New translations of Neruda’s most important poems, gathered to celebrate the centennial of his birth
One hundred years after his birth, Pablo Neruda's poetry is as vital and beloved as ever. This collection presents fifty of Neruda's most essential poems in dynamic new translations, the result of an unprecedented collaboration among a team of poets, translators, and the world's leading Neruda scholars. This is a definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth of Neruda's various styles, themes, and periods. An impressive group of translators including Alastair Reid, Stephen Mitchell, Robert Hass, Forrest Gander, Stephen Kessler and Jack Hirschman, have come together to revisit or completely retranslate the poems and the result is a collection which breathes new life and understanding into the work.
"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
DOCUMENTARY NERUDA! PRESENTE! TO TOUR WORLDWIDE IN CONJUNCTION WITH THIS BOOK; PREMIERES IN NEW YORK CITY & SAN FRANCISCO
Editor Mark Eisner, in association with Fundación Pablo Neruda, Stanford's Center for Latin American Studies, the Universidad de Chile, and the Chilean Presidential Commission on the Pablo Neruda Centennial, has created a documentary on Neruda’s life. Narrated by famed Chilean author Isabel Allende, this is an unprecedented film. Never before has there been a feature-length film about Neruda in English. Neruda! Presente! will be distributed worldwide in Spanish as well. For more information, or to inquire about a showing of the film near you, see www.nerudadoc.org
CENTENNIAL EVENTS WORLDWIDE —AND IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA — WILL CELEBRATE NERUDA'S LIFE AND WORK
In April, National Poetry Month, Eisner — along with many of the translators of The Essential Neruda —will read selections of Neruda's work in San Francisco, Michigan, Berkeley, Washington DC, New York, Boston, and Rhode Island. Translators and poets will read in honor of Neruda at the SF State University Poetry Center's 50th Anniversary event on April 17th. Continuing through July, events will take place across the globe, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., The Americas Society in New York City, Jardim das Artes in São Paulo, Brazil and Auditorio de Comfenalco in Cali, Colombia.
On July 12th, Neruda's 100th birthday, the Neruda Foundation in Chile, along with groups around the world, are organizing all-day readings of Neruda's poetry. City Lights will co-host special events in the Bay Area including "La Semana Neruda" with La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, CA and a gala celebration to take place on Neruda's birthday in San Francisco.
For updates on Neruda worldwide celebrations see: http://www.dialoguepoetry.org/neruda_readings.htm.
Pablo Neruda was born in Chile in 1904. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
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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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Life Studies, Life Stories:
Drawings
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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
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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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Winner of the Northern California Book Award for Best Translation
In this romantic comedy, a man with a dark secret unravels the mysteries of his past
Italian writer Cardo Mariano is a cauldron of contradictions. Plagued by guilt over the drowning of his younger brother, he is strangely terrified by life. When the Norwegian woman he loves becomes pregnant, he plunges into a comically disastrous liaison, fleeing from commitment and responsibility. He tries to escape through writing about his youth, reliving erotic encounters and the political activism of Italy in the 1960s. When he is finally forced to confront his past and his evasions, he learns to face his fear and finds that there are second chances after all.
"This is an extremely engaging story about fear and longing, about creating a new life from the ashes of an old one, revealing that the answers we seeka re often right in front of us." – Booklist
Stefano Bortolussi is an Italian novelist, critic, translator, and poet. He also writes a monthly column for Italian Esquire and works frequently in theater and film.
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Nine Alexandrias
Pocket Poets Series #56
by Semezdin Mehmedinovic
ISBN 0-87286-423-5
Paperback original, 98 pp
$9.95
$6.97
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New poems from the highly acclaimed author of Sarajevo Blues
Following his depiction of Bosnia under siege in the much celebrated Sarajevo Blues, Semezdin Mehmedinovic now explores the vast space of his new continent. Mostly written in response to a cross-country journey by train in post 9/11 America, Mehmedinovic’s Nine Alexandrias provides a poetry of witness and testimony of a very different order. In this nightmarish and exhilarating odyssey, Mehmedinovic’s political acuity is displayed everywhere but barely pronounced. In Washington D.C., his new home, the graphic and tactile affirmation of life amidst horror depicted so masterfully in Sarajevo Blues, turns into an eerie silence that permeates both the expanse of the land and the heart of the American empire.
Praise for Nine Alexandrias:
"It consists of three sequences; two of them while purposefully understated, are as good as anything published in English this year... Alcalay's English never feels forced or rushed, and his very acute introduction articulates the book's underlying conceit perfectly." – Publisher's Weekly *Starred Review
Praise for Semezdin Mehmedinovic’s Sarajevo Blues:
“Sarajevo Blues is widely considered here to be the best piece of writing to emerge from the besieged capital since Bosnia’s war erupted in April 1992.” —The Washington Post
Semezdin Mehmedinovic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia in 1960 and is the author of five books. Mehmedinovic arrived in the U.S. as a political refugee in 1996, and he is currently living in Alexandria, Virginia
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A writer-for-hire in LA’s inner city finds his emotionally distanced world jeopardized by a client’s special desires
In Echo Park, a neighborhood at the wrong end of Sunset Boulevard, Joe, a loner, lives marginally. Ironically, he finds himself becoming more involved than he’d planned in the lives of his clients, linked to their dreams and to their despair, and in some cases to their dirty secrets. Into this compromised world come two women who further complicate his life: Clio, a graphic artist whose passion is sketching flowers, and Corazon, who suddenly arrives from the Philippines in response to a letter from his biggest client. This noir-style novel vividly brings to life an embattled community of mostly have-nots who attempt to thrive amid political battles over air rights and pollution trading, LAPD abuse, and assorted run-of-the-mill inner city murders. Joe’s Word could be considered the final edition of Robert Towne/Jack Nicholson’s epic sweep of L.A. history: "Chinatown’s" grab for water, "Two Jakes’s" grab for land, and now, in Joe’s Word, L.A.’s air going to the highest bidder.
"Good things always seem to come in the small, neat editions packaged in the City Lights Noir series. Joe's Word gets my nod for the wry wit of its author, Elizabeth Stromme, and for the amused affection she has for an unglamorous neighborhood at the losing end of Sunset Boulevard." – The New York Times
"It's hard to understand why this delightful novel made its debut in France in 1996 and has only just graced its hometown, but it may be that the French love our L.A. noir almost as much — the French publishers even more — than we do. The Joe of the title is a writer for hire, the modern equivalent of a medieval scribe. – Los Angeles Times
"Stromme packages her moral message in a pitch-perfect rendition of a postwar crime novel, complete with an existentially slow buildup to the main action and a large helping of sexual perversion. This is the novel Jim Thompson would write if he were still kicking." – Booklist
"Intriguing, offbeat noir fiction" – Lev Raphael, Detroit Free Press
"As hilarious as The Big Lebowski by the Coen brothers...a small masterpiece of dry tenderness." – Bruno Juffin, Les Inrockuptibles
"Extremely vivid...A terrific gift for those who read it." – Gerard Lefort, Radio France Inter
Elizabeth Stromme has published two noir novels with Gallimard in France. Her work has appeared in Le Monde and the Los Angeles Times, among other journals and magazines; she currently writes about the politics of gardening in her column "The Underground Gardener" at www.undergroundgardener.com.
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Stories of spiritual longing and romantic illusion, or vice-versa, in the holy rubble of Los Angeles
Five stories track boys and men as they navigate among the ghosts and mirages of greater Los Angeles. Rifkin’s male protagonists are part fuck-up, part primal force, and full of longing—for fathers, for mothers, for sex, for faith, for just getting it right.
A one-time actor staggers toward his demise and clings to a ledge of possibly lunatic faith; a young boy is haunted by cosmic loneliness in the form of a medical encyclopedia; the heir to an absent father’s wealth can’t quite bring himself to claim his portion.
Far from the metropolitan glitz of Hollywood and downtown L.A., these stories take place in the off-the-grid, suburban neighborhoods of stucco-dwellers. Among car lots and strip malls, dusty brown hillsides and oil derricks, the ordinary becomes epic in the contested terrain between faith and doubt, love and sex, spirit and flesh, reality and illusion.
Praise for Signal Hill:
"...hauntingly beautiful, the work of a gifted storyteller with a sharp eye but a tender heart." - LA Times Book Review
"In his new collection, Rifkin writes with such startling originality and authority that you have to believe he'll be the next darling of the literary world." – Time Out, NY
"Stories and a novella suggest that Rifkin is what might have happened had Nathanael West lived on and been even more talented.... Exquisite." – Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
"As incisive, eloquent and definitive a collection of L.A. stories as any since David Freeman's A Hollywood Education nearly twenty years ago, but from the other side of the psychic tracks, where desperation runs parallel with wisdom." — Steve Erickson
“Alan Rifkin is a writer of perfect paradox. By turns lyrical and rude, tear-inducing and laugh-out-loud funny, Signal Hill stands out as the work of an author unafraid of tackling the big issues—namely what it means to try and survive with grace in a world as insane as we are, and what it means to love. A spot-on, weirdly life-affirming and terrifically written batch of stories. I could read this guy all day.” — Jerry Stahl
"Alan Rifkin's stories have a magnificent plaintive beauty. Not since Flannery O'Connor have so many misfits prevailed. Days pass after reading, and weeks, and months, and you find yourself still haunted, somehow renewed, and connected again to the mysteries of being alive.” — Martha Sherrill
“Alan Rifkin's deeply felt short stories carefully balance love and loss, faith and emptiness with both wit and wonder. His people are tragic, funny, quixotic, and always on the brink of redemption. His tight prose astutely keeps their lives from careening out of control. A terrific collection.” — Jill Ciment
Alan Rifkin is a writer for Los Angeles Magazine and a former contributing editor to Details. His short stories have appeared in L.A. Style and The Quarterly, and he has also written for the L.A .Times Magazine, Premiere, L.A. Weekly, Salon, and Buzz Magazine. He was recently announced a finalist for the 2003 PEN Center USA Award in Journalism for his essay "Pool Man," which appeared in the L.A. Weekly. He lives with his wife and four children in Long Beach, CA.
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where river meets ocean:
Poet Laureate Series No. 3
by devorah major
ISBN 1-931404-03-8
Paperback original, 104 pp.
$9.95
$6.97
Published by the City Lights Foundation
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where river meets ocean is the poetic junction of love, politics, creative action, and self-discovery
This collection of poetry begins with the poet’s inaugural address as Laureate of San Francisco, a sparkling essay that shows how poetry can please and empower. Strong, introspective and caring, devorah major’s poems capture the challenge and joy of being an artist as they survey the political and social landscapes of one of America’s favorite cities,
“A visionary of hope, with a heart big enough to embrace every neighborhood, street and alley in this magical and poetical city. Here is a poet who shoots straight as Cupid’s arrow. Zing! Right to the heart.” — Alejandro Murguía
devorah major is a poet, novelist, and essayist who has published prize-winning works of fiction and poetry. Among her books are Open Weave, Brown Glass Windows, and street smarts. She lives in San Francisco and works as an editor and arts administrator.
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The Beat Generation in San Francisco:
A Literary Tour
by Bill Morgan
ISBN 0-87286-417-0
Paperback reprint, 240pp
150 b&w illustrations
$17.95
$12.57
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The ultimate literary guide to San Francisco, packed with fabulous photos and scintillating anecdotes
A blow-by-blow unearthing of the places where the Beat writers first came to full bloom: the flat where Ginsberg wrote "Howl," the sites of the Six Gallery and Gary Snyder’s zen cottage in Berkeley, the ghostly railroad yards where Kerouac and Cassady toiled, the pads where Jack & Neal & Carolyn lived, Ferlinghetti’s favorite haunts. Here, too, are Ferlinghetti’s reminiscences about the City Lights Bookstore and the defining literary events of the last half century. Based on in-depth interviews, this guide chronicles the West Coast Beat experience from 1948 through the 1970s, with never-before-heard stories and new information about Corso, Kaufman, DiPrima, Kyger, Lamantia, Brautigan, Meltzer, Kandel, Duncan, Rexroth, and others.
This is an entertaining read as well as a practical walking (and driving) tour of San Francisco and the nearby Bay Area regions — from Mt. Tam in Marin County to Big Sur in the south.
Bill Morgan is a painter and archival consultant working in New York City. He is the author of The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac's City, and the editor of Travels with Ginsberg: A Postcard Book.
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Indigenous:
Growing up Californian
by Cris Mazza
ISBN 0-87286-422-7
Paperback original, 248pp
$16.95
$11.87
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Engaging memoir about growing up in rural Southern California and identifying as a "Californian" for life
Cris Mazza delivers a spirited rebuttal to pop-culture stereotypes about growing up female in Southern California. Coming of age in the 1970’s and ’80s, Mazza’s memories aren’t about surfing, cheerleading or riding in convertibles. Though her story has its exotic elements—her family hunts and gathers food in the semi-arid coastal hills well into the early ’70s—she sets herself in the context of familiar Americana. Repeating motifs—gender issues, the California landscape, dogs, musicians, plus the perplexing melancholy of a sexless marriage—thread through these very personal essays, as Mazza confronts madness, disability, sexual dysfunction and death, speaking to the drama of ordinary lives.
Praise for Indigenous:
"Mazza's beautifully rendered love affair with her native state has nothing to do with gilded dreams or pretty postcard depictions of sun and surf. Her experience is rooted not in image but in a primal connection to the land itself. " – The Chicago Tribune
"Mazza writes about California back in the day, before strip malls ravaged her childhood haunts.... Indigenous will appeal to those who enjoy memoirs and are interested in the broader idea of place." – Bust Magazine, Fall 2003
" ... Mazza reveals a normality beneath the California myth that seems all the more dazzling and exotic with the passage of time." – Los Angeles Times
"These essays shine with hard-won honesty and emotional clarity. You can trust Cris Mazza to level with you and entertain you with her stylish prose; this is an engaging collection." — Phillip Lopate, editor of Writing New York: A Literary Anthology
"Cris Mazza’s stunning memoir worries the notions of belonging, of be-longing for a place and of longing for the memories of same. Her tales of her native California expertly excavate an always surprising and always rewarding experience cache." — Michael Martone, author of The Flatness and Other Landscapes
Cris Mazza is the author of numerous story collections and novels, most recently, Girl Beside Him, and she is the editor of Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction. Check out her website at www.cris-mazza.com
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The World's Embrace:
Selected Poems
by Abdellatif Laâbi
Translated from the French by Victor Reinking,
Anne George, and Edris Makward
ISBN 0-87286-413-8
Paperback original, 224pp
$16.95
$11.87
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Poems with great lyric power from the critically acclaimed North African writer
Compelling poems from one of the most prolific and critically acclaimed of contemporary North African writers. Imprisoned for many years by the Moroccan authorities, Laâbi's poetry is haunted by memories of torture and prisons and bears witness to his preoccupations with — and resistance to — the growing international sickness of state-supported inhumanity.
