Verso Books

Book SynopsisAndrée Blouin—once called the most dangerous woman in Africa—played a leading role in the struggles for decolonization that shook the continent in the 1950s and ’60s, advising the postcolonial leaders of Algeria, both Congos, Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea, and Ghana.In this autobiography, Blouin retraces her remarkable journey as an African revolutionary. Born in French Equatorial Africa and abandoned at the age of three, she endured years of neglect and abuse in a colonial orphanage, which she escaped after being forced by nuns into an arranged marriage at fifteen. She later became radicalized by the death of her two-year-old son, who was denied malaria medication by French officials because he was one-quarter African.In Guinea, where Blouin was active in Sékou Touré’s campaign for independence, she came into contact with leaders of the liberation movement in the Belgian Congo. Blouin witnessed the Congolese tragedy up close as an adviser to Patrice Lumumba, whose arrest and assassination she narrates in unforgettable detail.Blouin offers a sweeping survey of pan-African nationalism, capturing the intricacies of revolutionary diplomacy, comradeship, and betrayal. Alongside intimate portraits of the movement’s leaders, Blouin provides insights into the often-overlooked contribution of African women in the struggle for independence.

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

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

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Book SynopsisA Child in Palestine collects the work of one of the Arab world’s greatest cartoonists, Naji al-Ali, known as ‘the Palestinian Malcolm X’. Discovered in the 1950s, he was revered throughout the region for his outspokenness, honesty and humanity. Resolutely independent, al-Ali strove to speak to and for the ordinary Arab people. The pointed satire of his stark, symbolic cartoons brought him widespread renown. His most celebrated creation, the child Hanthala, exposed the brutality of Israeli occupation, the venality and corruption of the region’s regimes, and the suffering of the Palestinian people. Hanthala is today seen as a surrogate witness to ongoing horrors and a beacon for Palestinian resistance.

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Book SynopsisThe era of hyperglobalization once hailed as the 'end of history' was characterised by boundless capitalist expansion. The neoliberal revolution gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralization and unification of states and state systems: the replacement of national with global governance or, in Europe, of the nation-state with a supranational superstate, the European Union. The 'New World Order' proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse proved to be ungovernable by democratic means. Instead, it was ruled through a combination of technocracy and mercatocracy, failing spectacularly to provide for political stability, social legitimacy and international peace. Marked by a series of economic and institutional crises, hyperglobalization gave rise to various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward transfer of state authority in its tracks. This book analyses the ongoing t

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Book SynopsisThe definitive feminist analysis of reproductive and ‘caring’ labor to emerge from Italian feminism of the 1970sEmerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic work expands and transforms how we analyze the sphere of reproduction, redefining the value of the individual’s life and the labor performed in the home.Released here for the first time in its unabridged form with historical notation and contemporary commentary, The Arcana of Reproduction is a foundational text and essential contribution to today’s discussions of social reproduction and the history of Italian feminism. Fortunati’s work provides some of the earliest theorizations of ‘immaterial,’ ‘affective,’ and ‘caring’ labor, and of the role of technology in reproduction, articulated decades before their popular reception in English academic literature.Reading this work some 50 years after its original publication gives us the tools to analyze the contemporary state of capitalist development and of women’s lives today. The text remains prefigurative and essential in our era of digital labor.

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Book SynopsisBaltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an "age of riots" as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. Award-winning poet and scholar Joshua Clover offers a new understanding of this present moment and its history. Rioting was the central form of protest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, yet it was supplanted by age of the glorious strike and labour protests of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From, from the seventies on, we're seen a return of the strike - now changed along with the coordinates of race and class.From early wage demands to recent social justice campaigns pursued through occupations and blockades, Clover connects these protests to the upheavals of a sclerotic economy in a state of moral collapse. Riot.Strike.Riot is a tour de force of political and theoretical analysis.Trade ReviewRiot, in this absolutely necessary book, is considered as differential procedure and rigorous improvisational method, as essential repertoire on the way from general malaise to general strike. But then this conception folds tightly yet disorderly into a new and open set of questions. It's not that the raging, ragged entrance to the new golden age is the new golden age. It's not that theory can't bear a riot. It's just that riot makes new ways of seeing what theory can and can't do and imposes upon us a kind of knowledge of our own embarrassing and already given resources of enjoyment. Joshua Clover says riot deserves a proper theory but here-sly, stone cold-he gives us more than that. Now we have some guidelines for the new and ongoing impropriety that fleshes forth and fleshes out our optimal condition. -- Fred Moten, scholar, activist, poet and author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition and The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black StudyIn its sweep, rigor, and elegance, Riot. Strike. Riot. is pleasurable and provocative, worthy of the urgent debates it should inspire. -- Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and Who We Be: The Colorization of AmericaRiot. Strike. Riot. is the crystalline analysis of this fraught moment-between communism and anarchism, between street protest and economic strike. Clover's text is clear without being simple, contemporary yet historical, and affectionate without being mawkish-much like a riot, in fact, it opens up the future while remembering that the past is comprised of little other than exploitation, exclusion and the kinds of violence that deliberately are attributed to the very people who suffer most from it. -- Nina Power, senior lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University and author of One-Dimensional WomanOne of the liveliest, sharpest, and erudite cultural theorists in the US. -- Charles Mudede * The Stranger *Frisky, audacious . Riot. Strike. Riot screams across the sky of our electoral theater. -- Michael Robbins * Chicago Tribune *[Riot. Strike. Riot] thrills. It elucidates and, in a way, valorizes a taboo fixture of the political arena in an era of seemingly perpetual economic crisis and withering patience for mere reform. -- Sam Lefebvre * East Bay Express *Phenomenal...The genius of Riot. Strike. Riot lies in its concise and historically confident analysis of riots. -- Justin Slaughter * Public Books *Joshua Clover provides a history of the present that is at once erudite and militant. In unfailingly elegant prose he not only traces where today's struggles came from but also proposes how they can chart the path to a new future. -- Michael Hardt, co-author of AssemblyIf communism is, as Marx wrote, "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things," then Joshua Clover is its most lucid and uncompromising contemporary theorist. Among its many virtues, Riot.Strike.Riot explains how our time of stagnant economic growth, exclusionary state violence, and uprisings of those left without reserves, might be capitalism's end times. In doing so, he challenges all of us who are committed to bending the status quo toward justice to an ambition adequate to its breaking point. -- Nikhil Pal Singh, author of Race and America’s Long WarWhy do we find police in places where there was once an economy? This unique book is abrilliant, clearheaded analysis of the historical relation between two forms of struggle, focusingon the riot, a pre-capitalist form returning in the transformed mode of "riot prime" as one of themost telling forms of our late capitalist present. Along the way, Joshua Clover gives us muchneeded concepts to deal with the strange new negations we have come to encounter in thismoment of waning accumulation-Long Crisis, the production of nonproduction, aerosolizedproduction-as capital shifts its center of gravity to circulation, and nonlabor struggles emerge asthe logical form of social conflict based on shared distance from labor markets rather than sharedlabor conditions. R-S-R' is a theory of riot but as such, crucially, a theory of periodization; it isessential reading for all students of the present. -- Sianne Ngai, author of Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting

