Search results for ""Boston Review""

The events of September 11 and the subsequent war on terrorism have provoked widespread discussion about the possibility of democracy in the Islamic world. Such topics as the meaning of jihad, the role of clerics as authoritative interpreters, and the place of human rights and toleration in Islam have become subjects of urgent public debate around the world. With few exceptions, however, this debate has proceeded in isolation from the vibrant traditions of argument within Islamic theology, philosophy, and law. Islam and the Challenge of Democracy aims to correct this deficiency. The book engages the reader in a rich discourse on the challenges of democracy in contemporary Islam. The collection begins with a lead essay by Khaled Abou El Fadl, who argues that democracy, especially a constitutional democracy that protects basic individual rights, is the form of government best suited to promoting a set of social and political values central to Islam. Because Islam is about submission to God and about each individual's responsibility to serve as His agent on Earth, Abou El Fadl argues, there is no place for the subjugation to human authority demanded by authoritarian regimes. The lead essay is followed by eleven others from internationally respected specialists in democracy and religion. They address, challenge, and engage Abou El Fadl's work. The contributors include John Esposito, Muhammad Fadel, Noah Feldman, Nader Hashemi, Bernard Haykel, Muqtedar Khan, Saba Mahmood, David Novak, William Quandt, Kevin Reinhart, and Jeremy Waldron.

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How can the speculative imagination help us build a better world?At a world-historical moment of global upheaval, speculative writing is enjoying a renaissance. This collection of poetry, stories, and essays engages speculation as both a ubiquitous feature of financial capitalism and a radical tool of collective imagination. By rejecting dominant ideas about what is possible, speculation empowers us to plot new paths to a more just world.Creative works range over violence and healing, memory and erasure, and alternative worlds, while essays span the meaning of land and community in the African diaspora, Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction, and the ethics of the far future. Taken together, these works suggest that speculation is ultimately about our relationships with each other—as one contributor puts it, “what they have been, what they are, and most important, what they could be.”

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A conservative Supreme Court is poised to roll back many progressive achievements, from affirmative action to abortion. In the forum that opens Rethinking Law, legal scholars Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath argue that the left must stop thinking of the law as separate from politics. Instead, we must recover a lost progressive vision, a “democracy of opportunity,” that sees the public—not the judiciary—as the ultimate arbiter of what the Constitution means.Offering a nuanced picture of the relationship between law and politics, other essays in Rethinking Law further explore the meaning of law beyond the Constitution and the courts. They look to social movements, including civil rights and LGBTQ rights, for lessons about social transformation. While contributors debate the limits of law in a vastly unequal society, they agree that it remains an essential resource for building a more just world.

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We bear deep wounds, individually and collectively. All have been worsened by a period of destructive politics that left us ill-equipped to respond to a global health catastrophe. As we struggle to recover our footing and grieve our dead, we believe that the arts must have a voice in the conversation about how we heal.This anthology draws together a wide range of artists and thinkers, established and emerging. In essays, memoir, poetry, fiction, and comics, contributors explore what it might look like to repair. Topics include the Salem witch trials, climate catastrophe, the January 6 siege of the Capitol, gender identity, the failures (and hope) of Western medicine, and the entwined horrors of racial, sexual, and colonial violence.No single text in this volume offers a definitive answer for what it means to repair. But together, they reveal a promising vision for where to go from here.

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Known around the world for challenging mainstream economics, economist Mariana Mazzucato believes, as the Financial Times writes, that “the public sector can and should be a cocreator of wealth that actively steers growth to meet its goals.” In Public Purpose: Industrial Policy’s Comeback and Government’s Role in Shared Prosperity, she calls on governments to create the economies we need today.Mazzucato’s challenge leads off a debate on the revival of industrial policy—roughly defined as deliberate government action to shape the economy. Industrial policy has fallen out of favor in recent decades as economists defer to free markets to produce innovation and growth. Yet today, thinkers across the political spectrum have begun expressing new interest in industrial policy as a way to address the most serious problems of our times: from national security and climate change, to the market’s underfunding of public goo

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Nearly two years into a global pandemic, uncertainty has profoundly unsettled both our personal and political lives. Some of its sources are epistemic: How long will vaccine immunity last? Do rising prices threaten economic recovery? Others are sharply existential: How will I pay rent next month? Will I see my loved one again? At no other moment in the twenty-first century has there been such widespread unease about what the future holds.Uncertainty is perhaps never more consequential than where it intersects with political power. Leading this issue’s forum, Sheila Jasanoff, pioneering scholar of science and technology studies, argues that public policy could benefit from a much more serious acknowledgment of uncertainty. In place of the hubris of technocratic expertise, Jasanoff calls for “technologies of humility”—institutional mechanisms, including greater citizen participation, for incorporating a wider range of experience and views in our sch

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It is rare now for people to stay where they were raised, and when we encounter one another—whether in person or, increasingly, online—it is usually in contexts that obscure if not outright hide details about our past. But even in moments of pure self-invention, we are always shaped by the past. In Ancestors, some of today’s most imaginative writers consider what it means to be made and fashioned by others. Are we shaped by grandparents, family, the deep past, political forebears, inherited social and economic circumstances? Can we choose our family, or is blood always thicker? And looking forward, what will it mean to be ancestors ourselves, and how will our descendants remember us?

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We are living in the midst of the greatest public health crisis of our time.Confronting the many challenges of this moment-from the medical to the economic, the social to the political-demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. Bringing together coverage of the unfolding pandemic from the critically acclaimed Boston Review, this collection explores the history and social legacies of pandemics, explores the place of science in popular culture and policy-making, and interrogates the ways in which science and health have been politicized.Thinking in a Pandemic collects the latest arguments from doctors and epidemiologists, philosophers and economists, legal scholars and historians, activists and citizens, as they think not just through this moment but beyond it.While much remains uncertain, our responsibility to public reason is sure. Now, more than ever, we affirm the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a healthier and more just world.Contributors include: Alex de Waal, David S Jones, Stefan Helmreich, Jeremy Greene, Dora Vargha, Jonathan Fuller, Marc Lipsitch, John Ioannidis, Trisha Greenhalgh, Sarah Burgard, Lucie Kalousova, Cailin O'Connoer, James Owen Weatherall, Natalie Dean.

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From the COVID-19 pandemic to uprisings over police brutality, we are living in the greatest social crisis of a generation. But the roots of these latest emergencies stretch back decades. At their core is a politics of death: a brutal neoliberal ideology that combines deep structural racism with a relentless assault on social welfare. Its results are the failing economic and public health systems we confront today-those that benefit the few and put the most vulnerable in harm's way.Contributors to this volume not only protest these neoliberal roots of our present catastrophe, but they insist there is only one way forward: a new kind of politics-a politics of care-that centers people's basic needs and connections to fellow citizens, the global community, and the natural world. Imagining a world that promotes the health and well-being of all, they draw on different backgrounds-from public health to philosophy, history to economics, literature to activism-as well as the example of other countries and the past, from the AIDS activist group ACT-UP to the Black radical tradition. Together they point to a future, as Simon Waxman writes, where "no one is disposable."CONTRIBUTORS Robin D. G. Kelley, Gregg Gonsalves and Amy Kapczynski, Walter Johnson, Anne L. Alstott, Melvin Rogers, Amy Hoffman, Sunaura Taylor, Vafa Ghazavi, Adele Lebano, Paul Hockenos, Paul Katz and Leandro Ferreira, Shaun Ossei-Owusu, , Colin Gordon, Jason Q. Purnell, Jamala Rogers, Dan Berger, Julie Kohler, Manoj Dias-Abey, Simon Waxman, Farah GriffinA co-publication between Boston Review and Verso Books.

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A young poet well known in the poetry community, Nadelberg has been compared to Gertrude Stein and James Schuyler and published her poems widely—from magazines and journals (Boston Review and Ploughshares) to hipster websites (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency). Six poems are inspired by, and in conversation with, the films by Eric Rohmer. Her last collection won the Slope Poetry Prize and was reviewed in the Believer, Chicago Review, and Verse. Nadelberg reviews for Rain Taxi Review of Books and Zoland.

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Andrew Ridker was born in 1991. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Boston Review, The Believer and St. Louis Magazine, and he is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics. He is the recipient of an Iowa Arts Fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The Altruists is his first novel.

