Sarah Palin has many faces: hockey mom, fundamentalist Christian, sex symbol, Republican ideologue, fashion icon, "maverick" populist. But, above all, Palin has become one thing: an American obsession that just won't go away. Edited by two senior editors at The Nation magazine, this sharp, smart, up-to-the-minute book examines Palin's obscure origins in Wasilla, Alaska, her spectacular rise to the effective leadership of the Republican Party, and the nightmarish prospect of her continuing to dominate the nation's political scene.

Going Rouge: Sarah Palin: An American Nightmare

Reed Betsy

OR Books

204 pages including appendix, notes and index, analysis of the injustice of the Israeli assault on Gaza and the resultant backlash on Israeli support

This Time We Went Too Far

Finkelstein, Norman G.

"This Time We Went Too Far" Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion

Norman G. Finkelstein

In literary America, to utter the name ?Gordon Lish? in a conversation is like adding hot sauce to a meal. You either enjoy the zesty experience, one that pushes your limits ?? or you prefer to stay away. It?s Lish who, first as fiction editor at Esquire magazine (where he earned the nickname ?Captain Fiction?) and then at the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, shaped the work of many of the country?s foremost writers, from Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah to Amy Hempel and Lily Tuck. As a writer himself, Lish?s stripped-down, brutally spare style earns accolades in increasing numbers. His oeuvre is coming to be recognized as among the most significant of the period that spans the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries. Kirkus Reviews wrote of his last collection that ?Lish?is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist.? This definitive collection of Lish?s short work includes a new foreword by the author and 106 stories, many of which Lish has revised exclusively for this edition. His observations are in turn achingly sad and wryly funny as they spark recognition of our common, clumsy humanity. There are no heroes here, except, perhaps, for all of us, as we muddle our way through life: they are stories of unfaithful husbands, inadequate fathers, restless children and writing teachers, men lost in their middle age: more often than not first-person tales narrated by one ?Gordon Lish.? The take on life is bemused, satirical, and relentlessly accurate; the language unadorned: the result is a model of modernist prose and a volume of enduring literary craftsmanship.

Collected Fictions

Gordon Lish

Killer Care: How Medical Error Became America's Third Largest Cause of Death, and What Can Be Done About It

James B. Lieber

"Step back Camus, your anti-hero has been fragmented and dispersed via the free-fall of social media. Michael J. Seidlinger's re-visioning enters the anthropocene without apology or oxygen masks, and asks us to take the trip toward self discovery as if the self was moving particles. A kick-ass ride. A beautiful dismemberment." —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children
"If anyone at any time is in search of a novel that renders the dysphoria and fragmentation experienced by the first generation to live through social media, then he or she should begin with The Strangest. Like Camus, Seidlinger does not so much describe anomie as write from it; the result is a strangely resonant book that feels, above all else, honest." —Will Chancellor, author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall
 Michael Seidlinger has dared tackle one of the literary classics of the 20th century literature and reimagined it for the 21st: and in Albert Camus' anti-hero Meursault, at once apathetic and violent, unable to connect with his fellow humans, Seidlinger exhumes a perfect metaphor for the Internet Generation. Zachary Weinham, anchorless in terms of morals and committed to nothing except commenting on comments and their comments etc., finds himself involved in the sinister machinations of Rios, someone he meets in a bar, and allows himself to be set up-whether out of apathy or a desire for self-destruction it's hard to tell. A murder ensues. Shunned by his friends and associates, not sure of what he has gotten into, Zachary heads for confrontation with society-and his own moral values.
"For a line to exist, it would first have to be crossed."

The Strangest

Michael J. Seidlinger

"Few Palestinians have opened their minds and hearts with such frankness." &#8212New York Times "Shehadeh writes beautifully, his language infused with a lyrical, melancholic sense of loss." &#8212Sunday TelegraphIndependent Award-winning author Raja Shehadeh here explores the politics of language and the language of politics in the Israeli-Palestine conflict, reflecting on the walls they create-legal and cultural-that confine today's Palestinians just as much as the physical borders, checkpoints and the so-called "Separation Barrier."The peace process has been ground to a halt by twists of language and linguistic chicanery that have degraded the word "peace" itself. Today, in relation to the Middle East, no one knows what the word even means. As one example of many available, Israel has argued that the omission of the word "the" in one of the UN Security Council's resolutions means it is not mandated to withdraw from all the territories it occupied in 1967.Language of War, Language of Peace is another fascinating investigation by one of Palestine's most important and fluent writers.