The present volume consists of poems selected by Laâbi from works published in French over the past ten years and includes a generous selection of recent work where he varies the tone and subject and the diction of his poetic projects, and moves with ease from the elegiac to the whimsical, for example, and from the personal to the proverbial.
Abdellatif Laâbi was born in 1942 in Fez. In 1966 he founded the avant-garde literary and artistic journal Souffles, which helped spark a literary and artistic renaissance throughout North Africa. Imprisoned for seven years in the ’70s for his political beliefs and his writings, he has lived in Paris since 1985. His latest book, a novel, will be published this year by Gallimard.
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The End of Youth
by Rebecca Brown
ISBN: 0-87286-418-9
Paperback original, 144pp
$11.95
$8.37
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Bittersweet tales about the loss of hope
The End of Youth is a collection of thirteen linked stories, essays and rants about carrying on after youth’s hope is gone. In "Afraid of the Dark," a child learns that there is good reason to be afraid. The narrator of "Description of a Struggle" finds that love can be brutal. "The Smokers" examines an adult’s realization that longevity means seeing loved ones die. Written with the same spare and vivid beauty as her earlier award-winning works, The End of Youth is certain to win Rebecca Brown even wider acclaim.
Praise for Rebecca Brown:
"Throughout her writing career, Brown has exhibited a rare sensitivity in delving into difficult, uncomfortable material - death, disease, imperfect bodies and minds... in this slim book... there's also humor and sensuality so intense it's visionary..." – San Francisco Chronicle
"Rarer than the newness, the wit, the vivid readability, is the deep caring understanding, the wholeness, the truth with which this astonishing, haunting writer creates her people." — Tillie Olsen
"A strange and wonderful first-person voice emerges from the stories of Rebecca Brown, who strips her language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need." — The New York Times Book Review
"In The End of Youth, her new collection of stories and essays, Brown turns [a] gentle yet relentless gaze onto herself -- or rather, onto scenes remembered from her childhood. The result is effortlessly perverse and frequently hilarious." – Booklist
Rebecca Brown is the author of The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley's Girl, The Gifts of the Body and The Dogs. She lives in Seattle.
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Spare and haunting, whimsical and contemplative snapshot-stories that reveal an unfamiliar Israel by remapping its blind spots
Part reportage, part parable, part excavation of history, this jigsaw puzzle of compelling tales constitutes an exile’s nostalgic tour into Israel’s culture of denial. Captivating in its beguiling, seeming simplicity, Picnic Grounds is a novel built from the layers of overlapping lives and stories, much like the villages and cities of Israel are constructed from a culture superimposed over the palimpsest of history. Landscape, language, and the manufacture of knowledge are deconstructed by a unique new voice, writing in a language that is not quite English, from a life that is anything but post-colonial.
Praise for Picnic Grounds:
"Shelach is a wonderful writer. There is no doubt that, from his very first book, he has a great future ahead him. This book should be read slowly in small sips, not gulped down, like a very bitter drink (not an intoxicating one)... a whole and complete world and without a personal, confident voice, brilliant in the way that a definite artist is a genius..." – Ha'aretz by Yitzhak Laor
"A spare and perfectly painful little book, Oz Shelach's Picnic Grounds sketches an Israel that you won't see on the news.... With ruthless precision, Shelach's novel plots the terrain of complicity, denial, and shared, unspoken culpability that Israel has crafted for itself over the last half-century." – The Village Voice
"The Israeli writer Oz Shelach... critiqu[es] Middle East politics through the creative fuzz of metaphor and suggestion... in his novel Picnic Grounds (City Lights Books). In one of the book's many narrative fragments, Shelach tells the story of a Haifa botanist who gets banned from a Botanical Society meeting in Tel-Aviv because he finds [in] Israel anemones in which "long strips of white, blue, and purple anemones ran through the thick of the red ones, like veins." Every place and every person in Picnic Grounds are like these anemones-- self-possessed entities interlaced with otherness, running on the blood from someone else's veins." – Josh Kun, San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Had Ernest Hemingway succeeded in writing the novel suggested by the vignettes that punctuate In Our Time, the result might have resembled Oz Shelach's Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments. . . . The novel, Shelach's first, is set in an Israel at once familiar, yet utterly alien...." – Forward Magazine
"Shelach's prose has an elegant precision borne of his journalistic activities.... [his] ironic understatement provides an eloquent indictment of the ongoing situation in Palestine." – San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Picnic Grounds is a forceful debut whose fragmentary form lends it the feel of a scrapbook – Kodak moments from a society with its guard down and its righteousness momentarily disabled." – Philip Herter, St. Petersburg Times
"Oz Shelach has managed, by pinpointing minutes, to evoke hours, days, years, a whole history. The very pauses in his extraordinary novel are filled with more width of understanding, more depth of compassion than would be possible in a book many times its length." — David Plante
"Taking responsibility for the destruction of Palestine is a pill still far too bitter for most Israelis to swallow. Stepping outside of home and Hebrew, Oz Shelach takes us on an eerie journey through the archaeology of complicity and denial. Deeply personal, Picnic Grounds is also a profoundly political document that forces us to confront, as James Baldwin put it, 'the price of the ticket,' the heavy debt a state can exact from its people." — Ammiel Alcalay
"There's something so captivating about these 'fragments,' about their beguiling simplicity, about the things they so eloquently withhold, something so pure and unpretentiously fresh. Oz Shelach, in the first person plural, is probably the most relentlessly restrained cartographer of the current Israeli scene, and this novel is the most intricately subtle commentary on that unsettled scene that I've read in years. A stunning literary achievement." - Anton Shammas
Oz Shelach was born in West Jerusalem in 1968, has been a journalist and editor for Israeli radio and magazines, and runs an online news service and art gallery at http://www.oznik.com. He currently lives in New York.
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Aureole:
An Erotic Sequence
by Carole Maso
ISBN 0-87286-410-3
Trade Paperback, 136pp
$12.95
$9.07
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Intimate and erotic celebration of desire from one of America's most innovative and daring writers
Two women leaf through a book of French slang, with its delicate and delicious mixing of food and sex. A man and a woman sit in a parisian dive, caressing each other’s hands. Two lovers take late-night refuge in a beach cabana, their lovemaking lit by the lights of his automobile. These are glimpses of some of the haunting scenes and characters that people this sometimes wild, sometimes elusive exploration of desire’s magical and subversive qualities.
"Whether she is writing about two women washing lentils or a man’s desire for a woman’s pair of ink-stained hands, Maso charges her very sentences with such sexual energy that form and content literally become one. Reading Aureole is pure pleasure." — Marjorie Perloff
"Maso’s voice is all her own: simultaneously cerebral and sensual, violently romantic and insistently woman-centered." — San Francisco Chronicle
"Carole Maso is that rare creature — an original! Her voice and vision are like no one else’s."
