Winner of the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and Arrowsmith Press's 2023 Derek Walcott Poetry Prize

National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Finalist

Written from his native Gaza, Abu Toha's accomplished debut contrasts scenes of political violence with natural beauty.-The New York Times

In 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 Milosz 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

The landmark, original publication of Allen Ginsberg's HOWL & Other Poems

HOWL & Other Poems, the prophetic book that launched the Beat Generation, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books in 1956. Considered the single most influential work of post-WWII United States poetry, the City Lights edition of HOWL has remained in print for more than 60 years, with well over 1,000,000 copies in print.

A strident critique of middle-class complacency, consumerism, and capitalist militarism, HOWL also celebrates the pleasures and freedoms of the physical world, including a tribute to homosexual love. In addition to Howl, poems in the book include: A Supermarket in California, Sunflower Sutra, America, In the Baggage Room at Greyhound, Transcription of Organ Music, and Wild Orphan, among others.

A History of HOWL:

City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti first heard Allen Ginsberg read Howl at the Six Gallery event in San Francisco, 1955, which featured writers Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure, introduced by poet Kenneth Rexroth. Jack Kerouac was present, but did not read, encouraging and cheering the other poets on. Ferlinghetti was so impressed by Ginsberg's performance, he immediately telegrammed him, referencing Ralph Waldo Emerson's response to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?

When the first edition of HOWL arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with the City Lights Bookstore manager, Shigeyoshi Murao. The two were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and the case was sent to trial. Ferlinghetti partnered with the ACLU to launch a defense of HOWL, and a parade of distinguished literary and academic witnesses appeared in court to persuade the judge of its merits. In the end, famously conservative Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, but rather, as he stated emphatically, HOWL was a work of redeeming social significance.

The landmark decision signaled a sea change in American culture, and the City Lights edition of HOWL became a vital cornerstone in the ongoing struggle for free expression and representation. It continues to attract generation after generation of readers.

It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages.--William Carlos Williams

Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius . . . probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman.--Bob Dylan

Not only did he give us love and poetry, he reminded us of our civic duty to use our voice.--Patti Smith

Howl was Allen's metamorphosis from quiet, brilliant, burning bohemian scholar trapped by his flames and repressions to epic vocal bard.--Michael McClure

Essential poems by the late New York poet.

Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry.

Edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his monumental The New American Poetry in 1960, it contains some of the poet's best known works including The Day Lady Died, Ave Maria, and Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]. These are the compelling and formally inventive poems--casually composed, for example, in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading--that made O'Hara a dynamic leader of the New York School of poets.

O'Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call. Few books of his era show less age.--Dwight Garner, New York Times

As collections go, none brings . . . quality to the fore more than the thirty-seven Lunch Poems, published in 1964 by City Lights.--Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review

What O'Hara is getting at is a sense of the evanescence, and the power, of great art, that inextricable contradiction -- that what makes it moving and transcendent is precisely our knowledge that it will pass away. This is the ethos at the center of Lunch Poems: not the informal or the conversational for their own sake but rather in the service of something more intentional, more connective, more engaged. --David L. Ulin, Los Angeles TImes

The collection broadcasts snark, exuberance, lonely earnestness, and minute-by-minute autobiography to a wide, vague audience--much like today's Twitter and Facebook feeds.--Micah Mattix, The Atlantic

Sweet poems, funny, exhilarating, spontaneous, subversive, poignant, and sometimes--often--more deeply, even darkly moving. But above all sweet. Probably a greater proportion of O'Hara's poems can be read for sheer pleasure than the poems of any other 20th-century writer. This slim volume is his liveliest, most distilled and delectable single collection. Quintessential O'Hara, and such a bargain!--Lloyd Schwartz, Grolier Poetry Book Shop

Chosen one of Booklist's Top Ten History Books of the Year!

The Afterlife Is Letting Go is a meditative consideration of Japanese American incarceration during WWII by Brandon Shimoda, author of the PEN Open Book Award-winning The Grave on the Wall.--Matt Seidel, Publishers Weekly's Big Indie Books

Both personal and choral, The Afterlife is Letting Go is deeply felt, precise, and as generous in its insights as it is unsparing in its critiques of how 'exclusion zones' proliferate and reach across time and space. A stirring, trenchant, and necessary work.--Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

In a series of reflective, multi-layered, sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the afterlife of the U.S. government's forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing.

Informed by personal/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.

This bilingual collection of Neruda's most essential poems is indispensable.

Selected by a team of poets and prominent Neruda scholars in both Chile and the U.S., this is a definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth and width of Neruda's various styles and themes.

An impressive group of translators that includes Alistair Reid, Stephen Mitchell, Robert Hass, Stephen Kessler and Jack Hirschman, have come together to revisit or completely retranslate the poems; and a handful of previously untranslated works are included as well.

This selection sets the standard for a general, high-quality introduction to Neruda's complete oeuvre.

...The Essential Neruda will prove to be, for most readers, the best introduction to Neruda available in English. In fact, I can think of few other books that have given me so much delight so easily. --The Austin Chronicle

This book is a must-have for any reader interested in a definitive sampling of the most essential poems by one whom many consider one of the best poets of the 20th century.--Mike Nobles, Tulsa World

A splendid way to begin a love affair with our Pablo or, having already succumbed to his infinite charms, revisit him passionately again and again and yet again.--Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden

The editors and translators know how to extract gold from a lifetime of prolific writing. If you want a handy Neruda companion and don't know where to begin, this is it.--The Bloomsbury Review

*Recommended by Reese Witherspoon's Book Club!

*Voted One of Book Riot's Most Influential Queer Books & Horror Novels of All Time!

Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler's Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, Jewelle Gomez's sexy vampire novel.

This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who shares the blood by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story.

The Gilda Stories is groundbreaking not just for the wild lives it portrays, but for how it portrays them--communally, unapologetically, roaming fiercely over space and time.--Emma Donoghue, author of Room

Jewelle Gomez sees right into the heart. This is a book to give to those you want most to find their own strength.--Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out Of Carolina

Jewelle Gomez is a writer, activist, and the author of many books including Forty-Three Septembers, Don't Explain, The Lipstick Papers, Flamingoes and Bears, and Oral Tradition. The Gilda Stories was the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards, and was adapted for the stage by the Urban Bush Women theater company in thirteen United States cities.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs was named one of UTNE Reader's 50 Visionaries Transforming the World, a Reproductive Reality Check Shero, a Black Woman Rising nominee, and was awarded one of the first-ever Too Sexy for 501c3 trophies. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Expanded 50th anniversary edition of the City Lights classic, featuring fifteen new poems. Simultaneously released with Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals on the one-year anniversary of her passing.

By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. In 1968, visionary poet Diane di Prima moved from Beat New York to hippie San Francisco to begin these letters, poems filled with a blend of utopian imagination, radical politics, and ecological awareness. Immersed in alternative histories and mystical traditions, the poems were catapulted into the world through underground newspapers and free pamphlets, circulating far and wide. In 1971, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the first of four ever-expanding book versions in the Pocket Poets Series. In her last years, di Prima oversaw the final iteration of this lifelong project, adding poems written between 2007 and her death in 2020. This 50th Anniversary edition marks the long-awaited return of Revolutionary Lettersto City Lights.

Praise for Revolutionary Letters, 50th Anniversary Edition:

There is a generosity and affection in Revolutionary Letters that I find myself returning to, always, when I'm at my most cynical and feeling lost for any understanding of what a better world might look like. When I need to be grounded and re-centered in my understanding of community care as a living, breathing, full-time mission. And, quite simply, when I need to be reminded of how language can begin on the page, and echo far beyond.--Hanif Abdurraqib

What's astonishing about Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters is how these poems are adamantly useful. A manual of insurgent instruction, these poems tell you how to mitigate tear gas and sleep deprivation, eat a healthy diet, and overthrow the state. This book is ever more urgent in our moment, as a resurgent left faces down the apocalypse. Revolutionary Letters is a time machine towards a better future.--Ken Chen

With this new and expanded edition we are offered a window onto a master poet redefining revolution over her lifetime. Di Prima continues to interrogate the ways in which we have been taught to live, love, eat, write, fight and take control. How can we make the most of this book and its wisdom? It's not enough to simply read it or even to write our own Revolutionary Letters. These poems are not realized until we are called upon to act.--Cedar Sigo

How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. And here you thought this classic couldn't get any better.--Wendy Trevino

Perloff's personal and professional journey--her life as a woman in a male-dominated profession, as a wife and mother, a playwright, director, producer, arts advocate, and citizen in a city erupting with enormous change--is a compelling, entertaining story for anyone interested in how theater gets made. She offers a behind-the-scenes perspective, including her intimate working experiences with well-known actors, directors, and writers, including Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Robert Wilson, David Strathairn, and Olympia Dukakis.

Whether reminiscing about her turbulent first years as a young woman taking over an insolvent theater in crisis and transforming it into a thriving, world-class performance space, or ruminating on the potential for its future, Perloff takes on critical questions about arts education, cultural literacy, gender disparity, leadership, and power.

Carey Perloff is an award-winning playwright, theater director, and the artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater of San Francisco since 1992.

A fascinating, first-person account of a historic era in the struggle for black empowerment in America.

Long an iconic figure for radicals, Huey Newton is now being discovered by those interested in the history of America's social movements. Was he a gifted leader of his people or a dangerous outlaw? Were the Black Panthers heroes or terrorists?

Whether Newton and the Panthers are remembered in a positive or a negative light, no one questions Newton's status as one of America's most important revolutionaries. To Die for the People is a recently issued classic collection of his writings and speeches, tracing the development of Newton's personal and political thinking, as well as the radical changes that took place in the formative years of the Black Panther Party.

With a rare and persuasive honesty, To Die for the People records the Party's internal struggles, rivalries and contradictions, and the result is a fascinating look back at a young revolutionary group determined to find ways to deal with the injustice it saw in American society. And, as a new foreword by Elaine Brown makes eminently clear, Newton's prescience and foresight make these documents strikingly pertinent today.

Huey Newton was the founder, leader and chief theoretician of the Black Panther Party, and one of America's most dynamic and important revolutionary philosophers.

Huey P. Newton's To Die for the People represents one of the most important analyses of the politics of race, black radicalism, and democracy written during the civil rights-Black Power era. It remains a crucial and indispensible text in our contemporary efforts to understand the continuous legacy of social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
--Peniel Joseph, author of Waiting Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

Huey P. Newton's name, and more importantly, his history of resistance and struggle, is little more than a mystery for many younger people. The name of a third-rate rapper is more familiar to the average Black youth, and that's hardly surprising, for the public school system is invested in ignorance, and Huey P. Newton was a rebel -- and more, a Black Revolutionary . . . who gave his best to the Black Freedom movement; who inspired millions of others to stand.
--Mumia Abu Jamal, political prisoner and author of Jailhouse Lawyers

Newton's ability to see theoretically, beyond most individuals of his time, is part of his genius. The opportunity to recognize that genius and see its applicability to our own times is what is most significant about this new edition.
--Robert Stanley Oden, former Panther, Professor of Government, California State University, Sacramento

An NPR Best Book of the Year!

A Southwest Book of the Year!

A Texas Observer Book of the Year!

Stories of working-class Mexican America, penned by one of the contemporary legends of Chicanx literature.

Gilb's familiar signature intimacy brings us face to face with marginal housing, gritty and exhausting jobs, street people, sex, earthquakes, fouled air, physical handicaps, racism. . . . Some of the stories are sidewinders: at first they indicate layers of something juicy and sweet but turn out to pierce the reader with painful splinters of insight.--Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain and The Shipping News

Dagoberto Gilb's latest cast of characters includes a young family whose exposure to a mysterious cloud of gas alters their lives forever; a high school dropout whose choice to learn the ways of the world from the adults at work leads him into a dangerous dalliance; a former high-rise carpenter who meets up with an eager old flame; an aging Chicano, living alone, whose children watch over him for signs of decline; and more. Gilb's distinct narrative voice offers his readers a warm welcome as he peels back the surface of everyday life to seamlessly guide us into realms of of myth and fable.

Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality--Georges Bataille pursues these themes with an original, often startling perspective.

Bataille 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. 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.

. . . one of the most original and unsettling of those thinkers who, in the wake of Sade and Nietzsche, have confronted the possibility of thought in a world that has lost its myth of transcendence.--Peter Brooks, New York Times Book Review

Bataille is one of the most important writers of the century.--Michel Foucault

[An] urgent, thrusting book about love, sex, death and spirituality by Georges Bataille.--Mark Price, Philosophy Now

A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. In this influential study he links the underlying sexual basis of religion to death, offering a dazzling array of insights into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and violence, as well as including comments on Freud, Sade and Saint Theresa. Everywhere, Eroticism argues, sex is surrounded by taboos, which we must continually transgress in order to overcome the sense of isolation that faces us all.--The Book Depository

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French intellectual and literary icon who wrote essays, novels, and poems exploring philosophical and sociological subjects such as eroticism and surrealism. City Lights published more of Bataille's works including The Impossible, The Tears of Eros, and Story of the Eye.

