Bøger udgivet af CITY LIGHTS

Stories of spiritual longing and romantic illusion, or vice-versa, in the holy rubble of Los Angeles.

Bittersweet tales about the loss of hope.

Drawn from the essence of Latin soul and free jazz, rich evocations of the author's ancestral roots.

Landscapes of War: From Sarajevo to Chechnya is an incisive examination of the tensions that exist between the West and Islamic societies of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. These essays, originating in Goytisolo's travels in the late 1990s, provide rich historical analysis and moving first-person reportage of life in four explosive war-zones: Sarajevo, Algeria, the West Bank and Gaza, and Chechnya. From the 17th century to the Gulf War, the West has regarded Islam as the enemy on the doorstep, and this book elucidates how relations between Islam and the West continue to be shaped in a climate of ideological, political and cultural confrontation.Goytisolo examines the fratricidal frenzy in Algeria and the war waged by French police against North African migrants in France, and he describes a besieged Sarajevo transformed into a concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire. He contemplates the despair and poverty of Palestinian youth living in the Occupied Territories and details the brutality of the Russian war in the Caucasus. Whether reporting on the fate of the Bosnians after the break up of the former Yugoslavia or analyzing the growing appeal of fundamentalisms—Islamic, Jewish and Russian Orthodox—Goytisolo displays the same blend of intelligence, vision, and warm fellow-feeling that has made him one the most imposing literary figures of our time.Many of these succinct and eloquent essays first appeared in Spain's leading newspaper El Pais, and English translations were published in the Times Literary Supplement (London).Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. In 1993 he was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for his literary achievement and contribution to world culture. His translated works include a two volume autobiography, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife; the trilogy Marks of Identity, Count Julian and Juan the Landless; and the essays, Saracen Chronicles. Other works by him and published by City Lights Publishers include The Marx Family Saga, published in 1999, and A Cock-Eyed Comedy, published in 2005.Peter Bush is Director of the British Center for Literary Translation and translated Juan Goytisolo's The Marx Family Saga, which was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclan.

Cultural Writing. Art. Poetry. In "Constellations of Miro, Breton", Paul Hammond unravels some of the mysteries of the call and response of these two Surrealists by reading the pictures against the poetry, the poetry against the pictures, and both against the madness of a history that none of us has left that far behind. Featured in this edition are reproductions of the complete series of Joan Miro's Constellations and a translation of Andre Breton's proses paralleles. Also included is Andre Breton's essay, "Constellations of Joan Miro", as well as documentary illustrations and photographs.

Over centuries, Andalusian Gypsies developed cante jondo, or deep song, which grew from the experience of exile and marginalization. Although flamenco music enjoys wide popularity today, the words of the songs are often lost in the passion of the performance, or because they are sung in dialect. This is a bilingual sampling of the lyrics and brief commentaries by aficionados.Will Kirkand is a San Francisco Bay Area writer and translator whose translated works include Lorca's The Gypsy Ballads and Róoacute;mulo Gallegos' classic novel Canaima. He is the author of a volume of short stories, Ixat Tales.

In Distance No Object, Gloria Frym turns her ironic, passionate gaze to post-Vietnam Berkeley and San Francisco. Private lives are still swept along by the currents of history, as in the sixties. But the names of the wars have changed…the bombs fall on Iraq, and "the war on poverty" becomes a war against the poor. The stories of Distance No Object evoke the deep frustrations between generations, friends, neighbors, and races. Yet civility, quotidian justice, a common language, and new love are imagined…and Kafka finds his true bride."Frym turns an unflinching eye on human interaction, capturing casual and intimate exchanges between strangers on trains, estranged husbands and wives, and errant children and their parents in this sensitive and assured collection…Frym focuses on sensitive social issues…her politically charged narratives are among her best."—Publishers Weekly"…a collection that is possibly ahead of its time while it masquerades as an elegy for an end to an era."—Austin Chronicle"Quiet and moving in their intensity of feeling."—Kirkus Reviews"Put Gloria Frym's splendidly knowing vision of the urban with Grace Paley's and Stephen Dixon's. Her voice is tender, searching, and ever so slightly insolent—you greet these stories like friends stopping by unannounced, friends so beguiling that you wish they'd stay longer than they do."—Jonathan Lethem, author of Gun, with Occasional Music and Amnesia Moon"Gloria Frym's stories strike me as going directly to the heart in a rational way. They hurt by being clear and reasonable—like William Carlos Williams' poetry, say. But hurt doesn't mean hurt, exactly; it means affected in a necessary way."—Alice Notley, author of Mysteries of Small HousesGloria Frym is no stranger to the literary scene, having been a writer and teacher for over two decades. She attended the University of New Mexico under the tutelage of poet Robert Creeley. "Creeley had quite a bit of national acclaim by that time," says Frym, "but I didn't know it. I just knew he was important to me and his presence brought a lot of important writers—Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, and others—to what was essentially an outpost on Route 66." Gloria Frym is the author of a previous collection of short stories, How I Learned, as well as several volumes of poetry, including By Ear, Back to Forth, Impossible Affection, and the forthcoming Homeless at Home. She is also the author of a book of interviews, Second Stories: Conversations with Women Artists. Since 1987, she has been a member of the core faculty of the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco.

