If Beale Street Could Talk

James Baldwin

London: Penguin, 1994

Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power.

SOLAR FUTURES:

How to Design a Post-Fossil World with the Sun

Marjan van Aubel

Prinsenbeek: Jap Sam Books, 2022

Solar energy needs a new narrative – one that says goodbye to old perspectives and only talks about efficiency and the payback time of blue solar panels. This publication illustrates what we need to know to transition from solar technology to solar design using everyday integrated aesthetic solutions.

Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

Marcia Bjornerud

Princeton University Press, 2020

Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales of our planet's long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating.  Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth's deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future. It offers a new way of thinking about our place in time, showing how our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and how our actions today will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations.

The White West: Fascism, Unreason, and the Paradox of Modernity

Kader Attia, Anselm Franke, Ana Teixeira Pinto (Eds.)

London: Sternberg Press, 2023

In Europe, what is called “fascism,” poet Aimé Césaire argued in his famous essay “Discourse on Colonialism,” is just colonial violence finding its way back home. In White West, contributors challenge the Eurocentrism that undergirds the current concept of fascism, tackling the under-theorized relation between settler colonialism and National Socialism via the “proto-totalitarian” scene of colonial expansion and its racialized concept of personhood, in order to counter the antipolitical nature of a concept such as the West, and the resurgence of fascist doctrines this notion engenders.

Portrait of an Eye : Three Novels

Kathy Acker

New York: Grove Press, 2020

Beginning with The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula in 1973, Kathy Acker set out on a brilliant journey toward the boundaries of modern fiction that has made her one of the most celebrated novelists of her generation.
From the start, Acker created a brash and sexy female voice as shocking as the worlds she invokes. In Childlike Life she steps into the biography of a Mississippi murderess who falls in love with a famous lawyer. In I Dreamt I Was A Nymphomaniac she takes a man capable of deceiving both sexes as her lover in a dreamy odyssey through the labyrinth of her desires. In The Adult Life Toulouse Lautrec a woman is starved for love and sex.

Burnout : The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat

Hannah Proctor

London: Verso, 2024

In the struggle for a better world, setbacks are inevitable. Defeat can feel overwhelming at times, but it has to be endured. How then do the people on the front line keep going? To answer that question and to help readers roll with the punches, Hannah Proctor draws on historical resources to find out how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope.

Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous

Mark Anthony Cayanan

Western Sidney University, 2021

Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous is a work of wild erudition and rococo elaboration, a collection of poems that loosely channels the dynamic of desire and inhibtion in Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice. The poems follow the trajectory of the ageing Aschenbach's pursuit of youth and beauty, transmuting his yearning and resistance into jittery flirtations with longing, decay and abandonment against a backdrop of political violence.

The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness

Sam Dolbear (Ed.)

London: Verso, 2023

The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin.