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Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin. New York. 1939. Pioneer Publishers. Translated from the French by Frances and Mason Merrill. Introduction by Dwight Macdonald. 339 pages. hardcover. 

DESCRIPTION - Fascism and Big Business, written in 1936 before the Second World War broke out, examines the development of nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy and its relationship with the capitalist families there. Its main thesis is that Fascism supported the heavy industrial sector (represented in Germany by Krupp, Emil Kirdorf, etc.) to the detriment of lighter industrial sectors, dedicated to building consumer goods. It points out the failure of "corporatism," which in effect meant the dismantling of trade unions and worker's inability to elect their own representatives, who were nominated instead by the fascists.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Daniel Guerin (19 May 1904 in Paris - 14 April 1988 in Suresnes) was a French anarcho-communist author, best known for his work Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as his collection No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism in which he collected writings on the idea and movement it inspired, from the first writings of Max Stirner in the mid-19th century through the first half of the 20th century. He is also known for his opposition to Nazism, fascism and colonialism, in addition to his support for the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the Spanish Civil War, and his revolutionary defence of free love and homosexuality.

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Anarchism by Daniel Guerin. New York. 1970. Monthly Review Press. Introduction by Noam Chomsky. Translated from the French by Mary Klopper. 166 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Martin Stephen Moskof Associates, Inc.

DESCRIPTION - Daniel Guerin, one of the ablest writers of the French Left, has brought to bear his extraordinary talents and his four decades of socialist scholarship in this absorbing and authoritative account of the history and theory of anarchism. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Daniel Guerin (19 May 1904 in Paris - 14 April 1988 in Suresnes) was a French anarcho-communist author, best known for his work Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as his collection No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism in which he collected writings on the idea and movement it inspired, from the first writings of Max Stirner in the mid-19th century through the first half of the 20th century. He is also known for his opposition to Nazism, fascism and colonialism, in addition to his support for the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the Spanish Civil War, and his revolutionary defence of free love and homosexuality.

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The Ancient Lowly - 2 volumes by C. Osborne Ward. Chicago. 1888-1900. Charles H. Kerr & Company. volume 1 - 597 pages; volume 716 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - FROM THE ANCIENT LOWLY - The great strikes and uprisings of the working people of the ancient world are almost unknown to the living age. It matters little how accounts of five immense strike-wars, involving destruction of property and mutual slaughter of millions of people, have been suppressed, or have otherwise failed to reach us; the fact remains that people are absolutely ignorant of these great events. A meagre sketch of Spartacus may be seen in the encyclopedias, but it is always ruined and its interest pinched and blighted by being classed with crime, its heroes with criminals, its theme with desecration. Yet Spartacus was one of the great generals of history; fully equal to Hannibal and Napoleon, while his cause was much more just and infinitely nobler, his life a model of the beautiful and virtuous, his death an episode of surpassing grandeur. Still more strange is it, that the great ten-years' war of Eunus should be unknown. He marshalled at one time an army of two hundred thousand soldiers. He manœuvered them and fought for ten full years for liberty, defeating army after army of Rome. Why is the world ignorant of this fierce, epochal rebellion? Almost the whole matter is passed over in silence by our histories of Rome. In these pages it will be read as news, yet should a similar war rage in our day, against a similar condition of slavery, its cause would not only be considered just, but the combatants would have the sympathy and support of the civilized world. The great system of labor organization explained in these pages must likewise be regarded as a chapter of news. The portentous fact has lain in abeyance century after century, with the human family in profound ignorance of an organization of trades and other labor unions so powerful that for hundreds of years they undertook and successfully conducted the business of manufacture, of distribution, of purveying provisions to armies, of feeding the inhabitants of the largest cities in the world, of inventing, supplying and working the huge engines of war, and of collecting customs and taxes - tasks confided to their care by the state. Our civilization has a blushingly poor excuse for its profound ignorance of these facts; for the evidences have existed from much before the beginning of our era.… They are growing fewer and dimmer as their value rises higher in the estimation of a thinking, appreciative, gradually awakening world

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cyrenus Osborne Ward (October 28, 1831 - March 19, 1902) was a historian and author of The Ancient Lowly (1887), the book that looked at ancient history from a working-class perspective. Raised to work on his parents’ Illinois farm, he left home in 1848 when he was seventeen. He travelled, earning his keep in manual trades and as a violinist. He read voraciously in history and geology and taught himself ancient and modern languages. He was rejected for service in the Civil War, and became involved with organised labour in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. His political writings brought him to the attention of international socialists;  the archive holding Ward’s papers in New York Public Library contains his membership card in the International Workingman’s Association, dated 1870 and signed by Karl Marx.Cyrenus Osborne Ward (October 28, 1831 - March 19, 1902) was a historian and author of The Ancient Lowly (1887), the book that looked at ancient history from a working-class perspective. Raised to work on his parents’ Illinois farm, he left home in 1848 when he was seventeen. He travelled, earning his keep in manual trades and as a violinist. He read voraciously in history and geology and taught himself ancient and modern languages. He was rejected for service in the Civil War, and became involved with organised labour in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. His political writings brought him to the attention of international socialists;  the archive holding Ward’s papers in New York Public Library contains his membership card in the International Workingman’s Association, dated 1870 and signed by Karl Marx.Ward was an active organizer and contributor to American socialist politics in the 19th century. He served on the Council of the First International at the The Hague Congress (1872) and worked in Marxist politics in Europe and the United States for much of the late nineteenth century. He worked as a librarian and translator for the US Bureau of Labor during the writing of his great work, under the title A History of the Ancient Working People and The Ancient Lowly to the Adoption of Christianity by Constantine.

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Peddlers of Hate: How the Ku Klux Klan Seized Power in 1920s Oregon by Steve Law. Corvallis. 2026. Oregon State University Press. 9781962645706. 278 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - The revived Knights of the Ku Klux Klan flourished in Oregon in the early 1920s. With more than sixty chapters established in both large and small communities like Portland, Medford, Astoria, and La Grande, the Klan’s power escalated in the region. Klan salesmen, working on commission, successfully enlisted Oregonians with a message of religious prejudice and racism. At the Klan’s peak, Portland was home to the sixth largest chapter in the country and there were more members per capita in Oregon than in any other state except one. In Peddlers of Hate, journalist Steve Law draws on published and unpublished sources, new research, and interviews with leading scholars to provide a comprehensive account of how Oregon became one of the Klan’s strongest outposts. Representing the Klan as merely a fraternal lodge, Klan recruiters were trained to vilify Catholics, immigrants, Blacks, and Jews. They gained wide support, toppling an incumbent governor and congressman, persuading voters to ban Catholic schools, and winning control of the legislature and several local governments. From stories of “escaped nuns” to fiery crosses at mass Klan rallies at Salem’s state fairgrounds and Portland’s Mount Tabor Park, Law examines this divisive and forgotten time in Oregon’s history. He shows how it was finally greed, hypocrisy, and corruption that spurred the hate group’s demise―providing historical lessons that will resonate today.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Steve Law is a retired Oregon newspaper reporter and editor. He and his wife live in Portland, Oregon.

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On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky. London. 2014. Penguin Books. 9780241969601. 170 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - On Anarchism sheds a much needed light on the foundations of Chomsky's thought, specifically his constant questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched power. The book gathers his essays and interviews to provide a short, accessible introduction to his distinctively optimistic brand of anarchism. Refuting the notion of anarchism as a fixed idea, and disputing the traditional fault lines between anarchism and socialism, this is a book sure to challenge, provoke and inspire. Profoundly relevant to our times, it is a touchstone for political activists and anyone interested in deepening their understanding of anarchism, or of Chomsky's thought.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books. Between 1980 and 1992, Chomsky was cited within the field of Arts and Humanities more often than any other living scholar, and eighth overall within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index during the same period. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the ‘world's top public intellectual' in a 2005 poll. Chomsky has also been described as the ‘father of modern linguistics' and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, logic, mathematics, music theory and analysis, political science, programming language theory and psychology. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem. After the publication of his first books on linguistics, Chomsky became a prominent critic of the Vietnam War and has since continued to publish books of political criticism. He has become well known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy, state capitalism and the mainstream news media. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media. He describes his views as ‘fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism,' and often identifies with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.

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The World of Odysseus by M. I. Finley. New York. 1978. Viking Press. 0670787647. 192 pages. hardcover. 

DESCRIPTION - Are the Iliad and the Odyssey just charming poetic fantasies? Or do they give a more or less accurate picture of the Mycenaean period, the early Dark Age or Homer's own era? Do archaeological discoveries like Schliemann's excavations at Troy bear out Homer's account of the Trojan War? The World of Odysseus is a concise and penetrating account of the society that gave birth to the Iliad and the Odyssey--a book that provides a vivid picture of the Greek Dark Ages, its men and women, works and days, morals and values. Long celebrated as a pathbreaking achievement in the social history of the ancient world, M.I. Finley's brilliant study remains, as classicist Bernard Knox notes, "as indispensable to the professional as it is accessible to the general reader"--a fundamental companion for students of Homer and Homeric Greece.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Moses I. Finley (May 20, 1912–June 23, 1986) was an American professor, whose prosecution by the McCarran Security Committee led to his move to England, where he became English classical scholar and eventually master of Darwin College, Cambridge. His most notable work is The Ancient Economy (1973), where he argued that status and civic ideology governed the economy in antiquity rather than rational economic motivations.

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Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves. New York. 1955. Cassell & Company. 204 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - We don't know who, or even if, Homer was. Given threads of internal evidence in the 'Odyssey', Robert Graves invents, or discovers, that the author of the poem was a woman, herself part of the epic action. He chooses the beguiling, clear-headed Nausicaa and re-visions the post-Trojan world through her eyes. This is the theme of 'Homer's Daughter', one of Graves's most daring fictional acts. The 'Odyssey' has been described as a 'woman's epic', full of female characters and different in kind and colour from the 'Illiad' with its tight focus, its largely male world, Graves's Nausicaa is brilliant at telling dramatic aplomb. The confrontations in the Council and between Aethon and the suitors are memorably evoked. Nausicaa is a princess of mixed Greek and other ancestry, combining in herself the various cultures that inform the language and folklore of the epic. Graves makes it possible for us to believe that the author told her own story, a true one, buried within the Homeric epic.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Graves was born on July 24, 1895, in Wimbledon, near London. His father, Alfred Perceval Graves, was a Gaelic scholar and minor Irish poet. His mother, Amalie von Ranke Graves, was a relation of Leopold von Ranke, one of the founding fathers of modern historical studies. One of ten children, Robert was greatly influenced by his mother's puritanical beliefs and his father's love of Celtic poetry and myth. As a young man, he was more interested in boxing and mountain climbing than studying, although poetry later sustained him through a turbulent adolescence. In 1913 Graves won a scholarship to continue his studies at St. John's College, Oxford, but in August 1914 he enlisted as a junior officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He fought in the Battle of Loos and was injured in the Somme offensive in 1916. While convalescing, he published his first collection of poetry, OVER THE BRAZIER. By 1917, though still an active serviceman, Graves had published three volumes. In 1918, he spent a year in the trenches, where he was again severely wounded. In January 1918, at the age of twenty-two, he married eighteen-year-old Nancy Nicholson, with whom he was to have four children. Traumatized by the war, he went to Oxford with his wife and took a position at St. John's College. Graves's early volumes of poetry, like those of his contemporaries, deal with natural beauty and bucolic pleasures, and with the consequences of the First World War. OVER THE BRAZIER and FAIRIES AND FUSILIERS earned for Graves the reputation as an accomplished war poet. After meeting the American poet and theorist Laura Riding in 1926, Graves's poetry underwent a significant transformation. Douglas Day has written that the ‘influence of Laura Riding is quite possibly the most important single element in [Graves's] poetic career: she persuaded him to curb his digressiveness and his rambling philosophizing and to concentrate instead on terse, ironic poems written on personal themes.' In 1927, Graves and his first wife separated permanently, and in 1929 he published GOODBYE TO ALL THAT, an autobiography that announced his psychological accommodation with the residual horror of his war experiences. Shortly afterward, he departed to Majorca with Laura Riding. In addition to completing many books of verse while in Majorca, Graves also wrote several volumes of criticism, some in collaboration with Riding. The couple cofounded Seizin Press in 1928 and Epilogue, a semiannual magazine, in 1935. During that period, he evolved his theory of poetry as spiritually cathartic to both the poet and the reader. Although Graves claimed that he wrote novels only to earn money, it was through these that he attained status as a major writer in 1934, with the publication of the historical novel I, CLAUDIUS, and its sequel, CLAUDIUS THE GOD AND HIS WIFE MESSALINA. (During the 1970's, the BBC adapted the novels into an internationally popular television series.) At the onset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Graves and Riding fled Majorca, eventually settling in America. In 1939, Laura Riding left Graves for the writer Schuyler Jackson; one year later Graves began a relationship with Beryl Hodge that was to last until his death. It was in the 1940s, after his break with Riding, that Graves formulated his personal mythology of the White Goddess. Inspired by late nineteenth-century studies of matriarchal societies and goddess cults, this mythology was to pervade all of his later work. After World War II, Graves returned to Majorca, where he lived with Hodge and continued to write. By the 1950's, Graves had won an enormous international reputation as a poet, novelist, literary scholar, and translator. In 1962, W. H. Auden went as far as to assert that Graves was England's ‘greatest living poet.' In 1968 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. During his lifetime he published more than 140 books, including fifty-five collections of poetry (he reworked his COLLECTED POEMS repeatedly during his career), fifteen novels, ten translations, and forty works of nonfiction, autobiography, and literary essays. From 1961 to 1966, Graves returned to England to serve as a professor of poetry at Oxford. In the 1970s his productivity fell off; and the last decade of his life was lost in silence and senility. Robert Graves died in Majorca in 1985, at the age of ninety.

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The Odyssey by Homer. Baltimore. 1967. Penguin Books. Translated from the Greek & With An Introduction by E. V. Rieu. 365 pages. paperback. L1. The cover shows a bronze relief of Odysseus in the Department of Antiquities, Berlin. 

DESCRIPTION - Homer's ODYSSEY, the great epic poem about the adventures of Odysseus during his return from the Trojan War and the drama of his homecoming, was translated by E.V. Rieu to make Homer enjoyable for those who are unfamiliar with the Greek world. The result is a modern best-seller. Indeed, the ODYSSEY, with its well-knit plot, its psychological interest and its interplay of character, is the true ancestor of the long line of novels that have followed it.' Homer's vitality and freshness are undimmed in Dr Rieu's lucid and sensitive prose translation.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Homer is best known as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He was believed by the ancient Greeks to have been the first and greatest of the epic poets. Author of the first known literature of Europe, he had a lasting effect on the Western canon. Whether and when he lived is unknown. Herodotus estimates that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him at around 850 BCE. Pseudo-Herodotus estimates that he was born 622 years before Xerxes I placed a pontoon bridge over the Hellespont in 480 BCE, which would place him at 1102 BCE, 168 years after the fall of Troy in 1270 BCE. These two end points are 252 years apart, representative of the differences in dates given by the other sources. The importance of Homer to the ancient Greeks is described in Plato's 'Republic', which portrays him as the protos didaskalos, 'first teacher', of the tragedians, the hegemon paideias, 'leader of Greek culture', and the ten Hellada pepaideukon, 'teacher of [all] Greece'. Homer's works, which are about fifty percent speeches, provided models in persuasive speaking and writing that were emulated throughout the ancient and medieval Greek worlds. Fragments of Homer account for nearly half of all identifiable Greek literary papyrus finds in Egypt.

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The Authoress of the Odyssey by Samuel Butler. Chicago. 1967. Phoenix Books/University of Chicago Press. Introduction by David Grene. A Phoenix Book published by The University of Chicago Press. 277 pages. paperback. Cover Design by Sidney Pivecka.

