Search results for ""City Lights Books""

Voted one of the Top 25 Books of 1999 by the Village Voice. As a poet, translator, critic, and scholar, Ammiel Alcalay has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, The New Republic, and Middle east Report, as well as for such literary journals as Grand Street, Conjunctions, and Paper Air. In Memories of Our Future, the unique intellectual and political path forged by Alcalay over the past fifteen years has now been collected in one volume. In a mix of personal narrative, political commentary, and literary criticism, Alcalay surveys diverse subjects, among them Mediterranean culture, Arabic literature, the destruction of Carthage, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the war in Bosnia. "In the truest sense, the essays in Memories of Our Future bear witness to events and ideas that shape the world. Poet, translator, scholar, Ammiel Alcalay brings to any subject an acute sensitivity to writing and a sophisticated understanding of the way politics works to produce and maintain literature. Whether thinking about diaspora, memory, modernism, sacred texts, or Juan Goytisolo, he attends to voices that are excluded or silenced. Ammiel Alcalay is a unique and important figure in contemporary world literature." --Lynne Tillman, author of No Lease On Life "Few contemporary intellectuals can boast of as diverse a range of skills and talents as Ammiel Alcalay. His work is cosmopolitan in the best sense: in an epoch of superficial globalism his approach to the cultures he deals with is always rigorous, always meticulously respectful of particularities and differences. Unlike many contemporary literary theoreticians, he is also profoundly alive to the social and political realities that shape cultural production. There is no one better qualified to explore the meaning of today's 'culture wars', locally and globally." --Amitav Ghosh, author of The Glass Palace "An outstanding anthology of essays surveying the complexities of Mediterranean cultures; the diverse, changing space of the Balkans, Middle East, and North Africa--areas of diasporas, dislocations, and genocidal exterminations provoked by nationalism and religious fanaticism. Of special interest are his observations and analysis of the Israeli/Palestinian confrontation, Arab/Jewish poetics, and Jewish identity in America." --Midwest Book Review Ammiel Alcalay is poet, translator, critic, and scholar who teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of, among other books, After Jews and Arabs (1993); The Cairo Notebooks (1993); Memories of Our Future (1999); From the Warring Factions (2002); Scrapmetal (2007), and A Little History (2010). He was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and helped to organize the Olson Now project. He launched Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a publishing venture whose mission is to retrieve and make available key texts falling widely under the rubric of the New American Poetry.

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This first anthology of twentieth-century Israeli literature to feature the work of writers who were born in-or whose families originated from-the Levant, Turkey, Iran, India, and Arab worlds represents twenty-four authors whose concerns with cultural identity, race, class, gender, and political allegiances place their work alongside today's emerging rediscovered and reinvented Arab, African, Indian, African-American, and Caribbean traditions. "This brilliant collection makes the emphatic point that translation is of necessity political and gives us ample evidence of those who have been thus silenced. Our imagination of the Middle East and its peoples must alter, reading these completely moving texts by so many diverse writers of consummate authority. Ammiel Alcalay has done us all a great service." --Robert Creeley "We need this book! The soil is so deeply mixed, the stories and voices redolent with shared fragrances and new seedlings. Anyone who imagines Jews and Arabs to be strictly oppositional needs to explore the rich twining of roots offered here, and consider how this cross-pollination may hold the hope for the whole region. Ammiel Alcalay is a fine, wise gardener." -- Naomi Shihab Nye "Having established himself as one of the most attentive readers of the Jewish-Arab Mediterranean past, Ammiel Alcalay sets out in this remarkable anthology to subversively redraw the boundaries and strata of modern Hebrew literature, introducing to the American reader key-notes that are almost inaudible within the Israeli literary establishment, and tracing the Oriental characters, long erased from the palimpsest of Hebrew literature." --Anton Shammas "A Jew writing in Arabic is not read in Israel...' So writes Samir Naqqash. Ammiel Alcalay's remarkable selection of texts is a plea on behalf of Israeli imaginations in spiritual exile. One is driven to meditate on the genius of truth in every re-visionary monument of home." --Wilson Harris Ammiel Alcalay is poet, translator, critic, and scholar who teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of, among other books, After Jews and Arabs (1993); the cairo notebooks (1993); Memories of Our Future (1999); from the warring factions (2002); Scrapmetal (2007), and A Little History (2010). He was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and helped to organize the Olson Now project. He launched Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a publishing venture whose mission is to retrieve and make available key texts falling widely under the rubric of the New American Poetry.

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From the introduction by Michael Hamburger:“Baudelaire's prose poems were written at long intervals during the last twelve or thirteen years of his life. The prose poem was a medium much suited to his habits and character. Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty. His thinking about society and politics, as about everything else, was experimental; like the thinking of most poets it drew on experience and imagination, rather than on facts and general arguments. That is another reason why the prose poem proved a medium so congenial to Baudelaire.”Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a French poet, essayist, art critic and translator for Edgar Allan Poe. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" to describe the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

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"My heroes are Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Oguz Atay, and Yusuf Atilgan. I have become a novelist by following their footsteps ...I love Yusuf Atilgan; he manages to remain local although he benefits from Faulkner's works and the Western traditions."--Orhan Pamuk "Motherland Hotel is a startling masterpiece, a perfect existential nightmare, the portrait of a soul lost on the threshold of an ever-postponed Eden."--Alberto Manguel "This moving and unsettling portrait of obsession run amok might have been written in 1970s Turkey, when social mores after Ataturk were still evolving, but it stays as relevant as the country struggles to save the very democratic ideals on which the Republic was rebirthed...brilliant writing ..."--Poornima Apte, Booklist, Starred Review "Turkish writer Atilgan's classic 1973 novel about alienation, obsession, and precipitous decline, nimbly translated by Stark...An unsettling study of a mind, steeped in violence, dropping off the edge of reason." --Kirkus Reviews "A maladroit loner who runs the seen-better-days Motherland Hotel in a backwater Turkish town, Zeberjet has become obsessed with a female guest who stayed there briefly and frantically anticipates her presumed return...as Zeberjet becomes increasingly unhinged, we're drawn into his dark interior life while coming to understand Turkey's post--Ottoman uncertainty. Sophisticated readers will understand why Atilgan is called the father of Turkish modernism, while those who enjoy dark psychological novels can also appreciate."--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal "Yusuf Atilgan gives us a wonderful, timeless novel about obsession, with an anti-hero who is both victim and perpetrator, living out a life 'neither dead nor alive' in a sleepy Aegean city. Motherland Hotel is an absolute gem of Turkish literature."--Esmahan Aykol, author of Divorce Turkish Style "Yusuf Atilgan, like Patrick Modiano, demonstrates how the everyday can reflect larger passions and catastrophes. Beautifully written and translated, Motherland Hotel can finally find the wider audience in the west that it deserves." --Susan Daitch, author of The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir "The freedom that Atilgan articulates isn't the freedom of Lord Byron or Milton Friedman. It's more like the sense of freedom that comes with finally having a diagnoses. It's the freedom that comes from understanding that you're imprisoned in other people's' ideas of freedom. But there's a consolation and a quiet wisdom that comes from understanding that these definitions will pass in turn, like guests checking out of a hotel."--Scott Beauchamp, Full Stop Zeberjet, the last surviving member of a once prosperous Ottoman family, is the owner of the Motherland Hotel, a run-down establishment a rundown establishment near the railroad station. A lonely, middle-aged introvert, his simple life is structured by daily administrative tasks and regular, routine sex with the hotel's maid. One day, a beautiful woman from the capital comes to spend the night, promising to return "next week," and suddenly Zeberjet's insular, mechanical existence is dramatically and irrevocably changed. The mysterious woman's presence has tantalized him, and he begins to live his days in fevered anticipation of her return. But the week passes, and then another, and as his fantasies become more and more obsessive, Zeberjet gradually loses his grip on reality. Motherland Hotel was hailed as the novel of the year when it was published in 1973, astonishing critics with its experimental style, its intense psychological depth and its audacious description of sexual obsession. Zeberjet was compared to such memorable characters as Quentin Compson in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Meursault in Albert Camus' The Stranger. While author Yusuf Atilgan had already achieved considerable literary fame, Motherland Hotel cemented his reputation as one of Turkey's premier modernists.

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Anne Waldman takes the opportunity with this twentieth-anniversary expanded edition to add twenty poems to this collection that brings into focus her lifelong engagement with "Chant" as central to contemporary performative poetry. Here are spells, invocations, laments, ritual rants. Archaic beliefs in magic and ecstasy meet current notions of the power of the spoken word. Waldman writes, "The poem is a textured energy field or modal structure. The poems for performance seem to manifest as psychological states of mind. They come together in a mental, verbal, physical, and emotional form, making their particular demands on my voice and body. I am the 'energumen.' The poem is the experience." Also included in this book are three essays on the oral tradition in poetry. One essay discusses the history and occasion of the title poem. The others treat such topics as performance art and poetic tradition, ethnopoetics, intoxication and transformation, Tibetan Buddhism, and the renewed ascendency of feminine energy in writing. Anne Waldman, world renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks of poetry. She is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "Anne Waldman is one of the fastest, wisest women to run with the wolves in some time." -- The New York Times Book Review Anne Waldman, world renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks of poetry including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet to be Born, and Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets).

