Search results for ""Los Angeles Review of Books""
Los Angeles Review of Books Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: Trending Issue: Trending Issue, No. 30
Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and disseminating rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts. Since its founding in 2011, LARB has quickly established itself as a thriving institution for writers and readers. TheLARB Quarterly Journal, a signature print edition, reflects the best that this institution brings to a national and international readership. The print magazine cultivates a stable of regular and ongoing contributors, both eminent and emerging, to cover all topics and genres, from politics to fiction, film to poetry, and much more.LARB specializes in a looser and more eclectic approach than other journals: grounded in literature but open to all varieties of cultural experience. Headquartered in Los Angeles, but home to writers and artists from all over the world, theLARB Quarterly Journal brings the pioneering spirit of the online magazine into print and remains committed to covering and representing today’s diverse literary and cultural landscape.
£9.15
Los Angeles Review of Books Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: Domestic Issue: Fall 2020, No. 28
Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and disseminating rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts. Since its founding in 2011, LARB has quickly established itself as a thriving institution for writers and readers. TheLARB Quarterly Journal, a signature print edition, reflects the best that this institution brings to a national and international readership. The print magazine cultivates a stable of regular and ongoing contributors, both eminent and emerging, to cover all topics and genres, from politics to fiction, film to poetry, and much more.LARB specializes in a looser and more eclectic approach than other journals: grounded in literature but open to all varieties of cultural experience. Headquartered in Los Angeles, but home to writers and artists from all over the world, theLARB Quarterly Journal brings the pioneering spirit of the online magazine into print and and remains committed to covering and representing today’s diverse literary and cultural landscape.
£9.15
Los Angeles Review of Books Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: Mistake Issue: Summer 2020, No. 27
Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and disseminating rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts. Since its founding in 2011, LARB has quickly established itself as a thriving institution for writers and readers. TheLARB Quarterly Journal, a signature print edition, reflects the best that this institution brings to a national and international readership. The print magazine cultivates a stable of regular and ongoing contributors, both eminent and emerging, to cover all topics and genres, from politics to fiction, film to poetry, and much more.LARB specializes in a looser and more eclectic approach than other journals: grounded in literature but open to all varieties of cultural experience. Headquartered in Los Angeles, but home to writers and artists from all over the world, theLARB Quarterly Journal brings the pioneering spirit of the online magazine into print and and remains committed to covering and representing today’s diverse literary and cultural landscape.
£8.50
Los Angeles Review of Books Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: The Pop Issue: No. 26, Spring 2020
The Spring 2020 issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal is dedicated to Pop, a term as disputable as it is ubiquitous. The parameters of pop depend on what they exclude: pop culture may be popular, but it is also what high culture and subcultures are not. This issue will examine the pop category as a product of artistic elitism and as a site of social construction. Who is pop for? What is a general audience and what makes for widespread appeal? What happens when a product of popular culture is embraced ironically or elevated as a so-bad-it’s-good guilty pleasure? This issue will ask what it means to be a member of this vast audience, to personally identify with art that asks millions of others to do the same — or to reject pop, question it, and stay in the margins. Whatever our relationship to it, pop permeates nearly every facet of our lives, including, and of particular significance to this issue, our own creative output. But just how passive is our consumption? This issue will reevaluate pop for the streaming age, the social media age, and the age of a reality star president.
£8.50
Los Angeles Review of Books Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: Ten Year Anthology Issue: Fall 2021, No. 32
Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and disseminating rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts. Since its founding in 2011, LARB has quickly established itself as a thriving institution for writers and readers. TheLARB Quarterly Journal, a signature print edition, reflects the best that this institution brings to a national and international readership. The print magazine cultivates a stable of regular and ongoing contributors, both eminent and emerging, to cover all topics and genres, from politics to fiction, film to poetry, and much more.LARB specializes in a looser and more eclectic approach than other journals: grounded in literature but open to all varieties of cultural experience. Headquartered in Los Angeles, but home to writers and artists from all over the world, theLARB Quarterly Journal brings the pioneering spirit of the online magazine into print and and remains committed to covering and representing today’s diverse literary and cultural landscape.
£9.15
Los Angeles Review of Books A Stab in the Dark: The Milestone Poetry Collection of Border Region Literature
Facundo Bernal's A Stab in the Dark (Palos de ciego) is a poetic chronicle of the struggles and joys of the Spanish-speaking community in Los Angeles and in the burgeoning border town of Mexicali during the early 1920s. Sharply satirical yet deeply empathetic, Bernal’s poems are both a landmark of Chicano literature and a captivating read. Anthony Seidman's energetic translation — the first into English — preserves the prickly feel of Bernal’s classic, down to the last stab. This edition also features the original Spanish text, an introduction by the prominent Mexicali writer Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, an additional introduction by critic Josh Kun, and a foreword by writer and lawyer Yxta Maya Murray.
£12.31
Los Angeles Review of Books Animal Quintet: A Southern Memoir
Colin Dayan meditates on the connection between her personal and family history and her relationship with animals in this lyrical memoir about her upbringing in the South. Unraveling memories alongside family documents and photographs, Animal Quintet takes a raw look at racial tensions and relations in a region struggling to change while providing a disquieting picture of a childhood accessible only through accounts of the non-human, ranging from famed Southern war horses led by Civil War generals and doomed Spanish fighting bulls to the lowly possum hunted by generations of Southerners. Placing the reader in the mind’s eye of a writer still grappling with her own mixed identity and unsettled past, the book is uniquely capable of transporting one’s imagination across time and place, mirroring the natural behavior of remembrances with its feeling of dislocation and non-linear movement. Regional folk songs about old gray mares and possums hiding in trees intermingle with stories and confidences shared by the household’s African-American nanny, enclosing the reader in a chorus composed of otherwise lost voices. Presented in a such a way that it simultaneously longs for the past and attempts to keep it at arm’s length, Animal Quintet achieves a haunting, nostalgic quality rare to memoirs focused on ancestral and personal identity.
£10.99
Los Angeles Review of Books Souls for Sale
On her wedding night, Remember “Mem” Steddon, daughter of a small-town conservative preacher, has a sudden change of heart. Abandoning her groom, she impulsively sneaks off their Los Angeles-bound honeymooner train in the middle of the desert. When she recuperates from dehydration, she finds herself on a film set and is cast as an extra. As Mem’s masterful art of deception drives her to fame, the left-behind husband returns, raging with jealousy and murderous revenge. First published 1922 and adapted to screen the following year by Rupert Hughes himself, this “insider” story of Hollywood filmmaking traces every Hollywood trope from slapstick comedy to theatrical melodrama with love and deceit at every page turn. Hazing the lines between truth and fiction, Souls for Sale is a snapshot of Hollywood’s Golden Age, hailed by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sandburg as “the heart of moviedom by anyone who believes in it.”