DESCRIPTION - In this heterodox but serious study of the Odyssey, originally published in 1897, Butler argues that the epic was not only written more than two centuries later than the Iliad, but that the author was a woman, a young Sicilian lady of Trapani. With great insight - and sometimes with whimsical humor - Butler examines the poem not only as a classical scholar but also as a fellow artist. His ‘proof' that much of the Odyssey could only have been written by a woman will convince many modern readers, if it did not some of his contemporaries. David Grene, in a new Introduction to the book, writes: ‘Butler's commonsense has a special sturdiness. It stands up. It occasionally approaches philistinism; but it never dissolves into verbal trickery and human falsity when we look closer. And in this strangest of books of classical scholarship and criticism, the paradoxical approach, whether you accept Butler's conclusions or not, makes you look at real things in the poem.' 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Butler (December 4, 1835, Langar, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom - June 18, 1902, London, United Kingdom) was an English satirist with an interest in music, biology, literature, and art, as well as classical scholarship. Among his other books are Erewhon, Erewhon Revisited, and The Way of All Flesh.

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Tragic Magic: The Life of Traffic’s Chris Wood by Dan Ropek. Oakamoor. 2016. Oakamoor Publishing. 9781910773192. 236 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Traffic was the most enigmatic British band of their day. Formed in early 1967 by Chris Wood, Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi and Dave Mason, they rejected the bright lights of London in favor of a run-down, supposedly haunted, cottage in the country - a place to live communally and write music. With Chris especially intent on channeling the vibes of England's landscape into their sound, days would be spent getting high, exploring, playing and working in varying proportions. Against all odds, this eccentric model paid off - songs such as "Dear Mr. Fantasy" and "John Barleycorn Must Die" would lift Traffic into the upper echelons of the rock world. As they brushed shoulders with Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, and the Grateful Dead, and with Dave dropping in and out of the band, Traffic's music evolved from a synthesis of Steve's innate musicality, Jim's atmospheric lyrics and Chris's special brand of congenial mysticism. Record sales boomed and tours carried them back and forth across the Atlantic, everything seemed to be going to plan - a dreamlike fairy tale come true. But for Chris, a toll would be exacted. Amid the clashing egos, wearing road trips, stressful break ups and a complex personal life, he vacillated precariously between bursts of exquisite creativity and torrents of self-destruction; a paradoxical dance which continued until his death in 1983. For a man who found artistic expression everything, and for whom suffering for it was an expectation, Chris would stare fully into the Medusa's face of the music industry, paying a higher price than perhaps any of his contemporaries. Researched and written over a ten-year period, "Tragic Magic" offers the only definitive account of Traffic's story and Chris Wood's quietly extraordinary life.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dan Ropek has previously written for Goldmine, Record Collector, and Crawdaddy! magazines He Also designed the cover and wrote the liner notes for Chris Wood’s Vulcan album (2008). When not teaching at Columbia Gorge Community College, Dan plays music and tends a small patch of forest in nearby Mount Hood, Oregon.

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Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question by Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens (editors). London/New York. 2001. Verso. 1859843409. With contributions by Edward W. Said, Norman G. Finkelstein, Christopher Hitchens, Peretz Kidron, Noam Chomsky, G. W. Bowersock, Ibrahim Abue-Lughod, Rashid Khalidi, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Muhammad Hallaj, and Elia Zureik. 296 pages. paperback. Cover photograph by Jean Mohr. 

DESCRIPTION - Since the 1948 war which drove them from their heartland, the Palestinian people have consistently been denied the most basic democratic rights. Blaming the Victims shows how the historical fate of the Palestinians has been justified by spurious academic attempts to dismiss their claim to a home within the boundaries of historical Palestine and even to deny their very existence. Beginning with a thorough exposé of the fraudulent assertions of Joan Peters concerning the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine prior to 1948, the book then turns to similar instances in Middle East research where the truth about the Palestinians has been systematically suppressed: from the bogus—though still widely believed—explanations of why so many Palestinians fled their homes in 1948, to today’s distorted propaganda about PLO terrorism. The volume also includes sharp critiques of the wide consensus in the USA which supports Israel and its territorial ambitions while maintaining total silence about the competing reality of the Palestinians.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward W. Said (1935–2003) was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature and of Kings College Cambridge, his celebrated works include Orientalism, The End of the Peace Process, Power, Politics and Culture, and the memoir Out of Place. He is also the editor, with Christopher Hitchens, of Blaming the Victims, published by Verso. New Left Review published an obituary in Nov–Dec 2003. Christopher Hitchens was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and. is a columnist for The Nation, Washington editor for Harper's, and a book reviewer for Newsday. Christopher Hitchens joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in November 1992 and wrote regularly for the magazine until 2011. In May 2011, he won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary for a series of columns on his having cancer. In recent years, Hitchens was a contributing editor to The Atlantic, where he wrote a monthly essay on books, and a regular columnist at Slate. From 1982 to 2002, he wrote a biweekly column for The Nation. Throughout his singular career Christopher Hitchens wrote for The New Statesman, the London Evening Standard, London's Daily Express, Harper's, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. His books include THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER (VERSO, 2001), LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN (BASIC, 2001), GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING (TWELVE, 2007), HITCH-22: A MEMOIR (TWELVE, 2010), and ARGUABLY: ESSAYS BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Twelve, 2011), a collection of his later essays. Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011.   Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of American Power and the New Mandarins, Manufacturing Consent (with Ed Herman), Deterring Democracy, Year 501, World Orders Old and New, Powers and Prospects, Profit over People, The New Military Humanism and Rogue States. Norman G. Finkelstein is the author of A Nation on Trial (with Ruth Bettina Birn), named a notable book for 1998 by the New York Times Book Review, and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

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The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi. New York. 2020. Metropolitan Books. 9781627798556. 321 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history. In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members - mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists - The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rashid Khalidi is the author of Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (Beacon Press, 2013) and six other books about the Middle East--Sowing Crisis, The Iron Cage, Resurrecting Empire, Origins of Arab Nationalism, Under Siege, and the award-winning Palestinian Identity. He is the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University and editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He has written more than eighty articles on Middle Eastern history and politics, including pieces in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and many journals. Professor Khalidi has received fellowships and grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Rockefeller Foundation; he was also the recipient of a Fulbright research award. Professor Khalidi has been a regular guest on numerous radio and TV shows, including All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Nightline.