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Book SynopsisGeorge Monbiot is one of the most vocal, and eloquent, critics of the current consensus. How Did We Get into this Mess?, based on his powerful journalism, assesses the state we are now in: the devastation of the natural world, the crisis of inequality, the corporate takeover of nature, our obsessions with growth and profit and the decline of the political debate over what to do.While his diagnosis of the problems in front of us is clear-sighted and reasonable, he also develops solutions to challenge the politics of fear. How do we stand up to the powerful when they seem to have all the weapons? What can we do to prepare our children for an uncertain future? Controversial, clear but always rigorously argued, How Did We Get into this Mess? makes a persuasive case for change in our everyday lives, our politics and economics, the ways we treat each other and the natural world.Trade ReviewA dazzling command of science and relentless faith in people . I never miss reading him. -- Naomi KleinWhat most impresses in Monbiot's clever, elegant writing is the way he strives to think beyond protest towards realistic, representative solutions to the problems of world politics and trade * The Times *George Monbiot is always original-both in the intelligence of his opinions and the depth and rigour of his research. -- Brian EnoHis passion for social and ecological justice is undimmed by twenty-first-century cynicism. His desire for knowledge across the widest gamut of subjects (scientific, historical, political and cultural) enables him to reach places which are foreign territory to many of us * Herald *A writer of eloquence and passion. * Observer *How Did We Get into this Mess? does an excellent job of articulating the cultural dearth of our times and suggesting ways to counteract its causes and expressions, whilst resisting defeatism...[Monbiot] leaves his reader with a sense of hope, empowered to help build a better future * Marx & Philosophy *

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Book SynopsisIn Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age. What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world's most valuable artworks are used as a fictional currency in a global futures market that has nothing to do with the work itself? Can we distinguish between creativity and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring artefacts as diverse as video games, Wikileaks files, the proliferation of spam, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.Trade ReviewSteyerl's art is extremely rich, dense and rewarding. . .With Steyerl, you can't always tell fact from fabulation, where the jokes end and seriousness begins, what is truth and what is a lie. A pleasure in art can unhinge us in everyday life, where we are undone by falsehoods at every turn. -- Adrian Searle * Guardian *Faced with a world lacking the stable ground necessary to base proper metaphysical claims or foundational political myths, one populated by questionable images, institutions and identities, Steyerl's practice - her example - retains a clear message: agency is still possible; one can still act, if only to needle and pick at representations in order to expose the conditions of manipulation, exploitation and affect underlying their appearance. * Art Review *[Steyerl] gleefully surfs everything from military 3-D imaging and printing to big data and corporate surveillance to computer gaming, finding in disparate events and phenomena the fingerprints of a neoliberal media order in which the old modernist notion of autonomy now refers to machines that communicate in codes. -- Saul Anton * Artforum *Offers a powerful defence of contemporary art's capacity to disrupt (rather than reinforce) systems of unequal distribution - of wealth, violence, power. This collection of essays is sometimes funny, frequently moving. -- Ben Eastham * The White Review *The highest duty of theory and art is to grasp and articulate their own time. In our time Hito Steyerl fulfills this duty as nobody else. Her investigations of the fate of images and words in the age of their global circulation are always focused and precise - but also adventurous, unexpected and fascinating. -- Boris GroysHito Steyerl's nuanced essays dissect the buckshot of digital information streams. And as her own art work engages all those digital filters and proxies that scramble and reassemble and generate noise, she also rehearses another way of thinking or recognizing or laughing. -- Keller Easterling, author of ExtratstatecraftPage by page, line by line, and phrase by phrase, Duty Free Art is a real and disquieting treasure. -- Andy Battaglia * Art News *Ms. Steyerl refuses to nail down a single idea, or insist on a point of view. Instead, we get art - her video - as an act of moral thinking-in-progress. In a very of-the-moment, digital-age way, the logic of that thinking is fractured, the nature of morality suspect. But a belief in the necessity of thinking, restlessly, politically, never is in doubt. * New York Times *Steyerl emerges as a critic in the tradition of Georg Simmel and Sigfried Kracauer, thinkers whom she credits with analyzing the surfaces of modernity not as superficial epiphenomena or "mere appearances" but as its condensation and substance. -- Chloe Wyma * Brooklyn Rail *

