DESCRIPTION
Release date Aug 17, 2021
Susan Sontag meets Hanif Abdurraqib in this fascinating exploration of the unexpected connections between how we consume images and the insidious nature of Fascism.
Images come at us quickly, often without context. A photograph of Syrian children suffering in the wake of a chemical attack segues into a stranger’s pristine Instagram selfie. Before we can react to either, a new meme induces a laugh and a share. While such constant give and take might seem innocent, even entertaining, this barrage of content numbs our ability to examine critically how the world, broken down into images, affects us. Images without context isolate us, turning everything we experience into mere transactions. It is exactly this alienation that leaves us vulnerable to fascism—a reactionary politics that is destroying not only our lives and our nations, but also the planet’s very ability to sustain human civilization.
Who gets to control the media we consume? Can we intervene, or at least mitigate the influence of constant content? Mixing personal anecdotes with historical and political criticism, Image Control explores art, social media, photography, and other visual mediums to understand how our culture and our actions are manipulated, all the while building toward the idea that if fascism emerges as aesthetics, then so too can anti-fascism. Learning how to ethically engage with the world around us is the first line of defense we have against the forces threatening to tear that world apart.
AUTHOR
PATRICK NATHAN is the author of Some Hell, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Republic, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, The Baffler, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis.
Pew: A Novel
Description
Winner of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fiction Books of 2020.
“The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey.” --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy.
In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew.
As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are—a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths.
Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.
Author
Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She was a finalist, twice, for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, along with the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. Born in Mississippi, she is based in Chicago.
The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World
DESCRIPTION
The creator of the hit podcast series Tides of History and Fall of Rome explores the four explosive decades between 1490 and 1530, bringing to life the dramatic and deeply human story of how the West was reborn.
In the bestselling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, The Verge tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. Here, author Patrick Wyman examines two complementary and contradictory sides of the same historical coin: the world-altering implications of the developments of printed mass media, extreme taxation, exploitative globalization, humanistic learning, gunpowder warfare, and mass religious conflict in the long term, and their intensely disruptive consequences in the short-term.
As told through the lives of ten real people—from famous figures like Christopher Columbus and wealthy banker Jakob Fugger to a ruthless small-time merchant and a one-armed mercenary captain—The Vergeillustrates how their lives, and the times in which they lived, set the stage for an unprecedented globalized future.
Over an intense forty-year period, the seeds for the so-called "Great Divergence" between Western Europe and the rest of the globe would be planted. From Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic to Martin Luther's sparking the Protestant Reformation, the foundations of our own, recognizably modern world came into being.
For the past 500 years, historians, economists, and the policy-oriented have argued which of these individual developments best explains the West's rise from backwater periphery to global dominance. As The Vergepresents it, however, the answer is far more nuanced.
AUTHOR
Patrick Wyman holds a PhD in history from the University of Southern California. He previously worked as a sports journalist, covering mixed martial arts and boxing from 2013 to 2018. His work has been featured in Deadspin, The Washington Post, Bleacher Report, and others. He is currently host of the podcast, Tides of History, and previously the host of Fall of Rome.
Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History
DESCRIPTION
Through exclusive interviews with protagonists like Bruce LaBruce, G.B. Jones, John Waters, and many more, alongside a treasure trove of never-before-seen photographs and reprinted zines, Queercore traces the history of a scene originally "fabricated" in the bedrooms and coffee shops of Toronto and San Francisco by a few young, queer punks to its emergence as a relevant and real revolution. Queercore gets a down-to-details firsthand account of the movement explored through the people that lived it—from punk's early queer elements, to the moments Toronto kids decided they needed to create a scene that didn't exist, to the infiltration of the mainstream by Pansy Division, and the emergence of riot grrrl as a sister movement—as well as the clothes, zines, art, film, and music that made this movement an exciting, in-your-face middle finger to complacent gay and straight society. Queercore will stand as both a testament to radically gay politics and culture and an important reference for those who wish to better understand this explosive movement.
AUTHOR
Walter Crasshole is a journalist and editor in Berlin, for Exberliner. Yony Leyser is the writer and director of three award-winning feature films. Liam Warfield is a writer, editor, and educator living in Chicago. Lynn Breedloveis a writer, performer, musician, entrepreneur, and community activist born and raised in the SF Bay Area. Anna Joy Springer is the author of The Vicious Red Relic, Love, The Birdwisher, and A Murder Mystery for Very Old Young Adults.
