran who spent his last ten years battling heroically with his injuries, while courageously speaking against America’s wars.
Based on hours of interviews with Young and those close to him, the book puts the reader alongside Young as he struggles with life as a paralyzed veteran, suffering frustration and humiliation as he attempts to reenter society and resume as normal an existence as possible. It shows his fight to balance his precarious health with his drive to speak out for veterans care and against the war, and the impact his catastrophic injuries had on his family and his relationships.
This emotional and powerful book sheds light on many crucial but often overlooked issues such as veterans’ care, public attitudes toward the disabled, medical marijuana, and the terminally ill. Tomas Young’s War shares everything, as unflinchingly honest as Tomas himself: the depression, the pain, the love, and laughter…the life of this man whose world was turned upside down by an Iraqi bullet more than ten years ago. Throughout, it serves as a powerful testament to the true cost of war.
PRAISE:
“I consider myself extremely fortunate to have known Tomas Young. I’m grateful that this powerful book of Mark Wilkerson’s will allow readers to experience the strength, humor and wisdom that this strong-willed and courageous man maintained til the very end. I miss him intensely.”
Eddie Vedder
“Tomas Young joined the army to wage war, and emerged a champion of peace. The grievous injury he suffered in Iraq consigned him to a wheelchair, but from there he rose to incredible heights, raising the hue and cry against an illegal war and those who authored it. Mark Wilkerson’s biography of Tomas Young is difficult but essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the ravages of war and the torment suffered by veterans and their loved ones. This book is a tribute to Tomas, written proof that profound humanity can survive the terrible crucible of war.”
Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of Democracy Now!
“Tomas Young’s is a story that every American should know. A soldier who paid a terrible price for the crimes of his superiors, Young courageously spoke out against the illegal war that eventually took his life, and attempted to hold those who initiated it accountable. Mark Wilkerson has done a great service in rendering Young’s life, and the lives of those who cared for him, in their full humanity.”
Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
“Powerful, moving, inspiring. When I finished reading this book I felt it was my duty to state again that I will do whatever it takes to ensure there are no more young Americans who will have to go through what Tomas had to endure. Never again. Thank you Tomas and thank you Mark for telling his story.”
Michael Moore, Academy Award-winning director
“There is nothing more courageous than a soldier who stands up against an unjust war. Tomas Young was a true American hero.”
Tom Morello
“Tomas Young’s war in Iraq lasted only five days, long enough to oblige Americans who sent him there to read this intimate, harrowing account of the life he lived after.”
Ann Jones, author of They Were Soldiers
“An extremely poignant statement on human vulnerability and the devastation of war.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Tomas Young, an army soldier paralyzed in Iraq, surmounted his injuries to become one of the most powerful and eloquent voices denouncing the war. He condemned with a righteous fury those who lied to lead us into war, including George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and called for them to be prosecuted and tried for war crimes. He grieved for all who were injured or killed in the conflict, American and Iraqi. He spoke on their behalf. And as his health deteriorated to the point where he was unable to leave his bed he penned in his last letter one of the most scathing indictments of the Iraq war and the terrible betrayal he and his fellow veterans endured. He served as the conscience of the nation. And although his life was cut short, his is the final word on a war that should have never been fought.”
Chris Hedges, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
“Tomas Young’s War is a heart-warming and heartbreaking story of a courageous soldier and his family. Few books reveal the graphic details of how families deal with the catastrophic war injuries of their loved ones–Mark Wilkerson’s Tomas Young’s War does just that in a sympathetic and at times humorous way. I first met Tomas in 2005 when he and his wife arrived in hot Camp Casey, Texas to challenge President Bush’s war on Iraq, the war that had almost killed him and had left him gravely injured. Over the next 8 years, as his body deteriorated, his mind remained clear about the Bush administration’s lies that took the nation to war and he became an important voice for peace, not war!”
Ann Wright, Colonel, US Army Reserve (Ret.) and former US diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq war
“Brilliantly rendered… Amid the unpleasant realities of urinary tract infections, hollow bed sores, leaking urine bags, failed erections, a collapsing marriage and blinding loneliness, Wilkerson finds a story of love, hope and fierce loyalty… Before another Commander in Chief swaggers before the news cameras and declares ‘Bring it on’ I want him to read this book.” —Phil Donahue, from the foreword
“As the dogs of war were howling in early 2003 and the media was simply regurgitating their hysteria, Robert Greenwald and I organized a group of celebrities, politicians and military experts who could get attention and launched Artists United to Win Without War. We were excoriated, of course, but at least created some debate before the inevitable disaster took place. In later years I argued that Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and their attending lapdogs should be required to walk naked down the main street of every American city, town and hamlet that lost a child, or part of one, to that horrifying misadventure and suffer the ignominy they so deeply deserved at the hands of the people they had betrayed. After reading Tomas Young’s War, Mark Wilkerson’s immensely powerful, pain-streaked book, I would only amend my prescription for these war criminals by adding the requirement that they be forced to read the book, aloud, while walking those streets.”
Mike Farrell, author of Just Call Me Mike; A Journey to Actor and Activist
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Mark Wilkerson spent eight years in the U.S. Army as an AH-1 Cobra & UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crew chief with the 3rd Infantry & 101st Airborne Divisions. He was deployed with the 101st to Mogadishu, Somalia, for six months in 1993. Mark has three children, Alex, Nick and Sam. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife Melissa. This is his third book.
Phil Donahue changed the face of daytime television, pioneering the audience-participation talk format as the host of the Donahue show, a 29-year run which stands as the longest of its kind in U.S. television history. His TV journalism earned him 20 Emmy Awards — 9 as host and 11 for the show — as well as the George Foster Peabody Award; the President’s Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus; the Media Person of the Year Award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance; and induction into the Academy of Television’s Hall of Fame. TV Guide named Donahue one of the Greatest Television Shows of All Time.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608460915 • 5 x 7 • 220 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A timely, well grounded analysis that reveals an inconvenient truth: we can’t save capitalism and save the planet.
As global temperatures rise, and polar bears continue to drown due to melting arctic ice, there has emerged a growing chorus of voices crying out to save the planet. Yet the harsh reality ignored by pundits and policy makers is that capitalism stands as the most intractable obstacle in the way of the changes that could avert ecological devastation.
Consciousness of the threat to our environment is growing, yet he majority of solutions on offer, from using efficient light bulbs to biking to work, focus on individual lifestyle changes, yet the scale of the crisis requires far deeper changes. Time still remains to save the planet, but only by building social movements for environmental justice that can demand qualitative changes.
PRAISE:
“Ecology and Socialism exposes the real roots of the ecological crisis: a global economic and social system that always puts profits before people. This book is more than essential reading – it is apowerful weapon in the fight to save our planet.”
“Finally, a book that bridges the best of the scholarly and activist literatures in socialist ecology! Sophisticated and compelling, eschewing academic jargons ‘post-modern’ and otherwise, Ecology and Socialism more than competently champions a Marxist approach to environmental crisis and the kind of economic democracy needed to achieve an ecologically friendly system of production and human development.”
Paul Burkett, author of Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective
“Chris Williams has written an exhaustively researched book that explores how the climate crisis is an outgrowth of our political economy. Our planet is in peril, but the solution is not technological, it is social. This book should gain the attention of many sociologists as Williams brings the problem of climate change to our doorstep, aiming to articulate the relationship between capitalism and the environment. The text moves deftly from a discussion of the science behind climate change to the social and political processes that are fueling this planetary crisis. The book draws on the most current climate change science. One of the features of this book that makes its contribution especially unique is the translation of the science of climate change to lay- person’s terms. Williams takes us through scientific, political, sociological, and philosophical terrain. Williams’ text is prescient in the sense that climate change will eventually bring us to question all areas of social life, namely capitalism, technology, and material productions.
Perhaps the greatest insight in the text is that our public ‘green’ discourse has misunderstood climate change as a technological problem with technological solutions, and as an individual problem with individual solutions. Williams crafts the entire text around this single point: climate change is a problem that stems from our economic system. Thus, solving the problem requires economic change. The green movement has taken a deadly wrong turn by focusing on individual responsibility and technological solutions. This brand of individualism is an extension of a neoliberal agenda, which conceals the reality that capitalism itself is the problem. …
This tremendous, well-written, urgent and persuasive book offers the paradigm shift needed to turn the green movement toward real systemic change.”
Sociological Inquiry
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Chris Williams is a long-time environmental activist and Vice President of the Union of Adjunct Faculty at Pace University, where he teaches course in energy and the environment, physics, and chemistry. He is also the chair of the science dept at Packer Collegiate Institute.
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A beloved folk singer presents an impassioned account of the fall and rise of the small American towns she cherishes. Dubbed by the New Yorker as “one of America’s very best singer-songwriters,” Dar Williams has made her career not in stadiums, but touring America’s small towns. She has played their venues, composed in their coffee shops, and drunk in their bars. She has seen these communities struggle, but also seen them thrive in the face of postindustrial identity crises.
Here, Williams muses on why some towns flourish while others fail, examining elements from the significance of history and nature to the uniting power of public spaces and food. Drawing on her own travels and the work of urban theorists, Williams offers real solutions to rebuild declining communities.
What I Found in a Thousand Towns is more than a love letter to America’s small towns, it’s a deeply personal and hopeful message about the potential of America’s lively and resilient communities.
PRAISE:
“Dar Williams, a singer-songwriter in the folk-introspective vein, has taken a road less traveled. She has written a book about grass-roots urban renewal…[What I Found in A Thousand Towns] does remind us that walking on the wild side—which these days means taking a stroll outside one’s techno-bubble—is a trip worth taking”
Wall Street Journal
“The popular folk singer and songwriter Dar William’s new book is not another endless parade of music memoirs. Having performed around around the United States for so many years, Williams writes about how she believes towns can best thrive in an age of economic and environmental struggles…. [What I Found in a Thousand Towns] reads as if Pete Seeger and Jane Jacobs teamed up, more a report from the Green party than the green room.”
New York Times Book Review
“During a time of political, economic, and social upheaval across the United States, Williams’ grounded optimism is a refreshing corrective.”
Kirkus Reviews
“What I Found in a Thousand Towns is a thoughtful and passionately explored journey of how American towns can revitalize and come to life through their art, food, history, mom and pop business, and community bridge building. Dar Williams gives us hope and vision for the possibilities of human connection.”
Emily Saliers, musician, Indigo Girls
“To become a great city planner takes three things: strong powers of observation, the ability to communicate, and the opportunity to travel the world to learn from successes and failures. Anyone who has heard a Dar Williams song is familiar with her gifts in the first two categories. And what better vocation than wandering minstrel to get to know the wide world and all its places? So observant, so articulate, and so prepared, Ms. Williams has created a stealth city planning text that is unsurpassed in its ability to charm and enlighten.”
Jeff Speck, city planner and author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
“Dar Williams channels the soul and spirit of Jane Jacobs. With a song-writer’s eye for detail and an urbanist’s nose for what makes cities and towns work, she provides stunning portraits of America’s great small towns.What I Found in a Thousand Townswill open your eyes to the key things that makes communities succeed and thrive even when the deck is stacked against them. I love this book: You will too.”
Richard Florida, author of The New Urban Crisis
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dar Williams is a folk singer-songwriter based in the Hudson Valley. She has recorded nine studio albums and released two live albums, and has been touring non-stop across the US for over twenty years. Williams is also a well-known environmental, feminist, and social justice activist; she works with children on planting bee-friendly gardens, wrote a series of green living columns for the Huffington Post, champions progressive gender and sexual politics, and performs at many benefit concerts including one to support the prisoner rights group Bread and Roses. In 2012, she taught “Music Movements in a Capitalist Democracy” at Wesleyan University. In 2013, she started leading a songwriting retreat called “Writing a Song That Matters” at the Garrison Institute in Garrison, New York. Williams is the author of two young adult novels, Amalee and Lights, Camera, Amalee.
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An astonishing graphic novel that brings Chomsky’s political analysis to bear on real people’s stories on the frontlines of America’s struggle for economic justice and human dignity.
The Instinct for Cooperation innovatively balances those real-life stories of struggle with conversations the author has had with Chomsky on how best to understand them.
Although the themes are wide-ranging, this book is ultimately about the importance and need for spaces of resistance in countering state and other institutional forms of violence. For example, when discussing the removal of books by police and sanitation workers from Zuccotti Park in November of 2011, Chomsky paused to say “Arizona knows all about that,” referring to the 2010 ban of Mexican American Studies in Tucson schools under Arizona House Bill 2281, which deemed classes that taught “ethnic solidarity” to be illegal. Rather than footnote the reference, Wilson tells that story. Like Joe Sacco’s animated political journalism, this book offers a unique perspective on current issues, while providing a major contribution to the understanding of Chomsky’s political theories.
PRAISE:
“Seeing the work of a bright new comics writer like Jeff makes me optimistic about the future of comics and society in general.”
Seth Tobocman, founding editor of World War 3 Illustrated, author of You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive, War in the Neighborhood, and Len
“Laser-sharp graphics and critical analysis, and radical love. Wilson and Gouveia give us a conversation with Chomsky that everyone can be part of.”
Kate Evans, author of Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, and Threads: From the Refugee Crisis
“By placing readers into an intimate conversation with one of this country’s most important thinkers, as well as members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Wilson and Gouveia provide a vital entry point for those seeking to wrestle with these ideas, sure to inspire further explorations of their own.”
Nick Sousanis, author of Unflattening, assistant professor at San Francisco State University
“What can be done? How do we begin to understand how to organize our thoughts — and our communities — to right inherent wrongs? One place to start might be The Instinct for Cooperation. Wilson, a doctoral candidate in geography at the University of Arizona, has distilled some of Chomsky’s ideas about threats to social and economic justice into a series of conversations with Chomsky and others. These chats highlight moments in history that could very well be seen as tipping points, where decisive action spawned by malaise replaced complacency. This book may serve as a primer for those who are interested in learning how to better organize themselves to confront issues that plague our communities.”
Santa Fe New Mexican
“Life-affirming and sophisticated. This book is full of laser-sharp graphics and critical analysis, and radical love. Wilson and Gouveia give us a conversation with Chomsky that everyone can be part of. Even if you think you know all about Chomsky, this beautiful book is well worth checking out”
Nation of Change (July BookClub Pick)
“Jeffrey Wilson breaks new ground, adding “graphic interview” to the expanding categories of nonfiction comics and introducing Chomsky and his political thoughts to a new audience of readers.”
Chris Gavaler, Pop Matters, 18 July 2018C
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jeffrey Wilson is a graphic novel author and Ph.D. Candidate in Geography at the University of Arizona. His work focuses on the social determinants of health, specifically the effect of foreclosures on health in Detroit, Michigan. He received a Master’s in Anthropology from Columbia University where his work explored the ways ethnography could be written in graphic novel form. He has published one of the first graphic novel interviews to appear in a peer-reviewed journal. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642592719 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In myriad ways, each narrator’s life has been shaped by loss, injustice, and resilience—and by the struggle of how to share space with settler nations whose essential aim is to take all that is Indigenous.
Hear from Jasilyn Charger, one of the first five people to set up camp at Standing Rock, which kickstarted a movement of Water Protectors that roused the world; Gladys Radek, a survivor of sexual violence whose niece disappeared along Canada’s Highway of Tears, who became a family advocate for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls; and Marian Naranjo, herself the subject of a secret radiation test while in high school, who went on to drive Santa Clara Pueblo toward compiling an environmental impact statement on the consequences of living next to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Theirs are stories among many of the ongoing contemporary struggles to preserve Native lands and lives—and of how we go home.
