Verso Books

Book SynopsisWhat is incest? Is it universally prohibited? Does this prohibition concern only "biological" kinships or does it extend to various "social" kinships, such as those that are formed today in so-called blended families but which also exist in many other societies?This prohibition plays a fundamental role in the functioning of the multiple kinship systems studied throughout the world. But where does it come from? Can we think, with Claude Lévi-Strauss, that the prohibition of incest alone marks the passage from nature to culture? And how can we understand, then, the persistent tension between the proclaimed, institutionalized prohibition and the incestuous practice which, everywhere, remains?World-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier highlights an essential fact, the spontaneously asocial and undifferentiated character of human sexuality and the need for a social regulation of this spontaneity. It thus brings to light the main teachings of anthropology on the question of incest, a major social fact of burning relevance today.

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Book SynopsisThe Automatic Fetish traces Marx’s analysis of capital, step by step, through the material compiled posthumously as the third volume of Capital. Identifying the critique of value as the central through line of the entire work, Beverley Best elaborates a theory of movement through which the capital machine generates social forms of appearance as the inversion of its inner operating mechanisms. Neither a return to basics nor a new-fangled reconstruction, The Automatic Fetish eschews novelty to show once again that Marx rewards careful study.- ‘If I had to choose one book that would make the case for the relevance of Marx’s critique of political economy to the humanities, this might very well be it’ Colleen Lye, co-editor of After Marx- ‘The contribution of The Automatic Fetish is hard to exaggerate’ Nicholas Brown, author of Autonomy- ‘Will make a significant contribution to the wid

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Book SynopsisAn ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls 'non-space' results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of 'supermodernity' to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena - a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history, Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative social life, and non-place, to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible.Unlike Baudelairean modernity, where old and new are interwoven, supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft, local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle. Auge does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: place still exist outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he argues powerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that this new form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of its own.Trade ReviewUnsettling, elegantly written and illuminating: essential reading for anyone seeking to understand our supermodern condition. -- PD Smith * Guardian *Shopping malls, motorways, airport lounges-we are all familiar with these curious spaces which are both everywhere and nowhere. But only now do we have a coherent analysis of their far-reaching effects on public and private experience. Marc Augé has become their anthropologist, and has written a timely and original book. -- Patrick WrightIt is indeed very seldom that one finds it difficult to put down a book because of the intellectual excitement it generates. Augé's Non-Places is such a book-a powerful message, modestly delivered, which stands out as a unique and refreshing anthropological voice. * Current Anthropology *Table of ContentsIntroduction to the Second EditionPrologueThe Near and the ElsewhereAnthropological PlaceFrom Places to Non-PlacesEpilogueA Brief Bibliography

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Book SynopsisPhotography was invented between the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Frederick Engels's The Communist Manifesto. Taking the intertwined development of capitalism and the camera as their starting point, the essays in Capitalism and the Camera investigate the relationship between capitalist accumulation and the photographic image, and ask whether photography might allow us to refuse capitalism's violence-and if so, how?Drawn together in productive disagreement, the essays in this collection explore the relationship of photography to resource extraction and capital accumulation, from 1492 to the postcolonial; the camera's potential to make visible critical understandings of capitalist production and society, especially economies of class and desire; and propose ways that the camera and the image can be used to build cultural and political counterpublics from which a democratic struggle against capitalism might emerge. With essays by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Siobhan Angus, Kajri Jain, Walter Benn Michaels, T. J. Clark, John Paul Ricco, Blake Stimson, Chris Stolarski, Tong Lam, and Jacob Emery.Trade ReviewThese essays scrutinize the photograph from multiple angles to expose the image-capitalism of our ongoing Imperial Age. A treasure trove of contemporary approaches to critical visual studies. -- Susan Buck-Morss, CUNY Graduate CenterThis is the most original and ground-breaking collection of essays on photography that I have seen in many years, featuring notable critics and scholars at the height of their powers. Do not look for consensus here, but a refreshing take on the enduring contradictions that beset this essential medium of modernity. -- W. J. T. Mitchell, author of What Do Pictures Want?Scintillating ... [in Capitalism and the Camera] Coleman and James ask us to consider the primary destructive gaze of powerful companies. -- Shanti Escalante-De Mattei * Art in America *

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Book SynopsisA classic of Western Marxism, The Destruction of Reason is Georg Lukács's trenchant criticism of German philosophy after Marx and the role it played in the rise of National Socialism. Originally published in 1952, the book is a sustained and detailed polemic against post-Hegelian German philosophy and sociology from Kierkegaard to Heidegger. The Destruction of Reason is unsparing in its contention that with almost no exceptions, the post-Hegelian tradition prepared the ground fascist thought. In this, the main culprits are Friedrich Nietzsche and Martín Heidegger who are accused, in turn, of introducing irrationalism into social and philosophical thought, pronounced antagonism to the idea of progress in history, an aristocratic view of the "masses," and, consequently, hostility to socialism, which in its classic expressions are movements for popular democracy-especially, but not exclusively, the expropriation of most private property in terms of material production.The Destruction of Reason remains one of Lukács's most controversial, albeit little read, books. This new edition, featuring an historical introduction by Enzo Traverso, will finally see this classic come back in to print.Trade Review[Lukacs possessed] a very specific and important kind of mind, raised to an extraordinary degree of interest by its quite exceptional ability. -- Raymond Williams

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Book SynopsisIn Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this-it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today.The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone's behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.Trade ReviewBen Tarnoff is the best kind of visionary: deeply knowledgeable, intensely practical, and utterly committed to the transformation of an abusive and corrupt status quo. We are profoundly fortunate to have his fine mind focussed on reimagining the tools that have remade our lives. An extraordinary and urgent book. -- Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not EnoughThe privacy-invading, throttled, and ad-filled Internet we have is not the Internet we deserve. But as Ben Tarnoff lucidly lays out, if we want to manifest the latent democratic potential of our communications infrastructure, we will have to wrest control from the privatizers and profiteers and transform the underlying political economy. Internet for the People provides an engaging and enraging account of how the online world was hijacked by corporate interests, excavating the past so we can envision and organize for a better future. Ben Tarnoff has done a public service writing this book. Now we need to get busy building the movements and popular power that can fight for an Internet in the public interest. -- Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone and The People’s PlatformTarnoff offers not only an eloquent and essential guide to the history of our capitalist internet, he also charts the myriad ways in which alternatives are emerging. A key book for imagining a better digital future. -- Nick Srnicek, author of Platform CapitalismThroughout this easy-reading narrative history, Tarnoff weaves his thesis that the internet must be de-privatized for the good of users....Tarnoff's politically infused history and critical analysis of the privatized internet is a useful, brief primer. -- Grace O'Hanlon * Library Journal *A helpful reframing-from thinking about how to avoid a horrible internet to how to create a good one....Tarnoff wants to bring the internet back to its publicly owned, civically oriented roots, and whether or not that's the right thing to do, it's the right question to ask. -- Gabriel Nicholas * Washington Post *Strikes a happy middle ground between technical history and polemic. -- Evan Malmgren * The Nation *In this stalled conversation, Ben Tarnoff's new book, Internet for the People, makes a striking intervention....his book reveals the hidden history of the internet and expands our ideas about its possible futures. -- Sarah Leonard * New Republic *

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Book SynopsisThe science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest? In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop--with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines. Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.Trade ReviewA powerful sketch of a political theory for a time of climate change. -- David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable EarthThe 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 DoctrineThe 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 *How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a challenge to the left, and an important one. -- John Foster * The Battleground *A short and gripping manifesto which aims to wrench the climate movement out of its complacency * Bright Green *Timely ... Malm delivers the essay in his usual lucid and fiery style * Ecologist *One of the most important things written about the climate crisis. -- Wen Stephenson * LARB *A profoundly necessary book -- Scott W. Stern * LARB *Advocates powerfully against despair and powerlessness. -- Tatiana Schlossberg * New York Times *Written passionately...Malm argues that it may be too late to avert climate crisis, but it is far from too late to ameliorate suffering. -- Sawarin Suwichakornpong * Bangkok Post *Malm offers a critical, passionate and hopeful assessment of where it might go next. Malm's refreshing humanist ethos combined with his Marxist radicalism make him one of the most exciting contemporary writers on the climate crisis, this forceful new entry into his repertoire is no exception, though perhaps a different beast from his more academic work. * Political Economy Research Centre *Refreshing and provoking * It's Freezing in LA *How to Blow Up a Pipeline makes a strong case for looking beyond non-violent activism * VICE *A humble and nuanced case... it's hard to read this book without daydreaming about sabotaging the private jets of the ultra-rich. -- Tim DeChristopher * Yes Magazine *While the book does not live up to its titular promise of providing instructions to detonate a pipeline, it does make an unflinching case for carrying out such activities in advanced capitalist countries. -- James Wilt * Canadian Dimension *Malm [has] captured the rising fury of climate activists -- Pilita Clark * Financial Times *Impossible to dismiss -- David Wallace-Wells * Times Literary Supplement *Malm is right. Shunning all violent acts will only prolong the worst. No new fossil fuel infrastructure can be created, and we need, as a society, to dismantle what we already have -- Devi Lockwood * VICE *By ruling out direct action, the climate movement robs itself, in Malm's view, of its only serious means of leverage. -- Adam Tooze * London Review of Books *Bracing * Financial Times *If you want to do something about the climate crisis instead of wallowing in despair, there's no better place to start than Andreas Malm's short treatise on the virtues of eco-sabotage. Provides a radical sort of hope. -- Abigail Weinberg * Mother Jones *Malm calls for the formation of a radical flank to the popular climate movement...[he] finds the peaceful discipline of the climate movement to be remarkable but stifling in its single mode of action, calling it gentle and mild in the extreme. -- James Mumm * Social Policy magazine *An impassioned argument for climate activists to move beyond non-violent protests...Even for those who disapprove of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, it is a useful guide to the noisiest climate activist voices. * Economist *A seductively well-written and well-researched book that argues climate activists should abandon their longstanding "commitment to absolute non-violence", and instead "escalate" their campaign by "physically attacking the things that consume our planet", such as fossil fuel infrastructure. -- Andy Beckett * Guardian *Dynamite -- David Hughes * Time Out *[A] persuasive and optimistic rebuttal of climate fatalism * Glasgow Guardian *A rousing case for property destruction as a tactic in the pursuit of climate justice. -- Simran Hans * Guardian *This is a book as weapon, a manifesto for forcing change framed by the legacy of the suffragettes' direct action, civil rights movement protests, anti-apartheid boycotts, national liberation armed striggles. * Philosophy Football *

