Böcker utgivna av Liveright Publishing Corporation

There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic "white working class," a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story.Spanning two hundred years-from one of Kelley's earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the Covid-19 pandemic-Black Folk highlights the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking jobs white people didn't want and confined to segregated neighborhoods, Black workers found community in intimate spaces, from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen, where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk, talking and laughing in a space free of white supervision and largely beyond white knowledge. As millions of Black people left the violence of the American South for the promise of a better life in the North and West, these networks of resistance and joy sustained early arrivals and newcomers alike and laid the groundwork for organizing for better jobs, better pay, and equal rights.As her narrative moves from Georgia to Philadelphia, Florida to Chicago, Texas to Oakland, Kelley treats Black workers not just as laborers, or members of a class, or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered-to themselves, to their communities, and to a nation that denied that basic fact. Through affecting portraits of her great-grandfather, a sharecropper named Solicitor, and her grandmother, Brunell, who worked for more than a decade as a domestic maid, Kelley captures, in intimate detail, how generation after generation of labor was required to improve, and at times maintain, her family's status. Yet her family, like so many others, was always animated by a vision of a better future. The church yards, factory floors, railcars, and postal sorting facilities where Black people worked were sites of possibility, and, as Kelley suggests, Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be the same today. With the resurgence of labor activism in our own time, Black Folk presents a stirring history of our possible future.

The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James's translation-decades in the making-gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent, and compulsively readable lyric poem. For the first time ever in an English translation, James makes the bold choice of switching from the terza rima composition of the original Italian-a measure that strains in English-to the quatrain. The result is "rhymed English stanzas that convey the music of Dante's triple rhymes" (Edward Mendelson). James's translation reproduces the same wonderful momentum of the original Italian that propels the reader along the pilgrim's path from Hell to Heaven, from despair to revelation.

Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans' techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented-but armed-aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore's life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the "river of time that divides the quick from the dead." Echoing Gore Vidal's United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay-and of history-itself.

In her international bestseller SPQR, Mary Beard told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome, from its slightly shabby Iron Age origins to its reign as the undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean. Now, drawing on more than thirty years of teaching and writing about Roman history, Beard turns to the emperors who ruled the Roman Empire, beginning with Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) and taking us through the nearly three centuries-and some thirty emperors-that separate him from the boy-king Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE).Yet Emperor of Rome is not your typical chronological account of Roman rulers, one emperor after another: the mad Caligula, the monster Nero, the philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Instead, Beard asks different, often larger and more probing questions: What power did emperors actually have? Was the Roman palace really so bloodstained? What kind of jokes did Augustus tell? And for that matter, what really happened, for example, between the emperor Hadrian and his beloved Antinous? Effortlessly combining the epic with the quotidian, Beard tracks the emperor down at home, at the races, on his travels, even on his way to heaven.Along the way, Beard explores Roman fictions of imperial power, overturning many of the assumptions that we hold as gospel, not the least of them the perception that emperors one and all were orchestrators of extreme brutality and cruelty. Here Beard introduces us to the emperor's wives and lovers, rivals and slaves, court jesters and soldiers, and the ordinary people who pressed begging letters into his hand-whose chamber pot disputes were adjudicated by Augustus, and whose budgets were approved by Vespasian, himself the son of a tax collector.With its finely nuanced portrayal of sex, class, and politics, Emperor of Rome goes directly to the heart of Roman fantasies (and our own) about what it was to be Roman at its richest, most luxurious, most extreme, most powerful, and most deadly, offering an account of Roman history as it has never been presented before.

The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America's legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn't join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome power to be avoided whenever possible. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law. Soon, ordinary African Americans, awakened by Supreme Court victories and galvanized by racial justice activists, launched the civil rights movement.In Before the Movement, acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these "rights of everyday use," Penningroth demonstrates, they made Black rights seem unremarkable. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself-the laws all of us live under today.Penningroth's narrative, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of his own family. Challenging accepted understandings of Black history framed by relations with white people, he puts Black people at the center of the story-their loves and anger and loneliness, their efforts to stay afloat, their mistakes and embarrassments, their fights, their ideas, their hopes and disappointments, in all their messy humanness. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life-a vision allied with, yet distinct from, "the freedom struggle."

For decades, Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry: from Medgar Evers in Turn Me Loose, winner of the NAACP Award; to York, the enslaved explorer who joined the Lewis and Clark expedition, in Buffalo Dance, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers-including his own ancestors-who enlisted in the Union Army in exchange for emancipation. Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reconstruction, Walker braids the voices of the United States Colored Troops with their family members, as well as slaveowners and prominent historical figures-including Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and Margaret Garner-into a wide-ranging series of "persona poems" imbued with atmospheric imagery and brimming with indomitable spirit. Evoking the pride and perseverance of formerly enslaved General Charles Young, Walker hums: "I, am America's promise, my mother's song, / and the reason my father had every right to dream."