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Book SynopsisThe divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity? The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Timely and provocative, Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.Trade ReviewOur software and our wetware are constantly glitching. How could it be otherwise? Rather than try for perfect order, let's embrace the glitch and find out how else it all could play out. Let's just admit we're done with the old empire of imperatives about both flesh and tech and tune in to those who are playing in the ruins, hacking their way through to another life. This book takes you there. -- McKenzie Wark, author of Capital is DeadGLITCH FEMINISM offers wry insights into the opportunities inherent in the implications of formerly discarded traces of both ourselves and our culture. This fascinating, profound and engrossing book places Legacy Russell as one of the more provocative, radical and original thinkers of her generation.' -- Lynn Hershman Leeson, artist and filmmakerRussell helps us understand that the components of our identity are in fact technologies. Glitch Feminism offers a powerful shift in mindset that empowers a generation of activist remixers. -- Lil MiquelaA timely rethinking of cyberfeminism from an intersectional perspective-a deeply personal investigation of blackness and queerness in and through technology. This erudite, vividly-rendered text weaves astute discussions of contemporary artistic practices with personal narrative, capital-T Theory, and virtuosic riffs on twenty-first-century slanguage. -- Mark Tribe, founder of RhizomeA glitch is an error, a mistake and a failure to function," and with this warning, Legacy Russell takes us on a lightening tour through the terminologies and theories of AFK, IRL, Glitch Ghosts, Digital Dualism, Binary Bodies, and other markers in the current lingo of on-line criticism. She translates the Internet world as she lives it right now. Russell is an important writer to follow as she points out shifting viewpoints of Internet politics in real time. -- RoseLee Goldberg, Director of PerformaGlitch Feminism offers technological failure, machinic anxiety, and seams in the interface as the very platforms from which we may begin to rework singular identities into inventive networks, proposing a reboot of feminist discourse. While channeling the boldness of the manifesto form, Legacy Russell offers a nuanced look at inspiring artists whose works reprogram systems of race, gender, and sexuality in the virtual places between living bodies and data bodies. Here, the paradox is the opportunity: the glitch shows you how things work, just as they don't. -- Malik GainesRussell's book is as expansive and plural as the identities it explores, considering art, aesthetic theory, queerness, Blackness and anti-Blackness and, necessarily, the modalities and futures of activist practice. * BerlinArtLink *Combining art, tech, feminism, Blackness, queerness and critical theory, Russell offers an alternative to error and encourages us to embrace the glitch. -- Karla Strand * Ms. Magazine *Luminous ... [Glitch Feminism is] a gorgeous document of a number of mostly Black trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming artists working today, from E. Jane and Juliana Huxtable to Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Wu Tsang, and American Artist. -- Rahel Aima * Bookforum *Luminous ... [Glitch Feminism is] a gorgeous document of a number of mostly Black trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming artists working today, from E. Jane and Juliana Huxtable to Shawné Michaelain Holloway, and American Artist. -- Rahel Aima * Bookforum *Glitch Feminism is a vital new manifesto and Russell's research as a curator breaks new ground on themes of gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new-media ritual. * artnet News *Glitch Feminism portrays the online avatar as a laboratory where black, queer, and gender non-conforming artists have explored, experimented, and ultimately expanded notions of the self. -- Mikkel Rosengaard * Bookforum *A pocketbook, guide, and beautiful envisioning of a radical art history ... Glitch Feminism upends the notion of "glitch-as-error," reapplying the term in a cyberfeminist context to explore how the glitch disrupts the governance of race, gender, and sexuality. * ATM Magazine *The feminism we need to break and remake the systematic regimes of power, not just in the digital world (and where is that line anyway?) but from the bottom up. * VNS_Matrix *Compelling ... Russell is concerned with how race, gender and sexuality influence and affect the way that our identities are performed, but she's not in search of a simple answer or an easy way out. She asks whether we can free ourselves from our bodies, not just on the Internet, in a forum or on our phones, but all the time. ... What is radical and genuinely exciting is the conviction that [Russell] has in glitch feminism as a political project outside of the mainstream, as a form of collective joy and identity-making. -- Sanjana Varghese * Hyperallergic *Glitch Feminism is a rallying cry, a recapturing of cyberfeminism oriented to include and spotlight the many queer and non-white voices who in their practice live out the awesome potential of an enmeshed digital feminism: the glitch. ... The deftness with which Russell wields language is artwork in itself. Like the vibrant contrast of the book's cover, Glitch Feminism is a bright declaration, an ecstatic embrace of the new futures that lurk just behind hegemonic defaults. -- Jesse Damiani * Forbes *The greatest pleasure of Russell's thin book comes from its sense of solidarity and community with the queer POC artists and poets whose transformative work is never slight, and which Russell pulls from and praises in equal and sustaining measure. -- Quinn Latimer * Mousse Magazine *[In Glitch Feminism] Russellis serving roses. But they are wild, shape-shiftingroses, outrageously lush and wondrous, and it iscertainly worth taking a moment to find out whatyet-unimagined visions we might have if we stop fora moment to smell them. -- Hanne Blank * Women's Review of Books *Most powerfully, Glitch Feminism suggests that by refusing to inhabit the binary online, the force of the binary in our lives 'AFK' is revealed. Glitch feminism as a practice can expose the gender binary for the strange, violent trick that it is, and unpick its role in keeping our world turning 'under the sun of capitalism', as Russell puts it in characteristically beautiful prose. -- R. V. Campbell * The White Review *A celebratory homage to glitch's refusal of negrophobic, patriarchal, capitalist forms of production. -- Darla Migan * Spike Art Magazine *Grounded in theory (from Edouard Glissant to Donna Haraway) but a fast, percussive read, [Glitch Feminism] is also a guide to the growing field of art practices - notably driven by Black and queer creators - that dissolve the boundary between "internet art" and physical performance, activism and community-building. -- Siddhartha Mitter * New York Times (Best Art Books of 2020) *Glitch Feminism explores the socio-techno construct of gender and sexuality, and the generative potential of glitches, malfunctions or errors in the social machine. Within it all, identity is both fugitive and multiple, with representations of this provided by artists such as boychild, Sondra Perry and American Artist. The book's parting shot: USURP THE BODY! BECOME YOUR AVATAR! * ArtReview Power 100 *Spellbinding -- Johanna Fateman * Artforum *[Glitch Feminism is] an urgent, compelling read and one we should take to heart as the glitches promise to cascade in coming months and years. -- Brian Merchant * OneZero ("Best Tech Books of 2020") *An exceptional read that excels at offering a radical politics of the body. Russell writes convincingly, poetically and with urgency. Her content is wide-ranging, highly detailed, and - importantly - hugely enjoyable to read. -- Sam Riley * The Quietus *[Glitch Feminism] explores the experiences of queer, nonbinary, and trans BIPOC in digital and internet spaces (a terminally capitalist, patriarchal realm) through a record of boundary-pushing contemporary artists. -- Tessa Solomon * ARTnews (Best Art Books of 2020) *Glitch Feminism has become a critical resource since its publication, especially when brainstorming for the future, helping assemble the language we need to imagine and build a better tomorrow. * Cultured Magazine *Russell's literary debut issues a corrective to the predominantly white domain of cyberfeminist theory, shining a light on artists who leverage digital media to challenge systems of gender and colonialism. -- Camille Sojit Pejcha * Document Journal *Glitch Feminism is an internet text, bringing together references and anecdotes from visual art, cultural theory, and popular culture, creating a commonplace of resistance. -- Lucy Holt * Cleveland Review of Books *Russell holds liberation on her horizon. Her achievement amounts to what Toni Cade Bambara once affirmed as the very 'task of the artist' ... the task for the artist whose community's survival depends upon political change is 'to make the revolution irresistible'. -- Amber Husain * Radical Philosophy *Glitch Feminism offers [a] syllabus for resistance and change. -- Sara Black McCulloch * Los Angeles Review of Books *[Glitch Feminism] offers new possibilities away from the canon that originally defined aesthetics as a field of study, by transforming the failure to be recognized into a form of ideological and artistic affirmation. -- Olivier Berggruen * Brooklyn Rail *A short critical work that acknowledges the radical potential of technology, while simultaneously presenting a deep, nuanced awareness of its current shortcomings, as well as our need to overcome them. -- Benjamin Carpenter * Medium *A pocket-sized book that packs a punch ... Glitch Feminism is a tour de force, leaning into the paradoxical and using it to educate, inspire, and radicalize. -- Nicola Alexander * Art New England *Russell thoughtfully frames every chapter around case studies of artists, writers, and fellow cyborgs who practice refusal and embody glitch - a perfect brew of glitch feminist theory and praxis ... Glitch Feminism is a monumental publication in its (re)framing of glitch as feminist and as the power of "no." -- Pauline Nguyen * Femme Art Review *

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Book SynopsisNo metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias.In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs LA's shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West - a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity.Trade ReviewAbsolutely fascinating. -- William GibsonFew books shed as much light on their subjects as this opinionated and original excavation of Los Angeles from the mythical debris of its past and future. * San Francisco Examiner *A history as fascinating as it is instructive. -- Peter Ackroyd * The Times *As central to the L.A. canon as anything that Carey McWilliams wrote in the forties or Joan Didion wrote in the seventies. -- Dana Goodyear * New Yorker *Angelenos, now is the time to lean into Mike Davis's apocalyptic, passionate, radical rants on the sprawling, gorgeous mess that is Los Angeles. -- Stephanie Danler, author of Stray and SweetbitterCity of Quartz deserves to be emancipated from its parochial legacy...[It is] a working theory of global cities writ large, with as much to teach us about multiculturalism as it does racial apartheid in Los Angeles. -- David Helps * Los Angeles Review of Books *A wildly original analysis of the city on the threshold of the new millennium, the book synthesized knowledge about Los Angeles's history, politics, culture, architecture, policing, immigration, and more, painting a dark picture that embodied a kind of American urban dystopia on steroids after the nightmare of Reaganism and the "developers' millennium." -- Micah Uetricht * The Nation *Dazzling * Counterfire *

