Verso Books

Book SynopsisThe Imperial Messenger reveals the true value of this media darling, a risible writer whose success tells us much about the failures of contemporary journalism. Belén Fernández dissects the Friedman corpus with wit and journalistic savvy to expose newsroom practices that favor macho rhetoric over serious inquiry, a pacified readership over an empowered one, and reductionist analysis over integrity. The Imperial Messenger is polemic at its best, relentless in its attack on this apologist for American empire and passionate in its commitment to justice.About the series: Counterblasts is a new Verso series that aims to revive the tradition of polemical writing inaugurated by Puritan and leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when in the words of one of them, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was "running up like parchment in the fire." From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that his collection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. Such polemics reappeared both before and during the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the last century. In a period of conformity where politicians, media barons and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it's time to revive the tradition. Verso's Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.Trade ReviewFilleting the silliest man on the planet needs a sure scalpel, and Belén Fernández wields hers with deadly finesse. -- Alexander Cockburn, editor of CounterPunchA long overdue takedown of a dangerous fraud. Fernández deserves great credit for having the stomach to digest all of Friedman's oeuvre and for her witty, fact-based and ruthless deconstruction of all his contradictions, incoherence, jingoism and inane aphorisms. You read it and you are amazed how a clown could rise to such dominance in American culture and how such drivel could pass for insight, and what that implies about us. The book is a vaccination that should be given to all college freshmen lest they too get infected, an antidote for those suffering from admiration of Friedman and a palliative remedy for those of us who have had aneurysms in reaction to his every latest bloviation. -- Nir Rosen, author of Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim WorldVia razor sharp analysis and meticulous research, Fernández reveals the consistently disastrous effects of the neoliberal policies Friedman cheerleads. The hubris, fallacy, consistent hypocrisy, and buffoonery of the New York Times' most widely read columnist is systematically deconstructed and laid bare. A must read. -- Dahr Jamail, journalist and author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied IraqBelén Fernández is a revelation to those who don't know her yet and a confirmation for those happy few who have known her sublime sense of political satire-subdued, innocent, piercing, frightful. She is a political satirist of the generation X vintage-low-key, self-effacing, happenstance, 'what-ever'-type who crawls under your skin and begins to tickle and before you know it bite. She insinuates so effortlessly, you think she is just chilling-she is not. Her book on Thomas Friedman is an act of restitution, a declaration of independence from a young, idealist, brave, and defiant generation of Americans who have had it up to here with barefaced banality that has been fed to them for too long. She is talking back-boldly, patiently, chapter and verse, going in for the kill. -- Hamid Dabashi, author of Iran, the Green Movement and the USA: The Fox and the ParadoxThomas Friedman is a representative for the peculiar, yet self-serving nature of American political, business and media elites. His patronizing, over-simplified (often self-deceiving) style came to define him, as a person, but also an entire era of patronizing, hegemonic and often bloody American foreign policy in the Middle East and the rest of the world. The Imperial Messenger is a superb dissection of the character of Friedman, and all the representations he snootily imitates. Belén Fernández's style is witty and unique, and her book is the antithesis of Friedman's various attempts at logic. -- Ramzi Baroud, author of My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold StoryFernández skewers empire's messenger Tom Friedman. . . .Few books on current affairs merit being called page-turners; because of Fernández's witty and punchy style, this one does. -- David Cronin * The Electronic Intifada *[A] meticulously researched book, written with wry wit and an unrelenting critical eye, that should be read by both Friedman's fans and critics alike; not just for what it reveals about his journalism or the New York Times, but for what it says about the state of American journalism as a whole. In short, if New York's 'paper of record' wanted to start rectifying its own journalistic deficiencies, it would do well to start by replacing Friedman with Fernández. -- Cyril Mychalejko * Toward Freedom *There is no wittier or sharper account of Thomas Friedman's intellectual and moral atrocities than Belen Fernández's The Imperial Messenger. -- Pankaj Mishra * Outlook India *[C]arefully argued, relentlessly well-written polemic ... there is something compellingly honest about Fernández's attention to the material context within which Friedman's ideas find succor. -- Max Ajl * Jadaliyya *[R]aises thought-provoking questions about the objectivity of mainstream media when it comes to US economic and foreign policy interests. -- Sandra Siagian * Asia Times *[S]hould be the companion volume to any and all reading of Friedman. -- Jim Miles * Counter Currents *Journalist Belén Fernández's new opus Imperial Messenger effectively eviscerating the NYT's Thomas Friedman (whom Alexander Cockburn, not one to pull punches, has called "the silliest man on the planet") strikes me as an example of the kind of book that a supine establishment,mainstream media herd must exert some effort to avoid paying even minimal attention. -- Robert Birnbaum * Our Man in Boston *Fernández subjects Friedman to careful scrutiny and assigns him failing grades for logic, consistency, and integrity. After reading Fernández dissect Friedman column by column, the unavoidable question is: How did Friedman ever pass himself off as a journalist? Why isn't Belén Fernández the New York Times' lead columnist? The answer is clear. Fernandez won't lie for the establishment. -- Paul Craig Roberts * Institute for Political Economy *[A] systematic, detailed take-down of the neo-liberal bias, myopic US-Israeli chauvinism, and general intellectual shallowness that almost scream to be noticed in Friedman's writing. Throughout, [Fernández] bolsters her arguments with detail so profuse and tightly packed that a brief review such as this can hardly do it justice. Deserves to be read widely and discussed in depth. After doing so, one may be much less prepared to say the same for the work of Thomas Friedman. -- John Robertson * War in Context *Those searching for a more thorough and academic destruction of Friedman's career and philosophy would enjoy The Imperial Messenger, an incisive dismantling of the man and his message. * Gawker *

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Book SynopsisMillions of young people-and increasingly some not-so-young people-now work as interns. They famously shuttle coffee in a thousand magazine offices, legislative backrooms, and Hollywood studios, but they also deliver aid in Afghanistan, map the human genome, and pick up garbage. Intern Nation is the first exposé of the exploitative world of internships. In this witty, astonishing, and serious investigative work, Ross Perlin profiles fellow interns, talks to academics and professionals about what unleashed this phenomenon, and explains why the intern boom is perverting workplace practices around the world.The hardcover publication of this book precipitated a torrent of media coverage in the US and UK, and Perlin has added an entirely new afterword describing the growing focus on this woefully underreported story. Insightful and humorous, Intern Nation will transform the way we think about the culture of work.Trade Review'Interns built the pyramids,' the great magazine The Baffler once declared. And that was just the beginning of their labors, as Ross Perlin demonstrates in this fascinating and overdue exposé of the wage labor without wages, the resumé-building servitude, at the heart of contemporary capitalism. -- Benjamin Kunkel, a founding editor of n+1 and author of the novel IndecisionA book that offers landmark coverage of its topic. -- Andrew Ross * London Review of Books *Perlin contends that most internships are illegal, according to the Fair Labor and Standards Act, stripping people who are employees in all but name of workers' rights. * New Yorker *A portrait of how white-collar work is changing ... thought-provoking and at times jaw-dropping-almost a companion volume to Naomi Klein's celebrated 2000 exposé of modern sweatshops, No Logo. -- Andy Beckett * Guardian *A compelling investigation of a trend that threatens to destroy 'what's left of the ordered world of training, hard work and fair compensation' ... Full of restrained force and wit, this is a valuable book on a subject that demands attention. -- Anna Winter * Observer *[An] eye-opening, welcome exposé. * Sunday Times *This vigorous and persuasive book ... argues that the fundamental issue is the growing contingency of the global workforce. -- Roger D. Hodge * Bookforum *Organizations in America save $2 billion a year by not paying interns a minimum wage, writes Ross Perlin in Intern Nation. * Economist *Well-researched and timely. * Daily Telegraph *[E]ye-opening ... The book tackles a sprawling topic with earnestness and flair. -- Katy Waldman * Washington Post *Perlin ... has an eye for polemical effectiveness. * Times Literary Supplement *A timely book addressing the exploitation of the nation's younger workforce under the guise of the 'internship model.' -- Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2011 * Huffington Post *A serious and extremely well-written text that offers sophisticated historical material about the origins of internship and its impact on the individuals concerned, the firms that use it and the world of work more generally. -- Cary L. Cooper * Times Higher Education *Perlin's attempt to understand internships as a symptom of wider trends in the economy ... makes the book such a fascinating read. * Spectator *When you are competing for jobs during a recession, the only thing worse than being exploited can be not being exploited. Yes, many internships are really crummy, but then some of them do ultimately lead to something ... which is why, when people have no access to internships at all, it makes them invisible. -- Ross Perlin speaking to Kaya Burgess * Times of London *Perlin dissects the employment practices of some of the world's biggest corporations, inc¬luding Disney, which he accuses of replacing "well-trained, decently compensated full-timers" with an army of low-paid interns. But for employers that approach recruitment strategically, internships are typically a cost-albeit one they hope will pay off in better, happier recruits. * Financial Times *[Perlin's] exposé on the internship model initiates a critical conversation on internships ... his thoughtful book is necessary reading for the millions of young people trying to break into the working world through internships. * Publishers Weekly *That fact that it took this long for someone to write this book seems as blatantly wrong as the practice itself. Perlin provides a welcome, long-overdue and much-needed argument. * Kirkus Reviews *Perlin's writing is engaging and the questions he raises are valid ones in an increasingly competitive job market. * Library Journal *[A] blistering, highly entertaining attack on today's internship culture. * Boston Globe *Cloaked in the innocent idea of the intern, aggressive employers are using young people trying to get a foothold to weaken the leverage of existing workers, especially professionals. Ross Perlin gives us an account of another subterranean strategy to undermine working people in the US. -- Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNYAlas, the valuable internship institution is being widely and flagrantly abused, as Ross Perlin demonstrates in this eye-opening book. A huge chunk of the American workplace has been distorted in an unhealthy way, and Perlin provides not only the diagnosis but the beginnings of a prescription. -- James Ledbetter, editor in charge of Reuters.com, and author of Unwarranted InfluenceThe world has been waiting for this book. It's lucky that someone as thoughtful and politically aware as Ross Perlin was there to write it. -- Anya Kamenetz, author of Generation Debt and DIY UFew books have been written about the effect of internships, so this short book will be eye-opening for many. Students and parents should add it their reading lists. -- Repps Hudson * St. Louis Post-Dispatch *For critics such as Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation, unpaid labor harms everyone in the labor market. -- Alexandra Alper * Reuters *Intern Nation provides a wide-angle overview of an international system of labor subsidization masked as career opportunity-indeed, as a de rigueur component of baccalaureate and even postgraduate degree work, without which a young person cannot hope to secure a gratifying and adequately remunerative professional career in the twenty-first century. -- Cecelia Tichi * Academe Magazine *[A] scathing look at the internship culture ... * Washingtonian *[Intern Nation] tracks how the explosion of internships in creative fields changed the entry level of many industries. * New York Times Critic's Notebook *

