Against The American Grain

A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.

Against the Grain is a collection of interviews with nine small press publishers, each one characterized by strength of resolve and a dedication to good books. Each press reflects, perhaps more directly than any large trade publisher could, the character of its founder; and each has earned its own place in the select group of important small presses in America. This collection is the first of its kind to explore with the publishers themselves the historical, aesthetic, practical, and personal impulses behind literary publishing. The publishers included are Harry Duncan (the Cummington Press), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lights), David Godine (David R. Godine), Daniel Halpern (the Ecco Press), Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson (Copper Canyon Press), James Laughlin (New Directions), John Martin (Black Sparrow), and Jonathan Williams (the Jargon Society). Their passion for books, their belief in their individual visions of what publishing is or could be, their inspired mulishness crackle on the page.

William Carlos Williams's examination of American history in a series of reflective essays.

In Thinking Across the American Grain Giles Gunn makes a major contribution to the current revival of pragmatism in America by showing how it provides the most critically resilient and constructive response to the intellectual challenges of postmodernism. Gunn reclaims and refurbishes elements of the pragmatic tradition that either have been lost or have undergone important changes and shows how newer critical approaches have strong roots in the pragmatic tradition. For Gunn, pragmatism is no longer concerned solely with the nature of knowledge and the meaning of truth. Because of its insistence on critical self-awareness, its opposition to closed systems of thought, and its concern with the ethical, political, and practical contexts of ideas, pragmatism offers a blueprint for performing intellectual work in a world without absolutes. The world Gunn's pragmatism recognizes is one of multiple truths, unstable interpretations, and competing interests. After critically reexamining the nature and scope of the pragmatic legacy, Gunn explores the way pragmatism successfully responds to conceptual and methodological controversies, from the rebirth of ideology, the spread of interdisciplinarity, and the development of the new historicism, to the revolt against theory, the erosion of public discourse, and the problematics of American civil religion. Drawing throughout on the work of William James, Henry James, Sr., John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Poirier, Stanley Cavell, Clifford Geertz, Frank Lentricchia, Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, and others, Gunn shows that pragmatism, because it offers a way of thinking across the categories of modern intellectual specializations, is located at the intersection of these critical, and often competitive, discourses. The postmodern challenge for the pragmatist thinker is not only how to render these different discourses conversible with one another, but how to turn the salient insights of each into elements of a new democratic and critical public culture, one able to counter the twin threats of ideology and solipsism. Giles Gunn is one of our most acclaimed contemporary critics, and this broad and ambitious book is certain to become one of the central works in the current revival of critical pragmatism and cultural studies.

In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives and brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment. For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive, and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of our past 10,000 years. The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against both our grain and nature's. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation, erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and the planet's.