NOlympians Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond
DESCRIPTION
NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond investigates the intersection of the global rise of anti-Olympics activism and the declining popularity of hosting of the Games. The Olympics were once buoyed by myths of luminous prosperity and upticks in tourism and jobs, but in recent years these assurances have been debunked. Now more than ever, it’s clear that the Olympics have transmogrified into a political-economic juggernaut that arrives with displacement, expanded policing, and anti-democratic backroom deals.
Jules Boykoff – a former professional soccer player who represented the US Olympic soccer team – zooms in on Los Angeles, where the Democratic Socialists of America have launched the NOlympics LA campaign ahead of the 2028 Summer Games. Boykoff shows how DSA-LA’s anti-Olympics activism fits with the resurgence of socialism in the US and beyond.
Boykoff’s research, based on more than 100 interviews with anti-Olympics activists, personal experiences at protests in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, London, and Tokyo, academic research, mass- and alternative-media coverage, and Olympic archives, is the backbone for this story of activists fighting against the odds and embracing the transformative politics of democratic socialism.
AUTHOR
Jules Boykoff is a professor of political science at Pacific University in Oregon, and is the author of Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics; Activism and the Olympics: Dissent at the Games in Vancouver and London; Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games; and Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States. His writing has appeared in New Left Review, the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, Al Jazeera, the Los Angeles Times, Jacobin, and elsewhere.
Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night
DESCRIPTION
The debut collection from award-winning poet Morgan Parker demonstrates why she’s become one of the most beloved writers working today. Her command of language is on full display. Parker bobs and weaves between humor and pathos, grief and anxiety, Gwendolyn Brooks and Jay-Z, the New York School and reality television. She collapses any foolish distinctions between the personal and the political, the “high” and the “low.” Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night not only introduced an essential new voice to the world, it contains everything readers have come to love about Morgan Parker’s work.
AUTHOR
Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? and the poetry collections There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker’s debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.”
Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Poetry Foundation, and lives in Minneapolis.
Philosophy, Pussycats, & Porn
Description
Philosophy, Pussycats, & Porn is a series of essays, blog posts, and stories surveying more than a decade of poignant journalistic accounts from internationally recognized writer, actor, and pornographer Stoya. Stoya provides crucial examinations of systemic biases toward sex workers and how sexuality is reflected in society. Stoya often points her journalistic lens inward, providing us with personal, illustriously detailed stories of her life, her collaborators, and how she has built a flourishing media haven in the face of a culture that is still learning how to handle public discourses on sex work.
Author
Stoya has been a pornographer since 2006 and a writer since 2012. She has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, Playboy, and others. She has acted in Serbian sci-fi feature Ederlezi Rising and two of Dean Haspiel’s plays, in Brooklyn and Manhattan. She lives with two cats and a platonic domestic partner named Steve.
Capital Hates Everyone
Why we must reject the illusory consolations of technology and choose revolution over fascism.
We are living in apocalyptic times. In Capital Hates Everyone, famed sociologist Maurice Lazzarato points to a stark choice emerging from the magma of today's world events: fascism or revolution. Fascism now drives the course of democracies as they grow less and less liberal and increasingly subject to the law of capital. Since the 1970s, Lazzarato writes, capital has entered a logic of war. It has become, by the power conferred on it by financialization, a political force intent on destruction. Lazzarato urges us to reject the illusory consolations of a technology-abetted "new" kind of capitalism and choose revolution over fascism.
Author
Maurizio Lazzarato is a sociologist and philosopher in Paris. He is the author of The Making of the Indebted Man, Governing by Debt, and Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, all published by Semiotext.
The Ethical Slut, Third Edition: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love
The classic guide to love, sex, and intimacy beyond the limits of conventional monogamy has been fully updated to reflect today’s modern attitudes and the latest information on nontraditional relationships.
