city lights publishers spring/summer 2010 catalog

8/14/2019 City Lights Publishers Spring/Summer 2010 Catalog

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CITY LIGHTS PUBLISHERSSpring/Summer 2010


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C I T Y L I G H T S P U B L I S H E R S S P R I N G / S U M M E R 2 0 1 0

We proudly present our Spring/Summer 2010 catalog. Reviewers, please let us

know if youd like an advance copy of any book were publishing:

Email [email protected]; Call 415-362-1901; Fax this checklist 415-362-4921;

or Mail it to: Stacey Lewis / City Lights Publishers / 261 Columbus Ave /

San Francisco, CA 94133.

THE BLACK HISTORY OF THE WHITE HOUSE

NEW WORLD OF INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE

COLORBLIND

IN DANGER

ABSENCE OF THE HERO

ISLANDERS

THE BOMB

PRISON/CULTURE

TRANCE ARCHIVE

Name

Address

Emai l address

NEWT

I

TLES ORDERING INFORMATION

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AND INQUIRIES TO:

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FOR ORDERS: ORDERSCITYLIGHTS.COM


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1C I T Y L I G H T S P U B L I S H E R S S P R I N G / S U M M E R 2 0 1 0

NEW

TITLE

T H E B L A C K H I S T O R Y O F T H E W H I T E H O U S E

THE BLACK HISTORY OF THE WHITE HOUSE

BY CL A R E N CE LUSANE

The Black History of the White House pres-

ents the untold history and shifting signifi-cance of the White House as experienced by

African Americans, from the generations of

enslaved people who helped to build it or

were forced to work there to its first black

First Family, the Obamas.

Juxtaposing significant events in White House history with the ongoing struggle

for equal rights, Lusane offers a unique and compelling view of one of Americas most

symbolic structures. And from the first slave-owning presidents to more contempo-

rary examples, he shows how U.S. presidents have used their authority to advance

racial justice only when under great pressure to do so. Here is the story of the furiousbacklash unleashed against President Roosevelt for inviting Booker T. Washington

to dinner in 1901, which resulted in a virtual ban on such invitations for the next 30

years. Here too are the voices of those who insisted on justice and representation,

such as Marcus Garvey, who issued a call in 1920 for a Black House and a black presi-

dent. The Black History of the White Houseis a timely reminder that the White House

has always been a prism through which to view the progress and struggles of black

Americans.

Dr. Lusane has been published in the Washington Post, the Miami Herald,

the Oakland Tribune, Black Scholar, and more. He often appears on PBS,

BET, C-SPAN, and other national media. Author of several books and

former editor of Black Political Agenda, he teaches at Howard University.

ISBN: 978-0-87286-532-7 $16.95, $17.95/CAN 200PP

JUNE 2010 TRADE PAPERBACK HISTORY / SOCIAL SCIENCE / CURRENT EVENTS

THE UNTOLD HISTORY

AND POLITICS OF THE

WHITE HOUSE FROM

THE PERSPECTIVE OF

AFRICAN AMERICANS

CLARENCE LUSANE IS ONE OF AMERICAS MOST THOUGHTFUL AND CRITICAL THINKERS

ON ISSUES OF RACE, CLASS AND POWER.MANNING MARABLE


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N E W W O R L D O F I N D I G E N O U S R E S I S T A N C E

NEW WORLD OF INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE

BY NOAMCHOMSKYAN D VOICES FROM NORTH, SOUTHAN DCENTRALAMERICA

EDITED BY LOIS MEYERAN D BENJAMN MALDONADO

CITY LIGHTS OPEN MEDIA

Indigenous societies today face difficult

choices: can they develop, modernize,

and advance without endangering their

sacred traditions and communal identity?

Specifically, can their communities benefit

from national education while resisting the

tendency of state-imposed programs to

undermine their cultural sovereignty, lan-

guage, and traditions? According to Lois

Meyer and Benjamn Maldonado, these areamong the core questions being faced by

indigenous societies whose comunalidad

or communal way of lifeis at odds with the dictates of big business and the social

programs of the state.

