On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint


Maggie Nelson - 2021
    Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom’s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing “practices of freedom” by which we negotiate our interrelation with—indeed, our inseparability from—others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture—from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis—is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.

Picturing Prince: An Intimate Portrait


Steve Parke - 2017
    At least half of the images in the book are exclusively published here for the first time; most other images in the book are rare to the public eye.Alongside these remarkable images are fifty engaging, poignant and often funny written vignettes by Parke, which reveal the very human man behind the reclusive superstar: from shooting hoops to renting out movie theatres at 4am; from midnight requests for camels to meaningful conversations that shed light on Prince as a man and artist.STEVE PARKE started working with Prince in 1988, after a mutual friend showed Prince some of Steve's photorealistic paintings. He designed everything from album covers and merchandise to sets for Prince's tours and videos. Somewhere in all of this, he became Paisley Park's official art director. He began photographing Prince at the request of the star himself, and continued to do so for the next several years. The images in this book are the arresting result of this collaboration.Biographical Notes STEVE PARKE is photo editor for Faerie Magazine. He worked as art director for Prince at Paisley Park for fourteen years. As a photographer, his clients have included Prince, David Bowie, Bon Jovi, Bob Dylan, Sheila E., AC/DC and more. He lives in Baltimore, USA.

Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History


Staughton Lynd - 2008
    Andrej Grubacic is an anarchist from the Balkans. Staughton Lynd is a lifelong pacifist, influenced by Marxism. They meet in dialogue in an effort to bring together the anarchist and Marxist traditions, to discuss the writing of history by those who make it, and to remind us of the idea that "my country is the world." Encompassing a Left libertarian perspective and an emphatically activist standpoint, these conversations are meant to be read in the clubs and affinity groups of the new Movement. The authors accompany us on a journey through modern revolutions, direct actions, anti-globalist counter summits, Freedom Schools, Zapatista cooperatives, Haymarket and Petrograd, Hanoi and Belgrade,  "intentional" communities, wildcat strikes, early Protestant communities, Native American democratic practices, the Workers' Solidarity Club of Youngstown, occupied factories, self-organized councils and soviets, the lives of forgotten revolutionaries, Quaker meetings, antiwar movements, and prison rebellions. Neglected and forgotten moments of interracial self-activity are brought to light. The book invites the attention of readers who believe that a better world, on the other side of capitalism and state bureaucracy, may indeed be possible.

Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart-Stopping Years as a CEO On the Feds' Hit-List


Howard Root - 2016
    Fifteen years later, his Minnesota company had created over 500 American jobs and developed more than 50 new medical devices that saved and improved lives. But in 2011, the federal government threatened to destroy his company and put Howard behind bars for years. Why? Federal prosecutors had been sold a bill of goods – a tall tale peddled by a money-hungry ex-employee out for revenge. All over one device. A device that never harmed a single patient and made up less than 1% of the company s sales. The investigation revealed the charges to be baseless, but the scalp-hunting prosecutors didn't back off. Instead they dug in – threatening witnesses, misleading grand juries, and strategically leaking secret documents. Whatever it took to pressure a headline-grabbing settlement. Howard Root stood up to the shakedown. Five years, 121 attorneys and $25 million in legal fees later, his life's work and freedom rested in the hands of 12 strangers in a San Antonio jury room. Would Howard and his company be vindicated by the verdict, or had he made the biggest mistake of his life by challenging the federal government? Cardiac Arrest is the eye-opening true story of life on the Feds' hit-list, told from the desk of a CEO who decided to fight back. Follow Howard from the boardroom to the courtroom, as he tells the inside story of the case that sparked outrage in the pages of The Wall Street Journal and triggered a congressional investigation.

Caliban and the Witch


Silvia Federici - 2004
    Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization."It is both a passionate work of memory recovered and a hammer of humanity's agenda." Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged"

The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul


Kahlil Gibran - 1994
    For Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), no single religious tradition revealed the whole truth, so he wove together insights from Eastern Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, American Transcendentalism and the folklore of his native Lebanon to create his own universal Anthem of Humanity.

Murder in the Front Row: Shots From the Bay Area Thrash Metal Epicenter


Brian Lew - 2011
    Featuring hundreds of unseen live and candid color and black-and-white photographs, "Murder in the Front Row" captures the wild-eyed zeal and drive that made Metallica, Slayer, and Megadeth into legends, with over 100 million combined records sold.

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human


Jonathan Gottschall - 2012
    We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It’s easy to say that humans are “wired” for story, but why?In this delightful and original book, Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life’s complex social problems—just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal. Did you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior? That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic?Of course, our story instinct has a darker side. It makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, advertisements, and narratives about ourselves that are more “truthy” than true. National myths can also be terribly dangerous: Hitler’s ambitions were partly fueled by a story.But as Gottschall shows in this remarkable book, stories can also change the world for the better. Most successful stories are moral—they teach us how to live, whether explicitly or implicitly, and bind us together around common values. We know we are master shapers of story. The Storytelling Animal finally reveals how stories shape us.