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Book SynopsisFor the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel's absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own times share startling similarities.Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new period of transition. In Less Than Nothing, the product of a career-long focus on the part of its author, Slavoj Zizek argues it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Zizek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought-Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics, and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.Trade ReviewA lucid rendering of modern society's debt to Hegel. * Publisher's Weekly *The publication of Less Than Nothing is a major event in contemporary philosophy. -- Don Antenen * Hey, Small Press *Less than Nothing is a master work that is eminently readable ... the book is raw with vital force, surplus even, and Zizek goes at it with a death drive all his own. * Rain Taxi Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisIn this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery. Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today's politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.Trade ReviewA brilliant exercise in unmasking liberal pretensions, surveying over three centuries with magisterial command of the sources. -- Peter Clarke * Financial Times *Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo stimulatingly uncovers the contradictions of an ideology that is much too self-righteously invoked. -- Pankaj Mishra * Guardian *Liberalism is far too serious to be left in the hands of the liberals. * Il Giornale *There is always something to learn from books by Domenico Losurdo. And [this book] is no exception, for the outstanding knowledge of modern and contemporary political thought, the rigorous philology and the pursuit of sources that have been forgotten or expunged. * Il Corriere della Sera *Vast historical research recommended for the depth of the 'excavation' and for the wealth of new material that emerges. * Il Sole 24 Ore *The latest, original work by Domenico Losurdo, a philosopher-historian of great lucidity, author of always innovative books ... travels through and analyzes the dark, deep and often malodorous side of liberalism. * La Stampa *Losurdo is almost unbelievably well-read * Jacobin *Losurdo chronicles the ways in which the leading theorists of liberalism aided and abetted the building up of a 'master-race democracy' in the antebellum United States and, afterwards, a world-wide 'war' waged by the northern European empires of liberty against one another and for the colonial subjection of the rest of the world. * The University Bookman *The book is a historically grounded, very accessible critique of liberalism, complementing a growing literature critical of liberalism. * CHOICE magazine *Liberals might be inclined to disregard Losurdo's work as bombastic and hyperbolic, but they would be exercising poor judgment to do so. This is not revisionist history, but history told from the point of view of those who are making it. -- Chris Byron * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisHow will climate change affect our lives? Where will its impacts be most deeply felt? Are we doing enough to protect ourselves from the coming chaos? In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that cities are ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion's share of carbon to the atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels. Today, the majority of the world's megacities are located in coastal zones, yet few of them are adequately prepared for the floods that will increasingly menace their shores. Instead, most continue to develop luxury waterfront condos for the elite and industrial facilities for corporations. These not only intensify carbon emissions, but also place coastal residents at greater risk when water levels rise.In Extreme Cities, Dawson offers an alarming portrait of the future of our cities, describing the efforts of Staten Island, New York, and Shishmareff, Alaska residents to relocate; Holland's models for defending against the seas; and the development of New York City before and after Hurricane Sandy. Our best hope lies not with fortified sea walls, he argues. Rather, it lies with urban movements already fighting to remake our cities in a more just and equitable way. As much a harrowing study as a call to arms Extreme Cities is a necessary read for anyone concerned with the threat of global warming, and of the cities of the world.Trade ReviewExtreme Cities is a ground-breaking investigation of the vulnerability of our cities in an age of climate chaos. -- Bill McKibben, author and founder of 350.orgA substantive contribution to the growing dialogue about our response-or lack thereof-to climate change. * Kirkus Reviews *Dawson makes a convincing case that, unless urban dwellers and civic leaders engage in a fundamental reconceptualization of the city and whom it serves, the future of urban life is dim. * Publishers Weekly *The way we design and live in cities will determine humanity's ability to avoid an anthropogenic mass extinction event in the coming century. Dawson makes this vividly clear in Extreme Cities, laying out in detail the nature of the problem and some possible positive actions we can take. Crucial to his argument is the fact that technological solutions will not be enough, so that we need to drastically reform the capitalist economic system to properly price and value the biosphere and human lives. His point that social justice is now a necessary survival strategy makes this not just a meticulous history and analysis of our situation, but also an exciting call to action. -- Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Red Mars trilogyA refreshingly different perspective on climate change. * Choice *Extreme Cities takes on the needed work of slowing down to chronicle and consider this meantime, without shying away from its messiness.More than simply lay out the existence of disparities, it illuminates the relationship between them. -- Liz Koslov * Public Books *[Ashley Dawson] cuts through the green capitalist hype and shows instead that life under climate change has grown increasingly precarious for working-class people living in major urban centers in the twenty-first century... A sweeping narrative that ties together disparate calamities. -- Zachary Alexis * International Socialist Review *

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Book SynopsisThe more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess?In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy-but rather superior control of subordinate labour. Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours, as it continues to do today. Sweeping from nineteenth-century Manchester to the emissions explosion in China, from the original triumph of coal to the stalled shift to renewables, this study hones in on the burning heart of capital and demonstrates, in unprecedented depth, that turning down the heat will mean a radical overthrow of the current economic order.Trade ReviewMalm forcefully unmasks the assumption that economic growth has inevitably brought us to the brink of a hothouse Earth. Rather, as he shows in a subtle and surprising reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution, it has been the logic of capital (especially the need to valorize immense sunk investments in fossil fuels), not technology or even industrialism per se, that has driven global warming. -- Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Ecology of FearFossil Capital is a theoretical masterpiece and a political-economic-ecological manifesto. It looks unblinkingly at the catastrophe that could await human society if we fail to act on the words System Change or Climate Change. It is a book that I will return to again and again-and take notes. -- John Bellamy Foster, University of Oregon, author of Marx’s EcologyThe definitive deep history on how our economic system created the climate crisis. Superb, essential reading from one of the most original thinkers on the subject. -- Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock DoctrineA unique reconceptualization of the relationship between nature, capitalism, and Marxism. * Jacobin *Will climate change make us evaluate differently the achievements of George Stevenson and James Watt, Industrial Age pioneers? For it was in Britain, which accounted for 80 per cent of fossil fuel combustion in 1825, that "the fossil economy" began. Malm's history is expansive and detailed, and often quite terrifying in its analysis. Essential reading. * Herald Scotland *The birth of the fossil economy, avers human ecologist Andreas Malm, arrived when steam eclipsed water power in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Around that, Malm builds a deep, insight-packed history of how society came to be in thrall to the twin engines of combustion and capital. -- Barbara Kiser * Nature *A major and important revision of Marxist theory . a singularly important work, pointing the way for future work in economics, politics, theories of time, space and energy. * Radical Philosophy *His thorough account of the switch to steam shows quite convincingly that coal did not make Britain great for everyone, and the transition was rooted not in technological superiority or environmental scarcity but in good old fashioned class conflict. -- Dayton Martindale * In These Times *Anyone with an interest in ecology, and anyone opposed to capitalism, must read Malm's crucial contribution to understand how and why capitalism makes war on planet Earth. -- Bill Crane * International Socialist Review *This impressive book speaks to several emergent areas in ecocriticism: material ecocriticism, the ubiquitous Anthropocene, environmental history, 'Victorian Ecology' . Such a formidable body of historical evidence has the potential to ignite both 'Victorian ecology' and a more socially engaged ecocriticism. -- John Parnham * Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism *Has Andreas Malm written the crime story of the year with his book Fossil Capital? Or submitted the fossil world order to psychoanalysis? Both. The depth of his inquiry into how our economic system created the climate crisis is impressive . Very concrete, very beautiful, and perfectly reasonable. -- Joar Tiberg * Aftonbladet *Fossil Capital presents, with impressive detail and theoretical clarity, how the fossil fuel economy has come into being. Malm does not reiterate commonplaces about climate change, but looks closely at its origins. This extremely well-written book is radical without being dogmatic. Malm does not take his audience for granted at any point; there are no short cuts. * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books *Remarkable book -- Benjamin Kunkel * London Review of Books *This is a denser, wonkier, and more historical survey of the long, ugly marriage between fossil fuels and capitalism - in fact, between fossil fuels and the entire history of economic growth. -- David Wallace-Wells * New York Magazine *The best book written about the origins of global warming ... Like Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, Fossil Capital trenchantly demonstrated that capitalism and capitalists are responsible for climate change. -- Michael Robbins * Bookforum *If we are to rescue ourselves from the looming catastrophe that is climate change, one of our tasks must be to understand how we became enmeshed in an economy powered by fossil fuels. It would be hard to find a more illuminating book for this purpose than Fossil Capital , a history of the rise of coal-fired steam power in Britain. In the tradition of historians such as Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood, Andreas Malm gives central importance to the capitalist social relations in which steam power is deployed as a form of power over people, challenging technological determinist accounts of the rise of the fossil economy (that steam power was inherently more efficient), as well as the " Anthropocene narrative" that sees the fossil economy as the inevitable outcome of human use of fire, and the Ricardian-Malthusian narrative that coal power was adopted because it was more abundant and cheaper than water. -- Michael W. Howard * Socialism and Democracy *Brilliant -- Paul Gillespie * Irish Times *

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Book SynopsisIt was the Autumn of 1969, and Italy exploded. Across the north of the country, factory workers stormed out on strike, demanding better pay and working conditions. The slogan "We Want Everything" rang through the streets. Italy's "Hot Autumn" had begun.In Nanni Balestrini's fictionalized account of the uprising, a young worker from Italy's impoverished south arrives at Fiat's Mirafiori factory in Torino, where he barely scrapes by with fourteen hour days of backbreaking work. His frustration is palpable, and soon he is agitating again his bosses for fun and giving himself minor injuries to win sick leave. Soon enough, he is swept up by a snowballing worker movement that leads to months of continuous strikes at Mirafiori. Eventually, the conflict bubbles out of the factory. The growing pressure having produced an inevitable crack, the streets are lined with barricades, and tear gas wafts into private homes.Introduced by Rachel Kushner, author of the critically acclaimed The Flamethrowers, We Want Everything is an explosive account of a revolution that would clear the way for another decade of radical unrest.Trade ReviewIn this fierce, compelling novel, Balestrini has found a way to individualise the universal, and universalise the individual, creating a document of the Italian labour struggles of the 1970s that has great value both as art and history. Balestrini becomes a channel for the working-class narrator, who stands for all the Southern masses who come north to the car factories to participate in the Italian 'economic miracle'. It's a book which charted a new course for fiction, one that deserves further exploration. -- Haru Kunzru, author of White TearsA fine example of a literary use of expressions that were then burgeoning in factories and mass meetings, caught between student unrest and worker fury. -- Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the RoseOne of the best novels of the year . Nothing could seem further from or more relevant to our historical moment. * Chicago Tribune *As demands arise again that echo the demands of the period-less work, more pay, more leisure, guaranteed income - We Want Everything sends a stirring reminder that these are not new demands, and that although it is a new generation rising to the challenge, it is the same fundamental struggle that continues * PopMatters *

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Book SynopsisThe City, as London's financial centre is known, is the world's biggest international banking and foreign exchange market, shaping the development of global capital. It is also, as this groundbreaking book reveals, a crucial part of the mechanism of power in the world economy. Based on the author's twenty years' experience of City dealing rooms, The City is an in-depth look at world markets and revenues that exposes how this mechanism works. All big international companies-not just the banks-utilize this system, and The City shows how the operations of the City of London are critical both for British capitalism and for world finance. Tony Norfield details, with shocking and insightful research, the role of the US dollar in global trading, the network of British-linked tax havens, the flows of finance around the world and the system of power built upon financial securities. Why do just fifty companies now have control of a large share of world economic production? The City explains how this situation came about, examining the history of the world economy from the post-war period to the present day.Trade ReviewNorfield writes from a position of experience: he has worked in the belly of the beast, and the book is the better for it...In The City, he has done the research and pulled together the financial statistics that explain how the bloodsucking works. * Financial Times *With heaps of empirical research and a clear style of argumentation, he demonstrates that the City isn't a "satellite of Wall Street" as many think, but its own beast, using Britain's imperialist privilege to extract value from the world economy. Much of the book is directed against bad arguments made by the liberal-left - the distinction between "productive" capitalism and"casino" banking; the populist vitriol against "the banks"- which Norfield believes aren't just analytically false but let capitalism off the hook. * Vice *This book does the seemingly impossible: rendering finance's mysteries transparent to the average reader, and at the same time delivering a penetrating analysis of the global economic system that will enlighten even experts. Tony Norfield has written a truly exciting and important book. -- Paul Mattick, author of Business as UsualTheCity is a valuable addition to the critical analysis of the financialisation of our world. And Tony Norfield is an experienced and radical guide to London's role in this process. This book should be required reading for both bankers and activists alike. -- Joris Luyendjik, author of Swimming with Sharks: My Journey into the World of the BankersA timely and insightful book...It is an excellent read foranyone seriously wanting to consider the financial system * Scottish Business Insider *How many Marxists are at work in the dealing rooms of the City? Presumably they keep their heads well down. Tony Norfield is-or was-one. Twenty years a trader at the centre of the financial web, he has married the insights into the workings of the system he gained to a thorough Marxist understanding of political economy. The result is this fascinating book. * Morning Star *Tony Norfield has had20 years experience in City of London financial dealing rooms, for ten years asan executive director and global head of FX strategy in a major European bank.He went on to complete a PhD in economics at SOAS, London. Above all, he is aMarxist. It's a perfect recipe for an excellent book on modern Britishimperialism and the features of global finance in the 21st century. -- Michael Roberts, author of The Long DepressionNorfield's unusual clarity as both an analyst and expositor is reflected in his ability to lay out for his readers an easy-to-grasp introduction to how finance works today in the process of offering a detailed historically-rooted account of the multiple hierarchies and privileged relationships through which global economic domination is constructed and reproduced. The City is a tour de force, which will soon be recognized as a formidable challenge to conventional wisdom and an essential contribution in its own right. -- Robert Brenner, author of The Economics of Global Turbulence

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Book SynopsisTheodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer are the leading figures of the Frankfurt School and this book is their magnum opus. Dialectic of Enlightenment is one of the most celebrated works of modern social philosophy that continues to impress in its wide-ranging ambition.Writing just after the Second World War and reflecting on the bureaucracy and myths of National Socialism and the inanity of the dawn of consumerism, Adorno and Horkheimer addressed themselves to a question which went to the very heart of the modern age: 'why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism'. Modernity, far from redeeming the promises and hopes of the Enlightenment, had resulted in a stultification of mankind and administered society, characterised by simulation and candy-floss entertainment.Tracing humanity's modern fall to the very rationality that was to be its liberation, the authors exposed the domination and violence that underpin the Enlightenment project.Trade ReviewA classic of twentieth-century thought. * Times Literary Supplement *A sustained and serious critique of Western civilization. * Times Higher Education Supplement *