PRAISE:
“This edited collection offers deep, experiential dives into law, policy, and life for contemporary Indigenous peoples in what is now the United States and Canada. These conversations and life histories, taken together, tell us a critical story of the effort it takes to live and transform structures that Indigenous peoples inherit and push against in bids for dignity, sovereignty, care, and justice in the twenty-first century.”
Audra Simpson (Kahnaw.:ke Mohawk), professor of anthropology, Columbia University
“This extraordinary book powerfully conveys both the cruel, ongoing dispossession of the Indigenous peoples of North America and their astounding spiritual wealth and resilience. How We Go Home introduces this complex history organically, through riveting and varied first-person stories skillfully woven into a larger tale. All those who seek to create a more just and sustainable way of living should be grateful for the essential wisdom shared in these oral histories.”
Amy Starecheski, director, Columbia University, Oral History MA Program
“Sara Sinclair’s editorial vision in How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America is both radically inclusive and extraordinarily caring. There are so many deep histories here that we need to talk about, that we haven’t been talking enough about. How We Go Home requires us to genuinely hear and listen to the stories and the histories that have shaped Indigenous lives across North America. All of these stories resonated with me in an intimate and personal way—it’s at times both comforting and alarming to read about so many diverging life experiences that so often strike parallels with my own. How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America is an astounding achievement and a deeply necessary book that creates space for a multiplicity of Indigenous lived experiences.”
Jordan Abel, author of Nishga
“How We Go Home is a testament to modern-day Indigenous revitalization, often in the face of the direst of circumstances. Told as firsthand accounts on the frontlines of resistance and resurgence, these life stories inspire and remind that Indigenous life is all about building a community through the gifts we offer and the stories we tell.”
Niigaan Sinclair, associate professor, Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba and columnist, Winnipeg Free Press
“The voices of How We Go Home are singing a chorus of love and belonging alongside the heat of resistance, and the sound of Indigenous life joyfully dances off these pages.”
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of As We Have Always Done
“This book will inspire you, it’ll piss you off; it’ll take you on a journey of ugly things and beautiful things and back again. It’s a hell of a read. Keep this one on your shelf and never let it go. Damn right.”
Simon Moya-Smith (Oglala Lakota and Chicano), writer, NBC News THINK
“How We Go Home confirms that we all have stories. These stories teach us history, morality, identity, connection, empathy, understanding, and self-awareness. We hear the stories of our ancestors and they tell us who we are. We hear the stories of our heroes and they tell us what we can be.”
Honourable Senator Murray Sinclair
“In this continent, oral history began with the creation and retelling of the rich, multilayered, and historical origin stories of Indigenous people whose lives were intricately bound to the land. The destruction and stealing of that land, and the systematic and highly personalized violence targeted against so many Indigenous communities, threatened the very act of storytelling itself. This book took my breath away, and then restored it. It refuses silence. It restores the word—and the field of oral history in unleashing the story of our origins.”
Mary Marshall Clark, director, Columbia Center for Oral History
“Heartfelt, stunning oratory and painfully revealing, Sinclair has gathered together a collection whose stories inform our history. A must-read.
Lee Maracle, Sto:lo poet, novelist, storyteller, and activist
Voice of Witness (VOW) advances human rights by amplifying the voices of people impacted by injustice. Cofounded by author Dave Eggers, writer and educator Mimi Lok, and physician Lola Vollen, the work of VOW is driven by the transformative power of the story, and by a strong belief that an understanding of crucial issues is incomplete without deep listening and learning from people who have experienced injustice firsthand.
Sara Sinclair is an oral historian of Cree-Ojibwa and German-Jewish descent. Sara was the lead interviewer for Columbia Center for Oral History Research’s Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project, and coedited a book from these narratives, published by Columbia University Press in August 2019.
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Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642595796 • US $15.95 • 5.25 in x 7.5 in • 330 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
When Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, it left no part of the archipelago unscathed. The hurricane triggered floods and mudslides, washed out roads, destroyed tens of thousands of homes, farms, and businesses, caused the largest blackout in US history, knocked out communications, led to widespread food, drinking water, and gasoline shortages, and caused thousands of deaths.
The seventeen oral histories collected in Mi María: Surviving the Storm share stories of surviving the storm and its long aftermath as people waited for relief and aid that rarely arrived. Zaira and her husband floated on a patched air mattress for sixteen hours while floodwaters rose around them. The road washed out in front of Emmanuel as he desperately tried to drive his pregnant wife who had begun labor to the hospital. Luis and his father anxiously counted the days that the dialysis clinic remained closed and lifesaving treatment was unavailable, while Miliana’s mother was sent home from the hospital —undiagnosed— only to fall critically ill in her own home.
Weaving together long-form oral histories and shorter testimonios, the book offers a multivocal peoples’ history of disaster that fosters a greater understanding of the failures of governmental disaster response and the correlating perseverance of the people impacted by these failures, highlighting the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. Ultimately, the ways in which these oral histories demonstrate the strength of community response to disaster in Puerto Rico are pertinent to other parts of the world that are being impacted by our current climate emergency.
PRAISE:
“This latest volume of the brilliant Voice of Witness series is this collection of 17 oral histories from people who survived Hurricane Maria which hit Puerto Rico in 2017. This book is not only an illustration of the resiliency and community needed to survive a storm like this, but a testament to people around the world for whom climate change hits hardest.”
Ms. Magazine
“A crucial oral history by Puerto Ricans surviving the twin disasters of Hurricane María and colonialism.”
Molly Crabapple, author, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham)
“For a disaster born at the intersection of colonization and the climate crisis, only a first-person plural account can truly do justice in a post-tragedy landscape where there has been no justice. Mi María: Surviving the Storm is a triumph of eyewitness accounts that centers survivors and tells a three-dimensional truth that can only be pieced together from multiple perspectives.”
Aya de León, author, Side Chick Nation
“Through first-person narratives and biographical profiles Mi María offers a kaleidoscope of experiences and personal stories that take readers behind the headlines of Hurricane María. The book offers an important archive of experiences, challenges, and stories that are otherwise absent from mainstream coverage of Puerto Rico and is sure to be of interest to both current audiences and future generations of readers interested in the lived experience of one of the largest political and environmental disasters in US history. The chance to hear directly from those left out of national headlines is at once moving, unsettling, and eye-opening.”
Yarimar Bonilla, coeditor, Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm
“Passionate and urgent; heart-wrenching and deeply infuriating. Mi María holds space for us to process the multiple and ongoing traumas of Hurricane María—the violence and devastation of the storm itself, yes, but also the deep-seated traumas of state failure, colonial neglect, and capitalist corruption Puerto Ricans found themselves forced to find solutions to while rebuilding their communities in the aftermath of the storm. These are stories not just of resilience. They are stories of resistance, solidarity, and the ethos of mutual aid—the daring to radically reimagine our world in new ways when confronted with our own survival.”
Sara Awartani, Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights at Harvard University
“Though the narrators in Mi María endure great hardship, their stories soar with strength and resolve and love of their fellow humans. Anyone who loves Puerto Rico must read this book.”
Dave Eggers, writer, cofounder of Voice of Witness
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608469581• US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in• 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Oral history is a universal form of storytelling. For many years, Voice of Witness has shared powerful stories of people impacted by injustice with a broad audience of readers. Say It Forward extends this work, offering a guide for social justice storytelling that outlines the critical methodology at the core of Voice of Witness’s evocative oral history collections. Field reports such as “OG Told Me” and “Tales of Tar Sands Resistance” candidly detail how to harness the power of personal narrative to expose larger issues of inequality.
PRAISE:
“Stories are humankind’s connective tissue, and Say It Forward reminds us the process through which we document a story is as important and powerful as the story itself.”
Lauren Markham, author of The Far Away Brothers
“Oral history changes lives. Claire Kiefer and Cliff Mayotte have made a profoundly clear, fluid, and accessible guide to doing your own oral histories, and teachers, students, and parents: I beg you to try it.”
Dave Eggers, Voice of Witness cofounder and author, The Monk of Mokha and What Is the What
“Say It Forward is a useful guide for anyone new to recording the oral histories of vulnerable populations. Voice of Witness makes plain how to work with sensitivity, respect, and care.”
Danielle Jackson, cofounder, Bronx Documentary Center
Voice of Witness (VOW) advances human rights by amplifying the voices of people impacted by injustice. Cofounded by author Dave Eggers, writer and educator Mimi Lok, and physician Lola Vollen, the work of VOW is driven by the transformative power of the story, and by a strong belief that an understanding of crucial issues is incomplete without deep listening and learning from people who have experienced injustice firsthand.
Cliff Mayotte is the Education Program Director with Voice of Witness. He previously edited The Power of the Story: The Voice of Witness Teachers Guide to Oral History published in 2013 by Voice of Witness and McSweeney’s.
Claire Kiefer is the author of Bear Witness, forthcoming from Big Pencil Press in Fall 2018. She is a Voice of Witness curriculum specialist.
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Paper • ISBN-13:9781608469567• US $17.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in• 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An estimated 80,000 Americans are held in solitary confinement in prisons across the country. Solitary confinement, often in cells no bigger than 6 by 10 feet, means 24 hours per day with little or no meaningful human contact.
Six By Ten explores the mental, physical, and spiritual impacts of America’s widespread embrace of solitary confinement, as told through the first-person narratives of individuals subjected to solitary confinement, family members on the outside, and corrections officers. Each chapter presents a different individual’s story and probes how Americans from all over the country and all walks of life find themselves held in solitary for years or even decades at a time.
PRAISE:
“The stories stop you in your tracks, but the appendices help move progress forward with simplicity, depth, and hope, beginning with ten things anyone can do that are impactful and accessible. The educational pieces of the book give apt background on the history and usage of solitary confinement, allowing even those examining the practice for the first time to have a firm grasp of the situation. Six by Ten moves Americans to action for humanity and fairness in the criminal justice system.”
Foreword Reviews
“Deeply moving and profoundly unsettling.”
Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
“A consistently eye-opening, urgent report on the use and misuse of prisoner isolation. ”
Voice of Witness (VOW) advances human rights by amplifying the voices of people impacted by injustice. Cofounded by author Dave Eggers, writer and educator Mimi Lok, and physician Lola Vollen, the work of VOW is driven by the transformative power of the story, and by a strong belief that an understanding of crucial issues is incomplete without deep listening and learning from people who have experienced injustice firsthand.
Mateo Hoke is writer, journalist, and coeditor of Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life under Occupation. He studied journalism at the University of Colorado and the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Taylor Pendergrass is an advocate and activist around ending mass incarceration and racial injustice in the criminal legal system. He currently works for the ACLU and lives in Denver, Colorado. He graduated from Duke University and the University of Colorado School of Law.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781608466184 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A collection of oral histories told by the thousands of young people fleeing violence and poverty in Central America.
They are a mass migration of thousands, yet each on travels alone. Solito, Solita, (“Alone, Alone”), is a Voice of Witness collection of oral histories which tell the story of youth refugees fleeing their home countries and traveling for hundreds of miles seeking safety and protection in America.
These powerful narrators describe why they fled their homes, what happened on their dangerous journeys through Mexico, how they crossed the border, and their ongoing struggle to survive in the United States. In our era of fear, xenophobia, and outright lies, these stories amplify the powerful voices of immigrant youth. What can they teach us about abuse and abandonment, bravery and resilience, hypocrisy and hope? In fitful bursts or breathless revelations, they bring us into their hearts and onto streets filled with the lure of freedom and fraught with violence. From fending off kidnappers with knives and being locked in freezing holding cells to tearful reunions with parents, Solito, Solita’s evocative stories bring to light the authentic experiences of young people struggling for a better life across the border.
PRAISE:
“In this moving and expertly researched collection of 15 narratives, Mayers, a historian and professor, and Freedman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, offer readers oral histories told by some of the ‘thousands of children… trekking from Central America to El Norte’ and some of the mothers making the journey with their children…The authors end by urging readers to take political action to help migrants like those interviewed here. This work carries a harrowing message.”
Publishers Weekly
“A poignant, uncompromising addition to the growing literature on the plights of migrating asylum-seekers from Central America.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Intense testimonies that leave one shivering, astonished at the bravery of the human spirit.”
Sandra Cisneros, MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and author of The House on Mango Street
“Solito, Solita gives readers the rare chance to hear directly from young migrants who have risked everything for a better life on our side of the border. With unflinching clarity, they detail the violence they left behind, the fear and difficulties they face after arrival, and the hope and resiliency that carries them through it all. They have courageously shared these experiences with the idea that people like us might read their stories and be moved to action, and we owe it to them to do so.”
Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River
“This book fills a crucial missing piece in today’s immigration debate. Everyone who cares about immigration—and about migrants—should read it.”
Aviva Chomsky, professor at Salem State University and author of Undocumented
“Stories of war and exile, of migrations and survival—a most pertinent collection for our times, one that puts a human face on the greatest tragedy and humanitarian crises of our generation. This collection is a must read for politicians that demonize refugees and a call to action for everyone else.”
− Alejandro Murguia, San Francisco Poet Laureate Emeritus and Professor of Latina/ Latino Studies at San Francisco State University
“Immigration narratives are too often reduced to tropes, to statistics and numbers, to binary politics and manipulative rhetoric, but not so in this volume of stories. Solito, Solita reaches beyond and beneath the headlines, clearing the mess and the noise so that we can hear the voices that matter most in contemporary migration: those of young migrants themselves.”
Lauren Markham, author of Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life
“These raw voices pulse with heartbreak, resilience, hope and even joy, shining a light on the forces that compel young people to flee their homes in the Northern Triangle in search of safety and solace in the United States. A must read for today’s immigration debate.”
Sara Campos, co-director of the New American Story Project
“This is a thorough, compassionate, and necessary book that allows an unique set of voices – child refugees – to be heard. The framing of the narratives and the Introduction offer important information about the U.S. role in the proliferation of violence and corruption but the work remains focused on the crucial individual voices.”
Voice of Witness (VOW) advances human rights by amplifying the voices of people impacted by injustice. Cofounded by author Dave Eggers, writer and educator Mimi Lok, and physician Lola Vollen, the work of VOW is driven by the transformative power of the story, and by a strong belief that an understanding of crucial issues is incomplete without deep listening and learning from people who have experienced injustice firsthand.
Steven Mayers is a writer, oral historian and Professor of English at the City College of San Francisco.
Jonathan Freedman is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, author, and writing mentor at the City College of San Francisco. His novel, The Last Brazil of Benjamin East, (2014 Bright Lights Press) was critically acclaimed. He graduated from Columbia University, traveled overland from America to Bolivia, and lived in Brazil, Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Distinguished Editorial Writing for his prophetic editorials calling for immigration reform.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9789131859790 • US $12 • 5 x 7 in • 240 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
An indispensable history and contemporary guide to the struggle for authentic sexual equality and liberation.
The movement for LGBT rights has greatly expanded sexual freedom, but many challenges confront the struggle for equality. Sherry Wolf’s Sexuality and Socialism offers a Marxist analysis that links today’s struggles for equal rights to a future based on genuine liberation.
PRAISE:
“‘What humans have constructed they can tear down.’ This is the powerful insight of this rare book that is at once politically important, theoretically and historically sophisticated, and clearly written. Sexuality and Socialism is enlivened in its engagement with a number of controversies, including those over the alleged biological determination of homosexuality, the myth of Black homophobia, and the consequences of postmodernist theories for the politics of gay liberation. Above all else, Wolf puts forward a cogent defense of the Marxist tradition — long and wrongly reviled as homophobic in itself — as a way to explain how LGBT oppression arose and what we can do to put it to bed.”
Dana Cloud, University of Texas at Austin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sherry Wolf is on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review. She has written for publications including MRZine and CounterPunch and has spoken across the country on the struggle for gay and lesbian liberation.