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One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Poetry Books for Spring 2023Metamorphoses springs from Ovid’s epic poem to explore the slipperiness of identity, its propensity for change and transience. In poems that shift registers from travelogue to elegy, from nature documentary to a simple record of the realities of daily life, Evan Kennedy focuses on transformation, personal and collective, in an empire in decline, in a world transfigured by ecological upheaval. With a range of reference from Roman household Gods to San Francisco poetic titans to musical celebrities like Madonna and Bob Dylan, Metamorphoses confronts change as an inevitable molecular process.

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the delicacy of embracing spirals investigates the ways in which the personal narrative of Black queer womanhood can be expressed through, a radically human lens. “mimi tempestt writes like a third testament in which God (or our understanding) finally matures. Like a painter longed for by a million canvasses. No peer. No rival. Just a cosmos enjoyed by friends; alive in the most exciting mind of our generation.”—Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of Blood on the FogWith a visual sensibility that explodes across the page, the collection begins with microcosmic poems of personal struggle and spirals out to macrocosmic texts of social and political critique. The book culminates in a fantastic account of the staging of a play with life-threatening consequences.

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A conjuration of ancient consciousness aimed at rehumanizing our contemporary cyborg condition."Referring to the American continent, ''Abya Yala'' (''land of life'') is a pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamá and Colombia. Harrison wrestles with language, racism, and humanity in political and spiritual poems."—Publishers Weekly, Most Anticipated Poetry Books, Spring 2024“Abya Yala”—“land of life” or “land of vital blood”—is a Pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamá and Colombia to refer to the American continent and more recently has signified the idea of a decolonized “New World” among various Indigenous movements. In Isthmus to Abya Yala, Panamanian American poet Roberto Harrison summons a mythic consciousness in response to this political and spiritual struggle. In his poems, with mysti

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Rising Up offers a timely exploration of how truthful narratives by and about people of color can be used to advance social justice in the United States. While people of color are fast becoming the majority population in the United States, the perspectives of white America still dominate the vast majority of the media created and consumed every day. Media makers of color, long shut out of the decision-making process, are rising up to advance a set of different narratives, offering stories and perspectives to counter the racism and disinformation that have long dominated America’s political and cultural landscape. In Rising Up, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar delivers a guide to racial justice narrative-setting. With a focus on shifting perspectives in news media, entertainment, and individual discourse, she highlights the writers, creators, educators, and influencers who are successfully building a culture of affirmation and inclusion. “Sonali Kolhatkar reminds us we are the stories we tell. Our stories can cast a spell of hate, division, and fear, or they can break the powerful grip of racial injustices that have held us since our country’s beginning. With personal and collective wisdom, Kolhatkar guides us in the storytelling that liberates.”—Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running: La Vida Loco/Gang Days in L.A. “Rising Up challenges the reader to not only rethink their assumptions, but to understand the critical importance of the creation of progressive narratives as an instrument in the struggles for human liberation.”—Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of The Man Who Fell From the Sky

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From Will Alexander, finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, a new collection of poems from the intersection between surrealism and afro-futurism, where Césaire meets Sun Ra. Divine Blue Light further affirms Alexander’s status as one of the most unique and innovative voices in contemporary poetry.One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Notable Poetry Books for Fall 2022!“Since the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines.”—The New York TimesAgainst the ruins of a contemporary globalist discourse, which he denounces as a “lingual theocracy of super-imposed rationality,” Will Alexander’s poems constitute an alternative cartography that draws upon omnivorous reading—in subjects from biology to astronomy to history to philosophy—amalgamating their diverse vocabularies into an impossible instrument only he can play. Divine Blue Light is anchored by three major works: the opening “Condoned to Disappearance,” a meditation on the heteronymic exploits of Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa; the closing “Imprecation as Mirage,” a poem channeling an Indonesian man; and the title poem, an anthemic ode to the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Other key pieces include “Accessing Gertrude Bell,” a critique of one of the designers of the modern state of Iraq; “Deficits: Chaïm Soutine & Joan Miró,” in homage to two Jewish artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France; and “According to Stellar Scale,” a compact lyric that traveled to space with astronaut Sian Proctor. The newest installment in our Pocket Poets Series, Divine Blue Light confirms Alexander’s status among the foremost surrealists writing in English today.Praise for Divine Blue Light:"Adopting a surrealist approach to making sense of the universe, Alexander plumbs language for its limits, often with dazzling results....Pondering the mysteries of existence and artistic influence, this engrossing work turns the quest for self-knowledge into a choral act."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"Alexander’s range—which moves past the propriety of each subject to the expansiveness of every—can be approximated as Aimé Césaire’s totality of the lion, or form and emptiness, or appositional, apparitional Black being. And this being is most real and realized through the collection’s quantum mechanics and dynamics, which Alexander invokes astrophysically, evokes metaphysically."—Jenna Peng, The Poetry Foundation"These surrealist and Afrofuturist poems examine politics, globalism, and the powers and limitations of language, while paying tribute to artists forced to flee the Nazi invasion of France.”—Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly"The 'invisible current' Will Alexander channels in the meteoric poems of Divine Blue Light is not surreal escape but vibrational engagement—an engagement with the infinite streams of the heart of being."—Jeffrey Yang, author of Line and Light"Like agua tilting itself into a god, Will’s texts suffuse the horizon of Poetry with the abstract purity of their oceanic movements, sun-condensing, dissolving seemingly endless sight into a disappearing instant of the Miraculous. Divine Blue Light exists by what it exudes."—Carlos Lara, author of Like Bismuth When I Enter

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Queer pastoral lyrics take on the romantic sublime in a stunningly assured debut collection.Sophia Dahlin’s first full-length collection, Natch, is a dazzling array of queer erotic lyrics demanding pasture in the romantic sublime. By turns dreamy, hysterical, earthy, and perverse, the poems of Natch speak the dialogue of a person’s parts, the dynamism of a queer body desiring something between rest and consumption. In her stunningly assured voice, compounded of bravado and vulnerability, Dahlin outlines the threshold where feeling takes over the body’s functioning, desire leads us past deciding, and we are so lustful that we are not dead when we have finished dying.“Sophia Dahlin’s witty, searching, and multi-humored poems are astute and forthright in their light/dark erotics. With the buoyancy that Natch suggests, this is also serious stuff. Refusing default logics, ingenious poetic powers are at play in these pages.”—Joan Retallack, author of BOSCH'D"The thinking in Sophia Dahlin's poems is thrillingly unforeseeable, the turns of phrase are addictively unique, and the poems as wholes will leave most of the other things you read tasting awfully bland by comparison. This is poetry written at the pitch of a brilliant mind, expressed with rare lucidity."—Kit Schluter, author of Pierrot's Fingernails"Natch is poetry gold-plated with queer love and lust. Sophia Dahlin resists the rigid binary of top v. bottom and instead renders a switchy lyricism that perverts all things pastoral in embrace of queer slipperiness. Give Natch the summer sweat and oozing attention it deserves."—Andrea Abi-Karam, author of EXTRATRANSMISSION

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An arresting memoir of the final years and tragic suicide of one of twentieth-century Europe’s greatest poets, published on the centenary of his birth."Daive's memoir sensitively conjures a portrait of a man tormented by both his mind and his medical treatment but who nonetheless remained a generous friend and a poet for whom writing was a matter of life and death."—The New Yorker"Jean Daive's memoir of his brief but intense spell as confidant and poetic confrère of Paul Celan offers us unique access to the mind and personality of one of the great poets of the dark twentieth century."—J.M. CoetzeePaul Celan (1920–1970) is considered one of Europe's greatest post-World-War II poets, known for his astonishing experiments in poetic form, expression, and address. Under the Dome is French poet Jean Daive's haunting memoir of his friendship with Celan, a precise yet elliptical account of their daily meetings, discussions, and walks through Paris, a routine that ended suddenly when Celan committed suicide by drowning himself in the Seine. Daive's grief at the loss of his friend finds expression in Under the Dome, where we are given an intimate insight into Celan's last years, at the height of his poetic powers, and as he approached the moment when he would succumb to the debilitating emotional pain of a Holocaust survivor.In Under the Dome, Jean Daive illuminates Celan's process of thinking about poetry, grappling with questions of where it comes from and what it does: invaluable insights about poetry's relation to history and ethics, and how poems offer pathways into a deeper grasp of our past and present. This new edition of Rosmarie Waldrop’s masterful translation includes an introduction by scholars Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard, which provides critical, historical, and cultural context for Daive’s enigmatic, timeless text."Under the Dome breathes with Celan while walking with Celan, walking in the dark and the light with Celan, invoking the stillness, the silence, of the breathturn while speaking for the deeply human necessity of poetry."—Michael Palmer, author of The Laughter of the Sphinx"The fragments textured together in this more-than-magnificent rendering of Jean Daive’s prose poem by this master of the word, Rosmarie Waldrop, grab on and leave us haunted and speechless."—Mary Ann Caws, author of Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism and editor of the Yale Anthology of Twentieth Century French Poetry"Rosmarie Waldrop's brilliant translation resonates with her profound knowledge of both Celan's and Daive's poetry and the passion for language that she shares with them. The text brings these three major poets together in a highly unusual and wholly successful collaboration."—Cole Swensen, author of On Walking On"Rosmarie Waldrop takes up Celan’s question to Jean Daive as her own. I cannot unread her inimitable ease in these pages. This is a book that contends with time."—Fady Joudah, author of Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance"Daive's writing is a highly punctuated recollection, a memoir, perhaps a testimony, but also surely a way of attending to the time of the writing, the conditions and coordinates of Celan's various enunciations, his linguistic humility. … Celan’s death, what Daive calls 'really unforeseeable,' remains as an 'undercurrent' in the conversations recollected here, gathered up again, with an insistence and clarity of true mourning and acknowledgement."—Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence

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The story of how a national grassroots network fought a resurgence of the KKK and other fascist groups during the Reagan years, laying the groundwork for today’s anti-fascist/anti-racist movements."Smash fascism! Read this book!"—Tom Morello, songwriter and guitarist with Rage Against the Machine"Studying the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee will give readers an understanding of the complexity of deconstructing the weapon of white supremacy from the inside out. Thank you Hilary and James for the precision of this analysis, and the true north of this star."—adrienne maree brown, author of Pleasure Activism and Emergent StrategyIn June 1977, a group of white anti-racist activists received an alarming letter from an inmate at a New York state prison calling for help to fight the Ku Klux Klan's efforts to recruit prison staff and influence the people incarcerated. Their response was to form the first chapter of what would eventually become a powerful, nationwide grassroots network, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, dedicated to countering the rise of the KKK and other far-right white nationalist groups.No Fascist USA! tells the story of that network, whose efforts throughout the 1980s—which included exposing white supremacists in public office, confronting neo-Nazis in street protests, supporting movements for self-determination, and engagement with the underground punk scene—laid the groundwork for many anti-racist efforts to emerge since. Featuring original research, interviews with former members, and a trove of graphic materials, their story offers battle-tested lessons for those on the frontlines of social justice work today.Praise for No Fascist USA!:"Hilary Moore and James Tracy have written a magnificent book that not only corrects the record but helps explain the mercurial rise of white supremacist organizations in the 1970s, how the Klan was (temporarily) defeated, and why this period has been largely ignored. No Fascist USA! radically shifts our perspective, challenging the prevailing wisdom that racist terrorism rises in response to economic downturns, white downward mobility, or in a vacuum created by progressive alternatives. I love this book."—Robin D.G. Kelley, from the foreword"No Fascist USA! is not only timely, but also essential in the present period of accelerated white supremacist activity and anti-racist organizing to combat it. In telling the story of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, the authors, without romanticizing or condemning, draw important lessons from the fifteen-year history of the group."—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment“With its savvy blend of youth culture and street confrontation, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee tried to stop Trumpism before Trump. They confronted the rise of white nationalism in prisons, workplaces, and music scenes when precious few paid attention to it . . . Hilary Moore and James Tracy have gifted us with an urgent read.”—Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era“James Tracy and Hilary Moore deliver a searing, bold new work that examines another painful and complicated chapter in American race relations. In an eye-opening account, They are able to connect the dots of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, a band of contemporary predominantly white activists, and its efforts to expose white supremacist organizations. With a fresh eye and new research, their book uncovers with stunning precision how these groups remain active and exposes some of their unlikely alliances.”—Laurens Grant, filmmaker, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and Freedom Riders“We learned from history. You can too!”—Terry Bisson, author of Fire on the Mountain and former member of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee"This book is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the roots of what happened in Charlottesville, and the burgeoning white nationalist membership lists in the U.S. today. We cannot possibly take on the challenges we face without learning from the past. This book is a necessary and long overdue contribution to inform the way forward."—Carla F. Wallace, co-founder, Showing Up for Racial Justice"I've waited thirty years for this book! Our emergency hearts have always driven uprisings to stop white terrorism, but it always takes more than black-bloc tactics in the streets to stop fascists. No Fascist USA! firmly connects today's militant anti-fascist street-fighting movements with important living radical histories to disrupt the cycles that keep the spectre of fascism alive in the modern era. The struggles faced by the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee continue today in our difficult arc towards collective liberation."—scott crow, author of Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense

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A series of personal and historical encounters with surrealism from one of its foremost practitioners in the United States."Penelope Rosemont has given us, better than anyone else in the English language, a marvelous, meticulous exploration of the surrealist experience, in all its infinite variety."—Gerome Kamrowski, American Surrealist PainterOne of the hallmarks of Surrealism is the encounter, often by chance, with a key person, place, or object through a trajectory no one could have predicted. Penelope Rosemont draws on a lifetime of such experiences in her collection of essays, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields. From her youthful forays as a radical student in Chicago to her pivotal meeting with André Breton and the Surrealist Movement in Paris, Rosemont—one of the movement's leading exponents in the United States—documents her unending search for the Marvelous.Surrealism finds her rubbing shoulders with some of the movement's most important visual artists, such as Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Mimi Parent, and Toyen; discussing politics and spectacle with Guy Debord; and crossing paths with poet Ted Joans and outsider artist Lee Godie. The book also includes scholarly investigations into American radicals like George Francis Train and Mary MacLane, the myth of the Golden Goose, and Dada precursor Emmy Hennings.Praise for Surrealism:"Rosemont is not delivering dry abstractions, as so many academic 'specialists,' but telling us about warm and exciting human encounters, illuminated by the subversive spirit of Permanent Enchantment."—Michael Löwy, author of Ecosocialism"This compelling and well-drawn book lets us see the adventures, inspirations, and relationships that have shaped Penelope Rosemont's art and rebellion."—David Roediger, author of Class, Race, and Marxism"The broad sampling of essays included here offer a compelling entry point for curious readers and an essential compendium for surrealist practitioners."—Abigail Susik, professor of art history, Willamette University"Rosemont's welcome memoir has a double virtue, as testament to the enduring radiance of Surrealism, and as a memento to the Sixties, revealing a sweetly beating wonderment at the heart of that absurdly maligned decade."—Jed Rasula, author of Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century"Artist, historian, and social activist, Rosemont writes from the inside out. Like a rare, hybrid flower growing out of the earth, she complicates, expands, and opens the strange and beautiful meadow where Surrealism continues to live and thrive.”—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Wild Milk"In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Penelope Rosemont, long a keeper of surrealism's revolutionary flame, shows how a penetrating look into the past can liberate the future."—Andrew Joron, author of The Absolute Letter"Rosemont recreates the feverish antics and immediate reception her close-knit, sleep-deprived, beat-attired squad find in the established, moray-breaking Parisian and international surrealists. Revolution is here, between the covers."—Gillian Conoley, author of A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems and translator of Thousand Times Broken: Three Books by Henri Michaux

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"The book that most shocked me this year for its literary quality is called Tzompaxtle, although in English it has another title, Torn from the World. The author is John Gibler, a real outlaw."--Diego Enrique Osorno, author of El Cartel de Sinaloa Andres Tzompaxtle Tecpile was torn from the world. Abducted off the street, blindfolded and beaten, he was brought to a Mexican military facility and "disappeared." Tzompaxtle, a young member of an insurgent guerrilla movement, was subjected to months of interrogation and torture as the military tried to extract information from him. In an effort to buy time to protect his family and comrades, and to keep himself alive, he lead his captors on fruitless journeys to abandoned safe-houses and false rendezvous locations for four months. Finally, faced with imminent execution, he decided to make what he thought was a suicidal attempt at escape; when he miraculously survived, he was able to return underground. Gleaned from years of clandestine interviews, Tzompaxtle's story offers a rare glimpse into chronic injustice, underground resistance movements, and the practice of forced disappearance and torture in contemporary Mexico. "At once harrowing and humane, John Gibler's wonderful new book shines a light on the darkest corners of the Mexican justice system. We cannot turn away from what we see there. This is a brave, daring book, equal in every way to the extraordinary life it documents."--Daniel Alarcon, author of The King is Always Above the People "Once in a long while a brilliant writer happens on a story he was born to tell--a story that in its stark and unremitting horror gives us a glimpse of the world as it is, unvarnished and unredeemed. John Gibler is such a writer and Torn From the World is such a story. A wrenching, astonishing tale, brilliantly told."--Mark Danner, author of The Massacre at El Mozote "Torn from the World is the product of a thorough investigation and it is written with rage and humility at the same time. This is the work of one of the most important journalists of our time."--Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World "John Gibler's powerful recounting of the forced disappearance of Andres Tzompaxtle Tecpile unearths the brutal machinery of state-sanctioned torture and terrorism in Mexico today. This book must provoke an outcry."--Sujatha Fernandes, author of Curated Stories "Not since Rodolfo Walsh's classic Operation Massacre have I read a work of political and literary journalism as inventive and urgent as John Gibler's Torn from the World. With courage, empathy, and clear-sightedness, Gibler tackles questions most journalists won't go near."--Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine "The North American journalist John Gibler not only presents here the guerrilla combatant's story, but also contextualized it within the broader, very troubled history of class relations in Guerrero and the contemporary proliferation of human rights abuses in Mexico, from Ayotzinapa to Ciudad."--Jesse Lerner, author of The Shock of Modernity