Jesse Ed Davis shared stages with the greatest music stars of the 1960s and '70s. His riffs and licks enlivened albums by three of four Beatles, and recordings by artists as distinct as Eric Clapton, Leonard Cohen, and Cher. But Davis-whose name has been all but lost to the annals of rock 'n' roll history-was more than just the most versatile session guitarist of the decade. By pairing bright flourishes with soulful melodies, Davis exploded our idea of what rock music could be, and who could make it. Interweaving more than a hundred interviews with legendary peers, bandmates, and family members, Washita Love Child reimagines the Kiowa-Comanche musician's improbable career, from his childhood in Oklahoma to his first major gig backing rockabilly star Conway Twitty, and from his climactic, dramatic performance at George Harrison's 1971 Concert for Bangladesh to his tragic demise, years later, in Los Angeles.

Countless books, news reports, and opinion pieces have announced the impending arrival of artificial intelligence, with most claiming that it will upend our world, revolutionizing not just work but society overall. Yet according to political philosopher and historian David Runciman, we've actually been living with a version of AI for 300 years because states and corporations are robots, too. In The Handover, Runciman explains our current situation through the history of these "artificial agents" we created to rescue us from our all-too-human limitations-and demonstrates what this radical new view of our recent past means for our collective future.From the United States and the United Kingdom to the East India Company, Standard Oil, Facebook, and Alibaba, states and corporations have gradually, and then much more rapidly, taken over the planet. They have helped to conquer poverty and eliminate disease, but also unleashed global wars and environmental degradation. As Runciman demonstrates, states and corporations are the ultimate decision-making machines, defined by their ability to make their own choices and, crucially, to sustain the consequences of what has been chosen. And if the rapid spread of the modern state and corporation has already transformed the conditions of human existence, new AI technology promises the same.But what happens when AI interacts with other kinds of artificial agents, the inhuman kind represented by states and corporations? Runciman argues that the twenty-first century will be defined by increasingly intense battles between state and corporate power for the fruits of the AI revolution. In the end, it is not our own, human relationship with AI that will determine our future. Rather, humanity's fate will be shaped by the interactions among states, corporations, and thinking machines.With clarity and verve, The Handover presents a brilliantly original history of the last three centuries and a new understanding of the immense challenges we now face.

The 1976 publication of Peter Hujar's Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, "was and remains one of the most sombrely beautiful and influential photography collections of its era" (Holland Cotter, senior art critic of The New York Times). When Hujar passed away in 1987, his work was relatively unknown except for a small following. The importance and artistic mastery of Hujar's photography, its tender gravity and intimacy, became recognised and canonical only after his death. The republication of this collection is composed of the original introduction by Susan Sontag and preceded by a new foreword by Benjamin Moser, with photographs presented in two sequences. A stirring ode to the flourishing downtown scene of the 1970s, this collection remains a deeply moving artifact of post-Stonewall New York City.

Nothing has brought English soccer more immediately into the American mainstream than Ted Lasso, which captivated the nation in thirty-four episodes over three seasons. But before there was Jason Sudeikis's lovable and, at first, hapless AFC Richmond, there was Watford Football Club, a team from the outskirts of London with barely enough fans to fill its stands-and which, in the mid-1970s, was languishing in 92nd place at the bottom of the last division of the English Football League. That is, until rock superstar Elton John-who, with his dad, had followed the team as a boy-bought the lowly franchise and, with legendary manager Graham Taylor, transformed the luckless football club into a top-seeded Premier League team. Inspiring, funny, and ultimately heartbreaking, Watford Forever recalls the improbably tender relationship between Elton John and Taylor, a straight-talking former fullback, who together beat the odds and their personal demons to save a club and a struggling community.

Few legal cases in American history are as riveting as the controversy surrounding the will of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1773-1833), which-almost inexplicably-freed all 383 of his slaves in one of the largest and most publicized manumissions in American history. So famous is the case that Ta-Nehisi Coates has used it to condemn Randolph's cousin, Thomas Jefferson, for failing to free his own slaves. With this groundbreaking investigation, historian Gregory May now reveals a more surprising story, showing how madness and scandal shaped John Randolph's wildly shifting attitudes toward his slaves-and how endemic prejudice in the North ultimately deprived the freedmen of the land Randolph had promised them. Sweeping from the legal spectacle of the contested will through the freedmen's dramatic flight and horrific reception in Ohio, A Madman's Will is an extraordinary saga about the alluring promise of freedom and its tragic limitations.