In 1768, at the age of nineteen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe began to study hermetic literature. This exploration had a huge impact on the early aesthetic education of Europe's great man of letters, the last renaissance titan. In the years that followed, Goethe immersed himself in the hermetic tradition, and even set up an alchemic laboratory and attempted to make an elixir of immortality. Although he eventually gave up his alchemical experiments, he was to believe in the validity of the Great Work for the rest of his life.Alchemic symbolism is prominent in many of Goethe's works, and it is particularly abundant in the tales of self-mastery and transformation presented in this collection. Included here are new translations of "Fairy Tale" ("Marchen"), Goethe's alchemical allegory; "The Counselor" and "The New Melusina," stories of temptation and the tests of love; "The Good Woman," a curious discourse on aesthetics and the rights of women; and the lyrical prose masterpiece "Novelle." Here also for the first time in English is "The Magical Flute," Goethe's sequel to Mozart's opera, with themes of initiation, the magical power of music, and liberated genius.

This startling and brilliantly comic novel tells the stories of two men: a father and his estranged son. Lamprias de Bergerac is a gentle mystic and amateur botanist who spends his middle-aged years in an erotic utopia deep in the Amazonian jungle, collecting specimens of rare orchids and ultimately finding Cucla, the young and free-spirited native woman who has become the love of his life. Meanwhile, his demented son Septimus is raised by his mother in prewar Europe, seething with hatred of the father who abandoned him. He rises to power in Nazi-occupied France, where he goes mad in an obsessive pursuit of racial purity.Rikki Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious, the realistic with the fantastic. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans."Linguistically explosive and socially relevant, [her] works are solid evidence that Rikki Ducornet is one of the most interesting writers around ... We are living in an age of intellectual and emotional starvation that is largely without spirituality, cynical about social change and disconnected from the natural world. We need writers to look at these difficult issues in a sophisticated manner. Ducornet has done this. She is the mirror of our innermost selves. And she gives us back to ourselves—despairing , hopeful, active, contemplative, fractured but surviving, playful, even happy sometimes, and always whole ... Ducornet's villains have the best lines ... one only has to think of Hitler or PolPot or any of our assorted tyrants to know that Ducornet's figures are ... taken from life."—The Nation"Entering Fire displays a cheerfully gruesome audacity and an imagination both lively and bizarre."—The New York Times"Entering Fire is about the metaphoric and potentially evil properties of language; it is about origins and motives of myth-making. This is a novel of ideas (often strange ideas) that is sustained throughout by brilliant writing."—London Sunday Times"Far from being an escapist fantasy, Entering Fire takes on some of the biggest issues of the 20th century … For sheer power, inventiveness and verbal density, [it] is the best read I've come across for a long time."—The Observer"A drastically beautiful comic writer who stitches sentences together as if Proust had gone into partnership with Lenny Bruce."—City Limits" … imaginative and unbridled fantasy."—Le Monde" … an imagination and a style as captivating as it is devastating."—Lire"Unlike anything you've ever read before."—L'ExpressRikki Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious, the realistic with the fantastic. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans.

With the great Renaissance voyages to the New World came the popularity of Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders, in which newly discovered monsters and marvels could be displayed. Like such a cabinet, this collection of essays surveys the monstrous and the marvelous—as transmuted in the alembic of Rikki Ducornet's open-hearted vision—in literature, art and film. For her, excess anomaly, and heterodoxy entice the imagining mind to embrace "otherness," enlarge the world and regenerate Eden.