To explore these issues in depth, Meyer and Maldonado conducted a series of

dialogues with Noam Chomsky, and invited numerous organizers and intellectuals from

indigenous communities of resistance to comment. In three in-depth conversations,

Chomsky offers poignant lessons from his vast knowledge of world history, linguistics,

economics, anti-authoritarian philosophy and personal experience, and traces numer-

ous parallels with other peoples who have resisted state power while attempting to

modernize, develop, survive, and sustain their unique community identity and tradition.

Following the interviews are commentaries from more than a dozen activists and intel-

lectuals from the Americas, who speak from their on-the-ground experiences and work

with indigenous communities in Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, and Canada. This is

Chomsky at his bestlucid, accessible and deeply informative.

Noam Chomsky is the critically acclaimed author of several bestselling

books. Some of his recent titles include Hegemony or Survival, Imperial

Ambitions, 9 -11, Media Control, and Interventions.

ISBN: 978-0-87286-533-4 $18.95, $19.95/CAN 300PP

APRIL 2010 TRADE PAPERBACK LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES / POLITICAL SCIENCE

INTERVIEWS

WITH CHOMSKY

ACCOMPANIED BY

COMMENTARIES

BY INDIGENOUS

ORGANIZERS ON

GLOBALIZATION AND

RESISTANCE IN THE

AMERICAS


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NEW

TITLE

Tim W ise is aut hor of seve ral bo oks, includ ing White Like Meand the

runaway hit, Between Barack and a Hard Place .

C O L O R B L I N D

COLORBLIND

Barack Obama, Post-Racial Liberalism and the Retreat From

Racial Equity

BY TI M WI S E

CITY LIGHTS OPEN MEDIA

Ever since the New Deal, voices on the liberal left

have advocated a retreat from color-conscious

public policies such as affirmative action, and

even from open discussion of racism as a key

factor in the perpetuation of racial inequity in

the United States. They have argued that the

barriers faced by black and brown Americans

are largely divorced from racism, and that these

stem, instead, from economic factors such as

deindustrialization, capital flight from the cities,

spiraling healthcare costs and inadequate funding for education, jobs programs, and

other programs of social uplift. From this starting point, they contend that universal

programs intended to help the poor and working class are the best means for narrowing

the racial inequalities with which the nation is still plagued.

In the first book to discuss the pitfalls of colorblindness in the Obama era, Tim

Wise argues against colorblindness and fordeeper color-consciousness in both public

and private practice. We can only begin to move toward authentic social and economic

equity through what he calls illuminated individualismacknowledging the diverseidentities that have shaped our perceptions and the role that race continues to play in

the maintenance of disparities between whites and people of color in the United States

today.

ISBN: 978-0-87286-508-2 $13.95, $14.95/CAN 160PP

MAY 2010 TRADE PAPERBACK SOCIAL SCIENCE / POLITICAL SCIENCE / CURRENT EVENTS

HOW

COLORBLINDNESS

IN POLICY AND

PERSONAL PRACTICE

PERPETUATE RACIAL

INEQUITY IN THE

UNITED STATES TODAY


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I N D A N G E R

IN DANGER

A Pa so li ni An th ol ogy

BY PIER P A O L O PASOLINI EDITED , WI T H AN INTRODUCTION BY J A CK H I R S CH M A N

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was a major

cultural figure in post-WW2 Italy, well

known as a poet, novelist, communist intel-

lectual, and filmmaker. In Dangeris the first

anthology in English devoted to his political

and literary essays, and includes a gener-

ous selection of his poetry. Against the

backdrop of post-war Italy, and continuing

through the mid-70s, Pasolinis writings provide a fascinating portrait of a Europe in

which fascists and communists violently clashed for power and journalists ran great

risks. The controversial and openly gay Pasolini was murdered at fifty-three; In Danger

includes his final interview, conducted hours before his death, as well as the cryptic

litany What Is This Coup? I Know, which many suspect motivated his murder. Here

also are Pasolinis essays on cultural topics like hippies and Zen buddhism, literary

discussions of writers like Italo Calvino, Marianne Moore, and Costantine Cavafy, and

even a 1967 interview between Pasolini and Ezra Pound concerning Pounds relation-

ship to the contemporary Italian avant-garde. The poetry ranges from early works

written in the Friulan dialect through his later lyric blasts against fascism.