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Book SynopsisWritten between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-century America and finds a life deformed by capitalism. This is Adorno's theoretical and literary masterpiece and a classic of twentieth-century thought.Trade ReviewA volume of Adorno is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature. -- Susan SontagThe best thoughts of a noble and invigorating mind. * Observer *Theodor Adorno's masterpiece of aphorisms and short prose meditations * Time Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisJacques Derrida was one of most influential philosophers of the 20th century. In The Politics of Friendship he explores the idea of friendship and its political consequences, past and future in order to explore invention of a radically new friendship, of a deeper and more inclusive democracy.Trade ReviewAs Jacques Derrida shows in The Politics of Friendship, many great meditations on friendship-by Cicero, by Montaigne, by Bataille, by Blanchot-are also meditations on mourning ... For Derrida, death lays bare the essential separateness of the friend not only in death but also in life. -- Merve Emre * New Yorker *

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Book SynopsisDuring the 1948 War, Israeli fighters and residents alike plundered Palestinian homes, shops, businesses, and farms. This bitter truth was then suppressed or forgotten over the coming years.Tens of thousands took part in the pillage of Palestinian property, stealing the belongings of their former neighbours. The implications of this mass looting go far beyond the personality or moral fibre of those who took part. Plundering served a political agenda by helping to empty the country of its Palestinian residents. In this context, it was part of the prevailing policy during the war - one designed to crush the Palestinian economy, destroy villages, and to confiscate and sometimes destroy crops and harvests remaining in the depopulated zones.The participating Jewish public became a stakeholder, motivated to prevent Palestinian residents from returning to the villages and cities they had left. These ordinary people were mobilized in the push for the segregation of Jews and Ara

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Book SynopsisBringing together three previously unpublished lectures presented to the public by Lacan at the height of his career, and prefaced by Jacques-Alain Miller, My Teaching is a clear, concise introduction to the thought of the influential psychoanalyst after Freud.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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Book SynopsisA materialist analysis reframing the Palestinian struggle within the contexts of imperialism and global capitalism, debunking mainstream misconceptions and providing a critical, materialist perspective on the region's complexities and conflicts.

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Book SynopsisAfter a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and two kids, McKenzie Wark has an acute midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recasts her relation to the world. Transition changes what, and how, she remembers. She makes fresh sense of her past and of history by writing to key figures in her life about the big themes that haunt us all-love and money, sex and death.In letters to her childhood self, her mother, sister, and past lovers, she writes a backstory that enables her to live in the present. The letters expand to address trans sisters lost and found, as well as Cybele, ancient goddess of trans women. She engages with the political, the aesthetic, and the numinous dimensions of trans life and how they refract her sense of who she is, who she has been, who she can still become. She confronts difficult memories that connect her mother's early death to her compulsion to write, her communist convictions, her coming to New York, the bittersweet reality of her late transition, and the joy to be found in Brooklyn's trans and raver communities.Trade ReviewSeeing the world unfold from the perspective of a self is easier than seeing that self as a particular folding-up of the world. MacKenzie Wark's special genius, in this wild ride across the late twentieth century and its aftermath, is to offer both perspectives at once, shimmying and shaking between the two with gleeful and brilliant abandon. -- Susan Stryker, author of Transgender HistoryMcKenzie Wark's account of her life to this point fuses friendship and history, love and ideas. Radically honest and beautifully light, her memoir offers brilliant and challenging ways of understanding how fluidly gender is actually lived by those who dare. Like all of her work, it's really a personal manifesto. I was inspired and energized reading this book. -- Chris Kraus, author of I Love DickA capacious offering to transfeminine truth-witty and wild, soft and scathing, broken-hearted and open-hearted. Moving toward the future by excavating the past, Wark makes space for complexity, innovation, self- determination, and communal possibility in "the sparkle of one's difference." -- Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer DoorIn writing letters to former selves, mothers, lovers and others McKenzie Wark has captured life lived in and as transformation with rigour and poetry. From an oppressive but formative 1960s Australian childhood, to the physical and intellectual expansiveness of New York City in the 21st century, Wark witnesses her beginnings and endings, her coming and unbecoming. She is bracing, sharp, argumentative and tender all at once -- Sophie Cunningham, author of The Devastating FeverA sharp epistolary memoir about gender, family, disability, and age...Wark's analysis of gender, sexuality, and queerness is both ebullient and trenchant. * Kirkus Reviews *Sad and tender and sassy and smart. A love letter to life and transition, to the endless possibilities of the body and the mind, to love itself. -- Fiona Kelly McGregor, author of IrisWark is one of the only scholars to take young people seriously-not as a spectacle or site of extraction, but as friends to learn from and hang out with. This lack of judgment, which radiates, not just through the book, but through the author herself, is what is so winning in the end. I am grateful for Love and Money, Sex and Death, and I'm grateful for McKenzie, too. -- Charlie Markbreiter * The New Inquiry *This memoir plumbs erasures in Wark's personal experiences in order to understand her personal formation outside of the 'born this way' narrative...there's something refreshing, even relieving, about the book's lack of a neat, packaged gender narrative. Love and Money, Sex and Death is a memoir that seeks understanding around a personal formation; it extends that spacious anarchy for others to play in too. * Foreword Reviews *[This] memoir is an attempt to make sense of the edited self and the person who we once were. A portrait of selfhood under construction. -- Isle McElroy, 24 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Fall * Vulture *Wark revisits and reexamines her past by writing letters to major figures in her life in her new memoir and a stunning look at transition, history, art, and memory. -- September 2023's Must Read Books * Nylon *[Love and Money, Sex and Death] outright embodies not just the communal, but the femmunal, the sprawling network of weirdo-others that make the self. -- Anahi Molina * Guernica *Wark's work is always worth checking out, and this new book looks to be an especially essential part of her bibliography. * Vol. 1 Brooklyn *Wark's poetic and direct language crafts an unusually moving text that draws on art, popular culture, and mythology. The result is an introspective narrative that both tells an individual's story and conveys essential insights into gender and queerness, family, friends, and change. -- Natalie Haddad * Hyperallergic *In glimpses that are both emotionally and intellectually breathtaking, [Wark] recalls her coming-of-age in Newcastle, Australia, in the 1960s and '70s; her career as a poet; her marriage and grief; parenthood; her various lovers and her transition, in her 50s. -- Melissa Bond * The New York Times Book Review *[Wark] turns the idea of a traditional, linear memoir on its head, using hindsight as a tool to reapproach, and in some cases recover, past relationships. -- Allison Armijo * The Gay & Lesbian Review *McKenzie Wark is one of the sharpest, most exciting voices writing at the intersections of capitalism, community, gender, and sex - more broadly, everything in this title - and she is also criminally underread. -- Arianna Rebolini, Best Memoirs of 2023 * Vulture *

