Events

Between Thought and Expression: A Conversation between James Kelman and Noam Chomsky

A Radical Guide, Anthropology and Social Change, PM Press, and Working Class History invite you to join us on Monday, December 6th at (1pm ET, 10am PT, 6pm UK) for a live, online conversation between James Kelman and Noam Chomsky, moderated by Working Class History. Free / donation. Register here.

This event is the virtual book launch event for Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime: Why Ideas Matter.

Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime: Why Ideas Matter is an impassioned, elucidating, and often humorous collaboration. Philosophical and intimate, it is a call to ponder, imagine, explore, and act.

James Kelman is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist whose many literary awards include the Booker and James Tait Black prizes. He was born in Glasgow in 1946 and left school in 1961, moving around and passing through Los Angeles for a brief period in the mid-1960s then in various jobs in various places in England. He started writing at the age of twenty-two: ramblings, musings, sundry phantasmagoria, stories, whatever. In 1969 while working in London he met and married Marie Connors from South Wales. They settled in Glasgow, where he has lived as writer, father, and grandfather. Kelman has been a vocal supporter of the Kurdish people and campaigns regularly with Scottish Solidarity with Kurdistan. For further information go to jameskelman.net.

Noam Chomsky is a laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics and Chomsky is one of the foremost critics of U.S. foreign policy. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics. His recent books include Who Rules the World? and Hopes and Prospects.

Join a conversation between Selma James, author of the new book Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet, and Alissa Trotz, editor of The Point is to Change the World by Andaiye, facilitated by Margaret Prescod, on Saturday, December 11th at 9am PST / 12 noon EST / 5pm GMT. Register for the online event: bit.ly/AndaiyeSelmaDec11

Between the Lines Books in Toronto, Eso Won Bookstore in Los Angeles, Pacifica Radio’s “Sojourner Truth”, Pacifica station WPFW in Washington DC, PM Press in Oakland, and Pluto Press in London join with the Global Women’s Strike in sponsoring the US launch of two pathbreaking books!

Online event will feature Selma James, author, and Alissa Trotz, editor of Andaiye’s book and Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Caribbean Studies at New College, University of Toronto. Margaret Prescod who introduced Selma’s book will be a facilitator.

Join Adrian Shanker, editor of Bodies and Barriers: Queer Activists on Health, for a book talk at the Asbury Park Social Justice Book Fair on Sunday, December 12th at 2pm at Trinity Church located at 503 Asbury Ave Asbury Park, NJ 07712. Learn more here.

About the book:

LGBT people pervasively experience health disparities, affecting every part of their bodies and lives. Yet many are still grappling to understand the mutually reinforcing health care challenges that lead to worsened health outcomes. Bodies and Barriers informs health care professionals, students in health professions, policymakers, and fellow activists about these challenges, providing insights and a road map for action that could improve queer health.

Through artfully articulated, data-informed essays by twenty-six well-known and emerging queer activists—including Alisa Bowman, Jack Harrison-Quintana, Liz Margolies, Robyn Ochs, Sean Strub, Justin Sabia-Tanis, Ryan Thoreson, Imani Woody, and more—Bodies and Barriers illuminates the health challenges LGBT people experience throughout their lives and challenges conventional wisdom about health care delivery. It probes deeply into the roots of the disparities faced by those in the LGBT community and provides crucial information to fight for health equity and better health outcomes.

The contributors to Bodies and Barriers look for tangible improvements, drawing from the history of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and from struggles against health care bias and discrimination. At a galvanizing moment when LGBT people have experienced great strides in lived equality, but our health as a community still lags, here is an indispensable blueprint for change by some of the most passionate and important health activists in the LGBT movement today.

Adrian Shanker is an award-winning activist and organizer whose career has centered on advancing progress for the LGBT community. He has worked as an arts fundraiser, labor organizer, marketing manager, and served as President of Equality Pennsylvania for three years before founding Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center in Allentown, PA, where he serves as executive director. An accomplished organizer, Adrian has led numerous successful campaigns to advance LGBT progress through municipal nondiscrimination and relationship recognition laws and laws to protect LGBT youth from conversion therapy. A specialist in LGBT health policy, he has developed leading-edge health promotion campaigns to advance health equity through behavioral, clinical, and policy changes.

Join us in Melbourne, Australia on Tuesday December 14th for the launch of Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985.

Kicking off at 7pm at Buck Mulligan’s, there will be readings from classic sci-fi novels by editors Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre as well as other contributors to the book. Discounted copies will be available on the night and free sci-fi novels for everyone who buys one. Learn more here.

Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985.

Much has been written about the “long Sixties,” the era of the late 1950s through the early 1970s. It was a period of major social change, most graphically illustrated by the emergence of liberatory and resistance movements focused on inequalities of class, race, gender, sexuality, and beyond, whose challenge represented a major shock to the political and social status quo. With its focus on speculation, alternate worlds and the future, science fiction became an ideal vessel for this upsurge of radical protest.

Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985 details, celebrates, and evaluates how science fiction novels and authors depicted, interacted with, and were inspired by these cultural and political movements in America and Great Britain. It starts with progressive authors who rose to prominence in the conservative 1950s, challenging the so-called Golden Age of science fiction and its linear narratives of technological breakthroughs and space-conquering male heroes. The book then moves through the 1960s, when writers, including those in what has been termed the New Wave, shattered existing writing conventions and incorporated contemporary themes such as modern mass media culture, corporate control, growing state surveillance, the Vietnam War, and rising currents of counterculture, ecological awareness, feminism, sexual liberation, and Black Power. The 1970s, when the genre reflected the end of various dreams of the long Sixties and the faltering of the postwar boom, is also explored along with the first half of the 1980s, which gave rise to new subgenres, such as cyberpunk.

