Reviews

Two important new books on anarchism...

by v/a

 Just in at the store are two excellent new books from our friends at the 20-year old collectively run publisher AK Press - Cindy Milstein's Anarchism and its Aspirations and We are an image from the future: The Greek Revolts of December 2008, edited by A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris & the Void Network.  

Cindy Milstein's Anarchism and its Aspirations is exciting not just because it's an extremely readable, highly relevant, pocket-sized primer of contemporary anarchist ethics and principles of organization, but because it's the first book in the long-awaited Institute for Anarchist Studies series.  We've been looking for a book like this for a while - an introductory text on anarchism that speaks from and to our own era, and that doesn't assume any kind of subcultural identification or predilection for insurgent style, the kind of book you can give to a curious teenager or a confused relative, but will also help the experienced anarchist clarify their own positions and practice. Check out an excerpt from the book over on the AK Press blog...

We are an image from the future, on the other hand, is much more concerned with what happens when anarchism explodes onto the streets and into history -  it's (we think) the best and most comprehensive collection of documents and reflections on the Greek revolts of December 2008, which brough business as usual to a screeching, burning halt in the wake of the police murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos in Athens.  While there's of course plenty of material here about the street fights, burning barricades, torched christmas trees, and generalized rioting, the book provides a much needed glimpse into the social composition and organizing processes which have, over the long haul, made possible the Greek insurrection.  This is a very important and relevant book for people who are inspired by the amazing capacity of the Greek movements to collectively resist State and Capital by any means necessary, especially in light of the current struggles being waged on Greek streets against the wave of global austerity.

Free All Political Prisoners!

by v/a

So if you missed Laura Whitehorn's amazing talk on February 25th down at Red Emma's, you should do yourself a favor and pick up the book she was presenting, her collection of the writings of Safiya Bukhari, The War Before, just released on Feminist Press.  It's an amazing collection of writings, speeches, and other material collected from the life of a former Black Panther and political prisoner, and a tireless activist in the struggle for the freedom of political prisoners - for instance, Safiya was one of the founders of the Jericho Movement, one of the most important organizations to reopen the fight on behalf of all the victims of COINTELPRO starting in the 1990s.   You can also check out the interview City Paper did with Laura Whitehorn this week.  

And speaking of political prisoners, we're also very happy to announce that we've got copies of Marshall "Eddie" Conway 's brand new book on the legacy of COINTELPRO, The Greatest Threat, in stock at the store - we'd be even happier if Eddie wasn't still in prison, framed up and locked away by the state apparatus for the work he had been doing in Baltimore's black communities with the Black Panther Party.   All proceeds from the sales of the book are going straight to Eddie's legal defense fund - we're selling it, but not taking any sort of profit off the sales.  

New books - in pictures!

by v/a

More gift ideas....

by v/a

Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future by Matt Hern.

 Matt Hern, radical deschooling activist (whose previous book, Everywhere all the Time has been extremely popular down here at Red Emma's), returns to his roots in urban studies with this amazing new book of essays on the ecology (environmental and cultural) of cities.  Having read most of the book over the shoulder of the person laying it out, I'm really excited by this one - hoping Matt winds up being the Michael Pollan of urban studies, since the book is remarkably readable, funny and personal, while at the same time outling the radically sensible ideas we need to invent a just and sustainable urban future.  Plus - it's a great gift, because you are virtually guaranteed that the person you buy it for will not already have it - Red Emma's has copies for sale before even Amazon.

 The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee 

 Our best selling title of 2009 by a landslide, this little blue book has insprired the comically uninformed fury of Glenn Beck , been introduced as evidence in the French government's Orwellian trial against the Tarnac 9,   and been probably the most widely read radical text of the year, including at our own anarchism study group at the Baltimore Free School.  

Swift Winds by Ron Sakolsky

A pocket sized compendium of Surrealist agitation from Ron Sakolsky, radical scholar, radio pirate, and amabassador from Utopia.  Illustrated by Anais LaRue and exquisitely printed by the good folks at Eberhardt Press.

Radical Mycology by the Spore Liberation Front

 We just got in a pile of these wonderful zines dealing with everything from mushroom foraging to using fungi in bioremediation.

