Love is Not Enough was written over the course of the year after the suicide of Frances Gregory's mother. The poems are an investigation into the circumstantial and relational dynamics of grief as well as the bloody spectres of patriarchy and generational trauma.
In the years since the end of the Cold War many new social movements have started peacefully, only to adopt a diversity of tactics as they grew in strength and collective experiences. The last ten years have revealed more clearly than ever the role of nonviolence. Propped up by the media, funded by the government, and managed by NGOs, nonviolent campaigns around the world have helped oppressive regimes change their masks, and have helped police to limit the growth of rebellious social movements. Repeatedly losing the debate within the movements themselves, proponents of nonviolence have increasingly turned to the mainstream media and to government and institutional funding to drown out critical voices.
The Failure of Nonviolence examines most of the major social upheavals following the Cold War to reveal the limits of nonviolence and uncover what a diverse, unruly, non-pacified movement can accomplish. Critical of how a diversity of tactics has functioned so far, this book discusses how movements for social change can win ground and open the spaces necessary to plant the seeds of a new world.
333 pages
The question of self-defense against the police is one that we are not allowed to consider, yet it is the only one that makes sense. The police do not exist to protect society from generalized cannibalism and mayhem, as in some paranoid Batman fantasy. They exist to protect the haves from the have-nots, to maintain the State’s monopoly on violence, and to make up for our atrophied capacity for conflict resolution, another of the many prerogatives the State has stolen from us...
Originally printed by Black and Red Books in 1976, Fredy Perlman's classic epistolary novel Letters of Insurgents has been unfortunately out of print for several years. However, Left Bank Books is very proud to bring this book back, with a new foreword written by Aragorn!
"Two individuals living on distant continents resume contact through correspondence. They describe meaningful events and relationships in their lives during the twenty years since their youthful liaison, comparing the choices each took. Yarostan lives in a "workers' republic"; Sophia in a "Western democracy." They both make efforts to lead meaningful lives. Along the way, they encounter bureaucrats, idealists, racists, flaunters of social convention, labor militants, professors, jailors, hucksters and more. In important respects, Sophia's biography parallels that of Fredy Perlman."
728 pages
The Ring of Fire Anthology is a collection of the zine from the late 1990s by ET Russian (aka Hellery Homosex), and features new material never before published. Ring of Fire is honest, engaging, and ahead of its time.
Through black and white ink drawings, comics, linoleum block print portraits, essays, interviews and erotica, this collection explores the intersections of art, bodies, healthcare, ability, gender, race, community, class, healing and the politics of work.
Alternately emotional and erotic, funny and political, Ring of Fire tells the author’s personal story, and captures the work and words of various artists and leaders from disability culture and history. A young activist steeped in the cultures of queer and punk, Russian embraced a cultural identity of disability while writing Ring of Fire. Years later, Russian examines what it means to work in healthcare in the United States.
This is a BIG book, at 8'x10' and 237 pages!!!
"Ring of Fire is one of the zines that had the most significant impact on my thinking--it totally blew my mind when I encountered it in 2000. I am thrilled to see gripping material from RoF combined with insightful, transformative new writing and images about disability justice, health care, art and activism being distributed as a book. A whole new generation of activists will now get to use these materials to reexamine their communities and transform the world. ET Russian's clarity, honesty and insight is a phenomenal contribution to today's activists building disability justice tools and frameworks in multiple movements and communities." --Dean Spade, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law
"The Ring of Fire Anthology is beautiful, sexy, and thought provoking all at the same time. If ever you've needed stories, art, poetry, and bad-ass rabble-rousing that connect disability and queerness, sexiness and radical anti-capitalist politics, look no further. ET Russian's vivid work lives and breathes these connections." --Eli Clare, author of Exile and Pride
A brand new essay by John Zerzan investigating the historical arc of patterns of domination and oppression that arose thousands of years ago and are strikingly similar to the world we currently live in. "For the past 1000 years in the Western world, history has been divided into modern and pre-modern...the Bronze Age is certainly buried in the pre-modern. But as we think our present-day, modern thoughts, how different are they, really, from those thoughts in the first, Bronze Age civilizations? Wasthat not the origin of the ntion, so basically corrosive to autonomy and freedom, that inequality and hierarchy are normal conditions and that misfortune is not a social evil, but an individual's just desserts?"
Originally written in 1975 by one of Left Bank's founding members, this pamphlet was the first piece of work that Left Bank published. At the time, there were few accounts of the Kronstadt rebellion written by anti-authoritarians. Left Bank Books has decided to republish this pamphlet in an attempt to preserve the history of the uprising, as well as the history of the LBB publishing project. This edition has beautiful letter-press covers and a clean and concise layout.
An account of the Seattle General Strike of 1919. Originally published by the Seattle Union Record in 1919, reprinted by Root & Branch in 1972, and by Left Bank Books and Charlatan Stew in 2009. This edition published by Left Bank Books and Charlatan Stew, 2012. 73 pages
A collection of Bernstein's writings, drawings and photos of him published four years after his death. 184 pages
Left Bank Books pamphlet #2, Draft Theses For Principles of Unity of the Anti-Authoritarian Revolutionary Movement, published in 1975 and revised in 1977.
This is the first newsletter than Left Bank Books formally published. It contains essays, book reviews, and some news items, put out circa 1981.