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Book SynopsisBorders harm all of us: they must be abolished.Borders divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities. They encourage the expansion of technologies of surveillance and control, which impact migrants and citizens both.Bradley and de Noronha tell what should by now be a simple truth: borders are not only at the edges of national territory, in airports, or at border walls. Borders are everyday and everywhere; they follow people around and get between us, and disrupt our collective safety, freedom and flourishing. is a passionate manifesto for border abolition, arguing that we must transform society and our relationships to one another, and build a world in which everyone has the freedom to move and to stay.Trade ReviewAgainst Borders demonstrates the clarifying power of applying abolitionist politics to the issue of borders. In doing so, it achieves a rare unity of theory and practice, combining profound analysis with pointers to radical action. -- Arun KundnaniThe arguments in this elegant and powerful book are entirely reasonable and pragmatic and yet utterly revolutionary, proposing an abolitionist political imagination and a horizon of liberation. -- Michael HardtA book that invites us to dream of a reconfigured world where the borders between nation states no longer control and define us. -- Stella DadzieA refreshing, well-argued and moving proposal for 'non-reformist reforms' that would demolish one of the cruellest components of the capitalist state, written with a non-sectarian openness and a utopian imagination -- Owen HatherleyAn accessible, detailed examination of how borders function. A must read for anyone who wants to get to grips with the case for border abolition. -- Maya Goodfellow, author of Hostile EnvironmentAn incisive exploration of how borders operate in the 21st century. -- Emily Kenway * openDemocracy *Against Borders: The Case for Abolition is a compelling and much-needed primer on abolishing borders. By de-bunking common myths, presenting historical analysis, and guiding readers through contemporary social movements, Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha passionately and accessibly lay out the vision and necessity for a world without borders. -- Harsha Walia, author Border and Rule & Undoing Border Imperialism

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Book SynopsisThe Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat is a brilliant fictional journey through Western political philosophy by one of our most original thinkers. Professor Caritat, a middle-aged Candide, walks naively through the neighbouring countries of Utilitaria, Communitaria and Libertaria, in his quest to find the best of all possible worlds. Cut loose from the confines of his ivory tower, this wandering professor is made to confront the perplexed state of modern thinking in this dazzling comedy of ideas.Trade ReviewWritten in a beautifully clear style, full of a keen, serious wit ... Lukes achieves both lightness and weight in a way many novelists might envy. * Independent *This book is a box of delights, often wonderfully funny and always deliciously clever, a contemporary political satire to set among the best. * New Statesman *Steven Lukes's moral fable is in the tradition of tall travellers' tales from Swift and Voltaire to Lewis Carroll and Samuel Butler. * London Review of Books *Knock-out satirical humour. * Times Literary Supplement *Lukes manages to equal the pace and flair of Candide. * New York Times Book Review *Utterly magnetic. * Los Angeles Times Book Review *

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Book SynopsisDespite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital's paradoxical expansion and entrenchment amidst crisis and unrest, Mute Compulsionoffers a novel theory of the historically unique forms of abstract and impersonal power set in motion by the subjection of social life to the profit imperative. Building on a critical reconstruction of Karl Marx's unfinished critique of political economy and a wide range of contemporary Marxist theory, philosopher Søren Mau sets out to explain how the logic of capital tightens its stranglehold on the life of society by constantly remoulding the material conditions of social reproduction. In the course of doing so, Mau intervenes in classical and contemporary debates about the value form, crisis theory, biopolitics, social reproduction, humanism, logistics, agriculture, metabolism, the body, competition, technology and relative surplus populations.Trade ReviewNot a day goes by without a question imposing itself on the minimally sane mind: how can all this shit around us just go on? In this masterful study, Søren Mau methodically drills into the core of the matter: the deeply entrenched power of some people over others, and of capital over everyone. It is this power that drives the disasters of our time, and it is a specific form of power, one rooted in the most basal layers of existence-the economy, where human bodies are (supposed to be) sustained. Written with verve and clarity, analytically sharp and dialectically shrewd in equal measure, Mute Compulsion reinvigorates historical materialism for the mid-twenty-first century. Through close readings of Marx and critical dialogues with contemporary theory, it throws up fresh insights for a new generation of Marxists, as well as for long-time connoisseurs. A big red book to cherish. -- Andreas Malm, author of Fossil Capital (Verso, 2016), The Progress of this Storm (2018) and How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021).An instant classic. The best introduction to Marx's thought in any language. -- Aaron BenanavThis is the first in-depth investigation of a key concept used in Marx's Capital: mute compulsion. Far beyond a purely philological exercise, Søren Mau shows the centrality of this concept for a better understanding of capitalist class rule, subsumption and biopolitics. If we take the findings of Søren Mau's book seriously, it will considerably change our views on the "power of capital" and the political strategies to fight against this power. -- Michael HeinrichMute Compulsion manages to do something quite extraordinary: it puts a definitive end to accusations of economic reductionism levelled against Marx through an argument which is both complex, and yet very simple. By proposing that capital's domination operates through a form of economic power that subordinates our everyday life, Mau underscores the need to throw our gaze not only at what happens in the workplace, but particularly outside of it. A tour de force through some of the key Marxist concepts and debates. -- Sara R. Farris, author of In the Name of Women's Rights. The Rise of Femonationalism (Duke UP, 2017)

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Book SynopsisThis edited collection celebrates Patrick Wolfe's contribution to the study and critique of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination. The chapters collected here focus on the settler-colonial assimilation of land and people, and on what Wolfe insightfully defined as 'preaccumulation': the ability of settlers to mobilise technologies and resources unavailable to resisting Indigenous communities. Wolfe's militant and interdisciplinary scholarship is thus emphasised, together with his determination to acknowledge Indigenous perspectives and the efficacy of Indigenous resistances. In case studies of Australia, French Algeria, and the United States, contributors illustrate how seminal his contribution was and is. There are three core reasons why it is especially important to develop the field of thinking inaugurated by Wolfe: first, because the demand for Indigenous sovereignty has been crucial to recent struggles against neoliberal attacks in the settler societies; second, because a critique of settler colonialism and its logic of elimination has supported important struggles against environmental devastation; and third, because the ability to think race in ways that are not disconnected from other struggles is now more needed than ever. Racial capitalism and settler colonialism are as imbricated now as they always have been, and keeping both in mind at the same time highlights the need to establish and nurture solidarities that reach across established divides.Trade ReviewPraise for Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview: The definitive theoretical and historical introduction to settler colonialism. * Oxford Bibliographies *Praise for Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical OverviewCrisply theorized. -- Zoë Laidlaw * The Historical Journal *Praise for How to Accept German Reparations: An idiosyncratic, far-ranging, well written book. This is several thoughtful books in one. -- Lora Wildenthal * German History *Praise for How to Accept German Reparations:This remarkable book is a deeply anthropological study of a problem that reaches back into the author's own familial past and connects it with an astonishing but entirely persuasive array of themes, including agency, victimhood, nationalism, racism, and religion. Slyomovics's measured, graceful prose undoes the false simplicities of attributing right and wrong-locating the book securely at the heart of what social anthropology is all about. -- Michael Herzfeld, Harvard UniversityPraise for The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco:An important contribution to scholarship on an area of the world that receives relatively little attention as well as an important contribution to what is fast becoming a fifth subfield for anthropology: legal anthropology. * Journal of Folklore Research *Patrick Wolfe reached into the dark heart of settler colonialism and provided us with a world changing theory, grammar, and politics with which to respond to the ongoing subjugation of colonised peoples. These essays enact the profound legacies of a singular intellectual-activist and demonstrate the enduring power of his analysis -- Melinda Hinkson, Director, Institute of Postcolonial Studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology, Deakin UniversitySetter colonial studies is impossible to imagine without the concepts that Patrick Wolfe developed over decades of thinking about Indigenous dispossession and racialization. Because colonialism is not 'post' in settler societies, the task of theorizing their modalities of domination and erasure remains a pressing task. Race, Place, Trace is a fitting tribute to, and continuation of, his singular legacy. -- A. Dirk Moses, author of The Problems of GenocidePatrick Wolfe would have loved this book. I could imagine him wanting to participate in the arguments that are offered throughout its pages, for all the chapters are infused with the same scholarly rigour and critical passion that characterised his own work. -- Ghassan Hage, Anthropology, University of Melbourne