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-Greenberg is also a highly visible critic; she has written recent reviews in The Boston Review, Rain Taxi, Verse, and EPR. - Greenberg teaches at Columbia College, Chicago, and has taught at Bentley College in Boston. - Greenberg will have poems in the Sept/Oct. 2003 issue of American Poetry Review, and extensive publication in other literary magazines in Fall 2003 and Spring 2004

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"Angie Estes has recently created some of the most beautiful verbal objects on the planet." (Stephen Burt, Boston Review) "James Merrill, Amy Clampitt and Gjertrud Schnackenberg all won praise, and sparked controversy, for their elaboration; Estes shares some of their challenges, should please their readers, and belongs in their stellar company."- Publishers Weekly Angie Estes' previous book, Tryst (also from Oberlin College Press), was named one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, as"a collection of poems remarkable for its variety of subjects, array of genres and nimble use of language." Her much-anticipated new book is another glittering demonstration of her gifts.

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This collection provides readers with a perpetually exciting, compact edition of the revolutionary poet's most powerful work. Frederick Seidel has been hailed as 'the poet of a new contemporary form' (New York Review of Books), and 'the most frightening American poet ever' (Boston Review). His ambitious, disturbing and tender work has mystified and captured critics, poets and readers for decades. Select Seidel allows readers to appreciate the scope of Seidel's work over the past half-century and his uncanny ability to say the unsayable. Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, 'the best American poet writing today'.

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"Pantheism and synesthesia are his visionary rules ...severe, contagious fun."-Boston Review "How much of what we call 'seeing' is actually 'believing?'" Geoffrey Nutter asks in his dazzling second collection. The quiet, daring "water voices" of these poems carry the reader into their serious play, in settings as varied as the Tappan Zee Bridge and the inside of a flower, turning language 'touchable' and words into music. Geoffrey Nutter was born in Sacramento, California. He is the author of A Summer Evening, winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1997 and The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, daughter, and son.

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"The poems of Timothy Donnelly astonish by their inventive intelligence . . . we learn that self-knowledge can be adequate to knowledge of the world, in all its violence and complexity."—Allen Grossman Timothy Donnelly's long-awaited second collection is a tour de force, fully invested with an abiding faith in language to illuminate the advances of personal and political contingency. Timothy Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation won the 2011 Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award. Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit was published by Grove Press in 2003. He is poetry editor for Boston Review and teaches at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.

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The Ghosts of Birds offers thirty-five essays by Eliot Weinberger: the first section of the book continues his linked serial-essay, An Elemental Thing, which pulls the reader into “a vortex for the entire universe” (Boston Review). Here, Weinberger chronicles a nineteenth-century journey down the Colorado River, records the dreams of people named Chang, and shares other factually verifiable discoveries that seem too fabulous to possibly be true. The second section collects Weinberger’s essays on a wide range of subjects—some of which have been published in Harper’s, New York Review of Books, and London Review of Books—including his notorious review of George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points and writings about Mongolian art and poetry, different versions of the Buddha, American Indophilia (“There is a line, however jagged, from pseudo-Hinduism to Malcolm X”), Béla Balázs, Herbert Read, and Charles Reznikoff. This collection proves once again that Weinberger is “one of the bravest and sharpest minds in the United States” (Javier Marías).

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Codes Appearing combines in a single volume three seminal and long unavailable collections by Michael Palmer. This volume rescues from limbo three of his most beautiful poetry volumes: Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, and Sun (1981, 1984, 1988). Making available a great deal of Palmer's most influential, exciting, and stunning work, Codes Appearing is a landmark volume. The significance of his writing is every day more recognized. "It is impossible," as The Boston Review noted, "to overstate Palmer's importance." "Michael Palmer,'" as Joshua Clover declared in The Village Voice, "is the most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation.... And his books, including the essential '80s triptych of Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, and Sun, are organized not by story but by a dreamland of calculus and sway....[Palmer's] genius is for making the world strange again."