— Edmund White
"Maso is gaining a reputation for reshaping language and form in unique, beautiful, experimental yet totally readable ways. She epitomizes all that is great about American literature today."
— Los Angeles Times
Carole Maso is the author of Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, Defiance, and other novels. She has received many awards, most recently the Lannan Literary Fellowship for fiction.
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Perversions Of Justice:
Indigenous Peoples and Angloamerican Law
by Ward Churchill
ISBN 0-87286-411-1
Paperback original, 296pp
$18.95
$13.27
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Examines the faulty "reasoning" employed to legislate control over North America's indigenous peoples and their lands
The United States is readily distinguishable from other countries, Chief Justice John Marshall opined in 1803, because it is a "nation of laws, not of men." In Perversions of Justice, Ward Churchill takes Marshall at his word, exploring through a series of eleven carefully crafted essays how the U.S. has consistently employed a corrupt form of legalism as a means of establishing colonial control and empire. Along the way, he demonstrates how this "nation of laws" has so completely subverted the law of nations that the current America-dominated international order ends up, like the U.S. itself, functioning in a manner diametrically opposed to the ideals of freedom and democracy it professes to embrace.
By tracing the evolution of federal Indian law, Churchill is able to show how the premises set forth therein not only spilled over onto non-Indians in the U.S., but were also adapted for application abroad — the trajectory of America's imperial logic can be followed all the way to the present New World Order. Churchill provides a point-by-point indictment of America’s behavior, and offers a view of how things might work if even the minimum requirements of international law were complied with.
Ward Churchill (Keetowah Cherokee) has achieved an unparalleled reputation as a scholar-activist and analyst of indigenous issues. He is a Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, a leading member of AIM, and has been a delegate to the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations. He is the author of numerous books, including A Little Matter of Genocide and Fantasies of the Master Race.
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A Panorama Of American Film Noir (1941–1953)
by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton
Translated from the French by Paul Hammond
ISBN 0-87286-412-X
Paperback original, 200pp
$16.95
11.87
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This first book published on film noir established the genre — a classic, at last in translation
When it appeared in France in 1955, A Panorama of American Film Noir was the first book ever on the genre: this classic is at last available in English translation. This clairvoyant study of Hollywood film noir is "a ‘benchmark’ for all later work on the topic" (from the Introduction by James Naremore). A Panorama of American Film Noir addresses the essential amorality of its subject from a decidedly Surrealist angle, focusing on noir’s dreamlike, unwonted, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel atmosphere, and setting it in the social context of mid-century America.
Beginning with the first film noir, The Maltese Falcon, and continuing through the postwar grande époque, which included such films as Gilda, The Big Sleep, and The Lady from Shanghai, Borde and Chaumeton examine the dark sides of American society, film, and literature that made film noir possible, even necessary.
A Panorama of Film Noir includes a film noir chronology, a detailed filmography, an index of names, and a selection of black-and-white stills.
"Incredibly, this is the first English translation of the very influential 1955 French book that initially identified, described and assessed the Hollywood movies that we now term film noir... a seminal work of cinema description and analysis and therefore an essential purchase for most libraries." – From the Starred Review in Library Journal
Raymond Borde (b. 1920), founder of the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, has written extensively on film history.
Etienne Chaumeton was the film critic of the Toulouse newspaper La Dépêche until his recent death.
Paul Hammond is a writer, editor, and translator living in Barcelona. He edited and translated The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, and he is the author of Constellations of Miró, Breton.
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Mygale
by Thierry Jonquet
Translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
City Lights Noir #4
ISBN 0-87286-409-X
Paperback original, 120pp
$11.95
$8.37
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Macabre French noir rings unique changes on themes of desire, identity, loss, and restitution
Mygale [MIG-uh-lee] n.: a genus of large tropical spiders . . .
Richard Lafargue, a well-known plastic surgeon, pursues and captures Vincent Moreau, who raped Lafargue’s daughter and left her hopelessly mad in an asylum. Lafargue is determined to exact an atrocious vengeance, and an ambiguous, even sadomasochistic relationship develops between self-apponted executioner and victim.
Recent Praise for Mygale:
"'Ingenious,' 'elegant,' 'sinister' – these are also adjectives that approximate, but fall short of, the narrative power of Mygale. Much like Poe's 'tales of terror,' Mygale is a story that invites both respect and repulsion: As a reader, you're happy to have read it... and just as happy, ultimately, to close the covers on its weird world." – Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post Book World
"More Jim Thompson that Raymond Chandler, Jonquet's prose is rough hewn, the panache is all in Mygale's bizarre setup, gruesome scenarios and genderbending ending." – St. Petersberg Times
Thierry Jonquet (b. 1954, Paris) has sold soap, painted white lines on the road, taught juvenile delinquents and worked in geriatric hospitals as an occupational therapist. Jonquet is an exponent of the hardboiled style of French noir that is inflected by post-May 1968 politics and social critique. His main source of inspiration is the daily newspaper, a trove of anecdotal evidence of, in his words, "the barbarity of the world we live in." But his writing is not so much politically engagé as cathartic. Jonquet’s crime novels and children's books have garnered many literary prizes.
Donald Nicholson-Smith has translated many works of fiction and nonfiction from the French, including The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre, The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem, and Three to Kill by Jean-Patrick Manchette.
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A provocative novel that defines terrorism as an artistic movement
Part Unabomber, part van Gogh, David Felsenstein yearns to create an unforgettable masterpiece. He browses the stacks of the Chicago Public Library in search of connections between obscure volumes, scrupulously footnoting his research into anarchy, magnetotherapy, Buddhism, plastic surgery, and much more. We read his journal, tracing his course through books and philosophies as he prepares his magnum opus — blowing up the library that he loves.
Recent praise for Instant Karma:
"...concentrated and diabolically clever novel... this is a tricky puzzle of a tale, one readers will enjoy in direct proportion to their interest in the roles books and libraries play in our lives, and to their familiarity with the diverse sources Swartz so cannily samples and remixes in this intelligent, arch, timely and piquant satire." – The Chicago Tribune
" Welcome to the oddball world of David Felsenstein, a Chicago loner who's part Young Werther, part Travis Bickle and part post-adolescent Borges... a kind of Dewey Decimal tribute to Paul Auster’s Leviathan..." – The Los Angeles Times
"Imagine a collaboration between David Sedaris and David Foster Wallace on a book about the interrelationship of art and anarchy.... What you end up with is Mark Swartz's weird but wonderful Instant Karma..." – Washington City Paper
"Mark Swartz's irreverent first novel, Instant Karma, features a lonely bookish pack rat... there is some sense in which Instant Karma can stand as an odd second cousin to Jonathan Franzen's recent collection of essays, How To Be Alone." – Readerville
"Instant Karma is insta-good, a tour de force, an engaging, farcical, joyful reprise of 1000 great ideas tumbling around in one humble brain, in one ordinary body. It has a great, remarkable, explosive ending that explodes right into your heart. Buy it and keep it with you at all times."
— Frederick Barthelme, author of Painted Desert and co-author of Double Down
"An obsessive read about an obsessive reader, Mark Swartz's Instant Karma is a book with the sort of power that makes you remember the sort of power books have."