First glimpsed riding on the back of a boy's motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a village in southeastern Poland before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed by prisoner Wilhelm Brasse. Three months later she is dead.How did this-the fictionalized account of a real person who was Catholic-happen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawa's story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles, Jewish and Catholic, who perished during the German occupation. Also evoking, among others, the writer Tadeusz Borowski's ill-fated life and Janusz Korczak's valorous attempts to save orphaned children, Czeslawa becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.

Why do Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and much of the far Right so explicitly admire the murderous and incompetent Russian dictator Vladimir Putin? Why is Ron DeSantis drawing from Victor Orbán's illiberal politics for his own policies as governor of Florida-a single American state that has more than twice the population of Orbán's entire nation, Hungary?In America Last, Jacob Heilbrunn, a highly respected observer of the American Right, demonstrates that the infatuation of American conservatives with foreign dictators-though a striking and seemingly inexplicable fact of our current moment-is not a new phenomenon. It dates to the First World War, when some conservatives, enthralled with Kaiser Wilhelm II, openly rooted for him to defeat the forces of democracy. In the 1920s and 1930s, this affinity became even more pronounced as Hitler and Mussolini attracted a variety of American admirers. Throughout the Cold War, the Right evinced a fondness for autocrats such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, while some conservatives wrote apologias for the Third Reich and for apartheid South Africa. The habit of mind is not really about foreign policy, however. As Heilbrunn argues, the Right is drawn to what it perceives as the impressive strength of foreign dictators, precisely because it sees them as models of how to fight against liberalism and progressivism domestically.America Last is a guide for the perplexed, identifying and tracing a persuasion-or what one might call the "illiberal imagination"-that has animated conservative politics for a century now. Since the 1940s, the Right has railed against communist fellow travelers in America. Heilbrunn finally corrects the record, showing that dictator worship is an unignorable tradition within modern American conservatism-and what it means for us today.

No, it's not a joke! First published in 1994, Knitting With Dog Hair taught a generation of readers how to gather, spin, and knit dog hair into wearable garments of all kinds, from Malamute mittens to Collie caps. Defying incredulity, the book became a cult sensation, featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and even People. This thirtieth-anniversary edition does more than just shed light on what had previously been an obscure practice: in expanded form, it provides tip-filled, easy-to-use advice on:How to harvest, clean, and store your pooch's fur.How to modify your patterns to accommodate pet-spun yarn.How to find experienced pet-hair spinners.With "an extensive catalogue raisonne of the various breeds" (New York Times) and several handy patterns, this illustrated guide is the creative answer to that vexing shedding problem. As the saying goes, you can't teach an old dog new tricks-but you can knit its hair.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning American lyricist Ira Gershwin (1896-1983) has been hailed as one of the masters of the Great American Songbook-songs written largely for Broadway and Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1950s. Now, in the first full-length biography devoted to his life, Ira Gershwin steps out at last from the long shadow cast by his younger and more famous brother George.It's a life with a sharp dividing line; we witness Ira's transformation by George's death at thirty-eight. From carefree dreamer and successful lyricist, he becomes guardian of his brother's legacy and manager of complex family dynamics, even while continuing to practice his craft with composers like Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern.Drawing on extensive archival sources and often using Ira's own words, Michael Owen offers a rich portrait of the modest man who penned the words to many of America's best-loved songs.

A woman is born. A woman is filmed in public without consent. A woman suffers domestic violence. A woman is gaslit. A woman is discriminated against at work. A woman grows old. A woman becomes famous. A woman is hated, and loved, and then hated again.Written in Cho Nam-joo's signature razor-sharp prose, Miss Kim Knows follows eight women, ranging from preteens to octogenarians, as they confront how gender shapes and orders their lives. In "Under the Plum Tree," Mallyeo feels existential as she bears witness to her sister's final days; in "Dear Hyunnam Oppa," a college graduate musters the courage to leave her partner; and in "Grown-Up Girl," a mother finally confronts her generational biases for the sake of her daughter. "Despite her characters' hardship and disappointments, there is mischief and glee to be found in these pages" (Hephzibah Anderson, Observer), resulting in another riveting read from an essential voice in world literature.

Part love story, part instruction manual, part spiritual journey, Dante's "little book," the Vita Nuova, has had a profound and far-reaching influence on global culture and is considered by many to be the perfect expression of the medieval ideal of courtly love, as well as an essential precursor to Dante's sublime poetic apotheosis, the Divine Comedy.Now Joseph Luzzi, celebrated author of books about Italian literature and culture and a lifelong lover and teacher of Dante's poetry, gives us a version of the Vita Nuova that is fresh, contemporary, and approachable-as vital and vivid as Dante's original Tuscan dialect-rendered in a voice that will entice a new generation of readers to swoon over one of the most heartbreaking stories of unfulfilled love in all of world literature.

