Search results for ""City Lights Books""

What is the meaning of freedom? Angela Y. Davis' life and work have been dedicated to examining this fundamental question and to ending all forms of oppression that deny people their political, cultural, and sexual freedom. In this collection of twelve searing, previously unpublished speeches, Davis confronts the interconnected issues of power, race, gender, class, incarceration, conservatism, and the ongoing need for social change in the United States. With her characteristic brilliance, historical insight, and penetrating analysis, Davis addresses examples of institutional injustice and explores the radical notion of freedom as a collective striving for real democracy - not something granted or guaranteed through laws, proclamations, or policies, but something that grows from a participatory social process that demands new ways of thinking and being. "The speeches gathered together here are timely and timeless," writes Robin D.G. Kelley in the foreword, "they embody Angela Davis' uniquely radical vision of the society we need to build, and the path to get there." The Meaning of Freedom articulates a bold vision of the society we need to build and the path to get there. This is her only book of speeches. "Davis' arguments for justice are formidable...The power of her historical insights and the sweetness of her dream cannot be denied."--The New York Times "One of America's last truly fearless public intellectuals." --Cynthia McKinney, former US Congresswoman "Angela Davis offers a cartography of engagement in oppositional social movements and unwavering commitment to justice." --Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Women's Studies, Hamilton College "Angela Davis deserves credit, not just for the dignity and courage with which she has lived her life, but also for raising important critiques of a for-profit penitentiary system decades before those arguments gained purchase in the mainstream." --Thomas Chatterton Williams, SFGate "Angela Davis's revolutionary spirit is still strong. Still with us, thank goodness!" --Virginian-Pilot "Long before 'race/gender' became the obligatory injunction it is now, Angela Davis was developing an analytical framework that brought all of these factors into play. For readers who only see Angela Davis as a public icon ...meet the real Angela Davis: perhaps the leading public intellectual of our era." --Robin D. G. Kelley author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original "There was a time in America when to call a person an 'abolitionist' was the ultimate epithet. It evoked scorn in the North and outrage in the South. Yet they were the harbingers of things to come. They were on the right side of history. Prof. Angela Y. Davis stands in that proud, radical tradition." --Mumia Abu-Jamal, author of Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A. "Behold the heart and mind of Angela Davis, open, relentless, and on time!" --June Jordan "Political activist, scholar, and author Angela Davis confronts the interconnected issues of power, race, gender, class, incarceration, conservatism, and the ongoing need for social change in the U.S. in her book, The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues." --Travis Smiley Radio Angela Y. Davis is professor emerita at the University of California and author of eight books. She is a much sought after public speaker and an internationally known advocate for social justice. Robin D.G. Kelley is the author of numerous books and a professor at the University of Southern California.

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The fifth volume of our Spotlight poetry series, Compression & Purity is a new collection of poetry by Los Angeles--based African American surrealist Will Alexander. Known for densely textured visionary epics influenced by poets like Aime Cesaire and Cesar Vallejo, Alexander here returns to shorter forms to address his ecological, cosmological, and historical concerns. Highlights include a monologue from the perspective of "The Blood Penguin," a song by the "New Water on Mars," and Alexander's autobiographical lyric essay, "My Interior Vita," describing the evolution of his artistic consciousness through jazz and surrealism. Compression & Purity confirms Alexander's reputation among surrealism's foremost contemporary practitioners.

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In the tradition of French poets like Francis Ponge, Pierre Reverdy, and Rene Char, The Tranquilized Tongue offers a series of prose meditations in the form of surrealist declaratives, each sentence unfolding like an alchemical riddle in which sounds, images, and figures appear, dissolve, and re-emerge to offer a glimpse of a complex unconscious roiling below the surface of everyday reality. Sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a sentence, occasionally just a fragment, each poem in The Tranquilized Tongue is a portal to new perspective on the everyday materials of reality as constituted through language itself. The postmodern classicism of language poetry meets the modernist romanticism of surrealism to startling effect in Baus's cabinet of curiosities. The eleventh volume of the City Lights Spotlight Poetry Series, The Tranquilized Tongue places Baus alongside such contemporary purveyors of the marvelous and speculative as Andrew Joron and Will Alexander. Eric Baus received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he studied with Peter Gizzi. Author of three previous poetry collections, including the prizewinning volumes The To Sound (2004) and The Scared Text (2011), Baus lives in Denver, Colorado, where he teaches writing and literature, works on digital audio archives of poetry, and co-edits Marcel Chapbooks. "The poems comprising The Tranquilized Tongue propose a unique blend of Persian miniature and habanero pepper. The book is aburst with unremitting predication, each poem a merciless thought machine." --Nathaniel Mackey "For over a decade now, Eric Baus has been one of the leading practitioners of a new kind of poem, one that draws as equally on the legacy of surrealism, the nouveau roman, and even the language poets, as it does on the Deep Listening practice of Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier's forays into resonant sound, the films of Charles and Ray Eames, and the voiceover of Sir David Attenborough narrating our insect and animal worlds. The Tranquilized Tongue speaks to us in a music capable of condensing geologic time into that of a microtonal interval: weird, warped, a little wobble on its newly hatched legs, this is a book where the word The will follow you like a gosling." --Noah Eli Gordon "Special objects in our multiple world--from eggs to kings, from bees to caskets, from wings to statues--spawn themselves with other teeming objects in a fertile generation of aphoristic actions calmed by the clarity of prose poems framed as linked short stories. The scintillating tensions between febrile nouns, adjectival properties, and active claims all in their phonemic bliss create an elegant surrealism charged with the primary mystery of Baus's lexicon." --Rachel Blau DuPlessis Beginning with the Pocket Poets Series and the publication of Howl, City Lights has played a vital role in American poetry for over 50 years. City Lights Spotlight shines a light on the wealth of innovative American poetry being written today, publishing accomplished figures known in the poetry community as well as young emerging poets, using the cultural visibility of City Lights to bring their work to a wider audience. In doing so, we also seek to draw attention to those small presses publishing such authors. As City Lights founder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, wrote in his recent Poetry as Insurgent Art, "If you would be a poet, experiment with all manner of poetics ...to create your own limbic, your own underlying voice, your ur voice. " With City Lights Spotlight, we seek to maintain this standard of innovation and inclusiveness, publishing highly original poetry from across the cultural spectrum, and reaffirming our longstanding commitment to this most ancient and stubbornly enduring form of art.

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"Heartbreakingly beautiful writing; sometimes funny, sometimes shattering--always revolutionary. Truly amazing collection!"--Margaret Cho "Sister Spit is like the underground railroad for burgeoning queer writers. Not only in the van, but in the audiences trapped in the hinterlands of America and looking to escape. Sister Spit saves lives."--Justin Vivian Bond, author of TANGO: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels A collection of writing and artwork from the irreverent, flagrantly queer, hilariously feminist, tough-talking, genre-busting ruffians who have toured with the legendary Sister Spit. Co-founded in 1997 by award-winning writer Michelle Tea, Sister Spit is an underground cultural institution, a gender-bending writers' cabaret that brings a changing roster of both emerging writers and some of the most important queer and counterculture artists of the day to universities, art galleries, community spaces, and other venues across the country and worldwide. Sister Spit: Writing, Rants and Reminiscence from the Road captures the provocative, politicized, and risk-taking elements that characterize the Sister Spit aesthetic, stamping the raw energy and signature style of the live show onto the page. Bratty poets and failed priestesses, punk angst and tough love, too much to drink and tattooed timelines--this anthology captures it all in a collection of poetry, personal narrative, fiction, and artwork. Featuring a who's who of queer and queer-centric writers and artists, the collection functions as a travelog, a historical document, and a yearbook from irreverent graduates of the school of hard knocks. Includes contributions by Eileen Myles, Beth Lisick, Michelle Tea, MariNaomi, Cristy Road, Ali Liebegott, Blake Nelson, Lenelle Moise, and many more!

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In Nervous Device, Catherine Wagner takes inspiration from William Blake's "bounding line" to explore the poem as a body at the intersection between poet and audience. Using this as a figure for sexual, political and economic interactions, Wagner's poems shift between seductive lyricism and brash fragmentation as they negotiate the failure of human connection in the twilight of American empire. Intellectually informed, yet insistent on their objecthood, Wagner's poems express a self-conscious skepticism even as they maintain an optimistically charged eroticism."Wagner's fourth collection contains poems of memory and dark artifice. She writes with an obscure, magnetic lens. . . . Wagner contrasts these complicated poems with short, clean, pieces that offer a kind of breathing space for the reader. Not to be mistaken for trivial, the linguistic tightness of these poems are highlights of Wagner’s collection."—Publishers Weekly"Taking with one hand what they give with the other, Wagner's poems are full of vehemence and disdain and tenderness and somewhere, in some inexpugnable part of the body of language through which so many discomforting feelings pass, a thorny kind of joy. This is my idea of great poetry: in which 'The actual is / flickering a binary / between word and not-word.'"—Barry Schwabsky, Hyperallergic"Nervous Device is such a smart book. You never know where the poems are going to take you, or when some startling, often cringe-making image or thought will intrude. Unable to settle into a comfortable rhetorical space, these poems reject simple claims to knowing something or doing right or changing the world. Rather, they move like an erratic insect stuck in a language bell jar. Brilliant, and disturbing."—Jennifer Moxley"Nervous Device, the human machine, palpitating inside its own little bounding lines. These poems do everything the human device does, vibrating like an electrified tornado inside a glass jar, and make this reader profoundly alive to huge swathes of being. There is no machine for mastering the self (yet), but there are Cathy Wagner's poems."—Eleni Sikelianos"The poems in Nervous Device resonate with a knowing nod to time and the difficulty and struggle of being sentient and intimate—of loving while being human. This is poetry connectivty: sexy, poignant, knowing. And the poems here make me feel possible."—Hoa Nguyen"Wagner's poems contain multitudes, at once overflowing with seductive lyricism only to suddenly shift into brash fragmentation. She is informed, but the word subjective has no place whatsoever in her work. As the cover suggests, the potential for human connection is downright erotic for Wagner."Alexis Coe, SF Weekly"The notion that the audience is 'putting [their] finger in [her] vagina' while reading Nervous Device signals one of Wagner's primary thematic concerns in the collection: the complex relationship between poetry, sex, desire, and the body."—Joshua Ware"Wagner is to be lauded, first and foremost, for her daring, her conceptual eclecticism, and her linguistic range. . . . Nervous Device is a clear-eyed and brave testament to the changing currents of a poet's life."—Seth Abramson, The Huffington Post" . . . the manner in which Wagner structures the language through repetitive dialogue both builds meaning and breaks it apart. . . . Wagner balances disjunction and lucidity, private and public, distant and (riskily) up-close."—Jessica Comola, HTML Giant

