Here are 100 books that Situationist International Anthology fans have personally recommended if you like
Situationist International Anthology.
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I have published 18 books of poetry, most recently the one I have listed here, as well as a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation. My emphasis has always been on the more progressive and risk-taking kinds of expression, as seen with the Beat poets, Ginsberg and Corso, and the New York School poets, Ashbery and O'Hara. Seeing a lack of that perspective on bookshelves, I edited two editions of a major anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and 42 issues of the literary magazine, New American Writing. I have been reading, more recently, a lot of great writing by women, especially those writing at length, with the volume up.
The book contains 70 sonnets, all with the same title as the book. Quick-witted, ironic, and politically dedicated to good cause, Hayes speaks from his own experience as an African-American: “Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous/Darkness. Probably all my encounters/Are existential Jambalaya.”
Winner of the National Book Award for his earlier work, Lighthead, he is a poet to watch for his moral sense and mastery of poetic form. The book was written in the first two hundred days of the first Trump presidency.
Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018
A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead
"Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times
In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship to study in Washington, DC, at the Library of Congress. I wrote a paper on cities and urban spaces that I later published. But this period of study coincided with the creation of early sections of Drifter, and the work in this collection draws from the books I’ve listed as energy sources, inspiration, and confirmation. I love anything that tries to open the mind to the limited ways we see and feel. That’s what I’m after on this journey, and these books are worthy companions and teachers.
“The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house,” Forche writes in her famous poem from this collection, “The Colonel.” I knew there was a connection between what I saw in Forche’s poetry and what I was after as I was cooking up my aesthetic with a good dose of Debord and Baudelaire and others.
I love that these are little dream movies, narrative flashes that spike up in your mind and then drift away like something you caught a glimpse of on that river moving quickly out of sight. And like Debord, there’s a little of the political, a little psychological, and more mystery to keep me coming back.
Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late 1970s, when she travelled around a country erupting into civil war. Documenting killings and other brutal human rights abuses, while working alongside Archbishop Oscar Romero's church group, she found in her poetry the only possible way to come to terms with what she was experiencing first-hand.
By 1980, when the fighting was becoming too dangerous, Archbishop Romero urged Forche to return home, asking her to 'talk to the American people, tell them what is happening to us. Convince them to stop the…
I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship to study in Washington, DC, at the Library of Congress. I wrote a paper on cities and urban spaces that I later published. But this period of study coincided with the creation of early sections of Drifter, and the work in this collection draws from the books I’ve listed as energy sources, inspiration, and confirmation. I love anything that tries to open the mind to the limited ways we see and feel. That’s what I’m after on this journey, and these books are worthy companions and teachers.
I love the distinction Debord makes between the flaneur of Baudelaire and the wanderers practicing the dérive. It’s worth meditating on, and you just might spot what he means as you read these poems that paint a picture of Paris as an urban kaleidoscope of images, strange and alluring.
As much as I might want to switch labels on cans in the grocery store (derive, in one version), I can’t help but see a throughline from “When the cruel sun redoubles it's sharp stroke/I walk alone, absorbed in my curious exercise” and Debord’s observation: “the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres.”
The bilingual, illustrated, and National Book Award-winning edition of Charles Baudelaire's masterpiece. The complete French text is accompanied with an English translation by Richard Howard.
Charles Baudelaire's 1857 masterwork was scandalous in its day for its portrayals of sex, same-sex love, death, the corrupting and oppressive power of the modern city and lost innocence, Les Fleurs Du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) remains powerful and relevant for our time.
In "Spleen et ideal," Baudelaire dramatizes the erotic cycle of ecstacy and anguish-of sexual and romantic love. "Tableaux Parisiens" condemns the crushing effects of urban planning on a city's soul and…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship to study in Washington, DC, at the Library of Congress. I wrote a paper on cities and urban spaces that I later published. But this period of study coincided with the creation of early sections of Drifter, and the work in this collection draws from the books I’ve listed as energy sources, inspiration, and confirmation. I love anything that tries to open the mind to the limited ways we see and feel. That’s what I’m after on this journey, and these books are worthy companions and teachers.
