Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives -- politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.

    Anger and grief in the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School are palpable in this urgent piece of writing, but no less remarkable are King’s keen thoughtfulness and composure as he explores the contours of the gun-control issue and constructs his argument for what can and should be done.

    This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems—selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.Among the essays included here are:• "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"• "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"• "I Am Your Sister"• Excerpts from the American Book Award–winning A Burst of LightThe poems are drawn from Lorde’s nine volumes, including The Black Unicorn and National Book Award finalist From a Land Where Other People Live. Among them are:• "Martha"• "A Litany for Survival"• "Sister Outsider"• "Making Love to Concrete"

    Ideal for anyone who wants to read a great work for the first time or revisit an old favorite, these new editions open the door to the stories and ideas that have shaped our world.

    Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to "the people," who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.Demand for recognition of one's identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious "identity liberalism" of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.Identity is an urgent and necessary book--a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.

    The introduction is by Edumund A. Opitz, founder, the Nockian Society.

    Never before, Lapham argues, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream conversation, so marginalized and muted by a government that recklessly disregards civil liberties. In the midst of the “war on terror,” we face a crisis of democracy as serious as any in our history. Gag Rule is a rousing and necessary call to action in defense of the right to raise our voices and have those voices heard.

    Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group's history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself.Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast-West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels' shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he's remembering The Source magazine cover announcing the Tribe's 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg's death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that--like the low end, the bass--are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.

    Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group of works that are both intimate and important, essays that move from personal experience to larger significance without severing the connection between speaker and audience. From Ernest Hemingway covering bullfights in Pamplona to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” these essays fit, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, “into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we’ve come from, and who we are, and where we are going.” Among those whose work is included are Mark Twain, John Muir, T. S. Eliot, Richard Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward Hoagland, and Annie Dillard.Foreword / by Robert Atwan --Introduction / by Joyce Carol Oates --Corn-pone opinions / Mark Twain --Of the coming of John / W.E.B. Du Bois --Law of acceleration / Henry Adams --Stickeen / John Muir --Moral equivalent of war / William James --Handicapped / Randolph Bourne --Coatesville / John Jay Chapman --Devil baby at Hull-house / Jane Addams --Tradition and the individual talent / T.S. Eliot --Pamplona in July / Ernest Hemingway --Hills of Zion / H.L. Mencken --How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston --Old stone house / Edmund Wilson --What are master-pieces and why are there so few of them / Gertrude Stein --Crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald --Sex Ex Machina / James Thurber --Ethics of living Jim Crow: an autobiographical sketch / Richard Wright --Knoxville: Summer of 1915 / James Agee --Figure a poem makes / Robert Frost --Once more to the lake / E.B. White --Insert flap "A" and throw away / S.J. Perelman --Bop / Langston Hughes --Future is now / Katherine Anne Porter --Artists in uniform / Mary McCarthy --Marginal world / Rachel Carson --Notes of a native son / James Baldwin --Brown wasps / Loren Eiseley --Sweet devouring / Eudora Welty --Hundred thousand straightened nails / Donald Hall --Letter from Birmingham jail / Martin Luther King, Jr. --Putting daddy on / Tom Wolfe --Notes on "Camp" / Susan Sontag --Perfect past / Vladimir Nabokov --Way to Rainy Mountain / N. Scott Momaday --Apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick --Illumination rounds / Michael Herr --I know why the caged bird sings / Maya Angelou --Lives of a cell / Lewis Thomas --Search for Marvin Gardens / John McPhee --Doomed in their sinking / William H. Gass --No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston --Looking for Zora / Alice Walker --Women and honor: some notes on lying / Adrienne Rich --White album / Joan Didion --Aria: a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez --Solace of open spaces / Gretel Ehrlich --Total eclipse / Annie Dillard --Drugstore in winter / Cynthia Ozick --Okinawa: the bloodiest battle of all / William Manchester --Heaven and nature / Edward Hoagland --Creation myths of Cooperstown / Stephen Jay Gould --Life with daughters: watching the miss America Pageant / Gerald Early --Disposable rocket / John Updike --hey all just went away / Joyce Carol Oates --Graven images / Saul Bellow --Biographical notes --Appendix: Notable twentieth-century American literary nonfiction