"In the fashion of the big novels by Salman Rushdie or Amitav Ghosh" (Biblio), Quarterlife is a groundbreaking portrait of a nation on the cusp of a new age. When the Bharat Party comes to power after a divisive election, Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant, is lured home to Mumbai. With him is Amanda, a restless New Englander eager to embody her ideals through a teaching fellowship in a Muslim-majority slum. Meanwhile, Naren's charismatic brother Rohit, an amateur filmmaker, sets out to explore his roots and befriends the fiery young men of the Hindu nationalist machine. Their journeys lead them into an astonishing milieu of brutal debates and infatuations as fraught as they are addictive, feeding into a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets-where the simmering unrest erupts. Hailed as "a landmark novel" (Indian Express), Quarterlife is a brilliantly innovative work that tests the limits of what the novel can achieve.

Visionary director Yuval Sharon has been celebrated as one of the world's most innovative opera impresarios, yet he has never adhered to traditional form, observing that most operas "suffer the dull edge of routine in unimaginative and woefully under-rehearsed productions." Sharon seeks to disrupt conventions by urging the performance of opera in "non-spaces" like parking lots; amplifying voices; and even performing classic works in reverse order. Surveying the role of opera in America and drawing on his experiences from Berlin to Los Angeles, Sharon lays out his vision for an "anti-elite opera," which celebrates the imagination and challenges the status quo. Refusing to believe that opera is dying, Sharon maintains that opera has always existed in a perpetual cycle of death and rebirth. Engaging and accessible, A New Philosophy of Opera, with its advocacy of opera as an "enchanted space" and its revolutionary message, promises to be one of the liveliest opera books in years.

From best-selling biographer Max Boot comes this revelatory portrait, a decade in the making, of Ronald Reagan, the actor-turned-politician whose telegenic leadership ushered in a transformative conservative era in American politics. Despite his fame as a Hollywood star and television host, Reagan remained an enigma-a man of profound contradictions-even to those closest to him. Believing that this inscrutability contributed to Reagan's appeal, Max Boot sought to reveal the real man behind the mythology. Drawing on more than a hundred new interviews and thousands of newly available documents, Reagan tells the epic story of the Depression-era poor boy who transfixed and transformed the nation. Yet Boot, a one-time Republican policy advisor, offers no apologia, depicting a man with a Manichean, good-versus-evil worldview derived from his moralistic upbringing. Providing revelatory insights into "trickle-down economics," the Cold War's end, the Iran-Contra affair, and so much more, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.

A remarkable and delightful variety of poetic languages is displayed throughout the work: songs, hymns, invective, elegy, sermons, polemic, and prose poetry. It is rich in historical and literary associations and is at the same time accessible to all.

How do social movements arise, wield power, and decline? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these questions in a groundbreaking work, narrating the stories of many of America's most influential twentieth-century social movements. Beginning with the turn-of-the-century settlement house movement, Gordon then scrutinizes the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and its successors, the violent American fascist groups of the 1930s. Profiles of two Depression-era movements follow-the Townsend campaign that brought us Social Security and the creation of unemployment aid. Proceeding then to the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, which inspired the civil rights movement and launched Martin Luther King Jr.'s career, the narrative barrels into the 1960s-70s with Cesar Chavez's farmworkers' union. The concluding chapter illumines the 1970s women's liberation movement through the dramatic story of the Boston-area organizations Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective. Separately and together, these seven chapters animate American history, reminding us of the power of collective activism.

"At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created," begins Time Shelter's enigmatic narrator, who will go unnamed. "In the mid-seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ." But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a "vagrant in time" who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century.In an apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by curiously planted forget-me-nots, Gaustine has opened the first "clinic for the past," an institution that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time to unlock what is left of their fading memories. Serving as Gaustine's assistant, the narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to nostalgic scents and even wisps of afternoon light. But as the charade becomes more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic to escape from the dead-end of their daily lives-a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop time itself."A trickster at heart, and often very funny" (Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker), prolific Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov masterfully stalks the tragedies of the last century, including our own, in what becomes a haunting and eerily prescient novel teeming with ideas. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter is a truly unforgettable classic from "one of Europe's most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists" (Dave Eggers).

Along the glittering coast of southern France, a white villa sits atop an earthen terrace-a site of artistic genius, now subject to bitter dispute. Eileen, a new architect known for her elegant chair designs, poured the concrete herself; she built it as a haven for her and her lover, and called it E-1027. When the hulking Le G, a founder of modernist architecture, laid eyes on the house in 1929, he could see his influence in the sleek lines-and he would not be outdone. Impassioned, he took a paintbrush to the clean, white walls. . . .Thirty years later, Eileen has not returned to Villa E and Le G has never left-his summers spent aging in a cabin just feet away. Mining the psyches of two brilliant, complex artists and the extrordinary place that bound them, Jane Alison boldly reimagines a now-legendary act of vandalism into a lushly poetic and mesmerizing novel of power, predation, and obsession.