Left Book Club Anthology
Price: $24.95
“In 1936 British publisher Victor Gollancz founded the Left Book Club to promote socialism and to educate the masses on the growing threat of fascism. A senior editor at the London Review of Books, Laity presents excerpts from influential club selections, including George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, and Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China. He also provides brief introductions to these works, as well as a 22-page introduction outlining the club’s history. At its height, the club boasted nearly 60,000 members. Despite its popularity, however, Gollancz was frequently criticized for his blind acceptance of the Communist Party line and his uncritical support of the Soviet Union. As a result of the party’s opposition to British intervention in World War II, Gollancz, like Arthur Koestler and many other British intellectuals, abandoned communism. Their subsequent embrace of liberalism is generally credited with the rising fortunes of the Labour Party in 1945. Recommended for academic libraries,...
Read more about: Left Book Club Anthology »Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts
Price: $12.95
Key texts from leading theorists in postwar French literary criticism. In Literary Debate, the second volume in The New Press’s Postwar French Thought Series, editors Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman present a selection of texts, many available in English for the first time, that together offer an illuminating and provocative overview of the last half-century of French literary criticism. Combining examination of literature as an institution and in historical context with pathbreaking interpretations of writing by such authors as Stephan Mallarmé and Sigmund Freud, Literary Debate presents the seminal work of figures such as Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Paul Sartre. These selections represent one of the most fertile periods the field has known. Including original essays by its editors, this volume brings together the important threads of one of the most influential movements in Western intellectual history.
... Read more about: Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts »Aesthetic Relation
Price: $19.95
One of the best-known continental theorists writing today, Grard Genette here explores our aesthetic relation to works of art. Through an analysis of the views of thinkers ranging from David Hume and Immanuel Kant to Monroe C. Beardsley, Arthur Danto, and Nelson Goodman, Genette seeks to identify the place of the aesthetic in a theory of artistic appreciation. His discussion is rich in detailed examples drawn from all of the arts. The Aesthetic Relation is a companion volume to The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence, published by Cornell in 1997. Taken together, the two books offer a comprehensive theory of art which addresses the work of art as at once object and action. Genette maintains that our aesthetic relation to all types of objects presupposes that special attention is paid to their outward aspect (rather than to their usefulness) when appraising them. Such appraisals, while wholly subjective and temporary, are expressed as objective and universal judgments about the items in question....
Read more about: Aesthetic Relation »Nickel and Dimed
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Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty level wages. Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them, in order to find out how anyone survives on six to seven dollars an hour. Ehrenreich left home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find and accepted whatever jobs she was offered from cleaning to care work, waitressing to folding clothes at Wal-Mart. So began a gruelling, hair-raising and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of working America.
... Read more about: Nickel and Dimed »Global Woman
Price: $11.95
In a remarkable pairing, two renowned social critics offer a groundbreaking anthology that examines the unexplored consequences of globalization on the lives of women worldwide. Women are moving around the globe as never before. But for every female executive racking up frequent flier miles, there are multitudes of women whose journeys go unnoticed. Each year, millions leave Mexico, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and other third world countries to work in the homes, nurseries, and brothels of the first world. This broad-scale transfer of labor associated with women’s traditional roles results in an odd displacement. In the new global calculus, the female energy that flows to wealthy countries is subtracted from poor ones, often to the detriment of the families left behind. The migrant nanny – or cleaning woman, nursing care attendant, maid – eases a “care deficit” in rich countries, while her absence creates a “care deficit” back home. Confronting a range of topics, from the fate of Vietnamese mail-order brides to the importation of Mexican nannies in Los Angeles and the selling of Thai girls to Japanese brothels,...
Read more about: Global Woman »True Hallucinations & The Archaic Revival: Two Classics in One V
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Truce Halluciinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise is a mesmerizing, surreal account of the bizarre adventures of Terence McKenna, his brother Dennis, and a small band of their friends, is a wild ride of exotic experience and scientific inquiry. Exploring the Amazon Basin in search of mythical shamanic hallucinogens, they encounter a host of unusual characters — including a mushroom, a flying saucer, pirate Mantids from outer space, an appearance by James and Nora Joyce in the guise of poultry, and translinguistic matter — and discover the missing link in the development of human consciousness and language. Cited by the L.A. Weekly as “the culture’s foremost spokesman for the psychedelic experience,” Terrence McKenna is an underground legend as a brilliant raconteur, adventurer, and expert on the experiential use of mind-altering plants. In the essays, interviews, and narrative adventures collected in Archaic Revival : Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution,...
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