“Linking philosophical exposition with economics and literary criticism, lyrical meditations with harsh polemics, the ‘Critique’ (first published in 1947) is an enduringly radical text which marks the invention of what we know as cultural studies.”

Publisher: Verso
Paperback: 312 pages

“Recounts the remarkable life of Rigoberta Menchú, a young Guatemalan peasant woman, through a series of interviews recording the details of everyday Indian life. Her story reflects the experiences common to many Indian communities in Latin America today. Menchú recounts suffering gross injustice and hardship in her earlier life: her brother, father and mother were murdered by the Guatemalan military. She learned Spanish and turned to catechist works as an expression of political revolt as well as religious commitment. Conveys both the religious and superstitious beliefs in her community and her personal response to feminist and social ideas.”

Publisher: Verso
Paperback: 251 pages

“Bartos’ remarkable photographs of the U.N. Building in New York look cold and formal. But only at first. Actually they are full of feeling. This is the haunted house of idealist bureaucracy, filled with the ghosts of promises and suffused with nostalgia for the utopian rigor of high modernism. Nobody has ever put that in a photo before, and Hitchens’ essay expertly peoples the empty spaces of Bartos’ work.”—Robert Hughes

Publisher: Verso
Hardback: 168 pages
Illustrated

Examines the ideas of strategists and directors and the views on war and cinema of writers from Apollinaire to William Burroughs. An account of military “ways of seeing” which shows how these have now permeated our culture.

Publisher: Verso
Paperback: 95 pages
Illustrated

“I went in search of an astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces… America is neither dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. It is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved… The microwave, the waste disposal, the orgasmic elasticity of the carpets: this soft, resort-style civilization irresistibly evokes the end of the world… We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video game… It is erosion and it is extermination, but it is also the tracking shot, the movies… Hence the exceptional scenic qualities of the deserts of the West, combining as they do the most ancestral of hieroglyphs, the most vivid light and the most total superficiality.”

Publisher: Verso
Paperback: 200 pages

“Cool Memories is the other side of America, the disillusioned side, presented in the form of a diary, though not in the classical sense. I’m trying to grasp the world in all its silences and its brutality. Can you grasp a world when you’re no longer tied to it by some kind of ideological enthusiasm or by traditional passions? Can things ‘tell’ themselves through stories and fragments? These are some of the questions posed in a book which may seem melancholic. But then I think almost every diary is melancholic. Melancholy is in the very state of things.”

Publisher: Verso
Paperback: 233 pages

A new investigation of simulations from Baudrillard edited in a Mythologies-like compilation. The focus: popular notions operating within what Baudrillard considers “delusionary” dialectics. Topics such as: “human rights” (to work, desire, the unconscious), epidemics, aesthetics, transsexuality, technology, terrorism, the Heidegger Nazi question, energy crisis, difference (regulated exchange breeching what is considered “good” or “useful”), immune systems, and more where recycled dialectic thought attempts impossible relations of determined value within the phenomena of “out of control late capitalism”, that is, the “advanced stage of simulacra.”
Baudrillard describes an “epidemic of value” where such a proliferation of values occurs that an overall disappearance of values takes place. Hence—the “transparency of evil.” He states that “it is as impossible to make estimations between beautiful and ugly, true and false, or good and evil, as it is simulataneously to calculate a particle’s speed and position.”
Offering double negations to dismantle the hopes of “progressives” and “post-modernists” alike, the collection closes with an essay entitled “The Object as Strange Attractor” which discusses potential escape from reproducing indifference, refuting claims that Baudrillard is exclusively a theorist of crisis. KH

Publisher: Verso
Paperback: 192 pages

Guy Debord dramatically broke 20 years of silence to eloquently update his prophetic call-to-arms. “In 1967, in a book entitled The Society of the Spectacle, I showed what the modern spectacle was already in essence: the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign. The disturbances of 1968, which in several countries lasted into the following years, having nowhere overthrown the existing organization of the society from which it springs apparently spontaneously, the spectacle has thus continued to gain strength; that is to spread the furthest limits on all sides, while increasing its density in the center. It has even learned new defensive techniques, as powers under attack always do… Since the spectacle today is certainly more powerful than it was before, what is it doing with this additional power? What point has it reached, that it had not reached previously? What, in short, are its present lines of advance?”

Publisher: Verso
Paperback: 94 pages

The opening salvo of a cryptic autobiography, interrupted by suicide, of the brilliant Situationist theorist . “There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter. One has only to mark off the precise limits that necessarily restrain this authority: its proper place in the course of time and in society; what one has done and what one has known, one’s dominant passions. ‘Who then can write the truth, if not those who have felt it?’”

Publisher: Verso
Paperback: 79 pages

Like the Blues Brothers, Mother Teresa (née Agnes Bojaxhiu) is on a mission from God—so don’t question how her sainthood was all but guaranteed by public opinion shaped from an early BBC documentary and book, or how she endorsed fascist reapportionment of her native Albania in exchange for being allowed a highly publicized homecoming there, or why she didn’t return Charles Keating’s $1.25 million when asked by Judge Ito’s court. Hitchens presents hard-hitting testimonials by doctors and nurses of total medical ineptitude at her clinics, and shows how the Reagan and Thatcher governments used Mother Teresa and her good name as a political ringer for anti-abortion conservative causes. Contains the classic photo of Mother Teresa and John Rutger (Ariana Huffington’s guru) in a studio superimposed over another picture of children in the Calcutta ghetto. Mother Teresa on not giving morphine to a terminal patient: “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” The sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.” MS

Publisher: Verso
Hardback: 98 pages
Illustrated