Winner of the 2000 Harold Morton Landon Translati+C100on Award.A major Spanish poet of the Generation of '27, Jorge Guillen's luminous poetry, marked by nobility of mind, balance, and clarity of vision, deserves to be more widely known to readers of English.Guillen was born in Valladolid, Old Castile. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he was arrested and detained briefly in Pamplona as a political prisoner. He left Spain in 1938 and went into voluntary exile in the United States, where he remained until after the death of Franco. In 1978 he returned to live in Spain. He died in Malaga in 1984.Many poems in Horses in the Air were written in America; many of them have never been translated into English before. Guillen's view of Europe from the New World, his experience as an exile and an immigrant, as well as his encounter with Spanish America and with Spain in America provide insights into our shared culture that are fresh and relevant today.

Revolutionary Romanticism draws on almost two centuries of intertwined traditions of cultural and political subversion. In this rich collection of writings by artists, scholars and revolutionaries, the transgressions of the past are recaptured and transvalued for the benefit of the struggles of today and tomorrow.Along the way, new light is shed on the radical sensibilities of Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schlegel, and the profoundly oppositional poetics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron and William Blake. The social romanticism of Jules Michelet is acclaimed for its visionary, quasi-religious breadth. The Paris Commune is figured by Karl Marx, Jules Vallès and Arthur Rimbaud. All-but-forgotten episodes of German expressionism and anarchism are recalled. The romantic outlook of Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse is relocated in their absolute negation of the social order. Surrealism, "the prehensile tail of romanticism," is followed to Haiti where it catalyzes revolt. And, at the end of the twentieth century, Guy Debord and the Situationist International provide the passionate détournement of the romantic project."Drunken Boat is a courageous and worthy effort to maintain alive, in a difficult period, unfettered critical thinking. It ought to be supported by all who care about freedom and justice."—Cornelius Castoriadis, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society"In a period when politics is dreary and political art clichéd, Drunken Boat is brilliantly alive and unconventional. It summons up a world where subversion spelled art and art spelled liberation; but Drunken Boat is more than a blast from the past: it speaks to the present. Drunken Boat is the vessel of choice for these bored with chartered cruises and organized day-trips."—Russell Jacoby, author of The Last Intellectuals". . . an illuminating collection of essays that surveys the evolution–and common threads–of romantic political thought over the last 200 years."—San Francisco Bay Guardian"Provides a readable, comprehensive history of 'a continued Vision' at odds with an empirical world."—Austin Chronicle

In Juan Goytisolo's surreal fiction Karl and Jenny Marx sit on their sofa in Hampstead and watch a television documentary. Albanian refugees land on a private Italian beach flourishing photocopies of dollar bills in search of paradise Dallas. Find out how Karl reacts to the demise of the systems Josef Visionariovitch and Co. build on his word! Read all about the family life of the Marxes, moving upmarket from Dean Street to Highgate and beyond, yet never free of the hock shop!A resurrected Marx visits scenes of former triumphs in Moscow, where MacLenin T-shirts and harmburger freedom are all the rage, and returns to a Hempstead housewarming reception and ball filmed by the cameras for a Merchant-Ivoryish Red Baroness—which subsequently becomes the subject of a Saturday-night talk-show featuring a feminist sexologist form UCLA, an anarchist form the Spanish Civil Bar, Bakunin . . .But the narrator's publisher, the urbane pipe-smoking Mr. Faulkner, wants a bestselling novel, a proper story with real facts and heart-rending descriptions of the Marx menage. Some hope! Goytisolo returns to the techniques of his youth, sticks in a photo of Helen Demuth, the family servant. Why bother with all that description? Leave that to Balzac. Now was Marx or Engels the father of her child?Juan Goytisolo's text, his most mordant satire yet, is a roller-coaster of bitter incentive and witty paradox, a verbal whip-lashing for the cheerleaders of the new world order."The most important living novelist from Spain."—Guardian"The Marx Family Saga is a surreal fantasy . . . Witty, clever and entertaining as well as provocative and insightful, The Marx Family Saga is a remarkable achievement."—Danny Yee, Danny ReviewsJuan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. Since 1956 he has lived in voluntary exile outside Spain and now divides his time between Paris and Marrakesh. His novels are The Virtues of the Solitary Bird and Quarantine.

