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Cover of We Want Everything

Verso Books

We Want Everything

Nanni Balestrini

€18.00

It was 1969, and temperatures were rising across the factories of the north as workers demanded better pay and conditions. Soon, discontent would erupt in what became known as Italy’s Hot Autumn. A young worker from the impoverished south arrives at Fiat’s Mirafiori factory in Turin, where his darker complexion begins to fade from the fourteen-hour workdays in sweltering industrial heat. His bosses try to withhold his wages. Our cynical, dry-witted narrator will not bend to their will. “I want everything, everything that’s owed to me,” he tells them. “Nothing more and nothing less, because you don’t mess with me.”

Around him, students are holding secret meetings and union workers begin halting work on the assembly lines, crippling the Mirafiori factory with months of continuous strikes. Before long, barricades line the roads, tear gas wafts into private homes, and the slogan “We Want Everything” is ringing through the streets.

Wrought in spare and measured prose, Balestrini’s novel depicts an explosive uprising. Introduced by Rachel Kushner, the author of the best-selling The Flamethrowers, We Want Everything is the incendiary fictional account of events that led to a decade of revolt.

Translated by Matt Holden
Introduction by Rachel Kushner

Published in 2022 ┊ 224 pages ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberationv

Verso Books

Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberationv

Juliana Gleeson

LGBTQI+ €20.00

How the intersex liberation movement exposed medical harms and became an inspiration to rethink sex and gender. 

Hermaphrodite Logic is a bold examination of intersex liberation. Juliana Gleeson reveals how a movement challenged systemic medical abuses to reshape our understanding of sex. Blending philosophical insights and personal testimonies, Gleeson argues that intersex people have been harmed not just for therapeutic reasons but to ease professional and parental anxieties.

Cover of If They Come in the Morning...

Verso Books

If They Come in the Morning...

Angela Y. Davis

One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United State.  

Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has seen unprecedented growth, with more of America's black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as pertinent today as the day it was first published.  

Featuring contributions from George Jackson, Bettina Aptheker, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin, Ruchell Magee, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Erika Huggins, Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and others.

Cover of Nymph: A Novel

Verso Books

Nymph: A Novel

Stephanie LaCava

Fiction €20.00

A young woman from a long line of assassins, lives her life with the ardent mission to avoid the trappings of any enduring romantic love, while keeping one on the pursuit of an untimely death for herself. 

Not yet thirty, Bathory, or 'Bat' to those near to her, has assembled a peculiar Model, sex worker, linguist and scholar of Latin. But nothing in her lively job history employs the singular traits she inherited from her strange family, chief among them an uncanny ability to sidestep seemingly certain death(s). An appropriate atavistic instinct, for someone from a long line of assassins and spies. Her clan are assassins of a romantic bent, her parents issuing theories on love galore. However Bat is set on swerving any enduring romantic loves, and she's set on dying young. Now, if she could only avoid that one alluring figure from her father's past.

A thriller, a love story, and a dynamic examination of class, violence and connection. The images we make to share and those we strive to conceal, alienation and salvation, magic and technology, LaCava's bold new novel is propelled by the compelling violence one can seed in contradiction.

Cover of Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine

Verso Books

Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine

Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox and 1 more

Essays €15.00

A materialist analysis of the links between global capitalism, energy politics, and racial oppression in Palestine. 

Why has Palestine become a defining fault line of contemporary politics?

Challenging mainstream narratives that reduce Palestine to ancient hatreds, humanitarian tragedy, or legal abstractions, Resisting Erasure places Israeli settler-colonialism within the broader historical arc of imperialism, race, and fossil capitalism in the Middle East.

Resisting Erasure is a succinct and far-reaching critique of the socio-economic and political forces that sustain the Israeli settler-colonial project. An essential introduction for anyone looking to understand what Palestine reveals about the world – and what it demands of us today.

Cover of Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza

Verso Books

Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza

Didier Fassin

Essays €15.00

How most Western governments and elites have supported the destruction of Gaza and silenced voices calling for the rights of Palestinians. 

Providing a record of the first six months of the war waged by the Israeli army after the 7 October attacks and drawing on a rich range of international sources, Didier Fassin examines how most Western governments have acquiesced in and often contributed to the destruction, by the Israeli army, of Gaza, its homes, infrastructures, hospitals, institutions of education, and civilian population. To justify their support and prevent criticism, they have provided an official version of the events, adopting the Israeli narrative. It was largely taken up by mainstream media, which ignored the experiences and perspectives of Palestinians. Dissenting voices were silenced. A policing of language and thought was imposed. Censorship and self-censorship became normalized. 

To call for a ceasefire or to demand the respect of humanitarian law was enough to prompt the ever-ready accusation of antisemitism. Exploring the multiple dimensions of the extreme inequality of lives between the two sides of the conflict and analyzing the complex geopolitical, economic and ideological stakes that underlie it, Fassin intends to constitute an archive of this moral abdication. In his view, the abandonment of the values and principles proclaimed by Western elites to be foundational will leave a deep scar in the history of the world.

Cover of Radical Love

Nightboat Books

Radical Love

Fanny Howe

Fiction €24.00

Radical Love gathers five of Fanny Howe's novels: Nod, The Deep North, Famous Questions, Saving History, and Indivisible, previously out-of-print and hard to find classics whose characters wrestle with serious political and metaphysical questions against the backdrop of urban, suburban, and rural America.

Cover of Confidences / Oracle

OCT0

Confidences / Oracle

Ivan Cheng

Fiction €13.00

Oracles don’t require belief—they now theatrically suspend disbelief. No longer advisors of world policy, they run Locus Solus, a town that has come to ramble around an eponymous theatre and chocolate factories. Theo, a centuries-old vampire intent on remaining contemporary through performance, visits Locus Solus, which is hosting Praise Estate, an international theatre festival. He uses the festival as an opportunity to stay with Gean, his oracle boyfriend, who is there visiting family. Theo has a fetish for the future, fixated on the one thing he is in no shortage of.

Confidences / Oracle is a lover’s trip to a weeklong theatre festival. A vehicle for recontextualising recent performance scripts and texts, Oracle is the third instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which intertwines vampires and performance as sites for circulation and recognition.

Cover of My Lesbian Novel

Dorothy, a publishing project

My Lesbian Novel

Renee Gladman

Fiction €17.00

The latest in writer and visual artist Renee Gladman's ever-expanding body of imaginative investigation is a sui generis novel of queerness and art-making, philosophy and sex. 

The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance. 

Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance - "though aspects of the formula drive me crazy... people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are" - a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process. 

The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of form and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, all published by Dorothy— Event Factory, The Ravickians, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, and Houses of Ravicka. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and was a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.