CAPITALISM’S CRISIS DEEPENS
Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown
By Richard D. Wolff
Haymarket Books (April 2016)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608465958 • US $18.95 • 223 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
While most mainstream commentators view the crisis that provoked the Great Recession as having passed, these essays from Richard Wolff paint a far less rosy picture. Drawing attention to the extreme downturn in most of capitalism’s old centers, the unequal growth in the its new centers, and the resurgence of a global speculative bubble, Wolff – in his uniquely accessible style – makes the case that the crisis should be grasped not as a passing moment but as an evolving stage in capitalism’s history.
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:
“Probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist”
New York Times Magazine
“Ideas of economic democracy are very much in the air, as they should be, with increasing urgency in the midst of today’s serious crises. Richard Wolff’s constructive and innovative ideas suggest new and promising foundations for much more authentic democracy and sustainable and equitable development, ideas that can be implemented directly and carried forward. A very valuable contribution in troubled times.”
Noam Chomsky
“Richard Wolff is the leading socialist economist in the country. This book is required reading for anyone concerned about a fundamental transformation of the ailing capitalist economy!”
Cornel West
“Bold, thoughtful, transformative—a powerful and challenging vision of that takes us beyond both corporate capitalism and state socialism. Richard Wolff at his best!”
Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism; Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy, University of Maryland
“From Fox to Occupy, it seems everyone wants to hear what American Marxist Richard Wolff has to say about economics…. He has gone from being a rare thing – an American Marxist – to something even rarer: a popular American Marxist.”
The Guardian
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Visiting Professor at the New School University in New York. Wolff’s recent work has concentrated on analyzing the causes and alternative solutions to the global economic crisis. His groundbreaking book Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism inspired the creation of Democracy at Work, a nonprofit organization dedicated to showing how and why to make democratic workplaces real.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781608462476 • 5 5/8 x 8 1/2 • $18 • 220 p.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A new historical vista is opening before us in these changing times, Wolff writes in this compelling new manifesto for a democratic alternative economy based on workers directing their own workplaces.
Capitalism as a system has spawned deepening economic crisis alongside its bought-and-paid for political establishment. Neither serves the needs of our society. Capitalism never provided jobs adequate to our ranges of skills or jobs that engage our desires to excel and develop our capacities. Capitalism never enabled working people to genuinely participate in the democratic control of our lives on and off the job. Now capitalism cannot provide jobs at all for millions of people, wastes the idled tools and equipment, and deepens poverty and insecurity.
One root cause of today’s social problems is the lack of genuine democracy in our economy as well as in our politics. The solution requires the institution of genuine economic democracy, starting with workers directing their own workplaces, as the basis for a genuine political democracy. A transition toward that solution is emerging out of capitalism’s failures and the healthy social demand to do better.
Here Wolff lays out a hopeful and concrete vision of how to achieve the transition. He speaks directly to the many people who will no longer tolerate the current system’s suffocating economic inequality and political corruption, people looking for a concrete program of action.
LINKS:
In the following exchange with Bill Moyers, economist Richard Wolff emphatically makes the case for a higher U.S. minimum wage, stressing the benefits to low-wage employees and to the economy, but also addressing popular counter-arguments:
“You’ve taken the folks at the bottom — the people who work hard, full-time jobs — and you’ve made their economic condition worse over a 50-year period, while wealth has accumulated at the top,” Wolff tells Bill Moyers. “What kind of a society does this?”
“Ideas of economic democracy are very much in the air, as they should be, with increasing urgency in the midst of today’s serious crises. Richard Wolff’s constructive and innovative ideas suggest new and promising foundations for much more authentic democracy and sustainable and equitable development, ideas that can be implemented directly and carried forward. A very valuable contribution in troubled times.”
Noam Chomsky
“Richard Wolff is the leading socialist economist in the country. This book is required reading for anyone concerned about a fundamental transformation of the ailing capitalist economy!”
Cornel West
“From Fox to Occupy, it seems everyone wants to hear what American Marxist Richard Wolff has to say about economics. … He has gone from being a rare thing – an American Marxist – to something even rarer: a popular American Marxist.”
The Guardian
“Imagine a country where the majority of the population reaps the majority of the benefits for their hard work, creative ingenuity, and collaborative efforts. Imagine a country where corporate losses aren’t socialized, while gains are captured by an exclusive minority. Imagine a country run as a democracy, from the bottom up, not a plutocracy from the top down. Richard Wolff not only imagines it, but in his compelling, captivating and stunningly reasoned new book, Democracy at Work, he details how we get there from here – and why we absolutely must.”
Nomi Prins, author of It Takes a Pillage and Black Tuesday
“Bold, thoughtful, transformative — a powerful and challenging vision of that takes us beyond both corporate capitalism and state socialism. Richard Wolff at his best!”
Gar Alperovitz, Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy, University of Maryland; author, America Beyond Capitalism
“Probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist.”
New York Times Magazine
“Imagine a country where the majority of the population reaps the majority of the benefits for their hard work, creative ingenuity, and collaborative efforts. Imagine a country where corporate losses aren’t socialized, while gains are captured by an exclusive minority. Imagine a country run as a democracy, from the bottom up, not a plutocracy from the top down. Richard Wolff not only imagines it, but in his compelling, captivating and stunningly reasoned new book, Democracy at Work, he details how we get there from here — and why we absolutely must.”
Nomi Prins, Author of It Takes a Pillage and Black Tuesday
Praise for Capitalism Hits the Fan (book and DVD):
“With unerring coherence and unequaled breadth of knowledge, Rick Wolff offers a rich and much needed corrective to the views of mainstream economists and pundits. It would be difficult to come away from this… with anything but an acute appreciation of what is needed to get us out of this mess.”
Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education, City University of New York
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Visiting Professor at the New School University in New York. Wolff’s recent work has concentrated on analyzing the causes and alternative solutions to the global economic crisis. Wolff is also the author of Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism and Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. He hosts the weekly hour-long radio program “Economic Update,” which is syndicated on public radio stations nationwide, and he writes regularly for The Guardian and Truthout.org. Wolff appears frequently on television and radio to discuss his work, with recent guest spots including “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “Moyers & Company,” “Charlie Rose,” “Up with Chris Hayes,” and “Democracy Now!.”
The coronavirus pandemic, the deepening economic crash, dangerously divisive political responses, and exploding social tensions have thrown an already declining American capitalist system into a tailspin. The consequences of these mounting and intertwined crises will shape our future.
In this unique collection of over 50 essays, “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself,” Richard D. Wolff argues clearly that “returning to normal” no longer responds adequately to the accumulated problems of US capitalism. What is necessary, instead, is transition toward a new economic system that works for all of us.
PRAISE:
“A blueprint for how we got here, and a plan for how we will rescue ourselves”
Chris Hedges
“A magnificent source of hope and insight.”
Yanis Varoufakis
“In this compelling set of essays, and with his signature clarity, intensity, accessibility and deference to historical and present perspective, Wolff has issued not just a stark warning, but concrete reasoning, as to why this time really should be different.”
Nomi Prins
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Visiting Professor at the New School University in New York. Wolff’s recent work has concentrated on analyzing the causes and alternative solutions to the global economic crisis. His groundbreaking book Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism inspired the creation of Democracy at Work, a nonprofit organization dedicated to showing how and why to make democratic workplaces real. Wolff is also the author of Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism and Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. He hosts the weekly hour-long radio program “Economic Update,” which is syndicated on public radio stations nationwide, and he writes regularly for The Guardian and Truthout.org. Wolff appears frequently on television and radio to discuss his work, with recent guest spots including “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “Moyers & Company,” “Charlie Rose,” “Up with Chris Hayes,” and “Democracy Now!.”
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9780359467020 • US $25.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 100 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Why should we pay attention to the great social critics like Marx? Americans, especially now, confront serious questions and evidences that our capitalist system is in trouble. It clearly serves the 1% far, far better than what it is doing to the vast mass of the people. Marx was a social critic for whom capitalism was not the end of human history. It was just the latest phase and badly needed the transition to something better. We offer this essay now because of the power and usefulness today of Marx’s criticism of the capitalist economic system.
PRAISE:
Praise for Understanding Socialism
“Richard Wolff’s book is the best accessible and reliable treatment we have of what socialism is, was, and should be. It is clear, concise, and compelling. In a time in which socialism is more popular than capitalism among the young, we now have a strong and powerful case for why socialism is what radical democracy looks like.”
Cornel West
“Rick Wolff puts the social back in socialism by centering the people, the places and the passions that other economists strip out. In the same accessible style that has made his programs and lectures such a hit, he explains his subject in a way that’s not only smart, but makes the rest of us feel smart. It’s actionable intelligence for the every person.”
Laura Flanders
“There are few economists who are the equal of Richard Wolff, which he once again proves with his latest book. Lucid, brilliant and uncompromising in his dissection of the capitalist system he also provides a sane and just socialist alternative to capitalist exploitation, one we must all fight to achieve.”
Chris Hedges
“Wolff’s 138-page book is an accessible and insightful primer that undertakes a critical examination of the history of state-led socialism while offering a refreshing vision of a new model based upon workplace democracy.”
Gregory N. Heires, Labor journalist and Portside Labor moderator
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Visiting Professor at the New School University in New York. Wolff’s recent work has concentrated on analyzing the causes and alternative solutions to the global economic crisis. His groundbreaking book Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism inspired the creation of Democracy at Work, a nonprofit organization dedicated to showing how and why to make democratic workplaces real. Wolff is also the author of Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism and Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. He hosts the weekly hour-long radio program “Economic Update,” which is syndicated on public radio stations nationwide, and he writes regularly for The Guardian and Truthout.org. Wolff appears frequently on television and radio to discuss his work, with recent guest spots including “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “Moyers & Company,” “Charlie Rose,” “Up with Chris Hayes,” and “Democracy Now!.”
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9780578227344 • US $30.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 150 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Understanding Socialism tackles the taboos and unveils the often hidden histories of socialism, but most importantly it offers a way forward: a socialism built on democracy in the workplace. A blend of history, analysis and opinion, Understanding Socialism is an honest and approachable text that knocks down false narratives, confronts failures, and offers a path to a new socialism based on workplace democracy.
Understanding Socialism not only explains what socialism is and has meant to various proponents, it also looks at the past transition from feudalism to capitalism as a model to help us visualize the next transition out of capitalism. Understanding Socialism explores how socialist theory was used and applied to shape the histories of countries like Russia and China principally, and many other countries in smaller but important ways. It analyzes the successes and defeats of those countries, the world’s reactions to them (anti-socialism and fascism), and how all of those factors offer important lessons for the building of a 21st century socialism.
PRAISE:
“Richard Wolff’s book is the best accessible and reliable treatment we have of what socialism is, was, and should be. It is clear, concise, and compelling. In a time in which socialism is more popular than capitalism among the young, we now have a strong and powerful case for why socialism is what radical democracy looks like.”
Cornel West
“Rick Wolff puts the social back in socialism by centering the people, the places and the passions that other economists strip out. In the same accessible style that has made his programs and lectures such a hit, he explains his subject in a way that’s not only smart, but makes the rest of us feel smart. It’s actionable intelligence for the every person.”
Laura Flanders
“There are few economists who are the equal of Richard Wolff, which he once again proves with his latest book. Lucid, brilliant and uncompromising in his dissection of the capitalist system he also provides a sane and just socialist alternative to capitalist exploitation, one we must all fight to achieve.”
Chris Hedges
“Wolff’s 138-page book is an accessible and insightful primer that undertakes a critical examination of the history of state-led socialism while offering a refreshing vision of a new model based upon workplace democracy.”
Gregory N. Heires, Labor journalist and Portside Labor moderator
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Visiting Professor at the New School University in New York. Wolff’s recent work has concentrated on analyzing the causes and alternative solutions to the global economic crisis. His groundbreaking book Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism inspired the creation of Democracy at Work, a nonprofit organization dedicated to showing how and why to make democratic workplaces real. Wolff is also the author of Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism and Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. He hosts the weekly hour-long radio program “Economic Update,” which is syndicated on public radio stations nationwide, and he writes regularly for The Guardian and Truthout.org. Wolff appears frequently on television and radio to discuss his work, with recent guest spots including “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “Moyers & Company,” “Charlie Rose,” “Up with Chris Hayes,” and “Democracy Now!.”
Paper • ISBN-13:9781608467969 • US $18 • 6 in x 9 in • 180 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In Marx at the Arcade, acclaimed researcher Jamie Woodcock delves into the hidden abode of the gaming industry, unravelling the vast networks of artists, software developers, and factory and logistics workers whose material and immaterial labor flows into the products we consume on a gargantuan scale. Along the way he analyzes the increasingly important role the gaming industry plays in contemporary capitalism, and the broader transformations of work and economy that it embodies.
PRAISE:
“An admirable contribution…a digestible compendium of the labor processes and conditions inside a notoriously opaque industry.”
The Outline
“Rejecting both fanboy boosterism and moralistic denunciations, Marx at the Arcade offers a refreshing approach to video games analysis. Woodcock never loses sight of the fact that the material conditions behind game production shapes the stories games tell and how they tell them, but does not reduce its analysis of the medium to these material conditions. The book highlights how it feels to actually play a game, what makes it fun, and why that participatory aspect matters when discussing what a game communicates as a cultural product.”
Jacobin
“Jamie Woodcock has written a book as fun and engrossing as any game. Not only does he bring a sharp Marxist analysis to the video games industry–in turn, he uses games to further our understanding of Marx. Whether you game or not, an indispensable book.”
Sarah Jaffe, author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt
“In his delightful Marx at the Arcade, Jamie Woodcock launches an urgently-needed workers’ inquiry into video and computer games—investigating both the work that goes into producing such games and the play in which so many of us seek relief from constant work. Lucid, scholarly, energetic and itself playful, Marx at the Arcade sets a new frontier for radical political understanding of the digital game.”
Nick Dyer-Witheford
“Marx at the Arcade is an important, brilliant and timely read that reveals the oft-ignored lives of overworked and exploited game workers, as well as the rise of the global Game Workers Unite movement that is fighting for change. Placing games within the context of a wider cultural and political struggle, Woodcock makes a compelling case for combating the toxic and reactionary elements of games culture, and pushing games towards a more positive, radical role in the world.”
Karn Bianco, Games Workers Unite
“Combining the unalloyed enthusiasm of the gamer with the critical gaze of the historical materialist, Jamie Woodcock’s book cracks open the console to reveal the struggles over value, labour and the meaning of play that haunt the world of video games. Even readers who last played a video game in an arcade will gain much from this lucid and combative exploration of the industry that organizes the “free time” of countless millions.”
Alberto Toscano, Reader in Critical Theory, Goldsmiths, University of London, author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea
“In this highly readable, up-to-the-minute counter-guide to videogame work and play, Jamie Woodcock skillfully breaks play out of the “magic circle,” not only revealing capitalism’s shaping influence on digital game culture but also restoring a political perspective on games as a site of struggle. Whether revisiting game history, analyzing individual games, unpacking the distinctiveness of the game commodity, or reporting on the increasingly contested working conditions of game developers, Woodcock richly illustrates the use value of Marxian concepts to the critical study of game media.”
Greig de Peuter, co-author of Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jamie Woodcock is a sociologist of work, focusing on digital labour, the gig economy, and resistance. He is currently a fellow at the London School of Economics, and is the author of the award-winning Working the Phones (2016). He is on the editorial board of Historical Materialism and an editor of Notes from Below, an online journal of workers’ inquiry.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608468577 • US $19.95 • 230 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Poetry from the canon of hip-hop by Black women of the diaspora.
