Tropical Truth: A Story Of Music And Revolution In Brazil

Title: Tropical Truth: A Story Of Music And Revolution In Brazil
Author: Caetano Veloso
ISBN: 9780747568018
Binding: paper
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Number of Pages: 354
Price: £7.75

From Publishers Weekly

The Brazilian singer/songwriter most highly regarded by the First World intelligentsia, Veloso makes his U.S. publishing debut with a rambling, extremely erudite memoir focusing on his role in the late-1960s musical happening known as Tropic lia. While on the surface, Tropic lia and Veloso (often compared to Bob Dylan) paralleled the U.S. counterculture of the 1960s, the author explains the multilayered context of Brazilian politics and art that made the movement unique. From the innocence of his middle-class youth in the northern state of Bahia, to his stays in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Veloso vividly re-creates his formative years, which were immersed in French new wave cinema, progressive English rock and Brazilian letters, particularly concrete poetry. "What we wanted to do would be... closer to Godard's films," he muses. "Masculin-feminin [sic], with... its adolescent sexuality-I saw it as one more moment in our daily lives in Sao Paulo." That Veloso is well-read is not in question-he cites everyone from Wittgenstein and Proust to Deleuze and Andrew Sullivan, while at the same time introducing non-Brazilian readers to an unknown canon of authors such as poet Augusto de Campos and essayist Oswald de Andrade. If there is any complaint with the book, it is that Veloso can get caught up in a maze of sometimes unconnected ideas that obscure his lucid descriptions of the intricacies of Brazilian music and its often equally literate stars. However, this is a must for Brazilian music fans, as well as anyone interested in how the modernist age played out in South America.

Envy

Title: Envy
Author: Yury Olesha
ISBN: 0-88233-091-8
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Ardis
Number of Pages: 315
Price: $12.95

Translated with an introduction by T.S. Berczynski

First published in 1927, Yury Olesha's Envy is, both stylistically and thematically one of the most provocative novels from the soviet era. Andrei Babichev is a paragon of Soviet values, an innovative and practical man, Director of the Food Industry Trust, a man whose vision encompasses such future advances for mankind as the 35-kopeck sausage and the self-peeling potao. Out of kindness, he rescues from the gutter Nikolai Karalerov, violently tossed from a bar after a drunken and self-destructive tirade. But instead of gratitude, Babichev finds himslf the subject of an endlessly malignant jealousy, as Kavaelrov sees in him a representative of the new bredd of man who has prevented him from realizing his true greatness. A scathing social satire, Envy is a concise and incisive exploration of the paradigmatic conflicts of the early Soviet age: old versus new, imagination versus pragmatism, and the alienation of the romantic artist in the age of technology.

Critics as far apart as Gleb Struve ("One of the most interesting and original works in the whole of Soviet literature") and Pravda ("Olesha's style is masterful, his psychological analysis infinitely subtle, his portrayal of negative characters truly striking") have praised the novel, and one of the signs of its universality is the fact that it has been claimed by nearly every school of critics and interpreted as everything from a submerged homosexual story to a 10th century Noes from the Underground.

A CAPTIVE SPIRIT :Collected Prose by Marina Tsvetaeva

Title:A CAPTIVE SPIRIT : Collected Prose
Author: Marina Tsvetaeva
Introduction by Susan Sontag
Translated and edited by J. Marin King
ISBN: 0-88233-353-4
Binding: Paper
Publisher:Ardis
Number of Pages: 491
Price:$ 16.95

Captive Spirit shows Marina Tsvetaeva's genius at the peak of its power. The selections are from her mature period, the 1930s, and include almost all of her autobiographical writings, her major literary portraits, and her literary criticism.

Exiled in Paris and isolated in the emigre community during this period, Tsvetaeva became increasingly aware of the importance of biography, history, and myth. Her famous portraits of Maximilian Voloshin and Andrei Bely reveal her remarkable capacities as an eyewitness, while her moving accounts of her father and mother, sisters and brother, seen through a child's eyes, comprise the most lyrical of family chronicles. The final section of the book, juxtaposing two works of literary criticism, demostrates her formidable critical and analytical intelligence.

Tsvetaeva composed her prose to be read aloud, and these essays, full of extraordinary vitality, reflect the urgency of one who writes to discover the essential truths hidden in the past. A Captive Spirit is a remarkable collection of work from, as Vladimir Nabokov described her, "a writer of genius."

"The Russianness of Tsvetaeva's poetry and prose-singularly direct and forceful are they are—consists in an obvious authenticity of the emotions. Everything is felt instantly and strongly; everything is strashny and vesely—terrible and joyful—and yet about this directness there is nothing histrionic, sloppy, or self-indulgent." —JOHN BAYLEY, The New York Review of Books

Singing from the Well - Reinaldo Arenas

Title: Singing from the Well
Author: Reinaldo Arenas
ISBN: 978-0140094442
Binding: paper
Publisher: Penguin USA
Number of Pages: 206
Price: $ 10.00


His mother talks piously of the heaven that awaits the good, and disciplines him with an ox prod. His grandmother burns his precious crosses for kindling. His cousins meet to plot their grandfather's death. Yet in the hills surrounding his home, another reality exists, a place where his mother wears flowers in her hair, and his cousin Celestino, a poet who inscribes verse on the trunks of trees, understands his visions.