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Book SynopsisSenator Bernie Sanders won 13 million votes and a majority of young voters in the 2016 Democratic primary, giving a consensus unbeatable party favorite, Hillary Clinton, a shockingly close challenge. He emerged from the presidential election as the most popular politician in the US, despite being a 75-year-old self-professed "democratic socialist." What lessons can be drawn from this surprising but-in the end-losing campaign, and what to make of the direction the Sanders movement has gone since the election?Vermont native Heather Gautney is a senior policy advisor to Bernie Sanders in his Washington, DC office and was a senior researcher on his presidential campaign. The author and editor of several books on social movements and American politics, she brings her scholarly expertise and left politics to bear on the scenes and conflicts she witnessed from inside the campaign and inside the Beltway. This is both an insider's sympathetic view of the Sanders phenomenon and a skeptical left scholar's view of its limitations. In reviewing what enabled Sanders to reach out to an unprecedented number of people with a socialist message, she draws lessons about the prospects and perils of building a leftist movement in the United States. Gautney's reflections on the role that race and class played in this election cycle and analysis of the prospects and perils of the Democratic Party will advance the passionate debate over how to build a progressive opposition to Trump and a lasting left movement in America.Trade ReviewA vigorous book that revisits the 2016 election...every argument is worth engaging with. -- Tom Carson * Bookforum *An outstanding piece of work that provides a deep-- and importantly the correct-- analysis of what Bernie's campaign was really about. -- Phil Fiermonte, Senior Advisor, Bernie 2016 and former Vermont State Director, Sen. Bernie Sanders Senate OfficeHeather Gautney's analysis of the 2016 campaign captures Bernie Sanders' refreshing plainspokenness.it deserves attention on the Left. * Wall Street Journal *An encouraging and informative insight into the Sanders campaign and what follows. * Morning Star *

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Book SynopsisIn this groundbreaking work, French legal scholar Alain Supiot examines the relationship of society to legal discourse. He argues that the law is how justice is implemented in secular society, but it is not simply a technique to be manipulated at will: it is also an expression of the core beliefs of the West. We must recognize its universalizing, dogmatic nature and become receptive to other interpretations from non-Western cultures to help us avoid the clash of civilizations. In Homo Juridicus, Supiot deconstructs the illusion of a world that has become 'flat' and undifferentiated, regulated only by supposed 'laws' of science and the economy, and peopled by contract-makers driven by only the calculation of their individual interests.Trade ReviewFrance's most incisive jurist, Alain Supiot . has renewed the idea that all significant belief-systems require a dogmatic foundation by focusing its beam sharply, to the discomfort of their devotees, on the two most cherished creeds of our time: the cults of the free markets and of human rights. -- Perry Anderson * London Review of Books *Alain Supiot develops an original and ambitious approach of the place and role of the law for man with the curiosity and audacity of an anthropologist, but all the while avoiding thetrap of universalism... The use of an anthropological wide-focus lens furnishes him with a wealth of observations which ground a high-calibre reflection, rigorously documented with examples drawn from the legal domain. * Études *After centuries of triumphalism on behalf of homo economicus, one had given up hope of hearing one day about homo juridicus. We can only congratulate Alain Supiot for this work which defends the anthropological function of the law, reminding us that the human being is a metaphysical animal which exists not only in thew universe of things (the economic) but also in a universe of signs. * Revue trimestrielle de droit civil *Novel and crucial -- Peter Goodrich * Modern Law Review *

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Book SynopsisHow the law harms sex workers - and what they want insteadDo you have to endorse prostitution in order to support sex worker rights? Should clients be criminalized, and can the police deliver justice?In Revolting Prostitutes, sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith bring a fresh perspective to questions that have long been contentious. Speaking from a growing global sex worker rights movement, and situating their argument firmly within wider questions of migration, work, feminism, and resistance to white supremacy, they make it clear that anyone committed to working towards justice and freedom should be in support of the sex worker rights movement.Trade ReviewWith fine, lucid discourse, Juno Mac and Molly Smith decline to engage in the typical back and forth that drones on between the would-be saviors, the scolds, and the glorifiers to go to the heart of the matter- sex work as labor, with a work force ready to speak their minds and fight for their rights. They avoid easy answers and ask the reader to rethink sex work. -- Susie Bright, author of Big Sex Little Death: A MemoirSmith and Mac are sharply honest about the emotional, social and political realities of sex work in all its forms and geographies, eschewing pearl-clutching or cheerleading for a laser-guided honesty and frankness about what can improve the lives and experiences of sex workers around the globe, regardless of social class. Revolting Prostitutes is key to understanding how important the rights of sex workers are, and what is at stake when policy is misguided or clouded in sentimentality and gut-feeling over straight evidence. A must-read for politicians, policy makers, and anyone keen to understand the realities of modern sex work. -- Dawn Foster, author of Lean OutRevolting Prostitutes will fuel the fight for sex workers' rights with fresh thinking on feminism, deep analysis of policing and the law, and a critical examination of sex work itself. Smith and Mac have drawn together a radically inclusive map for liberation. -- Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the WhoreEssential reading for feminists engaged in sex work and those studying it. By centering their analysis squarely on the issue of labor rights and upholding harm reduction as a critical benchmark, the authors take on entrenched positions in the feminist struggles over prostitution work and propose a subtle but powerful shift in the terrain of future debate. -- Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem with WorkRevolting Prostitutes is a book I have been waiting for. It is uniquely fit to address the destructive divisions that exist among feminists concerning prostitution. Rejecting the equally unacceptable alternatives of condemnation and glorification of sex work, the authors provide a powerful account of the work itself, the issues it raises, the institutional policy that shape it, all the while demonstrating that sex workers struggles are crucial to any movement for social justice. Well researched, beautifully written, Revolting Prostitutes should be widely read, especially, but non only, by feminists. -- Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the WitchRevolting Prostitutes succeeds as a well-reasoned, grounded and stubbornly materialist defense of sex workers rights in a literature characterized largely by sex panic, voyeurism, and extrapolation. -- Jennifer McGibbon * Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research *An essential addition to the feminist canon and required reading for anyone who cares about equality and human rights. * Independent *[Revolting Prostitutes] tackles complex topics that even sex workers struggle with, criticizing issues like classism in the sex worker community, professional dominatrixes who distance themselves from full-service sex workers out of whorephobia, and why decriminalization isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. -- Ana Valens * The Daily Dot *Revolting Prostitutes is a thrilling and formidable intervention into contemporary discussions of sex work, and settles the debate in favor of full and immediate global decriminalization. It does so without insisting that there is nothing troubling about sex work: about the psychosexual forces that lead men to buy it, or the economic forces that compel women to sell it. ... It is a model of how to write about politics - or, indeed, anything. -- Amia Srinivasan * The Chronicle of Higher Education *[Revolting Prostitutes] advocates for the complete decriminalization of sex work all over the world. -- River H. Kero * Book Riot *One of the most important books about sex work ... Beautifully written and meticulously researched, this book will change what you think you know about sex work. -- Kate Lister * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisWhy are we so obsessed by the pursuit of happiness? With new ways to measure contentment we are told that we have a right to individual joy. But at what cost? In an age of increasing individualism, we have never been more alone and miserable. But what if the true nature of happiness can only be found in others? In Radical Happiness, leading feminist thinker Lynne Segal believes that we have lost the art of radical happiness- the art of transformative, collective joy. She shows that only in the revolutionary potential of coming together it is that we can come to understand the powers of flourishing. Radical Happiness is a passionate call for the re-discovery of the political and emotional joy that emerge when we learn to share our lives together.Trade ReviewAn expansive and contemplative exploration of love, joy, desire, and the concepts surrounding Utopias, all of which find the author navigating human psychology, sociology, societal mores, and the economics of happiness. A calm, refreshing breath of fresh air in a dangerously uncertain moment in human history. * Kirkus Review *The socialist feminist we need to listen to right now. Her book is an important one because we need "a politics of hope" like never before. -- Emma Rees * Times Higher Education *A unique capacity for clarity and wit, along with her courage of intellect. -- Sheila RowbothamWide ranging in its analyses of feminist, political and social theory -- Margaret Drabble * [on Out of Time] *An engaging, enlightening read for anyone who wants to ponder the links between personal dissatisfaction and political disengagement - and possible remedies. The idea of collective happiness as the root of much satisfaction is simple, but deceptively hard to write about, let alone achieve. Segal succeeds in inspiring on many levels. -- Isabel Berwick * Financial Times *Radical Happiness ultimately arrives at a convincing argument about our need to overcome the now-common tendency to view dystopian thinking as a political act in and of itself . If happiness is 'not so much an emotion, a psychic state or inner disposition, but rather a way of acting in the world,' then so is the path to real social change. It is defined not by a list of demands, but by a commitment to the common good. A feminism that's about showing up for each other and not merely ourselves: how radical. -- Charlotte Shane * The Nation *Straightforward in argument and essential in content for our times ... a source of much joy and inspiration. * Peace News *There can be something exhilarating about taking part in a protest or other instance of activism. In her book Radical Happiness, Lynne Segal examines this side of activism, and also explores the ways in which avoiding politics entirely may be tied to a greater sense of disquiet and frustration. It's an incisive look at another facet of politics and society. -- Tobias Carroll * Signature *

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Book SynopsisIn The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, imperialism, and the modern nation state. Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce. Rather, it is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions, which required great transformations in social relations and in the relationship between humans and nature.Trade ReviewThe Origin of Capitalism was one of those 'Aha!' moments. Wood was an extraordinarily rigorous and imaginative thinker, someone who breathed life into Marxist political theory and made it speak-not to just to me but to many others-at multiple levels: historical, theoretical, political. -- Corey Robin * Jacobin *The writing is so supple and accessible, and the argument so persuasive, it's like watching a cloudy mixture of ideas being turned into a clear solution. -- Adrienne RichThis extremely valuable book offers an insightful tour of the historical debates surrounding the transition from feudalism to capitalism . a must-read for anyone with even the remotest interest in the origins of capitalism, or economic thought in general, from undergraduates through professionals. * Choice *Brilliant book . Into the central thread of her argument, Ellen Meiksins Wood has woven a wonderfully rich texture of comment on the arguments and debates that preceded her . not just a valuable new interpretation of an old history, it carries important lessons for our own times. * Spokesman *Ellen showed so many of us what it means to be a committed intellectual - that it is possible to be intensely moral and relentlessly analytical; to be passionate but still work with a cool attention to detail; to be profoundly rooted in a movement but maintain one's independent judgment. -- Vivek Chibber * Jacobin *True to her roots as the child of Jewish socialist refugees from Latvia, Ellen proudly positioned herself on the side of the poor and the oppressed, celebrating those who have fought for a more democratic and egalitarian society. -- David McNally * The Guardian *

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Book SynopsisFew terms are so widely used in the literature of international relations and political science, with so little agreement about their exact meaning, as hegemony.In the first full historical study of its fortunes as a concept, Perry Anderson traces its emergence in Ancient Greece and its rediscovery during the upheavals of 1848-1849 in Germany. He then follows its checkered career in revolutionary Russia, fascist Italy, Cold War America, Gaullist France, Thatcher's Britain, post-colonial India, feudal Japan, Maoist China, eventually arriving at twenty-first-century US geopolitics and Germany's place within an expanded European Union. The result is a surprising and fascinating expedition into global intellectual history.Trade ReviewAnderson's work displays stunning erudition. Part of a larger attempt to explain the forms and transformations of liberal power, The H-Word helps us understand how one hegemony dies and another begins. -- Gavin Jacobson * New Statesman *Fascinating history -- Adam Tooze * FT *If you want to see how hegemony has been transformed from a critical term in the lexicon of leftist scholars and activists to a less critical but increasingly pervasive term in the lexicon of those interrogating late US imperialism, then The H-Word is a book well worth reading. -- Jim Glassman * Antipode *Anderson deploys his formidable erudition to craft short chapters on the conflicting understandings of hegemony among Ancient Greek and Roman historians, Russian revolutionaries, Prussian military theorists, Italian communists (where Gramsci shows up), Anglo-American international relations scholars, Chinese statesmen from Confucius to Mao, post-structuralist Marxists (where Gramsci reappears), and the architects of the European Union. This is accomplished with admirably clear and jargon-free prose, and the book is a pleasure to read. -- Eduardo Frajman, Marx & Philosophy SocietyEngaging -- John Ikenberry * Foreign Affairs *Perry Anderson offers a global intellectual history of the many meanings, applications, and turning points in the use of hegemony as a theoretical tool. The most impressive aspect is the breadth he must operate with in terms of history, disciplines, and geographic contexts beyond Marxist theory and beyond the continent of Europe. -- Chris Hardnack * Socialism and Democracy *