“How curious it be, the obsession with reviling and renaming the black girl. How staggering our resistance. How maddening our sublime propensity for magic—not a magic designed to pull us out of our own bodies to become ‘the other,’ but a magic that would help us know ourselves. And be glorified in the knowledge.
What you hold in your hands is not an anthology of verse, it is a manual of glorious sorcery. It’s page upon page upon page of stanza as incantation—crafted not to make black girls’ lives less impenetrable and lyrically palatable for the curious, but to revel in the chilling power of our weaponry. . . .
I relentlessly love my sisters. We have taken back the right to name ourselves. We have realized the unwavering strength in our hue, in our connections to each other, in stories that parallel and collide, in stanzas that all work toward revelation.”
—From the foreword by Patricia Smith
PRAISE:
“Insightful, inspiring, relatable, and sometimes even heartbreaking, Black Girl Magic encompasses the wealth, beauty, and range of Black women.”
LitHub
“Dense, entrancing, necessary works by more than sixty black women poets create a black-girl-centric world of their own…The book provides a well-rounded look at what it means to be a black woman and in the process serves as a platform for our voices and bodies, revealing our maneuvers through the world as deeply relevant to and deserving of literary space.”
Chicago Reader
“The poems in the collection, influenced by the rhythms, lyricism, and expressiveness of hip-hop music and culture, speak to the many dimensions of black womanhood.”
Poets & Writers
“This anthology celebrates the works of Black women from all corners of the diaspora, exploring themes of beauty, unapologetic blackness, intersectionality, self-definition, and more.”
Teen Vogue
“Black Girl Magic features more than 60 writers using vivid imagery and crackling language to embrace their vulnerabilities and push against stereotypes that erase Black women’s lived experiences, instead honoring the richly variant forms and stories of Black womanhood… In a world that seems hell bent on the degradation of Black women and girls, hope can often seem like an unattainable luxury. Yet the beauty of Black Girl Magic lies in its defiance of that narrative pushed by patriarchal white supremacy.”
Broadly
“An enthralling, deep, beautiful and heartbreaking dive into the world of Black women. Black Girl Magic offers an insightful and necessary look at what it means to be black, resolute and have a platform to share it loud and proudly.”
Okayplayer
“One of the most important volumes of poetry in recent years.”
Dazed
“Written by and for black women, these poems disrupt myths and stereotypes and present expansive perspectives on black womanhood.”
Poet and vocalist Jamila Woods was raised in Chicago, IL and graduated from Brown University, where she earned a BA in Africana Studies and Theatre & Performance Studies. Influenced by Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks, much of her writing explores blackness, womanhood, and the city of Chicago.
Mahogany L. Browne is the Interim Executive Director of Urban Word NYC and Poetry Coordinator at St. Francis College. She holds fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research, and Rauschenberg. She is the author of Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby, Black Girl Magic, Kissing Caskets, and Dear Twitter, and a co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Idrissa Simmonds is a fiction writer and poet. Her work has appeared in Black Renaissance Noire, The Caribbean Writer, Fourteen Hills Press, and elsewhere. She is the 2014 winner of the Crab Creek Review poetry contest, and a NYFA and Commonwealth Short Story Award Finalist.
Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642591583 • US $26.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 260 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
One of the 21st century’s most brilliant sociologists confronts his own mortality.
Erik Olin Wright, one of the most important sociologists of his time, takes us along on his intimate and brave journey toward death, and asks the big questions about human mortality.
Human life is a wild, extraordinary phenomenon: elements are brewed in the center of stars and exploding supernova, spewed across the universe; they eventually clumped into a minor planet around a modest star; then after some billions of years this “stardust” became complex molecules with self-replicating capacities that we call life. More billions of years pass and these self-replicating molecules join together into more complex forms, evolve into organisms which gain awareness and then consciousness, and finally, eventually, consciousness of their consciousness. Stardust turned into conscious living matter aware of its own existence. And with that comes consciousness of mortality. . . . That I, as a conscious being will cease to exist pales in significance to the fact that I exist at all. I don’t find that this robs my existence of meaning; it’s what makes infusing life with meaning possible.
PRAISE:
“This final work by one of the very great social critics of our time is not only deeply moving, insightful and important, but an act of immense and urgent generosity.”
China Miéville
“Breathtaking in its range, riveting in its storyline and gripping in its honesty, Stardust to Stardust exemplifies how to live a deeply meaningful and connected life. Erik Olin Wright, in the last year of his life prematurely cut short by acute myeloid leukemia, wrote this public journal in which he shares his insights about life and love and many matters in between. This is a book that will enrich everyone’s life! Erik’s infectious curiosity, optimistic warmth, and deep-rooted kindness will touch the heart and mind of all who dip into its contents.”
Richard J. Davidson, NY Times best-selling author of The Emotional Life of Your Brain, Founder and Director, Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Stardust to Stardust is a text about the love of life, the mind, and above all of the love of humanity. It is also one of the most courageous texts I have ever read about dying. Moving with stunning ease between keen sociological insights about hospitals, to the connection between love and emancipatory social science, to discovering how to be comfortable with vulnerability, this blog, written in a few months between the discovery of Erik Olin Wright’s illness and his death, reflects a life of brilliance, generosity and love, and gifts us with lessons in both dying and living.”
Raka Ray, Professor of Sociology and Dean of the Social Sciences at UC-Berkeley (and former student of Erik’s)
“Erik Olin Wright was an extraordinarily kind mentor to his students, including me. But what stood out as he faced the end of his life was his courage and insight as he turned his analytical mind to himself and his own relationship to dying.The result is a deeply life-affirming take on death.”
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota
“You have probably figured out that your Caringbridge blog has a global audience. What maybe less obvious is that it is a powerful model for your readers — especially those of us who are your contemporaries and for whom the roll of the medical dice has to always be considered uncertain. You probably take it for granted that your response to your body’s ugly surprise has been completely consistent with your pre-AML thinking and work: purposive, organized with care and precision, aimed at maximizing the likelihood of a positive outcome; optimism tempered by clear-eyed acceptance of downside possibilities; indeed, even cheerful with a dose of humor. For the rest of us, your response is not just impressive but heartening…this note…is also to say thank you for– paradoxically– making it clear that the space for agency is wider than we might have believed before we started reading your Caringbridge blog.”
Peter Evans, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of California Berkeley.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019) was Vilas Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. He authored many books, including Classes, Interrogating Inequality, Class Counts, Deepening Democracy (with Archon Fung), and Envisioning Real Utopias.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Languages & Territories Where Rights Have Been Sold:
Language/Territory
Publisher
Chinese (traditional)/worldwide excluding Mainland China
For two months this fall, Zuccotti Park, squeezed deep in a canyon between bankers’ skyscrapers in lower Manhattan, was the site of an extraordinary political action. Home to the hundreds of anti-capitalist protestors who camped there overnight, and the thousands who visited to join the protest, the park became a magical place: a communion of sharing and consensus in the heart of a citadel defined by greed and oligarchy.
In the early hours of Tuesday November the 15th the occupiers’ camp was destroyed when police swept suddenly into the square, tearing down the tents, library, kitchen and medical center, and arresting hundreds. For the multitude supporting the action it was a heart-rending moment. But if the occupation at Zuccotti was destroyed that night, the movement it spawned across America has only just begun. Issues of equality and democracy, absent from mainstream political discussion in the United States for decades, are today springing up everywhere.
Now, in a new book assembled by a group of writers active in support of the occupation, the story of Occupy Wall Street is being told. Occupying Wall Street draws on extensive interviews with those who took part in the action to bring an authentic, inside-the-square history to life. In these pages you will discover in rich detail how the protest was devised and planned, how its daily needs were met, and how it won overwhelming support across the nation.
In a vivid, fast-paced narrative, the key events of the occupation are described: the pepper spraying of young women corralled between plastic fences by the NYPD; the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge; the victory on October 14th when an announced “clean up” of the square was abandoned by a mayor’s office fearful of a PR disaster; and the eventual storming of the occupation that brought it to an abrupt end. Woven throughout are stories of daily life in the square focusing on how the kitchen, library, media center, clean-up, hospital, and decision-making at the General Assembly functioned, all in the words of the people who were there.
The future course of Occupy Wall Street remains unclear. But one thing is starkly evident: Under the banner “We are the 99%” the protest has given birth to America’s most important progressive movement since the civil rights marches half a century ago. This is the story of that beginning.
Writers for the 99% is a group of writers and researchers, active in supporting Occupy Wall Street, who came together to create this book. A list of all those contributing will appear at the back of the book.
All profits from this book will be donated to Occupy Wall Street.
“An essential and galvanizing on-the-ground account of how oxygen suddenly and miraculously flooded back into the American brain.”
Jonathan Lethem
“The emphasis will be on everyday details of the occupation-a recreation of texture, in all its unfiltered smells and brain-bursting sounds.”
The Daily Beast
“The last 30 years belonged to Wall Street. If Occupy gets it right, the next 30 should belong to us. This indispensable book is the first chapter in the story about the long revolution to come.”
Andrew Ross, professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University
Hardcover • ISBN-13: 9781642594591 • US $16.00 • 6 in x 9 in • 80 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Merging documentary poetry from the epicenter of an epidemic with the story of viruses in the evolution of humanity, If God Is a Virus gives voice to the infected and the virus.
Based on original reporting from West Africa and the United States, and the poet’s experiences as a doctor and journalist, If God Is a Virus charts the course of the largest and deadliest Ebola epidemic in history, telling the stories of Ebola survivors, outbreak responders, journalists, and the virus itself. Documentary poems explore which human lives are valued, how editorial decisions are weighed, what role the aid-industrial complex plays in crises, and how medical myths and rumor can travel faster than microbes.
These poems also give voice to the virus. Eight percent of the human genome is inherited from viruses and the human placenta would not exist without a gene descended from a virus. If God Is a Virus reimagines viruses as givers of life and even authors of a viral- human self- help book.
PRAISE:
“Yasmin, a medical doctor who investigated outbreaks for the Epidemic Intelligence Service from the CDC and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, brings considerable experience and a poet’s vision and sense to her depiction of Ebola’s spread through Liberia. To read this work during the coronavirus pandemic is to recognize Yasmin’s prescience, and her ability to unpack how disease intersects with prejudice, race, myth, and poverty.”
The Millions
“If God is a Virus proves that poetry and public health together make and contain medical language, which makes the language of an epidemic more visible, more veracious. What breaks through is a voice of interiority telling us what’s not told about our bodies and what it means to function.”
Janice Lobo Sapigao, poet laureate, Santa Clara County, author of like a solid to a shadow
“In a time of heartbreak and devastation due to the world pandemic, Seema Yasmin’s brilliant If God Is a Virus takes a timely and critical look at disease and its sociopolitical contexts, including multi various forms of domination and hubris: colonization, White supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism. This is a necessary book for our times. Read it and be changed.”
Cathy Linh Che, author of Split, executive director, Kundiman
“Seema Yasmin’s fantastic hybrid poetry collection overthrows the dry mindlessness of scientific halls, their power points and false Gods in the face of racism and global domination. God is a virus, and she teaches us to see through data while teaching us to love.”
Fady Joudah, author of Tethered to Stars
“One always wants a poem to have such high stakes, wants a book to feel inevitable, that it couldn’t have been written and that no one else but the poet could have written it, so unique to an individual experience it is. Well, this is such a book. And only Seema Yasmin could have written it.”
Kazim Ali, author of The Voice of Sheila Chandra
“In her hands, a sole headline in Scientific American becomes a poem, as does the Hippocratic oath, the Broca’s region. Every journalist should read this book, every doctor, every patient. Gird your heart, though, she’s on a mission to break it with her tongue.”
Lulu Miller, co-host of Radiolab and author of Why Fish Don’t Exist
“In If God Is a Virus, Seema Yasmin approaches describing viruses with an unusual combination of humility and confidence for such a nearly impossible task. She achieves what journalistic and scientific writing often fails to do: to sketch viruses with a sense of wonder. But Dr. Yasmin asks and poetically answers another question: if God is a virus, perhaps we must stop thinking of our relationship with viruses as “us” and “them,” and understand that we are viruses, and they are us?
Steven W. Thrasher, PhD, professor and author of The Viral Underclass: How Racism, Ableism and Capitalism Plague Humans on the Margins
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award- winning journalist, professor, medical doctor, and author of three books, including Muslim Women Are Everything. She teaches science journalism and global health storytelling at Stanford University, and is the director of the Stanford Health Communications Initiative. Her poetry has appeared in Foundry, The Literary Review, Ruminate, and Bateau, and in the anthology The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: Halal If You Hear Me. If God Is a Virus is her first book- length collection of poems
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9781642598360 • US $29.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 350 pgs
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In a series of captivating photographs, Mateo Zapata pays homage to his hometown of Chicago, and the essential workers and organizers there striving for survival and a more just and equitable world.
Mateo Zapata utilizes poems, interviews, and more, interspersed throughout the photo series, to record one of the most pivotal years in recent history: within these pages are joy and exhaustion, blank stares and warm smiles, masked faces and fists in the air. It is a celebration of unity between communities of color, and the powerful potential therein. It is a reminder that hollow gestures of solidarity mean little without sincere action behind them—action that insists on, lifts up, and defends the humanity in ourselves and in others.
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Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
Walter Rodney was a scholar, working class militant, and revolutionary from Guyana. Strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, he remains central to radical Pan-Africanist thought for large numbers of activists’ today. Rodney lived through the failed –though immensely hopeful -socialist experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, in Tanzania and elsewhere.
The book critically considers Rodney’s contribution to Marxist theory and history, his relationship to dependency theory and the contemporary significance of his work in the context of movements and politics today. The first full-length study of Rodney’s life, this book is an essential introduction to Rodney’s work.
PRAISE:
“Zeilig is not stretching when he calls Rodney, ‘A revolutionary for our time.’” —New York Times
“This book is a welcome addition to the composition on the life and death of Walter Rodney and deals with the cover up of his assassination in the most authentic way since the C of I report of 2016.”
Donald Rodney
“Seeing, listening to or reading Walter Rodney, before and after his unfortunate death, something always puzzled and stayed with me – The How of Walter Rodney. How did this relatively young brother from a small Caribbean nation gain such a vast world view? How was he able to grasp the conditions of the Pan African world so firmly and translate those conditions through his socialist worldview? How was Rodney able to move so fluidly through communities in the Caribbean, the US, the UK, Africa and literally the whole of the Pan African world? How was he accepted and loved as kin in all of those communities? And how did he become the number one target of a Guyanese government desperately plotting to end his life? And of late, my big one, how does Walter Rodney still endure timelessly in the immediate consciousness of so many Pan-African activists and thinkers today? Without fail Leo Zeilig’s enduring A Revolutionary for Our Time answered these and so many other “how’s” beyond my considerations.”
Paul Coates, Black Classic Press
“Leo Zeilig takes readers through the choices that Walter Rodney made. Choices both small and large, but all taking Rodney to the heights of scholarship, organization, family, comradeship. Zeilig offers a compelling narrative and an incisive analysis of Rodney’s ferocious commitments to revolutionary change. This is a fascinating and vital study of Rodney’s life.”
Diane C. Fujino, professor and author, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama
“The Black Lives Matter movement’s embrace of radical and pan-Africanist ideas has introduced Walter Rodney to a new generation of activists. A Revolutionary for Our Time is an urgently-needed contribution, one that situates the importance of Rodney’s Marxism, his life and work, in working-class and anti-racist struggle. It is a must-read account of a revolutionary who understood that nothing short of socialism could bring liberation.”