£13.00
Los Angeles Review of Books Migrations
In J. L. Torres’s second story collection Migrations, the inaugural winner of the Tomás Rivera Book Prize, a “sucio” goes to an underground clinic for therapy to end his machista ways and is accidentally transitioned. Ex-gangbangers gone straight deal with a troubled, gifted son drawn to the gangsta lifestyle promoted by an emerging music called hip-hop. Dead and stuck “between somewhere and nowhere,” Roberto Clemente, the great Puerto Rican baseball icon, soon confronts the reason for his predicament. These stories take us inside the lives of self-exiles, unhomed and unhinged people, estranged from loved ones, family, culture, and collective history. Despite the effects of colonization of the body and mind, Puerto Ricans have survived beyond geography and form an integral part of the American mosaic.
£11.99
Los Angeles Review of Books N*gga Theory: Race, Language, Unequal Justice, and the Law
"A MUST-READ FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN UNDERSTANDING AND DISMANTLING MASS INCARCERATION." —Chesa Boudin, District Attorney of San Francisco America's criminal justice system is among the deadliest and most racist in the world and it disproportionately targets Black Americans, who are also disproportionately poor, hungry, houseless, jobless, sick, and poorly educated. By every metric of misery, this nation does not act like Black Lives Matter. In order to break out of the trap of racialized mass incarceration and relentless racial oppression, we, as a society, need to rethink our basic assumptions about blame and punishment, words and symbols, social perceptions and judgments, morality, politics, and the power of the performing arts. N*gga Theory interrogates conventional assumptions and frames a transformational new way of thinking about law, language, moral judgments, politics, and transgressive art—especially profane genres like gangsta rap—and exposes where racial bias lives in the administration of justice and everyday life. Professor Jody Armour (Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism) calls for bold action: electing progressive prosecutors, defunding or dismantling the police, abolition of the prison industrial complex. But only after eradicating the anti-black bias buried in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans and baked into our legal system will we be able to say that Black Lives Matter in America.
£12.99
Los Angeles Review of Books The Terror of the Unforeseen
In a searing takedown of the populist authoritarian vision of America, The Terror of the Unforeseen tackles the resurgence of fascism in the age of Donald Trump’s presidency. Through the mendacious exchange of facts for “fake news,” Henry A. Giroux examines the language of hatred that activates neoliberal fascism, complete with state-sanctioned racism, casino capitalism, and fear-mongering at federal and local levels. In this “age of disposability,” Trump’s rhetoric eschews reason and democratic principles in favor of impetuous politics rooted in bigotry, all to injuriously catastrophic effect. Through protests, strikes, and education, Giroux proposes an international social movement that joins together various modes of resistance to illuminate a democratic renewal, and proves himself once again as one of the great public intellectuals of our time.
£13.70
Penguin Books Ltd Trafalgar
'A kind of magical realism for science fiction ... Quite, quite brilliant' TorPart pulp adventure, part otherworldly meditation, this is the story of Trafalgar Medrano: intergalactic trader and lover of bitter coffee and black cigarettes. In the bars and cafés of Rosario, Argentina, he recounts tall tales of his space escapades - involving, among other things, time travel and dancing troglodytes.'A unique brand of science fiction ... unlike anything I've ever read' Los Angeles Review of Books
£9.04
Headline Publishing Group Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness
Stylish, witty and insightful -The Wall Street JournalMakes us look at ourselves and the human mind in a series of fascinating ways - New ScientistHouse is a pleasure to read. Like Oliver Sacks ... - Los Angeles Review of BooksA concise, elegant, and thought-provoking exploration of the mystery of consciousness and the functioning of the brain.Despite decades of research, remarkable imagery, and insights from a range of scientific and medical disciplines, the human brain remains largely unexplored. Consciousness has eluded explanation.Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness offers a brilliant overview of the state of modern consciousness research in twenty brief, revealing chapters. Neuroscientist and author Patrick House describes complex concepts in accessible terms, weaving brain science, technology, gaming, analogy, and philosophy into a tapestry that illuminates how t
£12.99
Penguin Books Ltd The History of Sexuality: 4: Confessions of the Flesh
The final major work by one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth centuryIn the fourth and final volume of his far-reaching and influential study of human sexuality, Foucault turns his attention to early Christianity, exploring how ancient ideas of pleasure were modified into the notion of the 'flesh'. Ranging over marriage, procreation and the concept of virginity as a divine state, Foucault brilliantly shows how a fledgling religion altered and defined the Western history of desire. Confessions of the Flesh brings to a conclusion one of the twentieth century's seminal works.'A thinker of immense power ... posing questions that still perplex us' The Times Literary Supplement'Required reading ... The appearance of the fourth volume is the most significant event in the world of Foucault scholarship in 20 years ... Essential' Los Angeles Review of Books
£12.99
Vintage Publishing Kiss of the Spider Woman: The Queer Classic Everyone Should Read
Valentin and Molina seemingly share little other than a cell in this queer classic ahead of its time.'Dazzling... a triumph' ObserverSometimes they talk all night long. In the still darkness of their Buenos Aires prison cell, Molina re-weaves the glittering and fragile stories of the film he loves, and the cynical Valentin listens. Valentin believes in the just cause that makes all suffering bearable; Molina believes in the magic of love that makes all else endurable. Though they seemingly share little other than a cell, the two form a bond so intimate - and a relationship so profoundly affecting - that only the other could understand.'A visionary work that breathed life into certain dimensions of human possibility long before society at large was prepared to imagine them.' Carolina de Robertis, Los Angeles Review of Books
£9.99
Hodder & Stoughton American Fever
'A subversive debut' GUARDIAN'Prose that dances with charge and potency' LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS*WINNER of a 2023 ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN AWARD FOR LITERATURE and a 2023 SOUTH ASIA BOOK AWARD*On a year-long exchange programme, sixteen-year-old Hira must swap the bustle of urban Pakistan for church and volleyball practice in rural Oregon. Stuck between two worlds, her experience of America is sometimes freeing, sometimes painful, often quite painful. And while she faces racism and Islamophobia, she also makes new friends and has her first kiss.But when her new life is blown apart by a shocking health crisis, Hira's sense of belonging is overturned once again - forcing her to consider her place in the world.'Marks the debut of a thrilling new global voice' Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes
£9.99
Vintage Publishing Kiss of the Spider Woman: The Queer Classic Everyone Should Read
Valentin and Molina seemingly share little other than a cell in this queer classic ahead of its time.'Dazzling... a triumph' ObserverSometimes they talk all night long. In the still darkness of their Buenos Aires prison cell, Molina re-weaves the glittering and fragile stories of the film he loves, and the cynical Valentin listens. Valentin believes in the just cause that makes all suffering bearable; Molina believes in the magic of love that makes all else endurable. Though they seemingly share little other than a cell, the two form a bond so intimate - and a relationship so profoundly affecting - that only the other could understand.'A visionary work that breathed life into certain dimensions of human possibility long before society at large was prepared to imagine them.' Carolina de Robertis, Los Angeles Review of Books
£9.99
The Naydus Press Childe Harold of Dysna
A masterpiece from one of Yiddish literature's true virtuosi, Moyshe Kulbak's satiric poem from 1933, Childe Harold of Dysna, appears here for the first time in a complete English translation. At once an exuberant celebration of Yiddish language and a searing indictment of capitalist excess, Kulbak's long poem follows the journey of its protagonist from small town Eastern Europe to the metropolis of Weimar Berlin. Drawing on his own experiences in Berlin in the early 1920s, Kulbak offers us a fresh perspective on life in interwar Berlin, and does so in one of the truly great pyrotechnic displays in Yiddish poetry. Robert Adler Peckerar's stunning translation conveys simultaneously Kulbak's verbal brilliance and his searing critique. This beautiful volume includes an introduction by Boris Dralyuk, the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and stunning illustrations by Beynish.