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Book SynopsisToday 13 million people are living in poverty in the UK. According to a 2017 report, 1 in 5 children live below the poverty line. The new poor, however, are an even larger group than these official figures suggest. They are more often than not in work, living precariously and betrayed by austerity policies that make affordable good quality housing, good health and secure employment increasingly unimaginable.In The New Poverty investigative journalist Stephen Armstrong travels across Britain to tell the stories of those who are most vulnerable. It is the story of an unreported Britain, abandoned by politicians and betrayed by the retreat of the welfare state. As benefit cuts continue and in-work poverty soars, he asks what long-term impact this will have on post-Brexit Britain and-on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1942 Beveridge report-what we can do to stop the destruction of our welfare state.Trade ReviewArmstrong has gone to Wigan to expose a situation with depressing echoes of Orwell's day: huge inequalities of wealth, comfort and life chances unaddressed by a government composed of distant, unsympathetic plutocrats and public schoolboys . . . The reasons for this apparent social shift, this new, ugly, public face of a lumpen proletariat Orwell rarely encountered, are many and complex. Most of them are surveyed in this forceful book. It is powerful stuff -- Stuart Maconie * Guardian [for The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited] *Back in 1936, Orwell asked why people should live in poverty and despair in one of the richest countries in the world? Now, as this book shows, the cold hand of poverty is back. It is time to ask this government the same question: Why? * Mirror *Defines the state of the nation * Big Issue *A great anecdotally-rich account of poverty in 21st century Britain * RSA Comment *Stephen Armstrong's The New Poverty is a hard hitting expose of the problems and suffering of people who are at the lower end of the pay scale and therefore at the mercy of those who wish to take advantage. This book is very much in the mould of George Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier and makes for uneasy, but essential reading. -- Richard Blair, Patron of the Orwell SocietyA visceral experience, punching through the layers of rationalisation, ignorance and self-interest separating those who live comfortably from those who don't ... The outstanding feature of The New Poverty is Armstrong's persistent effort to connect local experience and action the systematic context in which poverty is not only thriving but also taking increasingly sinister forms * London Review of Books *Mixes hard facts with heartbreaking interviews, deploying the latter to give weight to the former and to make their abstractions more devastatingly real. . .Read this and you'll realise that now is our time to act. -- Mark Rappalt * Art Review *

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Book SynopsisIn a series of seven trenchant interventions Alain Badou analyses the decisive developments in Greece since 2011. Badiou considers this Mediterranean country "a sort of open-air political lesson", with much to tell us about the wider situation. Greece is exemplary of "our fundamental contradictions in Europe, which are also ultimately the fundamental contradictions of the world such as it is-the world served up to the authoritarian anarchy of capitalism."Notwithstanding the Greeks' heartening opposition to the financial markets' hegemony, Badiou considers it also important to address the reasons why this opposition failed. "Movementist" politics may arouse widespread sympathy, but for the French philosopher they have "absolutely no effect other than to temporarily trap the movement in the negative weakness of its affects." Badiou argues that a consequential opposition inspired by the emancipatory politics of the past-or by what he calls "the communist hypothesis"-should set its compass by the "orienting maxims" proposed in this book, defining a direction for political action.Trade ReviewIn the past few years, Alain Badiou's oeuvre has imposed itself as the most significant philosophical import from the Continent. -- Alberto Toscano, author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea * The British Journal of Sociology *Whatever his pessimistic assessments of the contemporary situation (St Paul in the place of Lenin?), Badiou's emphasis on activity and production, his insistence on fidelity as the resurrected of the dormant Events of a seemingly extinct political praxis, can only be energizing for us. -- Fredric Jameson * New Left Review *One of the most important philosophers writing today. -- Joan CopjecA figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us! -- Slavoj ZizekAn heir to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. * New Statesman *Badiou's sardonically compressed style is never less than pungent. * Guardian *Shaking the foundations of Western liberal democracy. * Times Higher Education Supplement *A thinker of tremendously invigorating moral fervour, able to rise to Swiftian scorn or fine Cocteau-like flourishes. Badiou's passionate belief in human autonomy is inspiring. * Daily Telegraph *Scarcely any other moral thinker of our day is as politically clear-sighted and courageously polemical, so prepared to put notions of truth and universality back on the agenda. -- Terry EagletonFrench philosophy still has a kick in it, and it can still turn heads. You have been warned. -- Jonathan Rée * Prospect *Magnificently stirring. A characteristically lucid polemic from a philosopher who is far from willing to abandon humanity to the vicissitudes of so-called global capitalism. -- Mark Fisher * Frieze *Badiou has been an intellectual hero of France's anti-capitalist left since the Paris street protests of 1968. * BBC HARDtalk *Greece has long been a country with 'too much history,' a harbinger of broader developments in Europe. In the course of its recent crisis it provided the testing ground for several political approaches. Failure was general, but none was greater than the abject capitulation of Syriza. Alain Badiou surveys the wreckage calmly and with sadness, seeking the reinvention of a radical and class-based politics. This is indeed what Europe needs today, and the only positive outcome from the Syriza debacle. -- Costas Lapavitsas, SOAS, University of London

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Book SynopsisWe live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available to us today reveals less than we hope. Rather, it heralds a new Dark Age: a world of ever-increasing incomprehension.In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted Enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy. Surveying the history of art, technology and information systems he reveals the dark clouds that gather over discussions of the digital sublime.Trade ReviewNEW DARK AGE is a masterful study of all the things approaching out of the future's night. Compelling and essential. -- Warren Ellis, author of NORMAL and TRANSMETROPOLITANComputation brings humanity more darkness than enlightenment: a goblin horde of digital superstitions, invented and unleashed in just half a century. Yet James Bridle is fearless in our gloomy post-truth predicament; he's a theorist, artist, technical visionary and even a moralist. Has he foreseen the worst? -- Bruce Sterling, author of Pirate UtopiaHighlights the ways in which we are deliberately being kept in the dark and are sleepwalking into a future of non-stop surveillance and 'the dark clouds [gathering] over our dreams of the digital sublime. * Financial Times [Summer Reads 2018] *An extraordinary, perceptive analysis of the various ways in which the rise of information technology has obscured, rather than illuminated, the operations of power in the world, and diminished our capacity to improve it. It's brilliant and bracing -- Mark O'Connell * Guardian *New Dark Age is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I've read about the Internet, which is to say that it is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I've read about contemporary life. -- Mark O'Connell * New Yorker *[New Dark Age] is an essential read on the key subjects around AI, and the dangerous feedback loops that are currently being produced. -- Ben Vickers * Dazed *New Dark Age is enlightening but frightening, a dystopian warning about the implications of the convergence of data and robotics, code and quantum computing, science and technology. -- David Gorin * Financial Mail *Brilliant and beautiful. * The Australian *New Dark Age is a paradoxical work, elegiac yet futuristic, which embraces paradox and the limits of knowledge-especially the limits of knowledge that the present moment's technological advances, political instability, and environmental chaos have conferred upon us. -- Tobias Carroll * Literary Hub *An engaging, sharp, and urgent work that takes us well beyond the neo-Luddite fantasies of techno-apocalypse so prevalent in late critiques of technology. -- Mari Bastashevski * Burlington Contemporary *

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Book SynopsisThe surrogacy industry is worth an estimated 1 billion dollars a year, and many of its surrogates work in terrible conditions, while many gestate babies for no pay at all. Should it be illegal to pay someone to gestate a baby for you? Full Surrogacy Now brings a fresh and unique perspective to the debate. Rather than making surrogacy illegal or allowing it to continue as is, Sophie Lewis argues, we should be looking to radically transform it. Surrogates should be put front and centre, and their rights towards the babies they gestate should be expanded to acknowledge that they are more than mere vessels. In doing so, we can break down our assumptions that children necessarily belong to those whose genetics they share. This might sound like a radical proposal, she admits, but expanding our idea of who children belong to would be a good thing. Taking collective responsibility for children, rather than only caring for the ones we share DNA with, would radically transform notions of kinship. Adopting this expanded concept of surrogacy, helps us to see that it always, as the saying goes, takes a village to raise a child.Trade ReviewRooted in historical, site-based, narrative, and political accounts, Full Surrogacy Now is the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for. This kind of gestation depends on realizing the implications of knowing that we all actually, materially, make one another, and that this labor continues to be exploited, extracted, and alienated-unequally-at every turn in Capitalism and Patriarchy. Full of brilliant, generative, and also shamelessly biting critique of both bourgeois and communist tracts, feminist and otherwise, Lewis's voice is unique and bracing. I need it; it fills my whole self with reimagined possibilities for making oddkin who are not property. Lewis set out to write an immoderate, utopian, partisan, anti-authoritarian communist defense of surrogates and surrogacy in ramifying registers of meanings and practices, and she has succeeded. Lewis asks the necessary questions, "Can we parent politically, hopefully, nonreproductively- in a comradely way?" Can we become full surrogates for and with each other? In a book full of fierce demystifications and sharp dissections of injustice masquerading as humanitarianism, nonetheless Lewis convincingly and radically affirms: "Everywhere about me, I can see beautiful militants hell-bent on regeneration, not self-replication." -- Donna HarawayGiving birth is commonly called labor. What happens if all of human pregnancy and gestation is thought from the labor point of view? That's the challenge of Full Surrogacy Now. If it is all labor, then how can that labor be freed from now global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation? Lewis takes one of the most everyday things about being human and thinks it through from the point of view of a cyborg communism. This book goes far into places where few gender abolitionists have ventured and brings us a vision of another life. -- McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker ManifestoFull Surrogacy Now is more than an intervention, it is a landmark text of visionary feminist thinking. Sophie Lewis tears down decades of essentialist and contradictory presumptions on labor, motherhood and ownership to offer us the possibility of new ways to live with and for each other. This book is as breathtaking as it is necessary. -- Natasha LennardFull Surrogacy Now arrived and I could not stop reading. The crises of our time are crises of reproduction. Radical that she is, Sophie Lewis gets right to the root of the matter--and, radical that she is, finds its roots to be intersecting and entangled, "lovely, replicative, baroque", as one of her own gestators, Donna Haraway, might put it. But the gestator? Lewis moves expertly through decades of debates, as well as a rapidly growing body of empirical research, on surrogacy to carry us beyond the by-now familiar refrain that this or that activity "is work." Her goal could hardly be more ambitious: to rethink the "natural" gestation that every one of us comes from. I will reread this book for the sense it gives me that new ways of making one another and the world new might, in fact, be possible. Its verve and wit make me feel sure that Lewis' reproductive commune will be fun. -- Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love: The Invention of DatingAn instructive and moving book about the work of babymaking and the best possible future for birthing and raising children. It offers both a convincing polemic about surrogacy's past and present, and a vision of how to make it both more common and more mutually beneficial. Lewis treats surrogacy as a signal example of what will be integral to any common human flourishing to come: unmaking gender and the family as we know them, to build new kinds of sociality and care for what is not "biologically" "ours." I was floored by it. -- Sarah Brouillette, author of Literature and the Creative EconomySophie Lewis is at the top of a new generation of scholars and activists thinking the transformation of gestational labor within contemporary pharmacopornographic capitalism. Neither simply natural nor banally cultural, gestation appears as the unthought core of gender and sexual politics, and the key of a forthcoming womb revolution: trans-Marx meets mammal's politics! -- Paul B. Preciado, author of Testo JunkiePregnancy. Babies. Families. Nature itself. Like capitalism, communism knows no bounds. Relentless in the task of seizing of the means of reproduction, Sophie Lewis is the Right's worst nightmare. * George Ciccariello-Maher, author of Building the Commune *Sophie Lewis and her expansive vision of feminism are desperately needed right now. She makes the work of undoing what "womanhood" has come to mean look possible and irresistible. -- Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex WorkFull Surrogacy Now makes a significant contribution to the pressing political project of advocating for the rights of those workers whose labour is so often delegitimised, exploited and criminalised... join[ing] such texts as Juno Mac and Molly Smith's Revolting Prostitutesin combating the white, liberal, trans-exclusionary, whorephobic, 'feminist' discourse which is currently dominating conversations around sex work and gestational labour. * Vector *Lewis is attempting to do for pregnancy what the Wages for Housework movement did in reconceptualizing the unpaid labor done by women in the home as work. And recognizing surrogacy as work and surrogates as workers is a necessary first step, for if surrogacy is work, then isn't, by extension, every pregnancy? -- Esther Wang * Jezebel *The radical openness of these dreams is alluring ... [Full Surrogacy Now]leaves one with the beautiful, liquid possibility of a world that recognizes "our inextricably surrogated contamination with and by everybody else". * Times Literary Supplement *A thrilling new intervention ... by placing reproductive labour at the centre of her vision in Full Surrogacy Now, Lewis confronts a central issue that continues to be sidelined in the male-dominated field of futurism. * New Humanist *Theoretical, devious, a mix of manifesto and memoir. -- Jessica Weisberg * The New Yorker *Incisive and exciting...a must-read for those interested in queer feminist engagements with family, reproductive labour and global class relations. * LSE Review of Books *For a business that deals in common ingredients and a mature technology, surrogacy is curiously expensive... Nevertheless, the price tag remains high, as do the hoops to jump through, adding to already compelling human drama. Full Surrogacy Now is a prosurrogacy tract that finds plenty to fault in the current situation. -- Lela Edlund * Population and Development Review, Vol 46, No 3 *

