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Globalize Liberation:
How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World
edited by David Solnit
Available February 2004
ISBN 0-87286-420-0
Paperback original, 248pp
100 b&w illustrations
$16.95
$11.87
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A post-9/11 look at the new radicalism that has captured the imagination of activists worldwide
The attacks of 9/11 have renewed a hunger for insight into what is wrong with the present global order and for ideas and analysis about how to effect change. The strategies and hard-won victories of dedicated activists from global justice and community struggles can provide vision and hope, and in this collection of 33 articles and essays, we hear first-hand accounts from North America, Europe and Latin America.
In recent years, a new radicalism has inspired hundreds of thousands of protesters worldwide to flood the streets in an effective challenge to the global economic system. Yet, rarely is this radicalism clearly articulated or widely circulated. Globalize Liberation aims to deepen, popularize, update and provide concrete practical ideas for this growing spirit of resistance and innovation.
Contributors include: Betita Martínez, Starhawk, Walden Bello, Naomi Klein, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Midnight Notes Collective, Chumbawamba, and more.
David Solnit was a key organizer of the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. A twenty-year veteran of global justice, anti-war, environmental justice, and community struggles, he has worked to popularize the use of direct democracy to build mass movements in the United States and globally. He is a founder of Art and Revolution, which has helped popularize the use of art, street theater and giant puppets as an innovative form of resistance in numerous movements across North America, and from Israel and Palestine to Argentina. He is a trainer in grassroots organizing, direct-action strategy, and street theater. He lives and works as a carpenter in Oakland, California.
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Life Studies, Life Stories:
Drawings
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Available January 2004
ISBN 0-8726-421-9
Paperback original, 112 pp
100 b&w and color illustrations
$19.95
$13.97
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A revelatory retrospective of the insurgent graphic art of this most original poet and painter
Close to 100 figurative drawings in black and white, and in color, mostly nudes in love or strife, some "disastered by life," some with incisive or caustic words integrated in the images. This is a retrospective of Ferlinghetti’s graphic work and play, ranging from his early drawings made in Paris ateliers, to yesterday’s sessions sketching models in his San Francisco studio.
"In the mid-1950s, the work of Abstract Expressionists . . . made a huge impression on him. Ferlinghetti’s rising social consciousness . . . his ongoing creative expressions have tremendous prophetic relevance today as we find ourselves engulfed once again in the disasters of corporate greed and war." — Bette Korman, conceptual artist and curator
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights Books, author of A Coney Island of the Mind and Pictures of the Gone World, among numerous other books, has been drawing from life since his student days in Paris where he frequented the Académie Julien and where he did his first oil painting.
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Citizens of the Empire:
The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity
by Robert Jensen
Available February 2004
ISBN 0-87286-432-4
Paperback original, 160 pp
$11.95
$8.37
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Maintaining political, intellectual, and ethical hope in the heart of the world’s most powerful nation
"Robert Jensen supplies a much needed citizens' manual, that explains well the evasion of moral principles that underlie appeals to patriotism, and the differences between nominal and real free speech and a vibrant versus an empty and managed democracy." – Edward S. Herman, author of The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda and The Myth of the Liberal Media
As we approach the elections of 2004, U.S. progressives are faced with the challenge of how to confront our unresponsive and apparently untouchable power structures. With millions of anti-war demonstrators glibly dismissed as a "focus group," and with the collapse of political and intellectual dialogue into slogans and imperatives used to stifle protest — "Support the Troops," We Are the Greatest Nation On Earth," etc. — a state of hopelessness and cynicism can become overwhelming.
Citizens of the Empire probes deeply into the sense of disempowerment that has resulted from the Left’s inability to halt the violent and repressive course of post-9/11 U.S. policy. In this passionate and very personal exploration of what it means to be a citizen of the world’s most powerful, affluent and militarized nation in an era of imperial expansion, Jensen offers a potent antidote to leftists’ despair over the future of democracy.
In a plainspoken deconstruction of the dominant political rhetoric —intentionally crafted to depress political discourse and activism —, Jensen reveals the contradictions and falsehoods of the prevailing myths by using common-sense analogies that provide the reader with a clear-thinking rebuttal and a way to move forward with progressive political work and discussions.
With an ethical framework that integrates political, intellectual and emotional responses to the disheartening events of the past two years, Jensen examines the ways in which society has been led to this point and offers renewed hope for constructive engagement.