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The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands by Jeremy Salt. Berkeley. 2008. University of California Press. 9780520255517. 1 map. 484 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Written for those who want to know more about the Middle East than the mainstream media is willing or able to tell, this book begins by examining a question that has been asked by numerous commentators since September 11, 2001: ‘Why do they hate us?' Jeremy Salt offers the background essential for understanding the Middle East today by chronicling the long and bloody history of Western intervention in Arab lands. In lucid detail, he examines the major events that have shaped the region - ranging from the French in Algeria and the British in Egypt in the nineteenth century to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and to the continuing war in Iraq. Linking all of these together, Salt paints a damning picture of a sustained campaign by Western powers to dominate the Middle East by whatever means necessary. Throughout, he emphasizes the human cost of the policies put in place to preserve ‘Western interests' or in the name of bringing civilization, democracy, or freedom to the region. Making use of extensive research in U.S. and British archives that reveals what politicians were deciding behind closed doors, and why, this is a book that will change the way we see the Middle East. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jeremy Salt teaches in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Ankara and is author of Imperialism, Evangelism, and the Ottoman Armenians, 1878-1896.

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Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli. New York. 2016. Riverhead Books. 9780399184413. Translated from the Italian by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. 86 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: Coralie Bickford-Smith.

DESCRIPTION - This playful, entertaining, and mind-bending introduction to modern physics briskly explains Einstein's general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role humans play in this weird and wonderful world. Carlo Rovelli, a renowned theoretical physicist, is a delightfully poetic and philosophical scientific guide. He takes us to the frontiers of our knowledge: to the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, back to the origins of the cosmos, and into the workings of our minds. The book celebrates the joy of discovery.  “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world,” Rovelli writes. “And it’s breathtaking.”

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CARLO ROVELLI received his PhD in physics at the University of Padua. He has conducted research at Imperial College, Yale University, the University of Rome, and the University of Pittsburgh, and currently directs the quantum gravity group of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Aix-Marseille University. He is author of Quantum Gravity and What Is Time? What Is Space?, as well as many scholarly articles. His most recent book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, translated into thirty-four languages, is an international bestseller.

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Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution by Carlo Rovelli. New York. 2021. Riverhead Books. 9780593328880. Translated from the Italian by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell. 235 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: Jason Booher.

DESCRIPTION - One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, he examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving. Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg made the crucial breakthrough for the creation of quantum mechanics, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious. As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercely debate the meaning of the theory, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relationships rather than substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for thinking about the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness. Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better comprehend our place in it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CARLO ROVELLI received his PhD in physics at the University of Padua. He has conducted research at Imperial College, Yale University, the University of Rome, and the University of Pittsburgh, and currently directs the quantum gravity group of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Aix-Marseille University. He is author of Quantum Gravity and What Is Time? What Is Space?, as well as many scholarly articles. His most recent book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, translated into thirty-four languages, is an international bestseller.

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An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz. Boston. 2018. Beacon Press. 9780807013106. American Crossroads 16. 276 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Louis Roe.

DESCRIPTION - 2018 Winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights. Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers' Day, when migrant laborers - Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth - united in resistance on the first “Day Without Immigrants.” As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of “America First” rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights. 

Professor Paul Ortiz (Ph.D. Duke University, 2000) is the author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States, which received the 2018 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. His book Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 was awarded the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Book Prize from the Florida Historical Society and the Florida Institute of Technology. He also co-edited and conducted oral history interviews for the book, Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Jim Crow South. He teaches undergraduate courses and supervises graduate fields in African American history, Latinx history, comparative ethnic studies, U.S. South, labor, social movement theory, oral history and field work methodologies among other topics. Ortiz is currently working on three books: Settler Colonialism and the ‘War on Terror’: 1492 to the Present, which will be published by Beacon Press. He is co-editing a book with Wesley Hogan of Duke University titled Changing the System Now: People Power, History, and Organizing in the 21st Century, which includes contributions by William Greider, Lane Windham, Ernie Cortes and other activist intellectuals. He is currently finishing a synthesis of the segregated South with William H. Chafe titled: Behind the Veil: African Americans in the Age of Segregation, 1895-1965. Professor Ortiz is the director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. Under his leadership, SPOHP has received three national academic awards. The program offers oral history and experiential learning classroom and fieldwork opportunities year-round. The Proctor Program has led 15 field work trips to the Mississippi Delta where students have interviewed veterans of the civil rights movement. Most recently, SPOHP students helped to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Elaine Massacre in Phillips County, Arkansas. The program has also facilitated field work on special topics including global climate change, Latinx studies, African American history, women’s history, LGBT studies and many other areas. He joined the University of Florida Department of History in 2008 after teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Department of Community Studies between 2001-2008.

