Bøger udgivet af City Lights Books

The famed New York School bard's ruminations and deep ponderings, written during random Manhattan lunch hours.

Parenti explores the big issues of our time -- fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology.He shows how "rational fascism" renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. He maps out the internal and external forces that destroyed communism, and the disastrous impact of the "free market" victory on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He affirms the relevance of taboo ideologies like Marxism, demonstrating the importance of class analysis in understanding political realities and the ongoing collision between ecology and global corporatism.A bold, entertaining, iconoclastic exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today.

Nonfiction. Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology, with a single infinite substance, and all beings as the modes of being of this substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical propositions and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science. Recent attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher, and this new reading of Spinoza by Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his introduction, Deleuze opens us to the idea that the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us. One wonders, finally, whether Man might be defined as a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence.

A dying woman's attempt to recount the story of her life reveals the fragility of memory and the illusion of identity.

Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal stories explore the nature of memory, family ties, and the difficult imbalances of love.

An Iraq War vet's bracing, visionary response to the challenge posed by global warming and his hope in the humanities.

"Secrets of Voodoo" traces the development of this complex religion (in Haiti and the Americas) from its sources in the brilliant civilizations of ancient Africa. This book presents a straightforward account of the gods or loas and their function, the symbols and signs, rituals, the ceremonial calendar of Voodoo, and the procedures for performing magical rites are given."Voodoo," derived from words meaning "introspection" and "mystery," is a system of belief about the formation of the world and human destiny with clear correspondences in other world religions. Rigaud makes these connections and discloses the esoteric meaning underlying Voodoo's outward manifestations, which are often misinterpreted. Translated from the French by Robert B. Cross. Drawings and photographs by Odette Mennesson-Rigaud.Milo Rigaud was born in Port au Prince, Haiti, in 1903, where he spent the greater part of his life studying the Voodoo tradition. In Haiti he studied law, and in France ethnology, psychology, and theology. The involvement of Voodoo in the political struggle of Haitian blacks for independence was one of his main concerns.

The sequel to his famous book, More Notes of a Dirty Old Man reprints rare Bukowski columns unseen in decades.

A treasury of mid-'50s road poems, intoxication poems, dharma verse, Canuck patois elegy, haikus, and blues.

The first novel written in the Yoruba language and one of the first to be written in any African language.

First and only book of speeches on racism, community, freedom, and politics in the U.S. by international icon Angela Davis.

World-famous musician Ry Cooder publishes his first collection of stories, with a nod to Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West.

Transcripts from the explosive trial are paired with historic contextual writings to provide the "Essential Chicago Conspiracy Handbook."

A young journalist's chronicles of Mexican social movements and the powers attempting to repress them

In spontaneous, direct, and concrete verses, the author confesses his joy in poetry and life.

The final book by the founder of Surrealism, translated into English for the first time."For many ill-informed people, the name 'André Breton' is synonymous with surrealism. They are right. Without Breton, surrealism, even assuming it existed, would have been nothing more than a literary school. With him, it was a way of life."—Raymond Queneau, author of Zazie in the MetroAs leader and chief theoretician of Surrealism, director of myriad publications from the 1920s through the 1960s, poet André Breton was a prolific writer of prose. Author of numerous books, essays, and manifestoes, Breton periodically collected his most significant short essays into carefully arranged volumes. His last such collection, Cavalier Perspective, appeared posthumously in 1970; in it, editor Marguerite Bonnet assembled "articles, prefaces, responses to surveys, interviews," written between 1952 and 1966. Modeled on its predecessors, Cavalier Perspective is considered Breton's final book.Over 50 years after its initial publication, its appearance in English today is a crucial cultural event; here we encounter Breton writing on topics nearest to our present day and most relevant to current social and political issues. Cavalier Perspective finds Breton steadfastly pursuing his anti-fascist, anti-colonialist revolutionary aims in the age of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and space exploration, concerns largely unknown during Surrealism's more notorious interwar period. Far from conceding the movement's claim to contemporary relevance, and pointedly refusing the imposition of "strict temporal limits," Breton insists on Surrealism's dynamic and dialectical position in the book's titular manifesto, asserting its continuity through its perpetual capacity to respond to the needs of the hour.More than simply a poet and theoretician, Breton is best considered an "inaugurator of discourse" on the level of a Marx or Freud, and Cavalier Perspective is an essential capstone to his lifetime as the guiding hand behind the worldwide surrealist movement.