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Winner of the 2005 Lambda Literary Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction. "The Beautifully Worthless is an outrageous act of kindness."--Eileen Myles "She's insanely talented, it's mad. The Beautifully Worthless crisscrosses the USA, like Close to the Knives, like Kerouac, desperately seeking out everything occluded and driven, a frenzy of seeking frozen into poetry."--Kevin Killian "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 A runaway waitress leaves her lover, grabs her dog, and hits the highway. Ali Liebegott maps her travels in a series of hilarious and heartbreaking letters to the girl she left behind, and some of the most exquisite poetry written about love, heartache, and madness.

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Everyone's favorite Dirty Old Man returns with a new volume of uncollected work. Charles Bukowski (1920--1994), one of the most outrageous figures of twentieth-century American literature, was so prolific that many significant pieces never found their way into his books. Absence of the Hero contains much of his earliest fiction, unseen in decades, as well as a number of previously unpublished stories and essays. The classic Bukowskian obsessions are here: sex, booze, and gambling, along with trenchant analysis of what he calls "Playing and Being the Pet." Among the book's highlights are tales of his infamous public readings ("The Big Dope Reading," "I Just Write Poetry So I Can Go to Bed with Girls"); a review of his own first book; hilarious installments of his newspaper column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, including meditations on neo-Nazis and driving in Los Angeles; and an uncharacteristic tale of getting lost in the Utah woods ("Bukowski Takes a Trip"). Yet the book also showcases the other Bukowski-an astute if offbeat literary critic. From his own "Manifesto" to his account of poetry in Los Angeles ("A Foreword to These Poets") to idiosyncratic evaluations of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones, and Louis Zukofsky, Absence of the Hero reveals the intellectual hidden beneath the gruff exterior. Our second volume of his uncollected prose, Absence of the Hero is a major addition to the Bukowski canon, essential for fans, yet suitable for new readers as an introduction to the wide range of his work. "He loads his head full of coal and diamonds shoot out of his finger tips. What a trick. The mole genius has left us with another digest. It's a full house--read 'em and weep."--Tom Waits "This second volume of Bukowski's uncollected stories and essays offers all that Bukowski is known for--wry obscenity, smutty wisdom, seeming ramblings whose hidden smarts catch you unaware--but in addition there are moments here in which he takes off the mask and strips away the bravado to show himself at his most vulnerable and human. A must for Bukowski aficionados." --Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and The Open Curtain "Like a brass-rail Existentialist or a skid-row Transcendentalist, [Bukowski] is candid, unblinking, leaving it to his readers to cast their own judgment about his mishaps, his drinking, his sexual appetite or his own pessimism. He is Ralph Waldo Emerson as a Dirty Old Man, not lounging in the grape-arbor of Concord, Massachusetts, but bent-over a table in an L.A. flophouse scribbling in pencil to the strains of Sibelius."--Paul Maher Jr., Phawker "[Bukowski] could be generous and mean-spirited, heroic and defensive, spot-on and slanted, but he became the world-class writer he had set out to be; he has joined the permanent anti-canon or shadow-canon whose denizens had shown him the way. Today the frequent allusions to him in both popular and mainstream culture tend more to respect than mockery. If scholarship has lagged, this book would indicate that this situation is changing." --Gerald Locklin, Resources for American Literary Study "The pieces range over nearly half a century, and include a story about a baseball player seized by a sudden bout of existential paralysis, along with early, graphically sexual (and masterfully comic) stories published in such smut mags as Candid Press."--Penthouse "An absolute must for fans of Charles Bukowski's work, Absence of a Hero is also a welcome addition to public and college library literary studies shelves."--Midwest Book Review

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Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was a major cultural figure in post-WWII Italy, well-known as a poet, novelist, communist intellectual, and filmmaker. In Danger is the first anthology in English devoted to his political and literary essays, with a generous selection of his poetry. Against the backdrop of post-war Italy, and through the mid-'70s, Pasolini's writings provide a fascinating portrait of a Europe in which fascists and communists violently clashed for power and where journalists ran great risks. The controversial and openly gay Pasolini was murdered at the age of fifty-three; In Danger includes his final interview, conducted hours before his death.

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A book of cosmological surrealism in the tradition of Octavio Paz, Solar Poems is the first English translation of a single volume of poems by Mexico's famed poet-diplomat Homero Aridjis, exploring political consciousness as well as visionary psychological themes. President emeritus of International PEN, the prolific poet is Mexico's ambassador to UNESCO. Poemas solares (Solar Poems) was published in 2005. Translator George McWhirter won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Catalan Poems, the F.R. Scott Prize for Selected Poems of Jose Emilio Pacheco, and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for his novel Cage. He is Vancouver's first Poet Laureate. "Homero Aridjis is a profoundly ecological poet who has put his fame and time where his principles are, fighting to save the monarch butterflies that winter by the billions in the mountains of his native Michoacan, the sea turtle that lays her eggs on Caribbean beaches, and the gray whale that calves in the lagoons of Baja California. Aridjis writes to the point, with an open eye and a sense of humor ..." --John Oliver Simon, Poetry Flash

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In 1858, two black women meet at a restaurant and begin to plot a revolution. Mary Ellen Pleasant owns a string of hotels in San Francisco that secretly double as havens for runaway slaves. Her comrade, Annie, is a young Jamaican who has given up her life of privilege to fight for the abolitionist cause. Together they join John Brown's doomed enterprise and barely escape with their lives. With mesmerizing skill, Cliff weaves a multitude of voices into a gripping, poignant story of the struggle for liberation that began not long after the first slaves landed on America's shores. Michelle Cliff is the author of No Telephone to Heaven, among other books of fiction, and a forthcoming essay collection, Apocalypso. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA.

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Ward Churchill has achieved an unparalleled reputation as a scholar-activist and analyst of indigenous issues in North America. Here, he explores the history of holocaust and denial in this hemisphere, beginning with the arrival of Columbus and continuing on into the present. He frames the matter by examining both "revisionist" denial of the nazi-perpatrated Holocaust and the opposing claim of its exclusive "uniqueness," using the full scope of what happened in Europe as a backdrop against which to demonstrate that genocide is precisely what has been-and still is-carried out against the American Indians. Churchill lays bare the means by which many of these realities have remained hidden, how public understanding of this most monstrous of crimes has been subverted not only by its perpetrators and their beneficiaries but by the institutions and individuals who perceive advantages in the confusion. In particular, he outlines the reasons underlying the United States's 40-year refusal to ratify the Genocide Convention, as well as the implications of the attempt to exempt itself from compliance when it finally offered its "endorsement." In conclusion, Churchill proposes a more adequate and coherent definition of the crime as a basis for identifying, punishing, and preventing genocidal practices, wherever and whenever they occur. "Ward Churchill opens the X-Files of American history to examine the phenomenon of genocide in eight essays..." --Susan A. Miller, University of Nebraska-Lincoln "Churchill relates the history of genocide and the struggle for a definition of the term sufficiently accurate and comprehensive, to prevent the watering down of the concept, and to cut through the misleading rhetoric which now obfuscates debate, thereby permitting this and other genocides to continue..." --A. Clare Brandabur, Purdue University "Churchill paints the whole picture here -- from Columbus onwards, the major and significant struggles between an ignorant but brutal Conquistadores and the all-too-vulnerable American Tribes are analysed in a context of deliberate genocide. In terms of effectiveness, it surpasses the holocaust delivered upon European Jewry by the Nazi's." --Schnews.org.uk Ward Churchill (enrolled Keetoowah Cherokee) is Professor of American Indian Studies with the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. A member of the American Indian Movement since 1972, he has been a leader of the Colorado chapter for the past fifteen years. Among his previous books have been Fantasies of a Master Race, Struggle for the Land, Since Predator Came, and From a Native Son.