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A companion to our guides to San Francisco and New York, Beat Atlas: A Guide to the Beat Generation in America is a state-by-state guide to the rest of the nation's significant Beat locales. From Jack Kerouac's Lowell to William Burroughs' Lawrence, Kansas, to Neal Cassady's Denver--and everywhere in between--Beat Atlas contains a wealth of historical information subdivided by region and state for easy reference and is illustrated with photographs by Allen Ginsberg. Written by Ginsberg biographer and Beat authority Bill Morgan, and rich with literary lore, Beat Atlas makes an ideal companion for armchair travelers as well as those "on the road."

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The nameless narrator of The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary lives in her studio apartment with a pack of Doberman pinchers. The dogs, led by the cruel, charismatic bitch named Miss Dog, alternate between being brutal attack animals and loyal companions, being real and otherworldly. Some chapters draw upon the ecstatic and horrifying visions of Christian mystics; others take place in the landscapes of familiar fairytales; others in the banal settings of the late-night pick-up bars or suburban picnics. The narrator uneasily inhabits these worlds until the dogs force her to take irrevocable action. "A snarling attack on the fairytale form. A good girl's fears of inadequacy materialize as a pack of vicious dogs."--Publishers Weekly "A strange and wonderful first-person voice emerges from the stories of Rebecca Brown, who strips her language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need."--The New York Times "Using unsentimental language that slices, pries and exposes layers of emotion and sexuality as a scalpel does a body, Brown veers into the uncharted territory." --The San Francisco Chronicle "I read everything Rebecca Brown writes, watch for her books and hunt down her short stories. She is simply one of the best contemporary lesbian writers around."--Dorothy Allison "A dry, witty, graceful--if savage--gift."--Mary Gaitskill Rebecca Brown is the author of other fictions, including The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley's Girl, and The Gifts of the Body. She is the winner of the 2003 Washington State Book Award, and was awarded a Genius Award and grant from Seattle's weekly magazine, The Stranger. She lives in Seattle.

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Set off on the eternal trail of the Beat experience in the city that inspired many of Jack Kerouac's best-loved novels including On the Road, Vanity of Duluoz, The Town and the City, and Desolation Angels. This is the ultimate guide to Kerouac's New York, packed with photos of the Beat Generation and filled with undercover information and little-known anecdotes. Eight easy-to-follow walking tours guide you to: Greenwich Village bars and cafes where Kerouac and his friends Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Gregory Corso, Hettie and LeRoi Jones, John Clellon Holmes, Joyce Johnson, and others read poetry, drank, turned-on, and talked all night long. The Chelsea-district apartment where Jack wrote On the Road. Midtown clubs where Beat poets mingled with artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and listened to jazz and blues greats Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Billie Holiday. Times Square, a magnet for Kerouac and the Beats. Columbia University, where the original Beats first met and began a revolution in American literature and culture. Each tour includes a map of the neighborhood, subway and bus information, and an insider's angle on Jack Kerouac's life in New York. A must for Beat enthusiasts and critics. Bill Morgan is a painter and archival consultant working in New York City. His previous publications include The Works of Allen Ginsberg 1941-1994: A Descriptive Bibliography and Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Comprehensive Bibliography. He has worked as an archivist for Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Timothy Leary.

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Winner of the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and Arrowsmith Press's 2023 Derek Walcott Poetry PrizeNational Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Finalist“Written from his native Gaza, Abu Toha’s accomplished debut contrasts scenes of political violence with natural beauty."—The New York TimesIn this poetry debut Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege in Gaza, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profound humanity.These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack. Like Gaza itself, they are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.Accompanied by an in-depth interview (conducted by Ammiel Alcalay) in which Abu Toha discusses life in Gaza, his family origins, and how he came to poetry.Praise for Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear:“Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishingly gifted young poet from Gaza, almost a seer with his eloquent lyrical vernacular … His poems break my heart and awaken it, at the same time. I feel I have been waiting for his work all my life.”—Naomi Shihab Nye“Though forged in the bleak landscape of Gaza, he conjures a radiance that echoes Miłosz and Kabir. These poems are like flowers that grow out of bomb craters and Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishing talent to celebrate.”—Mary Karr"Mosab Abu Toha's Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear arrives with such refreshing clarity and voice amidst a sea of immobilizing self-consciousness. It is no great feat to say a complicated thing in a complicated way, but here is a poet who says it plain: 'In Gaza, some of us cannot completely die.' Later, 'This is how we survived.' It’s remarkable. This is poetry of the highest order."—Kaveh Akbar

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In a lively challenge to mainstream history, Michael Parenti does battle with a number of mass-marketed historical myths. He shows how history's victors distort and suppress the documentary record in order to perpetuate their power and privilege. And he demonstrates how historians are influenced by the professional and class environment in which they work. Pursuing themes ranging from antiquity to modern times, from the Inquisition and Joan of Arc to the anti-labor bias of present-day history books, History as Mystery demonstrates how past and present can inform each other and how history can be a truly exciting and engaging subject. "Michael Parenti, always provocative and eloquent, gives us a lively as well as valuable critique of orthodoxy posing as 'history.'"--Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States "Deserves to become an instant classic." --Bertell Ollman, author of Dialectical Investigations Those who keep secret the past, and lie about it, condemn us to repeat it. Michael Parenti unveils the history of falsified history, from the early Christian church to the present: a fascinating, darkly revelatory tale." --Daniel Ellsberg, author of The Pentagon Papers "Solid if surely controversial stuff."--Kirkus Michael Parenti, PhD Yale, is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leadiing progressive political analysts. He is the author of over 275 published articles and twenty books, including Against Empire, Dirty Truths, and Blackshirts and Reds. His writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.

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Immortalized as Dean Moriarty by Jack Kerouac in his epic novel, On the Road, Neal Cassady was infamous for his unstoppable energy and his overwhelming charm, his savvy hustle and his devil-may-care attitude. A treasured friend and traveling companion of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Ken Kesey, to name just some of his cohorts on the beatnik path, Cassady lived life to the fullest, ready for inspiration at any turn. Before he died in Mexico in 1968, just four days shy of his forty-second birthday, Cassady had written the jacket blurb for this book: "Seldom has there been a story of a man so balled up. No doubt many readers will not believe the veracity of the author, but I assure these doubting Thomases that every incident, as such, is true." As Ferlinghetti writes in his editor's note, Cassady was "an early prototype of the urban cowboy who a hundred years ago might have been an outlaw on the range." Here are his autobiographical writings, the rambling American saga of a truly free individual. Neal Cassady (1926-1968) was a key figure and writer during the Beat Generation and is known as the inspiration for Jack Kerouac's immortalizing character Dean Moriarty. In 1946, Cassady traveled to New York City where he met famous Beat poets and writers such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. Cassady's works were never published during his lifetime.