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.

A valuable rebuttal to the drumbeat...from the right. --New York Times Book Review

Entertainingly written. --Publishers Weekly

Parenti writes clear, smooth, often provocative prose, has a way of cutting to the heart of complex issues and knows how to tell a story. --Allan Johnson, Author of Human Arrangements

Michael Parenti, PhD Yale, is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leading progressive political analysts. He is the author of over 275 published articles and twenty books. His writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.

One of The Millions Most Anticipated Books & a Powell's Bookstore Staff Favorite of the Year!

Short stories from 25 emerging and established writers of Middle Eastern and North African origins, a unique collection of voices and viewpoints that illuminate life in the global Arab/Muslim world.

Provocative and subtle, nuanced and surprising, these stories demonstrate how this complicated and rich region might best be approached--through the power of literature.--Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Committed

Stories from the Center of the World gathers new writing from the greater Middle East (or SWANA), a vast region that stretches from Southwest Asia, through the Middle East and Turkey, and across Northern Africa. The 25 authors included here come from a wide range of cultures and countries, including Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, and Morocco, to name some.

In Asha and Haaji, Hanif Kureishi takes up the cause of outsiders who become uprooted when war or disaster strikes and they flee for safe haven. In Nektaria Anastasiadou's The Location of the Soul According to Benyamin Alhadeff, two students in Istanbul from different classes -- and religions that have often been at odds with one another -- believe they can overcome all obstacles. MK Harb's story, Counter Strike, is about queer love among Beiruti adolescents; and Salar Abdoh's The Long Walk of the Martyrs invites us into the world of former militants, fighters who fought ISIS or Daesh in Iraq and Syria, who are having a hard time readjusting to civilian life. In Eleazar, Karim Kattan tells an unexpected Palestinian story in which the usual antagonists -- Israeli occupation forces -- are mostly absent, while another malevolent force seems to overtake an unsuspecting family. Omar El Akkad's The Icarist is a coming-of-age story about the underworld in which illegal immigrants are forced to live, and what happens when one dares to break away.

Contributors include: Salar Abdoh, Leila Aboulela, Farah Ahamed, Omar El Akkad, Sarah AlKahly-Mills, Nektaria Anastasiadou, Amany Kamal Eldin, Jordan Elgrably, Omar Foda, May Haddad, Danial Haghighi, Malu Halasa, MK Harb, Alireza Iranmehr, Karim Kattan, Hanif Kureishi, Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi, Diary Marif, Tariq Mehmood, Sahar Mustafah, Mohammed Al-Naas, Ahmed Naji, Mai Al-Nakib, Abdellah Taia, and Natasha Tynes

One of Lit Hub's most Anticipated Poetry Books for Spring!

Like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Vallejo, Gazan poet Nasser Rabah embodies the magnificent possibilities of the human spirit and imagination under extreme conditions.

Nasser Rabah is my favorite living poet in Palestine. The musicality of his lines could replace my heartbeats and I would feel more than alive.--Mosab Abu Toha, author of Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear

Born in Gaza in 1963, Rabah spent some of his formative years in Egypt, before returning to Gaza in his early twenties, where he has lived ever since. There, among the generations who built its neighborhoods and populate its villages, in a place of great natural beauty and vibrant cities, living under constant surveillance, military occupation, blockade, siege and regular attack, in a culture steeped in literary and spiritual tradition, Rabah developed his distinctively singular vision and poetics.

This is Rabah's first book in English translation. The poems include a selection from three of his published collections, along with new poems written after October 2023, during the full-scale Israeli assault on Gaza. Throughout, we find a combination of irreverence and fidelity to tradition, a sense of surrealism infusing the depiction of everyday incomprehensibilities, and an unsettling, delicate tenderness always on edge in an atmosphere of sensory inundation and emotional saturation. Rabah's poems can be raw and uninhibited by social or literary conventions, exploring and questioning one's relationship to divinity in absurd circumstances while confronting the sacred cows of his own society, along with the sometimes voyeuristic interest from those on the outside of it. His poetry constantly interrogates--sometimes playfully and sometimes in utter existential despair--the paradoxes and difficulties of expression and of writing itself. Nasser Rabah is a poet we have much to learn from.