“One of the most useful relationship books you could ever read, no matter what your lifestyle choices. It’s chock-full of great information about communication, jealousy, asking for what you want, and maintaining a relationship with integrity.”—Annie Sprinkle, PhD, sexologist and author of Dr. Sprinkle’s Spectacular Sex
For 20 years The Ethical Slut—widely known as the “Poly Bible”—has dispelled myths and showed curious readers how to maintain a successful polyamorous lifestyle through open communication, emotional honesty, and safer sex practices. The third edition of this timeless guide to the ethics of relationships, communication, and sex has been revised to include:
• Interviews with poly millennials (young people who have grown up without the prejudices their elders encountered regarding gender, orientation, sexuality, and relationships)
• Tributes to polyamory pioneers
• Tools for conflict resolution and instructions on how to improve interpersonal dynamics
• New sidebars on topics such as asexuality, sex workers, LGBTQ terminology, and ways polys can connect and thrive
The authors also include new content addressing nontraditional relationships beyond the polyamorous paradigm of “more than two”: couples who don't live together, couples who don't have sex with each other, nonparallel arrangements, couples with widely divergent sex styles, power disparities, and cross-orientation relationships, while utilizing nonbinary gender language and new terms that have come into common usage since the last edition.
Author
Janet W. Hardy is the author of more than ten books and the founder of Greenery Press, a now defunct publisher specializing in sexually adventurous books. She has an MFA in creative writing from St. Mary's College, and swore off monogamy in 1987.
Dossie Easton is a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in alternative sexualities and relationships, with twenty years of experience counseling open relationships. She is the author of four other books, and has been an ethical slut since 1969.
Prisoners' Inventions
Description
At long last, a reprint of our book Prisoners' Inventions—a collaboration with our late friend Angelo about the many things he observed during the course of his long incarceration in California. It has been over 15 years since this book was last in print. The original book was published by WhiteWalls, and we've taken on the printing of this new edition.
This greatly expanded new edition includes over 80 additional pages of material including many new drawings and writings about prisoners' inventions that Angelo created after the last printing, new writing from Temporary Services, blueprint drawings by Angelo of his prison cell, and photo documentation of the cell's recreation for Temporary Services' exhibitions of the project. The book also has a completely new design by Partner & Partners. We could not be happier that a new generation of readers will finally get to see this book, and that longtime fans who have worn out their original copies will be able to have this fresh, expanded edition.
In 2001, the group Temporary Services invited their friend Angelo, a prisoner in California, to write about and draw the different things he had seen other prisoners invent.
Angelo illustrated everything from immersion heaters with electrical plugs made from razor blades, paper clips, and popsicle sticks, to cooking methods for bologna jerky on built-in cell light fixtures. These drawings and writings became the book and widely exhibited project Prisoners’ Inventions, first published in 2003.
This redesigned and expanded edition of Prisoners’ Inventions includes many pages of additional drawings and writings that Angelo produced after the last printing, as well as a new introduction by Temporary Services that details the origins and life of the project. Prisoners’ Inventions reveals an often-neglected side of prison existence: the need to create those objects and experiences that allow the most basic human desires to be satisfied.
Purchase a copy at Mirrored Society
Funeral for Flaca by Emily Prado
Description
Literary Nonfiction. Latinx Studies. FUNERAL FOR FLACA is an exploration of things lost and found--love; identity; family--and the traumas that transcend bodies; borders; cultures; and generations. Emilly Prado retraces her experience coming of age as a prep-turned-chola-turned-punk in this collection that is one-part memoir-in-essays; and one-part playlist; zigzagging across genres and decades; much like the rapidly changing and varied tastes of her youth.
Author
Emilly Giselle Prado is a writer and educator living in Portland; Oregon. She is a "first-and-a-half" generation Chicana raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by a first- generation Mexican American and a Mexican immigrant. Emilly spent half a decade working as a freelance multimedia journalist; producing award-winning reporting centered on the voices and experiences of people from historically marginalized communities. She is the author of Examining Assimilation (Enslow; 2019) a youth non-fiction book about the intersections of identity and society. Her writing can be found in NPR; Marie Claire; Bitch Media; Eater; The Oregonian; Ms. Magazine; and more. When not writing; Emilly serves as the Director of Youth Programs at Literary Arts by day and moonlights as DJ Mami Miami with Noche Libre; the Latinx DJ collective she co-founded in 2017.
Paperback: 200 pages
Publisher: Future Tense Books
Date Published: July 1, 2021
Subjects: Literary Criticism Caribbean Latin American Collections Biography Autobiography Cultural Ethnic Regional Hispanic Latino
EAN: 9781892061xxx
Physical Dimensions: 5.00" x 8.00"
Shipping Weight: 1.25 lbs.
Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities
Descrption
Los Angeles is well-known as a temperate paradise with expansive beaches and mountain vistas, a booming luxury housing market, and the home of glamorous Hollywood. During the first half of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was also seen as a mecca for both African Americans and a steady stream of migrants from around the country and the world, transforming Los Angeles into one of the world’s most diverse cities. The city has become a multicultural maze in which many now fear that the political clout of the region’s large black population has been lost. Nonetheless, the dream of a better life lives on for black Angelenos today, despite the harsh social and economic conditions many confront.
Black Los Angeles is the culmination of a groundbreaking research project from the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA that presents an in-depth analysis of the historical and contemporary contours of black life in Los Angeles. Based on innovative research, the original essays are multi-disciplinary in approach and comprehensive in scope, connecting the dots between the city’s racial past, present, and future. Through historical and contemporary anecdotes, oral histories, maps, photographs, illustrations, and demographic data, we see that Black Los Angeles is and has always been a space of profound contradictions. Just as Los Angeles has come to symbolize the complexities of the early twenty-first-century city, so too has Black Los Angeles come to embody the complex realities of race in so-called “colorblind” times.
Contributors: Melina Abdullah, Alex Alonso, Dionne Bennett, Joshua Bloom, Edna Bonacich, Scot Brown, Reginald Chapple, Lola Smallwood Cuevas, Andrew Deener, Regina Freer, Jooyoung Lee, Mignon R. Moore, Lanita Morris, Neva Pemberton, Steven C. Pitts, Carrie Petrucci, Gwendelyn Rivera, Paul Robinson, M. Belinda Tucker, Paul Von Blum, Mary Weaver, Sonya Winton, and Nancy Wang Yuen.
Author
Darnell Hunt is Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and Professor of Sociology at UCLA. He is the editor or author of numerous books, including Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America and Screening the Los Angeles “Riots:“ Race, Seeing, and Resistance.
Ana-Christina Ramón is Assistant Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA and a social psychologist.
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
Description
What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . .
Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day.
Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere.
Author
Amanda Montell is a writer and reporter from Baltimore with bylines in Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Woman's Day, The Rumpus, Byrdie.com, and WhoWhatWear, where she is the staff features editor. As a pop linguist, Amanda's insights have been featured in Glamour, Bustle, Refinery29, Hello Giggles, and Bust Magazine. Amanda graduated from NYU with a degree in linguistics. She lives in Los Angeles. Find her on Instagram @amanda_montell.
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins
Date Published: June 15, 2021
Subjects: Language Arts Disciplines Linguistics Sociolinguistics Social Science Feminism Feminist Theory Communication Studies
EAN: 9780062993xxx
Physical Dimensions: 5.50" x 8.25"
Shipping Weight: 0.85 lbs.
The Cheap Eaters by Thomas Bernhard
Description
Translated by Douglas Robertson. THE CHEAP-EATERS have been eating at the Vienna Public Kitchen for years, and true to their name, always the cheapest meals. They become the focus of Koller's scientific attention when he deviates one day from his usual path through the park, leading him to come upon the cheap-eaters and to realize that they must be the focal piece of his years-long, unwritten study of physiognomy. The narrator, a former school friend of Koller's, tells of his relationship with Koller in a single unbroken paragraph that is both dizzying and absorbing. In Koller, the narrator observes a "gradually ever-growing and utterly exclusive interest in thought... We can get close to such a person, but if we come into contact with him we will be repelled." Written in Bernhard's hyperbolic, darkly comic style, THE CHEAP-EATERS is a study of the limits of language and thought.
Author
Thomas Bernhard was one of the most important and unique writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1931, Bernhard published numerous novels and autobiographical writings, as well as short stories, plays, and poetry including THE CHEAP-EATERS (Spurl Editions, 2021) and ON THE MOUNTAIN (Marlboro/Noethwestern, 1991). Many of his prose works feature complex narrative structures and obsessive, misanthropic monologues. After years of chronic lung illness, Bernhard died in Austria in 1989.
Paperback: 104 pages
Publisher: Spurl Editions
Date Published: March 10, 2021
Subjects: Fiction Humorous Black Humor
EAN: 9781943679xxx
Physical Dimensions: 4.50" x 6.40"
Shipping Weight: 0.12 lbs.
Cunt, 20th Anniversary Edition
Description
An ancient title of respect for women, the word "cunt" long ago veered off this noble path. Inga Muscio traces the road from honor to expletive, giving women the motivation and tools to claim "cunt" as a positive and powerful force in their lives. In this fully revised edition, she explores, with candidness and humor, such traditional feminist issues as birth control, sexuality, jealousy between women, and prostitution with a fresh attitude for a new generation of women. Sending out a call for every woman to be the Cuntlovin' Ruler of Her Sexual Universe, Muscio stands convention on its head by embracing all things cunt-related. This edition is fully revised with updated resources, a new foreword from sexual pioneer Betty Dodson, and a new afterword by the author.
Author
Inga Muscio is a writer and public speaker addressing the issues of sexism, racism, sexual violence, and feminist issues. She teaches writing and appears frequently on college campuses. She lives in Seattle.
America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s
Description
What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors—and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.
Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post–Jim Crow United States no longer holds.
Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California.
The central lesson from these eruptions—that police violence invariably leads to community violence—continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.
Author
Elizabeth Hinton is associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and a professor of law at Yale Law School. The author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, she lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Big City by Scot Sothern
Description
Scot Sothern's profane western satire BIGCITY, is a novel with an unforgettable cast, including the wild Bitch Bantam, pulp writer Slab Pettibone, and his sidekick FuzzyWuzzy the bear in a tale as moving as it is scandalous. BIGCITY is the birth of feminism, robber barons, media stardom, and motion pictures, where teeming masses have come for a new life and a throw of the dice; with gritty realism and absurdist comedy, BIGCITY is a fantastical adventure and love story examining the dynamics of change and the politics of natural selection.
Author
Scot Sothern is an American photographer and writer best known for his controversial black and white photographs of prostitutes in Southern California, whom he photographed from 1986 to 1990, and again in 2010 when he began photograph and writing about sex workers in Los Angeles Skid Row.
Priestess: Second Edition by Marcella Kroll
Description
Priestess is a concept visual art book meets witch’s grimoire, filled with antidotes, spells, mantras, prose, and original art intertwined within the pages by Artist and Psychic Medium, Marcella Kroll. A biography of a witch without being a memoir, this is a modern book of shadows updated for a new era.
Author
Marcella Kroll is a multimedia artist, ritualist, psychic medium, and metaphysical teacher.
Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell
Description
A new manifesto for cyberfeminism
Simone de Beauvoir said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The glitch announces: One is not born, but rather becomes, a body.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. What must we do to work out who we are, and where we belong? How do we find the space to grow, unite and confront the systems of oppression? This conflict can be found in the fissures between the body, gender and identity. Too often, the glitch is considered a mistake, a faulty overlaying, a bug in the system; in contrast, Russell compels us to find liberation here. In a radical call to arms, Legacy Russell argues that we need to embrace the glitch in order to break down the binaries and limitations that define gender, race, sexuality.
Glitch Feminism is a vital new chapter in cyberfeminism, one that explores the relationship between gender, technology and identity. In an urgent manifesto, Russell reveals the many ways that the glitch performs and transforms: how it refuses, throws shade, ghosts, encrypt, mobilises and survives. Developing the argument through memoir, art and critical theory, Russell also looks at the work of contemporary artists who travel through the glitch in their work. Timely and provocative, Glitch Feminism shows how an error can be a revolution.
Author
Legacy Russell is a writer and curator. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Her written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art and a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow.
Debt, Tenth Anniversary Edition
Description
Before there was money, there was debt.
Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.
Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history. It shows how debt has defined our human past, and what that means for our economic future.
Authors
DAVID GRAEBER (1961--2020) was an American professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, who also taught at Goldsmiths College and Yale University. One of the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street, Graeber was also the author of The Utopia of Rules and numerous other books, as well as writing for magazines and newspapers including The Guardian, Harper’s, The Baffler, n+1, The Nation, The New Inquiry and The New Left Review.
THOMAS PIKETTY is professor of economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, associate chair at the Paris School of Economics, and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics. His book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, reached number one on the New York Timesbestseller list.