"If, as is axiomatic in therapeutic circles, a person suffering psychological disorder cannot begin to recover until s/he acknowledges the fact of his/her illness, the same principle must apply at the level of mass psychology to the populations of entire countries. Robert Jensen not only argues compellingly that this is so in the contemporary United States, he offers the range of proof necessary to convince all but the most delusional among us that his analysis is accurate. Thus does he provide a veritable cognitive tool kit with which to undertake transformation of the lethal pathology afflicting the U.S. body politic into a condition of mental health. Citizens of Empire is vital reading for anyone and everyone who would seek to forge a viable alternative politics in modern America." – Ward Churchill, author of A Little Matter of Genocide and Perversions of Justice
"That the U.S. today is engaged in a project of empire-building is now beyond debate. But few have clarified the consequences and the choice facing those of us who are citizens of that empire: to challenge it peacefully, from within, or to watch aghast as others attack it, violently, from without. Among those who would meet that challenge for justice, there is anger and there is hope. Bob Jensen has managed the unusual accomplishment of describing and invoking both." — Phyllis Bennis, author of Before and After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis and Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's UN
"Robert Jensen does more than challenge us to think and feel —he also encourages us to transform our lives. While Citizens of the Empire provides cogent information and analysis, the book also offers real clarity about the emotional imperatives of coming to terms with grim aspects of the status quo. At the same time that he demolishes media myths about the "war on terrorism," Jensen takes apart key mechanisms of propaganda, militarism and convenient illusions. Midway through the first decade of the 21st century, this book will jolt readers into a truer reckoning with their own beliefs and capabilities. Jensen makes a powerful case that we can stop being passive spectators and start being active co-creators of history. Citizens of the Empire is a book of realism and hope — a strong antidote to the poisons of conformity and despair." — Norman Solomon, Co-author, Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You, Executive Director, Institute for Public Accuracy
Robert Jensen is a professor of media law, ethics and politics at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream, among other books. He also writes for popular media, and his opinion and analytic pieces on foreign policy, politics and race have appeared in papers and magazines throughout the United States.
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New translations of Neruda’s most important poems, gathered to celebrate the centennial of his birth
This collection of Neruda’s most essential poems will prove indispensable. Selected by a team of poets and prominent Neruda scholars in both Chile and the U.S., this is a definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth and width of Neruda’s various styles and themes. An impressive group of translators that includes Alastair Reid, Stephen Mitchell, Robert Hass, Forrest Gander, Stephen Kessler and Jack Hirschman, have come together to revisit or completely retranslate the poems. This selection sets the standard for a general, high-quality introduction to Neruda’s complete ouevre.
"What better way to celebrate the hundred years of Neruda's glorious residence on our earth than this selection of crucial works - in both languages! - by one of the greatest poets of all time. A splendid way to begin a love affair with our Pablo or, having already succumbed to his infinite charms, revisit him passionately again and again and yet again." – Ariel Dorfman, author of Konfidenz and The Nanny and the Iceberg
"If the notion had struck Pablo Neruda, I am quite sure that like Fernando Pessoa and Antonio Machado he would have given birth to what the former called heteronyms. Like Pessoa especially, Neruda can be several poets according to where he is and when and what his mood might be. It is quite fitting therefore that his work in this anthology be shared by various translators, for, ideally, a translator is but another heteronym speaking in a different tongue and at a different time. Neruda is well served here by these other voices of his." – Gregory Rabassa
Pablo Neruda was born in Chile in 1904. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
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Written In Water:
The Collected Prose Poems
by Luis Cernuda
Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler
Available May 2004
ISBN 0-87286-431-6
Paperback original, 128 pp
$11.95
$8.37
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Prose poems by one of Spain’s greatest poets
While Cernuda’s verse is vivid testimony to various aspects of his biographical itinerary, it is in his prose poems that he traces more explicitly an outline of his life’s journey. Reviewing this work, Octavio Paz wrote: "In these memories and landscapes, in these notes toward the history of his sensibility, there is great objectivity: the poet doesn’t set out to fantasize, or to lie to himself or anyone else. He attempts only to illuminate, with an almost impersonal light, something very personal: a few moments in his life. (But is it truly ours, this life we live?)"
Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) was one of the leading poets of Spain’s Generation of 1927, which included Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Jorge Guillén.
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Ingrid Caven:
A Novel
by Jean-Jacques Schuhl
Translated from the French by Michael Pye
Available June 2004
ISBN 0-87286-427-8
Paperback original, 250 pp
$12.95
$9.07
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Winner of the Prix Goncourt 2000
A novel about the life of German cabaret singer and film actress Ingrid Caven, who was once director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s star, and his wife, muse to Yves Saint Laurent, and a protégé of Pierre Bergé. Consisting of memories, mixing real and invented people and events, Ingrid Caven reveals the cold heart of the European counterculture of the 1970s, an era of celebrity glitz, cocaine-fueled excess, gay bathhouses, and young idealists-turned-terrorists.
Jean-Jacques Schuhl is a Parisian dandy who lives with Ingrid Caven and who had not published a book for twenty years until this one. Ingrid Caven was an immediate bestseller in France where it sold over 235,000 copies in its first year of publication. It has been translated into seventeen languages.
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No Man’s Land:
Selected Stories
by Eduardo Antonio Parra
Available August 2004
ISBN 0-87286-429-4
Paperback original, 144 pp
$13.95
$9.77
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Stories from northern Mexico, the apocalyptic urban zones and desert landscapes just south of the border
In the no-man’s land of Mexico’s far north—harsh desert landscapes, bruising border towns, urban wastelands and fantastical rural villages—migrants, campesinos, and travelers find themselves lost between reality and delirium, tragedy and exaltation.
Ten stories with an unflinching gaze onto the fragility and brutality of life: A tabloid journalist tracks a pair of homeless lovers; a blackout extinguishes the lights of Monterrey, unleashing anxieties and criminal tendencies; a visiting teacher in a remote village witnesses a brutal incident of vigilante justice; a desperate young boy crosses the border in search of a father lost to the North.
Eduardo Antonio Parra (León, Guanajuato, 1965) is the author of two collections of stories, Los límites de la noche and Tierra de nadie. His stories have received numerous national prizes, including Mexico’s National Prize for the Short Story. They have been published, along with his essays, in various journals and magazines in Mexico. This is his first publication in English.
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