— Daniel Handler, author of Watch Your Mouth and The Basic Eight
"Instant Karma is irresistible from beginning to end. To make this original treatment of a complex and indeed zany subject so consistently entertaining is proof of a new and prodigious talent."
— Harry Mathews, author of Cigarettes and Tlooth
"Funny, erudite, tender, and sad, Instant Karma traces the mental disintegration of a young man's journey from solitary bilbiophile to Dada-library terrorist. But the book is also a meditation on our fragmented culture — that mysterious hodge-podge of conflicting images and myriad bits of text that threaten to destroy all possible meaning. In Mark Swartz's hapless anti-hero, David Felsenstein, the distance between incendiary idea and literal explosion becomes both dangerously small and frighteningly real." — Siri Hustvedt, author of Yonder: Essays and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl
"What a pleasure it is to read a book that is so wholly itself — contained and furious, timely and profound, and deeply, rigorously smart. I underlined passage after passage, as Swartz synthesizes the voices of countless other authors with his own, making a book built of books, creating both castles and rubble in the reader's mind. A striking debut."
— Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and An Invisible Sign of My Own
"Instant Karma reminds me of a number of my favorite books — Gogol’s scary-funny Diary of a Madman comes to mind. But it's a special kind of madness, book madness, the terror and pleasure of reading that is conjured up, making one think of the novels of David Markson, the inspired frenzy of John Leonard's critical prose, and of course the great novel in footnotes, Pale Fire. But Instant Karma is sui generis: Mark Swartz offers us an exploded library of crazy wisdom in brilliant fragments."
— Ron Rosenbaum, author, Explaining Hitler and The Secret Parts of Fortune
"This novella proves that too much reading can cause a shy boy to use explosives. The attenuated Young Werther here, direct heir to all the neurasthenic adolescents in literature, updates himself with late twentieth-century books, but stays in character. Nice satire, useful common reader."
— Andrei Codrescu, NPR commentator and author of Ay Cuba! A Socio-Erotic Journey and Cassanova in Bohemia
"As a reference librarian I have sometimes wondered what goes on in the hearts and minds of the many people who use the library all day, every day. Swartz provides just such a glimpse into one fictional psyche. Instant Karma’s troubled protagonist’s diary entries, obsessively footnoted from idiosyncratically disparate library texts, lead toward a potentially explosive end."
— Jim Van Buskirk, Reference Librarian, San Francisco Public Library
Mark Swartz is the author of Artists, a reference book published by Gale Research in 2001. As a writer on arts and culture, he has contributed to the Chicago Reader and the New Art Examiner, and his fiction and satire have been published in Chelsea, the Mississippi Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and the Brooklyn Rail. He currently works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A native of Chicago, he now lives in Brooklyn. Swartz is 33 years old.
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State of Siege
by Juan Goytisolo
Translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane
ISBN: 0-87286-406-5
Trade paperback original, 144pp
$13.95
$9.77
Top 25 Books of 2002, The Village Voice
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Set during the siege of Sarajevo, these fictionalized reflections bear witness to the universal cry for freedom.
A traveller looks out his hotel window on a war-torn city. A mortar explodes in his room and, when the police arrive, the corpse has disapeared and only a notebook of apocryphal writings and poems is found. These enigmas lead into a labyrinth, where blind and barbarous forces lay siege to individual lives and diverse cultures.
Recent Praise for State of Siege
"Juan Goytisolo's labyrinthine novel, originally published in Spanish in 1995 and now ably translated by Helen Lane, is at once an account of the siege of Sarajevo, a parade of postmodern storytelling techniques and an indictment of Western indifference.... Goytisolo effectively lets Sarajevo's horrors speak for themselves, with his portraits of snipers who take indiscriminate aim at children and of a man who shows tenderness for a starving kitten only to have it die from overeating." – The New York Times Book Review
"Seven years after its original publication, the territory expands apace, well beyond the pages of his novels or any one geographical setting. State of Siege now reads like painful literary prophecy." – Village Voice
"The often-confounding, but ultimately rewarding, narrative lines running circles through State of Siege find Spanish novelist Goytisolo combining a Borgesian spirit of play with the lyrically righteous anger at oppression perfected by Eduardo Galeano." – Booklist
"Goytisolo's latest novel comes out of his visits to Sarajevo in the early '90s, but it's hardly journalistic. An attempt "to oppose the truth of fiction to the lies of propaganda," the slippery, labyrinthine plot—about the mysterious disappearance of a foreigner's body in a Sarajevo-like city under siege—holds dream narratives, fragments of homoerotic, mystical poetry, and fantasies of a Parisian neighborhood's collapse. Goytisolo strives for a unity of politics and form, trapping his readers and characters alike in an epistemological purgatory in which "Reality has been transmuted into fiction: the horror tale of our daily existence!"– Village Voice Literary Supplement
"State of Siege is a novel of pure fiction, but infinitely more powerful than all the big speeches about Bosnia." —Le Nouvelle Observer
". . . a passionate dialogue with the reader, a reflection on privacy and commitment (engagement), with the steady vigilant presence of a great literary voice." —Le Monde
"The reader is thrown into the unreality of a besieged city, as if a firm hand had rudely pushed him out of the tank that brought him from the airport." —L’Express
"For the Spaniard Juan Goytisolo, writing is a dangerous adventure." —Lire
Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931 and lives in Marrakech. In 1993 he was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for his literary achievement and contribution to world culture. His translated works include a two-volume autobiography, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife, the novels Marks of Identity, Count Julian, Juan the Landless, Quarantine, Virtues of a Solitary Bird, The Marx Family Saga, and The Garden of Secrets, and the essays, Saracen Chronicles and Landscapes of War.
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Struggle for the Land:
Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide, and Colonization
by Ward Churchill
ISBN: 0-87286-414-6
Trade paperback, 460pp
$19.95
13.97
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Newly revised and expanded edition traces the history of Native American resistance and struggle
for decolonization
From the Sonora to the Arctic, North America's indigenous peoples have been dispossessed of nearly all their original territory, with the residue—about 2 percent—held under a colonial "trust" authority by the U.S. and Canada. Ironically, the often remote and presumably useless fragments of geography set aside to keep Native Americans out of sight and mind has turned out to be some of the most resource-rich on the planet. Native Americans should thus be among the most affluent sectors of the population, but instead, they are the absolute poorest. The reason for this paradox is clear: the riches of North America’s indigenous nations continue to be channeled into the settler’s economy.
By focusing upon certain modes of resource exploitation—uranium mining, coal stripping, hydropower generation and water diversion—Churchill demonstrates clearly that the effects of state/ corporate business in the mostly native-populated hinterlands of the continent are as ecocidal as they are genocidal. The ecological havoc being wreaked cannot be contained within reservation areas, and therefore poses a threat to all North Americans, presenting a common ground upon which Indians and non-Indians alike can and must struggle to repeal the status quo.
Winner of the Gustavus Myers Award for Literature on Human Rights
Ward Churchill (Keetowah Cherokee) has achieved an unparalleled reputation as a scholar-activist and analyst of indigenous issues. He is a Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, a leading member of AIM, and has been a delegate to the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations. He is the author of numerous books, including A Little Matter of Genocide and Fantasies of the Master Race.