    citizens; demands by the FBI for records of library borrowings; establishment of military tribunals to try suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens--many of the measures taken by the Bush administration since 9/11 have sparked heated protests. In Not a Suicide Pact, Judge Richard A. Posner offers a cogent and elegant response to these protests, arguing that personal liberty must be balanced with public safety in the face of grave national danger.Critical of civil libertarians who balk at any curtailment of their rights, even in the face of an unprecedented terrorist threat in an era of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, Posner takes a fresh look at the most important constitutional issues that have arisen since 9/11. These issues include the constitutional rights of terrorist suspects (whether American citizens or not) to habeas corpus and due process, and their rights against brutal interrogation (including torture) and searches based on less than probable cause. Posner argues that terrorist activity is sui generis--it is neither war nor crime--and it demands a tailored response, one that gives terror suspects fewer constitutional rights than persons suspected of ordinary criminal activity. Constitutional law must remain fluid, protean, and responsive to the pressure of contemporary events. Posner stresses the limits of law in regulating national security measures and underscores the paradoxical need to recognize a category of government conduct that is at once illegal and morally obligatory.One of America's top legal thinkers, Posner does not pull punches. He offers readers a short, sharp book with a strong point of view that is certain to generate much debate.OXFORD'S NEW INALIENABLE RIGHTS SERIESThis is inaugural volume in Oxford's new fourteen-book Inalienable Rights Series. Each book will be a short, analytically sharp exploration of a particular right--to bear arms, to religious freedom, to free speech--clarifying the issues swirling around these rights and challenging us to rethink our most cherished freedoms.

    In MILLENNIUM, Hakim Bey both sustains and expands the ideas of his groundbreaking work, THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE. Here, Bey suggests that mere detachment from (or even outright rejection of) the monolith of global capital is not enough; that either we accept ourselves as the 'last humans,' or else we accept ourselves as the opposition. The book also contains an illuminating interview with Bey, in which he discusses his body of work and assesses our collective position at the turn of the millennium.

    Boorstin’s prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any reader who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths.Cover design by Matt Dorfman.

    Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can't do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.

    Chronicling his stint on the barricades in Moscow in 1991, when he joined artists in resisting the coup whose failure ended the Soviet Union, his 2002 account of the rebirth of culture in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban, his insightful appraisal of a Myanmar seeped in contradictions as it slowly, fitfully pushes toward freedom, and many other stories of profound upheaval, this book provides a unique window onto the very idea of social change. With his signature brilliance and compassion, Solomon demonstrates both how history is altered by individuals, and how personal identities are altered when governments alter.A journalist and essayist of remarkable perception and prescience, Solomon captures the essence of these cultures. Ranging across seven continents and twenty-five years, Far and Away takes a magnificent journey into the heart of extraordinarily diverse experiences, yet Solomon finds a common humanity wherever he travels. Illuminating the development of his own genius, his stories are always intimate and often both funny and deeply moving.

    How then could our own "societies of the State" ever have arisen from these rich and complex stateless societies, and why?Clastres brilliantly and imaginatively addresses these questions, meditating on the peculiar shape and dynamics of so-called "primitive societies," and especially on the discourses with which "civilized" (i.e., political, economic, literate) peoples have not ceased to reduce and contain them. He refutes outright the idea that the State is the ultimate and logical density of all societies. On the contrary, Clastres develops a whole alternate and always affirmative political technology based on values such as leisure, prestige, and generosity.Through individual essays he explores and deftly situates the anarchistic political and social roles of storytelling, homosexuality, jokes, ruinous gift-giving, and the torturous ritual marking of the body, placing them within an economy of power and desire very different from our own, one whose most fundamental goal is to celebrate life while rendering the rise of despotic power impossible. Though power itself is shown to be inseparable from the richest and most complex forms of social life, the State is seen as a specific but grotesque aberration peculiar only to certain societies, not least of which is our own.Not for sale in the U.K. and British Commonwealth, South Africa, Burma, Jordan, and Iraq.