They hit you like a brick in the forehead: solid poems that look like letters from an exile. Both personal and strange, these poems capture the feeling of the wanderer where “it isn’t a mirror anymore but a window.” That’s what I want as I go: shots of wake-up words. Something to charge the eyes for the spectacles on the way.
A genre-bending collection of prose poems from Pulitzer Prize–winner Franz Wright brings us surreal tales of childhood, adolescence, and adult awareness, moving from the gorgeous to the shocking to a sense of peace. Wright’s most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet.
In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured “yes” of creation—“it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last,” Wright tells us.…
I am the primary writer and podcaster behind The Blockchain Socialist, a platform for exploring the intersection of crypto and left politics. I’ve published over 35 blogs for my website and on the web3 native blogging platform Mirror as well as for outlets like FWB and Outland Magazine. I’ve also recorded over 150 podcasts which included incredible guests with a wide ranging spectrum of political views and expertises like Vitalik Buterin, Cory Doctorow, Douglas Rushkoff, Nick Srnicek, Lawrence Lessig, and many more. And I don’t just talk about but I do it as I am also a co-founder of Breadchain Cooperative where we make blockchain applications from a post-capitalist perspective.
I have to say I absolutely loved this book because it was so thought provoking and relevant for understanding our current economic system because it is true, the capitalism written about in the 1800s and even 1900s is completely different than what we have today.
Even before web3, it’s plainly obvious that the role of information has increased in importance against the commodity and it’s vital to understand its implications.
In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capitalists and their factories but by those who own and control the flow of information. Yet, if this is not capitalism anymore, could it be something worse? What if the world we're living in is more dystopian than the techno utopias of the Silicon Valley imagination? And, if this is the case, how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the…
Ι have a passion for critical theory since I was intrigued by the idea, which originates in Marx’s Capital, that what limits our freedom and democracy is not the apparent personified power hold by the state and politicians. On the contrary, real power lies in capital, that's in abstract labour, which is the labour that must succumb to the standards of time is money, that runs through each one of us. Therefore, in my postdoctoral research in the last 13 years, I have attempted to follow this idea in the history of political philosophy. During my research, I realized that the mainstream reading of Marxism and critical theory is far from what it should be.
According to the Debord, concepts are fluid and open since they express alienation, class struggle, and the unavoidable contradictions inherent in capitalism. Therefore, his theory has a strong anarchic character and does not ignore the economy or the social conflicts confronted in everyday life, as some readers of his theory may believe. The spectacle, as used by the Situationists and Debord, does not take place on a different plane to that of commodity fetishism or alienation in everyday living, as sadly some scholars hold. His theory casts light on the idea of the inverted topsy-turvy world and the negativity that defetishises the apparent, closed, and reified forms, such as the bourgeois form of democracy and the state, that constitute a closed and fetishized social totality.
The Das Kapital of the 20th century. An essential text, and the main theoretical work of the situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This is the original translation by Fredy Perlman, kept in print continuously for the last 30 years, keeping the flame alive when no-one else cared.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am a professor emeritus of history and sociology, who has taught in universities in Canada and the UK. In the 20th century, Prague Castle was the seat of a gamut of modern political regimes, from democracy through fascism to communism. Gazing across the river at the Castle one night during my first visit to the city in early 1990, soon after the fall of communism, it occurred to me that there can be few better vantage points from which to rethink "the modern condition." My interest in imaginative histories, which montage details rather than attempting to provide an overarching grand narrative, stems from wrestling with how to communicate this complexity.
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, Annie Ernaux is one of France's best-loved writers.
She writes through details. Collaging phrases, photographs, lines of songs, objects, advertising jingles, fragments of film, radio and TV programs, and the words of men in bed at night, Ernaux writes the history of modern France via an intensely personal memoir. Dien Bien Phu, the Algerian War, the May '68 revolt, 9–11 are all here, as seen through her eyes and told in her unmistakable voice.
As one critic wrote, Ernaux "transforms her life into history and her memory into the collective memory of a generation." At once richly evocative and utterly unsentimental, this is one of the most original and impressive books I've read in a long while.
Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre - the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is 'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism' (New York Times),…
I’m a historian of Modern Europe based in Berlin. For the last twenty years or so, I’ve worked on different forms of protesting and street politics in twentieth-century Europe, always with an eye to how these histories might speak to the present. Having taught at the British University of Warwick, I’m now teaching high school students in Berlin, a career change that raised a simple but fundamental question once again: Why should we bother with history? What can we learn from history today? My passion for histories of protesting provides the answer to this question: These are histories that inspire dreaming, struggling, experimenting—and continuing to do so despite failures.
A lot has been written about the famous May ’68 in France, but to me, Kristin Ross’s book stands out because of what she argues was at the heart of the protests: they were an experiment “in declassification, in disrupting the natural ‘givenness of places,’” an attempt to question the very order of society.
Students left their spaces of study to engage with workers; workers—or at least some of them—refused to return to the hell their workplace was: they didn’t want to function as students or workers anymore. This vision of transgressing social or spatial boundaries, I believe, still speaks to the present. It promises a life not determined by social roles, a society not divided by neat sociological categories.
During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed-no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications.
Kristin Ross shows how the current official memory of May '68 came to serve a…
I’ve been fascinated by China and Chinese culture since I was a kid. I had bilingual books with Chinese characters on one page and an English translation on the other. I’d spend hours looking for patterns to match characters to their English meaning. That process became easier once I started studying Chinese at university. I’ve since lived in Beijing and Shanghai and return to China regularly, either by plane or by book.
Stories can be sticky. They attach memories to places. I first visited San Francisco’s Chinatown in the early nineties. There were no mobile phones then or digital maps, so I wandered the streets and browsed the stores, admiring the green-tiled roofs and bright red lanterns, imagining I was back in Beijing. Growing hungry, I entered the first restaurant I saw. I sat, ordered, and pulled a paperback out of my coat pocket as I waited for my homestyle tofu to arrive. Diners ate. Waiters cleared plates. People picked up their takeaways. And I read.
A few minutes later, the waiter returned. “You,” he said, “have a phone call.” He pointed at the desk beside the door. The restaurant’s phone handset was off the cradle and lay on the counter. “That’s impossible,” I thought. No one knew where I was. I didn’t know where I was. But there was the phone,…
Poet Zhang Yonglin is sentenced to a labor camp he ironically describes as a haven amidst the hysteria of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. After he marries a woman he had seen eight years earlier, the story becomes, on one level, an analogy between his temporary sexual impotence and the postion of intellectuals. A year later he is ready to abandon his wife and escape from the camp. Cameo appearances by philosophic and literary figures (Marx and Meng-tz, Othello and Song Ji) and discussing China and sex allow the incorporation of non-novelistic elements while indulging in gallows humor.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Born and raised in China, I grew up on a remote state-run farm where my parents, as condemned intellectuals during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, lived for 20 years. It wasn't until mid-80s they were allowed to return. I have heard many stories and read many books about this tumultuous period in China. I didn’t know much about my parents’ personal experiences until I was in my 30s. Today’s China is very different but I believe that history extends its roots deep into the present. As a writer, what interests me the most is the impact of history on individuals and society. My latest book is a historical wartime novel set in China and Europe.
Oral history as a literary form is relatively new in China. When asked why he wrote the book, Mr. Feng replied that it was because of his guilt as a survivor and as a witness. The Cultural Revolution has devastated and scarred generation after generation in China, yet most people are silent about their personal experiences. Feng conducted numerous interviews with ordinary people who had lived through that period and wrote these intimate stories in the collection. Every voice is different and deeply personal; together, they portray one of the most disturbing and tumultuous times in Chinese history.
Ten Years of Madness is a groundbreaking book that draws some parallels to Studs Terkel's "Working" in that it portrays a wide cross section of the Chinese people, but with a harrowing twist: how they survived the disastrous Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. Families were destroyed; an entire generation of artists and intellectuals was lost. These oral histories, expertly conducted and arranged by noted writer and cultural critic Feng Jicai, are essential in preserving the memory of those who survived and those who did not survive China's most calamitous period in its modern history.