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Witty, ironic stories from the heart of the Empire—a very unexpected Cuban empire
In the manner of fabled storytellers, Ponte creates a picture of contemporary Cuba — its real and imagined place in the world — through stories told by a foreign exchange physics student, urban planners who discover an underground metropolis in their own neighborhood, a traveler stranded in an airport restroom, a suspicious stranger listening to stories spun in a barbershop, and a Chinese butcher in love with a beautiful daughter of Ochún. This inventive brew of fantasy, popular religion, science and science fiction, travel adventure and tall tales celebrates the Cuban spirit at home and abroad.
Praise for Antonio José Ponte & Tales From the Cuban Empire:
"In a Spartan voice, frugal and brave, Havana-based writer Antonio José Ponte becomes a skillful Scheherazade who spins a fantastic collection of short stories that reads like a Cuban 'Arabian Nights'." – Miami Herald
"In this collection of stories, each told with a wild mania, the narrators, like Scheherazade, are desperate to save their lives by telling their story.... Each story loops back upon itself, arrives at an inconclusive end and should be read once more." – Los Angeles Times
"Unlike exiled writers who see the island as either a mythical homeland or a political cause, Ponte paints a picture that will strike the U.S. reader as surreal in its simplicity. . . . Cool, assured and quietly insightful, these tales provide rare glimpses into a Cuba often lost behind newspaper headlines."
— Publishers Weekly
"Ponte writes in a spare style more akin to Eastern European writers than anything usually associated with the bounty of the Caribberan, Cuban or otherwise. His sentences are short and sharp, his settings bleak and cold. . . . Smart and haunting . . ." — Village Voice Literary Supplement
Antonio José Ponte (born 1964 in Matanzas, Cuba) lives in Havana. He is the author of three widely acclaimed books of poetry, collections of essays, novels, and stories, including In the Cold of the Malecón. His work has been translated and published in France and Spain.
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Travels With Ginsberg:
A Postcard Book: Allen Ginsberg Photographs 1944- 1995
Edited by Bill Morgan
ISBN: 0-87286-397-2
Trade paperback, 40pp
$9.95
6.97
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A selection of candid photographs by a founding member of the Beat Generation
Allen Ginsberg was a serious shutterbug who delighted in taking candid snapshots of friends and fellow writers, but up until now readers have had little chance to consider the "poetic" world of his photographs. Here in the form of twenty detachable postcards are photographs taken over the years on the poet's many travels and trips abroad. Pictures include: Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Corso in Mexico; Burroughs and Bowles in Tangier; Snyder in Japan; and Ginsberg in India and Prague.
Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey. In 1956 City Lights published his signal poem "Howl," one of the most widely read poems of the era. He died in 1997.
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Front Lines:
Pocket Poets Series #55
by Jack Hirschman
ISBN: 0-87286-400-6
Trade paperback original, 128pp
$15.95
$11.17
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For Hirschman, the political is the most lyrical. This fine selection of his poetry embodies both.
In the activist verse of this poetic warrior, always committed, the actual world is never out of mind, even in his most intimate poems. Kabbalist, populist, and communist, Hirschman has published over sixty books of his own poetry, and this representative selection is a cross-section of his poetic output, spanning many years and mutations. When he reads aloud, the words take fire, and on the page they crackle and spark.
Jack Hirschman is a San Francisco poet, translator and editor. His powerfully eloquent voice set the tone for political poetry in this country many years ago. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, plus some forty-five translations from a half a dozen languages, as well the editor of anthologies and journals.
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Frigid Tales
by Pedro de Jesús
Translated from the Spanish by Dick Cluster
ISBN: 0-87286-399-9
Trade paperback, 112pp
$11.95
$8.37
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Emotionally charged stories of life lived on erotic impulse
This beautiful and original collection of stories set in Cuba plays opportunely with realism and fiction to create a world divided into six tales that form an interlocked unity–forming a passionate novel that gives us a tour de force of alienation and erotic obsession by taking us deep into a world where sex is casual, but real love elusive.
"Sex is a preoccupation and, as the King of Siam would say, 'a puzzlement' in this debut collection of six coy, elusive stories from a young Cuban fiction writer... witty and accomplished." –Kirkus
"The new Reinaldo Arenas." — El País
Pedro de Jesús was born in 1970 in Fomento, Cuba and studied at the University of Havana. In addition to writing short stories, de Jesús has published essays, and a novel, Síbilas en Mercaderes. Frigid Tales has been published in Spain and his work has appeared in anthologies in Germany, France, and Italy.
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Insurgent Muse:
Life and Art at the Woman’s Building
by Terry Wolverton
ISBN: 0-87286-403-0
Trade paperback, 200pp
$16.95
$11.87
Read a recent interview with author Terry Wolverton
Top 100 Books of 2002, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Finalist for the Lambda Book Award in Autobiography
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An artist's memoir of her years at the Woman's Building, a pivotal institution of West Coast cultural feminism
In the 1970s, the West Coast feminist art movement coalesced around the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, founded by artist Judy Chicago. Women from across the country were drawn to the experiment of creating a female-centered culture through artmaking, exhibitions, and education.
In Insurgent Muse, author Terry Wolverton tells of her thirteen-year involvement in the Woman’s Building. Arriving as a young art student in 1976, she stayed to become a teacher and co-founder of the Lesbian Art Project, and, eventually, executive director. Her journey—emblematic of many women who sought to redefine themselves in the light of feminism—entails confrontation with the damages of sexism, the pitfalls of utopian community, and the forces of social backlash.
Recent Praise for Insurgent Muse:
"The Woman’s Building became a North Star on a dream map for women who were looking to redefine their lives and work. And its history—rich, splintered, groundbreaking—is the subject of a new book." –Los Angeles Times
"As her memoir illustrates, being a woman artist in the mid-1970s was profoundly revolutionary." –Lesbian News
"Her documentation of the ideals, debates, and out-and-out battles waged during this important time in the feminist movement will give young women both a surprising and relatable snapshot of the era. . . . An inspirational read." –Bust Magazine
"Poet and novelist Wolverton describes her life and work at... the Woman's Building, a center for feminist art and culture in Los Angeles... provides an intimate look at the organizational struggles and triumphs. Recommended for public and academic libraries with extensive women's studies or art history collections, particularly on the West Coast." –Library Journal
"The spirit of the legendary Woman’s Building lives on in this unflinchingly brave and tender memoir. Terry Wolverton’s Insurgent Muse is witty, heart-rending, superbly honest and deeply moving, providing an acute social analysis of a young life and a memorable era of feminism that fueled so much art and so many epiphanies. The great work of the Woman’s Building deserves this book."
— Lucy Lippard, author of The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art
"In a memoir, I expect a personal journey and hope for more. Terry Wolverton’s Insurgent Muse delights me with an individual, collective, institutional, and historical text. My friend and colleague for over two decades, Wolverton can always be counted on to write with integrity, commitment, and charm."
— Arlene Raven, award-winning art historian and co-founder of the Woman’s Building
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Terry Wolverton’s amazing Insurgent Muse is a smart, funny, sexy, and deeply honest tribute to the extraordinary community of women artists whose creativity and fierce living rocked the world from an old building in downtown L.A. Part engaging memoir and part trenchant social history, Wolverton tells a story that is remarkably moving and inspiring. Insurgent Muse is a triumph."