£13.61
Little, Brown Book Group New York 2140
NOMINATED FOR THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL 2018'A towering novel' - Guardian'Relevant and essential' - Bloomberg BusinessweekAs the sea level rose, every street became a canal, every skyscraper an island. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city. New York Times bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson delivers a bold and brilliant vision of New York in the next century.'New York may be underwater but it's better than ever' - New Yorker 'Massively enjoyable' - Washington Post'Gripping . . . so hard to put down' - Business Insider 'A document of hope as much as dread' - Los Angeles Review of Books Novels by Kim Stanley Robinson: Icehenge The Memory of Whiteness A Short, Sharp Shock Antarctica The Years of Rice and Salt Galileo's Dream 2312 Shaman Aurora New York 2140 Red Moon
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Faber & Faber Erasure: now a major motion picture 'American Fiction'
'Truly brilliant.' Los Angeles Review of Books'A classic.' The Times'A remarkable novel.' Wall Street Journal** With a new foreword by Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and Filthy Animals **With your book sales at an all-time low, your family falling apart, and your agent telling you you're not black enough, what's an author to do? Thelonius 'Monk' Ellison has the answer. Or does he . . . ? Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction'One of the most original and forceful novels to have emerged from America in years.' TLS'A furious whirl of a book. It made me howl with laughter . . . and rage, and sorrow, and affinity.' Lisa McInerney'Seminal doesn't even come close. This novel is Everett at his finest, full of trademark protest, humanity and incisive humour, all wrapped up in one hell of a story.' Courttia Newland'Hilarious. . . Everett is a first-rate word wrangler.' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
£9.99
Harvard University Press An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns
Over the past twenty-five years, Bruno Latour has developed a research protocol different from the actor-network theory with which his name is now associated—a research protocol that follows the different types of connectors that provide specific truth conditions. These are the connectors that prompt a climate scientist challenged by a captain of industry to appeal to the institution of science, with its army of researchers and mountains of data, rather than to “capital-S Science” as a higher authority. Such modes of extension—or modes of existence, Latour argues here—account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and other domains of knowledge.“Magnificent…An Inquiry into Modes of Existence shows that [Latour] has lost none of his astonishing fertility as a thinker, or his skill and wit as a writer…Latour’s main message—that rationality is ‘woven from more than one thread’—is intended not just for the academic seminar, but for the public square—and the public square today is global as never before.”—Jonathan Rée, Times Literary Supplement“Latour’s work makes the world—sorry, worlds—interesting again.”—Stephen Muecke, Los Angeles Review of Books
£24.26
Orion Publishing Co Machine Vendetta
Panoply is a small, efficient police force, dedicated to maintaining the rule of democracy among the ten thousand disparate city states orbiting the planet Yellowstone.Ingvar Tench was one of Panoply's most experienced operatives. So why did she walk alone and virtually unarmed into a habitat with a vicious grudge against her organisation?As his colleagues pick up the pieces, Dreyfus must face his conscience. Four years ago, when an investigation linked to one of his most dangerous adversaries got a little too personal, Dreyfus arranged for Tench to continue the enquiry by proxy.In using her - even though he had his reasons - did Dreyfus also put her in the line of fire?And what does Tench's misadventure tell him about an enemy he had hoped was dormant?Praise for Alastair Reynolds:'A leading light of the new British space opera' Los Angeles Review of Books on Alastair Reynolds'One of the giants of the new British space opera' io9 on Alastair Reynolds'[Reynolds is] a mastersinger of the space opera' The Times (UK) on Blue Remembered Earth'[Reynolds] is the most gifted hard SF writers working today' Publishers Weekly on Beyond the Aquila Rift
£16.99
Goose Lane Editions Savage Love
The Globe and Mail Top 100Quill & Quire Book of the YearAmazon.ca Editors' Pick, Top 100Now magazine, Top 10 BooksChatelaine, Favourite Books of 2013"This was, hands down, the best book I read in 2013." -- Steven W. Beattie,The National Post The return of Douglas Glover, one of Canada's most lauded and brilliant authors. "Douglas Glover, the mad genius of Can Lit." -- Caroline Adderson, The Globe and Mail Savage Love shatters then transforms every conventional notion we've ever held about that cultural-emotional institution we call love. "The most stylish, adventurous fiction this country has ever seen." -- Quill & Quire Absurd, comic, dream-like and deeply affecting, Glover's stories are of our time yet timeless, spectacular fables that stand in any era, any civilization. "Eclectic and obsessive, abrasive and majestic." -- Los Angeles Review of Books Savage Love exposes the humanity lurking behind our masks, the perversities that underlie our actions. This is Douglas Glover country, and we are all willing visitors.
£15.99
David R. Godine Publisher Inc Late Wonders: New & Selected Poems
“Wesley McNair, an unassuming, avowedly regional pastoral poet from Western Maine, is writing the best poetry of his life—poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment.”—Los Angeles Review of Books Wesley McNair’s story-like poems have long celebrated eccentrics and misfits, the hopeful and the lost, with a tenderness that transcends the everyday. This career-spanning collection brings together his very best poems from the past four decades alongside his newest poems. Since the publication of his first book in the early 1980s, Wesley McNair has earned a reputation as a poet of place, an intimate observer of the speech and character of New England. In fact, McNair’s “place” is unlimited, as he proves in the lucid, far-ranging poems of this volume. “Whole lives fill small lines,” wrote Donald Hall of McNair’s work. He is truly, as Philip Levine wrote, “One of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” Late Wonders: New & Selected Poems includes “The Long Dream of Home” the complete trilogy of McNair’s masterful, long narrative poems written over the last thirty years: “My Brother Running,” “Fire,” and “Dwellers in the House of the Lord.” This is a collection for anyone who believes mixing a little sorrow and little comedy makes for poetry that moves the heart.
£21.99
Harvard University Press The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World
Winner of the Zócalo Book PrizeA New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice“Combines powerful moral arguments with superb storytelling.”—New StatesmanWhat moral values do we hold in common? As globalization draws us together economically, are the things we value converging or diverging? These twin questions led Michael Ignatieff to embark on a three-year, eight-nation journey in search of an answer. What we share, he found, are what he calls “ordinary virtues”: tolerance, forgiveness, trust, and resilience. When conflicts break out, these virtues are easily exploited by the politics of fear and exclusion, reserved for one’s own group but denied to others. Yet these ordinary virtues are the key to healing and reconciliation on both a local and global scale.“Makes for illuminating reading.”—Simon Winchester, New York Review of Books“Engaging, articulate and richly descriptive… Ignatieff’s deft histories, vivid sketches and fascinating interviews are the soul of this important book.”—Times Literary Supplement“Deserves praise for wrestling with the devolution of our moral worlds over recent decades.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
£18.95
New York University Press Avidly Reads Theory
“Theory offered us a way of understanding the world that, like so many youthful exuberances, was both vital and ridiculous.” As an avowed “theory head,” Jordan Alexander Stein confronts a contradiction: that the abstract, and often frustrating rigors of theory also produced a sense of pride and identity for him and his friends: an idea of how to be and a way to live. Although Stein explains what theory is, this is not an introduction or a how-to. Organized around five ways that theory makes us feel—silly, stupid, sexy, seething and stuck—Stein travels back to the late nineties to tell a story of coming of age at a particular moment and to measure how that moment lives on now. Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life. This is a story about the emotional lives of ideas.
£63.90
Orion Publishing Co Machine Vendetta
Panoply is a small, efficient police force, dedicated to maintaining the rule of democracy among the ten thousand disparate city states orbiting the planet Yellowstone.Ingvar Tench was one of Panoply's most experienced operatives. So why did she walk alone and virtually unarmed into a habitat with a vicious grudge against her organisation?As his colleagues pick up the pieces, Dreyfus must face his conscience. Four years ago, when an investigation linked to one of his most dangerous adversaries got a little too personal, Dreyfus arranged for Tench to continue the enquiry by proxy.In using her - even though he had his reasons - did Dreyfus also put her in the line of fire?And what does Tench's misadventure tell him about an enemy he had hoped was dormant?Praise for Alastair Reynolds:'A leading light of the new British space opera' Los Angeles Review of Books on Alastair Reynolds'One of the giants of the new British space opera' io9 on Alastair Reynolds'[Reynolds is] a mastersinger of the space opera' The Times (UK) on Blue Remembered Earth'[Reynolds] is the most gifted hard SF writers working today' Publishers Weekly on Beyond the Aquila Rift
£22.50
Little, Brown Book Group Cain Named The Animal
'In McCrae's hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through' Kate Kellaway, Guardian 'Confirms McCrae as one of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time' Kit Fan, GuardianWriting you I give the death I take I know I should feel wounded by your death I write to you to make a wound write back Shane McCrae fashions a world of endings and infinites in Cain Named the Animal. With cyclical, rhythmic lines that create and recreate images of our shared and specific pasts, McCrae writes into and through the wounds that we remember and 'strains toward a vision of joy' (Will Brewbaker, the Los Angeles Review of Books). Cain Named the Animal expands upon the biblical, heavenly world that McCrae has been building throughout his previous collections; he writes of Eden, of the lost tribe that watched time enter the garden and God rehearse the world, and of the cartoon torments of Hell. Yet for McCrae, these outer bounds of our universe are inseparable from the lives and deaths on earth, from the mundanities and miracles of time passing and people growing up, growing old, and growing apart. As he writes, 'God first thought time itself/Was flawed but time was God's first mirror.'
£10.99
Quercus Publishing Belladonna
"Belladonna is brutal, beautiful, and unforgettable . . . One of the truly outstanding novels of recent years" EILEEN BATTERSBY, Los Angeles Review of Books** Winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2018**** Shortlisted for the inaugural E.B.R.D. Prize for Literature **** Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize **An excoriating work of fiction that references the twentieth century's darkest hoursAndreas Ban is a writer and a psychologist, an intellectual proper, but his world has been falling apart for years. When he retires with a miserable pension and finds out that he is ill, he gains a new perspective on the debris of his life and the lives of his friends. In defying illness and old age, Andreas Ban is cynical and powerful, and in his unravelling of his own past and the lives of others, he uncompromisingly lays bare a gamut of taboos. Andreas Ban stands for a true hero of our times; a castaway intellectual of a society which subdues every critical thought under the guise of political correctness. Belladonna addresses some of the twentieth century's worst human atrocities in a powerful fusion of fiction and reality, the hallmark of one of Europe's finest contemporary writers.Translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth
£10.99
Little, Brown Book Group My Antonia
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A. S. BYATT'She is undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's greatest American writers' OBSERVER' . . . a clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit and the innate hardiness of the immigrants' XAN BROOKS, GUARDIAN 'Willa Cather was a wordsmith of enormous talent' ROBERT SLAYTON, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS'During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had both known long ago. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood . . . His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her'My Antonia is the unforgettable story of an immigrant woman's life on the Nebraska plains, seen through the eyes of her childhood friend, Jim Burden. The beautiful, free-spirited, wild-eyed girl captured Jim's imagination long ago and haunts him still, embodying for him the elemental spirit of the American frontier.In this powerful and astonishing novel, Willa Cather created one of the most winning yet thoroughly convincing heroines in American fiction.