A Basic History of Art


H.W. Janson - 1981
    Focusing on art before 1520, this edition organizes the material chronologically. It now incorporates considerable new material on the history of music and theatre, and updates scholarship on ancient art.

Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence In America, 1830-1930


Louis Adamic - 1931
    From the 1890s to the 1930s, hardly a year passed without a serious—and often deadly—clash between workers and management. Written in the 1930s, and with a new introduction by Mike Davis, Dynamite recounts a fascinating and largely forgotten history of class and labor struggle in America’s industrial beginnings.It is the story of brutal exploitation, massacres, and judicial murders of the workers. It is also the story of their response: when peaceful strikes yielded no results, workers fought back by any means necessary.Louis Adamic has written the classic story of labor conflict in America, detailing many episodes of labor violence, including the Molly Maguires, the Homestead Strike, Pullman Strike, Colorado Labor Wars, the Los Angeles Times bombing, as well as the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network


Caroline Levine - 2015
    Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life-and our attempts to know both art and politics. Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every aspect of our experience. Yet, forms don't impose their order in any simple way. Multiple shapes, patterns, and arrangements, overlapping and colliding, generate complex and unpredictable social landscapes that challenge and unsettle conventional analytic models in literary and cultural studies. Borrowing the concept of affordances from design theory, this book investigates the specific ways that four major forms-wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks-have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and it proposes exciting new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. Levine rereads both formalist and antiformalist theorists, including Cleanth Brooks, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Mary Poovey, and Judith Butler, and she offers engaging accounts of a wide range of objects, from medieval convents and modern theme parks to Sophocles's Antigone and the television series The Wire. The result is a radically new way of thinking about form for the next generation and essential reading for scholars and students across the humanities who must wrestle with the problem of form and context.

The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho-Punk, 1980-1984


Ian Glasper - 2007
    With Crass and Poison Girls opening the floodgates, the arrival of bands like Zoundz, Flux of Pink Indians, Conflict, Subhumans, Dirt, The Mob, Omega Tribe, and Icons of Filth heralded a new age of honesty and integrity in the 1980s underground music scene. It was a time when punk stopped being merely a radical fashion statement, and became a force for real social change. Anarchy in punk rock no longer meant "cash from chaos"—it meant "freedom, peace, and unity." Comprehensively covering all the groups and names, big and small,  The Day the Country Died also features exclusive interviews and hundreds of never-before-published photos.

Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader


Dark Star Collective - 2002
    Spanning the century, these classic essays contextualize feminism as a larger politics of liberation and equality. Whether it's Emma Goldman's attack on suffrage, the infamous Second Wave debates, or armed struggle group Rote Zora's call for direct action, critical analysis and biting polemic connect the dots to show not just how anarchism influenced feminism, but how feminism changed—and continues to change—the political landscape around it. Includes key essays "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" and "The Tyranny of Tyranny" which broke open the feminist debate on organizing in the 1970s.

The Income Tax: Root of All Evil


Frank Chodorov - 1954
    For the Amendment gives to the Federal Government first claim upon the earnings of the individual, and so infringes his natural right to own what he produces.With its graduated-tax provision, the Income Tax Amendment is a replica of that clause in the Communist Manifesto which provides for the confiscation of all property through the use of just such a tax.Not only is the individual citizen's liberty partitioned by the Amendment, but the several states are deprived of their Constitutional sovereignty, and the central Federal Government is overstrengthened at their expense. This growth of centralized power is a development which generations of Americans fought stubbornly to prevent.And the Federal Government, by the very nature of government itself, increases its "needs" in accordance with its means of revenue. Reduce Federal income, argues Frank Chodorov, and Federal "needs" will automatically be reduced.The author takes a forthright stand as he defines the immoral nature of income taxation and the fallacy of using to "level off" society. And finally he outlines what can be done to repeal the Income Tax Amendment, bearing in mind the Federal Government's legitimate need for revenue.

Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s; Chimes of Freedom, revised and expanded


Mike Marqusee - 2003
    In Wicked Messenger, acclaimed cultural-political commentator Mike Marqusee advances the new thesis that Dylan did not drop politics from his songs but changed the manner of his critique to address the changing political and cultural climate and, more importantly, his own evolving aesthetic. Wicked Messenger is also a riveting political history of the United States in the 1960s. Tracing the development of the decade’s political and cultural dissent movements, Marqusee shows how their twists and turns were anticipated in the poetic aesthetic—anarchic, unaccountable, contradictory, punk— of Dylan's mid-sixties albums, as well as in his recent artistic ventures in Chronicles, Vol. I and Masked and Anonymous.Dylan’s anguished, self-obsessed, prickly artistic evolution, Marqusee asserts, was a deeply creative response to a deeply disturbing situation. "He can no longer tell the story straight," Marqusee concludes, "because any story told straight is a false one."