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You can search our online inventory for books currently in stock, or read some of our reviews of the books we carry below. If you have questions or suggestions, please email books@redemmas.org. If you need to order books for a reading group, let us know - we like to support people getting together to read books by offering discounts on special orders.
Reviews
Sale books!
by v/a
Just in, some great discounts on some great titles:
- Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal for $9.0 (usually $22, a steal for this classic of participatory political drama!)
- Surrealism Against The Current : Tracts and Declarations for $10 (usually $30, an essential collection of everything that's been deeply political about Surrealism from its inception)
- The Fanon Reader for $14 (usually $25, a great introduction to one of the most important anticolonial thinkers of the past century)
- The Video Activist Handbook for $8.0 (usually $22.50 - Baltimore could really use some more video activists, so we hope someone picks this up soon!)
- The Lyotard Reader and Guide for $14.0 (usually $32)
and, if like us, you're bummed that you couldn't make it up to NYC last night to hear Noam Chomsky's speech at Riverside Church, you can listen online courtesy of WBAI (part II) or you can console yourself with these great discount Chomsky texts:
- Letters from Lexington for $8.0
- For Reasons of State for $9.0
- Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs for $8.0
- Pirates and Emperors, Old and New for $8.0
more >>
Upping The Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action issue #8
by UTA Editorial Committee
It is always exciting to see the newest issue of Upping The Anti (UTA ) appear on bookshelves and periodical racks. The radical journal, put out twice a year by a Pan-Canadian collective, is geared toward the activist/ politically engaged reader and features theoretical/critical articles, interviews, round-table discussions, and book reviews on contemporary radical/ anti-authoritarian politics . The ever-refreshing element of UTA is it's high level of discourse and discussion, minus the "specialist language" and acedemic lingo, giving it accessability and enabling it to be widely read and recieved by a large and diverse readership.
The newest issue of UTA (issue #8) covers a wide range of topics including interviews with Deborah Gould on the legacy of ACT UP , Helen Hudson of the Institue for Anarchist Studies on building longterm sustianable movements, and David McNally, Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin - York University political economy instructors on the econ. crisis. The issue also includes roundtables with SLAM (Student Liberation Action Movement) along with a discussion on Activist Study Groups, articles on the Palestinian struggle/ solidarity movements, Indigenous defense of land in Canada and anti-poverty groups in a climate of economic crisis.
As usual UTA offers us a consistent dosage of analysis and discussion that helps to keep anti-authoritarian/ capitalist/ oppression movements informed and moving...toward social justice and change.
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The Coming Insurrection
by The Invisible Committee
While translations of various quality have been floating around for a while now, it's deeply satisfying to have a polished, real-life, honest-to-god book version of The Coming Insurrection available. Authored by the anonymous collective "The Invisible Committee," the book has gained notoriety for being introduced by the state as one of the primary pieces of evidence in the trial for “criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity” of the Tarnac 9 - think the French version of the Green Scare here and you've got the idea.
So at least one state of this world thinks this is a dangerous book, and they might be right. The Coming Insurrection reads like a Situationist manifesto, and borrows from some of the same sources as Guy Debord and co. did (Henri Lefebvre's urbanism, for instance), but these kids have had the luxury of a few more decades of radical thought to draw on, so motifs drawn from Deleuze and Guattari, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and others surface throughout the text, which also distills down some of the conceptual work done in the (largely still untranslated) two issues of the journal Tiqqun.
And above all, it takes this whole theoretical war machine and deploys it in the current context, with rigor and consistency, aimed at green capitalism, electronic isolation, state terror, and crisis, in a kind of Minima Moralia meets Crimethinc full-bore assault on miserabilism, exploitation, control and cooptation, along with some hints of the possibilities of an insurrectionary politics and a communism worthy of the name.
It's an easy, pocket size text, a quick read, but one I'd encourage be re-read - it's all too easy to come away from the text with a limited picture of what the idea of insurrection they're advancing demands, to slip into thinking insurrection as what they uncompromising distance themselves from (an activist mileu). It's for this reason, too, that I'd recommend this text to people who aren't sold on "insurrection" as it's currently being advanced, who are working at different time scales, and who (like the authors of The Coming Insurrection), aren't expecting a climactic street fight against the cops to end state and capitalism for good. In fact, I'd say the most productive reading - if not the easiest one - of this little text is to try and think through what the revolutionary consistency it demands means for other subjects of (anti-)politics, than, say, a New School student. It'd be a shame to read this book lightly, to dismiss it as posturing or adventurism - to do so would be to miss the seriousness of the ethical project it proposes, much of which remains to be elaborated, in theory and in practice.
more >>Red Emma's - now with more DVDs!
by v/a
Thanks to our friends at AK Press, Red Emma's is now offering a vastly expanded film section, with DVD's from AK Press Video, PM Press/ Big Noise Films, and many other indendent video producers and distributors. We're focusing for now on radical documentaries - with titles currently in stock on everything from armed struggle in Britain to the corporatization of the world's water supply to factory occupations in Argentina.....and lots more on the way.
more >>
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
by Eduardo Galeano
You've probably heard about this book in the news lately, after Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama a copy at the Summit of the Americas. Open Veins has been a favorite at Red Emma's since we opened our doors - it's the definitive work on the impacts of colonialization and imperialism on Latin America, not just because of the comprehensive research and impressive analysis, but because Galeano is such an excellent writer - despite being a book which is largely about political economy, it never comes off as dry or hard to read. In fact, even where Galeano is writing about the intricacies of, say, import substitution as a strategy for independent, non-exploitative development, the text reads like a prose poem.