£10.99
New York University Press Avidly Reads Board Games
“How we should think about board games, and what do they do to us as we play them?” Writer and critic Eric Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a board game enthusiast to explore the emotional and social rules that games create and reveal, telling a series of stories about a pastime that is also about relationships. From the outdated gender roles in Life and Mystery Date to the cutthroat, capitalist priorities of Monopoly and its socialist counterpart, Class Struggle, Thurm thinks through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and ponders the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies and relationships—from the familial to the geopolitical. Like sitting down at the table for family game night, Board Games is an engaging book of twists and turns, trivia, and nostalgia. Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.
£63.90
Harvard University Press Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
“No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights.”—Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal“Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”—George SorosThe age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. While state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality has quietly disappeared. In its place, economic liberalization has emerged as the dominant force. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn considers how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of broader social and economic justice.Moyn places the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift and explores why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside exploding inequality.“Moyn asks whether human-rights theorists and advocates, in the quest to make the world better for all, have actually helped to make things worse… Sure to provoke a wider discussion.”—Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal“A sharpening interrogation of the liberal order and the institutions of global governance created by, and arguably for, Pax Americana… Consistently bracing.”—Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books“Moyn suggests that our current vocabularies of global justice—above all our belief in the emancipatory potential of human rights—need to be discarded if we are work to make our vastly unequal world more equal… [A] tour de force.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
£18.95
Yale University Press Graveyard Clay: Cré na Cille
A brilliant new translation of Ó Cadhain’s modern Irish literature masterpiece, meant to spark debate and comparison with Alan Titley’s Dirty Dust, now with bonus materials on its history, reception, interpretations, adaptations, and more “Gloriously attuned to the energy, copiousness, invective and ribaldry of the original Cre na Cille.”—Patricia Craig, Times Literary Supplement “Corrosively satirical and darkly comic. . . . A tour de force of a gabfest.”—Mark Harman, Los Angeles Review of Books In critical opinion and popular polls, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Graveyard Clay is invariably ranked the most important prose work in modern Irish. This bold new translation of his radically original Cré na Cille is the shared project of two fluent speakers of the Irish of Ó Cadhain’s native region, Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson. They have achieved a lofty goal: to convey Ó Cadhain’s meaning accurately and to meet his towering literary standards. Graveyard Clay is a novel of black humor, reminiscent of the work of Synge and Beckett. The story unfolds entirely in dialogue as the newly dead arrive in the graveyard, bringing news of recent local happenings to those already confined in their coffins. Avalanches of gossip, backbiting, flirting, feuds, and scandal-mongering ensue, while the absurdity of human nature becomes ever clearer. This edition of Ó Cadhain’s masterpiece is enriched with footnotes, bibliography, publication and reception history, and other materials that invite further study and deeper enjoyment of his most engaging and challenging work.
£13.60
Penguin Books Ltd Little Man, What Now?
From the bestselling author of Alone in Berlin, his acclaimed novel of a young couple trying to survive life in 1930s Germany'Nothing so confronts a woman with the deathly futility of her existence as darning socks'A young couple fall in love, get married and start a family, like countless young couples before them. But Lämmchen and 'Boy' live in Berlin in 1932, and everything is changing. As they desperately try to make ends meet amid bullying bosses, unpaid bills, monstrous mothers-in-law and Nazi streetfighters, will love be enough?The novel that made Hans Fallada's name as a writer, Little Man, What Now? tells the story of one of European literature's most touching couples and is filled with an extraordinary mixture of comedy and desperation. It was published just before Hitler came to power and remains a haunting portrayal of innocents whose world is about to be swept away forever. This brilliant new translation by Michael Hofmann brings to life an entire era of austerity and turmoil in Weimar Germany.'An inspired work of a great writer ... Fallada is a genius. The "Little Man" is Mr Everybody' Beryl Bainbridge'There are chapters which pluck the nerves...there are chapters which raise the spirits like a fine day in the country. The truth and variety of the characterization is superb...it recognizes that the world is not to be altered with moral fables' Graham Greene'Fallada deserves high praise for having reported so realistically, so truthfully, with such closeness to life' Herman Hesse'Fallada at his best' Philip Hensher'Performs the most astounding task, of taking us to a moment before history' Los Angeles Review of Books
£9.99
City Lights Books Violence: Humans in Dark Times
Through a series of penetrating conversations originally published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard talk with a wide range of cutting edge thinkers--including Oliver Stone, Simon Critchley, and Elaine Scarry--to explore the problem of violence in everyday life, politics, culture, media, language, memory, and the environment. "To bring out the best of us," writes Evans, "we have to confront the worst of what humans are capable of doing to one another. In short, there is a need to confront the intolerable realities of violence in this world."These lively, in-depth exchanges among historians, theorists, and artists offer a timely and bracing look at how the increasing expression and acceptance of violence--in all strata of society--has become a defining feature of our times."Many of us live today with a pervasive sense of unease, worried that our own safety is at risk, or that of our loved ones, or that of people whose bad circumstances appear to us through networked media. Violence feels ever-present. Natasha Lennard and Brad Evans help us to analyze those feelings, talking with a wide range of thinkers in order to gain insight into the worst of what humans do, and challenging us to imagine a world in which violence is no longer a given. Their book is full of surprising insights and intelligent compassion."