The first novel in Reinaldo Arenas's "secret history of Cuba," a quintet he called the Pentagonia, Singing from the Well is by turns explosively crude and breathtakingly lyrical. In the end, it is a stunning depiction of a childhood besieged by horror--and a moving defense of liberty and the imagination in a world of barbarity, persecution, and ignorance.

Imperium

Title: Imperium
Author: Ryszard kapuscinski
ISBN: 9781862079601
Binding: paper
Publisher: Granta
Number of Pages: 331
Price: Rs 399.00

From the Publisher
"A compelling and convincing narrative that examines the extensive damage done to entire nations, the human psyche and the physical environment....This is a devastating picture of Russia [that] penetrates deeply into the depressing truths of 70 years of Soviet rule, the borders, the fear, the inhumanity.... His portrait of the 'Imperium' is tragic, but ever so true."--Professor Thomas R. Beyer, Jr., Middlebury College, The Boston Globe

From the Inside Flap
By "the conjuror extraordinary of modern portage" (John le Carre)--a personal, brilliantly detailed exploration of the almost unfathomably complex Soviet empire. "When a writer of Mr. Kapuscinski's genius writes of the snows and the steppes of Siberia, of the doomed Aral Sea and Kiev . . . no pictures are necessary."--The Wall Street Journal. First time in paperback.

Imagining a Place for Buddhism

Title: Imagining a Place for Buddhism : Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India
Author: Anne E. Monius
ISBN: 9788189059194
Binding: paperback
Date: 2009
Publisher: Navayana
Number of Pages:
Price: Rs 350/-

Non-Hindu communities such as Buddhists, Jains and Ājiīvakas played such an important role in South Indian literary and religious culture, and in the administration of the state between the fourth and seventh centuries that the later Śaiva traditions labeled this period the Kalabhra interregnum—the interruption of the wicked ones. Despite their presence in Tamil inscriptional, archaeological and literary record, their significance has been undermined in historical narratives that have valorised the triumph of Tamil Śaivism, casting Buddhists and Jains as ‘foreigners’ to be spurned, ridiculed and dismissed as anti-Tamil. In this pioneering study, focusing on two extant Buddhist Tamil texts – Maṇimēkalai (a sixth-century poetic narrative) and Vīracōliyam (an eleventh-century treatise on grammar and poetics) – Anne Monius, Professor of South Asian Religions at Harvard Divinity School, sheds light on the role of literature and literary culture in the formation, articulation and evolution of Tamil Buddhist religious identity and community.

The cover features S. Anvar’s photograph of a 12th century statue of the Buddha at the Paravai bus stop, Perambalur, Tamilnadu.

Othappu : The Scent of the Other Side

Title: Othappu : The Scent of the Other Side
Author: Sarah Joseph , Valson Thampu (Translator)
ISBN: 9780198062165
Binding: Hardback
Date: June 2009
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Number of Pages: 330

Price: Rs. 395

This transfiguring work opens with Sister Margalitha leaving the Convent in search of God. When she decides to live with Karikkan, a priest who has abandoned his vocation, she offends her family, society, the Church, and the law. The scandal rocks Thrissur, and the couple become social outcasts.

Othappu, the first Malayalam novel of its kind, is about a woman’s yearning for a true understanding of spirituality and her own sexuality. The novel is a powerful indictment of the hypocrisy that plagues Christianity in many parts of the Subcontinent. Othappu unfolds at many levels to critique notions of class, caste, antiquity, and prestige that have, over time, eroded the power of the first Church.

The detailed Introduction by Jancy James provides rare insights into the work and skillfully sketches the social history of Kerala, the location of the novel. Two special inclusions— Paul Zacharia on the different meanings of ‘othappu’ and a dialogue between the author and Githa Hiranyan—lend fresh perspectives to the work.

Philosophy and Social by Rorty

Title: Philosophy and Social Hope
Author: Richard Rorty
ISBN: 9780140262889
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin
Number of Pages: 320
Price: £6.99

Since Plato most philosophy has aimed at true knowledge, penetrating beneath appearances to an underlying reality. Against this tradition, Richard Rorty convincingly argues, pragmatism offers a new philosophy of hope. One of the most controversial figures in recent philosophical and wider literary and cultural debate, Rorty brings together an original collection of his most recent philosophical and cultural writings. He explains in a fascinating memoir how he began to move away from Plato towards William James and Dewey, culminating in his own version of pragmatism. What ultimately matters, Rorty suggests, is not whether our ideas correspond to some fundamental reality but whether they help us carry out practical tasks and create a fairer and more democratic society.

Aimed at a general audience, this volume offers a stimulating summary of Rorty's central philosophical beliefs, as well as some challenging insights into contemporary culture, justice, education, and love.