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Cold War on Five Continents:A Global History of Empire and Espionage by Alfred W. McCoy. Chicago. 2025. Haymarket Books. 9798888905029. 591 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - A provocative analysis of the deadly Cold War conflicts that devastated countries and communities far from Moscow and Washington. Transforming battlegrounds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into veritable hellscapes, the surrogate wars of the Cold War era left behind a legacy of collective trauma and social conflict that have persisted into the present. In this ambitious work, Alfred W. McCoy uses a bottom-up, outside-in approach to offer an unexpected new perspective on the longest, most consequential conflict in modern history. McCoy renders an intimate portrait of both embattled covert operatives and committed antiwar protesters, thus humanizing the history of the Cold War—a history that has too often been told in impersonal terms of economic growth, nuclear arsenals, or diplomatic ententes. As today’s great powers devote humanity’s scarce resources toward ratcheting up a “new cold war” in the face of a worsening climate crisis, McCoy’s history is an important reminder that otherwise- ordinary individuals once helped end a global conflict that threatened nuclear holocaust.

 Alfred W. McCoy is professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Educated at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Yale, he has spent the past twenty years writing about the politics and history of Southeast Asia. He is the author of several books on the Philippines, one of which won the country's National Book Award, and the editor of Southeast Asia Under Japanese Occupation. An internationally recognized expert on drug trafficking and organized crime, he is also the author of DRUG TRAFFIC: NARCOTICS AND ORGANIZED CRIME IN AUSTRALIA.

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Before by Carmen Boullosa. Dallas. 2016. Deep Vellum Publishing. 9781941920282. Translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush. Introduction by Phillip Lopate. 113 pages. paperback. Cover design and typesetting by Anna Zylicz. Originally published as Antes in Mexico City, Mexico by Vuelta in 1989.

DESCRIPTION - Part bildungsroman, part ghost story, part revenge novel, Before tells the story of a woman who returns to the landscape of her childhood to overcome the fear that held her captive as a girl. This powerful exploration of the path to womanhood and lost innocence won Mexico's two most prestigious literary prizes. Carmen Boullosa, one of Mexico's leading writers, has published nearly twenty novels. Her most recent novel, Texas: The Great Theft, won the 2014 Typographical Era Translation Award and was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Translation Award.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carmen Boullosa (born September 4, 1954 in Mexico City, Mexico) is a leading Mexican poet, novelist and playwright. Her work is eclectic and difficult to categorize, but it generally focuses on the issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context. Her work has been praised by a number of prominent writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Alma Guillermoprieto and Elena Poniatowska, as well as publications such as Publishers Weekly. She has won a number of awards for her works, and has taught at universities such as Georgetown University, Columbia University and New York University (NYU), as well as at universities in nearly a dozen other countries. She is currently Distinguished Lecturer at the City College of New York. She has two children -- Maria Aura and Juan Aura -- with her former partner, Alejandro Aura --and is now married to Mike Wallace, the Pulitzer-prize winning co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Boullosa has written over a dozen novels, and some of these works have been translated into five different languages. Her bestselling novel, Son vacas, somos puercos (1991) was translated into English in 1997 as They're Cows, We're Pigs. The story is narrated in the first person by an old man looking back on his life. He was kidnapped and sent from his native France on a slave ship to the West Indies at the age of thirteen. To gain his freedom, he joins a group of pirates (or ‘pigs'), allowing Boullosa to compare two very different societal and political systems - traditional Europe and carefree pirates. In La milagrosa, a novel written in 1993, the protagonist is a girl who has the power to heal the sick and perform other miracles while she sleeps. She falls in love with Aurelio Jimenez, a detective sent to discredit her, even though she fears that her powers will disappear if she spends time with people. It ends ambiguously, leaving an unsolved murder without closure. Duerme, another popular work published in 1995, tells the story of Claire, a French woman whose mother was a prostitute. Attempting to escape the same profession, she arrives in Spain dressed as a man. To save a subject of the Spanish king, she reveals herself as a female and prepares to take his punishment of death by hanging. Beforehand, however, she is wounded in the left breast and her blood is replaced by water from the lakes of Mexico City. The water's magical powers make it possible for her to survive the punishment. She is also famous for her Teatro herEtico (1987), a compilation of three parodies in play format - Aura y las once mil vírgenes, Cocinar hombres, and Propusieron a María. The first tells the story of a man called by God to ‘deflower' eleven thousand virgins in his life, so that heaven's overpopulation problem might be addressed, since the women will have to wait in purgatory for a time. The man then uses his sexual encounters as material for his television commercials and becomes a successful advertising agent. Cocinar hombres tells the story of two girls who find themselves to have become young adult witches overnight, so as to fly over the earth tempting but not satisfying men. Finally, the third play satirically recounts the conversation between Joseph and Mary before Mary gives birth to Jesus and ascends to heaven.

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The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez. Minneapolis. 2021. Graywolf Press. 9781644450475. Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. 222 pages. paperback. Cover design: Walter Green. Originally published in 2016 as La dimension desconocida.

DESCRIPTION - It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández’s mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man’s face on the magazine’s cover with the words “I Tortured People.” His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fernández follows the “man who tortured people” to places that archives can’t reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel’s title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime. How do crimes vanish in plain sight? How does one resist a repressive regime? And who gets to shape the truths we live by and take for granted? The Twilight Zone pulls us into the dark portals of the past, reminding us that the work of the writer in the face of historical erasure is to imagine so deeply that these absences can be, for a time, spectacularly illuminated.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Patricia Paola Fernández Silanes (born 23 June 1971), better known as Nona Fernández, is a Chilean actress, author, and screenwriter. She is a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, and the Altazor prize (on many occasions). An only child of a single mother, Nona Fernández grew up in a Matta Avenue neighborhood close to the market Persa Bíobío. There she had her first job, selling second-hand clothes. Even though her name is the same as her mother's, Patricia Paola, everyone calls her Nona, the name by which she also signs her works. When she was just starting to walk, she used to talk little, hardly saying anything. All she could say was 'no'. Turning this negative into her child's pet word earned her the peculiar nickname "Nonito" among her family. When she got older, the nickname became Nona. She attended Santa Cruz School in Santiago and later the Catholic University Theater School. Later, as an actress, she founded the company Merri Melodys, participated in productions of many theatrical works, and won a competition of the Centro Chileno-Norteamericano de Cultura as the best actress. Natasha Wimmer is a translator who has worked on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, for which she was awarded the PEN Translation prize in 2009, and The Savage Detectives. She lives in New York.

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Space Invaders: A Novel by Nona Fernandez. Minneapolis. 2019. Graywolf Press. 9781644450079. Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. 76 pages. paperback. Cover design: Walter Green. Translation of Space Invaders.

DESCRIPTION - A dreamlike evocation of a generation that grew up in the shadow of a dictatorship in 1980s Chile. Space Invaders is the story of a group of childhood friends who, in adulthood, are preoccupied by uneasy memories and visions of their classmate Estrella González Jepsen. In their dreams, they catch glimpses of Estrella’s braids, hear echoes of her voice, and read old letters that eventually, mysteriously, stopped arriving. They recall regimented school assemblies, nationalistic class performances, and a trip to the beach. Soon it becomes clear that Estrella’s father was a ranking government officer implicated in the violent crimes of the Pinochet regime, and the question of what became of her after she left school haunts her erstwhile friends. Growing up, these friends―from her pen pal, Maldonado, to her crush, Riquelme―were old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them, but were powerless in the face of it. They could control only the stories they told one another and the “ghostly green bullets” they fired in the video game they played obsessively. One of the leading Latin American writers of her generation, Nona Fernández effortlessly builds a choral and constantly shifting image of young life in the waning years of the dictatorship. In her short but intricately layered novel, she summons the collective memory of a generation, rescuing felt truth from the oblivion of official history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Patricia Paola Fernández Silanes (born 23 June 1971), better known as Nona Fernández, is a Chilean actress, author, and screenwriter. She is a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, and the Altazor prize (on many occasions). An only child of a single mother, Nona Fernández grew up in a Matta Avenue neighborhood close to the market Persa Bíobío. There she had her first job, selling second-hand clothes. Even though her name is the same as her mother's, Patricia Paola, everyone calls her Nona, the name by which she also signs her works. When she was just starting to walk, she used to talk little, hardly saying anything. All she could say was 'no'. Turning this negative into her child's pet word earned her the peculiar nickname "Nonito" among her family. When she got older, the nickname became Nona. She attended Santa Cruz School in Santiago and later the Catholic University Theater School. Later, as an actress, she founded the company Merri Melodys, participated in productions of many theatrical works, and won a competition of the Centro Chileno-Norteamericano de Cultura as the best actress. Natasha Wimmer is a translator who has worked on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, for which she was awarded the PEN Translation prize in 2009, and The Savage Detectives. She lives in New York.

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Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers. New York. 2025. Harper. 9780063246638. 353 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Olivia McGiff.

DESCRIPTION - Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression. In Misbehaving at the Crossroads, a landmark work of Black history and memoir, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism and Black feminist thought; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks. Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman―and her extraordinary foremothers. How have Black women navigated the treacherous crossroads of American history to define their own identities? Intersectionality in Action: Go beyond the buzzword to see how the unique position of Black women in America shapes their public and private lives, from girlhood to womanhood; The Politics of Respectability: An unflinching look at the improvisational strategies Black women have used to combat oppression while navigating notions of femininity assigned to White women; Womanism and its Roots: Explore the origins of Black feminism, tracing its development as a powerful tool of resistance against both White supremacy and patriarchy; Ancestry and Historical Trauma: Jeffers combines personal genealogy with deep historical research to document the challenges of tracing Black women’s ancestry and uncovering the stories of her own extraordinary foremothers.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections, including the 2020 collection The Age of Phillis, which won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award, the George Washington Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She was a contributor to The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward, and has been published in the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and other literary publications. Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, whose members include fourteen U.S. presidents, and is Critic at Large for Kenyon Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at University of Oklahoma. The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois is her first novel and was a New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and an Oprah Book Club Pick.

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Voyager: Constellations of Memory by Nona Fernandez. Minneapolis. 2023. Graywolf Press. 9781644452172. Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. 112 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kapo Ng. Translation of: Voyager (mapa de las lenguas). 