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Book SynopsisHow Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African maldevelopment is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains an unshakably relevant study of the so-called "great divergence" between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the the multiplication of global inequality today. In this new edition, Angela Davis offers a striking foreword to the book, exploring its lasting contributions to a revolutionary and feminist practice of anti-imperialism.Trade ReviewWalter Rodney's magisterial opus is recognized globally as a landmark in African studies, not to mention the history of colonialism and imperialism. Beautifully written and expertly argued, it is that rare book that can be called a classic. It belongs on every bookshelf. -- Gerald Horne, historian and author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776 and Confronting Black JacobinsThis book is a legendary classic that galvanized freedom fighters around the world. -- Cornel West, philosopher, author, critic, and activistWalter Rodney was a pioneering scholar who provided new answers to old questions and posed new questions in relation to the study of Africa. -- Professor Winston McGowanThis classic work of black political thought, political economy, and Africa history inspired scholars and political activists in the struggle against colonialism and its misrepresentations of the past. I applaud this reissue, which should bring Rodney's prescient analysis to a new generation struggling from below, in whose hands, he would have reminded us, is no less than the future of humankind. -- Lewis R. Gordon, Author of An Introduction to Africana Philosophy"Appearing in 1972, HEUA was a genuine tour de force. It fused, as had never been done in a single volume before, African history in the global sense and underdevelopment theory, Marxism and black nationalism, intellectual passion and political commitment. HEUA instantly joined a select pan-Africanist canon that would be read at least as much outside as within the academy, an exclusive category that included the two texts that had greatly influenced Rodney's intellectual development, notably James's Black Jacobins and Williams's Capitalism & Slavery, along with Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Dubois's magisterial work on the struggle for democracy in the United States during the post-Civil War, post-slavery era. HEUA, however, differed from the above-mentioned works, which were written long after the events they charted occurred. HEUA, by contrast, was more urgent and immediate, having been produced in the heat of battle, which is to say amid the ongoing struggle of Africans against capitalist and neocolonialist underdevelopment. His purpose in writing the book, Rodney explained in the Preface, was "to try and reach Africans who wish to explore further the nature of their exploitation, rather than to satisfy the 'standards' set by our oppressors and their spokesmen in the academic world." -- Michael West * Groundings: Development, Pan-Africanism, Critical Theory, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2018 *A masterpiece. -- Andy Higginbottom * Redline *Rodney's analysis remains as relevant as it was when first published - a call to arms in the class struggle for racial equality. * LA Review of Books *This groundbreaking literary powerhouse performed a vital function in resistance to institutional racism. -- Paul Boateng * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisJudith Butler's new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state's monopoly on violence.Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how 'racial phantasms' inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.Trade ReviewPraise for Frames of War:A trenchant and brilliant book. -- Mike Rowe * Utne Reader *Praise for Frames of War:It's clear that its author is still interested in stirring up trouble-academic, political and otherwise. * Bookforum *Praise for Frames of War:Judith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time. -- J. M. BernsteinPraise for Frames of War:Judith Butler is the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today. Frames of War is an intellectual masterpiece that weds a new understanding of being, immersed in history, to a novel Left politics that focuses on State violence, war and resistance. -- Cornel WestPraise for Frames of War:An impressive and challenging book from one of the leading intellectuals of our time. * Diva *Praise for Precarious Life:A book that shines with the splendor of engaged thought. * Brooklyn Rail *Praise for Precarious Life:Here is a unique voice of courage and conceptual ambition that addresses public life from the perspective of psychic reality, encouraging us to acknowledge the solidarity and the suffering through which we emerge as subjects of freedom. -- Homi K. BhabhaButler's philosophical inquiry argues that it is in fact a shrewd and even aggressive collective political tactic. * New York Times *Perhaps the most influential and widely travelled feminist in the Western academy...[Butler] carefully, with assertive toughness, combats the hatred, fear and rage of those who respond violently to her continuous commitment to confronting normative patterns of coercion with calls for concerted actions of resistance. -- Lynne Segal * Times Higher Education *Judith Butler lucidly enumerates the obstacles nonviolence faces in a time when it is sorely needed. Drawing on works from Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Sigmund Freud, she makes a fresh new case for what a destructive obstacle our pervasive individualism is to nonviolent action - and the change possible with it. -- John Freeman * The Boston Globe *Featured in The New Yorker * The New Yorker *A text with a vision for another kind of world, one that refuses to take refuge in the comfort of moral platitudes. * Australian Book Review *Presents a hopeful philosophical position for evolving architecture competent in responding to society's issues, all the while being intertwined within it. * Architectural Review *Invaluable -- Henrietta Cullinan * Peace News *Butler's argument both builds on and contributes to a wider feminist literature concerned with developing ways of social and political living that stem from a relational understanding of the self. -- Alister Wedderburn * Radical Philosophy *

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Book SynopsisLonglisted for The Millions Best Translated Book Awards for FictionLonglisted for the National Book Award for Translated LiteratureFour siblings. Two summer houses. One terrible secret. When a dispute over her parents' will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favouritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different-a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured.Will and Testament is a lyrical meditation on trauma and memory, as well as a furious account of a woman's struggle to survive and be believed. Vigdis Hjorth's novel became a controversial literary sensation in Norway and has been translated into twenty languages.Trade ReviewHjorth parcels out the secrets with a precision worthy of Ibsen, so that the level of suspense is maintained up to the very last of the 343 pages. * Aftenposten *Vigdis Hjorth's new novel is furious and wise, trembling and stringent. Wills and Testaments examines who owns the past. This is the novel in weaponised form. * NRK *This was a novel that people could enjoy either as high literature or as a work of down-and-dirty revenge. The tabloids loved it as much as the broadsheets, and it became the bestselling novel of the year. * The Guardian *Its strong emotional truths take hold of you immediately - even before the family secret's consequences are made apparent: I dogeared page after page to mark off insights, movements, formulations. * Dagens Nyheter *The strength of the novel lies in Bergljot's convincing and continuing vulnerability, in her mixed feelings and her flaws . A clear-eyed and convincing story of a family's doomed attempt to reconcile and the limits of forgiveness. * Kirkus *Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers. -- Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?In a ruthless yet patiently delivered work, Hjorth does something that few writers achieve: Will and Testamentis both economical and overwhelming. -- Elsa Court * Financial Times *Devastating -- FriezeWill and Testament is a compulsively readable novel, one that turns questions of shame into weapons against silence. * Paris Review *Hjorth's thoughtful, drily funny, and often devastating novel will leave a deep and lasting impression on readers. * Publishers Weekly *Will and Testament is a reminder that it's easier to hide darkness than face it ... Hjorth argues cogently that conflicts and atrocities often stem from what a nation represses or denies. * Observer *Compelling ... Hjorth proves brilliant at revealing the stubborn, unredemptive quality of childhood suffering. -- Lara Feigel * Guardian *Even in the depths of family trauma, the scent of the forest, sea and meadow may still drift over the troubled cities and suburbs of Norwegian fiction. That forest may be a real place. It may also, as in Will and Testament, be a longed-for state of mind. -- Boyd Tonkin * Norwegian Arts *Hypnotic -- John Williams * New York Times Book Review *A powerfully humane novel about inheritance, trauma and the inheritance of trauma * Times Literary Supplement *Precise, contemplative, and deeply moving, it's a masterful unpacking of the tensions, secrets, and bonds that hold a family together. -- Hannah Williams * Los Angeles Review of Books *An extraordinary storyteller * LA Review of Books *Readers pining for a dose of brooding Norwegian writing in the style of Karl Ove Knausgaard may be drawn to this account of a woman's struggle to achieve reconciliation with a family that refuses to recognise she was the victim of abuse at the hands of her own father -- Ángel Gurría-Quintana * Financial Times *One of the year's gems in translation was Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund. A story of abuse, inheritance and the battle for the truth among a privileged Norwegian family, it grips like a vice while interrogating national as well as individual self-conception. * Guardian, Best Fiction of 2019 *Published to a storm of controversy in Vigdis Hjorth's native Norway in 2016, Will and Testament arrived in English this year. The novel is a meticulously paced account of a property dispute that bleeds poisonously back into the history of the narrator and the family members whose squabbling over a cabin comes to seem darkly absurd compared with the trauma she has suffered. -- Megan Nolan * New Statesman, Books of the year 2019 *Unsettling, beautifully constructed * Observer *Unspooling in a splenetic torrent of raw emotional intensity, [Will and Testament] speaks to wider issues of collective traumas that societies refuse to confront. * Morning Star *Add Vigdis Hjorth to the growing list of writers of significant autofiction, reality literature whose characters depend on recognizable people and actual situations. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental six volumes of the autobiographically inspired My Struggle and Elena Ferrante's indelible four-volume Neapolitan series (beginning with My Brilliant Friend), Hjorth's Will and Testament brilliantly examines the troubled life occasioned by recovered memories of a traumatic personal event. -- Robert Allen Papinchak * World Literature Today *A curious and very good short novel. -- Laura Waddell * Scotsman *

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Book SynopsisWhat if the problems of modern society don't come from production, but rather consumption and the system of cultural signs? In this classic work from the defining intellectual of the postmodern, Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign takes Marx's critique of political economy and its analysis of the commodity form as the starting point for an analysis of signs and their meaning in modern society. Influenced by Lefebvre's critique of everyday life, Barthes's semiology, and Situationism, Baudrillard analyses how objects are encoded within the system of signs and meanings that constitute contemporary media and consumer societies. Combining semiological studies and sociology of the consumer society, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign contains Baudrillard's most extensive engagement with Marxism and shows him at a critical juncture for the development of his thought.Trade ReviewModest, independent, and devastatingly humorous, Jean's work transmitted the lost urbanity of the mid-20th century while speaking of and into the future. -- Chris KrausWhat can one say of Baudrillard? His strange and striking apercus captured the moment, and his predictive powers, as a man who saw early on the rise of the media state, were unique. -- Kathryn BigelowFor a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972) and The Mirror of Production (1973) constitutes, in my view, his most substantial contribution to philosophy, and deserves to be better known. From today's perspective, Baudrillard may seem a more significant prophet than he appeared at the time. * Philosophy Now *The most notorious intellectual celebrity to emerge from Paris since Roland Barthes and the most influential prophet of the media since Marshall McLuhan. * i-D magazine *Superstar of the simulacrum, shaman of the virtual, evangelist of the hyperreal. -- Geoff DyerThe most important French thinker of the past twenty years. -- J.G. BallardThe David Bowie of philosophy * The Guardian *

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Book SynopsisSeventy-five years ago, Henry Wallace, then the vice president of the United States, mounted a campaign about the "Danger of American Fascism." As fighting in the European and Japanese theatres drew to a close, Wallace warned that the country might win the war and lose the peace; that the fascist threat the United States. was battling abroad had a terrifying domestic variant, growing rapidly in power: wealthy corporatists and their allies in the media. Wallace predicted that if the New Deal project was not renewed and expanded in the postwar era, American fascists would use fear mongering, xenophobia, and racism to regain economic and political power. He championed a progressive postwar world-an alternative to the rising triumphalist "American Century" notion in which the United States rejected colonialism and imperialism.Wallace's political vision-as well as his nomination to remain vice president-was sidelined by Democratic big city bosses and southern segregationists. In the decades to come, other progressives would mount similar campaigns: George McGovern and Jesse Jackson most prominently. As John Nichols chronicles in this book, they ultimately failed-a warning to would-be reformers today-but their efforts provide us with insights into the nature of the Democratic Party and strategic lessons for the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.Trade Review"Every progressive must read this book. John Nichols reminds us that Henry Wallace was the true heir to Roosevelt's New Deal. He stood up against militarism, championed health care as a right, and fought for racial justice. When the party bosses denied Wallace a place on the Democratic Party's 1944 ticket, they chose caution over a bold vision for 'winning the peace' with an Economic Bill of Rights and the Four Freedoms. As Nichols reveals, that set a pattern for compromise that sold the party and the nation short. Now, seventy-five years later, as progressives again fight for the soul of the Democratic Party, Nichols gives us the history and vision for a new progressive era." -REPRESENTATIVE RO KHANNA "Henry Wallace is a political figure--one of the giants of the mid-twentieth century--who has kind of been pushed out of the national political discussion ... Nichols [tells us] that one of the reasons Wallace was not renominated in 1944 was because of his opposition to racism. The segregationists didn't want him around." -SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS "More than a history book--this is an examination of what progressives must do to retake our democracy. Nichols points the way toward how we can build a party based on peace, liberty, and justice for all." -REPRESENTATIVE ILHAN OMAR "Nichols is a remarkable thinker and writer. He recognizes that fights that were not won in the past by advocates of economic and racial justice and peace can now be won--if we are determined enough, and hopeful enough, to carry the struggle forward." -REVEREND JESSE JACKSON "Nichols is so good at exploring the roots of U.S. radical politics, including our long socialist history. He puts the fights we're in now into perspective--and gives us inspiration to carry on." -MARIA SVART, National Director of Democratic Socialists of America "Henry Wallace thought we could avoid the Cold War internationally and work on addressing racism at home. He was ahead of his time, and he was punished for that. Maybe, now, we can recognize he was right about a lot of things." -NOAM CHOMSKY