Lee Wengraf, author, Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and the New Scramble for Africa
“The book connects Rodney’s thinking to his lived experiences across the world and the decades in which he lived. At a time when context is particularly essential, Zeilig’s book provides an essential narrative that situates Rodney not only in the history of revolutionary thought, but also at our contemporary moment, arguing that Rodney’s ideas make him a revolutionary not only for his but for our time.”
Erin MacLeod, Vanier College
“Through exacting research, exacting presentation, and careful analysis, Leo Zeilig offers a remarkable contribution to radical thought and practice worthy of Walter Rodney’s legacy.”
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and author of Reconsidering Reparations, and Elite Capture
“This is a splendid narrative of Walter Rodney’s legendary life and work across three continents. Leo Zeilig’s singular achievement is to have brilliantly located Rodney, the Black Power Marxist, at the intersection of the politics of radical nationalism and visionary socialism that suffused the pan-African world in the 60s and 70s. An unforgettable read.’’
Issa Shivji, Emeritus Professor, University of Dar es Salaam
“A Revolutionary for Our Time is both timely and necessary. Through Walter Rodney’s ideas and actions, it engages the weighty issues of the current moment. More than a biography of a remarkable individual, we get the optics of a family committed to radical, worldwide transformation and the crosscurrent of people who embraced them as well as the local-global networks of power they dared to challenge.”
Kwasi Konadu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Endowed Chair, Colgate University
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Leo Zeilig is a writer and researcher. He has written extensively on African politics and history, including books on working-class struggle and the development of revolutionary movements and biographies on some of Africa’s most important political thinkers and activists. Leo is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy—the radical African-studies journal founded by activists and scholars in 1974. Leo is a Research Associate at the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) at the University fo the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859684 • US $17 • 3.5 x 8.4 in • 224 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This collection of essays and interviews studies class struggle and social empowerment on the African continent.
Employing Marxist theory to address the postcolonial problems of several different countries, experts analyze such issues as the renewal of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt, debt relief, trade union movements, and strike action. Includes interviews with leading African socialists and activists.
With contributions from Leo Zeilig, David Seddon, Anne Alexander, Dave Renton, Ahmad Hussein, Jussi Vinnikka, Femi Aborisade, Miles Larmer, Austin Muneku, Peter Dwyer, Trevor Ngwane, Munyaradzi Gwisai, Tafadzwa Choto, and Azwell Banda.
PRAISE:
“This fascinating book fills a vacuum that has weakened the believers in Marxist resistance in Africa.”
Joseph Iranola Akinlaja, General Secretary of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers, Nigeria
“Cutting-edge.”
Patrick Bond, author of Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation
“Read this for inspiration, for the sense that we are part of a world movement.”
Socialist Worker (London)
“Grab this book. Highly recommended.”
Tokumbo Oke, Bookmarks Review of Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Leo Zeilig is a writer and researcher. He has written extensively on African politics and history, including books on working-class struggle and the development of revolutionary movements and biographies on some of Africa’s most important political thinkers and activists. Leo is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy—the radical African-studies journal founded by activists and scholars in 1974—and a research associate at the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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Arabic/worldwide
Al Arabi Publishing and Distributing
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Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608468522 • US $11.95 • 130 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The increased visibility of fascist and far-right organizations in the United States and elsewhere is sparking keen interest among a new generation. Important questions are posed: What is fascism? Why is it such a deadly threat? How can it be fought? How should it be fought?
In 1923, fascism was a new phenomenon, having come to power in Italy only the previous year. In the face of widespread uncertainty and confusion, German Marxist Clara Zetkin explained the nature of this new danger, proposing a sweeping plan for the unity of all victims of capitalism to counter the fascist threat.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) was a German Marxist leader, and a close collaborator of Rosa Luxemburg. An advocate for women’s rights, she initiated the first International Women’s Day in 1911. In the decade after 1923 she sought to organize a united front of struggle against the rise of Nazism.
Mike Taber is a longtime socialist activist and editor. He has edited or prepared dozens of books on the history of the revolutionary and working-class movement, including books by Leon Trotsky, V. I. Lenin, Malcolm X, James P. Cannon, Che Guevara, and Maurice Bishop. He currently lives in Chicago.
John Riddell has translated and edited seven volumes of documents of the Communist movement in the era of the Russian revolution. Two further Brill volumes now in preparation will complete this ambitious project.
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Trade Paper • ISBN-13: 9780062397348 • US $19.99 • 784 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
With a new introduction by Anthony Arnove, this updated edition of the classic national bestseller reviews the book’s thirty-five-year history and demonstrates once again why it is a significant contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.
Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People’s History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools—with its emphasis on great men in high places—to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace.
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People’s Historyof the United States is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles—the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality—were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.
Covering Christopher Columbus’s arrival through the September 11, 2001 attacks, A People’s History of the United States, which was nominated for the American Book Award in 1981, features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.
PRAISE:
“A brilliant and moving history of the American people.”
Library Journal
“Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation. And the series of ‘people’s histories’ derived from this great work have provided new understanding of who we are and what we should aspire to be. As the thirty-fifth anniversary edition reminds us, this is a remarkable legacy.”
Noam Chomsky
“[Howard Zinn] wrote to the people, for the people: ‘My intention is … to light a flame under the rest of us.’ And that is exactly what Howard Zinn did—in the dozens of books he wrote and edited, in the hundreds of speeches he gave in his teachings and activism, and, later in life, in his role as the muse of history and politics for a new generation of freethinkers and organizers.”
The Nation
“Few historians manage to reach a broad nonacademic audience…. Zinn’s public learned about ordinary Americans’ struggles for justice, equality, and power. I have long been struck by how many excellent students of history first had their passion for the past sparked by reading Howard Zinn.”
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780872864757 • US $16.95 • 308 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress is a major collection of essays on American history, race, class, justice, and ordinary people who stand up to power. Zinn approaches the telling of U.S. history from an active, engaged point of view, drawing upon untold histories to comment on the most controversial issues facing us today: government dishonesty, terrorism, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the loss of our liberties, immigration, and the responsibility of the citizen to confront power for the common good. A Power Governments Cannot Suppress is an invaluable post-9/11 era addition to the themes that run through Howard Zinn’s bestselling classic, A People’s History of the United States.
PRAISE:
“Find here the voice of the well-educated and honorable and capable and humane United States of America, which might have existed if only absolute power had not corrupted its third-rate leaders so absolutely.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“I love Howard Zinn. This collection of essays is a great book for anybody who wants to be better informed about history, regardless of their political point of view. I think Zinn is one of the most responsible, lively, and brave commentators on U.S. history now living. He’s constantly sounding the wake-up call, and we owe it to ourselves and our children to listen.”
Viggo Mortensen
“Thank you, Howard Zinn. Thank you for telling us what none of our leaders are willing to: The truth. And you tell it with such brilliance, such humanity. It is a personal honor to be able to say I am a better citizen because of you.”
Michael Moore
“This strong, incisive book by Howard Zinn provides us with a penetrating critique of current U.S. policies and embraces the sweep of history…A Power Governments Cannot Suppress leaves us with the faith that citizens have what it takes to confront power and to reverse the dangerous and unjust acts of our government.”
Jonathan Kozol, author of The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
“Howard Zinn is a unique voice of sanity, clarity, and wisdom who reads history not only to understand the present but to shape the future…A Power Governments Cannot Suppress should be read by every American, over and over again.”
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine
“Zinn writes with an enthusiasm rarely encountered in the leaden prose of academic history…”
New York Times Book Review
“Zinn collects here almost three dozen brief, passionate essays that follow in the tradition of his landmark work, A People’s History of the United States…Readers seeking to break out of their ideological comfort zones will find much to ponder here.”
Publishers Weekly
“This brilliant new book—like Howard Zinn’s presence, and his whole life, is the best possible antidote to political despair. Read it, and rejoin the struggle for a human world and a foreign policy that’s good for children.”
Daniel Ellsberg
“Zinn’s work exemplifies an approach to history that is radical, regardless of its subject or geographical location. He tells us the untold story, the story of the world’s poor, the world’s workers, the world’s homeless, the world’s oppressed, the people who don’t really qualify as real people in official histories. Howard Zinn painstakingly unearths the details that the powerful seek to airbrush away. He brings official secrets and forgotten histories into the light and, in doing so, changes the official narrative that the powerful have constructed for us.”
Arundhati Roy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463046 • US $18.00 • 148 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this slim volume, first released in 1968, Zinn lays out a clear and dynamic case for civil disobedience and protest, and challenges the dominant arguments against forms of protest that challenge the status quo. Zinn explores the politics of direct action, nonviolent civil disobedience, and strikes, and draws lessons for today.
PRAISE FOR HOWARD ZINN:
“Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Noam Chomsky
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463077 • US $15.00 • 112 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Howard Zinn dramatizes the life of Emma Goldman, the anarchist, feminist, and free-spirited thinker who was exiled from the United States because of her outspoken views, including her opposition to World War I.
With his wit and unique ability to illuminate history from below, Zinn reveals the life of this remarkable woman. As Zinn writes in his introduction, Emma Goldman “seemed to be tireless as she traveled the country, lecturing to large audiences everywhere.”
PRAISE:
“Howard Zinn’s play about Emma Goldman is a small miracle. Here is a drama that holds down the heroics, polemics and didacticism to which works about heroes and heroines are prone. True, Emma is idealized; she is loving, honest, selfless, daring, but she is also human and believable.”
Walter Goodman, New York Times
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463039 • US $15.00 • 192 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In this lively and accessible collection of essays, Zinn discusses a wide range of historical and political topics, from the role of the Supreme Court in U.S. history to the nature of higher education today. With equal parts humor and force, Zinn argues that propaganda can be exposed and authority challenged, and that the struggle for justice can lead to important breakthroughs in the fight to create a better society.
PRAISE FOR HOWARD ZINN:
“Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Noam Chomsky
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463022 • US $19.00 • 392 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Howard Zinn’s edited collection on the way justice really works in the United States.
Through this collection of voices, first published in 1977, Zinn explores ordinary people facing “justice” in the United States, in contrast to national myths of all Americans’ equal rights under the law. With sections on the police, the courts, prisons, housing, work, health, schools, and popular struggle, Justice in Everyday Life features classic essays by a diverse group of authors, including Jonathan Kozol.
PRAISE FOR HOWARD ZINN:
“Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Noam Chomsky
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780801476174 • US $28.95 • 302 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Fiorello LaGuardia is known best as the tempestuous mayor of New York City in the days when Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in the White House. There had been, however, an earlier time, which matched his mayoralty years in sheer drama and perhaps surpassed them in lasting achievement—LaGuardia’s years in Congress.
He served in the House of Representative almost continuously from 1917 to 1933, representing two ethnically diverse congressional districts: the Fourteenth (Greenwich Village), from 1917 to 1919, and the Twentieth (East Harlem), from 1923 to 1933. Although barred from important committee posts because of his political independence and thus denied from playing a direct role in lawmaking, he was a tireless and vocal champion of Progressive causes, from allowing more immigration and removing U.S. troops from Nicaragua to speaking up for the rights and livelihoods of striking miners, impoverished farmers, oppressed minorities, and struggling families. A goad to the era’s plutocrats and their enablers in government, LaGuardia fought for progressive income taxes, greater government oversight of Wall Street, and national employment insurance for workers idled by the Great Depression.
In this book, first published by Cornell University Press in 1959, Howard Zinn establishes LaGuardia’s tenure in Congress as a vital link between the Progressive and New Deal eras, offering a lively and informative account of his many legislative battles, his political philosophy, and the distinctly urban (specifically, New York City) sensibilities he brought to the Progressive movement.
PRAISE:
“Howard Zinn’s LaGuardia in Congress is an exceedingly well-written and highly readable study of a man and his times. It describes the career of an extraordinary human being whose background and ideology presaged the New Deal and whose specific legislative program foreshadowed and even went beyond it…. The volume is well documented. Zinn has drawn heavily from the personal papers of LaGuardia and his contemporaries, as well as from the interpretive studies of the period.”
American Political Science Review
“An admirable book, lively, objective, and nostalgic…. LaGuardia kept the flame of reform at least sputtering through years when the popular opinion supposed everything to be perfect. Howard Zinn wisely reminds us not to think of LaGuardia as having been an ‘important figure’ in these years; yet his energy was so fierce and many of the incidents of his political battles so picturesque that one could easily exaggerate the place he held on the national scene. In fact, he was almost invariably on the side of defeat. He was fighting against massive powers and, even more chillingly, against apathy and complacency.”
Saturday Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463015 • US $15.00 • 88 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The premise of this witty and insightful “play on history” is that Karl Marx has agitated with the authorities of the afterlife for a chance to clear his name. Through a bureaucratic error, though, Marx is sent to Soho in New York, rather than his old stomping ground in London, to make his case.
PRAISE:
“An imaginative critique of our society’s hypocrisies and injustices, and an entertaining, vivid portrait of Karl Marx as a voice of humanitarian justice—which is perhaps the best way to remember him.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A cleverly imagined call to reconsider socialist theory… Zinn’s point is well made; his passion for history melds with his political vigor to make this a memorable effort and a lucid primer for readers desiring a succinct, dramatized review of Marxism.”
Publishers Weekly
“Even in heaven it seems, Karl Marx is a troublemaker. But in the deft and loving hands of activist/author/historian Howard Zinn, the historical figure… is also a father, a husband and a futurist possessing a grand sense of humor.”
ForeWord
“A witty delight that will engage both new and old acquaintances of the Marxian corpus…. Even conservatives will find Zinn’s [book]… an intelligent and diverting read. Recommended for academic and public libraries alike.”
Library Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780872206854 • US $10.00 • 472 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This anthology assembles the contemporary writings not only of the New Dealers—the men who devised and executed the programs of the government in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt—but also of the “social critics” who “gathered in various stances and at various distances around the Roosevelt fires.” Here is a sampling of the famous movers and shakers of the 1930s: Thurman Arnold, Henry Wallace, Rexford Tugwell, David Lilienthal, Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, John Maynard Keynes, and of course Roosevelt himself.
Here too are the voices of those who thought the New Dealers were going “too far” such as Walter Lippmann and Raymond Moley, and of those who thought they were not going “far enough,” like John Dewey, W. E. B. DuBois, Norman Thomas, Lewis Mumford, and Carey McWilliams.
In his introduction, Howard Zinn defines the boundaries of the New Deal’s experimentalism and attempts to explain why it sputtered out. The result is a book that captures the spirit of the New Deal—hopeful, pragmatic, humane—yet remains hardheaded about its accomplishments and failures.
PRAISE:
“They’re all here, all the famous names of the New Deal, in an ambitious compendium of major articles and speeches…. Considerable effort appears to have been made to unearth thoughtful speeches and articles from some hard-to-find locations, with only a few items culled from public documents and none from the mass media publications, all of which is commendable.”
Jay Sigler, Science and Society (1968)
“The volume … remains a valuable resource.”
Stuart Kidd, Journal of American Studies (2005)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780060557676 • US $13.95 • 368 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From the bestselling author of A People’s History of the United States comes this selection of passionate, honest, and piercing essays looking at American political ideology.
Howard Zinn brings to Passionate Declarations the same astringent style and provocative point of view that led more than two million people to buy his book A People’s History of the United States. He directs his critique here to what he calls “American orthodoxies”—that set of beliefs guardians of our culture consider sacrosanct: justifications for war, cynicism about human nature and violence, pride in our economic system, certainty of our freedom of speech, romanticization of representative government, confidence in our system of justice. Those orthodoxies, he believes, have a chilling effect on our capacity to think independently and to become active citizens in the long struggle for peace and justice.