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Book Synopsis'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonious absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.Trade ReviewHjorth delivers a gripping tale of obsession about an artist and her frayed relationship with her family. [She] keenly walks the line between Johanna's concern and mania; as Johanna's hang-ups occasionally spin out of control, they remain true to the character. This accomplished novel is hard to shake. * Publishers Weekly, starred review *In Is Mother Dead, Hjorth returns to themes of family and estrangement. Johanna, a middle-aged artist, returns to Oslo for a retrospective of her work. She attempts to reconnect with her mother, but she doesn't pick up the phone. Johanna continues to call and text her, fixating on reaching her despite surfacing memories of an unhappy childhood. She continues to stalk her mother - hiding out in her mother's building, following her, and going through her trash - resulting in a memorable story of surveillance and psychological torment. -- Emily Firetog * Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2022 *A darkly insightful examination of mother-daughter relationships that captivates with the suspense of a thriller. The novel's strength lies in its deft use of psychological analysis as it looks at this relationship through one lens after another. * Kirkus Reviews *Is Mother Dead is a Norwegian domestic thriller about the lengths to which people will go to dig up truths that others want to stay buried. * Foreword Reviews, Starred Review *Hjorth has written a fascinating tale about the Norwegian postal system and composed a best-selling work of autofiction...In her latest work to appear in English, an ex-pat artist returns to Norway to oversee a retrospective of her work and attempts to contact, and then stalks, her estranged mother * The Millions, Most Anticipated Books of 2022 *Vigdis Hjorth is a major hero of mine. When my friend Sheila Heti told me to read A House in Norway, my life was changed. I've since recommended her work to so many people, who love it just as passionately. Hjorth has tapped into the novel in a way I have not seen or experienced since Woolf, Kafka, and Bernhard. -- Makenna Goodman, author of The ShameA master of familial estrangement and obsession, Hjorth tells the story of Johanna, an artist living abroad who returns to Oslo for a retrospective of her work. After initial attempts to get in touch with her estranged mother fail, she begins stalking her, hiding out in her building and rummaging through her trash. Hjorth's piercing writing captures the torment and mania that roils under the surface of most all of us. -- Lynn Steger Strong * Los Angeles Times *Beautiful in its ability to match effect with intention and in its descriptive powers. -- Declan O'Driscoll * Irish Times *Is Mother Dead overflows with contrasts in both its structure and its language. Some sections are stark and only a line or two long; other sentences are long and winding, helping to demonstrate the narrator's conflicted perspectives on art, family, and her own fraught relationship with her relatives. [An] immersive trip into the protagonist's mind - and the difficult decisions she has to reckon with. * Words Without Borders *Hjorth captures the minds inner dialogue...with almost nauseating precision. -- Emily Bootle * New Statesman *The realities of growing up with a mother who consumed you, who poured her insecurities into her young daughter, is an experience I have never before seen so ruthlessly examined. -- Billie Walker * Polyester Zine *Writing with a rush of anxious interiority beautifully reproduced by Barslund's translation, Hjorth spins out Joanna's hopes, fears, and half-suppressed memories in obsessive and propulsive run-on sentences, full of self-reflexive questions and crushing doubt...Is Mother Dead both pulls readers into Joanna's adventure and calls on them to become more alive to their own task, their arms stretching upward for the next rung. * Asymptote Journal *[A] harrowing and propulsive novel about the strained tether between daughters and mothers...lucidly translated by Charlotte Barslund. Hjorth deftly conveys the psychological warfare of familial conflict in circuitous, searching sentences. Fragments replicate the stab of betrayal, run-ons rummage for truth amid lies. -- Naomi Huffman * The New York Times Book Review *A thorough and anxious exploration of motherhood and childhood. -- Patrick Graney * Literary Review *Hjorth has masterfully written a family drama where no reunion takes place and a thriller where no blood is shed. -- Grace Kennedy * Ploughshares *[Is Mother Dead] feels liberating. In the struggle to break free...from our abusers and our own pain, there can be, in a hand as deft as Hjorth's, an energy both creative and destructive. -- Jessa Crispin * The Telegraph *A troubling and stunningly accomplished excavation into the past. -- Catherine Taylor * Financial Times *Hjorth traverses Johanna's emotional exile, the ruthless censorship within her family's stories, and the language of art, in which the narrator takes solace. * Astra Magazine *Bizarre yet totally mesmerising. -- Ellen Peirson-Hagger * i Newspaper *Both mother and daughter are paralysed - despite their attempts to slip the bonds of their relationship, neither can escape...This kind of 'merciless intimacy' is Hjorth's natural terrain. -- Eloise Hendy * Frieze *Is Mother Dead confirms Hjorth's place as an unparalleled chronicler of the fault lines in intimate relationships. -- Leslie Camhi * 4 Columns *Covering raw and prescient themes, Is Mother Dead is a rich but unsettling read. -- Kathryn Cutler-MacKenzie * Lucy Writers Platform *Brilliantly claustrophobic, this novel is a testament to the fact that, when the present becomes the past, we are only left with our own version of what happened. -- Holly Connolly * AnOther *The Norwegian novelist Hjorth is something of a specialist in mordant, exacting depictions of familial estrangement; her latest novel, translated by Charlotte Barslund, recounts the increasingly obsessive efforts by a middle-aged painter to reunite with her mother, whom she has not spoken to for decades. * The New York Times *Boldly refusing to settle for a narrative of forgiveness, Is Mother Dead is an increasingly shocking, unsettling novel. -- Lucy Scholes * Prospect *Rich and insular. -- Samir Chadha * White Review, Best Books 2022 *An absorbing study of inner turmoil ... gripping. -- Susie Mesure * Guardian *Hjorth is an intoxicating writer who manages to somehow infuse her fictional wanderings with a strong underpinning of personal truths. We feel her presence always lurking beneath Johanna. And we understand how much still remains unsaid. -- Elaine Margolin * World Literature Today *A profound, uncomfortable and ultimately beautiful exploration of the first human relationship. -- Emily Barton * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisSex and art, we're told, are sacred, two spheres that ought to be kept separate from the ravages of the marketplace. Yet both prop up two incredibly lucrative industries, built on the commodification of creativity and desire, authenticity and intimacy. Our reaction to this should not be moral or political outrage, nor legal regulation or denial, but rather-as Sophia Giovannitti argues here-acceptance, through which we can find a more autonomous way to live.In this searching and provocative work, drawing on cultural and political theory, the contemporary art world, and the author's own experience as a sex worker and artist trying to make a living, Giovannitti argues that if we delve into our anxieties around art and sex, we can instead find new ways to live and spaces, however small, of freedom. When there is nothing left to protect, she argues, everything is possible.Trade ReviewHighly original and unnervingly smart, Working Girl strips bare the worlds of art work and sex work, revealing unlikely parallels. In Giovannitti's informed and elegant analysis, sex and art come soaked in capitalist relations, their potential for holiness no barrier to the all-encompassing reach of commodification. Working Girl is fascinating in its specificity - the product of Giovannitti's lived experience in a particular niche of both industries - and through this comes a treatise that is both hopeful and new. -- Frankie Miren, author of The ServiceI love this book. It's fresh, exacting, and spaciously precisely unfettered. A book with a clear purpose fulfilled. Read it. -- Sarah Michelson, artistAn art object that also verbs in the most pleasurable way possible. Filled with clarity and a generous spirit, Sophia Giovannitti's Working Girl is a singular sensation you immediately feel the power of while reading. And later, as you begin to release all your outdated beliefs, you then realize Working Girl completely turned out in the best way possible: you too can be the art object that verbs -- Tourmaline, artistBetween the sex worker and art worker is a tension that defines the contemporary commodification of bodies, genders, time and desires. Working Girl documents Giovannitti's critical and creative interventions into this fraught and fascinating zone. She invites us to be more than voyeurs, and to think with her what is at stake in the art of sex and the sex of art -- McKenzie Wark, author of Capital is DeadIn Working Girl Sophia Giovannitti considers the material and metaphorical overlap between the sexual and artistic marketplaces -- Josephine Houman * Public Seminar *Giovannitti writes with candor and complexity about a life at the center of two of her greatest cultural preoccupations: sex and capitalism. -- Maggie Lange * Bustle, Most Anticipated Books Of Spring & Summer 2023 *Giovannitti mines both her personal experiences as an artist and a sex worker as well as larger political ones to traces the ways the worlds of art and sex work have in common. In doing so, she finds a way to commit to art, sex, and work on her own terms - finding freedom within the larger forces at work. -- Most Anticipated Books of May 2023 * Nylon *Giovannitti dances between memoir, art criticism, and political theory to unknot a provocative tension: how our supposedly 'sacred' fields of erotic and aesthetic experience are born out of systems of commodification. -- Jamie Hood * Vulture *[An] incisive debut memoir...Giovannitti's explorations of controversial topics are sharp and stirring, and her provocative observations will prompt debate. This deserves to be grappled with. * Publishers Weekly *In five chapters that move easily between cultural criticism, art theory, and sharply observed personal experience, Giovannitti raises fresh inquiries around fantasies of autonomy and authenticity in worlds heavily mediated by capital. * LIBER *Threading together memoir and criticism, her volume charts a journey through contemporary art addressing prostitution and pornography, the blind spots of movements like MeToo, the politicized actions of sex workers, and finding a way to live beyond labor. -- Wendy Vogel * e-flux *Working Girl suggests the appeal or even revolutionary potential of relating in such an upfront, contractual manner.a cleansing element to addressing things in such blatant terms, equity in considering one's time worth good money. -- Kate Wolf * Momus *Brilliant ... [Giovannitti's] gripping subject matter offers an accessible yet imaginative route into those intersections of sex work and the art market, from the perspective of a person with has lived experience of both. -- Rachel Ashenden * The List *Art and sex have always been intertwined, but Giovannitti thinks we're getting it all wrong. Drawing on theorists and experience, both as an artist and sex worker, she avoids easy reactions like outrage, instead rethinking how everyone can benefit from a sexy inquiry into the nature of art -- Adriana E. Ramírez, The best new books for summer 2023 * The Boston Globe *Incorporating eclectic references, from the French theory collective Tiqqun to the transgender artist Tourmaline, Working Girl is a pointillistic contemplation of labor and the varied ways we choose to contextualize and deny it. It's also a declaration of Giovannitti's confidence 'to discern for myself what is meaningful and what is bullshit' in a capitalistic landscape that shapes the most intimate parts of our lives. -- Rose Courteau * Cultured *A personal, provocative and, above all, sharply intelligent exploration of the contemporary world, and how to survive and even thrive within it. -- Eloise Hendy * Dazed *As Giovannitti expounds on the negotiations and violations that she sees in both industries, as well as glimmering moments of community, beauty, and anarchy, she draws on her own experience and carefully crafted critical lens, rather than accepting prevailing frameworks and prefabricated imaginaries. -- Cassie Packard * Brooklyn Rail *Giovannitti brings a fresh criticality ... when considering how expectations of intimacy and creativity intersect with workers' rights and autonomy within late-stage capitalist anxiety. -- Esmé Hogeveen * Frieze *Sophia's deft, precise, and intriguing in describing the everyday details of her world-and also floating thousands of feet above and seeing the whole structure move. It's one of the best things I've read recently about labor, commodification of intimacy, manufacture of fantasy, precious time on earth, the list goes on. * Purse Book *Magnetic and erudite...[Giovannitti's] intelligence is a kind of beautiful obliteration; her disdain for work and capitalism shimmers, while also proffering the profound devotion she has for art. -- Ayden LeRoux * The Los Angeles Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisNils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, uncovers a systematic campaign to persecute Assange. He reveals that Assange has faced grave and systematic due process violations, judicial bias, collusion and manipulated evidence. He has been the victim of constant surveillance, defamation and threats. Melzer also gathered together consolidated medical evidence that proves that the prison has suffered prolonged psychological torture. Melzer's compelling investigation puts the UK and US state into the dock, showing how, through secrecy, impunity and, crucially, public indifference, unchecked power reveals a deeply undemocratic system. Furthermore, the Assange case sets a dangerous precedent: once telling the truth becomes a crime, censorship and tyranny will inevitably follow.Trade ReviewThis is a landmark book, the first by a senior international official to call out the criminality of Western governments, and their craven media echoes, in the persecution of Julian Assange. Mark the word, persecution, says Nils Melzer, as well as "our" responsibility for the ravages inflicted on an heroic man for telling forbidden truths and on democracy itself. -- John PilgerMelzer, a brave and honest man, tells the whole truth about the brutality and illegality of what is being done to Julian Assange. Read this book. -- Brian EnoThis is a harrowing account of a corruption of justice that crosses not only borders, but the United Nations itself. Melzer's work is an urgent corrective to a false history - and an act of public service. -- Edward SnowdenPolitically motivated and unjustified, the prosecution of Julian Assange by a mature democracy threatens and undermines press freedom, the rule of law, and the prohibition of torture. By painstakingly and rigorously documenting the facts, Nilz Melzer reveals the full disturbing account of how the human rights of Julian Assange have been violated over years. It's a story that must be told and from which we all must learn. -- Agnes Callamard, Secretary-General, Amnesty International, former UN Rapporteur on TortureA stunning account on how official secrecy, corruption and impunity suffocate the truth and poison the rule of law. The present-day prosecution of Julian Assange aims to complete what Richard Nixon tried and failed to do in the Pentagon Papers case fifty years ago: rescind the foundation of our republic, the First Amendment protection of freedom of the press. As Melzer argues compellingly, nothing less than our continued status as a democracy is at stake in the need to block Assange's extradition, drop the unconstitutional charges against him, or if necessary, win his acquittal. It is the legal scandal of the century. -- Daniel Ellsberg, whistleblower, the Pentagon PapersIt is as if all the Anglo-American frustrations over the disasters of Iraq, Trump and a teetering Washington political system have become concentrated in official hatred of one man: Julian Assange. This dissident faces a 175 year sentence but the soldiers who shot dead innocent Iraqi civilians- the war crime he exposed and is facing extradition for- are escaping even an investigation. The ferocious cruelty summoned for pursuit of Assange is anatomised here by Nils Melzer who implies a question that should chill us: Assange now, who next? -- Bob Carr, former Australian foreign minister and longest serving Premier of New South WalesA powerful investigation into the heart of darkness of our legal and political systems. Once you read this breath-taking book by Nils Melzer, you will know why Julian Assange is being tortured so terribly and why he should be celebrated as a true hero of the 21st century -- Srecko Horvat, author of Poetry From the FutureThe most compelling case yet made for Assange's defence and a swingeing indictment of politicians, security services and judicial authorities ... [Melzer] marshal[s] a wealth of detail and legal evidence to make his case. -- Mary Dejevsky * Independent *The most methodical and detailed recounting of the long persecution by the United States and the British government of Assange -- Chris Hedges * New Age *Enlightening ... The material Melzer has gathered over his two-year investigation is riveting, and his motivation is clear. -- Andrew Hankinson * Spectator *A remarkable book by a remarkable man ... The research, knowledge and considered thought Melzer has given to Assange's case is powerful and unanswerable. * Morning Star *Nils Melzer has given us an invaluable record of the whole judicial witch-hunt. His evolution from sceptic to truth-seeker is particularly admirable. -- Peter Whittaker * New Internationalist *