Dangerous Visions and New Worlds contains over twenty chapters written by contemporary authors and critics, and hundreds of full-color cover images, including thirteen thematically organised cover selections. New perspectives on key novels and authors, such as Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, John Wyndham, Samuel Delany, J.G. Ballard, John Brunner, Judith Merril, Barry Malzberg, Joanna Russ, and many others are presented alongside excavations of topics, works, and writers who have been largely forgotten or undeservedly ignored.

Other books in the series by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre include Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980 and Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980.

Praise

“Dangerous Visions and New Worlds offers a birds eye view of a period when we were most passionate—about literature, the arts and the sciences, and when we let the rockets explore the universe while we turned to explore the multiverse in terms of the human psyche. Powered by a faith that fiction—especially speculative fiction—could change the world—the New Wave allied with the Underground Press, the Left and the world of rock and roll to create a cultural explosion. This book recalls the highly individualistic writers, with often radically different approaches.”
—Michael Moorcock

“Critics and general readers of science fiction have been struggling to define, assess, and in some cases, dismiss the New Wave era in science fiction since its inception. This entertaining volume offers a fresh, twenty-first century reappraisal of the major New Wave SF authors along with a concise history of the movement’s significant publications. Then, additional essays diversify the discussion to include other less well-known, progressive authors, and wide-ranging historical topics, effectively placing the New Wave in a broader radical context. An excellent introduction to the ground-breaking SF of the period, and an insightful critique of its continuing impact. And having all the vintage covers in one place is very cool.”
—Allan Kausch, original Lucasfilm Star Wars continuity editor, pre-production editor of The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick, co-editor of Michael Moorcock’s London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction

Join Meg Elison, author of Big Girl, for readings, workshops, and signings at DisConIII, the World Science Fiction Convention, in Washington, D.C. Big Girl is up for a Hugo Award for Best Novelette.

Schedule:

Thursday, December 16th at 4:00 PM in the Capitol Room 1135
Reading – Meg Elison and Usman T. Malik

Friday, December 17th at 10:00 AM in the Diplomat Ballroom 950
The Future of Work (Post Pandemic Edition)

Saturday, December 18th at 4:00 PM in the Cabinet Room 922
Why Do We Love Novellas and Novelettes?

Saturday, December 18th at 8pm – The Hugo Awards

About Big Girl

“There’s nothing better for writing a novel than rage,” says Meg Elison, one of science fiction’s fearless new “bad girls” who delight in the transgressive, and who dares gainsay her? Her debut novel won the Philip K. Dick award and led off a series that has lodged her on the Tiptree shortlist. She’s already too big to go unnoticed.

Her stories contain both rage and humor in an effective if uneasy mix. As droll as it is tall, “Big Girl” applies journalism’s clueless prose to the hormonal horrors of growing up. First published here, “Such People in It” celebrates the courage of cowardice in nightclubbing and life. Our almost-novella “The Pill” promises to change women’s lives as much as The Pill itself did, only this capsule comes complete with screams. “El Hugé” is an explosive new take on teen romance. “Gone with Gone with the Wind” explores the varieties of privilege in late Confederate America. Then of course there’s “Guts.” Turns out you either got ’em or you don’t. And in “Sprawling into the Unknown,” our intriguingly Outspoken Interview, Nell Zink, lesbian gun clubs, and Asimov’s unwelcome advances all fly economy class.

Meg Elison is a San Francisco Bay Area author. Her debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award and was a Tiptree longlist mention that same year. It was reissued in 2016 and was on the Best of the Year lists from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, PBS, and more. Her second novel was also a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. Elison was the spring 2019 Clayton B. Ofstad endowed distinguished writer-in-residence at Truman State University, and is a coproducer of the monthly reading series Cliterary Salon.

All We Have is Each Other: A live virtual discussion with anarchist artist and illustrator N.O. Bonzo on their compelling update of Peter Kropotkin’s seminal work, Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution. Thursday, December 16th, 7:00pm – 8:30pm ET hosted by Firestorm Books & Coffee. Learn more, register, and order the book from Firestorm here.

In his 1902 collection of essays Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Peter Kropotkin demonstrated that mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity—in both individuals and as a species—plays a far more important role in the animal kingdom and human societies than does individualized competitive struggle. Kropotkin carefully crafted his theory making the science accessible.

Every page of this new edition of Mutual Aid has been beautifully illustrated by one of anarchism’s most celebrated current artists, N.O. Bonzo. The reader will also enjoy original artwork by GATS (Graffiti Aaginst the System) and insightful commentary by David Graeber, Ruth Kinna, Andrej Grubacic, and Allan Antliff.

N.O. Bonzo is an anarchist illustrator, printmaker, and muralist based out of Portland, OR. They are the creator of Off with Their Heads: An Antifascist Coloring Book.

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) was the foremost theorist of the anarchist movement. Born a Russian Prince, he rejected his title to become a revolutionary, seeking a society based on freedom, equality, and solidarity. Imprisoned for his activism in Russia and France, his writings include The Conquest of Bread; Fields, Factories, and Workshops; Anarchism, Anarchist-Communism, and the State; Memoirs of a Revolutionist; and Modern Science and Anarchism. New editions of his classic works Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution; Words of a Rebel; and The Great French Revolution, 1789–1793 will be published by PM Press to commemorate his life and work on the centennial of his death.