PRAISE:
“A shotgun blast of revisionism that aims to shatter all the comfortable myths of American political discourse.”
Los Angeles Times
“It has been Zinn’s life’s work to illuminate the subjectivities others have ignored…. It joins his pioneering … People’s History of the United States to form what could be called the essential Zinn.”
Boston Phoenix
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463008 • US $18.00 • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The postwar boom in the United States brought about massive changes in American society and culture. In this accessible volume, originally published in 1973, historian Howard Zinn offers a view from below on these vital years in American history. By critically examining U.S. militarism abroad and racism at home, he raises challenging questions about this often romanticized era.
PRAISE FOR HOWARD ZINN:
“Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
For all languages and territories, please contact Taryn Fagerness at Taryn Fagerness Agency.
See here for a list of Taryn Fagerness’s foreign subagents.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608462995 • US $18.00 • 256 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Originally published in 1964, SNCC: The New Abolitionists influenced a generation of activists struggling for civil rights and seeking to learn from the successes and failures of those who built the fantastically influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It is an indispensable study of the organization, of the 1960s, and of the process of social change, reissued with a new introduction by the author.
PRAISE:
“Seminal.”
The Washington Post
“A good way to maintain your sense of the urgency of civil rights problems is to keep a copy of Howard Zinn’s book handy.”
The Harvard Crimson (1964)
“Zinn’s sympathetic portrayal of “the new abolitionists” conveys their courage and commitment”
The Journal of Southern History
“This is, by far, the most valuable book on SNCC to be published…. Zinn is a superb reporter and the narrative sections of the book are exceptionally effective…. Zinn’s main point is as relevant today as it was when he wrote the book. SNCC, he feels, is a profoundly radical, deeply egalitarian organization whose strength ‘comes from nowhere in the world, but cotton fields, prison cells, and the minds of young people reflecting on what they see and feel.’”
Lawrence Goldman, Phylon: The Clark Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780872865099 • US $8.95 • 100 pages
ABOUT THE BOOK:
As an active WWII bombardier returning from the end of the war in Europe and preparing for combat in Japan, Howard Zinn read the headline “Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan” and was glad—the war would be over. “Like other Americans,” writes Zinn, “I had no idea what was going on at the higher levels, and had no idea what that ‘atomic bomb’ had done to men, women, children in Hiroshima, any more than I ever really understood what the bombs I dropped on European cities were doing to human flesh and blood.” During the war, Zinn had taken part in the aerial bombing of Royan, France, and in 1966, he went to Hiroshima, where he was invited to a “house of rest” where survivors of the bombing gathered. In this short and powerful book on the backstory of the making and use of the bomb, Zinn also offers his deep personal reflections of these events, and the profound influence they had in transforming him from an order-taking combat soldier to one of our greatest anti-authoritarian, antiwar historians.
Simultaneous publication in the U.S. and Japan commemorated the 65th anniversary of the United States’s two atomic bombings of Japan by calling for the abolition of all nuclear weapons and an end to war as an acceptable solution to human conflict.
PRAISE:
“He wrote the book to remind himself and to remind us that anybody can throw the wrench in the machinery, and we often should.”
Bill Moyers
“Part history, part memoir, part sermon, The Bomb is meant to wake up citizens, to rouse them to reject ‘the abstractions of duty and obedience’ and to refuse to heed the call of war.”
The Rag Blog
“Zinn, the people’s historian, leaves us with words that bring together thought, action, and passion. His experience during World War II left him unpersuaded by the arguments of military necessity and the appeals to nationalism. We must refuse ‘to be transfixed by the actions of other people, the truths of other times,’ he writes in The Bomb. This ‘means acting on what we feel and think, here, now, for human flesh and sense, against the abstractions of duty and obedience.’”
Foreign Policy in Focus
“Occasioned by the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Zinn’s final work (completed just before his death in January 2010), combines a discussion of the horrors of atomic warfare with a glimpse at the carnage in Royan, which included the deaths of over 1,000 civilians in one of the first uses of napalm. . . . Zinn’s call to reject disproportionate violence in war remains unalloyed and relevant to today’s conflicts.”
Booklist
“Thoughtful and full of stories of an old soldier who regrets what he has done, The Bomb is a fine posthumous release that shares much of the lost wisdom of World War II.”
The Midwest Book Review
“[Zinn] may be gone, but through his powerful and passionate body of work— of which The Bomb is an excellent introduction—thousands of others will be educated and inspired to work for a more humane and peaceful world.”
The Morning Star
“The path that Howard Zinn walked—from bombardier to activist—gives hope that each of us can move from clinical detachment to ardent commitment, from violence to nonviolence.”
Frida Berrigan, WIN Magazine
“Zinn’s last book is a modest appeal to humanity: War is miserable, and we have to stop it.”
Micah Uetricht, In These Times
“The late Howard Zinn’s new book The Bomb is a brilliant little dissection of some of the central myths of our militarized society.”
David Swanson, LA Progressive
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780872865556 • US $16.95 • 256 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Howard Zinn’s views on social movements, freedom, history, democracy, and our own human potential are educational and transformative. In few places is his voice more clear and accessible than in the dozens of articles he penned for The Progressive magazine from 1980 to 2009, offered together here in book form for the first time.
Whether encouraging people to organize, critiquing the government, or speaking on behalf of working people who struggle to survive in an economy rigged to benefit the rich and powerful, Zinn’s historical clarity, unflappable optimism, and unshakable questions reverberate throughout The Historic Unfulfilled Promise: “Have our political leaders gone mad?” “What kind of country do we want to live in?” “Has the will of the people been followed?”
The Historic Unfulfilled Promise is a genuine work of conscience, rich in ideas, charged with energy; an invaluable introduction for the uninitiated and a must-have for Zinn’s fans.
PRAISE:
“This posthumous collection of Zinn’s passionate, iconoclastic, and wryly humorous articles from the Progressive magazine spans 30 years… Zinn argues repeatedly for an alternative to war, totalitarianism, and redistribution of resources and energy away from the military and ‘toward ideals of egalitarianism, community, and self-determination… which have been the historic, unfulfilled promise of the word democracy.’ Zinn persists with his optimism and sometimes proves astounding in his almost clairvoyant analysis, as the essays progress from Boston University student and faculty protests against the Vietnam War and the academic “Establishment” through the two Iraq wars, to Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan. In addition, Zinn writes of his own youth and radicalization, and his admiration for artists who “wage the battle of justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse,” including a warm and perceptive memorial to Kurt Vonnegut, with whom he became friends late in life, and with whom he shared a conversion to pacifism after serving in WWII. His call to action will strike a chord with a younger generation of occupiers.”
Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A sharp and insightful collection from one of the country’s most visible historians and critics.”
David Pitt, Booklist
“Howard Zinn was called a lot of different names: anarchist, socialist, and communist. He called himself a lot of different names, too: anarchist, socialist, and communist. No one ever seems to have called him Zen, but maybe it’s time to start… The Historic Unfulfilled Promise is a testament to Zinn’s Zen politics: his refusal to be silent, to acquiesce, or to sever his ties with the downtrodden.”
Jonah Raskin, MR Zine
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780060578268 • US $9.99 • 96 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
To celebrate the millionth copy sold of Howard Zinn’s great People’s History of the United States, Zinn drew on the words of Americans—some famous, some little known—across the range of American history. These words were read by a remarkable cast at an event held at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York City that included James Earl Jones, Alice Walker, Jeff Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfre Woodard, Marisa Tomei, Danny Glover, Myla Pitt, Harris Yulin, and Andre Gregory.
From that celebration, this book was born. Collected here under one cover is a brief history of America told through dramatic readings applauding the enduring spirit of dissent.
Here in their own words, and interwoven with commentary by Zinn, are Columbus on the Arawaks; Plough Jogger, an anonymous farmer and participant in Shays’ Rebellion; Harriet Hanson, a Lowell mill worker; abolitionist Frederick Douglass; Mark Twain; Mother Jones; Emma Goldman; Helen Keller; Eugene V. Debs; Langston Hughes; Genora Johnson Dollinger on a sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan; an interrogation from a 1953 HUAC hearing; Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; Malcolm X; and James Lawrence Harrington, a Gulf War resister, among others
PRAISE FOR A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES:
“Professor Zinn writes with an enthusiasm rarely encountered in the leaden prose of academic history, and his text is studded with telling quotations from labor leaders, war resisters, and fugitive slaves. There are vivid descriptions of events that are usually ignored … A reversal of perspectives, a reshuffling of heroes and villains.”
Eric Foner, The New York Times Book Review
“[A] brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically, and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.”
Library Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780252061226 • US $25.00 • 408 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This paperback bestseller presents a series of case studies and thought-provoking essays arguing for a radical approach to history and providing a revisionist interpretation of the historian’s role. In a new introduction written for this edition, Howard Zinn responds to critics of the 1970 edition and comments further on the radicalization of history.
PRAISE:
“The meaning of the sixties in intellectual, political and cultural life is very much debated today…. If you want to know how the civil rights movement and the peace movement affected the writing of American history, and indeed the history of the profession itself, Zinn’s collection is still the best thing to read.”
James R. Green, University of Massachusetts at Boston
“At least for appearance’s sake traditional historians have worn that balanced judgment they can ‘no more discard than their pants.’ Lodging a sharp critique of these erect professionals with humor and grace, Zinn shows that they clothe themselves in this spurious neutrality and in comparable bamboozlements—disinterested scholarship, objective study, dispassionate learning, among them; to cover the simple truth that history is contested terrain in which they are not innocent bystanders. A powerful debamboozler, The Politics of History is a no less powerful call to us all to remember ‘forgotten visions, lost utopias, unfulfilled dreams.’”
Richard Drinnon, Bucknell University
“Reissuing The Politics of History is a splendid idea. The issues Zinn deals with are as relevant today as when the book was first published.”
Marilyn B. Young, New York University
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463060 • US $18.00 • 312 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The South has long been surrounded in mystique. In this powerful volume, first published in 1967, Zinn draws on his own experiences teaching in the South and working within the Southern civil rights movement to challenge stereotypes surrounding the South, race relations, and how change happens in history. With a new introduction from the author.
PRAISE:
“[It’s] a particular joy … to read Howard Zinn’s calm, conscientious account of his experiences as a white teacher at Spelman College in the Deep South, experiences in which the nature of prejudice is viewed with understanding, perspicacity and … a not too guarded optimism…. [T]he book’s real strength lies in its many examples of cultural maladjustment toward political, economic and religious disparities. There is, for instance, a telling chapter on the much-publicized jailings of King and his followers in Albany, Georgia, for which Zinn blames Washington irresolution, rather than local ‘evil.’ Zinn’s temperature reading of the sick South shows up the sickness—a sleeping one, as it were—of the Republic. Thus his optimism is contingent upon our awakening to action and to health.”
Kirkus Reviews
“[A] book that, in its analysis of the South as quintessentially American, helped stimulate the ongoing debate over whether the region is different from and at odds with the rest of the country.”
Jimmy Lewis Franklin, Southern Cultures
“It is recommended reading for all who assume that there are palpable distinctions which set the South apart from the rest of the United States.”
The Journal of Southern History
“The strongest argument yet assembled for civil rights laws as a wedge for ultimate integration…. This is a mentally bracing view…. The view of the new radicals, which Zinn so eloquently presents, reminds us that change and openness are synonymous with life.”
Warren Sloat, Cross Currents (1965)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780060530341• US $16.99 • 512 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Containing just the twentieth-century chapters from Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States, this revised and updated edition includes two new chapters— covering Clinton’s presidency, the 2000 Election, and the “war on terrorism.”
Highlighting not just the usual terms of presidential administrations and congressional activities, this book provides you with a “bottom-to-top” perspective, giving voice to our nation’s minorities and letting the stories of such groups as African Americans, women, Native Americans, and the laborers of all nationalities be told in their own words.
PRAISE FOR A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES:
“Professor Zinn writes with an enthusiasm rarely encountered in the leaden prose of academic history, and his text is studded with telling quotations from labor leaders, war resisters, and fugitive slaves. There are vivid descriptions of events that are usually ignored … A reversal of perspectives, a reshuffling of heroes and villains.”
Eric Foner, The New York Times Book Review
“[A] brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically, and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.”
Library Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically African American women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote over forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780807073261 • US $18.00 • 216 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The only edition of world-renowned historian Howard Zinn’s three plays, an essential book for fans of Zinn or anyone interested in political theater.
World-renowned historian Howard Zinn has turned to drama to explore the legacy of Karl Marx and Emma Goldman and to delve into the intricacies of political and social conscience perhaps more deeply than traditional history permits. Three Plays brings together all this work, including the previously unpublished Daughter of Venus, along with a new introductory essay on political theater, and prefaces to each of the plays.
PRAISE:
“The first act of Emma, Howard Zinn’s play about Emma Goldman, is a small miracle. Here is a drama that holds down the heroics, polemics and didacticism to which works about heroes and heroines are prone. True, Emma is idealized; she is loving, honest, selfless, daring, but she is also human and believable.”
Walter Goodman,New York Times
“[Marx in Soho is] an imaginative critique of our society’s hypocrisies and injustices, and an entertaining, vivid portrait of Karl Marx as a voice of humanitarian justice—which is perhaps the best way to remember him.”
Kirkus Reviews
“[Daughter of Venus’s] central concerns—personal and social ethics; the balance of obligations to ourselves, our families, and our fellow citizens; the uses and abuses of political and scientific power—remain as timely as ever. . . . Zinn not only displays a fluid and passionately committed style but also is attempting to do something interesting with it: to interweave a story of familial tensions and national politics, and in doing so to remind us that the way we live our lives on the small, local, day-to-day scale of family life can have repercussions and implications for the life of the nation at large.”
Louise Kennedy, Boston Globe
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically African American women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote over forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463053 • US $15.00 • 144 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Of the many books that challenged the Vietnam War, Howard Zinn’s trenchant argument from 1967 stands out as one of the best—and most influential. At the height of the Vietnam War, it helped sparked a national debate and gave urgent voice to the growing antiwar movement. This edition includes a new introduction from the author.
PRAISE:
“Howard Zinn has had the courage to carry the general argument against further American involvement in the war in Vietnam to its logical conclusion. His is the best statement of the case for American withdrawal that has appeared to date. Until the case for withdrawal had been stated with the clarity and conviction that Zinn has brought to it, the debate about Vietnam was necessarily limited; in other words, it has tended to be a debate within certain unstated but clearly understood limitations. Mr. Zinn has also dispelled the fog of words, the shameless double-talk, and the myths that have beclouded American understanding of the issues, the alternatives and the real meaning of the war in Vietnam. An invaluable contribution to the dialogue on the subject.”
Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically African American women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote over forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608463053 • US $16.00 • 224 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A new edition of the classic memoir by one of our most lively, influential, and engaged teachers and activists. Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, tells his personal stories about more than thirty years of fighting for social change, from teaching during the civil rights movement at Spelman College to protests against the war in Iraq.
A former bombardier in WWII, Zinn emerged in the civil rights movement as a powerful voice for justice, and for hope.
PRAISE:
“An inspiring autobiography…in the tradition of Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, National Public Radio
“A history and a history maker to give us hope.”
Alice Walker
“A powerful, politically electric book from one of the most engaging social critics in the nation.:
Jonathan Kozol
“A personal favorite. This autobiography by the great activist and historian…provides an eloquent, personal account of the struggles for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, and a universal paean to protest and resistance.”
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive
“Zinn explains his involvement in the struggle for civil rights, against war, and in support of organized labor by citing his ‘abhorrence of any kind of bullying.’ These are lively tales.”