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Stray Poems opens with San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguía's inaugural address, where he provides a brilliant and impassioned poetic account of San Francisco's Native and Latino literary history. What follows is a selection of Murguía's most recent work, composed over the past twelve years. These are poems of the twenty-first century, written in a combination of English and Spanish—the patois of contemporary America. Angry, rebellious, subversive, sentimental, hip, urban, local, global.Alejandro Murguía is the author of Southern Front and This War Called Love, both winners of the American Book Award. He is San Francisco's first Latino Poet Laureate.Praise for Alejandro Murguía & Stray Poems:"In the city of poets, Murguía has become the activist voice of refugees and exiles--as so many of us are, even as natives--at the center of the Americas. Disguised by its sensuous intimacy, soothing and ennobling, his is a poetry that arms the resistance."--Dagoberto Gilb, author of The Magic of Blood"Poet, teacher, publisher, lover, literary guerrilla--Alejandro Murguía is a San Francisco treasure. And I'm not saying this because he knows where to find the best pozole. Although he does."--Jack Boulware, Litquake co-founder"The powerful stream of rich, diverse Spanish spoken in the United States by millions of Latinos from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, has rushed into the huge river of the English tongue in such a way that a language and a literature have been born from those troubled waters, exploring multiple alternatives and choosing many paths. These Stray Poems from Alejandro Murguía speak with all those voices, crossing linguistic borders and really going out of the way to deviate from the standard path and let the multiracial and multicultural, all-embracing Latino beat flow into the heart of English."--Daisy Zamora, The Violent Foam"Murguía with a tango unleashed, a city on fire, a rendezvous of homage, manifesto, revenge and transcendence--he is alone, without a face, yet recognizable in every body that swims through the under-streets of the City, of Paris, of Havana, of bombed-out-Here's-and-There’s and the stripped down body of all of us. No stones are left unturned; hypnotic, alarming, 'melodramático,' rough-lovin’, unkempt, 'dangerous,' and ready to battle at the center of the scorched core. 'I didn’t cheat,' one poem admits. He is on trial—fire-spitter and disassembler of cultural falsifications, in 'strange' and romantic moods, the poems scatter truth and aim and blow and burn and rise unto the flagless sky--'. . . a country of oceans and mountains.' Murguía gets there. Alone, because few embark on that voyage. An astonishing, brutal nakedness. Love, that is. No book like it. An unimaginable heart of and for the peoplea ground--breaking prize."--Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of California

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From poisoned water and police violence in our cities, to gun massacres and hate-mongering on the presidential campaign trail, evidence that America is at war with itself is everywhere around us. The question is not whether or not it's happening, but how to understand the forces at work in order to prevent conditions from getting worse. Henry A. Giroux offers a powerful, far-reaching critique of the economic interests, cultural dimensions, and political dynamics involved in the nation's shift toward increasingly abusive forms of power. His analysis helps us to frame critical questions about what can and should be done to turn things around while we can. Reflecting on a wide range of social issues, Giroux contrasts Donald Trump's America with Sandra Bland's to understand who really benefits from politically fueled intolerance for immigrants, communities of color, Muslims, low-income families, and those who challenge state and corporate power. A passionate advocate for civil rights and the importance of the imagination, Giroux argues that only through widespread social investment in democracy and education can the common good hope to prevail over the increasingly concentrated influence of extreme right-wing politicians and self-serving economic interests. Praise for America at War with Itself: "This is the book Americans need to read now. No one is better than Henry Giroux at analyzing the truly dangerous threats to our society. He punctures our delusions and offers us a compelling and enlightened vision of a better way. America at War with Itself is the best book of the year."--Bob Herbert, Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos and former Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times "In this current era of corporate media misdirection and misinformation, America at War with Itself is a must read for all Americans, especially young people. Henry Giroux is one of the few great political voices of today, with powerful insight into the truth. Dr. Giroux is defiantly explaining, against the grain, what's REALLY going on right now, and doing so quite undeniably. Simply put, the ideas he brings forth are a beacon that need to be seen and heard and understood in order for the world to progress."--Julian Casablancas "In America at War with Itself, Henry Giroux again proves himself one of North America's most clear-sighted radical philosophers of education, culture and politics: radical because he discards the chaff of liberal critique and cuts to the root of the ills that are withering democracy. Giroux also connects the dots of reckless greed, corporate impunity, poverty, mass incarceration, racism and the co-opting of education to crush critical thinking and promote a culture that denigrates and even criminalizes civil society and the public good. His latest work is the antidote to an alarming tide of toxic authoritarianism that threatens to engulf America. The book could not be more timely."--Olivia Ward, Toronto Star "America at War with Itself makes the case for real ideological and structural change at a time when the need and stakes could not be greater. Everyone who cares about the survival and revival of democracy needs to read this book." --Kenneth Saltman, Professor, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Author of The Failure of Corporate School Reform Henry A. Giroux's most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting and America's Addiction to Terrorism. A prolific writer and political commentator, he has appeared in a wide range of media, including the New York Times and Bill Moyers.

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One of the best short story writers in America. One of America's most widely anthologized short fiction writers has first new collection in almost two decades (since 1999). Braverman is a "writer's writer" revered by Joan Didion, Rick Moody, Janet Fitch, Dave Eggers, and others. 2 of the 8 stories included are previously unpublished; other stories have been selected by Raymond Carver, Dave Eggers, Akashic in their SF Noir book #1, and appear in other award-winning collections. Author who is widely known for rapturous female characters takes on the male voice in several groundbreaking stories here. Kate Braverman, at 68 years old, asserts new, craft-driven stories taking a long view on life, aging, mortality, family, and marriage.

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"Nader's assessment of how concentrated wealth and power undermine democracy is clear and compelling, but it's his substantive vision of how we ought to respond that makes Breaking Through Power essential reading. Written just before Donald Trump's Electoral College victory, Nader's latest book reads with even greater urgency now."--Yes Magazine In Breaking Through Power, Ralph Nader draws from a lifetime waging--and often winning--David vs. Goliath battles against big corporations and the United States government. In this succinct, Tom Paine-style wake-up call, the iconic consumer advocate highlights the success stories of fellow Americans who organize change and work together to derail the many ways in which wealth manipulates politics, labor, media, the environment, and the quality of national life today. Nader makes an inspired case about how the nation can--and must--be democratically managed by communities guided by the United States Constitution, not by the dictates of big businesses and the wealthy few. This is classic Ralph Nader, a crystallization of the core political beliefs and commitments that have driven his lifetime of advocacy for greater democracy. "Ralph Nader is the grand progressive of our time. We overlook his words at our own peril! This book is required reading."--Cornel West "Ralph Nader's Breaking Through Power is a brilliant analysis of corporate power and the popular mechanisms that can be used to wrest back our democracy. No one has been fighting corporate domination longer, or understands it better, than Nader, who will go down in history not only as a prophet but an example of what it means to live the moral life. We disregard his wisdom and his courage at our peril."--Chris Hedges, Pulitzer-Prize winner and author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt "Nader goes beyond delineating the problem and provides a critical prescription to battle the toxicity of unjust power--one that every individual can, and must, embrace."--Nomi Prins, author, All the Presidents' Bankers "People are recognizing that our founding, fundamental values of fairness, justice, and opportunity for all--the very values that define our America--are being shoved aside to create an un-America of plutocracy and autocracy. Ralph Nader's new book Breaking Through Power provides progressive boat-rockers with inspiration and a plan for reclaiming America from the greedy Plutocrats and Fat Cats who think democracy is for sale to the highest bidder."--Jim Hightower "I read Ralph Nader for the same reasons that I read Tom Paine. He knows what he thinks, says what he means, and his courage is a lesson for us all."--Lewis Lapham "Nader insists on speaking up for the little people and backs his arguments and decent sentiments with hard facts."--Publishers Weekly About Ralph Nader: Named by The Atlantic as one of the hundred most influential figures in American history, and by Time and Life magazines as one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century, Ralph Nader has helped us drive safer cars, eat healthier food, breathe better air, drink cleaner water, and work in safer environments for more than four decades. Nader's recent books include Animal Envy, Unstoppable, The Good Fight, and the bestseller, Seventeen Traditions. Nader writes a syndicated column, has his own radio show, and gives lectures and interviews year round.

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The third full-length collection by Julien Poirier, Out of Print is a truly bicoastal volume, reflecting the poet's years in New York as well as his return to his Bay Area roots. Consider it a meetinghouse between late New York School and contemporary California surrealism, a series of quips intercepted from America's underground poetry telegraph, or an absurdist mirror held up to consumerist culture. "Welcome Julien Poirier! What a distinct inspired voice. His work is abundant in surprise. His musical,often bonkers play of language is, for me, a source of delight & revelation."--David Meltzer "Julien Poirier's poems calibrate the vernacular in a sublime mathematics of commonalities. The effect is that of feelings on the run, enunciated clearly. In a sudden down-draught-'You're wind, you melt on my tongue'-he'll take the contemporary love poem into new stretches of believability while knowingly calling to account the failings that, whether perennial or merely topical, hem round ourselves to disastrous effect. For, no mistake, Out of Print means business: a forceful wake-up call, allowing as how for this old world the time for meaningful action may well have run out and we've joined the fabled damned, lost but for such eloquence, affection, and mad, mad laughter in Hell's despite."-Bill Berkson "Out of Print's unexpectedly a love poem, its humor sharpening into dissonant pleasure. And what a pleasure! Julien Poirier's weirdly direct and directly weird poems notice what an event is, whether it's four square monks in a Coupe de Ville or becoming the Invisible Hand, and render that event into a sensual and searching landscape. You are really there, no where, but there, in poetry as a means to think differently, and maybe, absurdly, hope."--Karen Weiser Julien Poirier is the co-founder of Ugly Duckling Presse. He has taught poetry in New York City and San Francisco public schools and at San Quentin State Prison. Previous books include Way Too West (2015) and El Golpe Chileno (2010).