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Hailed as one of the best contemporary poets writing in the English language, David Ferry meditates unsentimentally, in many of these powerful and often wrenching poems, on the dispossession of people afflicted by madness, homelessness, or other forms of "wildness." The voices in all the poems in this book demonstrate how, for each of us, there is no certain dwelling place."David Ferry's Dwelling Places is a marvelous, extremely moving book, distinguished by Ferry's characteristic formal virtuosity, extraordinarily fresh and 'inner' translations, and a kind of driven anguished rage at both the social conditions in which human beings have to live and the mysteriously unchangeable tragedies of individual human lives. The translations amplify and deepen the contemporary scenes. I feel that in the future this will be perceived as a great book."—Frank Bidart"Not until I had read Dwelling Places several times did I see how ingeniously resourceful, ambitious, and admirably modest a book David Ferry has made."—Boston Review

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George Louis Beer Prize WinnerWallace K. Ferguson Prize FinalistA Marginal Revolution Book of the Year“A groundbreaking contribution…Intellectual history at its best.”—Stephen Wertheim, Foreign AffairsNeoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again by the relentless change and social injustice that accompanied it.“Slobodian’s lucidly written intellectual history traces the ideas of a group of Western thinkers who sought to create, against a backdrop of anarchy, globally applicable economic rules. Their attempt, it turns out, succeeded all too well.”—Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg Opinion“Fascinating, innovative…Slobodian has underlined the profound conservatism of the first generation of neoliberals and their fundamental hostility to democracy.”—Adam Tooze, Dissent“The definitive history of neoliberalism as a political project.”—Boston Review

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"Powerful ...full of dark nostalgia."--Nathan Englander The Lifeboat All night in his lifeboat my father sang to keep the voices of the other men who cried in the wreckage from reaching him, he sang what he knew of the requiem, of the hit parade and the bits of hymns, he sang until he would never sing again, scalding his raw throat with sea-water until his ribs heaved, until the salt wept from his eyes on dry land, flecked at his lips in his squalling rages, streaked the sheets in his night sweats as night after night the reassembled ship scattered its parts on the shore of his bed, and the lifeboat eased him out again to drown each night among singing men. Inspired by a shipwreck endured by her father during the Second World War, and by his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and eventual suicide, Inheritance is a powerful poetic debut by the winner of the 2013 Boston Review Fiction Contest and The Malahat Review Far Horizons Award.

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Marjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously Wittgenstein's remark that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry," Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the "poet." What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal."This book has the lucidity and the intelligence we have come to expect from Marjorie Perloff.—Linda Munk, American Literature"[Perloff] has brilliantly adapted Wittgenstein's conception of meaning and use to an analysis of contemporary language poetry."—Linda Voris, Boston Review"Wittgenstein's Ladder offers significant insights into the current state of poetry, literature, and literary study. Perloff emphasizes the vitality of reading and thinking about poetry, and the absolute necessity of pushing against the boundaries that define and limit our worlds."—David Clippinger, Chicago Review"Majorie Perloff has done more to illuminate our understanding of twentieth century poetic language than perhaps any other critic. . . . Entertaining, witty, and above all highly original."—Willard Bohn, Sub-Stance

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"Zucker is a poet of bottom-scraping, blood-chilling existential anxiety, one among many, and a poet of New York City, one among many, and a poet of American Jewish inheritance, one among many, and one of the funniest, too."--Boston Review Rachel Zucker returns to themes of motherhood, marriage, and the life of an artist in this double collection of poems. Fables, written in prose form, shows the reader different settings (mountains, ocean, Paris) of Zucker's travels and meditations on place. The Pedestrians brings us back to her native New York and the daily frustrations of a woman torn by obligations. That Great Diaspora I'll never leave New York & when I do I too will be unbodied--what? you imagine I might transmogrify? I'm from nowhere which means here & so wade out into the briny dream of elsewheres like a released dybbyk but can't stand the soulessness now everyone who ever made sense to me has died & everyone I love grows from my body like limbs on a rootless tree Rachel Zucker is the author of Museum of Accidents, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife, The Last Clear Narrative, Eating in the Underworld, and Annunciation.

