In the style of Nudge or The Spirit Level - a groundbreaking book that will change the way you look at the world. This is the story of a new kind of social revolution which has transformed the lives of millions. It has drawn oppressed Indian women out of misery and passivity, persuaded teenagers to demand safe sex and to rebel against smoking; helped cure tuberculosis; enabled soldiers to have the confidence to face enemy fire and organized the nonviolent overthrow of a brutal dictator. Radical, optimistic and cogently argued, Join the Club will make you appreciate the power of one of humanity's most abundant resources: our connections with each other.

Review: '
Reminds us of the importance of social relationships, and of our deep-seated need for respect, approval and connection.' Prof. Kate Pickett, author of The Spirit Level 

 'Timely, thoughtful and important.' Jeffrey Sachs, New York Times Book Review 

 'Immediately make[s] one consider professional and personal obstacles in one's own life that might be amenable to a "join the club" solution - an empowering idea.' Newsweek

Author Biography: Tina Rosenberg is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a former member of the Times editorial board. Her book The Haunted Land won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.                                            

George Friedman offers a lucid forecast of the changes we can expect around the world during the 21st century. He explains where and why future wars will erupt (and how they will be fought), which nations will gain and lose economic and political power, and how new technologies and cultural trends will alter the way we live. Drawing on history and geopolitical patterns dating back hundreds of years, Friedman shows that we are now, for the first time in half a millennium, at the dawn of a new era, with changes in store, including: the US-jihadist war will conclude, to be replaced by a second full-blown cold war with Russia; and China will undergo a major extended internal crisis, and Mexico will emerge as an important world power.                                  

       For two months this fall, Zuccotti Park, squeezed deep in a canyon between bankers' skyscrapers in lower Manhattan, was the site of an extraordinary political action. Home to the hundreds of anti-capitalist protestors who camped there overnight, and the thousands who visited to join the protest, the park became a magical place: a communion of sharing and consensus in the heart of a citadel defined by greed and oligarchy. In the early hours of Tuesday November the 15th the occupiers' camp was destroyed when police swept suddenly into the square, tearing down the tents, library, kitchen and medical centre, and arresting hundreds. For the multitude supporting the action it was a heart-rending moment. But if the occupation at Zuccotti was destroyed that night, the movement it spawned across America has only just begun. Issues of equality and democracy, absent from mainstream political discussion in the United States for decades, are today springing up everywhere. Now, in a new book assembled by a group of writers active in support of the occupation, the story of Occupy Wall Street is being told. Occupying Wall Street draws on extensive interviews with those who took part in the action to bring an authentic, inside-the-square history to life. In these pages you will discover in rich detail how the protest was devised and planned, how its daily needs were met, and how it won overwhelming support across the nation. In a vivid, fast-paced narrative, the key events of the occupation are described: the pepper spraying of young women corralled between plastic fences by the NYPD; the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge; the victory on October 14th when an announced 'clean up' of the square was abandoned by a mayor's office fearful of a PR disaster; and the eventual storming of the occupation that brought it to an abrupt end. Woven throughout are stories of daily life in the square focusing on how the kitchen, library, media centre, clean-up, hospital, and decision-making at the General Assembly functioned, all in the words of the people who were there. The future course of Occupy Wall Street remains unclear. But one thing is starkly evident: under the banner 'We are the 99%' the protest has given birth to America's most important progressive movement since the civil rights marches half a century ago. This is the story of that beginning.

Author Biography: Writers for the 99% is a group of writers and researchers, active in supporting Occupy Wall Street, who came together to create this book. A list of all those contributing will appear at the back of the book.                                            

Growing up in a strict Muslim community in south-east London, Alom Shaha learnt that religion was not to be questioned. Reciting the Qu'ran without understanding what it meant was simply a part of life; so, too, was obeying the imam and enduring beatings when he failed to attend the local mosque. Shaha was more drawn to science and its power to illuminate. As a teen, he lived between two worlds: the home controlled by his authoritarian father, and a school alive with books and ideas. In a charming blend of memoir, philosophy, and science, Shaha explores the questions about faith and the afterlife that we all ponder. Through a series of loose 'lessons', he tells his own compelling story, drawing on the theories of some of history's greatest thinkers and interrogating the fallacies that have impeded humanity for centuries. Shaha recounts how his education and formative experiences led him to question how to live without being tied to what his parents, priests, or teachers told him to believe, and offers insights so that others may do the same. This is a book for anyone who thinks about what they should believe and how they should live. It's for those who may need the facts and the ideas, as well as the courage, to break free from inherited beliefs. In this powerful narrative, Shaha shows that it is possible to live a compassionate, fulfilling, and meaningful life without God.