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Book SynopsisThe rise of the IT industry in the nineties promised a new era of freedom and prosperity. It didn’t deliver. Certainly, algorithms are everywhere, but capitalism is no more civilised than ever. In fact, in the hands of private corporations, the digitalisation of the world drives us towards a darker future. The return of monopolies, the dominance of a few platforms, the blurred distinction between the economic and the political all epitomise a systemic mutation. Information and data networks push the digital economy in the direction of the feudal logic of rent, dispossession, and personal domination.How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism offers a fresh genealogy of the Silicon Valley consensus and its contradictions. It disentangles the principles of an emerging systemwide rationale. Large firms compete in cyberspace to gain control over data, and ordinary people are increasingly at the mercy of tech giants. In this new economic order, capital is movi

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Book SynopsisIn this ground-breaking work, Paul Gilroy proposes that the modern black experience can not be defined solely as African, American, Carribean or British alone, but can only be understand as a Black Atlantic culture that transcends ethnicity or nationality. This culture is thorough modern and, often, overlooked but can deeply enriches our understanding of what it means to be modern.This condition comes out of historical transoceanic experience, established first with the slave trade but later seen in the development of a transatlantic culture. And Gilroy takes us on a tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison. As a consequence, Black Atlantic charts the formation of a nationalism, if not a nation, within this shared, disasporic culture.Trade ReviewPaul Gilroy is one the most incisive thinkers of his generation...One can only hope that his voice travels far and wide. * Independent *In debates in recent years around questions of race, nation and culture, Paul Gilroy has stood out as an independent, unorthodox and (often for that very reason) exciting new voice. * Times Higher Educational Supplement *Whilst others scarcely put a toe in the water, in The Black Atlantic Gilroy goes in deep and returns with riches. * Guardian *At that moment, in US scholarship, the emphasis was still on minimising the role of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the making of capitalism. So to have the Black Atlantic argue so powerfully for its constitutive role in the making of modernity was really important. -- Saidiya HartmanIt was in this book that Gilroy laid out his concept of the 'black Atlantic', the idea that black culture is essentially a hybrid, a product of centuries of exchange, slavery and movement across the Atlantic. Exploring everything from the lives and work of African American philosophers such as WEB Du Bios, to black popular music, Gilroy demonstrates that black culture is both 'local' and 'global', and cannot be constrained within any single national culture. It flows across the black Atlantic of the book's title. The influence of Gilroy's work can be felt not only in modern scholarship but even in the work of the visual artist John Akomfrah. -- David OlusogaThe Black Atlantic, still his most influential work, used the writings of enslaved people and their descendants to demonstrate their centrality to the making of the modern world. * Guardian *He's the foremost intellectual in the United Kingdom: not an if, not a but, not a maybe -- Steve McQueen

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Book SynopsisWhat is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci's notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking project, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics. Their essays, organized as separate contributions that respond to one another, range over the Hegelian legacy in contemporary critical theory, the theoretical dilemmas of multiculturalism, the universalism-versus-particularism debate, the strategies of the Left in a globalized economy, and the relative merits of post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis for a critical social theory. While the rigor and intelligence with which these writers approach their work is formidable, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality benefits additionally from their clear sense of energy and enjoyment in a revealing and often unpredictable exchange.

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Book SynopsisShlomo Sand was born in 1946, in a displaced person's camp in Austria, to Jewish parents; the family later migrated to Palestine. As a young man, Sand came to question his Jewish identity, even that of a "secular Jew." With this meditative and thoughtful mixture of essay and personal recollection, he articulates the problems at the center of modern Jewish identity. How I Stopped Being a Jew discusses the negative effects of the Israeli exploitation of the "chosen people" myth and its "holocaust industry." Sand criticizes the fact that, in the current context, what "Jewish" means is, above all, not being Arab and reflects on the possibility of a secular, non-exclusive Israeli identity, beyond the legends of Zionism.Trade ReviewPerhaps books combining passion and erudition don't change political situations, but if they did, this one would count as a landmark. (In praise of The Invention of the Jewish People) -- Eric Hobsbawm * Observer *Sand's quiet earthquake of a book is shaking historical faith in the link between Judaism and Israel. (In praise of The Invention of the Jewish People) -- Rafael Behr * Observer *No discussion of the region any longer seems complete without acknowledgement of this book. (In praise of The Invention of the Jewish People) * Independent on Sunday *A radical dismantling of a national myth. (In praise of The Invention of the Jewish People) * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisIn this urgent response to violence, racism and increasingly aggressive methods of coercion, Judith Butler explores the media's portrayal of armed conflict, a process integral to how the West prosecutes its wars. In doing so, she calls for a reconceptualization of the Left, one united in opposition and resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of interventionist military action.Trade ReviewJudith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time. -- J. M. BernsteinJudith Butler is the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today. Frames of War is an intellectual masterpiece that weds a new understanding of being, immersed in history, to a novel Left politics that focuses on State violence, war and resistance. -- Cornel WestHers is a unique voice of courage and conceptual ambition that addresses public life from the perspective of psychic reality, encouraging us to acknowledge the solidarity and the suffering through which we emerge as subjects of freedom. -- Homi K. BhabhaA trenchant and brilliant book. * Utne Reader *An impressive and challenging book from one of the leading intellectuals of our time. * Diva *Judith Butler strongly upholds the tradition of dissenting voices in America, even in the midst of climate of fear and censorship that comes close at times to McCarthyism * Politics and Culture *Frames of War is an earnest, thought-provoking and uncompromisingly critical work on an issue of singular relevance * Red Pepper *