Gift suggestions!

by v/a

For the activist who needs to start getting things done on time:

We've still got plenty of the 2010 Slingshot organizers, in both spiral bound and pocket sized editions.  An iconic bit of appropriate print technology, hand-illustrated, and chock full of useful information.  And if Slingshot isn't quite your taste, we've got some brand new 2010 calendars on the shelves as well, with proceeds benefitting struggles from Palestine to Chiapas.

For the person curious about Baltimore history from below:

Back in stock is the amazing Baltimore Book, the classic volume of essays on Charm City's social history, covering labor struggles, desegregation, urban development, and much much more.  And also back in stock is the incredible photo essay book Middle East Baltimore Stories: Images and Words from a Displaced Community, a joint project of Art on Purpose and the recently dissolved Save Middle East Action Committee.  The book also includes two cds of interviews with neighborhood residents and community organizers, and can be yours for just $8!

For anyone who thinks the Old Testament can be a little extreme:

Sex, temptation, murder, betrayal, bizarre metamorphoses and talking snakes....in retrospect, there was absolutely no one more qualified than underground comics legend ROBERT CRUMB to illustrate the entire, uncut book of Genesis.  Get this one quick!

Read on for more...

Art Work: A National Conversation about Art, Labor, and Economics

by Temporary Services

We've always been inspired by Temporary Services and the larger largely Midwest-centric circles of what for lack of a better term we've tended to call art activism, by which we've meant not just artists working on decorating struggles for social justice, but actively engaging with them, finding ways to bring creativity, experimentation, and affective communication into contemporary activist practice.  So we were exceptionally excited to hear that they'd be putting together a free newspaper, to be distributed nationwide, examining the role of cultural work in an age of economic collapse.  With pieces by InCUBATE (the primary inspiration behind STEW) , Brian Holmes, Nato Thompson, the City From Below, 16 Beaver Group, Greg Sholette, Lize Mogel, and more (39 pieces in all!) this is some of the best use of newsprint we've seen in awhile?  And did we mention it's free?  And if we run out of it, you can always download it from http://www.artandwork.us/. more >>

The Screwball Asses

by Guy Hocquenghem

"In my entire life, I have only ever really met that which I was not trying to seduce"

This book is challenging; by this, I do not refer to its' erudite vocabulary or considered prose, but to its' clear-eyes analysis of queer culture as a necessary construct of a homophobic capitalist culture. It seems Guy Hocquenghem would have found good company at a contemporary workshop on pansexuality or polyamoury, yet penned this text in 1973; this is its' first English publication. He was post-old-left; he demands a fuller account of love and death than Freudo-Marxism can supply, yet rebels against the boxes capitalist society places us in; he is dismayed by voluntarism, yet demands to speak of desire--to have desire direct analysis.  Dig it: he considers loveless cruising a machine built by capitalism, couplehood an insane invention of the socius, orgasm a joyous risk of death, and believes that if we ever relieved ourselves of this culture of monosexuality and sublimated homosexuality there would no longer be homosexuality or heterosexuality:

"There are two sexes on earth, but is only to hide the act that there are three, four, ten, thousands, once you throw that old hag of the idea of nature overboard. There are two sexes on earth, but only one sexual desire."

This book is 87 pages, and we sell it for $13; it should be included in any meaningful review of queer theory.more >>

Some great new titles just in

by v/a

We're kind of in shock at how graphicaly wonderful our last book order turned out - with many new radical (or merely awesome) new titles on the shelves that are really some of the most visually-appealing books we've ever carried.