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Book SynopsisThey Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labour, how it is organised, and how it might change. Drawing on the thought of the feminist movement Wages for Housework, Gotby demonstrates that emotion is a key element in the reproduction of society and its norms. Addressing the problem of love's labour requires nothing less than a radical restructuring of society.Trade ReviewIntellectually nourished my thinking and language on gender. -- Raymond Antrobus, Best Books of 2023 * Granta *A fascinating and exhaustive explanation as to why emotions are a political issue. -- Brit Dawson * AnOther Magazine *They Call It Love shines a light on the invisible labour involved in love, examining who is responsible for performing it, how it can blossom, and why we do it. -- Adele Walton * Dazed *Gotby makes clear our emotional lives are inherently political. Her analysis of the politics of reproductive labour is a cogent criticism of the bourgeois capitalist logics of feeling, of the free labour of intimacy and of normative femininity. -- Adele Cassigneul * Mai *Gotby's narrative masterfully outlines how emotions, feelings and their manifestations tend to be portrayed, and understood, as a feminine domain of expertise ... Gotby brilliantly dismantles the silences and abuses surrounding this invisible work by naming it and showing its societal (and capital) worth -- Patrycja Sosnowska-Buxton * Sociological Review *They Call It Love is a very fine book - one that balances polemical force with careful and rigorous research. In advancing its account of emotional reproduction, it brings together existing bodies of work on unwaged social reproduction and remunerated emotional labour to great effect, shining a light upon a too often overlooked (and heavily gendered) form of work. It is sharp, thoughtful, and well-written, and represents a substantial scholarly achievement. Alva Gotby is a writer and thinker to watch out for. -- Helen Hester, author of Xenofeminism, co-author of After WorkThis thorough book sheds new light on the critics of the political economy on emotional life. It is a welcome addition to the studies on the social meaning of the immaterial production that takes place in the domestic sphere. The Call It Love is a fascinating insider's account of the hidden, economic dimension of our emotional lives whose subject matter will make for passionate arguments and conversations among feminists and scholars in general. -- Leopoldina Fortunati, author of The Arcane of ReproductionGotby's book importantly attempts to underscore and theorise the role of emotions within social reproduction theory. Her concept of 'emotional reproduction' is a reminder that fife-making work is not devoid of affect. -- Sara Farris, author of In the Name of Women's RightsThey Call It Love is a call to attention: Alva Gotby astutely maps the work of emotional support and care that is done day in and day out and across everyday life. Gotby not only insists that more value be attributed to emotional reproduction, but makes a sophisticated and compelling case for a radical repurposing of emotions, needs, and desires in the struggle for change - a struggle that is necessarily also a struggle for new ways of being together. -- Emma Dowling, author of The Care CrisisTable of ContentsIntroductionChapter 1: Emotional ReproductionChapter 2: The Political Economy of LoveChapter 3: Gendering WorkChapter 4: Feminist EmotionsChapter 5: A Different FeelingNotes

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Book SynopsisRed Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the concerns that animated their twentieth-century intellectual forebears. Okoth responds, challenging the claim that Marxism and Black radicalism are incompatible and showing that both are embraced in the anti-imperialist tradition he calls 'Red Africa'. The politics of Black revolutionary writers Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised - instead it was betrayed, violently sup- pressed, or erased. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which sustains the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to surrender. Red Africa is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition.Trade ReviewProvocative and polemical, Red Africa probes the limits of contemporary discourses of Black Studies and returns to the neglected histories of Marxism on the continent, finding resources for charting new emancipatory futures. -- Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-DeterminationA fiercely argued case for looking to the anticolonialism and Marxism of Red Africa in our current engagements with decolonisation. Okoth's critical assessment of certain variants of 'decolonial studies' and 'Afro-Pessimism' is welcome. -- Priyamvada Gopal, author of Insurgent EmpireThis is an important defence of the emancipatory politics of Eduardo Mondlane, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney from the reactionary perspectives of Afro-pessimism and African nationalism, raising the question of whether things might indeed have turned out differently had radical women such as Andrée Blouin been more intimately connected with the struggle for self-determination. -- Firoze Manji, co-editor, Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar CabralIn this rigorous debut, political theorist Okoth revisits the philosophies of mid-20th-century African revolutionaries....Activists and readers interested in leftist political history will be enthralled. * Publishers Weekly *Table of Contents1 Decolonisation and the Decline of the 'Bandung Spirit'2 From Black Studies to Afro-pessimism: The Making of an Anti-politics3 Racial Capitalism and the Afterlives of Slavery4 Négritude and the (Mal)practice of Diaspora5 Whose Fanon? On Blackness and National Liberation6 Neo-colonialism, or, The Emptiness of Bearing One's Flag7 Remnants of Red Africa