--Sarah Leonard, co-editor of The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century"In Violence, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard have created, alongside their interview subjects, a kaleidoscopic exploration of the concept of violence, in terrains expected and not, in prose taut and unexpectedly gorgeous. Their philosophical rigor provides the reader with an intellectual arsenal against the violence of the current moment."--Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood"We would be wise to read this collection with a similar eye toward service, and in so doing, open ourselves up to the rare mercy of no longer having to stand on our own."--Alana Massey, author of All The Lives I Want"The range of interviews with leading academics, to filmmakers and artists, is impressive, at once immediate and relevant, but also profoundly philosophical. More essentially, though, the conversations underline the need and suggest ways to resist and organize in a visionary way, in the extraordinary times we live in."--Razia Iqbal, BBC News"Notable contemporary thinkers and creators give their individual perspectives in this compelling look at violence. . . . A provocative volume that challenges humanity to correct its runaway course toward an increasingly violent future by learning from its violent past."--Kirkus Reviews"The purpose of the work is to challenge humanity to create more meaningful solutions when it comes to these kinds of violence--or at least to name violence without inadvertently inciting even more anger. . . . passion roars through every chapter . . . This book delivers on what it promises, which is an achievement. "--Alison Gately, The Los Angeles Review of Books"If you wish to read the intellectualization of violence, Violence is a phenomenal anthology. . . . Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard, the interviewers and the 'authors' of the anthology, have done a remarkable job in bringing together perceptive and intelligent contributors from various fields to scout the reaches of violence. Their piercing questions brought out brilliant responses from the interviewees."--L. Ali Khan, New York Journal of Books"Violence: Humans in Dark Times is an intriguing beginning to a much-needed sustained intellectual and aesthetic response to the horrors of modern times."—Zoe Vorsino
£13.99
Workman Publishing Orhan's Inheritance
When Orhan’s brilliant and eccentric grandfather, Kemal Türkoglu, who built a dynasty out of making kilim rugs, is found dead, submerged in a vat of dye, Orhan inherits the decades-old business. But Kemal has left the family estate to a stranger thousands of miles away, an aging woman in a retirement home in Los Angeles. Intent on righting this injustice, Orhan unearths a story that, if told, has the power to undo the legacy upon which Orhan’s family is built, a story that could unravel his own future. “Breathtaking and expansive . . . Proof that the past can sometimes rewrite the future.” —Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train “Stunning . . . At turns both subtle and transcendent.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “To take the tumultuous history of Turks and Armenians in the early part of this century, and to tell the stories of families and lovers from the small everyday moments of life to the terrible journeys of death, to make a novel so engrossing and keep us awake—that is an accomplishment, and Aline Ohanesian’s first novel is such a wonderful accomplishment.” —Susan Straight, author of Highwire Moon “Rich, tragic, compelling, and realized with deep care and insight.” —Elle “A book with a mission, giving a voice to history’s silent victims.” —The New York Times Book Review “Orhan’s Inheritance illuminates human nature while portraying a devastating time in history . . . A remarkable debut novel that exhibits an impressive grasp of history as well as narrative intensity and vivid prose.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “A remarkable debut from an important new voice. It tells us things we thought we knew and shows us we had no idea. Beautiful and terrible and, finally, indelible.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Queen of America
£13.52
Ridinghouse Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste
“As an art critic, [Hickey] doesn’t do what most people want from art criticism. He doesn’t provide his readers with a neat intellectual framework through which to view everything they see, like a Clement Greenberg or a Michael Fried, and he doesn’t really do beautiful description either ... Instead, Hickey gives you intricately structured argument and gorgeous prose ... Reading him you want to forget that the art market is a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos between Ukrainian oligarchs and Qatari princesses ... You want to be the thing you advocate; you want to ride the wave, mount the dais, and speak the truth.” – Los Angeles Review of Books Arguably one of the most astute critics working today, Dave Hickey's multi-decade career as a leading cultural commentator is characterised by his blend of high and mass culture and his fervent critique of the celebrity-driven culture of the 21st-century art world. Following his 2012 announcement of self-imposed exile from art criticism, this new body of essays once again questions and challenges the cultural status quo. With his trademark humour, Hickey has declared that: ‘I miss being an elitist and not having to talk to idiots’ in a field that, he believes, is defined by the commoditisation of art and the self-referential tendencies of criticism itself. This new body of shorter essays by the author of Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy and The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty looks at more contemporary phenomena: super-collectors, the trope of the biennale and the loss of looking.
£14.36
Harvard University Press Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form
Christian Gauss Award ShortlistWinner of the ASAP Book PrizeA Literary Hub Book of the Year“Makes the case that the gimmick…is of tremendous critical value…Lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag’s best work.”—Los Angeles Review of Books“Ngai exposes capitalism’s tricks in her mind-blowing study of the time- and labor-saving devices we call gimmicks.”—New Statesman“One of the most creative humanities scholars working today…My god, it’s so good.”—Literary Hub“Ngai is a keen analyst of overlooked or denigrated categories in art and life…Highly original.”—4Columns“It is undeniable that part of what makes Ngai’s analyses of aesthetic categories so appealing…is simply her capacity to speak about them brilliantly.”—Bookforum“A page turner.”—American Literary HistoryDeeply objectionable and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention).When we call something a gimmick, we register misgivings that suggest broader anxieties about value, money, and time, making the gimmick a hallmark of capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory.