For instance, we've finally gotten around to picking up Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels,which reprints some amazing early-20th century work from artists like Franz Masereel and Lynd Ward, some of which is the direct inspiration for a lot of contemporary anarchist graphic art like Seth Tobocman or Eric Drooker.  Check out this image from Masereel's Passion of Man:

Of course, no collection of radical graphic art would be complete without the work of Jose Guadalupe Posada, the intensely political Mexican engraver.  While we've carried Posada books in the store before, none really compare to Posada: Mexican Engraver, a beautifully printed, oversized compendium of Posada's work.  With all the skeletons, it'd make a great Day of the Dead present:

We've also got a local Baltimore entry in this order of eye-candy: Bruce Willen's and Nolen Straals' amazing Lettering & Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces.  Bruce and Nolen, besides running Post-Typography, one of the best design studios in Baltimore, are also the core of Double Dagger, the band that brought us the anti-gentrification anthem "Luxury Condos for the Poor".  While Lettering & Type isn't a politically radical book, it can't hurt for us all to start stepping up our font game:

We've also, thanks to a tip from the amazing avant-blog A Journey Round My Skull , picked up Dino Buzzati's 1969 book Poem Strip , freshly translated and reprinted by the good folks at the New York Review of Books.  We'll let the image speak for itsef on this one:

 And finally, speaking of essential internet resources, we did get in one or two books this week that don't include pictures, including The Great Anger: Ultra-Revolutionary Writing in France from the Atheist Priest to the Bonnot Gang, published by a new project spinning off of the Marxist Internet Archive, one of the finest collections of free texts on the Internet (and there's a lot more in there than just Marxists - their Anarchism section, for instance, is more comprehensive than many anarchist-run online collections!)  This book, with texts from Marat, Babeuf, Emile Henry, and many many more, is a pretty amazing slice of radical history.

Oh and did we mention Fredric Jameson's new Valences of the Dialectic?  Zizek's First as Tragedy, then as Farce? Crumb's Genesis?  Seriously, there's so much to read that you'd need some sort of organizer to keep track of it all - luckily we've got those too - the 2010 Slingshot organizer is in, in both pocket sized and large sprial bound versions:

Some new books...

by v/a

We've fallen a little behind on our reading here, so we don't have detailed comments on any of these yet, other than that they all look totally fantastic and the first three things we're going to get to as soon as we make it through this weekend's Radical Bookfair Pavilion.....

First up is James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia.  Now we were under the impression, what with their summary dismissal of our favorite anarchist anthropologist, David Graeber, that Yale University wasn't the best place to explore critiques of the state.  So we were more than a little surprised to see this book coming out, from Yale professor James Scott, who specializes in the historical sociology of agriculture in Asia.  The thesis of this new book, echoing Pierre Clastres claims about anarchy in the Amazon, is that we can point to significant populations of the world that have no interest in being governed by a state --- in this case, "Zomia", Scott's neologistic designation of Europe-sized chunk of uplands Southeast Asia, which Scott understands a two-thousand year old autonomous zone fighting off state formation and state encroachment.

Next is another impressive tome-sized book now gracing our shelves, from Werner Sollors and Greil Marcus (of Lipstick Traces fame), A New Literary History of America.  We're honestly surprised that we've never seen a book like this before --- esentially it's a literary anthology that also serves as a kind of madcap American history text.  With over 1110 pages of essays, stories, and other bits of literary ephemera, this is definitely on our list of things we want someone to buy for us as a gift.

And last up is another somewhat improbable title from the depths of academia --- what do you get when you cross Giorgio Agamben's primary translator and collaborator Daniel Heller-Roazen with the current (and entirely deserved) popular fascination with pirates?  Answer: The new Zone books title  The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, which is a fascinating exploration of the development of international law with an eye towards those people who are precisely and totally excluded from this law and its protections --- pirates, hostis humani generis (the enemy of all mankind) as Ancient Roman law put it..  Probably the most theory heavy book on pirates we've ever seen, and a nice complement to more straightforward "pirates are pretty awesome" titles like Marcus Rediker's similiarly named Villains of All Nations.

PLANNING TO CHANGE THE WORLD: A Plan Book for Social Justice Teachers

by the New York Collective of Radical Educators and the Education for Liberation Network

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800 St. Paul St. * Baltimore, MD 21202 * (410) 230-0450 * info@redemmas.org

Red Emma's is open Monday through Saturday from 10AM-10PM, and Sunday from 10AM-6PM. Our weekly collective meetings are Sunday at 7PM, and are open to anyone interested in the project, except for the first Sunday of every month, which is closed to everyone except collective members. Red Emma's is part of IU 660 of the Industrial Workers of the World, one of the only unions to recognize that worker collectives can stand in solidarity with those fighting the bosses as part of one big union.