This is a bi-lingual edition and includes the original versions in Arabic.

Essential radical texts by enslaved, jailed, and imprisoned Americans, edited by renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and activist-scholar Jennifer Black.

Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people's understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out.--Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography

Martin Luther King told us what he saw when he went to the mountaintop....But there's also the foot of the mountain, and there are also the regions beneath the surface. I want to try to tell you a little something about those regions.--Angela Y. Davis, author of Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Beneath the Mountain is a reader's guide for understanding the evolution of anti-prison tenets. This essential core of primary texts provides an arc of insurgent writings by dissidents and revolutionaries who experienced incarceration and state terror first-hand. With contributions from John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Crazy Horse, to Assata Shakur, Malcolm X, and Leonard Peltier, it also includes a previously unpublished communiqué from Angela Davis, written from jail at the time when she was forging the anti-prison critique that has since inspired a national movement.

Beneath the Mountain offers a record of the historic foundations for the contemporary abolition movement. What emerges from these texts is an emancipatory vision that inspires the work being done today, a vision centered on organizing and solidarity as an antidote to repression. An invaluable resource for readers on both sides of prison walls, this compendium of resistance and hard-won vision will be essential to all who seek to develop an abolitionist critique and to further an understanding of the nature of repression and liberation.

Chosen a Best Children's Book of the Year by the Bank Street Center!

Voted a Best Book of the Year by School Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews!

A biography for younger readers about one of the most influential activists of our time, who was an early advocate for African Americans and for gay rights.

Bayard had an unshakable optimism, nerves of steel, and, most importantly, a faith that if the cause is just and people are organized, nothing can stand in our way.--President Barack Obama

Bayard Rustin was one of the great organizers and activists of the Civil Rights Movement. Without his skill and vision, the historic impact of the March on Washington might not have been possible. I am glad this biography will make young people aware of his life and his incredible contribution to American history.--Congressman John Lewis

'We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers, ' declared Bayard Rustin in the late 1940s. A proponent of nonviolent resistance and a stalwart figure in the civil rights movement, Rustin organized a profound and peaceful milestone in American history--the 1963 March on Washington. . . . Troublemaker for Justice describes not only how Rustin orchestrated the March on Washington in two months but also how he stood up for his Quaker principles throughout his life. The three authors, Jacqueline Houtman, Walter Naegle and Michael G. Long, show the difficulties Rustin faced as a gay black man in 20th-century America, and that he shouldered them with strength, intelligence, and a quest for peace and justice.--Abby Nolan, The Washington Post

An excellent biography that belongs in every young adult library. Readers will find Rustin's story captivating; his story could encourage young people to fight for change.--Michelle Kornberger, Library Journal, *Starred Review

In today's political landscape, this volume is a lesson in the courage to live according to one's truth and the dedication it takes to create a better world.--Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review

A long-overdue introduction to a fascinating, influential change maker.--Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review

This biography is an indispensable addition to the literature of both civil and gay rights.--Michael Cart, Booklist, *Starred review

Bayard Rustin was a major figure in the Civil Rights movement. He was arrested on a bus 13 years before Rosa Parks and he participated in integrated bus rides throughout the South 14 years before the Freedom Riders. He was a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., teaching him the techniques and philosophy of Gandhian nonviolent direct action. He organized the March on Washington in 1963, one of the most impactful mobilizations in American history.

Despite these contributions, few Americans recognize his name, and he is absent from most history books, in large part because he was gay. This biography traces Rustin's life, from his childhood and his first arrest in high school for sitting in the whites only section of a theater, through a lifetime of nonviolent activism.

Authors Jacqueline Houtman, Walter Naegle, and Michael G. Long provide middle and high school students with a biography of Rustin that illustrates how the personal is political. Young readers will take away valuable lessons about identity, civics, and 20th-century history.--Rethinking Schools

Teachers: Discussion Guide Available! Explanation of Common Core Instructional Standards Available! Reach out to the publisher at Stacey [@] citylights.com

Exceptional stories that come pounding out of Bukowski's violent and depraved life. Horrible and holy, you cannot read them and ever come away the same again.

This collection of stories was once part of the 1972 City Lights classic, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. That book was later split into two volumes and republished: The Most Beautiful Woman in Town and, this book, Tales of Ordinary Madness.