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Rediscover Joyce Mansour, the most significant Surrealist poet to emerge from 1950s Paris.“You know very well, Joyce, that you are for me—and very objectively too—the greatest poet of our time. Surrealist poetry, that’s you.”—André Breton Joyce Mansour, a Syrian Jewish exile from Egypt, was 25 years old when she published her first book in Paris in 1953. Her fierce, macabre, erotically charged works caught the eye of André Breton, who welcomed her into his Surrealist group and became her lifelong friend and ally. Despite her success in surrealist circles, her books received scant attention from the literary establishment, which is hardly surprising since Mansour's favorite topics happened to be two of society's greatest fears: death and unfettered female desire.Now, over half a century later, Mansour's time has come. Emerald Wounds collects her most important work, spanning the entire arc of her career, from the gothic, minimalist fragments of her first published work to the serpentine power of her poems of the 1980s. In fresh new translations, Mansour's voice surges forth uncensored and raw, communicating the frustrations, anger, and sadness of an intelligent, worldly woman who defies the constraints and oppression of a male-dominated society. Mansour is a poet the world needs today.

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"A must-read for anyone interested in social justice and inequalities, social movements, the criminal justice system, and African American history. An excellent companion to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th."—Library Journal, Starred review "I was fortunate to grow up in a community in which it was apparent that our lives mattered. This memory is the antidote to the despair that seizes one of my generation when we hear the words 'Black Lives Matter.' We want to shout: Of course they do! To you, especially. In this brilliant, painful, factual and useful book, we see to whom our lives have not mattered: the profit driven Euro-Americans who enslaved and worked our ancestors to death within a few years, then murdered them and bought replacements. Many of these ancestors are buried beneath Wall Street. Mumia Abu-Jamal's painstaking courage, truth-telling, and disinterest in avoiding the reality of American racial life is, as always, honorable."—Alice Walker "Prophet, critic, historian, witness . . . Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of the most insightful and consequential intellectuals of our era. These razor sharp reflections on racialized state violence in America are the fire and the memory our movements need right now."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination "Mumia Abu Jamal's clarion call for justice and defiance of state oppression has never dimmed, despite his decades of being shackled and caged. He is one of our nation's most valiant revolutionaries and courageous intellectuals."—Chris Hedges, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt "This collection of short meditations, written from a prison cell, captures the past two decades of police violence that gave rise to Black Lives Matter while digging deeply into the history of the United States. This is the book we need right now to find our bearings in the chaos." —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States In December 1981, Mumia Abu-Jamal was shot and beaten into unconsciousness by Philadelphia police. He awoke to find himself shackled to a hospital bed, accused of killing a cop. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that Amnesty International has denounced as failing to meet the minimum standards of judicial fairness. In Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States. This collection of his radio commentaries on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country's black population. Applying a personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously angry and calmly principled radical black perspective on how racist violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn things around. Mumia Abu-Jamal is author of many books, including Death Blossoms, Live from Death Row, All Things Censored, Writing on the Wall, and Jailhouse Lawyers. "[Mumia's] writings are a wake-up call. He is a voice from our prophetic tradition, speaking to us here, now, lovingly, urgently."—Cornel West "He allows us to reflect upon the fact that transformational possibilities often emerge where we least expect them."—Angela Y. Davis "These writings date from the late 1990s and often show prescience on the part of the author, who was writing well before the Black Lives Matter movement that 'when the system kills Blacks, there is no outrage, for it has been normalized by centuries of white enslavement, terrorism, and injustice. Such violence is simply the accepted way of how things are.' Also included is a series of articles on the killing of Trayvon Martin, accurately anticipating the acquittal of the white man who shot him, and another series on Ferguson and its aftermath—how 'Ferguson may prove a wake-up call that Black lives matter. A call for youth to build social, radical, revolutionary movements for change.' The last piece is the longest, a pamphlet on how to build such a movement with a historical perspective on why this is necessary."—Kirkus Reviews "While the author does reflect on the widely reported cases of police violence against African Americans, as well as on the role of the media in determining what gets attention, the strength of the book rests in the essays that draw attention to lesser-known victims of police violence, particularly women of color whose stories never reached the mainstream media. Over the course of nearly four decades in prison, Abu-Jamal . . . has become an astute student of the justice system as well as a particularly cogent opponent of the death penalty.”—Publishers Weekly

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National Book Award for Poetry, 1973 Beginning with "long poem of these States," The Fall of America continues Planet News chronicle tape-recorded scribed by hand or sung condensed, the flux of car bus airplane dream consciousness Person during Automated Electronic War years, newspaper headline radio brain auto poesy & silent desk musings, headline flashing on road through these states of consciousness..."[Ginsberg] is never negligible, and he is often (the only true test) unforgettable." -- Helen Vendler, New York Times Book Review Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was an influential writer and poet during the 1950's Beat Generation and is best known for his poem "Howl."

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The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1965 is here presented in a commemorative 40th Anniversary Edition. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems was originally published by City Lights Books in the Fall of 1956. Subsequently seized by U.S. customs and the San Francisco police, it was the subject of a long court trail at which a series of poets and professors persuaded the court that the book was not obscene. Howl & Other Poems is the single most influential poetic work of the post-World War II era, with over 1,000,000 copies now in print. "Howl was Allen's metamorphosis from quiet, brilliant, burning bohemian scholar trapped by his flames and repressions to epic vocal bard."--Michael McClure "It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages." --William Carlos Williams "At the height of his bardic powers, Allen Ginsberg could terrify the authorities with the mere utterance of the syllable "om" as he led street throngs of citizens protesting the Vietnam War. Ginsberg reigned as the raucous poet of American hippiedom and as a literary pioneer whose freewheeling masterwork "Howl" prevailed against government censorship in a landmark obscenity trial 50 years ago." -- New York Times "Fifty years ago, on October 3, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Allen Ginsberg's great epic Beat-era poem HOWL was not obscene but instead, a work of literary and social merit. This ruling allowed for the publication of HOWL and exonerated the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who faced jail time and a fine 50 years ago for publishing 'HOWL.'" -- Pacifica.org Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian emigre, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and schoolteacher, in Paterson, New Jersey. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote Kaddish 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile. Carl Solomon to whom Howl is addressed, is a intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet."

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Paul Madonna's popular comic, "All Over Coffee" had been running for twelve years in the San Francisco Chronicle when he was evicted from his longtime home and studio in the Mission District, ground-zero in the "tech wars" transforming the city. Suddenly finding himself yet another victim of San Francisco's overheated boomtown housing market, with its soaring prices and rampant evictions, Madonna decided to use his comic as a cathartic public platform to explore the experience, and to capture the complex, highly charged atmosphere of a city--and a life--being forced through a painful transition. In a series of drawings and stories, Madonna evokes the sense of vertigo induced by being forced from his home, and the roil of emotions that ensue as he enters into the city's brutal competition for a place to live. The line between reality and surreality begins to blur almost immediately, in real life and in his comic. Absurd, maddening, and all-too-poignant, these drawings and stories capture the spirit of not just San Francisco, but a cultural epidemic that has now spread to cities around the world. "For years I've been intrigued and charmed by Paul Madonna's careful and thoughtful drawings of overlooked nooks and by-ways of San Francisco. In his new book he now combines them with manic, delirious, and increasingly paranoid writings as he struggles with the all-consuming City dilemma of gentrification; of who came first, who gets to stay, which wave of usurpers is more 'real' and deserving than the next, and finally, what happens when someone decides it's your turn to go. Beautiful and engaging."--Sandow Birk, visual artist "Madonna has created a kind of San Francisco Realism, details so absurd, cruel, and beautiful that they can only come from our infuriating home. If Charlie Kaufman squatted in an illegal sublet in Armistead Maupin's mind, this would be the lovely tenant."--Joshua Mohr, author of All This Life "Paul Madonna's On to the Next Dream is bleak, terrifying, hilarious and lovely."--MariNaomi, author and illustrator of Turning Japanese "Simply delightful. I really don't like much out there, I really don't, but On to the Next Dream I couldn't put down. It was sharp, clever, honest, and maybe the funniest book on eviction ever written." --New Yorker cartoonist and New York Times bestselling author, Bob Eckstein, Footnotes from the World's Greatest Bookstores Praise for Everything is its own reward by Paul Madonna: "The book is fantastic. Of time and tenderness. Beautiful drawings. Beautiful text. Ethereal and serious at once. The book is its own reward."--Maira Kalman, illustrator "Mesmerizing ...When his international images are paired with his sparse, poetic words--sometimes thought-provoking one-liners such as 'You don't get anywhere without searching' and sometimes long, meandering sections of dialogue and story--the effect is haunting."--Oprah.com Paul Madonna is a San Francisco-based artist and writer. He is the creator of the comic series "All Over Coffee" and the author of two books, All Over Coffee and Everything is its own reward. His drawings and stories have appeared in numerous books and journals as well as galleries and museums, including the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Oakland Museum of California.