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"With shades of Umberto Eco and Paul Auster, this brilliant, addictive adventure novel is about the search for a mythical lost city located somewhere in modern-day Iran. As a succession of explorers and shady characters dig deeper into the landscape, the ancient secret of Suolucidir is gradually revealed. This is brainy, escapist fiction at its best."--Publishers Weekly, Starred & Boxed Review "The author's prose is rich with winking allusions and sendups of modern tomb-raiding tropes, down to an explorer with 'a long stiff braid down her back.'"--The New Yorker " ...cerebral, satirical, and entertaining archaeological thriller ...this richly crafted and handsomely written novel rewards rereading."--David Cooper, New York Journal of Books "It's always a delight to discover a voice as original as Susan Daitch's."--Salman Rushdie "One of the most intelligent and attentive writers at work in the US today."--David Foster Wallace Indiana Jones meets Italo Calvino in a masterful, absurdist blend of biting social satire, rollicking adventure, invented history and mythology. A series of archeological expeditions unfolds through time, each one looking for the ruins of a fabled underground city-state that once flourished in a remote province near the border of present-day Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Sealed off for centuries by seismic activity, Suolucidir beckons with the promise of plunder and the glory of discovery, fantasies as varied as the imaginations of her aspiring modern-day conquerors. As the tumult of the twentieth century's great wars, imperial land grabs and anti-colonial revolutions swirl across its barren, deserted landscape, the ancient city remains entombed below the surface of the earth. A succession of adventurers, speculators and unsavory characters arrive in search of their prize, be it archeological treasure, oil, or evidence of crimes and punishments. Intrigue, conspiracies, and counter-plots abound, and contemporary events interfere with each expedition, whether in the form of the Axis advance, British Petroleum, or the Revolutionary Guards. People disappear, relics are stolen, and the city closes in upon itself once more. A satiric, post-colonial adventure story of mythic proportions, The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir takes place against a background of actual events, in a part of the world with a particular historical relationship to Russia and the West. But though we are treated to visual "evidence" of its actual existence, Suolucidir remains a mystery, perhaps an invention of those who seek it, a place where history and identity are subject to revision, and the boundaries between East and West are anything but solid, reliable, or predictable. Praise for The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir: "Susan Daitch has written a literary barnburner of epic proportions. The question buried at the core of The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir is one of empirical--or is the imperial?--knowledge itself. Her labyrinthine tale of archeological derring-do calls to mind both 1984 and 2666, and does so by looking backward in time as well as forward. It is also utterly original, the work of a visionary writer with an artistic sensibility all her own." --Andrew Ervin, author of Burning Down George Orwell's House "This is a novel of archeology and history, of mythology and empire, powered by an undeniable call to adventure and a deep yearning for understanding, written by a novelist who manages to surprise on nearly every page."--Matt Bell, author of Scrapper "Daitch's latest is a beguiling and virtuoso companion to our inevitable end: a novel that wrenches, sentence by fine sentence, some order from the chaos, while never shortchanging the chaos itself."--Mark Doten, author of The Infernal "Daitch's novel is Indiana Jones for the introspective crowd--a continual, thrilling, and harrowing search for historical treasures."--Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword Reviews

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The Gunman, originally published as The Prone Gunman, is now a major motion picture starring Sean Penn. This is the official movie tie-in edition. The film, opening March 20th, 2015, also stars Javier Bardem, Idris Elba and Ray Winstone, and is directed by Pierre Morel (Taken). About The Gunman: Terrier is a hired killer who wants out of the game, so he can settle down and marry his childhood sweetheart. But the Organization won't let him go: they have other plans for him. In a violent tale that shatters as many illusions as bodies, Jean-Patrick Manchette subjects his characters and the reader alike to a fierce exercise in style. This tightly plotted, corrosive parody of "the success story" is widely considered to be Manchette's masterpiece, and was named a New York Times "Notable Book" in 2002. The Gunman is a classic of modern noir. Also available in its original edition titled The Prone Gunman, along with Manchette's Three to Kill, published by City Lights in 2002. "For Manchette and the generation of writers who followed him, the crime novel is no mere entertainment, but a means to strip bare the failures of society, ripping through veils of appearance, deceit, and manipulation to the greed and violence that are the society's true engines."—Boston Globe "There's not a superfluous word or overdone effect . . . one of the last cool, compact and shockingly original crime novels Manchette left as his legacy to modern noir fiction."—New York Times Jean-Patrick Manchette was a French crime novelist credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the genre. He wrote ten short novels in the 1970s and early 80s, and is widely recognized as the foremost French crime fiction author of that time. His stories are violent, existentialist explorations of the human condition and French society. Jazz saxophonist and screenwriter, Manchette was also a left-wing activist influenced as much by the writings of the Situationist International as by Dashiell Hammett.

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Finalist for the 2016 PEN Center USA Award for Translation In 1809, at the age of eighteen, Henriette Faber enrolled herself in medical school in Paris--and since medicine was a profession prohibited to women, she changed her name to Henri in order to matriculate. She would spend the next fifteen years practicing medicine and living as a man. Drafted to serve as a surgeon in Napoleon's army, Faber endured the horrors of the 1812 retreat across Russia. She later embarked to the Caribbean and set up a medical practice in a remote Cuban village, where she married Juana de Leon, an impoverished local. Three years into their marriage, de Leon turned Faber in to the authorities, demanding that the marriage be annulled. A sensational legal trial ensued, and Faber was stripped of her medical license, forced to dress as a woman, sentenced to prison, and ultimately sent into exile. She was last seen on a boat headed to New Orleans in 1827. In this, his last published work, Antonio Benitez Rojo takes the outline provided by historical events and weaves a richly detailed backdrop for Faber, who becomes a vivid and complex figure grappling with the strictures of her time. Woman in Battle Dress is a sweeping, ambitious epic, in which Henriette Faber tells the story of her life, a compelling, entertaining, and ultimately triumphant tale. Praise for Woman in Battle Dress "Woman in Battle Dress by Antonio Benitez-Rojo, which has been beautifully translated from the Spanish by Jessica Ernst Powell, is the extraordinary account of an extraordinary person. Benitez-Rojo blows great gusts of fascinating fictional wind onto the all but forgotten embers of the actual Henriette Faber, and this blazing tale of her adventures as a military surgeon and a husband and about a hundred other fascinating things is both something we want and need to hear."--Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome "A picaresque novel starring an adventurous heroine, who caroms from country to country around the expanding Napoleonic empire, hooking up with a dazzling array of men (and women) as she goes. A wild ride!"--Carmen Boullosa, author of Texas: The Great Theft "As detailed as any work of history and as action filled as any swashbuckler, Woman in Battle Dress is not only Antonio Benitez Rojo's last and most ambitious book, but also his masterpiece. In this graceful English translation of Henriette Faber's autobiography--more than fiction, less than fact--American readers will have access to one of the most engaging novels to come out of Latin America in recent years."--Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Columbia University Antonio Benitez-Rojo (1931--2005) was a Cuban novelist, essayist and short-story writer. He was widely regarded as the most significant Cuban author of his generation. His work has been translated into nine languages and collected in more than 50 anthologies. One of his most influential publications, La Isla que se Repite, was published in 1989 by Ediciones del Norte, and published in English as The Repeating Island by Duke University Press in 1997. Jessica Powell has translated numerous Latin American authors, including works by Cesar Vallejo, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Cardenal, Maria Moreno, Ana Lidia Vega Serova and Edmundo Paz Soldan. Her translation (with Suzanne Jill Levine) of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo's novel Where There's Love, There's Hate, was published by Melville House in 2013. She is the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in support of her translation of Antonio Benitez Rojo's novel Woman in Battle Dress.

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"Frank Lima is an American Villon."--David Shapiro "Highly recommended for -reasons that go beyond historical -completeness."--Library Journal, starred review "This collection is not to be missed."--Publishers Weekly, starred review Protege of Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Allen Ginsberg, Frank Lima (1939-2013) was the only Latino member of the New York School during its historical heyday. After enduring a difficult and violent childhood, he discovered poetry as an inmate of a juvenile drug treatment center under the tutelage of the painter, Sherman Drexler, who introduced him to his poet friends. After his poetry debut in the Evergreen Review in 1962, Lima appeared in key New York School anthologies and published two full-length collections of his own. In the late 1970s, Lima left the poetry world to pursue a successful career as a chef, though he returned intermittently and continued to write a poem a day until his death. Incidents of Travel in Poetry is a landmark re-introduction to the work of this major Latino poet. Beginning with poems from Inventory (1964), his installment in the legendary Tibor de Nagy poetry series, Incidents includes selections from Lima's previous volumes, tracing his development from his early snapshots of street life to his later surrealist-influenced abstract lyricism. The bulk of the collection comes from his later unpublished manuscripts, and thus Incidents represents the full range of Lima's work for the very first time. Praise for Incidents of Travel in Poetry: "Finally. Finally. Finally. Here's the Frank Lima collection that poetry lovers worldwide have been waiting for. Lima was an authentic outlier and Incidents of Travel transcends and decolonizes any attempt at easy categorization. With this new body of work, we are reaping the price Lima paid for being ostracized. Our reward? The dream we wish we could have, whispers that hint of a new waste land, and we'll always be in his debt for having Lima as a guide."--Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon. "Frank Lima is a masterful writer of ecstatic, devastating, and hauntingly personal poetry. His candor is irresistible and transformative, as cuttingly witty in one poem as elegiac and sorrowful in the next. Complete with its nuances and disappointments, nobody writes the poetry of domestic reverence quite like Lima. In this generous selection of work from the poet's life, including poetry from 1997 onward, we can finally solidify Lima as a figure of crucial importance to our understanding of the New York School writers. This work shines with all the love and labor of Lima's thoroughly American experience, one which is inextricable from the trauma of cultural duality. Lima's voice speaks to us like an intimate friend, a co-conspirator in hope. 'Blessed are the poets who invented us as poets,' he writes in a poem for David Shapiro, an ode to both his best friend and to poetry. Blessed are we now to have this landmark collection of work from Frank Lima. This book is a long overdue treasure." --Wendy Xu From his first contact with poetry while incarcerated as a juvenile offender in Harlem, through his meetings with Langston Hughes and Frank O'Hara, his years with Berkson and Padgett and Berrigan, his stint as a chef, and his years of living his Vow to Poetry when he wrote at least a poem a day in total obscurity--Lima's life is an epic of contradictions. Frank Lima is a poet the world has been waiting to discover. Now we can."--Bob Holman