Dog Heart by Breyten Breytenbach

Title: Dog Heart
Author: Breyten Breytenbach
ISBN: 9780571200665
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Number of Pages: 208
Original Price: £9.99
Our Price: £ 6.99

'What I want to write is the penetration, expansion, skirmishing, coupling, mixing, separation, regrouping of peoples and cultures - the glorious bastardization of men and women mutually shaped by sky and rain and wind and soil.'

The leading Afrikaaner poet and anti-apartheid campaigner, Breyten Breytenbach returns to South Africa from Parisian exile and finds himself excavating both his family's history and that of his nation, through a series of contemporary sketches and haunting reminiscences which are highly coloured, strongly poetic, and often unsettling. We encounter the 'New South Africa', where efforts at a formal process of Truth and Reconciliation teeter uneasily atop a legacy of terrible and enduring violence.

The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist

Title:The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist
Author: Breyten Breytenbach
ISBN: 9780571136162
Binding:Paperback
Publisher:Faber and faber
Number of Pages:416
Original price: £9.99
Our Price:£ 6.99

A memoir of Breytenbach’s seven years in South Africa’s prisons - two of them in solitary confinement - this book captures the full horror of life in one of the worst penal systems in the world.

About The Author

Breyten Breytenbach was born in South Africa in 1939. He left South Africa in 1959 to travel throughout Europe, settling in Paris in 1961. He rapidly established himself as a leading Afrikaner poet of his generation, as well as a painter of distinction. Whilst in Europe he became active in the anti-apartheid movement, and it was during a return visit to South Africa in 1975 that he was arrested. He was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to nine years imprisonment. He was eventually found not guilty of the charges, but remained a political prisoner until 1982. Following his release, he returned to Paris, where he still lives with his wife, and obtained French citizenship.

In 1992 he co-founded the Goree Institute in Senegal, and in 1995 he co-founded the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of Natal. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Natal, Princeton University, the University of Cape Town, and New York University.

Breyten Breytenbach has won numerous awards for his writing and his painting, and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Illustrated)

Title: The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology
Author: Ed by Donald Preziosi
ISBN 10: 0192842420
ISBN-13: 978-0192842428
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Number of Pages: 608
Price: £16.99

The history of art has been written and rewritten since classical antiquity. Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century, debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be.

The Art of Art History is a unique guide to understanding art history through a critical reading of the field's most innovative and influential texts over the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: aesthetics, style, history as an art, iconography and semiology, gender, modernity and postmodernity, deconstruction and museology. More than thirty readings from writers as diverse as Winckelmann, Kant, Gombrich, Warburg, Panofsky, Heidegger, Lisa Tickner, Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Derrida, Mary Kelly, Michel Foucault, Rosalind Krauss, Louis Marin, Margaret Iversen, and Nestor Canclini are brought together, and Donald Preziosi's introductions to each topic provide background information, bibliographies, and critical elucidations of the issues at stake. His own concluding essay is an important and original contribution to scholarship in the field.

My teaching by Jacques Lacan

Title: My teaching
Author: Jacques Lacan
ISBN: 978 1 84467 271 4
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 128
Price: £8.99

Bringing together three previously unpublished lectures presented to the public by Lacan at the height of his career, My Teaching is a clear, concise introduction to the thought of the influential psychoanalyst. Drawing on examples from popular culture and common sense, this lively book explores a range of Lacan’s most important ideas, including his debt to Freud, linguistic unconsciousness and sexuality in its relation to psychoanalytic truth. Engaging, witty and personal, My Teaching offers a rare opportunity to engage directly with Lacan's own general explanation of his teaching to a non-psychoanalytic audience.

The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry

Title: The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry
Author: Ed By Lakshmi Holmstrom Edited By Subashree Krishnaswamy
ISBN: 9780670082810
Binding: Hard back
Publisher: Penguin/Wiking
Number of Pages: 260
Price: INR 499/-

The Rapids of a Great River begins with selections from the earliest known Tamil poetry dating from the second century CE. The writings of the Sangam period laid the foundation for the Tamil poetic tradition, and they continue to underlie and inform the works of Tamil poets even today. The first part of this anthology traverses the Sangam and bhakti periods and closes with pre-modern poems from the nineteenth century. The second part, a compilation of modern and contemporary poetry, opens with the work of the revolutionary poet Subramania Bharati. Breaking free from prescriptions, the new voices—which include Sri Lankan Tamils, women and dalits, among others—address the contemporary reader; the poems, underscored by a sharp rhetorical edge, grapple with the complexities of the modern political and social world.

The selection is wide-ranging and the translations admirably echo the music, pace and resonance of the poems. This anthology links the old with the new, cementing the continuity of a richly textured tradition. There is something in the collection for every reader and each will make his or her own connections—at times startling, at other times familiar.

Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory

Title: Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory
Author: Ed by Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, Sarah Stanbury
ISBN-10: 0231105452
ISBN-13: 978-0231105453
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Number of Pages: 384

Price: $29.00

In many fields, the body is the topic generating exciting new research and interdisciplinary inquiry. Feminist theorists, in particular, have focused on the female body as the site where representations of difference and identity are inscribed. Drawn from a broad range of disciplines, explores the tensions between women's lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body. The volume includes classic and contemporary essays on rape, pornography, eroticism, anorexia, body building, menstruation, and maternity, and challenges racial, class, and sexual categories. Complemented by the editor's introduction, is a comprehensive sourcebook on the major theoretical positions and critical trends surrounding the female body.

The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century

Title: The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century
Author: Marsha Meskimmon
ISBN10: 0231106874
ISBN-13: 978-0231106870
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Number of Pages: 224
Price: $30.50

Self-portraiture has long been a means for the male artist to assert an identity as masterful creator or tortured soul; women have overwhelmingly been presented as objects, and rarely as subjects of self-portraiture. In recent years, however, women artists have used their work to disrupt this tradition. With 43 illustrations of works by Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Cindy Sherman, and Jo Spence, among others, is the first sustained inquiry into the appropriation of self-portraiture by women. In suggestive critical meditations on paintings, photographic work, sculpture, performance art, and body art, Marsha Meskimmon shows how twentieth-century women artists have undermined male-centered definitions of how "the artist" depicts the self. Drawing upon feminist theory and philosophy from Simone de Beauvoir to Luce Irigaray, casts doubt on the idea of self-portrait as a mirror, in which the static self is rendered accurately and naturalistically. Meskimmon evokes a series of myths about what an artist is, how "he" should be represented, and how "his" work is to be read as autobiography. Through close readings of the imaginative self-representations of women artists -as male artist and god, as central player in the studio and in the Christian passion- she shatters these myths. In an absorbing assessment of the ways women artists have negotiated the complex group of roles ascribed to "woman," Meskimmon considers the partially nude painting by pregnant artist Paula Modersohn-Becker and performance artist Annie Sprinkle's confrontation of the thin line between celebration of female sexuality and objectification of the female body. As a nuanced appreciation of the interpretations of self-portraiture among women artists, will prove an invaluable resource on a subject that has received little attention from art criticism. Meskimmon's work also presents a bold challenge to critical tradition, compelling readers to rethink the meaning of the genre as a whole.

Adding insult to injury

Title: Adding insult to injury

Author: Nancy Fraser

ISBN: 9781859842232

Binding: Paper

Date: 2008

Publisher: Verso

Number of Pages: 360

Price: £16.99

Historically, leftwing accounts of injustice focussed primarily on economic harms, such as poverty, exploitation, and inequality. Recently, however, with the collapse of Communism and the rise of identity politics, attention has turned toward cultural harms, such as cultural imperialism, 'misrecognition,' and disrespect. New challenges for the left are raised: How to do justice to the legitimate claims of multiculturalism without abandoning the left's historic-and still indispensable-commitment to economic equality? How to broaden the understanding of injustice by adding (cultural) insult to (economic) injury? Adding Insult to Injury traces the debate sparked by Nancy Fraser's controversial effort to combine the social politics of equality and the cultural politics of difference, while probing the tensions between them. Introduced by Richard Rorty, the volume contains Fraser's influential essay 'From Redistribution to Recognition?'; critical responses by Judith Butler, Joseph Heath, Kevin Olson, Anne Phillips, and Iris Marion Young; and Fraser's rejoinders to them. The result is a wide-ranging and at times contentious exploration of alternative approaches to rebuilding the left.

Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market

Title: Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market
Author: Pierre Bourdieu
ISBN: 9781859846582
Binding: Paper
Date: 2003
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 96
Price: £9.00

Globalization's threat to artists and intellectuals, and how they can rebut it. Pierre Bourdieu, described by The Nation as "worthy of the militant mantle of Sartre and Foucault," here continues the themes advanced so successfully in his previous book Acts of Resistance. Firing Back is an eloquent dissection of globalization's intellectual and cultural role throughout the world, and a discussion of the ways in which effective opposition to it can be mounted. Bourdieu examines Europe's potential as a counterweight to America's globalizing policy and discusses how intellectuals and those working in the cultural sphere can create meaningful alternatives. He also raises challenging questions about the depoliticization of the academic world, arguing that scholars can no longer maintain that their research is objective or value-free. In a preface written for this edition, Bourdieu directly addresses American readers about the role they can play in the burgeoning anti-globalization movement.

Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange

Title: Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange

Author: Nancy Fraser , Axel Honneth

ISBN: 978-1859844922

Binding: Paper

Date: 2003

Publisher: Verso

Number of Pages: 273

Price: £16.00

"Recognition" has become a keyword of our time, but its relation to economic "redistribution" remains unclear. This volume stages a debate between two philosophers, one North American, the other German, who hold different views of the relation of redistribution to recognition. Axel Honneth conceives recognition as the fundamental, over-arching moral category, potentially encompassing redistribution, while Nancy Fraser argues that the two categories are both fundamental and mutually irreducible. In alternating chapters the authors respond to each other's criticisms, and offer a lively dialogue on identity politics, capitalism and social justice. The volume is a dramatic riposte to those who proclaim the death of "grand theory".