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"Old Angel Midnight is one of the great delights of the boundless improvisational world. Jack Kerouac's ear is peerless, manifesting structures otherwise impossible. A masterpiece of the mind freed to fly. Read it aloud, for yourself, 'for the sake of reading, and for the sake of the Tongue ...Let's hear the Sound of the Universe, son.'"-Clark Coolidge Old Angel Midnight is a treasure trove of Kerouac's experiments with automatic writing, a method he practiced constantly to sharpen his imaginative reflexes. Recorded in a series of notebooks between 1956-1959, what Kerouac called his "endless automatic writing piece" began while he shared a cabin with poet Gary Snyder. Kerouac tried to emulate Snyder's daily Buddhist meditation discipline, using the technique of "letting go" to free his mind for pure spontaneous writing, annotating the stream of words flowing through his consciousness in response to auditory stimuli and his own mental images. Kerouac continued his exercise in spontaneous composition over the next three years, including a period spent with William Burroughs in Tangiers. He made no revisions to the automatic writing entries in his notebooks, which were collected and transcribed for publication as originally written. Old Angel Midnight attests to the success of Kerouac's experiment and bears witness to his commitment to his craft, and to the pleasure he takes in writing: "I like the bliss of mind." "Old Angel Midnight is the illuminated notebook, the ur-text, of Kerouac vision/voice/language. The golden rule Catholicism of New England mind in kahoots with free time Godhead consciousness. This is true beat pleasure. This is our music."-Thurston Moore

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"If you haven't read this book yet--buy it, take it home, and read it now! This is the work that made me get off my ass and actually do something, and it will inspire you, too."--Kathleen Hanna, singer, Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin "I believe Karen Finley's un-careful rage was threatening because it is filled with grief, humor, and a profound passion for this life. Rereading it, I feel refreshed, as if I've been self-policing for years by tolerating boring, stupid things and now I'm free again. Thank you, Karen."--Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man "Shock Treatment is as timely and crucial as ever, inspiring feminist rage and wildness just as when it first blew my mind twenty-five years ago."--Michelle Tea, author of How to Grow Up "Karen Finley is an iconoclast who, ironically, became an icon when her work in Shock Treatment was targeted by right wing politicians. This important book is as necessary and vital today as it was twenty-years ago."--Sapphire, author of Push, among other works "Reading Shock Treatment today reminds me that Karen Finley has always been a writer of conscience. I remember seeing and hearing her read "The Black Sheep" off a piece of legal paper in the middle of a play at The Kitchen. No frills. She simply re-invented the poem."--Eileen Myles, author of Snowflake/different streets "How exciting for you, me, Karen, and the world--to have an occasion to revisit this period of powerful and earth-shaking work. Culture wars? Those bastards had no idea what they were up against."--Justin Vivian Bond, author of Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels "Finley’s Shock Treatment is more than just 'art.' It remains a searing and necessary indictment of America, a call to arms, a great protest against the injustices waged on queers and women during a time in recent American history where government intervention and recognition was so desperately needed. Twenty-five years on, Finley’s work continues to shock and provoke readers and audiences, demonstrating the powerful cultural and political impact her work has had on modern American art and performance art."--Nathan Smith, Los Angeles Review of Books No other artist captures the drama and fragility of the AIDS era as Karen Finley does in her 1990 classic book Shock Treatment. "The Black Sheep," "We Keep Our Victims Ready," "I Was Never Expected to Be Talented,"--these are some of the seminal works which excoriated homophobia and misogyny at a time when artists and writers were under attack for challenging the status quo. This twenty-fifth anniversary expanded edition features a new introduction in which Finley reflects on publishing her first book as she became internationally known for being denied an NEA grant because of perceived obscenity in her work. She traces her journey from art school to burlesque gigs to the San Francisco North Beach literary scene. A new poem reminds us of Finley's disarming ability to respond to the era's most challenging issues with grace and humor. KAREN FINLEY's raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. She has appeared and exhibited her visual art, performances, and plays internationally. The author of many books including A Different Kind of Intimacy, George & Martha, and The Reality Shows, she is a professor at the Tisch School of Art and Public Policy at NYU.

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"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 US military's global Interventions. Shock and awe!"—Vanity FairBecause We Say So presents more than thirty concise, forceful commentaries on US politics and global power. Written between 2011 and 2015, Noam Chomsky's arguments forge a persuasive counter-narrative to official accounts of US politics and policies during global crisis. Find here classic Chomsky on the increasing urgency of climate change, the ongoing impact of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing, nuclear politics, cyberwar, terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, and the Middle East, security and state power, as well as deeper reflections on the Obama doctrine, political philosophy, the Magna Carta, and the importance of a commons to democracy.Because We Say So is the third in a series of books by Chomsky published by City Lights Publishers that includes Making the Future (2012) and Interventions (2007), a book banned by US military censors. Taken together, the three books present a complete collection of the articles Chomsky writes regularly for the New York Times Syndicate, and are largely ignored by newspapers in the United States. Because We Say So offers fierce, accessible, timely, gloves-off political writing by America's foremost public intellectual and political dissident.Noam Chomsky is one of the world's most well-known critics of US policy. He has published numerous groundbreaking and best-selling books on global politics, history, and linguistics.

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Peering into life's cringe-worthy moments, best-selling author Beth Lisick excavates territory that most would rather ignore. Funny, odd, deeply personal, yet somehow universal, these are the kind of memories that haunt us all, the small awful moments of shame and humiliation that we'd rather forget than relive. Beth Lisick has made a career of opening her life to her readers in all of its messy, smart hilarity, but this type of story doesn't usually find its way into a memoir. With her trademark humor and sly intelligence, writing in short flashes the way these episodes tend to pop up in memory, Lisick recounts her most embarrassing moments with gusto. From a trick she played on a neighbor thirty years ago to what she accidentally blurted out at last night's dinner party, she explores the bad judgments and free-floating regrets that keep her up at night, and the result is a daring, candid, and wickedly funny collection of embarrassment embraced, the triumph of humor and perspective over everyday mortification. Writer, performer, and independent film actress Beth Lisick is the author of the New York Times best-selling comic memoir Everybody Into the Pool and the gonzo self-help manifesto Helping Me Help Myself. Praise for Yokohama Threeway: "The ultimate joyride for those of us who enjoy cringe-worthy embarrassment, genuine pathos, and an overdosing amount of schadenfreude."--Michael Ian Black "This book is fucking great."--Kathleen Hanna, of Bikini Kill and The Julie Ruin "A strangely touching and engaging portrait of the artist as a young screwup."--Booklist "Yokohama Threeway blends the funny and the painful into an elixir more closely resembling cough medicine than soda pop--a little bitter, made up of strange ingredients, not real pretty, but necessary if you want to get better. In the end, you are happy you took it, even if it leaves a funky aftertaste."--World Literature Today "Speaking as someone who hates everything, I love this book."--James Greer, musician & author of The Failure "Hilarious, heartbreaking, compassionate, pitch perfect, utterly original." --Joyce Maynard, author of After Her and Labor Day "A laugh-out-loud series of short, revelatory confessions propelled by curiosity and an acute desire to experience the world. It is not now and perhaps never will be quite in vogue for people to share their shames, but Lisick does it with aplomb and even exuberance."--Evan Karp, SF Weekly "Beth Lisick's new essay collection Yokohama Threeway made me laugh out loud more than anything else I have read all year, she is a master at sharing her life experiences with self-deprecating yet honest humor."--David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy "Beth Lisick, divulges the most embarrassing moments in a series of short essays dripping with wicked humor."--7x7 Magazine

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Taken together, Chomsky's essays present a powerful counter-narrative to official accounts of the major political events of the past four years: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the U.S. presidential race; the ascendancy of China; Latin America's leftward turn; the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea; Israel's invasion of Gaza and expansion of settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank; developments in climate change; the world financial crisis; the Arab Spring; the assassination of Osama bin Laden; and the Occupy protests. Laced throughout his critiques are expressions of commitment to democracy and the power of popular struggles. "Progressive legislation and social welfare," writes Chomsky, "have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above. Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace." Making the Future is a follow-up to Interventions, published by City Lights in 2007 and banned from Guantanamo Bay by U.S. military censors. Both books are drawn from articles Chomsky has been writing regularly for the New York Times Syndicate, but which go largely ignored by newspapers in the United States. Making the Future offers fierce, accessible, timely, gloves-off political writing by one of America's foremost intellectual and political dissidents. Making the Future presents more than fifty concise and persuasively argued commentaries on U.S. politics and policies, written between 2007 and 2011. "Unwavering political contrarian Noam Chomsky smart-bombs the U.S. military's global Interventions (City Lights). Shock and awe!"--Vanity Fair " ...he has emerged as one of the left's most implacable voices, challenging the often hidden structures that lie behind the abuse of power." --Paul V. Griffith, Chapter 16 "Making the Future is an impressive collection of articles shedding light on and challen- ging the current political, economic, and military world order. To make sense of the complex mechanisms at play, Chomsky adopts a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach: he juggles with history, sociology of the media, critical theory, and political philosophy." --Juliana Bidadanure, Global Discourse, 2013 Noam Chomsky is a world-renowned author, linguist, and advocate for democracy. He is the critically acclaimed author of many books, including Hegemony or Survival, Imperial Ambitions, Failed States, Manufacturing Consent, and Media Control. He lives in Massachusetts where he is Institute Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT.