— Tim Miller, solo performer and author of Shirts and Skins and Body Blows
"The Woman’s Building was magical, like the Hollywood sign and the Santa Monica pier. It was physical proof that the future was indeed here, now, and we were it. Insurgent Muse is a singular rite of passage that is simultaneously a collective coming of age. Wolverton is a passionate and accomplished writer."
— Kate Braverman, author of Lithium for Medea
"Wolverton’s memoir chronicles her ‘coming of age’ as a lesbian feminist writer and performance artist at the historic L.A. Woman’s Building. It’s a story of utopian ideals, passionate politics and the struggle to survive the changing political landscapes of America."
— Harmony Hammond, artist and author of Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History
"Is any individual life a representative life? Terry Wolverton’s seems to be in so many ways. Her searingly honest memoir tells what it was like to be a woman, an artist, a lesbian during those heady, storm and stress decades of the 1970s and ’80s. It’s all here — the multi-lover dyko dramas, the intersection of personal and political, the Coming Out and Recovery and remembering sexual abuse movements, the rise and fall of a women’s cultural center, the Woman’s Building in L.A. Wolverton has a poet’s sense of the complexities of the interior life and an eye witness’s intimacy with that era. Anyone wanting to know what it was like to be a woman, an artist, a lesbian at the end of the last American century will find this book indispensable."
— Rebecca Brown, author of The Terrible Girls and The Dogs
Terry Wolverton is the author of the novel Bailey’s Beads, two collections of poetry, Black Slip and Mystery Bruise. She has also edited numerous anthologies of gay and lesbian fiction, including His and Hers (Vols I-III).
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The Consul
by Ralph Rumney
Translated by Malcolm Imrie
ISBN: 0-87286-398-0
Trade paperback, 125pp
$12.95
$9.00
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Interviews from an extraordinary career dedicated to art, life, and revolt
Ralph Rumney has been in constant flight from the wreckage of postwar Europe. Crossing paths with every avant-garde of the past fifty years, he was one of the founding members of the Situationist International. Rumney’s traveling companions—Guy Debord, Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Félix Guattari, E.P. Thompson—are recalled in the oral history of The Consul with sharp intelligence and dry wit.
The Consul is profusely illustrated with Rumney’s own works as well as documents of his times and places.
"The Consul regains that magnificent freedom that a handful of people enjoyed and shared with artists, writers and others, in a world whose password was total, unfailing rejection of the world."—Judith Brouste, Art Press
Ralph Rumney (1934-2002) was the founder of the London Psychogeographical Society, a precursor of the Situationist International (1957). Rumney was recently the subject of two retrospective exhibitions.
Malcolm Imrie’s translations include Guy Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle and José Pierre’s Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research 1928–1932.
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The Prone Gunman
by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Translated from the French by Jim Brook
City Lights Noir
ISBN: 0-87286-402-2
Trade paperback, 102 pp
$11.95
$8.37
Top Mystery Book of 2002, The New York Times Book Review
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Manchette at the height of his powers in corrosive parody of "the successs story"
Martin Terrier is a hired killer who wants out of the game—so he can settle down and marry his childhood sweetheart. After all, that’s why he took up this profession! But the Organization won't let him go: they have other plans. Once again, the gunman must assume the prone shooting position. A tour de force, this violent tale shatters as many illusions about life and politics as bodies.
"For the first time readers can experience in English translation the masterful thriller considered Manchette's finest, proof positive that the French knew what they were talking about when they labeled this sort of novel 'noir'."
– Starred Review in Publishers Weekly, November 11, 2002
"In France, which long ago embraced American crime fiction, thrillers are referred to 'polars.' And in France the godfather and wizard of polars is Jean-Patrick Manchette.... For Manchette and his generation of writers who followed him, the crime novel is no mere entertainment, but a means to strip bare the failures of society, ripping through veils of appearance, deceit, and manipulation to the greed and violence that are the society's true engines." — The Boston Globe
"There's not a superfluous word or overdone effect in The Prone Gunman, one of the last cool, compact and shockingly original crime novels Manchette left as his legacy to modern noir fiction." — The New York Times Book Review
"This superbly muscular translation of the late French mystery writer Jean-Patrick Manchette's most celebrated work, The Prone Gunman, is the third volume issued [by] City Lights Noir. The series may prove to be the most needed contribution to contemporary fiction by any publisher in a good long while." – The San Francisco Chronicle
"For the first time, readers can experience in English translation the masterful thriller considered Manchette's finest, proof positive that the French knew what they were talking about when they labeled this sort of novel 'noir'." – Starred Review in Publishers Weekly
"Manchette describes his characters with the same wealth of external detail, icily delivered, that he uses for apartment decor or a hi-fi system." – The Village Voice
"This is lean, mean noir fiction that cleverly sends up the tough guy genre while incarnating it perfectly." — Detroit Free Press
"Jean-Patrick Manchette, the French novelist who died in 1995, is no stereotypical thriller writer. His world is external, all action and scheduling, like some off-kilter ‘Mission: Impossible’ episode. English-language fans of thrillers should be grateful to have more of him." —The Wall Street Journal
"The Prone Gunman … demonstrates Manchette’s perfect mastery."
—Robert Deleuse, Brief History of the French Crime Novel
Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–1995) rescued the French crime novel from the grip of stodgy police procedurals, restoring the noir edge by virtue of his post-1968 leftism. Manchette is a totem to a generation of French mystery writers, and his stories have inspired several films, including Claude Chabrol’s Nada.
James Brook is a poet who has translated works by Guy Debord, Henri Michaux, Gellu Naum, Benjamin Péret, Alberto Savinio, Victor Serge, and Sebastian Reichmann.
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Death In Troy
by Bilge Karasu
Translated from the Turkish by Aron Aji
ISBN: 0-87286-401-4
Trade paperback, 176pp
$11.95
$8.37
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From one of Turkey’s most influential authors, an arresting novel about male intimacy and desire
Mushfik is a young man growing up in Turkey, first in Sarikum, a small coastal village, and later in urban Istanbul. He comes of age in an atmosphere of sublimated, disoriented eroticism, his impulses restrained by religious and sexual taboos, rigid gender roles, stifling maternal love, and the enforced silences of social decorum. Unable to adapt easily to society’s unspoken rules, he is driven to the point of insanity from which he must slowly and painfully return.
Told from several points of view and structured in a series of intersecting flashbacks and interior monologues, Death In Troy describes the difficult geography of male intimacy from multiple perspectives — adolescent friendship, homosexual desire, mother-son bonds, and the relationships between men and women. In a complex chorus of styles and voices, Karasu evokes states of exaltation, humiliation, passion, and despair to create a jarring dis/harmony of one boy’s growth into manhood.
"[Karasu’s] refusal to be bound by the formal constraints of "The Novel" is meant to reflect his characters' refusal to be bound by the moral constraints of society as they confront their sexualities in a country that, though secular in government, is still largely Muslim in culture." — East Bay Express
Praise for Karasu’s Night:
"Beautifully done, this leaving behind of many of the normal devices of the novel enables Karasu to create a free-floating dystopia worthy of Kafka." — Booklist
". . . a deeply disturbing novel about politics, government, and the art of writing. . . . Karasu artfully evokes a Dantesque landscape . . . recommended for most collections." — Library Journal
Usually referred to as "the sage of Turkish literature," Bilge Karasu (1930–1995) is an influential reference point in the progress of Turkish fiction writing. A perfectionist, a philosopher, and a master of literary arts, he left behind a body of work, which, although intricately woven and at times obscure, skillfully outlines a world unmatched in its crystal clear transparency. The fact that he is labeled "the most difficult writer in the Turkish language" arises from his uncompromising loyalty to pure literature, which he described as a structure to be accomplished by a constant interaction between the writer and the reader.
During his lifetime, Karasu published collections of short stories, novels, and two books of essays. His novel, Night, was published in English translation by Louisiana State University Press in 1994 and was awarded the Pegasus Prize for Literature. Death In Troy is the second of his works to be translated into English. Another of Karasu’s novels, The Garden of Migrant Cats, will be published by New Directions in 2003.
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Nine stories of Latino/Chicano life at full throttle — a toda máquina.
From Mexico City to San Francisco’s Mission district, nothing comes easy — in life or in love. Here is an unstereotypical view of a world as treacherous as it is tender, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking. Using evocative images from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, "Boy on a Wooden Horse" tells the story of a young Mexico City boy’s dream of a better life torn apart by a series of catastrophes. The prize-winning story "El Ultimo Round," recounts the verbal combat of two lovers who wound each other unmercifully until attacked by a racist cowboy. "Ofrendas" resonates with both the irony and healing spirit of Latino culture, passionately celebrated on the Day of the Dead.
Authentic and honest, these nine stories reveal the strength, vulnerability, anxieties, and deepest desires of Latino men, the silenced voice of the barrio.
“Danger, cruelty, lust, loss, blood, death and dance . . . . Couldn’t put the book down. So hot I had to smother it in half and half. Murguía's a master of hearts on fire, working his storytelling anvil late at night, in a wrecked cubicle of SF called La Mission. No doubt the hungriest fiction and the most ferocious collection in the last three decades.” —Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Border Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream
“Alejandro Murguía has returned the short story to the people. Though some of his characters are down on their luck, the author has hit the literary jackpot with this one. He’s been revered as an artist for decades among the multicultural cognoscenti, and the publication of this fabulous volume will confirm for many readers what we knew all along.” —Ishmael Reed, author of The Reed Reader
“This is a book of rare intensity and transcultural joy! — José David Saldívar, author of Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies
"The nine tales of life in Mexico City and the Mission District depicted ... crackle with energy without losing sight of their narratives...[ Murguia's] Mission district is not a hipster haven but a melting pot for Latinos from all over the Americas, and his Mexico City is a thriving cultural whirlwind." — San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
Alejandro Murguía was born in California, but raised in Mexico City. His experiences as an international volunteer in the Nicaraguan Insurrection of 1979 are recounted in his second collection of short stories Southern Front (American Book Award,1991). He lives in San Francisco, where he teaches Latin American literature at San Francisco State University.
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Three To Kill
by Jean Patrick Manchette
Translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
ISBN: 0-87286-395-6
Trade paperback original, 185pp
$11.95
$8.37
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First in English for Manchette, renovator of French noir; trenchant social critique laced with black humor
Businessman Georges Gerfaut witnesses a murder—and is pursued by the killers. His conventional life knocked off the rails, Gerfaut turns the tables and sets out to track down his pursuers. And what does he discover along the way? Manchette—masterful stylist, ironist, and social critic—limns the cramped lives of professionals in a neo-conservative world.
From Three to Kill:
Georges Gerfaut is a man of fewer than forty years. His car is a steel-gray Mercedes. The leather of the seats is mahogany, and so are the rest of the interior decorations of the automobile. Georges Gerfaut's interior is dark and confused; one can make out some vague leftist ideas. On the dashboard of the car, above the dials, one can see a little metallic plaque with a matte finish on which are engraved Georges' name, his address, his blood type, and a shitty representation of Saint Christopher. Through the two speakers—one beneath the dashboard, the other under the back window—a casette player broadcasts at low volume West Coast jazz: Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Giuffre, Bud Shank, Chico Hamilton. . . .
The reason why Georges Gerfaut was thus dashing along the ring road with diminished reflexes and listening to that music should be sought in the relations of production. The fact that Georges had killed at least two men in the course of the year doesn't come into it.
Recent Praise for 3 To Kill:
"A social satire cum suspense equally interested in dissecting everyday banalities and manufacturing thrills. Writing with economy, deadpan irony, and an eye for devastating detail, Manchette spins pulp fiction into literature." – from the Starred Review in Kirkus Reviews
"Backed by a tremendous European reputation, one of the stars of Gallimard's Serie Noire comes to America with a lean thriller, in a brilliant new translation. . . . Manchette is a must for the reading lists of all noir fans." – Publishers Weekly
Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–1995) rescued the French crime novel from the grip of stodgy police procedurals, restoring the noir edge by virtue of his post-1968 leftism. Today, Manchette is a totem to the generation of French mystery writers who came in his wake. Jazz saxophonist, political activist, and screen writer, Manchette was influenced as much by Guy Debord as by Gustave Flaubert.
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San Francisco Poems
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
San Francisco Poet Laureate Series #1
Trade paperback original
1-931404-01-1
$9.95
$6.97
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A collection of poems about the City by the Bay by San Francisco's first poet laureate and owner of City Lights Books
San Francisco's first Poet Laureate (1999-2000) has collected here all of his poems set in the city he has lived in for over a half a century. He brings alive, with wit and lyricism, scenes of city life: a baseball game, yachts on the Bay, a couple in Golden Gate Park, an artists' bar, the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band, and many others. Also included are historic photographs of Ferlinghetti and friends as well as his inaugural address as laureate, with his vision of the city's history as a poetic center and suggestions for keeping it that way.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is the founder and current owner of City Lights Books and the first poet laureate of San Francisco. A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, he has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays.
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Love Works
by Janice Mirikitani
San Francisco Poet Laureate Series #2
Trade paperback original
1-931404-02-x
$9.95
$6.97
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A collection of poems by San Francisco's second poet laureate and neighborhood activist, Janice Mirikitani
Love Works brings together a collection of Janice Mirikitani's strongest poems on a diversity of subjects: the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II, family relationships, and the quest by people at the margins of society to claim justice, bread, and dignity. Also included is Mirikitani's inaugural address as San Francisco's Poet Laureate for 2000-2002, in which she discusses how poetry can connect people and transform lives.
Janice Mirikitani has lived in San Francisco since 1963. As Executive Director and President of Glide Foundation, she has created and directed programs at Glide Memorial Church for over thirty-five years. She is the author of three poetry books and has edited several anthologies of poetry and prose.
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San Francisco's Telegraph Hill
by David F. Myrick
A City Lights Foundation Book
Hardcover
1-931404-00-3
$34.95
$24.47
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The reprinted classic documenting one of the nation's most unique neighborhoods
City Lights has collaborated with the Telegraph Hill Dwellers Association to update and reprint David Myrick’s classic Telegraph Hill, a beautiful, lavishly illustrated book that is an invaluable community resource documenting the story of one of San Francisco’s most unique neighborhoods.
David Myrick has long had an interest in the history and geography of the western United States which began when he learned that one of his ancestors left Vermont in 1850 by covered wagon to come to San Francisco. Living on Telegraph Hill for almost three decades, he shared his enthusiasm for this special place with his neighbors. After serving for five years as editor and publisher of the neighborhood journal Tellegraph Hill Bulletin (now The Semaphore), he wrote the history of the hill.
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