Patricia O’Connell, The New York Times
“Pick up this book! Start reading it! I guarantee you won’t stop. The most influential teacher I’ve ever had continues to teach us about life and humanity and hope.”
Marian Wright Edelman
“A teacher who committed his politically engaged life to the belief that love is a command to action.”
Colman McCarthy, The Washington Post
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically African American women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote over forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781608462599 • US $18.95 • 320 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Howard Zinn has illuminated our history like no other US historian. This collection of his speeches on protest movements, racism, war, and US history, many never before published, covers more than four decades of his active engagement with the audiences he inspired with his humor, insight, and clarity.
PRAISE:
“Reading Howard’s spoken words, I feel that I am almost hearing his voice again—his stunning pitch-perfect ability to capture the moment and the concerns and needs of the audience, whoever they may be, always enlightening, often stirring, an amalgam of insight, critical history, wit, blended with charm and appeal.”
Noam Chomsky
“With ferocious moral clarity and mischievous humor, Howard turned routine antiwar rallies into profound explorations of state violence and staid academic conferences into revival meetings for social change. Collected here for the first time, Howard’s speeches—spanning an extraordinary life of passion and principle—come to us at the moment when we need them most: just as a global network of popular uprisings searches for what comes next. We could ask for no wiser a guide than Howard Zinn.”
Naomi Klein
“To hear [Howard] speak was like listening to music that you loved—lyrical, uplifting, honest…. I know he would love it for each of you to find your voice and to be heard. This book will provide you with some inspiration.”
Michael Moore
“To read this book is to hear Howard Zinn speak again, inspiring us for the struggles from below that are our only hope for any future at all.”
Frances Fox Piven
“Howard Zinn was one of us, the best part of us. Enjoy these speeches. Hear his voice. Then hear your own, hear it closely.”
Josh Brolin
“One of my favorite expressions from Nicaragua is: ‘Struggle is the highest form of song.’ In that case Howard Zinn is one of our great singers and these speeches are righteous songs filled with the boldness, vision, humor, depth and urgings of his profoundly human voice. Howard sang a different America, an invisible America, an America of the 99 percent. He sang of the lies and deceit of the government and the impossibility and horror of wars made in America’s name. He sang of a dream, a deeper dream that is now rising in the streets. I cannot think of a more important set of songs to be singing at this time.”
Eve Ensler
“Howard Zinn’s speeches, beautifully gathered together here by Anthony Arnove, are a joy and an inspiration.”
Marisa Tomei
“Howard Zinn’s towering legacy will forever be as a historian who made history. He made history because his books, his actions, and especially his speeches inspired ordinary people to do extraordinary things. We fight onward today in a remarkable tradition of struggle. For many of us, we first became aware of this tradition by sitting in a packed, musty meeting hall and listening to stories of heart, humor, and heroism, as communicated by Howard Zinn.”
Dave Zirin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in“people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Anthony Arnove produced the Academy Award–nominated documentary Dirty Wars and wrote, directed, and produced The People Speak with Howard Zinn. He is the editor of several books, including Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which Arnove co-edited with Zinn, The Essential Chomsky, and Iraq Under Siege, and is the author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal. He is on the editorial boards of Haymarket Books and the International Socialist Review, and is the founder of Roam Agency.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780060844257 • US $13.99 • 192 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Historian, activist, and bestselling author Howard Zinn has been interviewed by David Barsamian for public radio numerous times over the past decade. Original Zinn is a collection of their conversations, showcasing the acclaimed author of A People’s History of the United States at his most engaging and provocative.
Touching on such diverse topics as the American war machine, civil disobedience, the importance of memory and remembering history, and the role of artists—from Langston Hughes to Dalton Trumbo to Bob Dylan—in relation to social change, Original Zinn is Zinn at his irrepressible best, the acute perception of a scholar whose impressive knowledge and probing intellect make history immediate and relevant for us all.
PRAISE:
“Not to read Howard Zinn is to do a disservice to yourself.”
Arundhati Roy
“A history maker to give us hope.”
Alice Walker
“It has been Zinn’s lifework to illuminate the subjectivities others have ignored.”
Boston Phoenix
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
David Barsamian has altered the independent media landscape, both with his weekly radio program, Alternative Radio—now in its thirty-fifth year—and his books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.
Arundhati Roy studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. The novel has been translated into more than forty languages worldwide. She has written several non-fiction books, including Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said (with John Cusack), and The End of Imagination, all published by Haymarket Books. She is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780060530341• US $16.99 • 512 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Why Howard Zinn has become one of the most important and influential American historians is perhaps nowhere more evident than in this new book. Few social critics have been as inspiring as the ever-hopeful Zinn and, unlike many historians, Zinn turns historical details toward deeper observations on the universal truths and struggles of humankind. His remarkable wisdom and insight can be found in his earliest writings through his latest essays, speeches, and plays.
Uncommon Sense brings together his most poignant and profound quotations from decades of writing and speaking. The book reveals the philosophical side of Howard Zinn and a consistency of vision over fifty years on topics ranging from government to race, history, law, civil disobedience, and activism. Offering quotations of universal and timeless quality, the book shows why history will regard this historian as a political and moral philosopher in the company of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
PRAISE FOR HOWARD ZINN:
“Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Noam Chomsky
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically African American women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote over forty books.
A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES Abridged Teaching Edition
Howard Zinn
Teaching materials by Kathy Emery and Ellen Reeves
The New Press (Revised and updated ed., August 2003)
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780062397348 • US $21.95 • 640 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has turned history on its head for an entire generation of readers, telling the nation’s story from the viewpoints of ordinary people—the slaves, workers, immigrants, women, and Native Americans who made their own history but whose voices are typically omitted from the historical record.
The New Press’s Abridged Teaching Edition of A People’s History of the United States has made Zinn’s original text available specifically for classroom use, with a wide range of tools for students to begin a critical inquiry into the American past. The teaching edition includes exercises and teaching materials to accompany each chapter.
PRAISE FOR A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES:
“Professor Zinn writes with an enthusiasm rarely encountered in the leaden prose of academic history, and his text is studded with telling quotations from labor leaders, war resisters, and fugitive slaves. There are vivid descriptions of events that are usually ignored … A reversal of perspectives, a reshuffling of heroes and villains.”
Eric Foner, The New York Times Book Review
“[A] brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically, and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.”
Library Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in“people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9780807050132 • US $20.00 • 192 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Three renowned historians present stirring tales of labor: Howard Zinn tells the grim tale of the Ludlow Massacre, a drama of beleaguered immigrant workers, Mother Jones, and the politics of corporate power in the age of the robber barons. Dana Frank brings to light the little-known story of a successful sit-in conducted by the ‘counter girls’ at the Detroit Woolworth’s during the Great Depression. Robin D. G. Kelley’s story of a movie theater musicians’ strike in New York asks what defines work in times of changing technology.
PRAISE:
“Three Strikes brings to life the heroic men and women who put their jobs, bodies, and lives on the line to win a better life for all working Americans. Zinn, Frank, and Kelley show us that while the country and the union movement have changed greatly in the last hundred years, our struggle to close the divide between rich and poor remains the same.”
John Sweeney, president, AFL-CIO
“Provocative analysis of still relevant issues, as the passionate, sometimes violent demonstrations at international meetings of the global economy demonstrate.”
Mary Carroll, Booklist
“Highly readable, well-researched narratives of dramatic action”
Leon Fink, Chicago Tribune
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically African American women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote over forty books.
Paperback/Poster • ISBN-13: 978156584171B • US $25.00 • 48 pgs.
ABOUT:
Few works of American history have done more to change the way in which recent generations have looked at their past than Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. With millions of copies sold, Zinn’s social history fleshes out the bare skeleton of traditional historical texts with the stories of working men and women throughout this country’s history.
A People’s History of the United States: The Wall Charts is a set of two posters and an explanatory booklet designed to bring the contents of the original People’s History to an even broader audience. Illustrated in full color, they portray over five hundred years of American social and cultural history. Organized thematically as well as chronologically, they allow the reader to trace the developments of specific topics—from slavery and resistance to the role of women—through images and quotations that go well beyond the wars and presidencies of traditional American history.
A People’s History of the United States: The Wall Charts creates a unique tool for learning about American history from the celebrated book that turned history on its head.
PRAISE FOR A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES:
“Professor Zinn writes with an enthusiasm rarely encountered in the leaden prose of academic history, and his text is studded with telling quotations from labor leaders, war resisters, and fugitive slaves. There are vivid descriptions of events that are usually ignored … A reversal of perspectives, a reshuffling of heroes and villains.”
Eric Foner, The New York Times Book Review
“[A] brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited politically and economically, and whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.”
Library Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in“people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
George Kirschner (d. 2008) began teaching high school history at the age of fifty, using A People’s History of the United States.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781594510557 • US $34.95 • 224 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Perhaps no other historian has had a more profound and revolutionary impact on American education than Howard Zinn. This is the first book devoted to his views on education and its role in a democratic society. Howard Zinn on Democratic Education describes what is missing from school textbooks and in classrooms—and how we move beyond these deficiencies to improve student education.
This book seeks to redefine national goals at a time when public debates over education have never been more polarized—nor higher in public visibility and contentious debate. Zinn’s essays on education, many never before published, are framed in this book by a dialogue between Zinn and Donaldo Macedo, a distinguished critic of literacy and schooling, whose books with Paulo Freire, Noam Chomsky, and other authors have received international acclaim.
PRAISE:
“This is a well-written and dynamic book to read, and a sociological treasure within the field of education. The authors explore both education and society within the context of democracy in a scholarly and meaningful way. The authors challenge us to re-define American culture and test our courage to develop a more equitable democracy.”
Leslie T. C. Wang, Contemporary Sociology
“Howard Zinn on Democratic Education is an excellent display of an author’s uncompromising commitment to democracy and education, especially in the face of repression. Zinn’s courage in confronting America’s historical and contemporary ills compels us to deliver the same sense of justice to our students and our country.”
Karen Emily Suurtamm, Canadian Journal of Education
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Donaldo Macedo is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education at the Unviersity of Massachusetts, Boston. A critical theorist, linguist, and expert on literacy and education studies, Macedo is the founder and former chair of the Applied Linguistics Master of Arts Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Macedo has been a central figure in the field of critical pedagogy for more than 20 years. His work with Paulo Freire broke new theoretical ground, as it helped to develop a critical understanding of the ways in which language, power, and culture contribute to the positioning and formation of human experience and learning. Macedo was Freire’s chief translator and English language interpreter. His published dialogues with Paulo Freire are considered classic works not only for their elucidation of Freire’s theories of literacy but also for adding a more critical and theoretically advanced dimension to the study of literacy and critical pedagogy. Macedo’s and Freire’s coauthored book, Literacy: Reading the World and the Word, is central to critical literacy in that it redefines the very nature and terrain of literacy and critical pedagogy. Professor Macedo has published more than one hundred articles, books, and book chapters in the areas of linguistics, critical literacy, and multicultural education. His publications have been translated into several languages.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781595586223 • US $19.95 • 416 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
When the historian Howard Zinn died in early 2010, millions mourned the loss of one of our foremost intellectual and political guides: a historian, activist, and truth-teller who, in the words of Bob Herbert, “peel[ed] back the rosy veneer of much of American history.”
Designed to highlight Zinn’s most important writings, The Indispensable Zinn includes excerpts from Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States; his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train; his inspiring writings on the civil rights movement; and the full text of his celebrated play Marx in Soho. Noted historian and activist Timothy Patrick McCarthy provides essential historical and biographical context for each selection.
With an introduction from Zinn’s former Spelman College student and longtime friend Alice Walker and an afterword by Zinn’s friend and colleague Noam Chomsky, The Indispensable Zinn is both a fitting tribute to the legacy of a man whose “work changed the way millions of people saw the past” (Noam Chomsky) and a powerful and accessible introduction for anyone discovering Zinn for the first time.
PRAISE:
“A fine selection that shows the enduring relevance of Zinn’s wisdom, and even more important for our time, of his radical democratic commitments.”
Frances Fox Piven
“The Indispensable Zinn captures Zinn’s eloquence and perception well; his writings remain remarkably relevant to today’s social and cultural debates. Tim McCarthy’s wonderful introduction provides a spirited guide to one of this country’s most invaluable public intellectuals.”
Martin Duberman, author of Stonewall
“Just as there will be only one Muhammad Ali, there will always be only one Howard Zinn. But both are in fact ‘The Greatest.’”
Dave Zirin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Anthony Arnove produced the Academy Award–nominated documentary Dirty Wars and wrote, directed, and produced The People Speak with Howard Zinn. He is the editor of several books, including Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which Arnove co-edited with Zinn, The Essential Chomsky, and Iraq Under Siege, and is the author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal. He is on the editorial boards of Haymarket Books and the International Socialist Review, and is the founder of Roam Agency.
Paper • ISBN-13:9781583228692 • US $19.95 • 5.5 in x 8 in• 464 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A Young People’s History of the United States brings to US history the viewpoints of workers, slaves, immigrants, women, Native Americans, and others whose stories, and their impact, are rarely included in books for young people. A Young People’s History of the United States is also a companion volume to The People Speak, the film adapted from A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States.
Beginning with a look at Christopher Columbus’s arrival through the eyes of the Arawak Indians, then leading the reader through the struggles for workers’ rights, women’s rights, and civil rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ending with the current protests against continued American imperialism, Zinn in the volumes of A Young People’s History of the United States presents a radical new way of understanding America’s history. In so doing, he reminds readers that America’s true greatness is shaped by our dissident voices, not our military generals.
PRAISE:
“Zinn has written a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those who have been exploited … the book is an excellent antidote to establishment history…While the book is precise enough to please specialists, it should satisfy any adult reader.”
Library Journal
“In many years of searching, we have not found one history book we would recommend to them—until [the] just published A Young People’s History of the United States. This is the edition of A People’s History that we have all been waiting for.”
Deborah Menkart, executive director, Teaching for Change
“Zinn’s work exemplifies an approach to history that is radical, regardless of its subject or geographical location. He tells us the untold story, the story of the world’s poor, the world’s workers, the world’s homeless, the world’s oppressed, the people who don’t really qualify as real people in official histories. Howard Zinn painstakingly unearths the details that the powerful seek to airbrush away. He brings official secrets and forgotten histories out into the light, and in doing so, changes the official narrative that the powerful have constructed for us. He strips the grinning mask off the myth of the benign American Empire. To not read Howard Zinn is to do a disservice to yourself.”
Arundhati Roy
“[Zinn] gives a real insight in to history that is often left out of text books. Highly recommended.”
Socialist Review
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those … whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories” (Library Journal). The book, which has sold more than 2.6 million copies and been translated into 23 foreign editions, has become a cultural touchstone, encouraging interest in “people’s histories” in universities and activist meetings alike. In 2009, History aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People’s History and a companion volume, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “Howard Zinn’s work literally changed the conscience of a generation.”
Zinn grew up in a working-class, immigrant household in Brooklyn. At eighteen, he became a shipyard worker and flew bomber missions over Europe during World War II, experiences which helped to shape his opposition to war and his interest in the lives of working people. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He wrote more than forty books.
Rebecca Stefoff has devoted her career to writing nonfiction books for young readers. She has adapted a number of landmark works in history and science. Visit her website here: http://rebeccastefoff.com/
Paperback • ISBN-13: 9781608465897 • US $17.95 • 276 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The people of Brazil celebrated when they learned that in the space of two years their country would host the world’s two largest sporting events: the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. Now they are protesting in numbers the country hasn’t seen in decades.