£19.95
Quercus Publishing EEG
*WINNER OF THE BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD USA**SHORTLISTED FOR THE EBRD PRIZE**SHORTLISTED FOR THE OXFORD-WEIDENFELD PRIZE*"A writer and thinker of ever greater relevance, a voice whose wide-ranging screeds we ignore at our peril" CLAIRE MESSUD"Her work is of such power and scope that had she remained alive, she would have been a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature" JOSIP NOVAKOVICH, Los Angeles Review of BooksAn urgent new novel about death, war and memory, and a bristling follow-on from Belladonna.In this extraordinary final work, Daša Drndic's combative, probing voice reaches new heights. In her relentless search for truth she delves into the darkest corners of our lives. And as she chastises, she also atones.Andreas Ban failed in his suicide attempt. Even as his body falters and his lungs constrict, he taps on the glass of history - an impenetrable case filled with silent figures - and tries to summon those imprisoned within. Mercilessly, fearlessly, he continues to dissect society and his environment, shunning all favours as he goes after the evils and hidden secrets of others. History remembers the names of perpetrators, not of the victims.Ban travels from Rijeka to Rovinj in nearby Istria, from Belgrade to Toronto to Tirana, from Parisian avenues to Italian palazzi. Ghosts follow him wherever he goes: chess grandmasters who disappeared during WWII; the lost inhabitants of Latvia; war criminals who found work in the C.I.A. and died peacefully in their beds. Ban's family is with him too: those he has lost and those with one foot in the grave. As if left with only a few pieces in a chess game, Andreas Ban plays a stunning last match against Death.Translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth
£10.99
Harvard University Press Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography
An Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal WinnerA Progressive Book of the YearA TechCrunch Favorite Read of the Year“Deeply researched and thoughtful.”—Nature“An extended exercise in myth busting.”—Outside“A critique of both popular and scientific understandings of the hormone, and how they have been used to explain, or even defend, inequalities of power.”—The ObserverTestosterone is a familiar villain, a ready culprit for everything from stock market crashes to the overrepresentation of men in prisons. But your testosterone level doesn’t actually predict your appetite for risk, sex drive, or athletic prowess. It isn’t the biological essence of manliness—in fact, it isn’t even a male sex hormone. So what is it, and how did we come to endow it with such superhuman powers?T’s story begins when scientists first went looking for the chemical essence of masculinity. Over time, it provided a handy rationale for countless behaviors—from the boorish to the enviable. Testosterone focuses on what T does in six domains: reproduction, aggression, risk-taking, power, sports, and parenting, addressing heated debates like whether high-testosterone athletes have a natural advantage as well as disagreements over what it means to be a man or woman.“This subtle, important book forces rethinking not just about one particular hormone but about the way the scientific process is embedded in social context.”—Robert M. Sapolsky, author of Behave“A beautifully written and important book. The authors present strong and persuasive arguments that demythologize and defetishize T as a molecule containing quasi-magical properties, or as exclusively related to masculinity and males.”—Los Angeles Review of Books“Provides fruitful ground for understanding what it means to be human, not as isolated physical bodies but as dynamic social beings.”—Science
£17.95
New Europe Books The Wife Who Wasn't: A Novel
“This comedy of errors is a page-turner, where a mail-order bride service, enough love triangles to boggle the mind, a stolen Egon Schiele painting, and a devastating fire lead the worlds of Santa Barbara and Chișinău to collide.” —Los Angeles Review of Books An exhilaratingly comical, crosscultural debut novel, The Wife Who Wasn’t brings together an eccentric community from the hills of Santa Barbara, California, and a family of Russians from Chișinău, the capital of Moldova. It starts in the late 1990s, after the fall of communism, and has at its center the mail-order marriage between a California man (Sammy) and a Russian woman (Tania) who comes to America, which engenders a series of hilarious cultural misunderstandings. The novel’s four parts take place alternately in California and Moldova, and comprise short chapters whose point of view moves seamlessly between that of the omniscient narrator and that of various characters. Delivered in arresting prose, both realities—late 90s, bohemian/hipster California and postcommunist Moldova—thus come together from opposite points of view. Above all, this novel is a comedy of manners that depicts the cultural (and personality) clash between Tania and Sammy, Anna (Sammy’s teenage daughter) and Irina, and Bill (Sammy’s neighbor) and Serioja (Tania’s brother). It is also a comedy of errors in the tradition of playful, multiple love triangles. The novel reaches a shocking climax involving a stolen Egon Schiele painting and alluding to the real history of East Mountain Drive, whose bohemian community was destroyed in the 2008 “Tea Fire.” A literary tour de force and a rollicking satire of both suburban America and urban Eastern Europe, is a must for fans of Gary Schteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook), Keith Gessen (A Terrible Country), Ludmila Ulitskaya (), and Lara Vapnyar (Divide Me By Zero).
£12.99
The New Press Thick: And Other Essays
FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Named a notable book of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Time, and The Guardian As featured by The Daily Show, NPR, PBS, CBC, Time, VIBE, Entertainment Weekly, Well-Read Black Girl, and Chris Hayes, "incisive, witty, and provocative essays" (Publishers Weekly) by one of the "most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time" (Rebecca Traister) “Thick is sure to become a classic.” —The New York Times Book Review In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom—award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed—is unapologetically "thick": deemed "thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less," McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work. Thick "transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women" (Los Angeles Review of Books) with "writing that is as deft as it is amusing" (Darnell L. Moore). This "transgressive, provocative, and brilliant" (Roxane Gay) collection cements McMillan Cottom's position as a public thinker capable of shedding new light on what the "personal essay" can do. She turns her chosen form into a showcase for her critical dexterity, investigating everything from Saturday Night Live, LinkedIn, and BBQ Becky to sexual violence, infant mortality, and Trump rallies. Collected in an indispensable volume that speaks to the everywoman and the erudite alike, these unforgettable essays never fail to be "painfully honest and gloriously affirming" and hold "a mirror to your soul and to that of America" (Dorothy Roberts).
£17.99
Harvard University Press The Cigarette: A Political History
Los Angeles Times Book Prize FinalistWinner of the Willie Lee Rose PrizeWinner of the PROSE Award in United States HistoryHagley Prize in Business History FinalistA Smithsonian Best History Book of the Year“Vaping gets all the attention now, but Milov’s thorough study reminds us that smoking has always intersected with the government, for better or worse.”—New York Times Book ReviewFrom Jamestown to the Marlboro Man, tobacco has powered America’s economy and shaped some of its most enduring myths. The story of tobacco’s rise and fall may seem simple enough—a tale of science triumphing over corporate greed—but the truth is more complicated.After the Great Depression, government officials and tobacco farmers worked hand in hand to ensure that regulation was used to promote tobacco rather than protect consumers. As evidence of the connection between cigarettes and cancer grew, scientists struggled to secure federal regulation in the name of public health. What turned the tide, Sarah Milov reveals, was a new kind of politics: a movement for nonsmokers’ rights. Activists took to the courts, the streets, city councils, and boardrooms to argue for smoke-free workplaces and allied with scientists to lobby elected officials. The Cigarette puts politics back at the heart of tobacco’s rise and fall, dramatizing the battles over corporate influence, individual choice, government regulation, and science.“A nuanced and ultimately devastating indictment of government complicity with the worst excesses of American capitalism.”—New Republic“An impressive work of scholarship evincing years of spadework…A well-told story.”—Wall Street Journal“If you want to know what the smoke-filled rooms of midcentury America were really like, this is the book to read.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
£20.95