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Book SynopsisWhat if we could do better than the family?We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family.Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition.Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.Trade ReviewSharp, engaging, and bursting with intellectual energy, Abolish the Family is a triumph. Whether you come to this book as a critic of The Family or as its most ardent supporter, you're sure to find something within its pages to move, challenge, or provoke you. It's a joy to read, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. -- Helen HesterI am consistently dazzled by Sophie Lewis's work, which is both intellectually capacious and heart-expanding. Abolish the Family is a liberatory demand and a world-making project proposed here with revolutionary love and inimitable style. Without fail, Lewis clarifies, disrupts and inspires. -- Natasha Lennard, author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist LifeThe idea of family abolition tends to provoke skeptical reactions: Can't families be a source of solidarity? Without families, who would we count on when things get tough? Shouldn't we protect vulnerable families, ostracized families, separated families? Sophie Lewis faces up to the hard questions without flinching, while ultimately steering us towards different ones: How else could we live, and who else could we be? Abolish the Family is a rigorously utopian, radically compassionate, unapologetically revolutionary manifesto, by equal parts thrilling and sobering. We all deserve better than the family, Lewis argues, and it's up to all of us to build new forms of solidarity and care that reach beyond biology or even kin, even if we don't know quite what they'll look like. Abolish the Family will make you want to find out. -- Alyssa BattistoniSophie Lewis once again shines forth as one of the boldest thinkers of our current moment with this highly anticipated sequel to her groundbreaking Full Surrogacy Now. How might we understand caring, sharing, and loving outside the concept of kinship? In this energizing little book - part history and critical analysis, part manifesto - Lewis helps us understand family abolition as world-making rather than as a subtraction of infrastructure, and she does so with remarkable clarity, precision, and wit. -- Sianne Ngai, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist FormWhat would it be like to imagine a communism not just of wealth but also of care, love and belonging? Where the full range of human needs are met without depending on the fragile bubble of the nuclear family? That institution we are all supposed to believe will be there for us - even though so many books and films detail all the ways in which it fails. This is the difficult yet important terrain where Sophie Lewis ventures. Abolish the Family is a short, sharp shock to our assumptions about the good life and how to achieve it. -- McKenzie WarkIn her writing, Lewis shows us the kind of feminist care that is within our reach and the intellectual work we must do to actualise it. Generous, charged and always underpinned by a comradely orientation to its reader, Abolish the Family traverses historical and contemporary arguments for unmaking the bourgeois family and methodically interrogates the idea that it is an unshakeable, ubiquitous institution that must be protected at all costs. Lewis draws on a number of radical political genealogies to say "no" - the nuclear family is a deficient provider of care and resource, a conceptual footstool for the racist nation-state and its many border regimes, a hotbed of gendered exploitation and violence...there are other possibilities! Let's embrace them together! -- Lola OlufemiSophie 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 WhoreSophie 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 JunkieA bracing invitation to think beyond an institution that immiserates so many but that, for just as many, remains a fixed point of social possibility. Sophie Lewis is, as always, sharp, bold, compassionate and fearless. -- Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to SexSophie Lewis is at the forefront of a vital queer, trans, feminist communist movement to create an expansive field of revolutionary theory and strategy for today. Abolish the Family is an important contribution to Lewis's already discourse-shaping body of work, analyzing and seeking ways to move beyond the contradictory and complex function of families under conditions of extreme capital accumulation and capitalist crisis. A call for liberation from the privatization of domestic labor and the cruel scarcities of care under capitalism, Abolish the Family exhorts us toward something so much better than what we've got. -- Jordy Rosenbery, author of Confessions of the FoxA lively, sharp and relatively short primer on family abolition ... Lewis does not pretend to have all the answers, but makes a solid case for joining her in finding them. -- Amy Hall * New Internationalist *Sophie Lewis is our most eloquent, furious and funny critic of how the family is a terrible way to satisfy all of our desires for love, care, nourishment. -- Erin Maglaque * New Statesman *Thrilling. -- Emily Kenway * Refinery29 *A timely provocation. -- Tom Whyman * ArtReview *The manifesto I needed. -- Zakia Uddin * White Review, Best Books 2022 *Anchored in a strikingly hopeful feminist Marxism, Lewis leads the reader through a systematic, didactic introduction to the politics and possibilities of cutting ourselves loose from the constraints and impositions of the traditional patriarchal, capitalist family. -- Hanne Blank * LIBER *Lewis builds a harsh yet well-grounded portrait of familial dysfunction. This provocation stings * Publishers Weekly *

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Book SynopsisA new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki's stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other. These eleven stories offer readers the opportunity to delve deeper in this singular writer's work.Trade ReviewFascinatingly skewy -- Cal Revely-Calder, best books of 2023 * Daily Telegraph *This collection showcases [Suzuki's] unique sensibility, which combined a punk aesthetic with a taste for the absurd. Her work-populated by misfits, loners, and femmes fatales alongside extraterrestrial boyfriends, intergalactic animal traffickers, and murderous teen-agers with E.S.P.-wryly blurs the boundary between earthly delinquency and otherworldly phenomena. * The New Yorker *The work and messages of Ursula K. Le Guin, the author's longer-lived contemporary, come to mind. Both Suzuki and Le Guin knew that gender roles are a matter of costume or control, affect or affliction. The terms we use to define humanity are often inhuman -- Catherine Lacey * New York Times *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. * Times Literary Supplement *Not only still relevant but remarkably fresh ... All these stories are brilliant * Guardian *With this impressive collection, translators Bett, David Boyd, Helen O'Horan, and Daniel Joseph bring 11 strange, transfixing, and compassionate short stories from Suzuki to English-speaking audiences. SFF fans are sure to be pleased with these slangy, accessible new translations of a master. * Publishers Weekly *Her punky irreverence remains radiant' * Frieze *These strangely prescient stories are perfect for fans of Haruki Murakami, George Saunders, and Philip K. Dick * Publishers Weekly *Extraordinary. To use one of her own coolly illuminating formulations, Suzuki is steward of a new anxiety -- China Miéville[A] riveting book of short stories by cult favorite Japanese sci-fi author Izumi Suzuki. -- Sophia June, Most Anticipated Books of 2023 * Nylon *A little speculative, a little punk, a little chaotic-all singular in their voice and vision. In this new collection, there will be cheating husbands, score settling, alternate timelines, bored teens, and space pirates...What a thrill it is to see that more of her stories are coming down the pipes. -- Most Anticipated Books of 2023 * Lit Hub *Even decades after her death, Suzuki's sci-fi fantasy worlds feel fresh. The 11 stories in this deeply unsettling and imaginative collection are sure to enthrall, disturb and entertain...A brilliant follow up. -- 15 Upcoming Releases We Can't Wait to Read in 2023 * Tokyo Weekender, *Sure to be wonderfully off-kilter and imaginative. -- Iain Maloney * Japan Times *This volume is at the top of my TBR list. -- Karla J. Strand * Ms. Magazine *This collection reaches out from the past not as a warning so much as the musings of a writer grasping for hope in a dark world. Music is woven through the book, as if Suzuki had created an accompanying playlist and is urging readers to listen along...These 11 stories surprise with wry humor and stun with the loneliness of living. * Kirkus Reviews *[Suzuki] has produced stories that delight in weaving the uncanny into everyday experiences. The stories are edgy and comic, taking a sharp, sardonic scalpel to male privilege in Japanese society ... a singular voice in Japanese literature -- Michael Cronin * Irish Times *Through stories of murderous aliens, rock-and-roll has-beens and failed witches, Suzuki knows very well that life on Earth sucks, but that doesn't stop her from constantly imagining and reimagining radical alterities. -- Marv Recinto * ArtReview Asia *Suzuki creates worlds subtly unstuck from specific times and locations ... The anxiety at the heart of her writing resonates far beyond its temporal walls. Suzuki's science fiction of the 1980s has an eerie accordance with the world as we know it today. -- Genie Harrison * Tokyo Weekender *Suzuki's work is richly steeped in science fiction, fantasy, and '70s counterculture...throughout [she] empathizes with those who feel alien, other, or ostracized-especially women and girls battling patriarchy and misogyny. -- Laura Zornosa * TIME *The continuing translation of Suzuki's work is extremely exciting, as it helps to provide a more thorough picture of a dynamic and experimental artist whose work parallels some of the most important work of the 1970s new wave, cyberpunk, and beyond. -- Nell Keep * Booklist, Starred Review *Sardonic, dystopian commentaries on the struggle to stay sane in a world that often fails to offer encouragement to do so. -- Sean Sheehan * The Prisma *This new collection brings the same gritty, surreal vibes we love. * Book Culture *These stories are deeply, persistently, wonderfully odd, full of humor, irony, heartache, and aliens. -- Patrick Rapa * The Philadelphia Inquirer *Sharp and achingly present, these eleven short stories ... present emotional and often unsettling glimpses into worlds both familiar and fantastical ... Suzuki's voice is boldly abrasive. -- Bella Creel * Asymptote Journal *Reader, beware: Suzuki's stories are soft, but they are not light. -- Nick Mamatas * The Fabulist *Blurring together magic, fantasy, and sci-fi, [Suzuki's] stories bend reality to explore themes of marriage, friendship, love, sexuality, and femininity. * The Millions *Wild and restless ... I can't think of anyone I'd rather read this spring than this countercultural icon of the Japanese literary underground. -- Angel Lambo * Frieze *A forerunner of cyberpunk ... With dark humour and cool affect, [Suzuki] presented the isolation of Japanese domestic life. -- Stephanie LaCava * Telegraph *An enjoyably acidic and darkly funny set of stories in which the novelty is not always so much in the ideas as in the consistently engaging execution. Suzuki's distinctly misanthropic voice enlivens these narratives of women whose mundane lives are altered - sometimes humorously, sometimes catastrophically - by science-fictional or supernatural occurrences. -- Dexter Palmer * The Washington Post *Translated into English decades after her death, the sci-fi stories of Izumi Suzuki gently twist modern Japan into tales of unspeakable loneliness. -- Amanda DeMarco * Spike Art Magazine *Impressively uncanny stuff. -- Tobias Carroll * Words Without Borders *[Hit Parade of Tears] challenges the concepts of fantasy and science fiction, twisting these genres into new and strange things. These tales are bleak, funny, feminist, angry, and often deeply allegorical and political. * Books & Bao *Hit Parade of Tears perfectly demonstrates Suzuki's sharp social satire, her singular voice, and her unique aesthetics ... mesmerising feminist explorations of gender, alienation and treacherous states of reality that could not have been written by anyone else -- Jonathan Thornton * Fantasy Hive *Suzuki's acidic voice permeates these 11 hazy, imaginative stories following women whose lives are altered by time travel, aliens, magic and more. * The New York Times Book Review *A collection of stories that sway between science fiction, fantasy and the intrigue of modern relationships. Expect a wild ride through affairs, space pirates and discoveries of new dimensions. -- Ellen Scott * Stylist *It's rare for a short story collection to captivate and glue your eyes to the page like a thriller. But Hit Parade of Tears ... does just that, lining up one twisted mindbender after another ... her plots beguile as they come apart and pull together like pieces of a deliberately imperfect puzzle. -- Eric Margolis * Japan Times *This newly translated collection of Izumi Suzuki's short stories, first published more than forty years ago, is jaunty, odd, violent, femme-centric, funny-but what strikes me most is its freshness." -- Young Kim * LIBER *[Hit Parade of Tears] has the could-it-be-prescience that renders good science fiction both captivating and uncanny. At the same time, it often feels so rooted in the '60s and '70s that it could have emerged from a time capsule..its prose is strong and clear, a message from the past that has, thanks to her stellar team of translators, arrived here asking to be heard. -- Lily Meyer * NPR *Two years ago, Izumi Suzuki's work was published in English for the first time in the collection Terminal Boredom. This second collection gives English language readers even more of her inventive and atmospheric stories that explore life on the outskirts using science fiction and fantasy elements. -- Patricia Thang * Book Riot *Suzuki's narratives might contain B-movie silliness. They also have the hypnotic power of a bender. Just look at the time - you've suddenly finished them all. -- Jen Vafidis * The New York Times Book Review *A unique voice in science fiction ... Suzuki's stories represent female rage at a society which refused to include her ... darkly witty -- Terri-Jane Dow * Mslexia *Packed with casual, occasional sadism ... Each story is air-locked away from the noisy links between organism and ecosystem, consumer supply chain and perpetual war ... Dreams of estrangement play out across a total lack of world. -- Alex Quicho * The White Review *[Suzuki's] characters' clever means of dealing with society give life to each story even half a century after their original publication. It is not so much the specifics of the worlds Suzuki creates as the way her characters find relief within them that makes Hit Parade of Tears translate well for a contemporary audience. -- Jenny Wu * The Harvard Review *[Hit Parade of Tears] speaks to our anxieties and fears about a world, a future, slowly slipping from our grasp -- Ian Mond * Locus Magazine *This posthumous collection of stories is absurd, with little to do with the laws of physics: Suzuki takes common sci-fi and fantasy tropes - themselves a skewer on reality - and twists them further so that what you're left with is time- and space-bending plotlines and very strange characters. * Harper's Bazaar *Both humorous and devastating ... [Suzuki's] signature sci-fi style is as moving as it is unpredictable and a must-read by anyone interested in the emotional politics of our potential future(s). -- Jennifer Brough * Lucy Writers Platform *Suzuki is a master at mixing high sci-fi concepts with melodrama. -- Ben Dreith * Maudlin House *Ominous and funny ... Suzuki's "sci-fi surreal" explores reality in the same way that surrealism did and still does in its contemporary manifestations, and critiques society as all good sci-fi does. -- Vik Shirley * Firmament Magazine *Izumi takes her insincerity to depths unimaginable, from where it floats up as alien, tampered, and wholly disorienting. -- Shahriar Shaams * The Daily Star (Bangladesh) *