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"Warren's first book of poems is highly self-reflective, interestingly interrogative, and a lot of fun."--Booklist Charged with swagger and sensuality, tenderness and cold fact, the 10th Spotlight series installment, Here Come the Warm Jets, is the brash debut volume by Bay Area poet Alli Warren. Taking its title from the Brian Eno classic, Jets jumbles gender, class, and space-time perspectives into a chorus of contemporary idioms and lyrical longings. Against the daunting backdrop of contemporary political-economy, Warren launches her missives of desire, in writing that is at once raw and sly. From the Bishop of Worms to Flipper to E-40, nobody's safe from the easy virtuosity with which she makes language sing. The collection is a finalist for the 2014 California Book Award. About the Spotlights Series: City Lights Spotlight hopes to shine a light on the wealth of innovative American poetry being written today. We intend to publish accomplished figures known in the poetry community as well as young emerging poets, using the cultural visibility of City Lights to bring their work to a wider audience. In doing so, we also seek to draw attention to those small presses publishing such authors. As City Lights founder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, wrote, "If you would be a poet, experiment with all manner of poetics ...to create your own limbic, your own underlying voice, your ur voice." Praise for Here Come the Warm Jets: "The 10th in City Lights' 'Spotlight Series,' poet Alli Warren's first book is anthemic, both wry and full of wonder, colloquial and lyrical and glittering with revelations. [It] upends contemporary syntax for the sake of self-expansion, moving seamlessly between edification and amused, tongue-in-cheek condemnation."--San Francisco Weekly "Here Come the Warm Jets starts by cycling through swaths of factless job-voice before pitching an unfolding exuberant doom-diction through the book's positively evil prosodic middle. Relative time, absolute time, ornery time, palpation time, and a kind of time I can't name are all in play along the way. I think Warren's end of capitalism would come with the richest planes of full life, but only the poems and their upending of the never-ending blossom hull make me think so." --Anselm Berrigan "When form and form's fiance come maundering Alli Warren will undo them both with tart prepositional gambits and the vagaries of fortune-telling and a fine poker-faced command of stagecraft itself. With nods to the congress of manners (and hat tips too to Brooks, Duncan, and others) Here Come the Warm Jets plays at neither checking nor abashing but chronicles what it just might be to be beyond the reach of any drama, any architecture. This is one heavenly book."--C. S. Giscombe "Though she may be excoriating the system, Warren has fun doing it, however, with a willingness to always go for a dirty joke ...This dead-pan tone belies the slyly crafted humor of her wordplay, which mashes up multiple registers for comic, sometimes cutting effect ...Even as Warren's poems dance away from any notion of a fixed self ...a tender undercurrent runs throughout, and the closing 'Personal Poem'--comprising a series of second-person commands--offers a roundabout glimpse into the poet's more quotidian inspirations, while offering some sage advice: 'Don't talk too much about language in mixed company.'" --American Poets Praise for Alli Warren: "[She]'s one of those poets who, once you read her work, instantly becomes a necessity."--Ron Silliman "Warren displays a serious commitment to delineating the multifarious registers of communication that collide into what we think of as culture."--Noah Eli Gordon

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Theo, our scruffy, big-hearted, and quick-witted heroine, is not so much down on her luck as delivered luckless into a culture where the winners and losers have already been decided. Her adventures in getting over take her from San Francisco to New York City, from dyke bars to telemarketing outfits, casinos to free clinics. With the signature poet's voice that has won her awards and acclaim, Ali Liebegott investigates the conjoined hearts of hope and addiction in an unforgettable story of what it means to be young and broke in America. Praise for Cha-Ching!: "...frank, funny and painfully realistic ...Liebegott has unleashed a book that's part road novel, part portrait of a would-be artist as a young woman and part unabashed romance."--Josh Davis, The Rumpus "Ali Liebegott's books evoke a life-affirming sensation that comes from embracing the pendular. Her ability to hit the right tone is scientific, almost violent in its precision--a single word or observation, well-placed, can have a reader crying or laughing aloud."--Evan Karp, Bomb Magazine "Cha-Ching!, [Liebegott's] latest novel, is one of those books that cause you to look up, blinking, realizing that you've read 75 pages and your coffee is cold. It's a rush of offtrack betting, impulsive road trips, liquor-fueled make-out sessions, and the sort of low-end jobs that are invisible in most fiction but everywhere in Liebegott's work."--San Francisco Magazine "Cha-Ching! is a rush - the clatter of youth on the angry move, the rattling of dreamy gambles in crappy apartments, the desperate crash of falling for someone despite the million reasons why and the bang! bang! bang! of our tender hearts."--Daniel Handler author of Why We Broke Up "Cha-Ching! is so raw with need that I found myself itching that addict's itch to chase the seemingly impossible."--Karolina Waclawiak, deputy editor of The Believer and author of How to Get Into the Twin Palms "An open-hearted, deeply romantic story about a fucked-up dyke, her pit bull, her search for love, her tenuous grasp on hope, a pretty girl and the literal spin of the wheel."--Sarah Schulman, author of The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination "...fresh and compelling ...the novel offers a subtle and compassionate depiction of addiction and its cycle of despair-and-hope, too. "--Charlotte Bhskar, Zyzzyva About the Author: Ali Liebegott is the author of the award-winning books The Beautifully Worthless and The IHOP Papers. In 2010 she took a train trip across America interviewing female poets for a project titled, The Heart Has Many Doors; excerpts from these interviews are posted monthly on The Believer Logger. Her novel Cha-Ching! is the third in the City Lights/Sister Spit series. In addition, she is the founding editor at Writers Among Artists whose first publication, Faggot Dinosaur, was released in 2012.

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Inspired by the Beats, Black Mountain, and the New York School, Lisa Jarnot emerged in the 1990s as one of the foremost poets of the post-Language avant-garde. Joie de Vivre draws on twenty years of work, from the bold fragmentation of her mixed media debut, Some Other Kind of Mission, to the experimental lyricism of her recent Night Scenes. Following the poet's evolution through her engagements with form and music, Joie de Vivre showcases Jarnot's restless virtuosity and relentless curiosity. The archaic, the surreal, the pastoral, the political--no register of language proves too recalcitrant for her expansive sense of song. Praise for Joie de Vivre: "Riveting ...Reading this work is truly a joy."--Publishers Weekly "This compilation includes the best of Jarnot's Whitmanesque reflections and Ginsbergian outcries, speech acts that list always toward an avant-garde."--Booklist "Her ideas meddle in the traditions of form, medium, sound, and arrangement to recall the modernism of Joyce and Stein ...This selection highlights her inventiveness." --Library Journal About the Author: Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1967, Lisa Jarnot studied with Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo and later earned an MFA at Brown University. The author of four full-length poetry collections and the former editor of the Poetry Project Newsletter, she has also just published Robert Duncan: The Ambassador From Venus (University of California Press, 2012), the definitive biography of the San Francisco poet. Since the mid-1990s, she has lived in New York City.

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"Mel Goodman has spent the last few decades telling us what's gone wrong with American intelligence and the American military, and now, in National Insecurity, he tells us what we must do to change the way the system works, and how to fix it. Goodman is not only telling us how to save wasted billions--he is also telling us how to save ourselves." -- Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker Upon leaving the White House in 1961, President Eisenhower famously warned Americans about the dangers of a "military industrial complex," and was clearly worried about the destabilizing effects of a national economy based on outsized investments in military spending. As more and more Americans fall into poverty and the global economy spirals downward, the United States is spending more on the military than ever before. What are the consequences and what can be done? Melvin A. Goodman, a twenty-four-year veteran of the CIA, brings peerless authority to his argument that US military spending is indeed making Americans poorer and less secure while undermining our political standing in the world. Drawing from his firsthand experience with war planners and intelligence strategists, Goodman offers an insider's critique of the US military economy from President's Eisenhower's farewell warning to Barack Obama's expansion of the military's power. He outlines a much needed vision for how to alter our military policy, practices, and spending in order to better position the United States globally and enhance prosperity and security at home. Melvin A. Goodman is the Director of the National Security Project at the Center for International Policy. A former professor of international security at the National War College and an intelligence adviser to strategic disarmament talks in the 1970s, he is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed The Failure of Intelligence.