Language of War, Language of Peace

Raja Shehadeh

"The groups' action has been carefully organized, effectively executed and persistent, as any protest that's going to work must be." — Holland Cotter, art critic, The New York Times
On Saadiyat Island, just off the coast of Abu Dhabi, branches of iconic cultural institutions, including the Louvre, the Guggenheim, the British Museum and New York University, are taking shape to the designs of architects such as Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, and Norman Foster. In this way, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) seeks to burnish its reputation as a sophisticated destination for wealthy visitors and residents. Beneath the glossy veneer of the Saadiyat real estate plan, however, lies a tawdry reality. Those laboring on the construction sites are migrant workers who arrive from poor countries heavily indebted as a result of recruitment and transit fees. Once in the UAE the sponsoring employer takes their passports, houses them in sub-standard labor camps, pays much less than they were promised, and enforces a punishing work regimen. If they protest publicly, they risk arrest, beatings, and deportation. For five years, the Gulf Labor Coalition, a cosmopolitan group of artists and writers, has been pressuring Saadiyat's Western cultural brands to ensure worker protections. Gulf Labor has coordinated a boycott of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and pioneered innovative direct action that has involved several spectacular museum occupations. As part of a year-long initiative, an array of artists, writers, and activists submitted a work, a text, or an action. Contextualized by essays that trace how Gulf Labor has evolved, their contributions are reproduced in this book. The result is a compelling chronicle of a campaign at the forefront of a new wave of world-wide cultural activism.

The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor

Andrew Ross

Can we build a robot that trips on acid? This is not a frivolous question, according to neuroscientist Andrew Smart. If we can't, he argues, we haven't really created artificial intelligence. In an exposition reminiscent of crossover works such as Gödel, Escher, Bach and Fermat's Last Theorem, Andrew Smart weaves together Mangarevan binary numbers, the discovery of LSD, Leibniz, computer programming, and much more to connect the vast but largely forgotten world of psychedelic research with the resurgent field of AI and the attempt to build conscious robots. A book that draws on the history of mathematics, philosophy, and digital technology, Beyond Zero and One challenges fundamental assumptions underlying artificial intelligence. Is the human brain based on computation? Can information alone explain human consciousness and intelligence? Smart convincingly makes the case that true intelligence, and artificial intelligence, requires an appreciation of what is beyond the computational.

Beyond Zero and One

Andrew Smart

Extraordinary Rendition brings together the work of sixty-five prominent writers to examine America's culpability in the denial of human rights and dignity to Palestinians in Israel/Palestine and beyond. The anthology includes pieces by writers such as Chana Bloch, Jane Hirshfield, Colum McCann, Roger Reeves, George Saunders and Alice Walker. In writing that is always clear, and often startlingly beautiful, they cover a range of issues including the erasure and reconstruction of histories, the examination of identity, the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of speaking out as artists, the conditions of occupation, and the potential for activism. They also explore the way U.S. foreign policy towards Palestine regularly mirrors the harsh realities faced by many of America's own minorities. The anthology as a whole counters the dehumanizing narrative about Palestine that has taken hold in the United States, often supported by mainstream news organizations, and makes a significant contribution toward an understanding of the ways people of conscience in general, and writers in particular, can take on one of the most pressing political questions of our time. With contributions from Corban Addison, Mariana Aitches, Xhenet Aliu, Ammiel Alcalay, Kazim Ali, Sinan Antoon, Phillip B. Williams, Teju Cole, Michael Collier, Ted Conover, Ramola Dharmaraj, Marlene Dumas, Mary Jane Nealon, Duranya Freeman, Tess Gallagher, Cristina Garcia, Suzanne Gardinier, David Gorin, Kim Jensen, Lawrence Joseph, Nancy Kricorian, Rickey Laurentiis, Kiese Laymon, Farid Matuk, Colum McCann, Askold Melnyczuk, Christopher Merrill, Claire Messud, Philip Metres, Peter Mountford, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Dina Omar, Alicia Ostriker, Ed Pavlic, Sarah Schulman, Alan Shapiro, Robert Shetterly, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tom Sleigh, Ahdaf Soueif, Adam Stumacher, William Sutcliffe, Janne Teller, Philip Terman, Diego Vazquez Jr., Alice Walker, and Clarence Young.

Extraordinary Rendition

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