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Book SynopsisBanks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don't just own financial assets.The roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and even the homes in which many of us live-all now swell asset managers' bulging investment portfolios.As the owners of more and more of the basic building blocks of everyday life, asset managers shape the lives of each and every one of us in profound and disturbing ways. In this eye-opening follow-up to Rentier Capitalism, Brett Christophers peels back the veil on ""asset manager society.""Asset managers, he shows, are unlike traditional owners of housing and other essential infrastructure. Buying and selling these life-supporting assets at a dizzying pace, the crux of their business model is not long-term investment and careful custodianship but making quick profits for themselves and the investors that back them.In asset manager society, the natural and built environments that sustain us become one more vehicle for siphoning money from the many to the few.Trade ReviewAt its best when [Christophers'] passion comes through, stripping away the spin of an industry that likes to portray itself as benefiting teachers, nurses and firefighters but which disproportionately enriches itself. -- Philip Augar * Financial Times *An illuminating interrogation of asset-manager society and its pathologies. -- John Cassidy, author of How Markets Fail: The Rise and Fall of Free Market EconomicsIf big banks were the villains of the 2008 financial crisis, big asset managers may well be at the heart of the next global economic trauma. In this must read book, Brett Christophers outlines how the world's top fund managers and private equity titans have taken over not only our portfolios, but the homes in which we live, the hospitals we go to when we are sick, the food we eat and the water we drink. Our very lives are now financialized - with disturbing consequences that have yet to be understood, or grappled with -- Rana Foroohar, Global Business Columnist and Associate Editor, Financial TimesThere are few financial topics as deserving of more thorough examination than asset management and its myriad modern manifestations. What insiders often blandly call "non-bank financial institutions" are in reality the new powerhouses of modern capitalism. Brett Christophers ably shows that their dominion has increasingly extended from financial assets to "real" assets - the roads we drive, the water we drink, the homes where we live, and sometimes even the hospitals where we die. As Christophers points out, the broader societal consequences are significant. -- Robin Wigglesworth, Editor, FT Alphaville, and author of Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance ForeverAn excellent book that sheds light on the grim reality of modern asset management unfolding at the heart of our society: the homes where we live and the energy infrastructures we depend on. The study of the asset-manager 'society' provides a sobering mapping of the relentless control exerted by asset managers - their portfolios establishing commercialised dependencies across our economy. Christophers successfully uncovers how such investment operations-often under a veil of non-transparent ownership-- put families and their livelihoods at the mercy of rent-seeking corporations. His book is a captivating take on a consequential multitrillion-dollar industry for everyone seeking to understand the configurations of an increasingly unequal and non-transparent economic system. -- Mariana Mazzucato, Professor at University College London and author of The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economyWhen we shop, park, care for our loved ones, pay rent or our utilities bills, you and I are often little more than tiny trickles of income for companies whose names are not on our bills and that we may not even know. How did this happen and what does it say about where power lies? As ever, Brett Christophers makes a lucid, knowledgeable and impressively unimpressable guide to terrain usually fenced off from the public. -- Aditya Chakrabortty, Senior economics commentator, The GuardianChristophers lays out an essential guide to the many ways a poorly understood force in the global economy - asset management - structures our physical world, from housing to food to clean energy. As useful for curious academics as for organizers on the ground, Our Lives in Their Portfolios is a forensic account of an industry so ubiquitous as to go unnoticed. Christophers' engaging, easy to grasp account shines much-needed light on an industry that thrives in darkness, busting open the dangerous myths it tells about itself. -- Kate Aronoff, co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New DealIf you are interested in politics, but don't know much about asset managers like Brookfield and Blackstone, you need to read this book. What Brett Christophers reveals in Our Lives in Their Portfolios is the secret fight over who controls our social infrastructure, and whether it will be a small clique of financiers who live in gilded cities, or whether it will be the public. From the rent we pay on our housing to energy grids, sewer systems, and telecom networks, these firms are as important as they are opaque. Christophers shines a light into this secretive arena, and exposes how power works and what the real stakes of our political debates over finance really are. -- Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and DemocracyChristophers takes up the global money trail, highlighting how investors have been quietly buying up critical infrastructure in Europe and beyond. -- Joe Humphreys * Irish Times *An incisive overview of the outsized returns made on physical assets by a small class of global elites, and the price the rest of society may ultimately pay. * Spear's *Worth persevering for the good stuff. Christophers chronicles how Britain has become the focus for Macquarie and the like. -- John Arlidge * The Sunday Times *An impressive feat...Christophers does what few other economists are able to convincingly undertake in less than three hundred pages. He has written a book on the creeping financialization of our daily lives that an informed, generalist audience can understand, and told it through engaging and relatable case studies. -- Adam Almeida * Jacobin *Incisively dissects - and criticises - the landscape of this novel stage of capitalism. -- Chris Dorrell * City A.M. *[One] of the best analysts of contemporary global capitalism. -- Kojo Koram * Times Literary Supplement *Christophers' neat dissection of the industry ... reveals how, while purporting to work for our retirements, it disproportionately enriches itself. -- Moira O’Neill, Best summer books of 2023 * Financial Times *Necessary reading for anyone wanting to stay abreast of our dysfunctional economic times. -- Will Davies * New Statesman *

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Book SynopsisPaul Feyerabend's globally acclaimed work, which sparked and continues to stimulate fierce debate, examines the deficiencies of many widespread ideas about scientific progress and the nature of knowledge. Feyerabend argues that scientific advances can only be understood in a historical context. He looks at the way the philosophy of science has consistently overemphasized practice over method, and considers the possibility that anarchism could replace rationalism in the theory of knowledge.This updated edition of the classic text includes a new introduction by Ian Hacking, one of the most important contemporary philosophers of science. Hacking reflects on both Feyerabend's life and personality as well as the broader significance of the book for current discussions.Trade ReviewA devastating attack on the claims of philosophy to legislate for scientific practice. * New Society *A brilliant polemic. * New Scientist *Since it was first published in 1975, Against Method has followed Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions into becoming a classic text in the debate about scientific methodology and scientific reasoning. * The Philosopher *A powerful critique. * London Review of Books *Against Method is more than a book: it is an event. * Archives de Philosophie *

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Book SynopsisMarc Perelman pulls no punches in this succinct and searing broadside, assailing the 'recent form of barbarism' that is the global sporting event. Forget the Olympics and consider, under Perelman's guidance, the ledger of inequities maintained by such supposedly harmless games.They have provided a smokescreen for the forcible removal of 'undesirables'; aided governments in the pursuit of racist agendas; affirmed the hypocrisy of drug-testing in an industry where doping is more an imperative than an aberration; and developed the pornographic hybrid that Perelman dubs 'sporn', a further twist in our corrupt obsession with the body.Drawing examples from the modern history of the international sporting event, Perelman argues that today's colosseums, upheld as examples of 'health', have become the steamroller for a decadent age fixated on competition, fame and elitism.Trade ReviewMarc Perelman has written a magnificent manifesto for all of us dedicated anti-Olympiads, revealing in compelling detail how sport, which has long been the opium of the people, is now the political and financial dirty business of the rulers as well. -- Terry EagletonExcited about the Olympics? If not, this bolus of weaponised French spleen will be the perfect literary antidote. -- Steven Poole * Guardian *Bracingly bilious counterblast against the new 'planetary religion.' * Independent *The work of stirring polemic that all of us who were picked last for teams at school have been waiting for. -- Nick Lezard * Guardian *A provocatively timed polemic that situates today's mass sporting spectacle at the very heart of globalised capitalism. -- Rod Stanley * Dazed and Confused *Perelman's claim that sport "becomes the sole project of a society without projects" rings uncomfortably true as austerity-hit Britain prepares to host a lavish Olympics. * Financial Times *French journalist Marc Perelaman argues ... ruthless[ly] ... agaist an emerging kind of barbarism. * Book News *