In Danger is edited and introduced by internationally renowned poet Jack

Hirschman, who also edited the enduring City Lights classic Artaud Anthology. Trans-

lated by several hands, including Hirschman and well-known rocker Jonathan Rich-

man,In Dangeris essential reading for anyone interested in Pasolinis brave lyricism

and critical insight.Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was a major cultural figure in post-WW2Italy, well-known as a poet, novelist, communist intellectual, and film-

maker.

ISBN: 978-0-87286-507-5 $16.95, $17.95/CAN 250PP

AUGUST 2010 TRADE PAPERBACK POETRY / PO LITICAL SCIENCE / LITERARY CRITICISM

IN DA NG ER REVEALS

THE LITERARY LIFE

OF INTERNATIONALLY

RENOWNED

FILMMAKER PIER

PAOLO PASOLINI


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NEW

TITLE

ISBN: 978-0-87286-531-0 $16.95, $17.95/CAN 300PP

APRIL 2010 TRADE PAPERBACK FICTION

ISBN: 978-0-87286-534-1 $26.00, $27.00/CAN 300PP

APRIL 2010 TRADE CLOTH FICTION

A B S E N C E O F T H E H E R O

ABSENCE OF THE HERO

Uncollected Stories and Essays, Vol. 2: 1946-1992

BY CH A R L E S BU KO W S KI

EDITED , WI T H AN I N T R O D U CT I O N BY D A V I D CALONNE

Everyones favorite Dirty Old Man returns with

a new volume of uncollected work. Charles

Bukowski (1920-1994), one of the most outrageous

figures of 20th-century American literature, was

so prolific that many significant pieces never

found their way into his books. Absence of the

Herocontains much of his earliest fiction, unseen

in decades, as well as a number of previously

unpublished stories and essays. The classic Bukowskian obsessions are here: sex, booze,

and gambling, along with trenchant analysis of what he calls Playing and Being the Poet.

Among the books highlights are tales of his infamous public readings (The Big Dope

Reading, I Just Write Poetry So I Can Go to Bed with Girls); a review of his own first

book; hilarious installments of his newspaper column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, including

meditations on neo-Nazis and driving in Los Angeles; and an uncharacteristic tale of

getting lost in the Utah woods (Bukowski Takes a Trip). Yet the book also showcases

the other Bukowskian astute if offbeat literary critic. From his own Manifesto to his

account of poetry in Los Angeles (A Foreword to These Poets) to idiosyncratic evaluations

of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones, and Louis Zukofsky, Absence of the Hero

reveals the intellectual hidden beneath the gruff exterior.

Our second volume of his uncollected prose, Absence of the Herois a major addition

to the Bukowski canon, essential for fans yet suitable for new readers as an introduction to

the wide range of his work.

EVERYONES FAVORITE

DIRTY OLD MAN

RETURNS WITH MORE

BOOZY TALES OF

EXTRAORDINARY

MADNESS

Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany in 1920 andbrought to Los Angeles at age three. Using the city as a backdrop

for his work, Bukowski wrote prolifically, publishing over fifty

volumes of poetry and prose. He died in San Pedro, California on

March 9, 1994. His books are widely translated and posthumous

volumes continue to appear.