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How to take advantage of technology, data, and the collective wisdom in our communities to design powerful solutions to contemporary problems “Bursting with sage, practical advice for public sector officials and civil society actors who want to engage citizens and give them more power.”—Glen Weyl and Henry Farrell, Boston Review The challenges societies face today, from inequality to climate change to systemic racism, cannot be solved with yesterday’s toolkit. Solving Public Problems shows how readers can take advantage of digital technology, data, and the collective wisdom of our communities to design and deliver powerful solutions to contemporary problems. Offering a radical rethinking of the role of the public servant and the skills of the public workforce, this book is about the vast gap between failing public institutions and the huge number of public entrepreneurs doing extraordinary things—and how to close that gap. Drawing on lessons learned from decades of advising global leaders and from original interviews and surveys of thousands of public problem solvers, Beth Simone Noveck provides a practical guide for public servants, community leaders, students, and activists to become more effective, equitable, and inclusive leaders and repair our troubled, twenty-first-century world.

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"The poems of Anthony McCann are beautiful, brutal, and unerring. They present us with, or return us to, a complicated, violent, poignant, weird, and mysterious world--a world which is very particularly his, and also our own, re-sung. For some time now I have believed McCann to be one of the finest poets writing today."--Maggie Nelson "McCann demonstrates that the truth surrounds us all; our best way of connecting with it is through compassion and love. With equal parts exuberance and dread, the speaker encourages us to 'waste the whole day feeling these things.'"--Boston Review Thing Music is full of flesh, of creatures tangled in their worlds. Marked variously by the desert and coastal landscapes of Southern California and the intersections of phenomenology and anarchism, these poems are porous bodies, traversed by light and noise. From "Mouth Guitar": Now the pulsing afternoon takes each belly in its hands lifts it up towards some glass and all that's inside While he crawled on with his body towards vengeance or the state Anthony McCann lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the University of California-Riverside's Palm Desert MFA program. He is the "Poet Laureate" of Machine Project, and also teaches courses at the California Institute of the Arts.

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"One of the most exciting and visceral poets of his generation."—Tony Hoagland"Look at homie on the beach picking shells in dress shoes," David Tomas Martinez writes in his raw, electrifying second collection. In his debut, Hustle, Martinez offered a kaleidoscopic coming-of-age narrative replete with teen shootings and car-jackings, uncertain forays into sex, and the ongoing violence of colonialism upon Latino communities in San Diego. Emerging from the fray, the poet is left to wonder: Who am I now? In Post Traumatic Hood Disorder, the speaker assembles a bricolage self-portrait from the fractures of the past. Sliding between scholarly diction and slangy vernacular, studded with references to Greek mythology and hip-hop, Martinez's poems showcase a versatility of language and a wild-hearted poetic energy that is thoughtful, vulnerable, and distinctly American.David Tomas Martinez is a recipient of a 2017 NEA fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the Verlaine Poetry Prize, a CantoMundo fellowship, and the Stanley P. Young Fellowship from Breadloaf. His debut collection of poetry, Hustle (2014, Sarabande Books) received the New England Book Festival's prize in poetry, the Devil's Kitchen Reading Award, and $10,000 as honorable mention from the Antonio Cisneros Del Moral Prize. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares, Tin House, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Martinez lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Inger Christensen, often cited as a Nobel contender, is one of Europe’s most revered poets. Winner of the Nordic Prize of the Swedish Academy and the Austrian State Prize for Literature, she is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking work Det (It), a cycle of poems published in 1969. Her first book published in the U.S., alphabet (New Directions, 2001), met with a tremendous response: “Seductive,” said Boston Review; “A visionary reincarnation of the natural world in the atomic age,” wrote Chicago Review. Butterfly Valley: A Requiem collects four medium-length works, each startling for its beauty and formal innovation. “Butterfly Valley” is a sonnet cycle which describes the glowing color and beauty of butterflies, and also their fragility and mortality. Memory is uncovered in the poem like the fluttering of their wings. In “Watersteps,” the fountains and piazzas of Rome coalesce, brought alive in the imagination by the poem’s shifting rhythms, lines, and overall structure. In “Poem on Death” the poet seeking immortality faces the whiteness of the page as the blankness of death: “it feels so odd! immodest to think / about death when no one / you know has died / it means that each time / you look at yourself in the mirror / you look death in the eye / without crying / like a clear and fully! comprehensible answer / but to questions / you dare not ask.” “Meeting,” written in extended sections, describes a “coming together,” yet examines our failure to connect and the ability of language to overcome this.