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Today's economic crisis is capitalism's worst since the Great Depression. Millions have lost their jobs, homes and healthcare while those who work watch their pensions, benefits, and job security decline. As more and more are impacted by the crisis, the system continues to make the very wealthy even richer. In eye-opening interviews with prominent economist Richard Wolff, David Barsamian probes the root causes of the current economic crisis, its unjust social consequences, and what can and should be done to turn things around. While others blame corrupt bankers and unregulated speculators, the government, or even the poor who borrowed, the authors show that the causes of the crisis run much deeper. They reach back to the 1970s when the capitalist system itself shifted, ending the century-old pattern of rising wages for U.S. workers and thereby enabling the top 1% to become ultra-rich at the expense of the 99%. Since then, economic injustice has become chronic and further corrupted politics. The Occupy movement, by articulating deep indignation with the whole system, mobilizes huge numbers who seek basic change. Occupying the Economy not only clarifies and analyzes the crisis in U.S. capitalism today, it also points toward solutions that can shape a far better future for all. Richard D. Wolff is professor emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and visiting professor at the New School University. Author of Capitalism Hits the Fan, he's been a guest on NPR, Glenn Beck Show, and Democracy Now! David Barsamian is founder and director of Alternative Radio and author of Targeting Iran. He is best known for his interview books with Noam Chomsky, including Targeting Iran. "With unerring coherence and unequaled breadth of knowledge, Rick Wolff offers a rich and much needed corrective to the views of mainstream economists and pundits." --Stanley Aronowitz

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We live in a time when public discourse is more skewed than ever by the propaganda that big money can buy, with trust in the leadership of elected officials at an all-time low. The "news" has degenerated into sensationalist sound bites, and the idea of debate has become a polarized shouting match that precludes any meaningful discussion. It's also a time of anxiety, as we're faced with economic and ecological crises on a global scale, with stakes that seem higher than ever before. In times like these, it's essential that we be able to think and communicate clearly. In this lively primer on critical thinking, Robert Jensen attacks the problems head on and delivers an accessible and engaging book that explains how we can work collectively to enrich our intellectual lives. Drawing on more than two decades of classroom experience and community organizing, Jensen shares strategies on how to challenge "conventional wisdom" in order to courageously confront the crises of our times and offers a framework for channeling our fears and frustrations into productive analysis that can inform constructive action. Jensen connects abstract ideas with the everyday political and spiritual struggles of ordinary people. Free of either academic or political jargon, this book is for anyone struggling to understand our world and contribute to making it a better place. Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. "At the moment, what passes for political debate is the bickering of two vociferous and wrong-headed parties. Robert Jensen reacquaints us with the political and social skills we'll need if we're to reclaim politics for the 21st century. This is a brave book, one that packs more wisdom in its few pages than a shelf's worth of political theory, because it's also a book about political practice. Jensen patiently, honestly, and rigorously exemplifies the highest virtues of a public intellectual."--Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System "The first date or dinner party taboo is famous: 'No religion, no politics.' Debating, discussion, engagement with ideas that matter--these are all supposed to be left to professionals, specialists who talk to each other in mutually incomprehensible ways. Meanwhile decades of advertising, sound bites, PR, filtered information, and internet trolling have numbed us even more. But we don't have to live this way. We could immediately start living in a better world, one in which every conversation was an opportunity to learn more about ourselves, others, and the precious little world we all have to try to live on together. To do that, though, we would have to re-learn how to think and talk, how to agree and disagree. Robert Jensen's Arguing For Our Lives can help us do that."--Justin Podur, Associate Professor, York University and author of Haiti's New Dictatorship (Pluto Press 2012) "Arguing for Our Lives is a crucial book for reclaiming not only the pedagogical and political virtues of critical thinking, but for securing the foundations for critical agency and engaged citizenship. This is an indispensable book for students, educators, and others willing to fight the current ongoing assault by religious, political, and moral fundamentalists on critical thought, if not reason itself, that has engulfed American politics. Everyone should read Arguing for Our Lives if they believe there is a connection between how we think and how we act, how we understand democracy and how we experience and struggle for it."--Henry Giroux, author of Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Politics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm, 2012)

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The fourth installment of our Spotlight poetry series, Stranger in Town is the second full-length collection by San Francisco poet Cedar Sigo. Reflecting queer identity while eschewing all cliches, Stranger exudes an urban mysticism redolent of the SF Renaissance--particularly John Weiners--as it collages the fragmented experiences of contemporary culture. Born in 1978 on the Suquamish Indian Reservation in Washington state, Cedar Sigo studied at Naropa under Anne Waldman and Lisa Jarnot. His first book, Selected Writings (2003), was reprinted in a revised edition in 2005. A writer on art, literature, and film, Sigo recently blogged for SFMOMA's Open Space.

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A bearded man in a badly soiled suit known only as The Stranger wanders an apocalyptic landscape on the fringes of a dying metropolis, looking for a way to "get back on top." Thwarted and rejected at every turn by old friends and strangers alike--even by the author of this novel, whom he visits repeatedly in unsuccessful attempts to determine his own narrative--his impotence and rage are expressed in acts of seemingly senseless violence. The various characters he encounters on his journey--a pack of sadistic boys, skinheads who beat him senseless, a deaf-mute woman who tries to heal him, a sidewalk preacher, and a deranged man who identifies him as The One--avoid or abuse him, or attempt to follow him. Entertaining, disturbing, and wildly intelligent, written with sinister humor and great compassion, Ether reflects on the possibilities and consequences of forgiveness, the problems of faith, and the trials of creation. "Like a David Lynch movie transcribed by Pierre Reverdy, it's a brilliant and unforgettable book, written somewhere between sleeping and waking." - Chris Kraus, author of Torpor "This is an intense, intelligent novel that paints a vivid picture of an America that most of us refuse to see, are afraid to see. This is real art." - Percival Everett, author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier "A book that's both pure as snow and filthy as dirty, with the lovely detachment of ice. Like Beckett, Ehrenreich has the talent of being particular and general at once, and thus steps outisde of time" - Lydia Millet, Pulizer Prize finalist for Love in Infant Monkeys "Ether is a dark and powerful work, with disturbing metaphysical overtones. Ben Ehrenreich is a gathering power in the literary land." - John Banville, author of The Infinities "Ben Ehenreich transforms the brutal human and urban blight into a landscape of cosmic battle. Ether is a dark, complex, richly written, beautiful novel. It is a rarity in American fiction today." - Frederic Tuten, author of Self Portraits: Fictions "Ether, perhaps even more than his previous novel, The Suitors, shows Ben Ehrenreich unafraid of storytelling that is terrifically bold and sly." - Sesshu Foster, author of World Ball Notebook Ben Ehrenreich is an award-winning journalist and fiction writer. Ether is his second novel. Praise for Ben Ehrenreich's first novel The Suitors: "Smart and postmodern in a puckish, Calvino-like sense...Ehrenreich writes with an ease and pure line-by-line skill that's rare."--The New York Times Book Review "Ehrenreich blends Tom Robbins' sly humor with Steve Erickson's bubbling sense of the subconscious and Voltaire's irreverent twists of plot."--Los Angeles Times Book Review "Ehrenreich shows the stirrings of an original talent."--Publishers Weekly "Brilliant, and at the same time moving. It's a relief to know that literature exists yet."--Juan Goytisolo

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The second volume of our City Lights Spotlight Poetry series, Free Cell is the latest book of poems from New York-based poet Anselm Berrigan, one of the most influential American poets under the age of forty. In a departure from his previous work, Free Cell consists of two experimental suites, "Have a Good One" and "To Hell with Sleep," connected by a central poem. The former director of St. Mark's Poetry Project, Anselm Berrigan is the son of poets Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley. He is the poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail and the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan.

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Despite official declarations, the war in Afghanistan is far from over; in fact, it's escalating. Seven years after 9/11, the Taliban continue to regroup, attack, and claim influence over most of the region. This book presents a fresh, comprehensive analysis of Afghanistan's political history that begins at the roots of tribal leadership and ultimately emphasizes our present political moment and the impact of ongoing US military intervention. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, first went to Afghanistan in 1981 and have reported for CBS News, Nightline, and The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Their documentary Between Three Worlds was broadcast by PBS.

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Noam Chomsky says that the freedom to challenge power is not just an opportunity, it's a responsibility. For the past several years Chomsky has been writing essays for The New York Times Syndicate to do just that: challenge power and expose the global consequences of U.S. policy and military actions worldwide. Interventions is a collection of these essays, revised and updated with notes by the author. While Chomsky's New York Times Syndicate writings are widely published around the world, they have rarely been printed in major U.S. media; none have been published in the New York Times. Concise and fiercely argued, Interventions covers the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Bush presidency, Israel and Palestine, national security, the escalating threat of nuclear warfare, and more. A powerful and accessible new book from one of America's foremost political intellectuals and dissidents. "Interventions offers over forty of Chomsky's columns; insightful, crisp and well-researched pieces on news events of the day. From 9-11 to the Iraq War, from the 'non-crisis' of social security to the leveling of Lebanon, Chomsky provides informed opinion and critical analysis." -- Mumia Abu-Jamal "Chomsky is a global phenomenon ...perhaps the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet." -- New York Times Book Review "Unwavering political contrarian Noam Chomsky smart-bombs the U.S. military's global Interventions (City Lights). Shock and awe!" -- Vanity Fair "With relentless logic, Chomsky bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us--and to discern what they are leaving out...Agree with him or not, we lose out by not listening." -- Business Weekly Noam Chomsky has taught linguistics and philosophy at MIT for more than fifty years. He is a critically-acclaimed author of numerous books, including Hegemony or Survival, Imperial Ambitions, Failed States, Manufacturing Consent, and Media Control and Failed States.

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"You have a unique viewpoint from which to write about Jack as no one else has or could write. I feel very deeply that this book must be written. And no one else, I repeat, can write it."-William S. Burroughs Edie Parker was eighteen years old when she met Jack Kerouac at Columbia University in 1940. A young socialite from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, she had come to New York to study art, and quickly found herself swept up in the excitement and new freedoms that the big city offered a sheltered young woman of that time. Jack Kerouac was also eighteen, attending Columbia on a football scholarship, impressing his friends with his intelligence and knowledge of literature. Introduced by a mutual friend, Jack and Edie fell in love and quickly moved in together, sharing an apartment with Joan Adams (who would later marry William S. Burroughs). This is the story of their life together in New York, where they began lifetime friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and others. Edie's memoir provides the only female voice from that nascent period, when the leading members of the Beat Generation were first meeting and becoming friends. In the end, Jack and Edie went their separate ways, keeping in touch only on rare occasions through letters and late-night phone calls. In his last letter to Edie, written a month before his death, Kerouac ended it with the encouraging phrase: "You'll be okay." It was from that note that the title of this book was taken.

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"His journey is our journey through the tumultuous and disillusioning decades. He is our Everyman, he is us."-Seattle Post-Intelligencer Praise for Tom Hayden: "One comes away enthralled by Hayden's odyssey."-The Boston Sunday Globe From his earliest days as a Freedom Rider and leader of Students for a Democratic Society, through decades as a state senator, to contemporary notes on the Iraq war, the global South, immigration, and spirituality, Tom Hayden's writings constitute nothing less than an alternative history of our times. Writings for a Democratic Society is the only book that encapsulates Tom Hayden's writings over fifty years, a time in which he has been a reflective eyewitness to American history in the making. The book is composed on sections about the new Left of the 1960s, the Chicago 8, Vietnam, electoral politics, gang violence, Ireland, the environment, global justice, and US foreign policy today. "Tom Hayden changed America," the national correspondent of The Atlantic, Nicholas Lemann, has written. He created the "blueprint for the Great Society programs," according to presidential assistant Richard Goodwin. He was the "single greatest figure of the 1960s student movement," according to The New York Times Book Review. Forty years later he was described as "the conscience of the Senate." Tom Hayden is the author or editor of more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including Reunion and Street Wars.

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Iran and the United States are on a collision course. David Barsamian presents the perspectives of four experts on Iran who discuss the 1953 CIA coup and the rise of the Islamic regime, Iran's internal dynamics and competing forces, relations with Iraq and Afghanistan, and the consequences of US policy. Ervand Abrahamian authored Iran Between Two Revolutions. Noam Chomsky's most recent book is Failed States. Nahid Mozaffari edited the The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature. David Barsamian's books include Imperial Ambitions with Noam Chomsky and Original Zinn with Howard Zinn.

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In The Souls of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the question whites wanted to ask him was: "How does it feel to be a problem?" In The Heart of Whiteness, Robert Jensen writes that it is time for white people in America to self-consciously reverse the direction of that question and to fully acknowledge that in the racial arena, they are the problem. While some whites would like to think that we have reached "the end of racism" in the United States, and others would like to celebrate diversity but are oblivious to the political, economic, and social consequences of a nation-and their sense of self-founded on a system of white supremacy, Jensen proposes a different approach. He sets his sights not only on the racism that can't be hidden, but also on the liberal platitudes that sometimes conceal the depths of that racism in "polite society." The Heart of Whiteness offers an honest and rigorous exploration of what Jensen refers to as the depraved nature of whiteness in the United States. Mixing personal experience with data and theory, he faces down the difficult realities of -racism and white privilege. He argues that any system that denies non-whites their full humanity also keeps whites from fully accessing their own. This book is both a cautionary tale for those who believe that they have transcended racism, and also an expression of the hope for genuine transcendence. When white people fully understand and accept the painful reality that they are indeed "the problem," it should lead toward serious attempts to change one's own life and join with others to change society. Robert Jensen is the author of Citizens of the Empire. He is a professor of media ethics and journalism at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Following the footsteps of a writer persecuted because of his ideas and tortured by his own frustrations, a young Catalan woman embarks on an adventure in the jungles of Colombia where her familiar world shatters and from which nothing emerges unharmed. Confronted by solitude in a region where it rains incessantly, she discovers, first in her lover, then in the people around her, the alarming signs of a devastating war. In a narrative that swings between intimacy and horror, she bears witness to a hell in which she abandons everything except the language she has had to reinvent, as her only refuge, to speak about the thousand new faces death has shown her. Nuria Amat was born in Barcelona, where she now lives.

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Compelling poems from one of the most prolific and critically acclaimed of contemporary North African writers. Imprisoned for many years by the Moroccan authorities, Laabi's poetry is haunted by memories of torture and prisons and bears witness to his preoccupations with-and resistance to-the growing international sickness of state-supported inhumanity. Abdellatif Laabi was born in 1942 in Fez. In 1966, he founded the avant-garde literary and artistic journal Souffles, which helped spark a literary and artistic renaissance through North Africa. Imprisoned for seven years in the '70s for his political beliefs and his writings, he has lived in Paris since 1985. His latest book, a novel, will be published this year by Gallimard.

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This seminal book established Churchill as an intellectual force to be reckoned with in indigenous land rights debates. Required reading for anyone interested in Native North America and ecological justice. Revised and expanded edition. Ward Churchill (Keetowah Cherokee) has achieved an unparalleled reputation as a scholar-activist and analyst of indigenous issues. He is a Professor of American Indian Studies, a leading member of AIM, and has been a delegate to the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations.

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In the no-man's-land of Mexico's far north-harsh desert landscapes, bruising border towns, urban wastelands and fantastical rural villages-migrants, campesinos and travelers find themselves lost between reality and delirium, tragedy and exaltation. Ten stories with an unflinching gaze onto the fragility and brutality of life: a tabloid journalist tracks a pair of homeless lovers; a blackout extinguishes the lights of Monterrey, unleashing anxieties and criminal tendencies; a visiting teacher in a remote village witnesses a brutal incident of vigilante justice; a desperate young boy crosses the border in search of a father lost to the North. Eduardo Antonio Parra (Leon, Guanajuato, 1965) is the author of two collections of stories and -winner of Mexico's National Prize for the Short Story.

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In the 1970s, the West Coast feminist art movement coalesced around the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, founded by artist Judy Chicago. Arriving as a young art student in 1976, Terry Wolverton stayed on to become a teacher and co-founder of the Lesbian Art Project, and eventually, executive director. Her journey-emblematic of many women who sought to redefine themselves in the light of feminism-entails confrontation with the damages of sexism, the pitfalls of utopian community, and the forces of social backlash. Terry Wolverton is the author of the novel Bailey's Beads, two collections of poetry, Black Slip and Mystery Bruise. She has also edited numerous anthologies of gay and lesbian fiction, including His and Hers (Vols I-III).

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Throughout his adventurous life, Ralph Rumney was in constant flight from the wreckage of postwar Europe. Crossing paths with every avant-garde of the past fifty years, he was one of the founding members of the Situationist International. Rumney’s traveling companions — Guy Debord, Pegeen Guggenheim, Asger Jorn, Michèle Berstein, Bernard Kops, Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Félix Guattari, E.P. Thompson, Victor Brauner, and many others — are recalled in the oral history with sharp intelligence and dry wit.Profusely illustrated with Rumney’s own photos, paintings, and collages and other documentary materials."The Consul regains that magnificent freedom that a handful of people enjoyed and shared with artists, writers and others, in a world whose password was total, unfailing rejection of the world." —Judith Brouste, Art Press". . . fine compendium of the most poetic of political writings, albeit still a partial measure for fans, followers and future revolutionaries awaiting the complete translations of the journal Situationist Internationale." —Publishers WeeklyRalph Rumney (1934 - 2002), was the sole member of the London Psychogeographical Society, a founding organization of the Situationist International (1957). He is the author of The Leaning Tower of Venice, a fabled psychogeographical exploration of that city.Malcolm Imrie is a literary agent and translator whose translations include Guy Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle and Josè Pierre's Investigating Sex: Surrealist Discussions 1928 - 1932.

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Winner of Spain's National Prize for Literature In the middle of the night, a woman awakens to find a stranger in her bedroom. Though she cannot determine who he is--or, indeed, whether he is even real at all and not just an extension of her dreams or her writing--she is drawn into a conversation with her unexpected guest. What she tells him becomes the story of a woman coming of age in the repressive Spain of the Franco era. In The Back Room Carmen Martin Gaite spins out a hypnotic evocation of one woman's life counterpointed against the social history of modern Spain. The growth of a personal identity and the terrors of fascism are woven together within the delicate fabric of this dreamlike narrative. The result is an intimate and existential confessional--part autobiography, part fiction. In direct and simple language, Martin Gaite envisions life within a world besieged. This, her finest work, explores the back room of memory with a quiet but irresistible power. "The winner of Spain's 1978 National Prize for Literature, Gaite's postmodern novel interweaves dreams and fantasies with autobiography and Spanish history, resulting in a book that is complex and elusive, but more than worth the effort."--Publishers Weekly "A serious, fascinating work, indeed a great novel...leaves its readers mesmerized."--ABC Literario "Excellently plotted and written with that perfect simplicity that tends to escape notice and which has characterized Gaite's novels from the start...She has once again made the difficult art of writing into easy reading."--El Mundo "...intensely serious, literary and wryly humorous, [her] mesmerizing, labyrinthine sentences induce a sense of wandering the corridors and topiaried gardens of Marienbad."--Sunday Times "Some of the cultural specifics in this 1978 novel from Spain-songs, doll furniture, movies-may be meaningful only for Spanish readers. But Martin Gaite's novel, the first in Columbia's new Twentieth Century Continental Fiction Program, is artful and engaging nonetheless, a book of intelligent moods modulating into one another."-Kirkus Reviews Carmen Martin Gaite was one of Spain's leading novelists. She was the author of numerous works of fiction and criticism, including Variable Cloud and, most recently, The Farewell Angel. The Back Room was the first of her novels to appear in Spain after the death of Franco, and the first to be translated into English. In 1978 it was awarded Spain's National Prize for Literature.