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Book SynopsisJewish radicals manned the barricades on the avenues of Petrograd and the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto; they were in the vanguard of those resisting Franco and the Nazis. They originated in Yiddishland, a vast expanse of Eastern Europe that, before the Holocaust, ran from the Baltic Sea to the western edge of Russia and incorporated hundreds of Jewish communities with a combined population of some 11 million people. Within this territory, revolutionaries arose from the Jewish misery of Eastern and Central Europe; they were raised in the fear of God and taught to respect religious tradition, but were caught up in the great current of revolutionary utopian thinking. Socialists, Communists, Bundists, Zionists, Trotskyists, manual workers and intellectuals, they embodied the multifarious activity and radicalism of a Jewish working class that glimpsed the Messiah in the folds of the red flag.Today, the world from which they came has disappeared, dismantled and destroyed by the Nazi genocide. After this irremediable break, there remain only survivors, and the work of memory for red Yiddishland. This book traces the struggles of these militants, their singular trajectories, their oscillation between great hope and doubt, their lost illusions-a red and Jewish gaze on the history of the twentieth century.Trade ReviewIts impact on me was immense. I devoured it; my political horizons radically expanded. Not only, I came to realise, was there no contradiction between Judaism, socialism and internationalism, but, until the Nazi genocide, they existed in a profoundly interrelated way. -- Sai Englert * Salvage *An eye-opening oral history. -- Gabriel Levy, author of Judaic Technologies of the WorldA haunting, inspiring and often tragic book, Revolutionary Yiddishland uses first-hand interviews, deep archival research and sharp analysis to bring to life a complex landscape of factory workers, partisans, poets, party leaders, refugees, ghetto fighters and movement intellectuals. -- Ben Lorber * In These Times *This rich and poignant and often enthralling record traces the Yiddishland revolutionaries from their East European roots through the years of hope and struggle and hideous crimes to the heroic anti-Nazi resistance and beyond, with fascinating asides on Spain and Palestine. There are many lessons for today, not least the significance ofthe lively interaction of revolutionary intellectuals and workers and the efforts to integrate the commitment to radical social and economic change with the formation of a Jewish identity that would break sharply from the stultifying tradition and open the way to the aspirations of the Jewish workers' movement that was at the forefront of revolutionary struggle from its earliest days. -- Noam ChomskyCould there have been a future for pre-war Jewry in which Israel did not exist and Jews were gathered in a nation state within a federated Soviet Union? This is one of the questions brought up in Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg's book. There is hope for the spirit and aims behind the stories this book tells. Jewish radicalism did not die out in 1942 with the Final Solution. It now expresses itself without Yiddish. -- Clive Bloom * Times Higher Educational Supplement *A fascinating window onto a lost world. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the complex relationship between the Jewish left, the general left, and Zionism. The gripping testimonies collected in these pages give the lie to the idea that Jews in the Shoah went like sheep to the slaughter. Brossat and Klingberg do not try to iron out the wrinkles of the past. Their insightful commentary illuminates the passions, paradoxes, triumphs and defeats of the witnesses who populate their book. -- Brian Klug, author of Being Jewish and Doing JusticeNowadays we know more and more about the Nazi Genocide. Unfortunately, we have much less knowledge about the everyday life which preceded the horror and was so brutally terminated. For opening up this world we must praise Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klinberg for their vital new book, Revolutionary Yiddishland. Here, life is given priority over death, and the struggles of so many in the Yiddishland allow us to see past the catastrophes. -- Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish PeoplePraiseworthy * Jewish Currents *Brossat and Klingberg's book is a memorial to a missing world. As an aesthetic composition, it is beautiful. -- Max Ajl * Mondoweiss *Altogether, Revolutionary Yiddishland is a thoroughly engaging read. It's an important historical document preserving the memory of this radical period of Jewish and European history. -- JP O'Malley * Haaretz *

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Book SynopsisA classic collection of essay by Jacques Ranciere, that focuses on the ways in which radical philosophers understand the people they profess to speak for. The Intellectual and His People engages in an incisive and original way with current political and cultural issues, including the "discovery" of totalitarianism by the "new philosophers," the relationship of Sartre and Foucault to popular struggles, nostalgia for the ebbing world of the factory, the slippage of the artistic avant-garde into defending corporate privilege, and the ambiguous sociological critique of Pierre Bourdieu. As ever, Rancière challenges all patterns of thought in which one-time radicalism has become empty convention.Trade ReviewIn the face of impossible attempts to proceed with progressive ideas within the terms of postmodernist discourse, Rancière shows a way out of the malaise. -- Liam GillickRancière's writings offer one of the few consistent conceptualizations of how we are to continue to resist. -- Slavoj Zizek

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Book SynopsisNeurodiversity is one of the most urgent political issues of our time. As the number of diagnoses of autism, ADHD, and other types of neurodivergence rises, we are starting to understand that there is no such thing as a 'normal' brain. But society is still organised around neuronormativity, and autism is treated as a disease.Jodie Hare, diagnosed with autism at twenty-three, argues it is time to redefine the politics of who we are. She calls for the recognition of diversity as part of natural variation, rather than a departure from sameness. This will have an impact on the places where we learn, work, and socialise - and Hare shows how these can be adapted to be more inclusive and accessible. She shows how we might commit to building a world where we can all thrive, one that works to combat discrimination based on race, class, gender, and disability.

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Book SynopsisAlgeria’s Arab Jews were renowned for their metal-working and jewellery-making skills, and these jewellers of the ummah—the Arabic community—are, for Azoulay, the symbol of a world that can still be reclaimed and repaired.In a series of letters written to her father, her great-grandmother, and her children—and to the thinkers and artists she claims as intellectual kin, such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt—Azoulaytraces the history of Arab Jewish life in Algeria, and how it was disrupted by French colonialism. She begins by asking how her family became assimilated into the identities of Israeli, Jewish, or French. As she does, she finds a whole lost world open up to her - the world of her family, the Arab Jews of Algeria. She traces how Arab Jews were severed from other Arabs, and how Arab Jews were severed from their Arabness by the Israeli vision of a Jewish diaspora, and sets out to repair those breaks and revive their world. B

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Book SynopsisA classic work by the founding father of existentialism, describing his philosophy and its relationship to Marxism

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Book SynopsisThe Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise—neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic, and never less than entertaining—is a penetrating vision of the world of office work. As translator David Bellos writes, it shows us what ‘computers, perhaps even those powered today by AI, simply cannot do: make us laugh and make us cry’.This playful novel originated with a 1968 invitation from IBM, then searching for a writer to explore the use of computers in literature. Georges Perec took up the invite and programmed an early computer to follow the steps an employee of a large corporation would take to submit a successful request for a raise. (Perec himself was such a lowly employee at the time, his prospects of getting a raise as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.) From that algorithmic experiment grew this pioneering and enduring fiction.

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For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick's essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing writing from the course of her career, Taking a Long Look illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick's work: that the painful process of understanding one's self is what binds us to the larger world.In these essays, Gornick explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom's Cabin; and the characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown bus terminal. Even more, All That Is Given brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, championing the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s.Alternately crackling with urgency or lucid with insight, the essays in Taking a Long Look demonstrate one of America's most beloved critics at her best.

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Book SynopsisPraised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft "ought to be positioned," as Bookforum put it, "at the center of any discussion of race in American life." Most people assume racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call "racecraft." And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed. That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions.Trade Review“It’s not just a challenge to racists, it’s a challenge to people like me, it’s a challenge to African-Americans who have accepted the fact of race and define themselves by the concept of race.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates “Fundamentally challenged some of my oldest and laziest ideas about race.” —Zadie Smith“These essays are extraordinary. I love the forceful elegance with which they hammer home that race is a monstrous fiction, racism is a monstrous crime.”—Junot Díaz “Demanding and intelligent.” —Jennifer Vega, PopMatters “Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields have undertaken a great untangling of how the chimerical concepts of race are pervasively and continuously reinvented and reemployed in this country.”—Maria Bustillos, Los Angeles Review of Books“The neologism ‘racecraft’ is modelled on ‘witchcraft’ … It isn’t that the Fieldses regard the commitment to race as a category as an irrational superstition. On the contrary, they are interested precisely in exploring its rationality—the role that beliefs about race play in structuring American society—while at the same time reminding us that those beliefs may be rational but they’re not true.”—Walter Benn Michaels, London Review of Books“A most impressive work, tackling a demanding and important topic—the myth that we now live in a postracial society—in a novel, urgent, and compelling way. The authors dispel this myth by squarely addressing the paradox that racism is scientifically discredited but, like witchcraft before it, retains a social rationale in societies that remain highly unequal and averse to sufficiently critical engagement with their own history and traditions.”—Robin Blackburn “[Racecraft] should be more widely read than it is—no matter its current reach. In it, the authors achieve an intelligence and agility that is rare in discussions of identity, racism, and inequality.” —Matthew McKnight, Nation “Liberal mores against overt racism are crumbling in the face of Trump. We must build them better … The Fields sisters dive through sociology, history, and science to reach the material truth: races is a product of racism, not the other way around.”—Charlie Heller, Paste“With examples ranging from the profound to the absurd—including, for instance, an imaginary interview with W.E.B. Dubois and Emile Durkheim, as well as personal porch chats with the authors’ grandmother—the Fields delve into ‘racecraft’s’ profound effect on American political, social and economic life.”—Global Journal“This is a very thoughtful book, a very urgent book.”—The Academic & The Artist Cloudcast“Ostensibly ‘antiracist’ politics that treat racial categories as if they were real … perpetuate what they purport to resist. As this form of counterproductive antiracism becomes hegemonic in our culture, the Fieldses’ insights are increasingly salient.”—Blake Smith, Washington Examiner

