Pre Prison Writings

A wide-ranging and important 1994 collection of Gramsci's pre-prison writings.

This edition of letters by Antonio Gramsci vividly evokes the 'great and terrible world' in which he lived.

Hailed by Terry Eagleton in the Guardian as "definitive," this is the only complete and authoritative edition of Antonio Gramsci's deeply personal and vivid prison letters.

In Uncanny Rest Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation. Focusing on his personal day-to-day experiences of the “shelter-in-place” period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Moreiras engages with the limits and possibilities of critical thought in the realm of the infrapolitical—the conditions of existence that exceed average understandings of politics and philosophy. In each dated entry he works through the process of formulating a life’s worth of thought and writing while attempting to locate the nature of thought once the coordinates of everyday life have changed. Offering nothing less than a phenomenology of thinking, Moreiras shows how thought happens in and out of a life, at a certain crossroads where memories collide, where conversations with interlocutors both living and dead evolve and thinking during a suspended state becomes provisional and uncertain.

-- "Times Literary Supplement"

An inspiring memoir from a legendary activist and political prisoner that “reminds us of the sheer joy that comes from resisting civic wrongs” (Truthout). In 1968, Safiya Bukhari witnessed an NYPD officer harassing a Black Panther for selling the organization’s newspaper on a Harlem street corner. The young pre-med student felt compelled to intervene in defense of the Panther’s First Amendment right; she ended up handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police car. The War Before traces Bukhari’s lifelong commitment as an advocate for the rights of the oppressed. Following her journey from middle-class student to Black Panther to political prisoner, these writings provide an intimate view of a woman wrestling with the issues of her time—the troubled legacy of the Panthers, misogyny in the movement, her decision to convert to Islam, the incarceration of outspoken radicals, and the families left behind. Her account unfolds with immediacy and passion, showing how the struggles of social justice movements of the past have paved the way for the progress—and continued struggle—of today. With a preface by Bukhari’s daughter, Wonda Jones, a forward by Angela Y. Davis, and edited by Laura Whitehorn, The War Before is a riveting look at the making of an activist and the legacy she left behind.

'An extraordinary philosopher ... probably the most original communist thinker of twentieth-century Europe' Eric Hobsbawm'These letters are a noble and moving testament both to Mussolini's failure and to the courage and strength of will that drove Gramsci throughout his life' The Observer'Gramsci's letters ... demonstrate the originality of his brand of communist thought ... An extraordinary character, who does not deserve to be solely the property of academics and name-dropping cultural critics' The ScotsmanAntonio Gramsci is one of the great European Marxists, hailed by Eric Hobsbawm as 'an extraordinary philosopher ... probably the most original communist thinker of twentieth-century Europe'. His primary contribution has been in his insistence on an understanding of popular culture in the battle to create a revolutionary consciousness. It is this humanitarian aspect of his thinking that illuminates the vivid personal testimony of his prison letters, written between 1926 and 1937.

In September of 2022, twenty-five years after Leonard Peltier received a life sentence for the murder of two FBI agents, the DNC unanimously passed a resolution urging President Joe Biden to release him. Peltier has affirmed his innocence ever since his sentencing in 1977--his case was made fully and famously in Peter Matthiessen's bestselling In the Spirit of Crazy Horse--and many remain convinced he was wrongly convicted. Prison Writings is a wise and unsettling book, both memoir and manifesto, chronicling his life in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. Invoking the Sun Dance, in which pain leads one to a transcendent reality, Peltier explores his suffering and the insights it has borne him. He also locates his experience within the history of the American Indian peoples and their struggles to overcome the federal government's injustices. Edited by Harvey Arden, with an Introduction by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, and a Preface by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark.