Bøger udgivet af City Lights Books

An impressive selection, in bilingual format, from the work of one of Mexico's greatest contemporary writers.Born in Mexico City in 1951, Alberto Blanco is a dynamic and influential voice in the new poetry of Mexico. A musician, artist, essayist, translator, and storyteller, his poetry explores the connections on frontiers between verbal, visual, and aural experience. He is both an innovator and a classicist, a materialist and a mystic, a visionary and a chronicler of everyday life.Here his poems converse with their English translations, to create "a singular book…not simply a bilingual edition, but one unified voice, a poetry that speaks of a world far beyond languages and borders," (from the introduction by Jose Emilio Pacheco)."The meticulous and loving catalog of moments, animals, plants, beings, suns, and nocturnal revelations that this poetry offers us constitutes—in my way of thinking—a terrible oracle, and at last a shout of hope. To say it in a simpler, more direct way, it is a prayer." -Alvaro Mutis"Alberto Blanco's deep poetry inhabits both the world and the universe of imagination; these poems shed their own light and fly on their own wings." -Michael McClureJuvenal Acosta is an author who has published fiction, journalism, and poetry. He is now a teacher at the California College of the Arts. His books include The Tattooed Hunter and The Violence of Velvet.José Emilio Pacheco (1939-2014) was a Mexican poet, essayist, novelist and short story writer. He has been regarded as one of the major Mexican poets of the 20th Century.

Richly informed and written in an engaging style, Against Empire exposes the ruthless agenda and hidden costs of the U.S. empire today. Documenting the pretexts and lies used to justify violent intervention and maldevelopment abroad, Parenti shows how the conversion to a global economy is a victory of finance capital over democracy.As much of the world suffers unspeakable misery and the Third-Worldization of the United States accelerates, civil society is impoverished by policies that benefit rich and powerful transnational corporations and the national security state. Hard-won gains made by ordinary people are swept away.

The Zapatista Army emerged from the jungle on New Year’s Day, 1994, and provoked a national crisis in Mexico. At a demonstration in Mexico City, over 100,000 people marched together and shouted, "First World, HA HA HA!"—a defiant declaration of solidarity with the rebels, an insurgent army of indigenous campesinos who have challenged the direction of Mexico's future.The Chiapas uprising was internationally hailed as a direct attack on the New World Order. It was a milestone in the continuing history of indigenous resistance in the Americas, and an important development in the growing worldwide struggle against global policies of economic colonization.In this collection, writers from Mexico and the United States provide the background and context for the Zapatista movement, and explore its impact, in Mexico and beyond."Elaine Katzenberger has assembled an interesting and stimulating collection of voices from Mexico and the United States, of those in revolt and those reacting to the revolt . . . Listened to as moments of an ever wider and ever more multi-sided conversation, the voices in the book should contribute to that amplification by giving their listeners a sense of the complexity and breath of the discussion."—Harry Cleaver, Professor at University of TexasElaine Katzenberger is a publisher and Executive Director for City Lights Booksellers and Publishers. Her edited works include fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Some works have won awards including the American Book Award and a PEN West Award for Excellence in Publishing. Katzenberger serves on the Board of Directors of the City Lights Foundation and is on the Advisory Board of Circuit Network.

A woman's struggle for self-realization in contemporary Iran, a novel with "the clarity and spare sensuousness of Persian poetry or miniature painting."—Ruth Prawer JhabvalaWhen Minou Hakini marries a man of her own choosing—an intellectual and a radical—and moves to Abadan, a thriving oil town near the Iraqi border, she imagines her life will be adventurous and liberating. Before long, however, she becomes aware of her husband's suspicious liaisons and dangerous activities. Her struggle to forge her own identity as a woman in contemporary Iran is charged with passion, anger and finally a need to escape.“The ecstasies and disillusionments of first love are the stuff of great tragedies and cheap romances, but Nahid Rachlin has done something else with this familiar theme, and something more, though her style is elegantly simple . . . ”—The New York Times Book Review" . . . Rachlin (Foreigner) tells her story with economy and suspensefulness, weaving strands of unstable political life and sexual secrecy—in a small, vivid closeup of life in Iran at that fateful hour, within a society that had become its own prisoner."—Kirkus ReviewsNahid Rachlin is an Iranian-American who lives in New York and teaches at Barnard College. She is the author of Foreigner and The Heart's Desire, both novels, and Veils, a collection of short stories.

In 1928, Georges Bataille published this first novel under a pseudonym, a legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the erotic by means of forbidden obsessive fantasies of excess and sexual extremes. A classic of pornographic literature, Story of the Eye finds the parallels in Sade and Nietzsche and in the investigations of contemporary psychology; it also forecasts Bataille's own theories of ecstasy, death and transgression which he developed in later work.

Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality--Georges Bataille pursues these themes with an original, often startling perspective. He challenges any single discourse on the erotic. The scope of his inquiry ranges from Emily Bronte to Sade, from St. Therese to Claude Levi-Strauss and Dr. Kinsey; and the subjects he covers include prostitution, mythical ecstasy, cruelty, and organized war. Investigating desire prior to and extending beyond the realm of sexuality, he argues that eroticism is "a psychological quest not alien to death.

Drama. Sam Shepard's FOOL FOR LOVE is arguably the playwright's best known play. Focusing, as many of Shepard's plays do, on the dark side of life in the West, FOOL FOR LOVE was first produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in February, 1983, before moving to Off-Broadway at the Circle Repertory Theatre in May of that year. Shepard himself directed these original productions, winning Obie Awards for his writing and directing as well as the award for best new American play.

With Bukowski, the votes are still coming in. There seems to be no middle ground--people seem either to love him or hate him. Tales of his own life and doings are as wild and weird as the very stories he writes. In a sense, Bukowski was a legend in his time . . . a madman, a recluse, a lover . . . tender, vicious . . . never the same . . . these are exceptional stories that come pounding out of his violent and depraved life . . . horrible and holy, you cannot read them and ever come away the same again.

"Family Album is Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemâan's rollicking follow up to her acclaimed English-language debut, Poso Wells. Alemâan is known for her spirited and sardonic take on the fatefully interconnected--and often highly compromised--forces at work in present-day South America, and particularly in Ecuador. In this collection of eight hugely entertaining short stories, she dives deep into the tales that Ecuadorian's like to tell about themselves, following the foundational creation myths of that small South American nation all the way to their logical and sometimes ignominious ends. A muddy brew of pop-culture and pop-folklore yields intriguing, lesser-known episodes of contemporary Ecuadorian history, along with a rich cast of unforgettable minor characters whose intimate stories open up onto a vista of Ecuador's place on the world stage, now and all along the way. Alemâan teases tropes of hardboiled detective fiction, satire, and adventure narratives to recast the discussion of historical forces and national identity. The stories provide a humorous spin on universal themes of human frailty and desire, while taking on some difficult and complex issues, including misogynistic violence, the exploitation and appropriation of natural resources, violence against indigenous groups, religious tensions, political corruption, and the steady flow of illicit drugs. From a pair of deep-sea divers using Robinson Crusoe's map of a shipwreck to locate sunken treasure in the seas of the Galapagos Archipelago, to an outlaw pilot who flies a group of missionaries from the American Midwest deep into the Amazon jungle, where their attempt to convert an indigenous village results in a massacre, opening the way for the appropriation of natives' land by oil companies; from a small group of mysterious Germans who took refuge on an unpopulated Galapagos island during the lead-up to the Second World War, to a night with the husband of Ecuador's most infamous expat, Lorena Bobbit, this series of cracked "family portraits" provides a cast of heroes and anti-heroes in stories that sneak up on a reader before they know what's happened: they've learned a great deal more about a country whose more well known exports -- soccer, coffee and cocoa--mask a much more intriguing national story that's ripe for the telling"--

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics' Circle Award for Poetry! Winner of a 2022 Palestine Book Award“Written from his native Gaza, Abu Toha’s accomplished debut contrasts scenes of political violence with natural beauty."—The New York TimesIn this poetry debut Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege in Gaza, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profound humanity.These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack. Like Gaza itself, they are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.Accompanied by an in-depth interview (conducted by Ammiel Alcalay) in which Abu Toha discusses life in Gaza, his family origins, and how he came to poetry.Praise for Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear:“Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishingly gifted young poet from Gaza, almost a seer with his eloquent lyrical vernacular … His poems break my heart and awaken it, at the same time. I feel I have been waiting for his work all my life.”—Naomi Shihab Nye“Though forged in the bleak landscape of Gaza, he conjures a radiance that echoes Miłosz and Kabir. These poems are like flowers that grow out of bomb craters and Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishing talent to celebrate.”—Mary Karr"Mosab Abu Toha's Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear arrives with such refreshing clarity and voice amidst a sea of immobilizing self-consciousness. It is no great feat to say a complicated thing in a complicated way, but here is a poet who says it plain: 'In Gaza, some of us cannot completely die.' Later, 'This is how we survived.' It’s remarkable. This is poetry of the highest order."—Kaveh Akbar

Is it possible to create a borderless world? How might it be better equipped to solve the global emergencies threatening our collective survival? Build Bridges, Not Walls is an inspiring, impassioned call to envision-and work toward-a bold new reality.

The final book of poems from a Beat Generation legend, Mule Kick Blues finds McClure restlessly innovating until the end.

Women in Public dismantles and reassembles the humor, absurdity, and terror that inform interactions with gender, sexuality, and amorous consumption.

Essays on racial flashpoints, white denial, violence, and the manipulation of fears in America today.

In gritty, sometimes fantastical stories about Latinx life, women challenge feminine stereotypes and make sense of fractured family histories.

Queer pastoral lyrics take on the romantic sublime in a stunningly assured debut collection.