DESCRIPTION - A startling book-length essay, at once grand and intimate, from National Book Award finalist Nona Fernández. Voyager begins with Nona Fernández accompanying her elderly mother to the doctor to seek an explanation for her frequent falls and inability to remember what preceded them. As the author stares at the image of her mother’s brain scan, it occurs to her that the electrical signals shown on the screen resemble the night sky. Inspired by the mission of the Voyager spacecrafts, Fernández begins a process of observation and documentation. She describes a recent trip to the remote Atacama desert―one of the world’s best spots for astronomical observation―to join people who, like her, hope to dispel the mythologized history of Chile’s new democracy. Weaving together the story of her mother’s illness with story of her country and of the cosmos itself, Fernández braids astronomy and astrology, neuroscience and memory, family history and national history into this brief but intensely imagined autobiographical essay. Scrutinizing the mechanisms of personal, civic, and stellar memory, she insists on preserving the truth of what we’ve seen and experienced, and finding ways to recover what people and countries often prefer to forget. In Voyager, Fernández finds a new container for her profound and surreal reckonings with the past. One of the great chroniclers of our day, she has written a rich and resonant book.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Patricia Paola Fernández Silanes (born 23 June 1971), better known as Nona Fernández, is a Chilean actress, author, and screenwriter. She is a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, and the Altazor prize (on many occasions). An only child of a single mother, Nona Fernández grew up in a Matta Avenue neighborhood close to the market Persa Bíobío. There she had her first job, selling second-hand clothes. Even though her name is the same as her mother's, Patricia Paola, everyone calls her Nona, the name by which she also signs her works. When she was just starting to walk, she used to talk little, hardly saying anything. All she could say was 'no'. Turning this negative into her child's pet word earned her the peculiar nickname "Nonito" among her family. When she got older, the nickname became Nona. She attended Santa Cruz School in Santiago and later the Catholic University Theater School. Later, as an actress, she founded the company Merri Melodys, participated in productions of many theatrical works, and won a competition of the Centro Chileno-Norteamericano de Cultura as the best actress. Natasha Wimmer is a translator who has worked on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, for which she was awarded the PEN Translation prize in 2009, and The Savage Detectives. She lives in New York.

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The History of Western Philosophy of Western Philosophy in One Hundred Haiku by Haris Vlavianos. New York. 2026. Eris. 9781967751808. Translated by Peter Mackridge. 116 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - A whirlwind tour of two and a half millennia―told in 100 razor-sharp haiku. In this audacious pocket history, celebrated Greek poet Haris Vlavianos compresses Western philosophy from Thales to Nussbaum into crystalline 5-7-5 bursts: funny, heretical, and unexpectedly illuminating. Plato gets a cave with “all mod cons.” Kant boots up a “laptop mind.” Wittgenstein tries to coax a fly from its bottle. It’s Russell meets Bashō, Socrates with a punchline―and beneath the wit, real argument and insight. Rendered into live, witty English by Peter Mackridge, The History of Western Philosophy in 100 Haiku is a perfect gift for the philosophically curious, the poetry-obsessed, and anyone who likes their big ideas distilled to their brightest essence. Read it straight through, keep it by the bedside, or press it into a skeptic’s hand: you’ll laugh, you’ll learn, and you’ll never look at the canon the same way again.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Haris Vlavianos is a Greek poet, translator, and scholar. Educated at the University of Bristol and at Oxford, he is Professor of History, Political Theory, and History of Ideas at the American College of Greece, and editor of the literary journal Poetics. He is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry and essays, and has translated T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Anne Carson, and William Blake into Greek. Peter Mackridge is Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Oxford and a visiting professor at King’s College London. A leading authority on Greek language and literature, he is the author of The Modern Greek Language and Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976 (both OUP). He has introduced and translated C. P. Cavafy for Oxford World’s Classics and rendered into English major works by Vizyenos, Papadiamandis, Tachtsis, and others―bringing scholarly precision and lyrical ease to every translation.

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The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. New York. 2018. Riverhead Books. 9780735216105. 240 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: Jason Booher.

DESCRIPTION - From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, a concise, elegant exploration of time. Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to “flow”? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe. Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Brief Lessons on Physics so appealing, The Order of Time offers a profoundly intelligent, culturally rich, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CARLO ROVELLI received his PhD in physics at the University of Padua. He has conducted research at Imperial College, Yale University, the University of Rome, and the University of Pittsburgh, and currently directs the quantum gravity group of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Aix-Marseille University. He is author of Quantum Gravity and What Is Time? What Is Space?, as well as many scholarly articles. His most recent book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, translated into thirty-four languages, is an international bestseller.

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Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli. New York. 2017. Riverhead Books. 9781101948606. Translated from the Italian by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. 280 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: Coralie Bickford-Smith. 

DESCRIPTION - From the New York Times bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, a closer look at the mind-bending nature of the universe. What are time and space made of? Where does matter come from? And what exactly is reality? Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli has spent his whole life exploring these questions and pushing the boundaries of what we know. Here he explains how our image of the world has changed over the last few dozen centuries. In elegant and accessible prose, Rovelli takes us on a wondrous journey from Aristotle to Albert Einstein, from Michael Faraday to the Higgs boson, and from classical physics to his own work in quantum gravity. As he shows us how the idea of reality evolved over time, Rovelli offers readers a deeper understanding of the theories he introduced so concisely in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. His evocative explanations invite us to imagine, beyond our ever-changing idea of reality, a whole new world that has yet to be discovered.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CARLO ROVELLI received his PhD in physics at the University of Padua. He has conducted research at Imperial College, Yale University, the University of Rome, and the University of Pittsburgh, and currently directs the quantum gravity group of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Aix-Marseille University. He is author of Quantum Gravity and What Is Time? What Is Space?, as well as many scholarly articles. His most recent book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, translated into thirty-four languages, is an international bestseller.

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