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'I need a man good-looking enough to pick up a dame who has a sense of class, but he's got to be tough enough to swap punches with a power shovel.' In the first of the four cases in Trouble is My Business, Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is offered a job that leaves a bad taste in the mouth: smearing a girl who's 'got her hooks into a rich man's pup'. Before too long Marlowe's up to his neck in corpses and cops and he's taken pity on the girl. There's nothing like making trouble out of your business . . .The four novellas collected here are quintessential Raymond Chandler: slick, crystal-clear writing that pins the reader to the seat and won't let go until the last page is turned.'Age does not wither Chandler's prose' Literary Review'Chandler's prose flies off the pages like a burst from a Tommy gun. Chandler was perhaps the finest exponent of the fledgling genre now known as pulp fiction' Scottish Field'One of the greatest crime writers, who set the standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times 'Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner . . . An original . . . A great artist' Boston Review'Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since' Paul AusterDiscover the newest addition to the inimitable Philip Marlowe series - Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne - out 6 September 2018 in hardback and ebook from Hogarth.

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The Corpse Flower brings works from Bruce Beasley's first four award-winning collections together with twenty-five new poems, organizing them around the metaphor that gives the book its title: an enormous tropical bloom that reeks like carrion, and around whose three-day florescence "dung beetles & flies & sweat bees swarm / . . . pollen gummed all over / their furred feet." The corpse flower serves as a figure for Beasley's coming to terms with birth and death, fecundity and decay, the illusion of death, and the flourishing of the rare and beautiful out of the materials of the decayed. The Corpse Flower traces a spiritual pilgrimage, weaving autobiography into a larger meditation on the materials of language and of the life of the spirit. Beasley's is a deeply physical spirituality - as he writes in one poem, "the soul's / impossible to tell / from the objects of its appetite." Throughout these poems, family mythology, as well as religious and mythic narrative and iconography, become occasions for extraordinary meditations on the physicality of birth and death, beginnings and endings. This substantial selection of Bruce Beasley's work, written over a twenty year period, offers the opportunity to experience, page by page, a poet's evolution, and to follow a unique, creative mind as it reaches, through interrogations of faith, science, and art, toward some form of resolution - a resolution increasingly represented by the beauties of language itself. On Summer Mystagogia "These brilliant poems, often both mythic and demotic, powerfully initiate the reader into a world at once marred and yet suffused by the signs and wonders of an 'irresistible grace.' . . . A wonderfully resilient and hard-won poetry of witness." -Boston Review

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A fresh portrayal of one of the architects of the African American intellectual tradition, whose faith in the subversive power of education will inspire teachers and learners today.“As departments…scramble to decolonize their curriculum, Givens illuminates a longstanding counter-canon in predominantly black schools and colleges.”—Boston Review“Informative and inspiring…An homage to the achievement of an often-forgotten racial pioneer.”—Glenn C. Altschuler, Florida Courier“A long-overdue labor of love and analysis…that would make Woodson, the ever-rigorous teacher, proud.”—Randal Maurice Jelks, Los Angeles Review of Books“Fascinating, and groundbreaking. Givens restores Carter G. Woodson, one of the most important educators and intellectuals of the twentieth century, to his rightful place alongside figures like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells.”—Imani Perry, author of May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National AnthemBlack education was subversive from its inception. African Americans pursued education through clandestine means, often in defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence. They developed what Jarvis Givens calls a tradition of “fugitive pedagogy”—a theory and practice of Black education epitomized by Carter G. Woodson—groundbreaking historian, founder of Black History Month, and legendary educator under Jim Crow.Givens shows that Woodson succeeded because of the world of Black teachers to which he belonged. Fugitive Pedagogy chronicles his ambitious efforts to fight what he called the “mis-education of the Negro” by helping teachers and students to see themselves and their mission as set apart from an anti-Black world. Teachers, students, families, and communities worked together, using Woodson’s materials and methods as they fought for power in schools. Forged in slavery and honed under Jim Crow, the vision of the Black experience Woodson articulated so passionately and effectively remains essential for teachers and students today.