Relying on field work from the favelas of Rio to the halls of power in Washington DC, Dave Zirin exposes how sports and politics have collided in spectacular fashion. One of the Boston Globe’s “Best Sports Books of 2014,” newly updated to assess the final tally of debt and displacement that accompanied the 2014 World Cup, eyewitness accounts of the militarized police crackdown, and new reporting on the pre-Olympic plans furthering immiseration in cities across Brazil.
PRAISE:
“Brother Dave Zirin is the finest, most important writer on sports and politics in America.”
Dr. Cornel West
“In a world dominated by advertising dollars, company men, brand managers, player reps and billionaire owners, Zirin is that rare breed: an old-fashioned progressive. A muckraker… He’s the author of eight books and counting, including What’s My Name Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States, and A People’s History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play, which have made him a standard-bearer for progressive athletes, fans, and scholars, and earned the admiration of legends like Jim Bouton, Frank Deford, Lester Munson, Howard Zinn, and Chuck D.”
Literary Hub
“Zirin’s hope is in his intention, and in the intention of many others, to understand and remember that left unchecked, the greedy and hypocritical initiatives connected to these grand events threaten to destroy not only the lives of the poorest residents of the cities involved, but the sports themselves.”
Boston Globe
“People think speaking truth to power is easy, but if it was easy everyone would do it. This book does it… it speaks truth to the powers that be, from Brazil to the US to FIFA to the IOC. It hits you like an uppercut that rattles your brain and sets it straight. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.”
John Carlos, 1968 Olympic medalist
“Dave Zirin is not just the radical brilliant sports critic but along with Naomi Klein the investigative journalist of our neoliberal era. He has figured out that sports operates at the the nexus of capitalism, race, class, sexuality, privatization and of course spectacle. That’s why his work is so important to so many of us.”
Robin D. G. Kelley, author, Africa Speaks, America Answers
“Dave Zirin has long stood on the edge of the sports writing world, exploding topics many of his colleagues are scared to approach. With Brazil’s Dance with the Devil, he puts to bed any notion that the IOC and FIFA have the best interests of their host countries at heart. Brazil is a special country and Dave Zirin honors its people and history while mercilessly going after those who would undermine its people. This book is a remarkable mix of investigative sports journalism and insightful social history.”
Glenn Greenwald, author, No Place to Hide
“In a sports journalism landscape where it sometimes seems there are only those who fawn and those who pander, where curiosity about the world at large is in short supply, Zirin is an altogether different kind of presence. He does care, until it hurts, and consistently delivers unique takes on the nexus of sports and race, globalization, politics and human rights. In Brazil’s Dance with the Devil, Zirin’s at his best, on familiar and fertile ground. Like so much of his work, it’s incisive, heartbreaking, important and even funny.”
Jeremy Schaap, ESPN, author of New York Times bestseller Cinderella Man
“For years, FIFA and the Brazilian government have failed to understand the complexity of the Brazilian populace, that it’s possible both to love soccer and to be outraged over the organization of the World Cup at the expense of the people. Dave Zirin, one of our great chroniclers of sports and society, spent time on the ground in Brazil interviewing those most affected by the Brazilian World Cup and Olympics, and he comes away with the truth of it all: That the brutal expense of these Mega-events isn’t worth the investment of so much public money and historical memory. Everyone who watches the World Cup should read this book.”
Grant Wahl, senior writer, Sports Illustrated
“A vision from abroad about our Brazil from inside. It’s a vision at once critical, smart, truthful, and free of prejudices, and not sparing any criticisms of his own country, the United States. Additionally it’s a generous vision that uplifts the great Brazilian people. Enthusiastically recommended!”
Juca Kfouri, columnist, UOL Esporte
“Dave Zirin offers a great, fast-paced primer for those who want to get up to speed with what is happening on the ground in Brazil as it prepares for the World Cup and Olympics. Zirin brings the reader through years of history in order to contextualize the tumult on the streets during the 2013 Confederations’ Cup and offers perspective on what the world can expect during the World Cup and Olympics. Brazil’s Dance with the Devil gives insight into the linkages between corruption, massive public spending and the folly of mega-event planning in a country with huge wealth inequalities and major infrastructure challenges. Zirin has done his homework and fieldwork, consulting the classics and experts to bring together a fast-paced, focused read for an international audience.”
Juliana Barbassa, Former Rio de Janeiro correspondent, Associated Press
“Dave Zirin fans, of which I count myself as one, will relish his new book, Brazil’s Dance with the Devil. With his unique sports-politics lens and artful story-telling, this book focuses on Rio’s upcoming World Cup and Olympics. Readers will never again allow their love of sports to blind them to the re-purposed political ends of big, international sporting events.
Nancy Hogshead-Makar, civil rights attorney, senior director of advocacy for Womens Sports Foundation, Olympic Gold medalist
“Dave Zirin does it again. In only the way he knows, he takes the political and makes it extremely personal and inserts us all into the heart of soccer in Brazil. You don’t have to have ever watched a soccer to be caught up in this epic story. Sports needs Dave Zirin more than it even knows. Although after this book he probably won’t be invited to carry The Olympic Torch anytime soon.”
W. Kamau Bell, comedian
“Like everything Dave Zirin writes, this book is impassioned, deeply informed and very readable. It’s also a necessary book, because Brazil is a poorly understood country entering a crucial period. Zirin backs up his opinions with good, honest reporting. Brazil has a good friend in him.”
Simon Kuper, author, Soccernomics
“Millions will enjoy the World Cup and Olympics, but Zirin justly reminds readers of the real human costs beyond the spectacle.”
Kirkus Reviews
“This explosive book is a must-read for sports fans and readers interested in the human condition surrounding these events.”
Library Journal
“Brazil’s Dance With the Devil, is a powerful and haunting look at what’s happening behind the scenes (oft-tragically) in a nation hosting both the World Cup and the Olympics. It’s strong work.”
Jeff Pearlman, author, Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Named one of the “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World” by the Utne Reader, Dave Zirin is the author of ten books on the intersection of sports and politics. He also writes on this subject for the Nation magazine, their first sports writer in 150 years of existence. Zirin is also the host of the “Edge of Sports Podcast” and “The Collision with Etan Thomas and Dave Zirin” on WPFW in Washington DC.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859417 • US $16 • 5.5 in x 7.5 in • 280 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The nation’s sharpest sportswriter explores the contested politics of sports and profiles athletes making change.
This much-anticipated sequel to What’s My Name, Fool? by acclaimed commentator Dave Zirin breaks new ground in sportswriting, looking at the controversies and trends now shaping sports in the United States — and abroad. Always insightful, never predictable.
PRAISE:
“Brother Dave Zirin is the finest, most important writer on sports and politics in America.”
Dr. Cornel West
“In a world dominated by advertising dollars, company men, brand managers, player reps and billionaire owners, Zirin is that rare breed: an old-fashioned progressive. A muckraker… He’s the author of eight books and counting, including What’s My Name Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States, and A People’s History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play, which have made him a standard-bearer for progressive athletes, fans, and scholars, and earned the admiration of legends like Jim Bouton, Frank Deford, Lester Munson, Howard Zinn, and Chuck D.”
Literary Hub
“Dave Zirin is the best young sportswriter in America because he’s the one who understands the x’s and o’s, can arrange them vividly and show us what they mean in a world spinning out of control.”
Robert Lipsyte
“If you’re a sports fan you’ll love this book. If you’re politically politically active sports fan, you’ve found your bible.”
Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor, The Nation magazine
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Named one of the “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World” by the Utne Reader, Dave Zirin is the author of ten books on the intersection of sports and politics. He also writes on this subject for the Nation magazine, their first sports writer in 150 years of existence. Zirin is also the host of the “Edge of Sports Podcast” and “The Collision with Etan Thomas and Dave Zirin” on WPFW in Washington DC.
Chuck D redefined rap music and hip hop culture as leader and co-founder of legendary rap group Public Enemy. Spike Lee calls him “one of the most politically and socially conscious artists of any generation.” He co-hosts a weekly radio show on Air America.
Paper • ISBN-13: 9781931859202 • US $15 • 7.9 in x 5.3 in • 200 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Sportswriter Dave Zirin shatters numerous myths to show the contested meaning of sports in America today. What’s My Name, Fool? offers a no-holds-barred look at the business of sports today. In humorous and accessible language, Zirin shows how sports express the worst, as well as the most creative and exciting, features of American society.
PRAISE:
“Brother Dave Zirin is the finest, most important writer on sports and politics in America.”
Dr. Cornel West
“In a world dominated by advertising dollars, company men, brand managers, player reps and billionaire owners, Zirin is that rare breed: an old-fashioned progressive. A muckraker… He’s the author of eight books and counting, including What’s My Name Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States, and A People’s History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play, which have made him a standard-bearer for progressive athletes, fans, and scholars, and earned the admiration of legends like Jim Bouton, Frank Deford, Lester Munson, Howard Zinn, and Chuck D.”
Literary Hub
“Dave Zirin is one of the brightest, most audacious voices I can remember on the sports writing scene, and my memory goes back to the 1920s. A rare combination of social awareness, sports savvy and highly readable writing skills.”
Lester Rodney, Sports Editor, New York Daily Worker, 1936-58
“Dave Zirin has an amazing talent for covering the sports and politics beat. Ranging like a great shortstop, he scoops up everything! He profiles the courageous and inspiring athletes who are standing up for peace and civil liberties in this repressive age. A must read!”
Matthew Rothschild, Editor, The Progressive
“Too often writers on the Left take a priggish attitude toward sports, huffing that an examination of the political economy of baseball or boxing is beneath serious commentary. … As Dave Zirin shows in his riveting new book, What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, these days you’re much more likely to learn about the dynamics of class struggle, the power of unions and the persistence of racism by watching the Red Sox play the Yankees, than hours spent amid the visual backwash of CNN. Here you will find vividly written stories of exploitation and resistance, courage and collective action: from Tommy Smith and John Carlos’s lone stance in Mexico City to the great Curt Flood’s heroic break from the confines of baseball’s plantation house. Zirin doesn’t get bogged down in heavy theorizing. He writes with compassion, humor and a saber-like sharpness that deftly shreds owners and mainstream sportswriters alike. He’s the new Lester Rodney. And that’s very high praise, indeed.”
Jeffrey St. Clair, co-editor, CounterPunch
“Zirin has unique wit, vast sports knowledge and delightful candor. It is refreshing to see someone who can cut through the fluff and get to the heart of any sports issue. You want sports with an edge? You picked the right book.
Ed DeMayo, CEO, Basketball.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Named one of the “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World” by the Utne Reader, Dave Zirin is the author of ten books on the intersection of sports and politics. He also writes on this subject for the Nation magazine, their first sports writer in 150 years of existence. Zirin is also the host of the “Edge of Sports Podcast” and “The Collision with Etan Thomas and Dave Zirin” on WPFW in Washington DC.
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9781642599671 • US $17.95 • 5.5 in x 8.5 in • 140 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Inspired by the cleansing water often used in spiritual baths, Florida Water is an ode to the myriad ways a poem can rinse, reflect, reveal, and unravel us. An honest meditation on migrating to South Florida for love, connection, and community, these poems lay bare the challenging dance between the role of the artist, lover, and organizer. aja monet confronts the interpersonal truths of community organizing while also uncovering the state’s fraught history with racial prejudice, maroon communities, and natural disasters. This intimate collection of lyrical poems are the artifacts of her search for belonging and healing as she wades through the rising tides of climate change, heartbreak, and systemic violence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
aja monet is a surrealist blues poet, storyteller, and organizer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She won the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam poetry award title in 2007 and aja monet follows in the long legacy and tradition of poets participating and assembling in social movements. Her first full collection of poems is titled My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, from Haymarket Books. Her poems explore gender, race, migration, and spirituality. In 2018, she was nominated for a NAACP Literary Award for Poetry and in 2019 was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry for her cultural organizing work in South Florida. aja monet co-founded a political home for artists and organizers called Smoke Signals Studio. She facilitates “Voices: Poetry for the People,” a workshop and collective in collaboration with Community Justice Project and Dream Defenders. aja Monet also serves as the new Artistic Creative Director for V-Day, a global movement to end violence against all women and girls.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
I am 17 and have never killed a man but i know the face of death as if heirloom my country memorizes murder as lullaby —From “For Fahd”
Powerful, poetic meditations on motherhood, sisterhood, spirituality, solidarity, displacement/gentrification, racism, and sexism.
My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter is poet Aja Monet’s ode to mothers, daughters, and sisters—the tiny gods who fight to change the world.
Textured with the sights and sounds of growing up in East New York in the nineties, to school on the South Side of Chicago, all the way to the olive groves of Palestine, these stunning poems tackle racism, sexism, genocide, displacement, heartbreak, and grief, but also love, motherhood, spirituality, and Black joy.
PRAISE:
“Thank you, Aja Monet.”
Ava Duvernay
“Interesting, powerful, at times challenging poetry.”
Roxane Gay
“A triumphant collection.”
O Magazine
“Stunning and evocative… fierce and revolutionary.”
Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“Intergenerational talismans, pulled from the heart.”
Florence Welch
“A bold, intimate and powerful collection of poems.”
Ms. Magazine
“Aja Monet’s powerful, evocative collection My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter takes readers to poverty-stricken Brooklyn, Chicago’s South Side, Palestine, and everywhere in between. Monet’s voice is at once fiery and emotionally raw, exposing the struggles faced by those targeted by racism, sexism, police brutality, and domestic violence.”
Buzzfeed, “The 13 Best Poetry Books of 2017”
“AjaMonet’s writing blazes in these breathtakingly fierce poems.”
LitHub
“Generations of women, fighters all, live and breath in Monet‘s poetry… this book is a torch in the dark.”
Frontier Poetry
“A testament to the brilliance of Black women, from the South Side of Chicago and beyond.”
Bitch Magazine
“This might be THE single poetry collection I am most excited about this year.”
Bustle
“AjaMonet’s poetry, like her activism, is one of resistance and reimagining. It resists simplicity, instead opening up new vistas for the reader and new points of entry into perspectives that are largely ignored; she gives voices to the marginalized and forgotten and imagines worlds in which those voices can ring out.”
The Los Angeles Review
“My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter turns bodies that have been used as weapons into weapons of liberation. We cannot be contained.”
Courage Renewal
“Aja Monet ‘s poetry offers us textures of feeling and radical shifts of meaning that expand our capacity to envision and fight for new worlds. From Brooklyn, USA to Hebron, Occupied Palestine, we take a feminist journey through rage and serenity, through violence and love, through ancient times and imagined futures. This stunning volume reminds us that conflict and contradiction can produce hope and that poetry can orient us toward a future we may not yet realize we want.”
Angela Davis
“We who follow the dynamic poetry of Aja Monet know her to be a wizard of optimism and musicality. My Mother Was A Freedom Fighter reminds us of her wisdom. These poems are made of the black woman genius they praise: “the ghost of women once girls,” “mothers who did the best they could,” and “daughters of a new day.” Monet is a child of old school black power and a daughter of the myriad political traumas of today. Her poetry is indispensable. These poems are fire.”
Terrance Hayes, author of How to Be Drawn
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
aja monet is a surrealist blues poet, storyteller, and organizer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She won the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam poetry award title in 2007 and aja monet follows in the long legacy and tradition of poets participating and assembling in social movements. Her poems explore gender, race, migration, and spirituality. In 2018, she was nominated for a NAACP Literary Award for Poetry and in 2019 was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry for her cultural organizing work in South Florida. aja monet co-founded a political home for artists and organizers called Smoke Signals Studio. She facilitates “Voices: Poetry for the People,” a workshop and collective in collaboration with Community Justice Project and Dream Defenders. aja Monet also serves as the new Artistic Creative Director for V-Day, a global movement to end violence against all women and girls.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