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"L'humour Noir" is one of the seminal concepts of Surrealism, and Breton's famous anthology is his definitive statement on the subject. It contains provocative assessments of the writers he most admired. Some, such as Kafka, Swift, Rimbaud, Poe, Lewis Carroll and Baudelaire, are well known, but other names will come as a revelation to many - as will the passages Breton includes by writers you thought you knew. Breton's original foreword, considered to be one of his most important theoretical essays, is included, along with his preface to the 1966 edition. For each of the 45 authors included, Breton writes a biographical and critical preface, placing their work in the context of black humour, which, as readers will discover for themselves, is a partly macabre, partly ironic, and often absurd turn of spirit that Breton defined as "a superior revolt of the mind."

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A compilation of Charles Bukowski's underground articles from his column "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" appears here in book form. Bukowski's reasoning for self-describing himself as a 'dirty old man' rings true in this book."People come to my door—too many of them really—and knock to tell me Notes of a Dirty Old Man turns them on. A bum off the road brings in a gypsy and his wife and we talk . . . . drink half the night. A long distance operator from Newburgh, N.Y. sends me money. She wants me to give up drinking beer and to eat well. I hear from a madman who calls himself 'King Arthur' and lives on Vine Street in Hollywood and wants to help me write my column. A doctor comes to my door: 'I read your column and think I can help you. I used to be a psychiatrist.' I send him away . . .""Bukowski writes like a latter-day Celine, a wise fool talking straight from the gut about the futility and beauty of life . . ." —Publishers Weekly"These disjointed stories gives us a glimpse into the brilliant and highly disturbed mind of a man who will drink anything, hump anything and say anything without the slightest tinge of embarassment, shame or remorse. It's actually pretty hard not to like the guy after reading a few of these semi-ranting short stories." —Greg Davidson, curiculummag.comCharles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany on August 16, 1920, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). Other Bukowski books published by City Lights Publishers include More Notes of a Dirty Old Man, The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, Tales of Ordinary Madness, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, and Absence of the Hero. He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.

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One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books for Fall 2016 "Cortazar's verse is more traditional than his fiction, but his style and themes are in harmony across genres: eccentric, mystical, full of animals but deeply human. Cortazar is a people's poet, accessible from every angle, and his position as a titan of the Latin American boom is indisputable."--Publishers Weekly, starred review World renowned as one of the masters of modern fiction, Julio Cortazar was also a prolific poet. While living in Paris during the last months of his life, Cortazar assembled his life's work in verse for publication, and Save Twilight selects the best of that volume, making his poems available in English for the very first time. This expanded edition, with nearly one hundred new pages of poems, prose and illustrations, is a book to be savored by both the familiar reader and the newcomer to Cortazar work. Ranging from the intimate to the political, tenderness to anger, heartbreak to awe, in styles both traditionally formal and free, Cortazar the poet and subverter of genres is revealed as a versatile and passionate virtuoso. More than a collection of poems, this book is a playful and revealing self-portrait of a writer in love with language in all its forms. Praise for Save Twilight: "With this expanded edition of Save Twilight, Stephen Kessler continues his project, begun in the 1980s, of translating poetry by Julio Cortazar. Widely known for his fiction, especially Hopscotch, a seminal work of the Latin American Boom, Cortazar was also a compelling poet. Kessler has found just the right turns of phrase in English to capture the Argentine's deeply moving writing and exceptionally emotive language. What a gift this collection is for English-speaking readers."--Edith Grossman, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation "Some people run the world, others are the world. Cortazar's poems are the world; they have a special consideration for the unknown."--Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel "What a pleasure, this walk in a well-orchestrated park with shades as complex, as light & as dark, as multifoliate as the actual world! This book--the 'poetic ecology' Cortazar had envisioned--is an open invitation to make yourselves at home twixt sea and loss, wine & sorrow, birth & riptide, tobacco & talk, laughter & death. Nothing human is foreign to the poet--& he brings it home with great clarity & grace. The writing & the book embody a tradition of hospitality, or as Cortazar puts it: 'Hello little black book for the late hours, cats on the prowl under a paper moon.' The injunction to save twilight stands as title--it is also exactly what the writing accomplishes. Stephen Kessler's elegant, accurate, and sometimes felicitously ose translations do these poems more than justice."--Pierre Joris, author of Barzakh (Poems 2000-2012) "For those who have enjoyed Cortazar's fiction, among the most seminal and compelling of our time, here now are his wonderful poems. And for those who don't know Cortazar from a cat, it's a chance to visit his crepuscular world in all its multiple layers. A tender, experimental, humorous, meditative, jazzy, heart-breaking collection to be relished and savored slowly." --Ariel Dorfman, author of Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile Julio Cortazar was born in Brussels in 1914 of Argentinian parents, raised in Argentina, and spent his most productive years in Paris, where he died in 1984.

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"The world is ready for her blend of insane Angela Carter with the originality of Clarice Lispector."—Mariana Enriquez, LitHubDelicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal stories explore the nature of memory, family ties, and the difficult imbalances of love."Both her debut story collection, Forgotten Journey, and her only novel, The Promise, are strikingly 20th-century texts, written in a high-modernist mode rarely found in contemporary fiction."—Lily Meyer, NPR"Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature."––Jorge Luis Borges"I don't know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us."—Italo Calvino"These two newly translated books could make her a rediscovery on par with Clarice Lispector. . . . there has never been another voice like hers."—John Freeman, Executive Editor, LitHub" . . . it is for the precise and terrible beauty of her sentences that this book should be read.A masterpiece of midcentury modernist literature triumphantly translated into our times."—Publishers Weekly * Starred Review"Ocampo is beyond great—she is necessary."—Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance and Associate Director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University "Like William Blake, Ocampo's first voice was that of a visual artist; in her writing she retains the will to unveil immaterial so that we might at least look at it if not touch it."—Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread"Ocampo is a legend of Argentinian literature, and this collection of her short stories brings some of her most recondite and mysterious works to the English-speaking world. . . . This collection is an ideal introduction to a beguiling body of work."—Publishers WeeklyThis collection of 28 short stories, first published in 1937 and now in English translation for the first time, introduced readers to one of Argentina's most original and iconic authors. With this, her fiction debut, poet Silvina Ocampo initiated a personal, idiosyncratic exploration of the politics of memory, a theme to which she would return again and again over the course of her unconventional life and productive career.Praise for Forgotten Journey:"Ocampo is one of those rare writers who seems to write fiction almost offhandedly, but to still somehow do more in four or five pages than most writers do in twenty. Before you know it, the seemingly mundane has bared its surreal teeth and has you cornered."—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World: Stories"The Southern Cone queen of the short-story, Ocampo displays all her mastery in Forgotten Journey. After finishing the book, you only want more."—Gabriela Alemán, author of Poso Wells"Silvina Ocampo's fiction is wondrous, heart-piercing, and fiercely strange. Her fabulism is as charming as Borges’s. Her restless sense of invention foregrounds the brilliant feminist work of writers like Clarice Lispector and Samanta Schweblin. It’s thrilling to have work of this magnitude finally translated into English, head spinning and thrilling."—Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe

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A traveler looks out his hotel window on a war-torn city. A mortar explodes in his room and, when the police arrive, the corpse has disappeared and only a notebook of apocryphal writings and poems is found. These enigmas lead into a labyrinth, where blind and barbarous forces lay siege to individual lives and diverse cultures. "State of Siege is a novel of pure fiction, but infinitely more powerful than all the big speeches about Bosnia."-Le Nouvel Observateur "A passionate dialogue with the reader, a reflection on privacy and commitment [engagement], with the steady vigilant presence of a great literary voice."-Le Monde "The reader is thrown into the unreality of a besieged city, as if a firm hand had rudely pushed him out of the tank that brought him from the airport."-L'Express "For the Spaniard Juan Goytisolo, writing is a dangerous adventure." -Lire "Dreams, reminiscences of the war in Spain, thoughts on the novel, borrowings from mystery and detective fiction, references to ancient cultures and Arabic culture, numerous allusions to the narrative structure of Don Quixote-these make up the form of this novel that, as the author says in an ironic and provocative way, isn't written 'according to the rules.'"-Fayard Presse Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931 and lives in Marrakech. In 1993, he was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for his literary achievement and contribution to world culture. His translated works include a two-volume autobiography, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife, the novels Marks of Identity, Count Julian, Juan the Landless, Quarantine, Virtues of a Solitary Bird, The Marx Family Saga, and The Garden of Secrets, and the essays Saracen Chronicles and Landscapes of War.

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