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2023Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy. What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital - and starve it to death.Trade ReviewNancy Fraser is a legendary radical philosopher grounded in the best of the Marxist and feminist traditions yet whose genuine embrace and profound understanding of Black, ecological, immigrant and sexual freedom movements make her a unique figure on the contemporary scene! Cannibal Capitalism is not only a singular gem - it is an instant classic for our bleak times! -- Cornel West, author of Race MattersA brilliant synthesis of Fraser's many pathbreaking contributions to a Marxian theory of capitalism for the twenty-first century, beautifully written. -- Wolfgang Streeck, author of How Will Capitalism End?Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives. With characteristically clear and inventive prose, Nancy Fraser unpacks capitalism's historically shifting, interlaced dynamics, revealing the interrelations between seemingly disparate crises and social violences. Throughout, we see the powerful potential of an anti-racist, eco-social reproduction critique. And we see why the future of the planet and humanity depend upon the socialist left building anti-capitalist struggles that reach across workplaces, streets, forests and oceans. -- Sue Ferguson, author of Women and WorkNancy Fraser has produced the most elegant theory yet of capitalism in our age - capitalism not in the narrow economic sense, but capitalism in the sense of a total omnivore, a system that cannot stop devouring everything around it, destroying the lives of people and nature. This is Marxist theory for our age of crisis - and, we shall hope, of reckoning. -- Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a PipelineShould serve to remind ... that capitalism remains a guzzler of care, and this is an unsustainable position -- Rachel Andrews * White Review, Best Books 2022 *An explicit plea for a political project. The parallels between care and ecology are instructive. -- James Butler * London Review of Books *Fraser captures how gender oppression, racial domination, and ecological destruction are not incidental to capitalism, but structurally embedded in it. -- Rhoda Feng * The Nation *Table of ContentsPreface: Cannibal Capitalism: Are We Toast?1. Omnivore: Why We Need to Expand Our Conception of Capitalism2. Glutton for Punishment: Why Capitalism Is Structurally Racist3. Care Guzzler: Why Social Reproduction Is a Major Site of Capitalist Crisis4. Nature in the Maw: Why Ecopolitics Must Be Trans-environmental and Anti-capitalist5. Butchering Democracy: Why Political Crisis Is Capital's Red Meat6. Food for Thought: What Should Socialism Mean in the Twenty-First Century?Epilogue: Macrophage: Why COVID Is a Cannibal Capitalist Orgy

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Book SynopsisTraversing the nation, Municipal Dreams offers an architectural tour of some of the best and most remarkable of our housing estates, and in doing so offers an engrossing social history of housing in Britain. John Broughton asks us to understand better their complex story and to rethink our prejudices. His accounts include extraordinary planners and architects who wished to elevate working men and women through design and the politicians, high and low, who shaped their work, the competing ideologies which have promoted state housing and condemned it, the economics which has always constrained our housing ideals, the crisis wrought by Right to Buy, and the evolving controversies around regeneration. He shows how the loss of the dream of good housing for all is a danger for the whole of society - as was seen in the fire in Grenfell Tower.Trade ReviewThe book celebrates an era during which dreams of shelter and security for all-not just those who could afford to purchase it-were in large part made a reality, and asks us if we oughtn't to consider reviving that dream before it gets destroyed completely . There couldn't be a better time for this book. -- Lynsey Hanley * Guardian *Required reading . provides a comprehensive history of Britain's council estates [that] challenges the well-worn narrative. -- Anna Minton * Prospect *This serious, heartfelt book makes a convincing case that publicly provided homes have to be at least part of the response to the dysfunctional state that British housing has now attained. -- Rowan Moore * Observer *A fine survey of an astonishing achievement. -- Ed Heathcote * Financial Times *Boughton's book works as a gazetteer of public achievement-from Arts and Crafts cottages to modernist monuments to ordinary streets, from Hammersmith to Hull-and a nuanced but polemical tale of how the municipal idea was destroyed, revealing the caricatures and pseudo-history that were used to convince us that the places built to swindle us were better than the places we built for ourselves to live in. -- Owen Hatherley, author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great BritainFollows the epic story of British council and social housing, from its Victorian origins to Twentieth Century estates, the right to buy and the Grenfell fire. While every page is rich with fascinating detail, Boughton also tells the grand narrative of how modern housing was created for millions, and how that dream has been cynically and carelessly undermined. This is an inspiring read and a necessary corrective to the myths that seek to destroy one of the most important struggles of our times - the drive for decent housing for all. -- John Grinrod, author of OutskirtsA well-written, humane and even-handed appraisal of the successes and failures of municipal and national housing programmes from the 1890s to the present. * Blueprint *A deeply informed account of the ways in which local and national governments in the U.K. have or have not sought to provide affordable housing for their citizens. -- Rebecca Mead * The New Yorker, Favourite Nonfiction Books of 2019 *Despite the crowded field, Boughton's book has quickly established itself as a landmark text in the reevaluation of the legacy of council housing, a sober, thorough work that reminds us of some of the most significant achievements of Britain's postwar 'social democratic moment. -- Gareth Millington * Public Books *

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Book SynopsisWe live in an age of impotence. Stuck between global war and global finance, between identity and capital, we seem to be incapable of producing that radical change that is so desperately needed. Is there still a way to disentangle ourselves from a global order that shapes our politics as well as our imagination?In his most systematic book to date, renowned Italian theorist Franco Berardi Bifo tackles this question through a solid yet visionary analysis of the three fundamental concepts of Possibility, Potency, and Power. Overcoming any temptation of giving in to despair or nostalgia, Berardi proposes the notion of Futurability as a way to remind us that even within the darkness of our current crisis, still lies dormant the horizon of possibility.Trade ReviewAs a diagnostician, Berardi is among the sharpest. * Slate *Bifo is a master of global activism in the age of depression. His mission is to understand real existing capitalism. Sense the despair of the revolt, enjoy this brilliant 'labour of the negative'! -- Geert Lovink, Founding Director of the Institute of Network Cultures

