The Harditts In Sawna

Two married writers express their shared activism in a surprising range of styles and voices.

"Printer's ink is the greatest explosive."?Lawrence Ferlinghetti Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded the City Lights publishing house sixty years ago in 1955, launching the press with his now legendary Pocket Poets Series. First in the series was Pictures of the Gone World?the only book of his own poems that Ferlinghetti would ever publish at City Lights. Within a year, he had brought out two more volumes, translations by Kenneth Rexroth and then poems by Kenneth Patchen. But it was the success and scandal of number four, Howl & Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (1956), that put City Lights on the map, positioning the Pocket Poets Series at the forefront of the literary counterculture. A landmark sixtieth anniversary retrospective, this edition is a must-have collection, an invaluable distillation of the energetic, iconoclastic, and still fresh body of work represented in the ongoing series. Ferlinghetti has selected three poems from each of the sixty volumes, including the work of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Voznesensky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Julio Cortázar, Frank O'Hara, Marie Ponsot, Denise Levertov, Diane di Prima, Robert Duncan, Phillip Lamantia, Malcolm Lowry, and many more of the Pocket Poets Series innovative, influential, and often groundbreaking American and international poets. Ferlinghetti provides a fresh introduction that looks back at the inspiration for the series, why certain poets were included, and who were the ones that got away. His behind-the-scenes, personal anecdotes provide priceless insights that shed new light on his vision and his editorial practices at a time when the Pocket Poets Series was shaping the contours of poetry's avant-garde.

Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.

As interest in environmental issues grows, many writers of fiction have embraced themes that explore the connections between humans and the natural world. Ecologically themed fiction ranges from profound philosophical meditations to action-packed entertainments. Where the Wild Books Are offers an overview of nearly 2,000 works of nature-oriented fiction. The author includes a discussion of the precursors and history of the genre, and of its expansion since the 1970s. He also considers its forms and themes, as well as the subgenres into which it has evolved, such as speculative fiction, ecodefense, animal stories, mysteries, ecofeminist novels, cautionary tales, and others. A brief summary and critical commentary of each title is included. Dwyer’s scope is broad and covers fiction by Native American writers as well as ecofiction from writers around the world. Far more than a mere listing of books, Where the Wild Books Are is a lively introduction to a vast universe of engaging, provocative writing. It can be used to develop book collections or curricula. It also serves as an introduction to one of the most fertile areas of contemporary fiction, presenting books that will offer enjoyable reading and new insights into the vexing environmental questions of our time.

Someone has vandalized the Total Planet Food Co-op. The floor is littered with chick peas and black turtle beans, homegrown potatoes and Brown Cow yoghurt, knobbly carrots, trail mix, and boxes upon boxes of Celestial Seasonings herbal tea. Surely this is the work of the Beast, a half-bear, half-ram capable (some say) of taking on human form. But is the Beast secretly Chuck, a disgruntled co-op member? Or Mr. Belfast, the churchgoing manager of the competing A& P? Or is it, as one character theorizes, simply a "metaphor for Capitalism"? Readers of Robert Nichols' short stories will find his United States of America to be a place that is at once familiar and yet strangely different. In rural Vermont, Mr. Goss discovers his monthly utility bill includes a $31 surcharge to pay for the murder of four Nicaraguan villagers ("That seemed low," he muses). A Midwest bus station becomes home to countless Indians and Haitians, brought by buses that arrive but never depart. And a remote stretch of Maine seacoast known for its "extraordinary tides" is suddenly littered with corpses--from the Bhopal chemical disaster. Throughout these stories, Robert Nichols' moral outrage is the more eloquent for being muted. His characters continually confront the intrusion of the grotesque and absurd into everyday life with an understated puzzlement reminiscent of Kafka's Joseph K. Depicting a world in which the comfortable and well-off are denied the luxury of isolation from those who suffer, these stories are--like Mr. Goss's unusually sensitve electric meter--a place "where the invisible and hidden is measured."

Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context: Dialogues with James Tully gathers leading thinkers from across the humanities and social sciences in a celebration of, and critical engagement with, the recent work of Canadian political philosopher James Tully. Over the past thirty years, James Tully has made key contributions to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including: interventions in the history of moral and political thought, contemporary political philosophy, democracy, citizenship, imperialism, recognition and cultural diversity. In 2008, he published Public Philosophy in a New Key, a two-volume work that promises to be one of the most influential and important statements of legal and political thought in recent history. This work, along with numerous other books and articles, is foundational to a distinctive school of political thought, influencing thinkers in fields as diverse as Anthropology, History, Indigenous Studies, Law, Philosophy and Political Science. Critically engaging with James Tully’s thought, the essays in this volume take up what is his central, and ever more pressing, question: how to enact democratic practices of freedom within and against historically sedimented and actually existing relationships of imperialism?

In this remarkable tetralogy of short novels, Nichols envisions the nature of our communal, yet highly individualized society in which decentralized democracy, ecological sensibility, bioregional principles, and liberatory technologies are integrated into a traditional culture. It is a vision of utopia emerging out of the rich particularity of history and lived experience. First published in five separate volumes in the late 1970s, Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai has never gained the recognition it deserves. It is an extraordinary contribution to both literary and theoretical utopianism and should be recognized both for its radical ideology and for the fecundity of the imagination that informs it at all moments. It is a beguiling and inventive mixture of hallucinogenic prose and poetry that has demonstrates a fiercely independent mind and talent at its pinnacle. This reissue includes the full series, Red Shift (with illustrations from Peter Schumann), Arrival, Gahr City, The Harditts in Sawna, and Exile. "As those lucky enough to have read Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai know, Robert Nichols is one of our most profoundly original writers, his political passion, and acuteness transfigured by a visionary gleam." --Ursula K. Le Guin

This book tells, with the heartfelt power of a father's poetic prose, the story of the first sixteen years of the life of his daughter Kristin, an amazing human being who at birth was described as being a vegetable. It took Robert Nichols over ten years to write this little book telling the distress and delight of his years as the father of a child with Down syndrome. But, this is not a book about a chromosomal abnormality, or even about disability. It is the story, wrenched from the very souls of Robert, his wife Carol, and their daughter Kristin, of a family confronting difficulty with love, humor, and compassion.This book tells a difficult, sometimes sad story of the unfairness, the danger, and the cruelty of the world Kristin has known and her parents have battled. But, mainly, it is the story of a beautiful human being who, throughout her life, has been a source of joy, inspiration, and a lot of good laughs to any who have been fortunate enough to know her. The Kristin Book: Update 2013, with unflinching honesty and passionate truth, will give the reader artful cause to weep, to laugh, and to celebrate the wonderful potential that is implicit to the human spirit. In this update of The Kristin Book, the original 1987 text is included along with an update of the ensuing twenty-five years since publication with sections written by Robert, Carol, and Kristin Nichols.Thank you for caring.