Metapolitics- Alain Badiou

Title: Metapolitics

Author: Alain Badiou

ISBN: 978-1844675678

Binding: Paper

Date: 2006

Publisher: Verso

Number of Pages: 159

Price: £11.99

Metapolitics argues that one of the main tasks of contemporary thought is to abolish the idea that politics is merely an object for philosophical reflection. Badiou indicts this approach, which reduces politics to a matter of opinion, thus eliminating any of its truly radical and emancipatory possibilities.

Against this intellectual tradition, Badiou proposes instead the consideration of politics in terms of the production of truth and the affirmation of equality. He demands that the question of a possible "political truth" be separated from any notion of consensus or public opinion, and that political action be rethought in terms of the complex process that binds discussion to decision.

Starting from this analysis, Badiou critically examines the thought of anthropologist and political theorist Sylvain Lazarus, Jacques Rancière's writings on workers' history and democratic dissensus, the role of the subject in Althusser, as well as the concept of democracy and the link between truth and justice.

The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism

Title: The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism
Author: Georges Bataille
ISBN: 9781844675609
Binding: Paper
Date: 2006
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 211
Price: £12.99

A veritable cult figure for postmodernism, Bataille (1897-1962) formulated what is now vanguard received wisdom, and he did so long before Derrida proposed differance in 1967, giving Bataille's pronouncements the additional authority of duration. Furthermore, while eschewing the Orphic, he typically encapsulates his ideas with a near-eminently quotable-paradox (e.g., "The sacred demands the violation of what is normally the object of terrified respect"). These pieces, dating mostly from 1945 to 1951, when surrealism was attempting a second wave, are documents of Parisian intellectual life, discussing such issues as the distinctions between existentialism and surrealism and the Camus/Sartre quarrel following The Rebel (1951). Bataille sees successful surrealism as the destruction of self, the individualism that must be sacrificed before liberty can be achieved for the community. Richardson's accurate and readable translations are carefully annotated, making this a useful collection for English readers.
Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY-Binghamton
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In Defense of Anarchism

Title: In Defense of Anarchism
Author: Robert Paul Wolff
ISBN: 978-0-520-21573-3
Binding: Paper
Publisher: University of California Press
Number of Pages: 86
Price: $8.95

"To entitle a book In Defense of Anarchism simply requires chutzpah. To do it well requires some intelligence. Professor Wolff has both. Anarchy, being generally relegated to the ideological dust-bin or drafted as fodder for editorializing blasts, has long been in need of an intelligent reassessment. Wolff's brief book attempts this by taking the reader along a political via dolorosa which begins with his own innocent belief in 'traditional democratic doctrines.'"—Lawrence S. Stepelevich, The New Scholasticism

"A deep and provocative discussion of some of the most fundamental issues in political philosophy, written crisply, with candor, in a style that I find very winning. It is a most useful book, and a very good one."—Carl Cohen, author of Communism, Fascism, and Democracy"

A provocative and engrossing introduction to current questions of political legitimacy, consent, deliberative democracy, the basis of majority rule, workers collectives, etc., that have been taken up by contemporary political theorists."—Georgia Warnke, author of Justice and Interpretation

Conversations with Cézanne

Title: Conversations with Cézanne
Edited by Michael Doran
ISBN: 978-0-520-22519-0
Binding: Paper
Publisher: University of California Press
Number of Pages: 278
Price: $19.95

Michael Doran has gathered texts by contemporaries of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)—including artists, critics, and writers—that illuminate the influential painter's philosophy of art especially in his late years. The book includes historically important essays by a dozen different authors, including Emile Bernard, Joaquim Gasquet, Maurice Denis, and Ambroise Vollard, along with selections from Cézanne's own letters.

In addition to the material included in the original French edition of the book, which has also been published in German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, this edition contains an introduction written especially for it by noted Cézanne scholar Richard Shiff. The book closes with Lawrence Gowing's magisterial essay, "The Logic of Organized Sensations," first published in 1977 and long out of print.

Cézanne's work, and the thinking that lay behind it, have been of inestimable importance to the artists who followed him. This gathering of writings will be of enormous interest to artists, writers, art historians—indeed to all students of modern art.

Hatred of Capitalism : A Semiotext(e) Reader

Title: Hatred of Capitalism : A Semiotext(e) Reader 

Editors: Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer 

ISBN: 978-1-58435-012-5

Binding: Paper

Publisher: SEMIOTEXT(E)

Number of Pages:  430

Price: $19.95

Compiled in 2001 to commemorate the passing of an era, Hatred of Capitalism brings together highlights of Semiotext(e)'s most beloved and prescient works. Semiotext(e)'s three-decade history mirrors the history of American thought. Founded by French theorist and critic Sylvere Lotringer as a scholarly journal in 1974, Semiotext(e) quickly took on the mission of melding French theory with the American art world and punk underground. Its Foreign Agents, Native Agents, Active Agents and Double Agents imprints have brought together thinkers and writers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Assata Shakur, Bob Flanagan, Paul Virillio, Kate Millet, Jean Baudrillard, Michelle Tea, William S. Burroughs, Eileen Myles, Ulrike Meinhof, and Fanny Howe. In Hatred of Capitalism, editors Kraus and Lotringer bring these people together in the same volume for the first time.

About the Editors

Chris Kraus is a filmmaker and the author of I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia, and coeditor of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader. Index called her "one of the most subversive voices in American fiction." Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability and dazzling speed.

Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext(e), lives in New York and Baja, California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions (Semiotext(e), 2007
 

Pornocracy

Title: Pornocracy

Author: Catherine Breillat 

ISBN: 978-1-58435-047-7

Binding: Paper 

Date: 2008

Publisher: SEMIOTEXT(E)

Number of Pages: 148

Price: $14.95

As celebrated as it is reviled, internationally acclaimed filmmaker Catherine Breillat's novel Pornocracy viscerally enacts the dramatic confluence of mystery, desire, and shame that lies at the heart of sexuality. In Pornocracy, a beautiful woman wanders through a gay disco and engages a man, confident that he will follow her. Perversely and dispassionately, she offers her body as the ground of a ritualistic game in which, over the course of three evenings, the two will explore the numbing mechanics of sexual brutality. What follows is an exchange between a man and a woman that is both frankly sexual and deeply philosophical.

Adapted and directed for film in France by Breillat as Anatomy of Hell (2004), Pornocracy leads the reader through an undulating and atmospheric exploration of the criminal and the erotic, finally climaxing in a place well beyond more familiar moral terrain. Although Breillat's films—most recently Fat Girl (2001) and Romance (1999)—are well known to international audiences, this publication marks her literary debut in America. It will demonstrate that Breillat's famous films are but one aspect of her strikingly original poetic and philosophical vision.

Includes an interview with Catherine Breillat by Dorna Khazeni.

About the Author

Catherine Breillat is a filmmaker and writer based in Paris. She is known not only for her films focusing on themes of sexuality, but also for her best-selling novels. Pornocracy is the first of her novels to be published in English.
 

Video Green : Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Chris Kraus

Title: Video Green : Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness 

Author: Chris Kraus 

ISBN: 978-1-58435-022-4

Binding: Paper  

Publisher: SEMIOTEXT(E)

Number of Pages:  220

Price: $14.95

Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.

About the Author

Chris Kraus is a filmmaker and the author of I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia, and coeditor of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader. Index called her "one of the most subversive voices in American fiction." Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability and dazzling speed

Ghalib:Epistemologies of Elegance

Title: Ghalib:Epistemologies of Elegance

Author: Sara Suleri Goodyear, Azra Raza  

ISBN:  9780670081950 

Binding: Hardback

Date: 2009 

Publisher: Viking/Penguin 

Number of Pages: 183

Price: Rs 325/-

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869) lived at a time of historic change in India—a period when the British conquest of India was in its ascendancy and the Mughal Empire was coming to an end. He was witness to the ravagement of Delhi and its courtly culture, culminating in the catastrophe of the uprising of 1857. This trauma, accompanied by his personal losses, informs his poetry, evidenced in Divan-e-Ghalib containing 235 ghazals in Urdu, ghazals redolent with a sense of loss, grief and a plangent longing for a vanished way of life. Yet, what sets his poetry apart is an irrepressible sense of humour, energy and linguistic delight that drive his darkest lamentations.

In Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance, Sara Suleri Goodyear and Azra Raza select twenty-one ghazals that illustrate the astonishing range of Ghalib’s many voices and the ideas that populate his poetry. Every ghazal is accompanied by an introduction, a literal translation and a detailed commentary that elucidate the complexities of the individual sher and the ghazal as a whole. The result is an erudite introduction to the work of the greatest Urdu poet of all time, which will be invaluable not only to the Ghalib aficionado but also the lay reader spellbound by the intricate imagery and the dazzling scope of this extraordinary poet.

 

The Present as History : Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Global Power

Title: The Present as History : Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Global Power
Author: Nermeen Shaikh
ISBN: 978-81-89632-17-5
Binding: Hardback
Date: 2008 
Publisher: Stanza 
Number of Pages: 276  
Price:  RS 495/-

Contents:

Acknowledgements.

Introduction.

I. The global economy: 1. Amartya Sen. 2. Helena Norberg-Hodge. 3. Sanjay Reddy. 4. Joseph Stiglitz.

II. Post colonialism and the new imperialism: 5. Partha Chatterjee. 6. Mahmood Mamdani. 7. Anatol Lieven.

III. Feminism and human rights: 8. Shirin Ebadi. 9. Lila Abu-Lughod. 10. Saba Mahmood. 11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

IV. Secularism and Islam: 12. Talal Asad. 13. Gil Anidjar.

Notes.

Index.

The Present as History is a rare opportunity to hear world-renowned scholars speak on the new imperialism, feminism and human rights, secularism and Islam, post-colonialism, and the global economy. They treat the United States as an object to be historically and politically interrogated rather than as the norm from which all else is to be evaluated and assess the Third World through its history of colonialism and neocolonialism rather than focusing on issues of culture and morality. Amartya Sen discusses the shortcomings of the development agenda as it was conceived at the close of the Second World War, while Joseph Stiglitz explains economic globalization and the power of the International Monetary Fund in guiding its trajectory. Sanjay Reddy argues that global poverty estimates are flawed, and Helena Norberg-Hodge uses her experience in Tibet to lay bare the problems with development practice. Political scientists Partha Chatterjee, Mahmood Mamdani, and Anatol Lieven chart the growth of hegemonic power from the colonial to the postcolonial period.Chatterjee examines the enduring effects of colonial administrative and governing practices, while Mamdani, focusing on the present global dispensation, explains the growth of terrorist movements around the world in the context of the Cold War. Lieven looks at the different strains of American nationalism and the continuities and ruptures between nineteenth-century empires and the present one. Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi elaborates the relationship between Islam, democracy, and human rights while anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood respectively trace the historical use of women as an excuse for imperial intervention and discuss the relationship between liberalism, Islam, and secularism. Literary theorist and cultural critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak looks at the legacy of colonialism in the domain of language and education, and isolates the problems associated with human rights discourse and practice.In conclusion, Talal Asad traces the genealogy of the term secularism, the special place of Islam within it, and its relationship to modernity.Gil Anidjar considers the distinction between religion and politics and elaborates the historical links between secularism and Christianity. Taken together, these interviews offer a valuable understanding of world history and a corrective to predominant conventional discourses on global power and justice.

Empire

Title: Empire
Author: Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri
ISBN: 9780674006713
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Number of Pages:478
Price: $22.50

Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today's Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers.

Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society--to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order.

More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today's world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm--the basis for a truly democratic global society.

Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977

Title: Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977
Author: Félix Guattari

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer

Introduction by François Dosse
ISBN: 9781584350606
Binding: Paper
Date: 2008
Publisher: MIT press
Number of Pages: 335
Price: $17.95

Chaosophy is an introduction to Félix Guattari's groundbreaking theories of "schizo-analysis": a process meant to replace Freudian interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, who utilized neuroses as his working model, Guattari adopted the model of schizophrenia—which he believed to be an extreme mental state induced by the capitalist system itself, and one that enforces neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. Guattari's post-Marxist vision of capitalism provides a new definition not only of mental illness, but also of the micropolitical means for its subversion.

Chaosophy includes Guattari's writings and interviews on the cinema (such as "Cinema Fou" and "The Poor Man's Couch"), a group of texts on his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze (including the appendix to the second edition of Anti-Oedipus, not available in the English edition), and his texts on homosexuality (including his "Letter to the Tribunal" addressing the French government's censorship of the special gay issue of Recherches he edited, which earned him a fine for publishing "a detailed exposition of depravity and sexual deviations… the libidinous exhibition of a minority of perverts"). This expanded edition features a new introduction by François Dosse (author of a new biography of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), along with a range of added essays—including "The Plane of Consistency," "Machinic Propositions," "Gangs in New York," and "Three Billion Perverts on the Stand"—nearly doubling the contents of the original edition.

Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France

Title: Subjects of Desire : Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France
Author: Judith Butler
ISBN: 978-0231064514
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Number of Pages: 268
Price: $27.00

This now classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the trajectory of desire and its genesis from Hegel's formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit through its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault, presenting how French reception of Hegel posed successive challenges to his metaphysics and view of the subject and revealed ambiguities within his position. Subjects of Desire provides a sophisticated account of the post-Hegelian tradition that has predominated in modern France and remains timely in thinking about contemporary debates concerning desire, the unconscious, subjection, and the subject.

Review

Robert B. Pippin, The Philosophical Review - "What her account suggests is that the most damaging aspect of contemporary French Hegel reception is that its highly critical emphasis on the metaphysical issues of identity, rationality, and historical closure have so obscured Hegel's original idealism, especially his theory of reflection, that the rejection of Hegel brings with it, with a kind of dialectical necessity, the return of the pre-Hegelian, even the pre-Kantian, a kind of naive hope for 'immediacy' and, paradoxically, a commitment to a realism that the idealist tradition was to have finished off." —

The Politics of Truth by Michel Foucault

Title: The Politics of Truth
Author: Michel Foucault
ISBN: 978-1-58435-039-2
Binding: Paper
Date: 2007
Publisher: MIT Press
Number of Pages: 195
Price: $14.95

In 1784, the German newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift asked its audience to reply to the question "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant took the opportunity to investigate the purported truths and assumptions of his age. Two hundred years later, Michel Foucault wrote a response to Kant's initial essay, positioning Kant as the initiator of the discourse and critique of modernity. The Politics of Truth takes this initial encounter between Foucault and Kant, as a framework for its selection of unpublished essays and transcripts of lectures Foucault gave in America and France between 1978 and 1984, the year of his death. Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three-volume History of Sexuality. It also offers what is in a sense the most "American" moment of Foucault's thinking, for it was in America that he realized the necessity of tying his own thought to that of the Frankfurt School.

Michel Foucault (1926–84) is widely considered to be one of the most influential academic voices of the twentieth century and has proven influential across disciplines.

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left

Title: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
Author: Judith Butler , Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek
ISBN: 978-1859842782
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 329
Price: £15.99

What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci's notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking project, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics. Their essays, organized as separate contributions that respond to one another, range over the Hegelian legacy in contemporary critical theory, the theoretical dilemmas of multiculturalism, the universalism- versus-particularism debate, the strategies of the Left in a globalized economy, and the relative merits of post-structumalism and Lacanian psychoanalysis for a critical social theory. While the rigour and intelligence with which these writers approach their work is formidable, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality benefits additionally from their clear sense of energy and enjoyment in a revealing and often unpredictable exchange.

The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 18801940

Title: The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 18801940 Author: Julian Carter
ISBN: 978-0822339489
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: Duke University Press
Price: £17.95

Whiteness still carries enormous weight, yet many whites express bafflement when accused of exercising racial power. For them, exercising public power is not racist, but natural. Unfortunately, its racial dimensions remain largely invisible to the people who wield it. In this slim but complex volume, Julian B. Carter explores how the power of whiteness was rendered invisible in the early twentieth century. White Americans shifted their rhetoric from talking about the superiority of white civilization to focusing on normality. "Normal" was, in essence, a distillation of white values, and the white origins of normality could go without saying. Making racial signifiers redundant and thus unnecessary made it possible for whites to forget the role of whiteness and white power in determining what "good Americans" accepted and advocated in social behavior. In the process, American culture linked appropriate (meaning white) private behavior with the good of the nation, thus perpetuating "white" civilization.

Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940

Title: Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940
Author: Dipesh Chakrabarty
ISBN: 978-0-691-07030-8
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Number of Pages: 272
Price: $ 28.95

Dipesh Chakrabarty combines a history of the jute-mill workers of Calcutta with a fresh look at labor history in Marxist scholarship. Opposing a reductionist view of culture and consciousness, he examines the milieu of the jute-mill workers and the way it influenced their capacity for class solidarity and "revolutionary" action from 1890 to 1940. Around and within this empirical core is built his critique of emancipatory narratives and their relationship to such Marxian categories as "capital," "proletariat," or "class consciousness."

The book contributes to currently developing theories that connect Marxist historiography, post-structuralist thinking, and the traditions of hermeneutic analysis. Although Chakrabarty deploys Marxian arguments to explain the political practices of the workers he describes, he replaces universalizing Marxist explanations with a sensitive documentary method that stays close to the experience of workers and their European bosses. He finds in their relationship many elements of the landlord/tenant relationship from the rural past: the jute-mill workers of the period were preindividualist in consciousness and thus incapable of participating consistently in modern forms of politics and political organization.

Reena Spaulings by Bernadette Corporation

Title: Reena Spaulings
Author: Bernadette Corporation
ISBN: 978-1-58435-030-9
Binding: Paper
Publisher: SEMIOTEXT(E)
Number of Pages: 205
Price: $14.95

Set in post-9/11 New York City, Reena Spaulings was written by a large collective of writers and artists that bills itself as The Bernadette Corporation. Like most contemporary fiction, Reena Spaulings is about a female twenty-something. Reena is discovered while working as a museum guard and becomes a rich international supermodel. Meanwhile, a bout of terrible weather seizes New York, leaving in its wake a strange form of civil disobedience that stirs its citizens to mount a musical song-and-dance riot called "Battle on Broadway." Fashioned in the old Hollywood manner by a legion of professional and amateur writers striving to achieve the ultimate blockbuster, the musical ends up being about a nobody who could be anybody becoming a somebody for everybody. The result is generic and perfect—not unlike Reena Spaulings itself, whose many authors create a story in which New York itself strives to become the ultimate collective experiment in which the only thing shared is the lack of uniqueness.

About Bernadette Corporation

The artist-collective Bernadette Corporation was founded in a night club in 1994. In the beginning the group organized spontaneous, purposeless events in public space. In 1995 they morphed into a fashion label, then a self-publishing company that from 1999 to 2001 published an art magazine called Made in USA. Bernadette Corporation has also produced films, including Hell Frozen Over (2000), and Get Rid of Yourself (2003), as well as exhibits at art galleries and museums throughout the world.

Review from Frieze magazine

Postmodernism and the Other

Title: Postmodernism and the Other
Author: Ziauddin Sardar
ISBN: 978-0745307497
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Pluto
Number of Pages: 344
Price: £ 19.95

This controversial work examines postmodernism from a non-Western perspective, and exposes its claims as a sham. Sardar makes a systematic assessment of the salient spheres of postmodernism - from philosophy and architecture, to film, music and new age religions - and reveals that, contrary to commonly-held notions, postmodernism operates to further marginalise the reality of the non-West and confound its aspirations.