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Book SynopsisThe first volume of The Idea of Communism followed the 2009 London conference called in response to Alain Badiou's 'communist hypothesis', where an all-star cast of radical intellectuals put the idea of communism back on the map.This volume brings together papers from the subsequent 2011 New York conference organized by Verso and continues this critical discussion, highlighting the philosophical and political importance of the communist idea, in a world of financial and social turmoil.Contributors include Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Susan Buck-Morss, Jodi Dean, Adrian Johnston, François Nicolas, Frank Ruda, Emmanuel Terray and Slavoj Zizek.Trade ReviewDo not be afraid, join us, come back! You've had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it-time to get serious once again! -- Slavoj Zizek

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Book SynopsisHistorian and political thinker Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that theories of "postmodern" fragmentation, "difference", and contingency can barely accommodate the idea of capitalism, let alone subject it to critique. In this book she sets out to renew the critical programme of historical materialism by redefining its basic concepts and its theory of history in original and imaginative ways, using them to identify the specificity of capitalism as a system of social relations and political power. She goes on to explore the concept of democracy in both the ancient and modern world, examining its relation to capitalism, and raising questions about how democracy might go beyond the limits imposed on it.Trade ReviewReading a Wood essay is a shock to the system, demanding the reader take a position, often leaving you invigorated and slightly bruised in the process. -- Michael Watson * Red Pepper *

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2001 Carey McWilliams AwardA CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC, Magical Urbanism focuses on how Latinos are attempting to translate their urban demographic ascendancy into effective social power. Mike Davis chronicles the Dickensian underworld of day labor in New York, tracks the development of new ecologies and levels of development along the border, and examines the shifting realities of life and work for Latinos in US cities. The cosmopolitan result of the Latinization of America’s cities is a rich, constantly evolving culture that has the potential, argues Davis, to become a radical new American counterculture.

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Book SynopsisThe ways we encounter contemporary art and performance is changing. Installations brim with archival documents. Dances stretch for weeks. Performances last a minute. Exhibitions are spread out over thirty venues. There are endless artworks about mid-century architecture and design. How are we expected to engage with today's diverse practise? Is the old model of close-looking still the ideal, or has it given way to browsing, skimming, and sampling?Across four essays, art historian and critic Claire Bishop identifies trends in contemporary practice - research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture - and their challenges to traditional modes of attention. Charting a critical path through the last three decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures of digital technology.

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Book SynopsisAutumn/Winter 2022 issue of Salvage, featuring Richard Seymour, Alva Gotby, Nisha Kapoor, and Eric BlancGive Dust a Tongue includes an essay on class dysphoria by Richard Seymour, and an essay by Jairus Banaji on Russian capitalism today, Nisha Kapoor on data in the landscapes of capital and the state, Alva Gotby on the labour of lesbian life, Tony Wood on the invasion of Ukraine one year on, James Meadway on the end of industrial capitalism, Gargi Bhattacharyya on imperial decay, and Jamie Allinson on fossil sovereignty.With fiction by Gracie Mae Bradley, poetry by Jackqueline Frost and photos by Richard Seymour.

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Book SynopsisSince 2016, the UK has been in a crisis of its own making: but this is not the fault of Brexit but of a larger problem of our politics. The status of political parties, the mainstream media, public experts and officials have all been disrupted. Along the way, there have been shocking and exhilarating events: the unforeseen 2017 election result, the horrific details of Grenfell Tower and the Windrush scandal, the sudden rise and fall of the Brexit Party.As the 'mainstream' of politics and media has come under attack, the basic norms of public life have been thrown into question.This Is Not Normal takes stock of a historical moment that no longer recognises itself. Davies tells a story of the apparently chaotic and irrational events, and extracts their underlying logic and long-term causes. What we are seeing is the effects of the 2008 financial crash, the failure of the British neoliberal project, the dying of Empire, and the impact of the changes that technology and communications have had on the idea of the public sphere as well as the power of information. This is an essential book for anyone who wants to make sense of this current moment. .Trade ReviewThis book presses pause on the dazzling contingent brightness of the present, and allows the reflections of the evening to gather and turn towards a new day. * Manchester Review of Books *Brilliant ... Davies will be one of the experts to turn to guide us through the coming years. * WIRED *As William Davies brilliantly articulates in his most recent book, This is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain, it's hard to convincingly advocate for normality, or indeed for norms in general, if you've spent years openly trashing the very notion. -- Dublin Review of BooksThis Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain seeks to pore over the deeper roots, expressions and manifestations of four interlocking crises in British politics, addressing some of the most pressing and perplexing questions facing the UK ... as Davies so skillfully shows, it would be foolish to make any firm predictions of what happens next. * LSE Review of Books *This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain seeks to pore over the deeper roots, expressions and manifestations of four interlocking crises in British politics ... as Davies so skillfully shows, it would be foolish to make any firm predictions of what happens next. * Brave New Europe *But as an example of what its author calls "real-time sociology," the book harbors more ambition and more value than just a chronicle. Building on theoretical insights developed in his earlier work, Davies undertakes an applied investigation into the intertwined fates of liberalism, democracy, and media in the Anglo-American present, an investigation anchored in the problem of trust. -- Adam Kelly * LA Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisSpring/Summer 2021 issue of Salvage, featuring Kevin Ochieng Okoth, Marianela D’Aprile, Richard Seymour and others.The Disorder of the Future includes an essay on the settler-colonial politics of an airport by Francesco Anselmetti, Kevin Ochieng Okoth on decolonisation and rethinking the cycle of national liberation, Marianela D’Aprile on protesting during a plague, Jonas Marvin and Gary Howe on Brexit, Richard Seymour on fascism, Sharri Plonski on confronting the infrastructural terrain of Gulf-Israel relations, Joseph Tomaras on refusing the tyranny of manhood, and Michael Roberts on modern monetary theory. The artist of this issue is Jesse Darling, and the volume concludes with a short story from Helen Mackreath.

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Book SynopsisWinter 2021 issue of Salvage, featuring China Miéville, Sarah Jaffe, Tad DeLay, and Jules Joanne GleesonAlready, Not Yet includes an essay on communism by China Miéville, Richard Seymour in praise of nature writing, Kevin Ochieng Okoth making sense of the German elections, Sarah Jaffe on how to grieve in an era of mass death and climate catastrophe, Barnaby Raine on Stalinism 2.0, Luísa Calvete Portela Barbosa on Lula, Bolsonaro and the future of Brazilian politics, and Jules Joanne Gleeson on two approaches to queer history.The artist of this issue is Patty Paine, and the volume concludes with a short story from Heba Hayek.

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Book SynopsisThe age of denial is over, we are told. Yet emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green- washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. This timely, interdisciplinary contribution to the environmental humanities draws on the latest climatology, the first shoots of an energy transition, critical theory, Earth’s paleoclimate history, and trends in border violence to answer the most pressing question of our age: Why do we continue to squander the short time we have left?The symptoms suggest society’s inability to adjust is profound. Near Portland, militias incapable of accepting that the world is warming respond to a wildfire by hunting for imaginary left-wing arsonists. Europe erects nets in the Aegean Sea to capture migrants fleeing drought and war. An airline claims to be carbon neutral thanks to bogus cheap offsets. Drone strikes hit people living along the aridity line. Yes, Exxon knew as early as the 1970s, but t

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Book SynopsisErnest Mandel’s book is a study of Eurocommunism unlike any other. Written in the polemical tradition of Trotsky, its sweep extends well beyond the immediate prospects of the Communist Parties of Western Europe. Mandel traces the long historical process which has transformed the once embattled detachments of the Third International into the constitutionalist formations of “historic compromise” and “union of the people” today. He then goes on to argue that the national roads to socialism of contemporary Eurocommunism are the “bitter fruits of socialism in one country” in the USSR.Mandel’s book contains trenchant and documented criticisms of the ideas of Santiago Carrillo in Spain, the economic policies of the PCI in Italy, and the PCF’s theories of the State in France. But it also sets these Western developments in the context of European politics as a whole—discussing the Russian response to Carrillo, the organizationa

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Book SynopsisCelebrity philanthropy comes in many guises, but no single figure better encapsulates its delusions, pretensions and wrongheadedness than U2's iconic frontman, Bono-a fact neither sunglasses nor leather pants can hide. More than a mere philanthropist-indeed, he lags behind many of his peers when it comes to parting with his own money-Bono is better described as an advocate, one who has become an unwitting symbol of a complacent wealthy Western elite.The Frontman reveals how Bono moved his investments to Amsterdam to evade Irish taxes; his paternalistic and often bullying advocacy of neoliberal solutions in Africa; his multinational business interests; and his hobnobbing with Paul Wolfowitz and shock-doctrine economist Jeffrey Sachs. Carefully dissecting the rhetoric and actions of Bono the political operator, The Frontman shows him to be an ambassador for imperial exploitation, a man who has turned his attention to a world of savage injustice, inequality and exploitation-and helped make it worse.Trade ReviewI genuinely see myself as a traveling salesman. I think that's what I do. I sell songs door-to-door on tour. I sell ideas like debt relief, and like all salesmen, I'm a bit of an opportunist and I see Africa as great opportunity. -- Bono

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Book SynopsisIn this fascinating work of cultural theory and philosophy, Robert Pfaller explores the hidden cost of our contemporary approach to pleasure, belief and illusion. Sports, design, eroticism, social intercourse and games-indeed, all those aspects of our culture commonly deemed "pleasurable"-seem to require beliefs that many regard as illusory. But in considering themselves above the self-deceptions of the crowd, those same sceptics are prone to dismissing a majority of the population as naive or misguided. In doing so, they create a false opposition between the 'simple' masses and their more enlightened rulers. And this dichotomy then functions as an ideological support for neoliberal government: citizens become irrational victims, to be ruled over by a protective security state. What initially appears to be a universal pleasure principle-the role of "anonymous illusions" in mass culture-in this way becomes a rationale for dismantling democracy.Trade ReviewBut let's go back to belief, to the cliché that today we have lost belief. This is nothing more than a pseudo-debate: today we believe more than ever-and this is the problem, as Robert Pfaller has shown. The concepts of the debate are therefore no longer the same. Unfortunately, however, the great majority of philosophers haven't stepped up to the challenges at this high level, and thus they burden us with false answers. -- Slavoj Zizek