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I S L A N D E R S

ISLANDERS

BY AMMIEL ALCALAY

Enigmatic and multi-layered, Islanders is about

finding ones own hard-won truth. A youngmans indelible memories of the struggle to

find intimacyformative experiences like the

ebb and flow of friendships, love, and ordinary

workaday lifeare viewed through a lens of

nostalgic longing and hard-eyed realism as he

attempts to come to terms with the past. Set

during the cataclysm of the last years of the war

in Vietnam, in a landscape that shifts between

the bleak fishing towns of the Atlantic coast to the ruined cities of the Northeast, Islanders

explores the classic theme of identitys intricate relationship to place.

Excerpt from Islanders

The young man thought to make a story of it, the woman, the son she had, some

years they lived, the things that happened around them, but he also thought

of the table, kept thinking about where it was and couldnt remember, the size

of the room, what wall it leaned against and the things themselves that lay on

it. His day had been long, the streets hot, filled with other sweating bodies, his

feet ached and names repeated themselves in his head. Two stories he had

read years ago stuck to him, and as he looked at the bottle and the woman he

thought about the men that wrote them, saw the men themselves, cold, in long

overcoats with cigarettes, hunched over coffee in some diner, their rooms filled

with smoke, crumpled papers, completely removed from what they were writing

about, the people they wrote of never imagining they were being written about,

the idea that someone was recording the facts of their lives, the circumstances

they lived in.

SEEN THROUGH

THE PRISM OF

PERSONAL HISTORY,

AN EVOCATIVE,

UNSETTLING VIEW OF

A WORLD FALLING

APART

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic, and scholar who teaches at

Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of,among other books,After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture,

the cairo noteboooks, and Memories of Our Future. He was one of the

initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and helped to organize the

OlsonNowproject. He has recently launched Lost & Found: The CUNY

Poetics Archival Initiative, a publishing venture whose mission is to

retrieve and make available key texts falling widely under the rubric

of the New American Poetry.

ISBN: 978-0-87286-506-8 $11.95, $12.95/CAN 96PP

APRIL 2010 TRADE PAPERBACK FICTION


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NEW

TITLE

As an active WWII bombardier returning from the

end of the war in Europe and preparing for combat

in Japan, Howard Zinn read the headline Atomic

Bomb Dropped on Japan and was gladthe war

would be over. Like other Americans, writes Zinn,

I had no idea what was going on at the higher

levels, and had no idea what that atomic bomb

had done to men, women, children in Hiroshima,

any more than I ever really understood what the

bombs I dropped on European cities were doing

to human flesh and blood. During the war, Zinn

had taken part in the aerial bombing of Royan, France, and in 1966, he went to Hiroshima,where he was invited to a house of rest where survivors of the bombing gathered. In this

short and powerful book, the backstory of the making and use of the bomb, Zinn offers his

deep personal reflections and political analysis of these events, and the profound influence

they had in transforming him from an order-taking combat soldier to one of the greatest

living anti-authoritarian, anti-war historians writing today. Zinns committed lifetime of

teaching and writing is based in the belief that only by embracing the truth of history can

ordinary people, rethinking their roles, find the possibility for redemption and change.

Publication in August commemorates the 65th anniversary of the USAs two atomic

bombings of Japan.

T H E B O M B

THE BOMB

BY H O WA R D ZINN

ISBN: 978-0-87286-509-9 $8.95, $9.95/CAN 100PP

AUGUST 2010 TRADE PAPERBACK HISTORY / PO LITICAL SCIENCE

HOWARD ZINNS

PERSONAL,

HISTORICAL, AND

POLITICAL VIEWS ON

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF

THE U.S. BOMBINGS

OF ROYAN AND

HIROSHIMA

Howard Zinn is the author of many books, including A PeoplesHistory of the United States and A Power Government s Cannot

Suppress.

ZINN IS ONE OF THE MOST RESPONSIBLE, LIVELY, AND BRAVE COMMENTATORS ON U.S.

HISTORY NOW LIVING.VIGGO MORTENSEN, O MAGAZINE


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P R I S O N / C U L T U R E

PRISON/CULTURE

EDITED BY S H A R O N E . BL I S S, KE V I N B . CH E N, A ND S T E V E D I CKI S O N

Over two million individuals are behind bars

in U.S. prisons, living in isolation from their

families and their communities. Prison/Culture

investigates the culture of incarceration as

an integral part of the American experience

through a compilation of stunning and often

heartrending art by inmates, as well as artists

on the outside, such as Sandow Birk and Keith

Antar Mason, who address incarceration, crimi-

nal profiling, wrongful conviction, prison labor,

and the death penalty. The book also includes

essays on prisons and prison art by Angela Davis and Mike Davis, and poetry by AmiriBaraka, Ericka Huggins, Luis Rodriguez, Sesshu Foster, and more.

Art from Prison/Culture

NEARLY FIFTY

ARTISTS, POETS, AND

ACTIVISTS EXAMINE

THE CONTEMPORARY

PRISON SYSTEM

THROUGH

HEARTRENDING ART

AND WRITING

ISBN: 978-1-931404-11-2 $19.95, $21.95/CAN 96PP 80 COLOR

PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS APRIL 2010 TRADE PAPERBACK

ART / POLITICAL SCIENCE


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NEW

TITLE

TRANCE ARCHIVE

New and Selected Poems

BY ANDREW JO R O N

CITY L I G H T S S P O T L I G H T SERIES NO . 3

T R A N C E A R C H I V E

Since his post-9/11 essay on poetry and politics,

The Emergency, Andrew Joron has been regard-

ed as one of American poetrys most profound

practitioners. Trance Archive, Volume 3 in our City

Lights Spotlight series, draws on over 20 years of

Jorons work, tracing his trajectory from his early

days as a science fiction poet to his later fusion

of surrealist romanticism and language poetry

materialism into what he calls speculative lyric.

Infused with radical politics, Jorons poetry takesinspiration from chaos and complexity theory, and reflects personal associations ranging

from anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend to surrealist mystic Philip Lamantia. Featur-

ing long out-of-print work as well as new poems, Trance Archive affirms Jorons place

among major contemporary poets.

ISBN: 978-0-87286-530-3 $14.95, $15.95/CAN 120PP

APRIL 2010 TRADE PAPERBACK POETRY

A graduate of UC Berkeley, where he majored in Philosophy of

Science, Andrew Joron is the author of five previous collections

of poetryForce Fields(1987), Science Fiction(1992), The Removes

(1999), Fathom (2003), and The Sound Mirror (2008)and The Cryat Zero: Selected Prose (2007). His translations from the German

include Literary Essays of Ernst Bloch (1998) and Richard Anders

The Footsteps of One Who Has Not Stepped Forth (1999). In 2004 he

published Neo-Surrealism; or, the Sun at Night: Transformations of

Surrealism in American Poetry 1966-1999. He plays theremin in the

improvisational trio Free Rein.

ANDREW JORON IS A MODERNDAY ALCHEMIST. HES NOT INTERESTED IN SOLIPSISTIC

SELFENRICHMENT; RATHER, HE PRACTICES THE ART OF TRANSFORMATION. THOUGH

ALIGNED WITH THE REVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE BEHIND SURREALISMTHE CONJURING

OF PARADOX TO EXPAND THE POSSIBLEHE APPRECIATES THE MOVEMENTS AESTHETIC

LIMITATIONS AND HAS SOMEHOW, MIRACULOUSLY, MANAGED TO CREATE POETRY

ATTUNED TO MATERIALIST CRITIQUES OF LANGUAGE WITHOUT ABANDONING ANY OF

THE ARTS MYSTERY AND METAPHYSICAL INQUIRY.NOAH ELI GORDON, BOOKFORUM

LIKE A CHANCE

ENCOUNTER BETWEEN

EINSTEIN AND

BRETON, T R A NC E

A RC HI VE EMBRACES

PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE,

AND SURREALISM


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city lights publishers spring/summer 2010 catalog

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