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.

Bukowski ... a professional disturber of the peace ... laureate of Los Angeles netherworld [writes with] crazy romantic insistence that losers are less phony than winners, and with an angry compassion for the lost.--Jack Kroll, Newsweek

Bukowski's works are extraordinarily vivid and often bitterly funny observations of people living on the very edge of oblivion. His poetry, in all its glorious simplicity, was accessible the way poetry seldom is a testament to his genius.--Nick Burton, PIF Magazine

A concise and illuminating book about the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, one of the early thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism.

Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science.

Attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher and this reading of Spinoza by Gilles Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his introduction, Deleuze opens us to the idea that the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us. One wonders, finally, whether Man might be defined as a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence.

Gilles Deleuze, known for his inquiries into desire, language, politics and power, finds a kinship between Spinoza and Nietzsche. He writes, Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy and in vision . . . he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time I read him, of a witch's broom that he makes one mount.

Gilles Deleuze was a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes.

Robert Hurley is the translator of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.

One of The Millions Most Anticipated Books for Spring !

Set in the uncanny valley between Bugs Bunny and Franz Kafka, Cartoons is an explosive series of outrageous, absurdist tales.

The true surrealist is unblinking, convulsive, and cheerfully open to the mysterious flow, into their texts, of mythic and archetypal elements operating beyond their conscious control. In Cartoons, Kit Schluter vaults into the zone of Julio Cortázar, Richard Brautigan, and late Giorgio di Chirico, where the reader breaths the air of pure freedom attained rattling inside the chains of self.--Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

More than simply a book, Cartoons proposes itself as a genre of imaginary writing in opposition to the realism of most contemporary U.S. fiction, aligning itself with the French symbolism and Latin American fabulism its author is known to translate. A giant cricket with a tiny Kit Schluter in a jar, The Girl Who Is a Piece of Paper, an umbrella who confuses the words porpoise and purpose in its quest for self-fulfillment, these are just a few denizens of its pages, suffused with a fairy tale-like animism. A pair of slugs go on a bender. A microwave oven decries microaggressions. A beer bottle is filled with regret. An escalator mechanic's shoe conceals a terrible secret.

As befits its title, Cartoons defies the laws of physics and fiction alike, eschewing tonal consistency in favor of a simultaneity of joy and horror, ecstasy and disgust, wrapped in an extravagant layer of black humor. The stories blur the boundary between microfiction and poet's prose, featuring impossible transformations and surrealistic events, even as they wrestle with urgent psychic and moral dilemmas. Heightening the atmosphere of pervasive unreality are a number of drawings by the author, which don't so much illustrate as parallel the tales with their own fantastic scenarios.

Motel Chronicles reveals the fast-moving and sometimes surprising world of the man behind the plays that have made Sam Shepard a living legend in the theater.

Shepard chronicles his own life birth in Illinois, childhood memories of Guam, Pasadena and rural Southern California, adventures as ranch hand, waiter, rock musician, dramatist and film actor. Scenes from this book form the basis of his play Superstitions, and of the film (directed by Wim Wenders) Paris, Texas, winner of the Golden Palm Award at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

. . . essential reading. A scrapbook of short stories, autobiographical reveries, poetry and photographs, Motel Chronicles is full of verbal delights, as well as insights into its author's entire canon. Whether Mr. Shepard is reminiscing about his parents or daydreaming about cherished movies and cars of his youth, he speaks in pungent and ethereal language that remakes our West. Read in conjunction with the plays, Motel Chronicles also helps demystify the origins of Mr. Shepard's psychological obsessions and desolate frontier iconography.-Frank Rich, New York Times

If plays were put in time capsules, future generations would get a sharp-toothed profile of life in the U.S. in the past decade and half from the works of Sam Shepard.--Time

Sam Shepard is a shaman--a New World shaman. Sam is as American as peyote, magic mushrooms, Rock and Roll, and medicine bundles.--Jack Gelber

Sam Shepard (1943) is a playwright, actor, author, screen writer and director whose work is performed on and off Broadway and in other theaters across the country. In 1979, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Buried Child. In 1983, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in The Right Stuff. His other famous works include True West, A Lie of the Mind and Curse of the Starving Class. Fool For Love & the Sad Lament of Pecos Bill by Sam Shepard was also published by City Lights Publishers.