Harvard University Press The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power
Winner of the George Perkins Marsh PrizeWinner of the Stuart L. Bernath PrizeWinner of the W. Turrentine Jackson AwardWinner of the British Association of American Studies Prize“Extraordinary…Deftly rearranges the last century and a half of American history in fresh and useful ways.” —Los Angeles Review of Books“A smart, original, and ambitious book. Black demonstrates that the Interior Department has had a far larger, more invasive, and more consequential role in the world than one would expect.”—Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand DesertsWhen considering the story of American power, the Department of the Interior rarely comes to mind. Yet it turns out that a government agency best known for managing natural resources and operating national parks has constantly supported America’s imperial aspirations.Megan Black’s pathbreaking book brings to light the surprising role Interior has played in pursuing minerals around the world—on Indigenous lands, in foreign nations, across the oceans, even in outer space. Black shows how the department touted its credentials as an innocuous environmental-management organization while quietly satisfying America’s insatiable demand for raw materials. As presidents trumpeted the value of self-determination, this almost invisible outreach gave the country many of the benefits of empire without the burden of a heavy footprint. Under the guise of sharing expertise with the underdeveloped world, Interior scouted tin sources in Bolivia and led lithium surveys in Afghanistan. Today, it promotes offshore drilling and even manages a satellite that prospects for Earth’s resources from outer space.“Offers unprecedented insights into the depth and staying power of American exceptionalism…as generations of policymakers sought to extend the reach of U.S. power globally while emphatically denying that the United States was an empire.”—Penny Von Eschen, author of Satchmo Blows Up the World“Succeeds in showing both the central importance of minerals in the development of American power and how the realities of empire could be obscured through a focus on modernization and the mantra of conservation.”—Ian Tyrrell, author of Crisis of the Wasteful Nation
£22.46
City Lights Books Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment
"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
£12.99
Penguin Books Ltd White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
The International Bestseller'With clarity and compassion, DiAngelo allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to "bad people." In doing so, she moves our national discussions forward. This is a necessary book for all people invested in societal change' Claudia RankineAnger. Fear. Guilt. Denial. Silence. These are the ways in which ordinary white people react when it is pointed out to them that they have done or said something that has - unintentionally - caused racial offence or hurt. After, all, a racist is the worst thing a person can be, right? But these reactions only serve to silence people of colour, who cannot give honest feedback to 'liberal' white people lest they provoke a dangerous emotional reaction. Robin DiAngelo coined the term 'White Fragility' in 2011 to describe this process and is here to show us how it serves to uphold the system of white supremacy. Using knowledge and insight gained over decades of running racial awareness workshops and working on this idea as a Professor of Whiteness Studies, she shows us how we can start having more honest conversations, listen to each other better and react to feedback with grace and humility. It is not enough to simply hold abstract progressive views and condemn the obvious racists on social media - change starts with us all at a practical, granular level, and it is time for all white people to take responsibility for relinquishing their own racial supremacy.'By turns mordant and then inspirational, an argument that powerful forces and tragic histories stack the deck fully against racial justice alongside one that we need only to be clearer, try harder, and do better' David Roediger, Los Angeles Review of Books'The value in White Fragility lies in its methodical, irrefutable exposure of racism in thought and action, and its call for humility and vigilance' Katy Waldman, New Yorker'A vital, necessary, and beautiful book' Michael Eric Dyson
£9.99
Faber & Faber This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew
The first comprehensive biography of this undervalued writer, who was considered 'far and away the best living woman poet' in her day.Andrew Motion's Spectator Book of the Year.'One of the many achievements of This Rare Spirit is its rejection of that tired view of the poet as mouse that barely roared in favour of a true sense of a spikily modern woman, bound by various obligations but resilient, headstrong, and poetically inventive . . . Copus's diligent, scholarly, sensitive work should help Mew's pipe play on for years to come.' Declan Ryan, Los Angeles Review of Books'[A] supreme biography . . . It is hard to do justice to the breadth of research Copus has done here, or the compassionate, detailed conjuring of Mew and her milieu . . . An essential book, a classic work of literary biography.' Seán Hewitt, Irish Times'[K]eenly intelligent, fascinating and nuanced biography . . . Save Charlotte Mew! And read this book.' Joanna Kavenna, Literary Review'An exquisitely told account of the life of a half-forgotten London poet whose work was admired by Hardy, Sassoon and Virginia Woolf. Julia Copus does her justice at last.' Claire Tomalin'This Rare Spirit is a classic - the biography of Mew we have all been waiting for.' Fiona BensonThe British poet Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was regarded as one of the best poets of her age by fellow writers, including Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sasson, Walter de la Mare and Marianne Moore. She has since been neglected, but her star is beginning to rise again, all the more since her 150th anniversary in 2019. This is the first comprehensive biography, from cradle to grave, and is written by fellow poet Julia Copus, who recently unveiled a blue plaque on Mew's childhood house in Doughty Street and was the editor of the Selected Poetry and Prose (2019).Mew was a curious mix of New Woman and stalwart Victorian. Her poems speak to us strongly today, in these strangely mixed times of exposure and seclusion: they reveal the private agony of an isolated being who was forced to keep secret the tragedies of her personal life while being at the same time propelled by her work into the public arena. Her poetry transfigures that very private suffering into art that has a universal resonance.
£25.00
Simon & Schuster Ltd Lady Tan's Circle Of Women
'Despite the inordinate limits placed on women, See allows their strengths to dominate their stories' Washington Post'Poignant . . . quietly affecting' TimeIn 15th century China two women are born under the same sign, the Metal Snake. But life will take the friends on very different paths. According to Confucius, ‘an educated woman is a worthless woman’, but Tan Yunxian – born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separation and loneliness – is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. She begins her training in medicine with her grandmother and, as she navigates the male world of medicine, requiring tact and diplomacy, she struggles against the confining world of her class. From a young age, Yunxian learns about women’s illnesses, many of which relate to childbearing, alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling. The two girls find fast friendship and a mutual purpose – despite the prohibition that a doctor should never touch blood while a midwife comes in frequent contact with it – and they vow to be forever friends, sharing in each other’s joys and struggles. No mud, no lotus, they tell themselves: from adversity beauty can bloom. How might a woman like Yunxian break free of tradition, go on to treat women and girls from every level of society, and lead a life of such importance that many of her remedies are still used five centuries later? How might the power of friendship support or complicate these efforts? Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is a captivating story of women helping other women. It is also a triumphant reimagining of the life of a woman who was remarkable in the Ming dynasty and would be considered remarkable today.Praise for Lisa See 'This novel spans wars and generations, but at its heart is a beautifully rendered story of two women whose individual choices become inextricably tangled’ Jodi Picoult 'No one writes about female friendship, the dark and the light of it, with more insight and depth than Lisa See’ Sue Monk Kidd 'See’s thoughtful and empathetic book sheds necessary attention on this largely ignored event' New York Times 'A powerful and essential story of humanity' Los Angeles Review of Books 'A spellbinding portrait of a time burning with opportunity and mystery' O: The Oprah Magazine 'A lush tale infused with clear-eyed compassion' The Washington Post
£17.77