One of favorite things about Open Veins is the way in which it demonstrates how colonialism remained (and remains) a problem long after formal political independence. For instance, Galeano shows how policies of "free trade" (first British, then American) picked up exactly where the colonial policies of Spain and Portugal left off. With Obama breaking his campaign promise to renegotiate NAFTA with an eye towards greater environmental and labor protections, it seems unlikely that he's actually read the book he was given.
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A very short history of Franklin Rosemont
by David Roediger, Paul Garon, Kate Khatib, and John Duda
Franklin Rosemont, celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and surrealist activist, died Sunday, April 12 in Chicago. He was 65 years old. With his partner and comrade, Penelope Rosemont, and lifelong friend Paul Garon, he co-founded the Chicago Surrealist Group in 1966, an enduring and adventuresome collection of characters that would make the city a center for the reemergence of that movement of artistic and political revolt. Over the course of the following four decades, Franklin and his Chicago comrades produced a body of work, of declarations, manifestos, poetry, collage, hidden histories, and other interventions that has, without doubt, inspired an entirely new generation of revolution in the service of the marvelous.
Read on to find out more about Franklin, a charasmatic figure in the history of radical publishing and left activism in the United States.
more >>New books!
by v/a
It's been a great week for new books at Red Emma's. We've got in the long-awaited new book by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, Race Course Against White Supremacy.
We've also got four new titles in from PM Press - the mammoth first volume (!) of The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Projectiles For The People by J. Smith, Andre Moncourt, and Bill Dunne,
the first issue of Stuart Christie's new anarchofilm journal Arena: On Anarchist Cinema, Vikki Law's Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women (who will incidentally be presenting on the city and incarceration at the upcoming City From Below along with Power Inside and Critical Resistance),
plus a new book of great street art presented in its actual context:
Banksy Locations and Tours: A Collection of Graffiti Locations and Photographs in London.
And then, on top of all that, we now have Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons by Matteo Pasquinelli, a brand new and much needed analysis of the material foundations of networked immaterial labor - kind of a skeptical Italian autonomist Marxist take on the hype around the creative commons.
Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism
by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt
The first in a two-volume mega-work called Counterpower, this brand new book from AK Press is a sprawling rexamination of the historical anarchist tradition. Unlike many approaches to the subject, Black Flame takes the stance that treating "anarchism" as a loose collection of tangentially related doctrines (including everything from Tolstoy's misanthropic Christianity to ultra-libertarian capitalism) is fundamentally a mistake. Instead, the authors propose a (re)definition of "anarchism" which treats it as a coherent social movement which can be traced historically, with its roots and relevance in its class politics - an anarchism against both state and capital and seeking to organize resistance and alternatives. Although this might not sit well with a lot of contemporary people identifying as anarchists (like for instance those who think anarchism can be somehow "post-left"), the trade-off is well worth it, since the authors (themselves associated with South Africa's Zabalaza) are able to use their conceptual rubric to demonstrate conclusively the coherent international character of the Anarchist movement, a welcome antidote to Eurocentric accounts of the movement and its history.
more >>Monthly Review!
by John Bellamy Foster, editor
We're thrilled to announce that we're now carrying Monthly Review again, one of our favorite periodicals down here at Red Emma's. Sixty years old this year, Monthly Review has been a beacon for independent socialist political economy, anti-imperialism, and environmental thought that we've been sad to have not stocked for the past six months or so, due to the continuing implosion in the independent periodical distribution game.
We've also got the brand new Monthly Review press book by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Conseqences, which synthesizes the evolving big-picture analysis of the current financial meltdown that has been appearing in the pages of Monthly Review (and which we've found to be invaluable).
Don't trust us? Here's what Immanuel Wallerstein had to say about Crisis:
“Everyone at last knows we are in a great financial crisis. Foster and Magdoff have seen it coming for some time now. If you want a clear and cogent explanation of the reality of our debt crisis and what might be done about it, this is your book.”
Make Your Place: Affordable, Sustainable Nesting Skills
by Raleigh Briggs
It's not easy being green - especially as ready-made corporate pseudo-solutions to everday needs are pushed down our throats by the new "green" capitalism, making sustainability (or rather a vague feeling of absolution from guilt over habits of overconsumption) a privilege for those who can afford it.
So naturally we were exceptionally pleased to see the latest from our friends at Microcosm Publishing, Make Your Place: Affordable, Sustainable Nesting Skills - a compilation of simple, really sustainable solutions to basic problems - with sections on organic gardening, industrial chemical-free house-cleaning, and natural health remedies. And all in pocket-size, hand-lettered $7 book.
more >>
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