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Book SynopsisIn this landmark collection spanning three centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing, Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. The manifesto-raging and wanting, quarreling and provocative-has always been central to feminism, and it's the angry, brash feminism we need now.Collecting over 75 manifestos from around the world, Burn It Down! is a rallying cry and a call to action. Among this quarrelsome sisterhood, you'll find:Breanne Fahs argues that we need manifestos in all their urgent rawness-their insistence that we have to act now, that we must face this, that the bleeding edge of rage and defiance is where new ideas are born.Trade ReviewAn invaluable reminder of feminism's radical and revolutionary visions. It's also, to those least inclined to read it but most in need of doing so, a powerful threat. -- Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes HerThis exhilarating work of love and scholarship is a radiant gift to all who value liberation and justice. Reading it filled me with hope, inspiration and an electric connection to the angry, dissatisfied comrades who have come before me - as well my outraged contemporaries. A must-read, an antidote to powerlessness, a literary companion for the ages. -- Michelle Tea, author of Against MemoirIn an age of platitudes and etsy-fied feminist empowerment products, Breanne Fahs gives us the uncompromising, the unruly, the ungovernable, the unpalatable. This book is a fiery reminder that the world does not change, we change the world. -- Jessa Crispin, author of The Dead Ladies ProjectThis text is important historically and as a handbook for understanding and organizing today. Fahs has put together a collection that runs from the immediate and practical to the futuristic and abstract. In doing so, she reminds us that radical feminism is both utopian vision and practical argument. -- Ron Jacobs * Counterpunch *Learned and impassioned ... irreverent, scabrous and enraged, these manifestos also happen to be full of contradictions, written in the heat of the moment and without a cool eye to posterity. But it's this rough-hewn immediacy that makes some of them so bracing to read, especially now. -- Jennifer Szalai * New York Times Book Review *Editors' Choice * The New York Times Book Review *Powerful and inspiring -- Nina Burleigh * Air Mail *Magnificently cathartic...a reminder of the power and importance of taking a position, asserting your rights and expressing them forcefully - and that we can take strength from these positions, appreciate them, disagree, and argue the nuances with equal force and passion. -- Hettie Judah * i newspaper *Burn It Down sweeps through time and across the globe. -- Frankie Miren * New Socialist *Any Gender Studies professor who isn't teaching Burn It Down! is missing something important in their curriculum. -- Megan Volpert * PopMatters (Best Books of 2020) *An essential text for any time, but especially this one. -- Jane Caputi * Journal of American Culture *

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Book SynopsisThe reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposable commodities isn't only destroying the world, it is damaging ourselves and our way of being. How do we stop the impending catastrophe, and how can we create a movement capable of confronting it head-on?In Alternative Prosperity, philosopher Kate Soper offers an urgent plea for a new vision of the good life, one that is capable of delinking prosperity from endless growth. Instead, she calls for a renewed emphasis on the joys of being, one that is capable of collective happiness not in consumption but by creating a future that allows not only for more free time, and less conventional and more creative ways of using it, but also for more fulfilling ways of working and existing. This is an urgent and necessary intervention into debates on climate change.Trade ReviewThis is an excellent book. It addresses what, in both conceptual and political terms, is arguably the most important source of tension and confusion in current arguments about the environment, namely the concept of nature; and it does so in a way that is both sensitive to, and critical of, the two antithetical ways of understanding this that dominate existing discussions. -- Russell Keat, University of Edinburgh [praise for What is Nature]There's a piece of the ecological crisis that most consider too hot to handle: consumption. With her signature rigour, Kate Soper picks it up and inspects it and finds that we can do without much of it - indeed, less of it would make us richer human beings. Calmly dismantling the illusion that consumption is pleasure, she shows how drives and needs will be set free when we throw away the commodity form. Some on left bow to the cult of technology and dream of accelerating out into sci-fi space. Others attend to the limits and joys of life and read Kate Soper. -- Andreas Malm, author of Progress of This StormNo task could be more urgent than the one that this book accomplishes so brilliantly. For life on Earth to survive, we have to change not just what we consume, but how we feel about consuming. Guilt and deprivation won't save us. A different kind of hedonism, an aesthetic and sensibility not enslaved by addictive consumerism, are indispensable components of any culture that hopes to survive this century. Alternative Prosperity offers a lucid, profound and pragmatic exploration of these issues, elaborating both on what such a radical recalibration of our sensibilities might entail, and what concrete political measures might achieve it. -- Jeremy Gilbert, author of Twenty-first Century SocialismA provocative and necessary book that provides us with the means to rethink consumption, work and sustainable prosperity without losing sight of what makes us feel good. -- Political Economy Research Centre * Nick Taylor *Kate Soper's vision is necessary and beautiful. -- Sarah Jaffe * Bookforum *In an overheating world, Soper switches the focus to the philosophy of happiness: the relationships, the time to "stand and stare" and the reflective autonomy that make life worthwhile. Her Post-Growth Living is a manual for rebuilding the economy with humans in mind. * Prospect: The world’s top 50 thinkers 2021 *I am confident that this singular plea is both fecund and needed, even if, after reading, I am still not sure exactly what "alternative hedonism" actually is. -- Jordan Fox Besek * Monthly Review *It is a great testament to Soper that this patient and provocative work will no doubt continue, in the crucial decades ahead, to remind us of the urgent need to move daily life firmly beyond growth. -- Ed Graham * Marx & Philosophy *

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Book SynopsisThe reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposable commodities isn't only destroying the world, it is damaging ourselves and our way of being. How do we stop the impending catastrophe, and how can we create a movement capable of confronting it head-on?In Alternative Prosperity, philosopher Kate Soper offers an urgent plea for a new vision of the good life, one that is capable of delinking prosperity from endless growth. Instead, she calls for a renewed emphasis on the joys of being, one that is capable of collective happiness not in consumption but by creating a future that allows not only for more free time, and less conventional and more creative ways of using it, but also for more fulfilling ways of working and existing. This is an urgent and necessary intervention into debates on climate change.Trade ReviewThis is an excellent book. It addresses what, in both conceptual and political terms, is arguably the most important source of tension and confusion in current arguments about the environment, namely the concept of nature; and it does so in a way that is both sensitive to, and critical of, the two antithetical ways of understanding this that dominate existing discussions. -- Russell Keat, University of Edinburgh [praise for What is Nature]There's a piece of the ecological crisis that most consider too hot to handle: consumption. With her signature rigour, Kate Soper picks it up and inspects it and finds that we can do without much of it - indeed, less of it would make us richer human beings. Calmly dismantling the illusion that consumption is pleasure, she shows how drives and needs will be set free when we throw away the commodity form. Some on left bow to the cult of technology and dream of accelerating out into sci-fi space. Others attend to the limits and joys of life and read Kate Soper. -- Andreas Malm, author of Progress of This StormNo task could be more urgent than the one that this book accomplishes so brilliantly. For life on Earth to survive, we have to change not just what we consume, but how we feel about consuming. Guilt and deprivation won't save us. A different kind of hedonism, an aesthetic and sensibility not enslaved by addictive consumerism, are indispensable components of any culture that hopes to survive this century. Alternative Prosperity offers a lucid, profound and pragmatic exploration of these issues, elaborating both on what such a radical recalibration of our sensibilities might entail, and what concrete political measures might achieve it. -- Jeremy Gilbert, author of Twenty-first Century SocialismA provocative and necessary book that provides us with the means to rethink consumption, work and sustainable prosperity without losing sight of what makes us feel good. -- Political Economy Research Centre * Nick Taylor *Kate Soper's vision is necessary and beautiful. -- Sarah Jaffe * Bookforum *In an overheating world, Soper switches the focus to the philosophy of happiness: the relationships, the time to "stand and stare" and the reflective autonomy that make life worthwhile. Her Post-Growth Living is a manual for rebuilding the economy with humans in mind. * Prospect: The world’s top 50 thinkers 2021 *I am confident that this singular plea is both fecund and needed, even if, after reading, I am still not sure exactly what "alternative hedonism" actually is. -- Jordan Fox Besek * Monthly Review *It is a great testament to Soper that this patient and provocative work will no doubt continue, in the crucial decades ahead, to remind us of the urgent need to move daily life firmly beyond growth. -- Ed Graham * Marx & Philosophy *

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Book SynopsisThe System of Objects is a tour de force-a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day-offering a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society.Trade ReviewA sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left. * New York Times *The most notorious intellectual celebrity to emerge from Paris since Roland Barthes and the most influential prophet of the media since Marshall McLuhan. * i-D magazine *Modest, independent, and devastatingly humorous, Jean's work transmitted the lost urbanity of the mid-20th century while speaking of and into the future. -- Chris Kraus