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Wafaa Bilal's childhood in Iraq was defined by the horrific rule of Saddam Hussein, two wars, a bloody uprising, and time spent interned in chaotic refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bilal eventually made it to the United States to become a professor and a successful artist, but when his brother was killed by an unmanned U.S. Predator drone, he decided to use his art to confront those in the comfort zone with the realities of life in a conflict zone. His response was "Domestic Tension," an unsettling interactive performance piece: for one month, Bilal lived alone in a prison cell-sized room in the line of fire of a remote-controlled paintball gun and a camera that connected him to Internet viewers around the world. Visitors to the gallery and a virtual audience that grew by the thousands could shoot at him twenty-four hours a day. The project received overwhelming worldwide attention and spawned provocative online debates; ultimately, Bilal was named Chicago Tribune's Artist of the Year. Structured in two parallel narratives, the story of Bilal's life journey and his "Domestic Tension" experience, Shoot an Iraqi is for anyone who seeks insight into the current conflict in Iraq and for those fascinated by interactive art technologies and the ever-expanding world of online gaming. "Once I picked up this book, i could not put it down. There is something so urgent and compelling about Bilal's story, as though he is speaking to our time. His story is not just for those interested in the arts; it is a human story of the horror, frustration, and tragedies of war." -Mary Flanagan, artist and author of re:skin "This is an unsettling and gripping book. It poignantly recounts a dark and imaginative experiment inspired by an excruciating and ghastly reality. Its unsettling effects couldn't be more welcome: we desperately need to be shocked out of our collective zombification, and this book does that by leading us through a wild labyrinth at once aesthetic, political, and existential. Potent stuff." -Danny Postel, author of Reading "Legitimation Crisis" in Tehran "Who in their right mind would allow the internet to shoot at them? Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life, and the Resistance Under the Gun tells the story of Wafaa Bilal. When his brother was killed by an unmanned Military device during the Iraq war, Bilal took it locked himself in a room, a camera showing him to the world with a remote controlled paintball gun connected to the internet, in the name of art and political statement. Bilal explains himself quite well, making Shoot an Iraqi fascinating reading." -Midwest Book Review "Weaving together accounts of Iraq and America, art and violence, performance and reality, past and present, this gripping account all but shakes the reader by the lapels." -Publishers Weekly Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal has exhibited his art worldwide, and traveled and lectured extensively to inform audiences of the situation of the Iraqi people, and the importance of peaceful conflict resolution. Bilal's 2007 dynamic installation "Domestic Tension" gained global recognition, being named Artist of the Year by the Chicago Tribune. Bilal has held exhibitions in Baghdad, the Netherlands, Thailand and Croatia; as well as at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum and various other US galleries. His residencies have included Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California; Catwalk in New New York; and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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Crude Reflections chronicles the human and environmental impact of oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the pollution is so extensive that medical experts currently predict thousands of deaths from cancer and the disappearance of five indigenous rainforest communities. Photographers Lou Dematteis and Kayana Szymczak have documented the physical and emotional reality of those affected by this toxic contamination, roughly thirty times greater than the more widely reported Exxon Valdez oil spill. Their powerful images are accompanied by moving first-person testimonies from the victims, and the uplifting story of efforts by local communities to seek justice and to prevent further drilling.

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Winner of the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards in Poetry and 2010 American Book Award The first team sport in human history was played with a ball made of stone, on courts that have been found from the Mayan ruins of Central America to Arizona. Thus, we find a soccer dad walking the sidelines of a scuff ed LA field, its goal lines swirling, nets strung loosely between daylight and the spirit world--Sesshu Foster's inimitably fierce and powerfully evocative mix of the fantastic and the mundane. World Ball Notebook is a hybrid genre mixed text, composed of extracts from travel notebooks, email poems, postcard jottings, letters and blog posts, a record of the written moment compiled, refracted, prismatic. Poet Sesshu Foster is the author of the highly acclaimed City Terrace Field Manual and Atomic Aztex, a novel. "What playing field are we on exactly? The game gets hotter more interesting and 'stranged' as Sesshu Foster expands the metaphor in this dizzying collection of 'high energy constructs'. A delicious mongrel mix of cross-cultural underbelly reveries, anecdotes, observations, snapshots, histories, politics. He is one of our wittiest, wide-awake, astute, 21st century raconteurs. 'Take me out to the ballgame...I don't care if I never come back...'" --Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics "World Ball Notebook is Sesshu Foster's breakthrough book, in which he raises the trenchant deadpan observations of City Terrance Field Manual and the alternative-universe hijinks of Atomik Aztex to a new and even more potent level. (Beware, dear reader: the contents of this book are radioactive.) Always surprising and incisive, Foster now finds the marvelous in the ordinary, banal, and abject, and, in the words that dance and tremble, he conveys the sheer (and often terrifying) wonder that one is alive in a weird and terrible time. It is this wonder--this sense of seeing everyday life for the first time, and embracing every part of it without exception--that places Foster at the forefront of innovative and daring writing. This book is exhilarating, and I am grateful to the author for giving me a chance to see the world this way." --John Yau Sesshu Foster taught composition and literature in East LA for twenty years. He won the 2010 American Book Award for World Ball Notebook, the 2009 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry for World Ball Notebook, the 2005 Believer Book Award for Atomik Aztex, the 1990 American Book Award for Invocation LA: Urban Multicultural Poetry, and was a finalist for a PEN Center West Poetry Prize and for the Paterson Poetry Prize for City Terrace Field Manual.

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A hybrid collection of texts written and performed on the road, from Mexico City to San Francisco, from Central America to central California, illustrated throughout with photos and artwork. Rants, manifestos, newspaper cutups, street theater, anti-lectures, love poems, and riffs tell the story of what it's like to live outlaw and brown in the United States. Juan Felipe Herrera is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. The author of twenty-one books, he is also a community arts leader and a dynamic performer and actor. He is the son of Mexican immigrants and grew up in the migrant fields of California.

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Cristina Peri Rossi was born in Uruguay and is considered a leading light of the "Latin American Boom" generation. In 1972, after her work was banned under a repressive military regime, she left her country, moving to Spain. This collection of poems, written during her journey and the first period of her self-exile, was so personal that it remained unpublished for almost thirty years. It is accompanied here by two brilliant essays on exile, one by Peri Rossi and the other by translator Marilyn Buck, who is an American political prisoner, exiled in her own land. Cristina Peri Rossi is the author of thirty-seven works, including The Ship of Fools.

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Long out of print, Rebecca Brown's brilliant debut novel explores the psychic repercussions of growing up in an alcoholic family, and the ways in which one woman's past continues to inform and inhabit her life. Robin Daley's childhood is dominated by a sense of impermanence: Her hard-drinking father disappears as suddenly and unexpectedly as he arrives. Her adulthood offers an escape, but strange things happen when the dark corners and locked rooms of family life are revealed. Rebecca Brown is the author of The Gifts of the Body, The Last Time I Saw You, and The End of Youth. She lives in Seattle.

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In the alternate universe of this glitteringly surreal first novel, the Aztecs rule, having conquered the European invaders. Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness, is visited by visions of a parallel world run by the Europeans, where consumerism reigns supreme. Aztecs armed with automatic weapons, totemic powers and blood sacrifice conquer and colonize 1940s Europe, as ghosts of the world wars emerge to haunt contemporary Los Angeles. Atomik Aztex is a hilarious read. A potent concoction, with influences from graphic novels, along with Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, the paranoia of Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs, and an outrageous cyber-Aztlan mix reminiscent of Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Sesshu Foster is the author of the critically acclaimed City Terrace Field Manual.

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From inside her cell in the wall of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, Alix, a young Parisian recluse, observes a tumultuous world of thieves and scoundrels, rebels, heretics, and pilgrims. Set during the Hundred Year's War and based on the historical figure of Alix la Bourgotte, Sealed in Stone, traces the intersecting lives of a vagabond Turkish sailor, a Bohemian intellectual, the amazing Alix, and a young rebel from Lombardy who finds himself powerfully drawn to her. "Toni Maraini's Sealed in Stone, an allegorical novel set in the heart of medieval Paris, radiantly portrays the triumph of the soul over the darkness of existence. An extraordinary achievement." --Lucia A. Blackstone "...a strange and necessary novel." --Alberto Moravia Toni Maraini is an Italian poet, novelist, and art critic. She grew up in an literary family in Sicily, and has lived in Paris, London, Casablanca, and New York. She currently lives in Rome.

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Author Thomas Glave is known for his stylistic brio and courageous explorations into the heavily mined territories of race and sexuality. This searing collection of stories is a stunning debut of a writer the Village Voice has named "One to Watch." "Thomas Glave walks the path of such greats in American literature as Richard Wright and James Baldwin while forging new ground of his own. His voice is strong and his technique dazzling as he cuts to the bone of what it means to be black in America, white in America, gay in America, and human in the world at large. These stories span the globe of the human experience and the human heart. They are brutal in some places, tender in others, but always honestly told. A true talent of the 21st century." -- Gloria Naylor "Thomas Glave has a strong talent and courage to take up the right to enter the inner selves of both black and white characters in his stories. This is a creative claim beyond 'authenticity' determined by skin color. He also has that essential writer's ear for the way different people speak within their cultures, and what their idiom gives away of their inhibitions and affirmations." --Nadine Gordimer "What a writer! What a book! Glave is a brilliant writer of startlingly fresh prose ...His stories are intricate tapestries of life rendered through a triumphant act of the imagination." --Clarence Major "Remarkable stories by a gifted writer who explores the stresses, the split-minds, the implicit grandeurs, the subtleties, and the terrors of emotional desire and obsession." --Wilson Harris "[Glave's] rare insight, boundless courage, and fierce imagination make these stories resound long after you turn the last page." --Village Voice Thomas Glave is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, the essay collection Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (winner of a 2005 Lambda Literary Award), and is editor of the anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (winner of a 2008 Lambda Literary Award).

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Whatsaid Serif, Nathaniel Mackey's third book of poems, is comprised of installments sixteen through thirty-five of Song of the Andoumboulou, an ongoing serial work whose first fifteen installments appear in Eroding Witness and School of Udhra, his two previous books. Named after a Dogon funeral song whose raspy tonalities prelude rebirth, Song of the Andoumboulou has from its inception tracked interweavings of lore and livid apprehension, advancing this weave as its own sort of rasp. These twenty new installments evoke the what-sayer of Kakapalo storying practice as a figure for the rough texture of such interweaving. Mackey has suggested that the Andoumboulou, a failed, earlier form of human being in Dogon cosmology, are "a rough draft of human being," that "the Andoumboulou are in fact us; we're the rough draft." The song is of possibility, yet to be fulfilled, aspiration's putative angel itself. "Nathaniel Mackey's poem is a brilliant renewal of and experiment with the language of our spiritual condition and a measure of what poetry gives in trust - 'heat's/mean' and the rush of language to bear it." --Robin Blaser "Mackey's raspy rebus-like cultural resurfacings are both beautiful to read and worthy of repeated efforts at comprehension." --Publishers Weekly Nathaniel Mackey, recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers' Award, is the author of School of Udhra and Atet A.D., both also published by City Lights Publishers. He won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006, was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2014, and won Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry in 2015. He teaches a poetry workshop at Duke University.

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Notes on Thought and Vision by Imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) is an aphoristic meditation on how one works toward an ideal body-mind synthesis; a contemplation of the sources of imagination and the creative process; and a study of gender differences H.D. believed to be inherent in women's and men's consciousness. Here, too, is The Wise Sappho, a lyrical tribute to the great poet of Lesbos, for whom H.D. felt deep personal kinship.""Notes" is filled with dualisms that seem to split experience at all levels: body and spirit, womb and head, feeling and thought, the unconscious and ego consciousness, female and male, nature and divinity, classical and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian, Sphinx and Centaur, Pan and Helios, Naiads and Athene, thistle and serpent. But the impulse behind "Notes" is to account for those mysterious moments in which the polarities seemed to fall away, or—more accurately—to find their contradictions lifted and subsumed into a gestalt that illuminated the cross-patch of the past and released her to the chances of the future." —Albert Gelpi, Introduction"H. D.'s Notes on Thought and Vision [is] such a unique, inspiring, exploration of her notion of the creative process, orchestrated through an array of fully female, not feminine, not feminist, female figures." —Paul Kameen, University of Pittsburgh, English DepartmentHilda "H.D." Doolittle (1886-1961) was a poet, novelist, and memoirist well-known for her role with the avant-gard Imagist group. Though born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, her publications took off in London and earned her a spot within the emerging Imagist movement. She is also known for being unapologetic about her sexuality and is an icon for LGBT rights and feminist movements.

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In 1928, Georges Bataille published this first novel under a pseudonym, a legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the erotic by means of forbidden obsessive fantasies of excess and sexual extremes. A classic of pornographic literature, Story of the Eye finds the parallels in Sade and Nietzsche and in the investigations of contemporary psychology; it also forecasts Bataille's own theories of ecstasy, death and transgression which he developed in later work.

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These mad immortal stories, now surfaced from the literary underground, have addicted legions of American readers, even though the high literary establishment continues to ignore them. In Europe, however (particularly in Germany, Italy, and France where he is published by the great publishing houses), he is critically recognized as one of America's greatest realist writers."Collections such as The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (1983) . . . showcase Bukowski's impressive narrative and creative abilities in stories that most often take place in bars and dingy apartments but are not simply about sex and alcohol. They're about staying alive in a world where the only choice for the majority of us is to face a firing squad in an office every day—the post office, in Bukowski's case—or maintain a commitment to creativity as we struggle to pay for food and a meager place to live." —Adam Perry, Santa Fe ReporterCharles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany on August 16, 1920, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in 1946 and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways.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). He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.

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These classic Kerouac meditations, zen koans, and prose poems express the poet's beatific quest for peace and joy through oneness with the universe. "The Scripture of the Golden Eternity is fueled by Kerouac's discerning meditation on the nature of impermanence & consciousness, subtle like the dharma it invokes. We're here to disappear, therefore let's be as vivid & generous as we can. The intelligence & compassion behind this text is still alive." -Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics The Scripture of the Golden Eternity is Jack Kerouac's statement of confidence in his oneness with the universe of energy and form, a confidence to which his whole being swelled. His was not the search for the ecstasy of the mystic or psychedelic or the Artaud-mad. He sought a recognition in philosophy of his early sense that his body participated in the universal forms of energy with a quality of exuberance-that "serious exuberance" which he so accurately called jazz." -Eric Mottram, Introduction Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes (City Lights), Scattered Poems (City Lights), and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (City Lights).

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"Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Loaded is like a blast of fresh air. She is no fan of guns or of our absurdly permissive laws surrounding them. But she does not merely take the liberal side of the familiar debate."--Adam Hochschild, The New York Review of Books"If . . . anyone at all really wants to 'get to the root causes of gun violence in America,' they will need to start by coming to terms with even a fraction of what Loaded proposes."—Los Angeles Review of Books"Her analysis, erudite and unrelenting, exposes blind spots not just among conservatives, but, crucially, among liberals as well. . . . As a portrait of the deepest structures of American violence, Loaded is an indispensable book."—The New RepublicLoaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, is a deeply researched—and deeply disturbing—history of guns and gun laws in the United States, from the original colonization of the country to the present. As historian and educator Dunbar-Ortiz explains, in order to understand the current obstacles to gun control, we must understand the history of U.S. guns, from their role in the "settling of America" and the early formation of the new nation, and continuing up to the present.Praise for Loaded:"Dunbar-Ortiz's argument will be disturbing and unfamiliar to most readers, but her evidence is significant and should not be ignored."—Publishers Weekly" . . . gun love is as American as apple pie—and that those guns have often been in the hands of a powerful white majority to subjugate minority natives, slaves, or others who might stand in the way of the broadest definition of Manifest Destiny."—Kirkus Reviews"Trigger warning! This is a superb and subtle book, not an intellectual safe space for confirming your preconceptions—whatever those might be—but rather a deeply necessary provocation."—Christian Parenti, author of Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis

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Blackshirts & Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology--terms often bandied about but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parenti's trademark. Parenti shows how "rational fascism" renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. He also maps out the external and internal forces that destroyed communism, and the disastrous impact of the "free-market" victory on eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He affirms the relevance of taboo ideologies like Marxism, demonstrating the importance of class analysis in understanding political realities and dealing with the ongoing collision between ecology and global corporatism. Written with lucid and compelling style, this book goes beyond truncated modes of thought, inviting us to entertain iconoclastic views, and to ask why things are as they are. It is a bold and entertaining exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today. "A penetrating and persuasive writer with an astonishing array of documentation to implement his attacks."--The Catholic Journalist "Blackshirts & Reds discusses the great combat between fascism and socialism that is the defining feature of the Twentieth Century, and takes every official version to task for its substitution of moral analysis for critical analysis, for its selectivity, and for its errata. By portraying the struggle between fascism and Communism in this century as a single conflict, and not a series of discrete encounters, between the insatiable need for new capital on the one hand and the survival of a system under siege on the other, Parenti defines fascism as the weapon of capitalism, not simply an extreme form of it. Fascism is not an aberration, he points out, but a "rational" and integral component of the system."--Stan Goff, The Prism 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. 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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