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Book SynopsisThe new front in the War on Terror is the "homegrown enemy," domestic terrorists who have become the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures of policing and surveillance in the United States and across Europe. Domestic surveillance has mushroomed - at least 100,000 Muslims in America have been secretly under scrutiny. British police compiled a secret suspect list of more than 8,000 al-Qaeda "sympathizers," and in another operation included almost 300 children fifteen and under among the potential extremists investigated. MI5 doubled in size in just five years.Based on several years of research and reportage, in locations as disperate as Texas, New York and Yorkshire, and written in engrossing, precise prose, this is the first comprehensive critique of counterradicalization strategies. The new policy and policing campaigns have been backed by an industry of freshly minted experts and liberal commentators. The Muslims Are Coming! looks at the way these debates have been transformed by the embrace of a narrowly configured and ill-conceived antiextremism.Trade ReviewAn important and moving investigation of the costs of the 'war on terror' for those who have been its targets, including the thousands of innocent Muslims who have been infiltrated, entrapped, and surveilled in the search for the radicalized terrorist among us. Kundnani gives eloquent voice to the communities that have been regulated, watched, and silenced by the national security state. -- David Cole, author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on TerrorismA bold new look at the much discussed issue of surveillance, documenting how it impacts the communities most affected-American and British Muslims. With incisive reporting from across the US and the UK, combined with trenchant analysis, Arun Kundnani captures what it feels like to be a 'suspect population.' -- Deepa Kumar, author of Islamophobia and the Politics of EmpireArun Kundnani is one of Britain's best political writers, neither hectoring nor drily academic but compelling and sharply intelligent. The Muslims Are Coming should be widely read, particularly by liberals who consider their own positions unassailable. -- Robin Yassin-Kassab * Guardian *Kundnani's argument is compelling in its dissection of governments' disproportional responses. -- Tanjil Rashid * Financial Times *Kundnani's book is a fact-rich call for vigilance and clear thinking about the erosion of civil liberties and attitudes. * New Statesman *A gripping exposition of how the west has made a post-communist enemy and, in some ways, ignited Islamicist terrorism. -- Yasmin Alibhai-Brown * Independent *An incisive, scholarly, bold, and convincing critique of the never-ending 'War on Terror,' whose roots extend far beyond the tragedy of 9/11. An important work. -- Wajahat Ali, cohost of Al Jazeera America’s The Stream and author of The Domestic CrusadersArun Kundnani, a British-born scholar who is now an adjunct professor at New York University, is a different sort of leftist. He is not Muslim, either by background or conviction, but he maintains that 'Islamophobia' is a thinly disguised form of racial prejudice, and that on both sides of the Atlantic, the war on terror has been an excuse for governments to ratchet up surveillance and harassment of people who are 'guilty' of nothing worse than critical thought about their countries' domestic or foreign policies. * Economist *Excellent and timely . a compelling guide to the debate over the nature of British Islam. * Telegraph *A must-read guide to the second decade of war waged on the home front. -- John Feffer, author of Crusade 2.0: The West's Resurgent War on IslamThis timely and urgent analysis carefully examines the ideologies and law enforcement strategies that undergird the domestic War on Terror. What Kundnani finds is disturbing: sweeping, specious radicalization theory and racialized assumptions about the nature of Islam drive domestic counterterrorism practices. This has had devastating consequences for the rights and liberties of Muslims and the state of constitutional protections in the US and UK. -- Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa ParksIndispensable and powerful . Essential reading for government officials engaged in designing our counterterrorism policies, as well as readers trying to make sense of them. -- Faiza Patel, Co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program, Brennan Center, NYU School of LawMeasuring his ideas against global terror experts, Kundnani offers hard alternatives to international security agencies, policing trends, and options for reasonable dissent in his thoughtful, rational plea to curb the War on Terror. * Publishers Weekly *Kundnani frankly and refreshingly moves away from ideological symptoms and toward political causes in tackling extremism. * Kirkus Reviews *Aptly reveals the West's anti-Islam and anti-Muslim prejudice in the form of 'war on terror.' It unravels and critiques their reified anti-Muslim policies persuasively. It is a groundbreaking, balanced, simple to read, and timely contribution to the existing literature that vividly highlights the true face of the West's perception of Muslims-as an alien race. -- Muhammad Yassen Gada * Arab Studies Quarterly *Based on several years of research and reportage, The Muslims are Coming! is an incisive critique of the repressive and surveillance-heavy methods of combatting homegrown terrorism utilized in both the US and UK. * LitHub *

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Book SynopsisCrowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we need to rethink the collective subject of politics. When crowds appear in spaces unauthorized by capital and the state-such as in the Occupy movement in New York, London and across the world-they create a gap of possibility. But too many on the Left remain stuck in this beautiful moment of promise-they argue for more of the same, further fragmenting issues and identities, rehearsing the last thirty years of left-wing defeat. In Crowds and Party, Dean argues that previous discussions of the party have missed its affective dimensions, the way it operates as a knot of unconscious processes and binds people together. Dean shows how we can see the party as an organization that can reinvigorate political practice.Trade ReviewIn this enthralling and exhilarating book, Jodi Dean shows that, contrary to neo-anarchist cliche, the party form and class struggle are very far from being outmoded. The revival of the party has produced a surge of enthusiasm in contemporary left politics-an enthusiasm that Crowds and Party both explains and stokes up. -- Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist RealismJodi Dean's new book isn't just a timely reminder that to change our thoroughly and deliberately atomized society demands collective action and militant organization; it is also a passionate analysis of the fractured passion of shared political commitment, linking the enthusiasm of group experience with the sustained and steady discipline of popular empowerment. -- Peter Hallward, author of Damming the FloodWritten clearly, forcefully, and passionately, Dean gives us-the Left-not just a diagnosis of our defeat but, more importantly, a way out: the communist Party. -- Derek R. Ford * The Hampton Institute *Dean has a powerful point to make: political movements have to move beyond immediate expression-the crowd-and embrace long-term organization-the party. -- Matt Ray * Open Letters Monthly *Jodi Dean's book rejects those who invest positively in the individual or the multiple per se and instead asks for a new and more subversive collective subject of politics. From real crowds like the Occupy Movement to the theoretical conceptions of crowds and mobs, Dean's book interrogates the role of the crowd and the party in an attempt to provide a way forward politically. -- Alfie Bown * Hong Kong Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1978, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman caused a storm of controversy. Michele Wallace blasted the masculine biases of the black politics that emerged from the sixties. She described how women remained marginalized by the patriarchal culture of Black Power, demonstrating the ways in which a genuine female subjectivity was blocked by the traditional myths of black womanhood. With a foreword that examines the debate the book has sparked between intellectuals and political leaders, as well as what has-and, crucially, has not-changed over the last four decades, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman continues to be deeply relevant to current feminist debates and black theory today.Trade ReviewA landmark black feminist text ... This text deserves rereading. * Ms. Magazine *One of the first books truly critiquing the systems in place, ways of thinking and being that feed the myth of black women as the ultimate heroine. * The Root *Wallace, a young black feminist, writes thoughtfully and temperately ... Her voice has a special authority. * Kirkus Reviews *[Wallace] is a light to Black Feminism, Women and Gender Studies, African American and Diaspora Studies, Film Studies, popular culture, the art world, and beyond. * The Feminist Wire *A book of great vision. * Meridians Journal *Courageous, outspoken, clear-eyed. * Publishers Weekly *Serious, well-written, effective in its demystification, valuable as a model of hardheaded but caring analysis, principled in its criticism ... Wallace's fearless presentation of her analysis quite takes the breath away. -- Toni Cade Bambara * Washington Post *

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Book SynopsisThe Weary Sons of Freud lambasts mainstream psychoanalysis for its failure to grapple with pressing political and social matters pertinent to its patients' condition. Gifted with insight and compelled by fury, Catherine Clément contrasts the original, inspirational psychoanalytical work of Freud and Lacan to the obsessive imitations of their uninspired followers-the weary sons of Freud.The analyst's once attentive ear has become deaf to the broader questions of therapeutic practice. Clement asks whether the perspective of socialism, brought to this study by a woman who is herself an analysand, can fill the gap. She reflects on her own history, as well as on that of psychoanalysis and the French left, to show what an activist and feminist restoration of the talking cure might look like.Trade ReviewA work of ferocious humour and loving spite. What, she asks herself (and us) loud and direct, are psychoanalysts for? * La Nouvel Observateur *Brilliantly written ... to be read in one sitting. * Le Monde *

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Book SynopsisEverywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It is time to reevaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future.Having successfully colonised everyday life, radical technologies - from smartphones, blockchain, augmented-reality interfaces and virtual assistants to 3D printing, autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars - are now conditioning the choices available to us in the years to come. How do they work? What challenges do they present to us, as individuals and societies? Who benefits from their adoption? In answering these questions, Greenfield's timely guide clarifies the scale and nature of the crisis we now confront - and offers ways to reclaim our stake in the future.Trade ReviewAdam Greenfield goes digging into the layers that constitute what we experience as smooth tech surface. He unsettles and repositions much of that smoothness. Radical Technologies is brilliant and scary. -- Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of Expulsions.We exist within an ever-thickening web of technologies whose workings are increasingly opaque to us. In this illuminating and sometimes deeply disturbing book Adam Greenfield explores how these systems work, how they synergise with each other, and the resultant effects on our societies, our politics, and our psyches. This is an essential book. -- Brian EnoA tremendously intelligent and stylish book on the 'colonization of everyday life by information processing' calls for resistance to rule by the tech elite... a landmark primer and spur to more informed and effective opposition -- Steve Poole * Guardian *"Fascinating and scary.[Adam Greenfield] is very well informed about a whole host of technologies that we hear a lot about but (if you're like me) have a hard time grasping. He's a graceful writer, so even when he's angry he's eloquent without relying on emotional cues or nostalgia. More importantly, he thinks new technologies have a lot of potential - but if we fail to pay attention, all of its benefits will reinforce current power structures. What they call 'innovation' now that 'progress' has gone out of style is the entrenchment of power and wealth." -- Barbara Fister * Inside Higher Ed *

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