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Book SynopsisWelcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her past, her practice and her hatred, things start stirring themselves up around her. In a corner of Oslo a coven of witches begin cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a death metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. And awful things happen in aspic.Jenny Hval's latest novel is a radical fusion of feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, writing and art.Trade Review"Hval's curiosity is more than simple pleasure in perversity: It's meant to defile the idea of women's bodies as pristine and plush . and reshape it into something more dreadfully real. Maybe more revolutionary than that transfiguration is her disemboweling of desire itself, unraveling it to its fearsome, primal state, and exploring the strangeness of how sexuality can alienate one from oneself; how feelings of mistrust come about when desire is new, queer and unreliable." * NPR *"Strange and lyrical . Hval's writing is surreal and rich with the grotesque banalities of human existence." * Publishers Weekly *"The themes of alienation, queerness, and the unsettling nature of desire align Hval with modern mainstays like Chris Kraus, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Maggie Nelson."-Pitchfork * Pitchfork *"Hval's surreal debut riffs on the same layered intricacies as her music, transcending simple categorisation to create a dreamy landscape both separate and a part of what we recognise as reality." * Stinging Fly *"With the release of the newly translated Paradise Rot, we can experience her artistic evolution beyond the shape of a timeline, as a series of challenging examinations melting and bending in on themselves . Listening to-or now reading-her work feels like getting jettisoned into an underwater reality that fantastically mirrors our own. It would be entirely terrifying, if exploring it weren't so much fun." * The Nation *A sensual, putrid reimagining of the original sin that explores the dynamics between two young women . [a] striking debut novel . To read Paradise Rot is to inhabit one of Hval's eerie, theory-conscious soundscapes. As in a dream, the closeness of this world to our own and its simultaneous uncanny otherness, awash with potent symbolism, leaves us looking at everything anew. It took nine years to be translated into English; I only hope we needn't wait so long for the two other books, already published in Norwegian, from this talented polymath. * Financial Times *"All I can say is with no electricity I read Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval in the dark tonight by flashlight, in one go. It will not let go of you. A surreal *and* realist gem of sensation and detail and character. Beautiful and boldly written" * Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation *Astute * Kirkus Reviews *[Girls Against God] is part fever dream, part manifesto, and part nostalgic reminiscing, with a hefty dose of feminist and queer theory for good measure. ... Chaotic yet ordered, Hval dives deeply into the process of self-discovery. [Her] language is visceral and haunting, corporal and carnal. -- Carolyn Ciesla * Booklist *This genre-bending novel from a self-described gloomy child queen blends feminism and the occult with a touch of time travel. -- Joshunda Sanders * Boston Globe *[An] incendiary genre-bending novel. ... Throughout, Hval employs a dirge-like repetition of themes (feminist rage prominent among them), which enlivens her witchy visions and sets the stage for a reincarnated Edvard Munch, on the run from the vengeful subject of his painting Puberty. Hval's fascinating exploration is not for the faint of heart, but those who like it dark will find this right up their alley. * Publishers Weekly *The atmosphere of Girls against God is on its surface bleak and unforgiving and yet beneath that impression there is a second story about the strength and solidarity of despised women. -- David Renton * Morning Star *[In] Girls Against God, Hval plunges up to her elbows in the thick, black, chthonic goo of rebellion and angst, through the quintessentially Scandinavian medium of black metal. The black-metal scene has historically been extremely sexist, but Hval reclaims it for the hateful, nihilistic teenage girls of the world with a decades-spanning tale of cinematic terrorism, political witchcraft, and satanic noise. * The A.V. Club (5 new books to read in October) *What begins with dressing as a goth and cursing at school morphs into witches' covens and fantastic demonic, cannibalistic banquets. Along the way Hval segues into the role of language (Norwegian, but also English) as a tool of both suppression and liberation, and the role of digital technology in the same. -- ArtReview * Mark Rappolt *Hval is one of the few musicians to branch out into the world of literary fiction. For Hval, it is a sideline that makes total sense, working as an extension of her atmospheric sound and descriptive, inquisitive lyrics. -- Leonie Cooper * Guardian *It is Hval's unflinching attitude to mixing genres that has brought both her essays and her bewitching, otherworldly music to critical acclaim...Hval is best in her moments of dark humour and in her writing on femininity. -- Baya Simons * Financial Times *Ambitious...[Girls Against God] has much of interest to say about the loneliness and pleasure of adolescent blasphemy, with totems of patriarchal Norwegian authority such as Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, Edvard Munch, and the Lutheran church singled out in the narrator's crosshairs. -- George MacBeth * Asymptote Journal *Anti-bourgeois and feminist, soaked in conviction and rage. -- Cal Revely-Calder * Telegraph *Strange and seductive and challenging and, at times, very funny ... a reminder that musician-turned-author Hval, is one of the most intriguing, provocative artists around at the moment. -- Teddy Jamieson * Herald *Girls Against God covers every angsty young woman's favourite subjects. Witchcraft, heavy metal, viscera, and hatred. It's a book in the grand tradition of Kathy Acker and women surrealists everywhere, dancing through space and time into different dimensions. -- India Lewis * The Arts Desk *An excellent, bewitching read. Jenny Hval's musical ability makes her a natural novelist - her writing often feeling like a blend of lyrics and essays. Girls Against God is a terrifying, striking fusion of the occult and female repression. -- Laura Mehers * Indiependent *In Girls Against God, Hval challenges the form and conventions of the novel once again: a vivid, seething voice narrates a series of apocalyptic events cut together with food fights, black metal shows, black magic, and surreal, witchy rituals. -- Alexandra Kleeman * Lit Hub *Hval, who is known for using body imagery to express political ideas about art, depicts cultish rituals to subvert what she sees as "the restrictive framework of our daily lives." * New Yorker *Girls Against God is compelling, surprising, and frequently inspiring. ... laced throughout with powerful urban imagery and striking turns of phrase. -- Andrea Tallarita * PopMatters *Truly transgressive -- Terri-Jane Dow * Severine *[Girls Against God] is a must-read for anyone looking for a mystifying, genre-bending read. -- Hannah May-Powers * The Tulane Hullabaloo *Riveting ... Like the French philosopher Luce Irigaray, [Hval] explores ideas of what a feminist or radical language would sound like. -- Sukhdev Sandhu * Guardian *Hval is steeped in the traditions of autofiction and the theoretical novel. ... The plot aspires toward an "escape route from structure and rhetoric," and makes room for thrilling observations on art, magic, and rebirth. -- Jenn Pelly * Pitchfork (Favourite Music Books of 2020) *If Girls Against God were an artwork, it would be a Munch - raw, dark and seething. -- Chloë Ashby * Times Literary Supplement *Readers drawn to more experimental literature will feel strangely at home in Jenny Hval's novel. For all of Girls Against God's baffling imagery and cryptic dialogue, the narrator registers as an individual longing for an existence outside the binary of light and dark, good and evil; a voice oppressed by a lifetime of being told it must be saved because it is lost, one that sees in the archetype of the witch not a heretic or a deviant but something more elemental: someone who is free. -- Zack Ravas * Zyzzyva *[Hval] pries into black metal's past to present an alternative, radical, and genuinely liberating trajectory for black metal to exist as a dissident art form. -- William Peel * Overland *Hval's writing embraces finding new ways to express thought patterns, experiences, and stories-and encourages people to let go of logic rather than look for the familiar markers of institutionally accepted creative writing. -- Nathania Gilson * Hazlitt *To say that Jenny Hval has an impressive creative range is an understatement ... Girls Against God is ambitious, with a plot that blends time travel, black metal, witchcraft, and film theory. -- Tobias Carroll * Tor *

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Book SynopsisOn a planet where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia -- until a boy escapes and a young woman's perception of the world is violently interupted. Two old friends enjoy cocktails on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems. A bickering couple emigrate to a world that has worked out an innovative way to side-step the need for war, only to bring their quarrels (and something far more destructive) with them.And in the title story, Suzuki offers readers a tragic and warped mirroring of her own final days as the tyranny of enforced screen-time and the mechanistion of labour bring about a shattering psychic collapse. At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.Trade ReviewSuzuki is a daring writer and these stories will show the English-language world what she is made of. -- Jessica Esa * Metropolis Japan (5 Japanese Novels to Read in 2021) *Her punky irreverence remains radiant * Frieze *If you're into Kobo Abe and prefer Ryu Murakami to Haruki you'll not (as the title of this inaugural translation of Suzuki into English suggests), be bored. * The Millions (Most Anticipated: The Great First-Half 2021 Book Preview) *Weird and wonderful, unique and unsettling ... You won't put this one down. * Osusume Books *The stories chosen for this collection showcase an author whose interest in alienation and despair as well as playful literary exploration parallels the work of other '70s SF titans such as Joanna Russ or Thomas Disch. . Essential reading not only for those interested in Japanese SF, but for anyone interested in spiky, beautiful, and bleak literature. -- Nell Keep * Booklist (Starred Review) *These strangely prescient stories are perfect for fans of Haruki Murakami, George Saunders, and Philip K. Dick. * Publishers Weekly *The latest inclusion in the modern canon of Japanese women authors' surreal feminist work, [Terminal Boredom] puts a distinctly sci-fi spin on the concept. * Thrillist (30 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2021) *Surprisingly contemporary ... with pertinent musings on the mutability of gender and the elusive nature of identity. -- Declan O'Driscoll * Irish Times *With the use of speculative elements, [Suzuki's] dark and playful stories highlight the realities of living on the lower rungs of society. -- Patricia Thang * Book Riot *[Terminal Boredom plays] with tech, gender, and tradition in marvelous ways. Highly recommended. -- Patrick Rapa * Philadelphia Inquirer *There's nothing boring about the short stories in Terminal Boredom. * The A.V. Club (5 new books to read in April) *Terminal Boredom provides a historical capsule and an interesting mirror to the American science fiction of the [1970s]. -- Silvia Moreno-Garcia * Washington Post *The seven stories here are not only still relevant but remarkably fresh . brilliant -- Lisa Tuttle * Guardian *Each of the worlds Suzuki creates is deep and complex, with many of the questions raised lingering long after the last page and making you crave more. -- Iain Maloney * Japan Times *An engaging and highly-relevant collection of short stories that will resonate with many readers, especially fans of writers like Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, and even George Orwell, but from a refreshingly female perspective. -- Rachel Stanyon * Asymptote Journal *Full of punk, punch, and feminist shruggings ... a spiky, timeless, and timely collection of psychologically astute speculative fiction * Lunate Fiction *Sure to be a treat for fans of Haruki Murakami, George Saunders, and the twisty genre experimentation of Black Mirror. * Chicago Review of Books (12 Must-Read Books for April) *The work and messages of Ursula K. Le Guin, the author's longer-lived contemporary, come to mind. -- Catherine Lacey * New York Times *A welcome glimpse inside the mind of a writer whose talent has been overlooked for far too long. * All the Anime *Suzuki's stories are reminiscent of the unhinged science fiction dystopias of the master of the craft, Philip K. Dick ... [and] extend the canon of twentieth century science fiction. -- Ian MacAllen * Chicago Review of Books *Suzuki's work, now released in English for the first time, marks an exciting moment. Its themes feel of-the-moment despite being written over thirty years ago, and yet they are also surreal-the imagined artificialities of the 1980s written as futuristic now mirror our mundane, modern technology. -- Makenna Goodman * Electric Literature *The themes of [Suzuki's] fiction thrum with a resistant, brightly grim tension. Passing decades certainly haven't dulled the razor's cut of her punk sensibilities. -- Lee Mandelo * Tor *A vital addition to the science fiction canon in the anglophone world ... If there is any proof needed that the future has ended, it is that these stories can speak to us so directly across the four decades since their writing. -- Calum Barnes * The Quietus *Dazzling ... her stories are characterised by the elegance with which they pierce the well-ordered surface of modern life to uncover the corrosion at its heart. -- Andy Hedgecock * Morning Star *At last, we have access to some of [Suzuki's] most exciting works * Books & Bao *Terminal Boredom is even more striking and believable in 2020 than it was in 1980 . Suzuki's feminist spirit is as relevant and her stories as piercing today as they were more than thirty years ago -- Alison Fincher * Asian Review of Books *One of the freshest collections I've read in years. -- Andy Weir * Toronto Star *Brilliant and often bleak . all shot through with a camp ethos, dark humour and kitchen-sink realism . in their brio and jagged urgency, these stories have, if anything, only gained in their alarming immediacy. -- Bryan Karetnyk * Times Literary Supplement *A thoroughly likeable and engaging book -- Bernard Cohen * South China Morning Post *Whether riffing on the poison of technology or about private feelings of loneliness and want, there is a psychic complexity to Suzuki's fiction ... Terminal Boredom is a reason for celebration. -- Jason Parham * WIRED *No matter how strange the fictional worlds of the future she manufactures, her reader would find something deeply familiar in the simple conversations of her characters. -- Xiaochen Su * The News Lens *Although they were written in the 70s and 80s, some of [the stories in Terminal Boredom] feel so fresh that it would be easy to mistake them as new ... For its time, the writing is subversive, defiant, and unapologetic, and for our time, it is poignant and prescient. -- Leah Binns * Full Stop *Gets under the skin ... The groundlessness of life, the absence of the big Other, is a disconcerting theme and a feminist perspective is explored in a highly speculative and punkish way -- Sean Sheehan * The Prisma *Wildly imaginative ... Psychologically this book is not an easy read, but intellectually it is fascinating -- Kerryn Goldsworthy * Syndey Morning Herald *Izumi Suzuki was a wonderful writer who should've been published in English much sooner. Like the protagonist of 'Women and Women', we've been deprived of some good jams. -- Lloyd Markham * New Welsh Review *Sucks you with its darkness. -- Eugen Bacon * Aurealis *Darkly irreverent ... such well-written anatomies of anxiety and dissatisfaction are both timeless and of obvious relevance today. -- Rhian E. Jones * New Humanist *Intriguing from start to finish, rife with bitter truths about relationships, imaginative haunting worlds, and-buried beneath it all-some insightful commentary on the human condition. -- Ethan Wescoatt * International Examiner *Suzuki's science fiction isn't neatly categorisable ... Her voice is fiercely unique and her stories linger in the corner of the mind's eye long after reading - devour them. -- Jennifer Brough * Lucy Writers Platform *The truths, beauty and strangeness [Suzuki] gave the world throughout her career are hard-fought, rewarding, and demanding. -- Josh Wilson * The Fabulist *Startlingly prescient ... Part of what makes Suzuki's storytelling so engrossing is her ability to depict existential boredom and grim, sometimes terrifying, futures without falling into fatalism. -- Julia Shiota * The Ploughshares Blog *Terminal Boredom is a subtle but sharp collection ... and a worthwhile introduction to Izumi Suzuki's work. -- Juliet Jacques * Tribune *These are brash, clever, odd works of science fiction, propelled by an irreverent kind of up yours! energy, and yet also a deep worry for the state of life in twentieth-century Japan and also the planet itself. -- Rhian Sasseen * The Baffler *