Unlike many Latin American writers whose work has been published in the United States, Francisco Hinojosa does not rely on magical realism, exotic recipes or cultural nostalgia. Rather, his stories convey a mercilessly sardonic view of family and society, and his ingenious array of anti-heroes embodies a conspicuous disdain for convention. Here, in eight masterly stories that are as cruel and pitiless as they are hilarious, he explores the complexities of love and human relationships. These fiercely funny picaresque adventures are peopled with characters who inspire feelings of both solidarity and derision, but let the reader beware: just when you find yourself laughing out loud, you might recognize your reflection in the funhouse mirror.

The nameless narrator of The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary lives in her studio apartment with a pack of Doberman pinschers. The dogs, led by the cruel, charismatic bitch named Miss Dog, alternate between being brutal attack animals and loyal companions, being real and otherworldly. Some chapters draw upon the ecstatic and horrifying visions of Christian mystics; other take place in the landscapes of familiar fairy tales; others in the banal settings of late-night pick-up bars or suburban picnics. The narrator uneasily inhabits these worlds until the dogs force her to take irrevocable action.

Exquisite recipes that push the boundaries of vegan cuisine

Dino Campana wrote the unique, visionary masterwork of Italian literature Orphic Songs when he was in his twenties. The originality, rapturous language, and strange beauty of his poetry make him as important to twentieth-century poetry as García Lorca or Mayakovsky. Campana was the wild man of Italian poetry in 1914, on the eve of World War I. The war saved some young Italians from rebellion and from Fascism, but not Campana. Always an outsider, he was a vagabond who worked now and then as a gaucho, miner, fireman, organ-grinder, janitor, circus tumbler, horse groomer, and a wandering musician with a Gypsy band. He died in Castel Pulci, a psychiatric hospital, in 1932."Dino Campana's small and intensely magical body of poetry from the early years of the last century-prose and free verse that combine the visual and the visionary with astonishing vigor and haunting grace-is little known to English-speaking readers." -Oberlin College PressDino Campana (1885-1932) was an Italian lyricist and poet, known for his flamboyant personality. His only collection of poems is found in Orphic Songs. In 1918 he was admitted into a mental hospital and lived the rest of his life there.

"America Besieged" deals with the underlying forces within U.S. society that deeply affect our lives. Showing how we are being misled and harmed by those who profess to have our interests at heart, Michael Parenti writes: "We are indeed a nation besieged, not from without but from within, not subverted from below but from above; the moneyed power exercises a near monopoly influence over our political life, over the economy, the state, and the media. Some Americans are astonished to hear of it. Others have had their suspicions, although they may not be quite sure how it all adds up. This book invites the reader to stop blaming the powerless and poor and, in that good old American phrase, start 'following the money.' That is the first and most important step toward lifting the siege and bringing democracy back to life."Michael Parenti, one of America's most astute and entertaining political analysts, is the author of Against Empire, Dirty Truths, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, Democracy for the Few, Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America, and many other books.

David Lauer is a poet and translator who lives in Chihuahua, Mexico.

This eye-opening and entertaining collection of essays investigates media and culture, conspiracy and state power, ideology and political consciousness. Parenti ranges over such crucial issues as free speech, the rise of neofascism, the relationship between wealth and poverty, the "terrorism" hype, the continuing mystifications about the Kennedy assassination, and the deceptions and injustices of U.S. corporate global domination.Moving from the political to the personal, Parenti shows the links between seemingly disparate social and political forces. Dirty Truths also contains three poems and moving accounts of his own ethnic family life and the political intolerance he encountered in academia.This book is a rich buffet, an enlightening and provocative feast for the mind and heart.Author of Against Empire, Democracy for the Few, Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America, and many other books, Michael Parenti is one of the country's most astute and engaging political analysts. He has taught at a number of universities and now lives in Berkeley, California.

This vibrant new collection of nineteen short stories by the two-time winner of the prestigious O. Henry Prize is by turns erotic, wildly funny, bawdy, and poignant. Eidus explores our contemporary obsessions: sex - both safe and not-so-safe; Prozac, the '90s drug of choice; Nautilus machine mania; the sinister attraction of vampires; film star James Dean; and rock 'n' roll icons Axl Rose and Elvis - all with dazzling range.