In his final book, poet Neeli Cherkovski paints a portrait of his life through luminous details of encounters with his illustrious comrades."A prolific poet and denizen of beatnik cafes who chronicled the literary ethos of bohemian culture."—New York TimesTo be published on what would have been his 80th birthday, The Portrait Gallery Called Existence finds the poet and memoirist combining these twin vocations in intimate depictions of his fellow artists and reflections on his family. The book follows Cherkovski from his early encounters in L.A. with poets like Wanda Coleman and Jack Micheline to his youthful heyday among the Beat Generation in North Beach, San Francisco, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. The passage of time is inevitably marked with the loss of beloved friends, recorded in elegies for recently deceased poets like Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, and Jack Hirschman, as well as a series of poems celebrating his close friendship with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.Join Neeli as he drinks whiskey with Bob Kaufman in Chinatown, visits his gentle and impoverished hero John Wieners, and takes a terrifying drive through San Francisco with Ferlinghetti. Also included are several portraits of key poetic forebears, like Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and especially Rimbaud, examined from Cherkovski's perspective in 1959 and 2023. The book ends with memories of close family members and a number of moving self-portraits, as the poet confronts his own mortality and impending death. A powerful final statement from a master poet.

Little Red Barns is a groundbreaking investigation of factory farms and the unprecedented measures being taken to hide their impact — on animals, public health, and the environment — from the public.Will Potter had planned to write a book about a troubling form of censorship, namely, a host of new "ag-gag" laws that criminalize photographers and journalists as terrorists for their efforts to expose abuses on factory farms. But his work soon expanded into a much larger investigation of a nexus of political corruption and corporate power that works to silence protest and to obscure reality with propaganda. What emerges is a chilling account of the secret campaigns of weaponized storytelling being used to prevent us from seeing the ecological, public health, and authoritarian threats that these farms represent.Potter's journalistic practice of bearing witness took him to places he had never expected, from factory farms to fascist groups, from whistleblowing to censorship laws, political corruption and propaganda campaigns, and the book is an immersive, engaging personal account of the ups and downs of his journey. A well-woven tale of investigative reporting, archival research, photography, and memoir, Little Red Barns is about how the biggest industries on the planet hide from the public and secretly campaign to silence protest. The little red barns are a case study, and a warning for anyone concerned about the right to protest and hold corporations accountable.

Like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Vallejo, Gazan poet Nasser Rabah embodies the magnificent possibilities of the human spirit and imagination under extreme conditions.Born in Gaza in 1963, Rabah spent some of his formative years in Egypt, before returning to Gaza in his early twenties, where he has lived ever since. There, among the generations who built its neighborhoods and populate its villages, in a place of great natural beauty and vibrant cities, living under constant surveillance, military occupation, blockade, siege and regular attack, in a culture steeped in literary and spiritual tradition, Rabah developed his distinctively singular vision and poetics.This is Rabah's first book in English translation. The poems include a selection from three of his published collections, along with new poems written after October 2023, during the full-scale Israeli assault on Gaza. Throughout, we find a combination of irreverence and fidelity to tradition, a sense of surrealism infusing the depiction of everyday incomprehensibilities, and an unsettling, delicate tenderness always on edge in an atmosphere of sensory inundation and emotional saturation. Rabah's poems can be raw and uninhibited by social or literary conventions, exploring and questioning one's relationship to divinity in absurd circumstances while confronting the sacred cows of his own society, along with the sometimes voyeuristic interest from those on the outside of it. His poetry constantly interrogates—sometimes playfully and sometimes in utter existential despair—the paradoxes and difficulties of expression and of writing itself. Nasser Rabah is a poet we have much to learn from.This is a bi-lingual edition and includes the original versions in Arabic.

The lives of working class Mexican America, where everyday stories offer a portal to myth and fable.This collection of eleven stories is the newest installment of an ongoing, multi-volume literary documentary project, penned by one of the contemporary legends of Chicanx literature.Dagoberto Gilb's cast of characters includes a young family whose exposure to a mysterious cloud of gas alters their lives forever; a high school dropout whose choice to learn the ways of the world from the adults at work in his uncle’s industrial laundry leads him into a dangerous dalliance;  a former high-rise union carpenter who agrees to meet up with an eager old flame; an aging Chicano, living alone, whose children watch over him for signs of decline; and more.These are stories about working class people who come and go mostly unnoticed or ignored, whose lives are not fodder for literary tropes or cliches. They are neither heroes nor villains, just regular people with their flaws and merits, facing the challenges and questions posed by everyday life. Gilb writes in a distinctive, appealing voice, welcoming the reader in with an easy sense of familiarity, and the effect is spare on the surface, but profound. Deftly capturing the nuances of interpersonal relationships in a simple word or gesture, he peels back the surface of seemingly unremarkable encounters to reveal layers of myth and uncanny surrealism, propelled by the momentum of new, changing times.

"Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia reflects each facet of the poet's development up to the point of its publication. "Revelations of a Surreal Youth (1943-1945)" includes the incendiary poems from his teenage years which brought him early avant-garde fame, including his signature "Touch of the Marvelous." "Trance Ports (1948-1961)" covers the Beat years, evincing increasing involvement with mysticism, esoterism, and religion. Finally, "Secret Freedom (1963-1966)" heralds his return to surrealism, cementing his countercultural bona fides with the LSD-fueled "Blue Grace," the zig-zagging Kundalini-inspired "What Is Not Strange?" and the Aquarian Age ode "Astro-Mancy," which prefigures his later engagement with Native American culture. This new edition includes an afterword by poet and editor Garrett Caples, recounting the book's genesis through correspondence between Lamantia and Ferlinghetti and including archival images. A much-needed restoration to the Pocket Poets Series of today, Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia glows like a red-hot coal still burning with the revolutionary fervor of its time"--

"COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco meditates on the extraordinary time of loss, isolation, and bizarre rituals of the Covid era and its aftermath. First performed at sold-out theaters in New York, where the Village Voice compared Karen Finley to Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, this vivid suite of poems invokes a maelstrom of feelings that will make you laugh and cry, sometimes on the same page. In COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco, Finley processes the pandemic in all its complexity-from the collective coping strategies during isolation and loss to the absurd new habits we acquired, from handwashing to wiping down groceries to decorative double masks and zoom dance parties. The New York City hotspot echoes an earlier AIDS era; that rage and sorrow remain part of the City's DNA. During COVID, tragic historic events such as the police murder of George Floyd and the continued brutality on Black and brown bodies, challenged the nation. Revolution took to the streets. The reversal of Roe v Wade and the criminalizing of trans peoples' bodies, mental health realities, houselessness, essential workers' rights, and social isolation brought desperate conditions. Finley reflects on these traumas, asking how do we employ love despite the hate, to encourage humanity despite proliferating violence? On the fifth anniversary of the pandemic lockdown, COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco looks back while also looking forward, offering art as salvation, and the deep belief in the power of words, compassion, and humor to transcend the harsh realities of today"--

"A memoiristic travelogue that illuminates the enduring legacy of the mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during World War II"--

An underground denizen of San Francisco soars above it in a state-of-the-art long poem. Over a decade ago, Patrick James Dunagan stoically refused to be published in the Spotlight series, citing his desire to maintain critical independence as a prolific reviewer of contemporary poetry. Finally, he has been prevailed upon to turn over a manuscript, City Bird and Other Poems. Defying the media narrative of the city's demise, the poems of City Bird celebrate the joys of San Francisco, invoking artists like Joan Brown and Jay DeFeo, poets like Bill Berkson and Lew Welch, and local landmarks like O'Farrell Street, St. Anne of the Sunset, and Thrasher magazine, all the while foregrounding Dunagan's lightly worn erudition. But the book stands on its lengthy title poem, a tour de force combining composition and collage, filtered through the poet's laid-back lyricism. Unapologetically literary with its understated formal imperatives, City Bird is at once a self-referential poetics, examining itself unfolding, and a stream-of-consciousness narrative of Hugh, the nominal protagonist, seemingly engaged in eating a sandwich. Proustian in its sweep, even as it courts a ludicrous Beckett-like minimalism, the poem takes sidelong glances at our contemporary political malaise, while contemplating consciousness itself. If Ashbery had written "The Skaters" about skateboarders, it might have come out very like City Bird. A major achievement in contemporary American poetry, City Bird further confirms Dunagan's reputation as the best-kept secret of San Francisco. "Nothing is left unseen, including present memories years before with friends, or a dramatic monologue through recent readership, receiving everyone's voices into a huge collage . . . City Bird is all this and more. A meditation and intense easy stroll through a poet's city and all the things that make up a gorgeous life within it, listening and living."-Micah Ballard, author of Waifs and Strays

"More than simply a book, Cartoons proposes itself as a genre of imaginary writing in opposition to the realism of most contemporary U.S. fiction, aligning itself with the French symbolism and Latin American fabulism its author is known to translate. A giant cricket with a tiny Kit Schluter in a jar, The Girl Who Is a Piece of Paper, an umbrella who confuses the words porpoise and purpose in its quest for self-fulfillment, these are just a few denizens of its pages, suffused with a fairy tale-like animism. A pair of slugs go on a bender. A microwave oven decries microaggressions. A beer bottle is filled with regret. An escalator mechanic's shoe conceals a terrible secret. As befits its title, Cartoons defies the laws of physics and fiction alike, eschewing tonal consistency in favor of a simultaneity of joy and horror, ecstasy and disgust, wrapped in an extravagant layer of black humor. The stories blur the boundary between microfiction and poet's prose, featuring impossible transformations and surrealistic events, even as they wrestle with urgent psychic and moral dilemmas. Heightening the atmosphere of pervasive unreality are a number of drawings by the author, which don't so much illustrate as parallel the tales with their own fantastic scenarios"--

"This recently discovered treasure is a stunning portrait of sex, family, religion, culture of origin, and the betrayals of the body. Tender and blistering, erotic and spiritual - Cuadros dives into these complexities which we grapple with today, showing us how to survive these times, and beyond"--

"Abya Yala"-"land of life" or "land of vital blood"-is a Pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamâa and Colombia to refer to the American continent and more recently has signified the idea of a decolonized "New World" among various Indigenous movements. In Isthmus to Abya Yala, Panamanian American poet Roberto Harrison summons a mythic consciousness in response to this political and spiritual struggle. In his poems, with mystic fervor, Harrison finds phonetic unities concealing conceptual oppositions he must transcend. Invoking "mobilian" as an ur-language against racism and toward an all-inclusive humanity-in opposition to the "mobile" of phone-mediated existence-the poems of Isthmus to Abya Yala burn with a visionary ardor that overpowers rationality through an intensive accumulation of imagery. They even sometimes manifest as visual poems in the form of drawings he calls "Tecs," opposing the dominance of technology to the advocacy of pan-Indian nationhood by 19th century Shawnee leader Tecumseh. "Tecumseh Republic" is the poet's name for a new post-racial, post-national, post-binary, post-colonial, holistic and earth-oriented society with no national borders, with Panamâa, the isthmus, as its only entry and exit"--

"Short stories from 25 emerging and established writers of Middle Eastern and North African origins, a unique collection of voices and viewpoints that illuminate life in the global Arab/Muslim world. Stories from the Center of the World gathers new writing from the Greater Middle East, a vast region that stretches from Southwest Asia, through the Middle East and Turkey, and across Northern Africa. The 25 authors included here are either native to the region, or part of a diasporic community, a diverse mix of men and women, queer and straight, who come from a wide range of cultures and countries, including Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, and Morocco, to name a few. Selected from among a wave of new fiction published in The Markaz Review, this 'best of' collection features both well-established and emerging writers, some being published in English for the first time. The stories span a number of styles and genres, from literary fiction to sci-fi, epistolary to noir. In 'Asha and Haaji,' Hanif Kureishi takes up the cause of outsiders who become uprooted when war or disaster strikes and they flee for safe haven. In Nektar Anastasiadou's 'The Location of the Soul According to Benyamin Alhadeff,' two students in Istanbul from different classes--and religions that have often been at odds with one another--believe they can overcome all obstacles. MK Harb's story, 'Counter Strike,' is about queer love among Beiruti adolescents; and Salar Abdoh's 'The Roots of Heaven' invites us into the world of former militants, fighters who fought ISIS or Daesh in Iraq and Syria, who are having a hard time readjusting to civilian life. In 'Eleazar,' Karim Kattan tells an unexpected Palestinian story in which the usual antagonists--Israeli occupation forces--are mostly absent, while another malevolent force seems to overtake an unsuspecting family. Omar El Akkad's 'The Icarist' is a coming-of-age story about the underworld in which illegal immigrants are forced to live, and what happens when one dares to break away. The Markaz Review, an online journal of literature and the arts, was founded in 2020 with a mission to showcase work from a cultural region that's often overlooked or misrepresented. Here, we get a different viewpoint. Moving from the margins to the center, or the markaz--a word and a concept shared among languages and cultures of the region--the writers featured here establish a worldview that highlights the vanguard creativity and humanity of the various populations represented in their stories"