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“In a display of rationality uncommon to discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nusseibeh takes an impartial vantage point, trying to sort out a mess largely generated by overblown and hyperactive political identities.”—Boston Review“[This] philosophical and balanced book is unfailingly sensitive and empathetic to both sides.”—Publishers WeeklyCan a devout Jew be a devout Jew and drop the belief in the rebuilding of the Temple? Can a devout Muslim be a devout Muslim and drop the belief in the sacredness of the Rock? Can one right (the right of return) be given up for another (the right to live in peace)? Can one claim Palestinian identity and still retain Israeli citizenship? What is a Palestinian state worth? For over sixty years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been subjected to many solutions and offered many answers by diverse parties. Yet, answers are only as good as the questions that beget them. It is with this simple, but powerful idea, the idea of asking the basic questions anew, that the renowned Palestinian philosopher and activist Sari Nusseibeh begins his book.What Is a Palestinian State Worth? poses questions about the history, meaning, future, and resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Deeply informed by political philosophy and based on decades of personal involvement with politics and social activism, Nusseibeh’s moderate voice—global in its outlook, yet truly grounded in his native city of Jerusalem—points us toward a future which, as George Lamming once put it, is colonized by our acts in this moment, but which must always remain open.

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"One might argue that nothing is sacred in Caroline Knox's work, but it would be truer to its spirit to say that everything is sacred here-and all are welcome."-Rebecca Frank, Boston Review "Caroline Knox reminds us how whangy and interesting it all is."-C.D. Wright "She is often obscure, but her allusions are as much a sign of camaraderie as of scholarly pretension, her poems a pert crystallization impossible in more narrative poetry."-The New Yorker Caroline Knox once again demonstrates that she is a master at lyrical billiards, sending all levels of diction in surprising and comedic directions. No subject matter is off-limits for her examination. Her vast range of experiment is exciting, and the ensuing poems are games, dreams, and riddles. This collection is art on the page for the eye and the ear. From "Poem": Of milk, these persons make the butter until have what are cheeses when they're at home; of cheese, hors d'oeuvres of sandwich are manufactured sandwich islands. The workforce custom subsume draft cereal. Forasmuch as we are not birdlike, we pig out, crikey, put away comestibles big-time. Caroline Knox's most recent publications are Flemish (Wave Books, 2013), and Nine Worthies (Wave Books, 2010). Quaker Guns (Wave Books, 2008) received a Recommended Reading Award 2009 from the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Six poems are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, Second Edition. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council (1996, 2006), The Fund for Poetry, and the Yale/Mellon Visiting Faculty Program.

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Compares the privileged educational experience offered to the children of relocated Nazi scientists in Texas with the educational disadvantages faced by Mexican American students living in the same city.Educating the Enemy begins with the 144 children of Nazi scientists who moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1946 as part of the military program called Operation Paperclip. These German children were bused daily from a military outpost to four El Paso public schools. Though born into a fascist enemy nation, the German children were quickly integrated into the schools and, by proxy, American society. Their rapid assimilation offered evidence that American public schools played a vital role in ensuring the victory of democracy over fascism. Jonna Perrillo not only tells this fascinating story of Cold War educational policy, but she draws an important contrast with another, much more numerous population of children in the El Paso public schools: Mexican Americans. Like everywhere else in the Southwest, Mexican American children in El Paso were segregated into “Mexican” schools, where the children received a vastly different educational experience. Not only were they penalized for speaking Spanish—the only language all but a few spoke due to segregation—they were tracked for low-wage and low-prestige careers, with limited opportunities for economic success. Educating the Enemy charts what two groups of children—one that might have been considered the enemy, the other that was treated as such—reveal about the ways political assimilation has been treated by schools as an easier, more viable project than racial or ethnic assimilation. Listen to an interview with the author here and read an interview in Time and a piece based on the book in the Boston Review.

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A NONAME BOOK CLUB PICK Named a Kirkus Reviews "Best Book of 2021" "Becoming Abolitionists is ultimately about the importance of asking questions and our ability to create answers. And in the end, Purnell makes it clear that abolition is a labor of love—one that we can accomplish together if only we decide to."—Nia Evans, Boston ReviewFor more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. From community policing initiatives to increasing diversity, none of it has stopped the police from killing about three people a day. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these "solutions" do not match the problem: the police cannot be reformed. In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. Louis, let alone the nation. But the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing.Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings. Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence. Becoming Abolitionists shows that abolition is not solely about getting rid of police, but a commitment to create and support different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most excitingly, an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place.

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