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Book SynopsisOn the map of global trade, China is now the factory of the world. A parade of ships full of raw commodities-iron ore, coal, oil-arrive in its ports, and fleets of container ships leave with manufactured goods in all directions. The oil that fuels China's manufacturing comes primarily from the Arabian peninsula. Much of the material shipped from China are transported through the ports of Arabian peninsula, Dubai's Jabal Ali port foremost among them. China's 'maritime silk road' flanks the peninsula on all sides.Sinews of War and Trade is the story of what the making of new ports and shipping infrastructure has meant not only for the Arabian peninsula itself, but for the region and the world beyond. The book is an account of how maritime transportation is not simply an enabling companion of trade, but central to the very fabric of global capitalism. The ports that serve maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport create racialised hierarchies of labour, engineer the lived environment, aid the accumulation of capital regionally and globally, and carry forward colonial regimes of profit, law and administration.Trade ReviewIf the maritime industry represents the circulatory system of the modern global economy, then Laleh Khalili has offered us a uniquely insightful forensic assessment of how this capillary system took shape through history and the central role played by ports on the Arabian Peninsula. Her book, Sinews of War and Trade, makes clear that these ports have been far more than just tacit intersections of international trade. They have played and continue to play a vital role in framing racial labour hierarchies, accumulating capital in specific hands, and reinforcing colonial regimes of profit, law and administration. Both lucid and nuanced, the book offers a masterful study in the ways that violence and security as well as licit and illicit trade, get negotiated in and by these ports. This is one of those rare pieces of academic research that is at once readable and accessible for the lay public while also making a genuine contribution to the relevant historical scholarship. -- Ian Urbina, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the author of Outlaw OceanLaleh Khalili's fascinating new book opens the window on another world, hidden in plain sight, a shadow world of ports and container ships that holds a key to the often violent workings of contemporary capitalism. To read Sinews of War and Trade is to understand the truth of Derek Walcott's observation that "the sea is history." -- Adam ShatzIn this long awaited book Laleh Khalili makes brilliant contributions to every subject she touches: maritime history, labor history, military history, and the history of global capitalism. Readers will delight in the book's originality -- there is truly nothing else like it. -- Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human HistoryLaleh Khalili is our Ismael, taking us on a fascinating journey under the surface of war and trade, into its world of infrastructure, the chains that bind humanity because of capitalism's maddening search for the white whale of endless profit. Centred on the Arabian Peninsula, the story of big ships and bigger egos resonates across the oceans from port to port, an oily residue marking the ugliness of our times. -- Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research[Laleh Khalili] gives a nuanced account of many seas and lands. Written with meticulous attention to historical details, Khalili maps global capitalist trends that drew the shores of the Arabian Peninsula into global markets, bringing commodities, labour, pilgrims and adventurers to mark the history of a region that only began to attract attention with the discovery of oil. This book takes us back to old maritime trade, ports and people who shaped the history of the region. Much of this history is still very relevant to the present. -- Professor Madawi Al-RasheedIn this extraordinary work, Laleh Khalili takes us on an epic journey that is at once painfully timely and powerfully timeless. Centering this story of imperial trade and war on the Arabian Peninsula, Khalili illuminates how the very making of land and legal categories, the transformation of borders, the political and economic rights of workers, and entire planetary ecologies are remade through the ruthless impetus to move cargo and commodities overseas. The scale of this book is breathtaking but the story is intimate and expertly crafted, moving from entire coast lines to city streets and singular bodily movements. This is a poetry of place that exposes the power and violence of circulatory infrastructures of war and trade, while always insisting that another maritime world is possible. -- Deborah CowenA refreshing and inspiring dive into the very connected history of the Arabian Peninsula -- Philippe Pétriat * Arabian Humanities *

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Book SynopsisCounterpointing Los Angeles's central role in America's fantasy life - the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909 - with its wanton denial of its own real history, Mike Davis creates a revelatory kaleidoscope of American fact, imagery, and sensibility. Drawing upon a vast array of sources, Ecology of Fear meticulously captures the nation's violent malaise and desperate social unease in an era of climate change and social change. With savagely entertaining wit and compassionate rage, this book conducts a devastating reconnaissance of our all-too-likely urban future.With a new 2021 afterword taking stock of LA's 21st century.Trade ReviewGraced with a bold political and environmental vision, much splendid phrasemaking and a multitude of facts...A truly eccentric contribution. * New York Times Book Review *

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Book SynopsisThe conflict in Northern Ireland was one of the most devastating in post-war Europe, claiming the lives of 3,500 people and injuring many more. This book is a riveting new history of the radical politics that drove a unique insurgency that emerged from the crucible of 1968. Based on extensive archival research, One Man's Terrorist explores the relationship between the IRA, a clandestine army described as 'one of the most ruthless and capable insurgent forces in modern history', and the political movement that developed alongside it to challenge British rule. From Wilson and Heath to Thatcher and Blair, a generation of British politicians had to face an unprecedented subversive threat whose reach extended from West Belfast to Westminster. Finn shows how Republicans fought a war on several fronts, making use of every weapon available to achieve their goal of a united Ireland, from car bombs to election campaigns, street marches to hunger strikes. Though driven by an uncompromising revolutionary politics that blended militant nationalism with left-wing ideology, their movement was never monolithic, its history punctuated by splits and internal conflicts. The IRA's war ultimately ended in stalemate, with the peace process of the 1990s and the Good Friday Agreement that has maintained an uneasy balance ever since.Trade ReviewProvides us with one of the best analyses available of the politics that motivated and drove different currents within insurrectionary Irish republicanism over the past 60 years. Well researched and scrupulously objective, the author is ever academically critical. Nevertheless, he does not suffer from the endemic hostility to his subject that mars so many other works in this genre. -- Tommy McKearney, author of The Provisional IRAThere are numerous current treatments of the modern IRA, its rivals, and its allies. Daniel Finn's stands out for its concise clarity, and because, free of jargon, it is written from the left. -- Brendan O’Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, University of PennsylvaniaA fine, subtle analysis of the Provisional IRA's armed campaign and the movement's political development over three decades. Daniel Finn provides sharp insights into the leadership's strategic thinking as it manoeuvred towards a ceasefire in the 1990s. He shows how this militant Republican movement transformed itself into an electorally successful left-wing political party in Ireland North and South. -- Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, National University of Ireland, Galway[Finn is] studious in his research and solid in his writing * Irish Times *A concise yet detailed discussion of the modern Irish Republican movement. -- Ron Jacobs * CounterPunch *This book's account of how Sinn Fein's leaders played an instrumental role in making this possible is an indispensable guide to understanding how this template can - and cannot - be applied to resolving other terrorist conflicts, as well. -- Joshua Sinai * Washington Times *This slim volume packs a resonant, intelligent power. * RTÉ Guide *Given the outpouring of academic books and articles on the Northern Ireland conflict that has occurred since the 1960s...Does Daniel Finn's book represent an oasis in this intellectual and moral desert? The judgement has to be a qualified affirmative. * Dublin Review of Books *

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