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Book SynopsisThe environmental crisis under way is unique in human history. It is a true existential crisis. Those alive today will decide the fate of humanity. Meanwhile, the leaders of the most powerful state in human history are dedicating themselves with passion to destroying the prospects for organized human life. At the same time, there is a solution at hand, which is the Green New Deal. Putting meat on the bones of the Green New Deal starts with a single simple idea: we have to absolutely stop burning fossil fuels to produce energy within the next 30 years at most; and we have to do this in a way that also supports rising living standards and expanding opportunities for working people and the poor throughout the world. This version of a Green New Deal program is, in fact, entirely realistic in terms of its purely economic and technical features. The real question is whether it is politically feasible. Chomsky and Pollin examine how we can build the political force to make a global Green New Deal a reality.Trade ReviewThis little book contains a big idea: climate stabilisation that avoids the collapse of organised social life can be achieved, along with more decent jobs, improved living standards and reduced poverty everywhere in the world. Two eminent thinkers present a convincing case for a realistic, feasible Global Green New Deal. * Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi *The project that is the Green New Deal is enriched by the insights of two great minds: those of Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin. Both understand that the GND will fail if it does not protect the jobs and livelihoods of the working class. They explain how a transformation needed to restore the ecosystem can, and will transform the organisations and lives of working people worldwide - for the better. * Ann Pettifor, author of The Case for The Green New Deal *This book is a survival manual for civilization. I want everyone--yes, every person on the planet--to learn its message and to face the challenge it poses: "What am I doing to help bring about a global Green New Deal in the early years of this decade?" For Americans, the first steps are clear: consign all climate deniers to permanent political oblivion and force all other policymakers to match fine words with deeds - i.e.commit to the Pollin-Chomsky global program for climate stabilization, a massive expansion of good jobs, and just transition. -- Daniel Ellsberg, author of The Doomsday MachineBrisk and lucid. -- Lit Hub ("Most Anticipated Books of 2020") * John Freeman *In this compelling read, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky and progressive economist Robert Pollin present a convincing case for a realistic, feasible Global Green New Deal. * Dazed *A thought-provoking and succinct manifesto. -- Russell Whitehouse * International Policy Digest *[Chomsky and Pollin] argue it is possible to tackle climate collapse over the next 30 years ... A capitalist system that fails to respond does not deserve to survive. * Irish Times *Emphasises the crisis our planet faces but also says 'there is a solution at hand'. * Irish Examiner *

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Book SynopsisContemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. "Flow" is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub. And the bad news is that political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas, and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style forgoes them. Considering original streaming TV, popular literature, artworld trends, and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion and today's intolerance of representation, and points to alternative forms in photography, TV, novels, and constructive theory that prioritize distance, impersonality, and big ideas instead.Trade ReviewThis brilliantly written, wild ride of a book is an enthralling, gloves-off critical intervention urgently needed in this moment. -- Jonathan Crary, author of 24/7 and Scorched EarthKornbluh offers a swift -- and much needed -- kick to one of the most insidious symptoms of our time: the demand for the now, the immediately felt, the one-off. Armed with a strong imperative: "Think!" which she reiterates in an uncommonly rich vocabulary and from a variety of perspectives, she succeeds at the very least in holding up this runaway trend. Together with her previous critiques of capitalism, Immediacy establishes Kornbluh as one of the most inventive new voices in the field. -- Joan Copjec, Brown University, author of Read My DesireAnna Kornbluh brilliantly reinvigorates critique for an age drowning under the deluge of self-presentation. Embracing structure over style, representation over personalization, and collectivity over narcissism, she creates a space for thinking -- the necessary space for politics. -- Jodi Dean, author of The Communist HorizonThe sensation of reading Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy is of someone turning on the light in a dark room. Suddenly one beholds a world one had only been stumbling through and can begin, with Kornbluh's help, to trace a whole new set of relations between the disparate phenomena that define contemporary culture. The shocking conceptual clarity and rightness of its dialectical reversal of everything we thought we knew about life lived under conditions of postmodern hyper-mediation should make this book the starting point of future discussions of the nature of the present. -- Mark McGurl, Stanford University, author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of AmazonTo the things themselves! Fuck no, that's precisely the problem. In this book on the poetics of social forms, Kornbluh has expertly diagnosed the contemporary yen for immediacy and immanence, presence and reality, the indistinct blurs and liquid flows of seemingly authentic experience. Taking it all as a kind of social pathology, she reads contemporary style through the deterritorializations of hyper capitalism, and the crushing lateness of an economic logic that insists on no alternative for society and no future for the planet. What results is a plea for the labor of mediation, and an insistence on dialectics as the central mechanism of art and culture. -- Alexander R. Galloway, author of Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital AgeImmediacy masterfully exposes the common core of many different problems and phenomena that we do not necessarily think of as related. The imperative of immediacy and its suffocating logic are the hallmarks of what Kornbluh calls "too late capitalism". Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis and art she makes a vivid, passionate, and most compelling case for mediation that creates the much-needed capacity to imaginatively break with the merely given. An extremely precious book that goes far beyond purely academic concerns. -- Alenka Zupancic, author of Let Them RotAnna Kornbluh simply nails it in this fearless, witty, and conceptually powerful indictment of contemporary capitalist culture's desire to annihilate negation-while also "negating the negation" by showing how things might be otherwise. A stunning and unignorable book. -- Sianne Ngai, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form

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Book SynopsisIsraeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights.As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful expose of Israeli academia's ongoing and active complicity in Israel's settler-colonial project.Trade ReviewThis book lands like a grenade, detonating comfortable and long held myths about the liberalism and independence of Israel's university system. In their place, Wind's rigorous and jaw-dropping research reveals countless ways that the nation's most celebrated and storied education institutions are utterly entangled in the violent machinery of Palestinian dispossession, occupation, incarceration, surveillance, siege and military bombardment. From the development of deadly weapons to the crafting of state propaganda to the training of officers, there is no escaping the conclusion that these universities are part and parcel of the official infrastructure that has enabled Israel to systematically avoid the political solutions that are the only hope of enduring peace in the region. An explosive contribution from a brilliant young scholar. -- Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and DoppelgangerThere are no ivory towers! Maya Wind brings this truth to the light with a forensic accounting of Israeli universities and their complete implication in Israel's occupation and apartheid regime. Towers of Ivory and Steel lays bare Israeli campuses as Jewish settlements of replacement in occupied lands, the knowledge arm for security forces and the local military industry, and as sites of Palestinian intellectual suppression, all co-signed by the "liberal silence" of Israeli academics. Fearless, emphatic, and unflinching. No other work better demonstrates why higher education remains a vital site of struggle over the future of democracy, in Israel, in Palestine, and across the world. -- Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our CitiesThis book is a must read - meticulously researched, lucidly written, and convincingly argued. Wind deftly illuminates the myriad ways in which the university is a site of meaningful struggle, debunking the deep-seated myths that heretofore have served to normalize Israel's academic complex as it is part and parcel of the state's settler colonial projects of both occupation and apartheid that violently dominate and dispossess the Palestinian people. Towers of Ivory and Steel provides a roadmap for Israeli academics to end the institutional complicity and join the movement to remake higher education for liberation. -- J. Kehaulani Kauanui, author of Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State NationalismA devastating analysis of the extensive, insidious ways that the Israeli academy is central to the architecture of occupation, settler colonial violence, and repression of Palestinians. Through meticulous ethnographic and archival research, Wind not only gives lie to the claim that the Israeli academy is a bastion of academic freedom and vigorous debate. She provides a model for the decolonial work we must all do until there is freedom and liberation for all. -- Jessica Winegar, co-author with Lara Deeb of Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle EastDrawing on Hebrew sources, Maya Wind shatters the myth of liberal expression in Israeli universities, revealing instead how they prop up apartheid. -- Rebecca Ruth Gould * New Arab *Towers of Ivory and Steel is a paradigm-shifting book, with incredible insider reporting that provides riveting detail of how Israeli universities serve primarily as centers of military research, propaganda, and command. A must read. -- Sarah Schulman * Bookforum *Table of ContentsForeword by Nadia Abu El-HajIntroductionPart I:COMPLICITY1. Expertise of Subjugation2. Outpost Campus3. The Scholarly Security StatePart II:REPRESSION4. Epistemic Occupation5. Students Under Siege6. Academia Against LiberationEpilogueAfterword by Robin D. G. KelleyNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisBritain was once the leading economy in Europe; it is now the most unequal. In Shattered Nation, leading geographer and author of Inequality and the 1% shows that we are growing further and further apart. Visiting sites across the British Isles and exploring the social fissures that have emerged, Danny Dorling exposes a new geography of inequality. Middle England has been hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis, and even people doing comparatively well are struggling to stay afloat. Once affluent suburbs are now unproductive places where opportunity has been replaced by food banks. Before COVID, life expectancy had dropped as a result of poverty for the first time since the 1930s.Fifty years ago the UK led the world in child health; today, twenty-two of the twenty-seven EU countries have better mortality rates for newborns. No other European country has such miserly unemployment benefits; university fees so high; housing so unaffordable; or a government economically so far to the right. In the spirit of the 1942 Beveridge Report, Dorling identifies the five giants of twenty-first-century poverty that need to be conquered: Hunger, Precarity, Waste, Exploitation, and Fear. He offers powerful insights into how we got here and what we must do in order to save Britain from becoming a failed state.Trade ReviewDorling chooses facts over fiction, data over spin, reality over nostalgia in this sweeping overview of a badly fractured and weakened Britain. His carefully evidenced text documents the rapid 'Americanisation' of the British economy, the obscene rise in inequality and the savaging of Britain's much admired public services. Above all, he draws attention to the economic, political and social fissures enfeebling a nation that only forty years ago was well regulated, fairer and vibrant -- Ann Pettifor, author of The Case for the Green New DealThis book shows just how complicit mainstream politicians have been in Britain's economic and moral decline, particularly when the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats launched their inexcusable 'austerity' policy in 2010. The book shows just how apt today is William Beveridge's aphorism of 1942 that 'it is a time for revolutions,not for patching -- Guy Standing, author of The Corruption of CapitalismBrimming with lesser-known facts and compelling stories, Dorling's latest book affirms the growing unease many of us have been feeling as public services languish and living standards decline. Shattered Nation presents an essential but devastating picture of a country stretched to breaking point. With characteristic care, clarity, and insight, Dorling dissects Britain's geography of inequality, breaking down the crisis into a set of intertwined failings whose details will enrage and empower readers. A powerful and humane offering that shows us how the mess was made and urges us to lose no time in demanding something better. -- Arianne Shahvisi, author of Arguing for a Better World: How to Talk About the Issues That Divide UsThe self-deception that we are a nation of fairness and justice is systematically exploded by a calm and persistent use of factual observations of the lives of people, spread between the super rich and the increasingly poor and socially left behind, in all parts of the country ... To read this could be depressing and disempowering, but that is not the intention. It is up to us, all of us, to be prepared to argue for a society that really does care for all -- Jeremy Corbyn, MPSobering, shocking and brilliantly incisive. A snap-shot of a divided nation and a powerful antidote to nostalgic fantasies. -- David Olusoga, author of Black and BritishShattered Nation comes at a critical point in time ... captur[ing] the picture of a nation that feels hopelessly broken. -- Yiannis Baboulias * New Humanist *Excellent ... [Shattered Nation] gives clear and detailed analyses of the various ways in which greed, globalism, and a self-perpetuating cycle of growing inequality and destruction of our social matrix has shattered our nation. -- Tim Barton * Hastings Independent *Excellent ... [Shattered Nation] provides a masterful critique of just why this country is in the shattered state it is. -- Paul Donovan * Morning Star *Dorling convincingly demonstrates that the UK is a failing state. -- Larry Patriquin * LSE Review of Books *A devastating critique of how the UK got into the state it is today -- Paul Donovan * Guardian-Series *Fascinating ... Dorling expertly demonstrates how successive administrations devoted to profit, not people, constantly adopted policies to favour the rich regardless of human consequences which inevitably made the poor poorer. -- Mo Stewart, author of Cash Not Care: the planned demolition of the UK welfare stateWide ranging, entertaining, excoriating ... packed with facts and statistics that often astonish ... a depressing but essential read -- Stewart Wood * Literary Review *[Dorling] assembles a wealth of evidence to show how the current trajectory in the UK is one of increasing inequality ... [and] has created a resource for all those involved in movements in the UK striving for social justice and for an end to hunger, precarity, waste, exploitation and fear. -- Graham Kirkwood * Counterfire *Table of ContentsPart I. Borders1. The Roundabout2. Growing DividesPart II. Giants3. Hunger4. Precarity5. Waste6. Exploitation7. FearPart III. Mountains8. A Failing State9. Conclusion

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Book SynopsisWhat if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable?This is Brett Christophers' claim. The global economy is moving too slowly toward sustainability because the return on green investment is too low.Today's consensus is that the key to curbing climate change is to produce green electricity and electrify everything possible. The main economic barrier in that project has seemingly been removed. But while prices of solar and wind power have tumbled, the golden era of renewables has yet to materialize.The problem is that investment is driven by profit, not price, and operating solar and wind farms remains a marginal business, dependent everywhere on the state's financial support.We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing. But there is an alternative to providing surrogate green profits through subsidies: to take energy out of the private sector's hands.An essential intervention, The Price Is Wrong is as politically far-reaching as it is factually illuminating.

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