Reviews: 

'Illuminates the route to a better destination for all those who seek what Alom found: namely, that precious liberty of mind which makes its possessor open to all good things.' - A.C. Grayling, author of The Good Book.                                                       

       The first book to make sense of 21st Century pop, "Retromania" explores rock's nostalgia industry of revivals, reissues, reunions and remakes, and argues that there has never before been a culture so obsessed with its own immediate past. Pulling together parallel threads from music, fashion, art, and new media, Simon Reynolds confronts a central paradox of our era: from iPods to YouTube, we're empowered by mind-blowing technology, but too often it's used as a time machine or as a tool to shuffle and rearrange music from yesterday. We live in the digital future but we're mesmerized by our analogue past.

Reviews: 

"Amazing." --Bruce Sterling, Wired.com 

"Looking back over the last 25 years you'd be hard pressed to name a music journalist more adept at tracking and defining the zeitgeist." --Dave Haslam, The Guardian 

"Simon Reynolds, one of our most thoughtful music writers, poses a stark question for anyone who cares about the future of pop . . . A devastating critique of the way music is now consumed." --Patrick Sawer, The Daily Telegraph

"Bracingly sharp. As a work of contemporary historiography, a thick description of the transformations in our relationship to time--as well as to place--"Retromania" deserves to be very widely read." --Sukhdev Sandhu, The Observer (London)

Author Biography: Simon Reynolds is the author of Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, The Sex Revolts: Gender Rebellions and Rock and Roll (co-written with Joy Press), Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 and, most recently, Bring The Noise: Twenty Years of Hip Hop and Hip Rock.                                            

From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved and The Summer Without Men, a dazzling collection of essays written with Siri Hustvedt's customary intelligence, wit and ability to convey complex ideas in a clear and lively way. Divided into three sections - Living, which draws on Siri's own life; Thinking, on memory, emotion and the imagination; and Looking, on art and artists - the essays range across the humanities and science as Siri explores how we see, remember, feel and interact with others, what it means to sleep, dream and speak, and what we mean by 'self'. The combination offers a profound and fascinating insight into ourselves as thinking, feeling beings.

Reviews: 
 'Provocative but often funny, encyclopedic but down to earth...Hustvedt's erudite book deepens one's wonder about the relation of body and mind.' -- Oliver Sacks 

'Readers of Oliver Sacks will rate this book highly; as with Sacks, scientific knowledge and a powerful capacity for empathy are closely linked...It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear.' -- Hilary Mantel, Guardian 

'She thinks her way through complex subject matter with the effortless clarity of a poised and sceptical outsider...a short book with an encyclopaedic breadth' -- Lisa Appignanesi, Independent 

'She has an enviable ability to digest and reframe her discoveries into clear, accessible prose' -- Melanie McGrath, Sunday Telegraph 

'Fascinating...what gives the book its originality is that she wavers on the edge of the various disciplines, preferring her own imaginative, deeply personal reflections to the potential certainty that might be offered by doctors...Although a desire for clear-cut answers is understandable, Hustvedt suggests that this is often far from possible. And she leaves the reader thinking about his or her own bouts of illness in a thoroughly fresh way.' -- Lorna Bradbury, Daily Telegraph

Author Biography: Siri Hustvedt's first novel, THE BLINDFOLD, was published by Sceptre in 1993 and her second, THE ENCHANTMENT OF LILY DAHL, followed in 1997. Both were highly acclaimed and translated around the world, while part of THE BLINDFOLD was made into a film (Of Women and Magic, directed by Claude Miller). Her third novel, WHAT I LOVED, was published in 2003 to even greater acclaim and has been an international success; her next novel, THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN, followed in 2008. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Fiction, and The Best American Short Stories, and she is also the author of READING TO YOU, a poetry collection, and three collections of essays, YONDER, MYSTERIES OF THE RECTANGLE: Essays on Painting, and A PLEA FOR EROS, and a non-fiction work, THE SHAKING WOMAN: A HISTORY OF MY NERVES. Her most recent novel is THE SUMMER WITHOUT MEN. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, Paul Auster.        

Release Date:
June 2012                                    

In 'The Office: A Hardworking History', Gideon Haigh traces from origins among merchants and monks to the gleaming glass towers of New York and the space age sweatshops of Silicon Valley, finding an extraordinary legacy of invention and ingenuity, shaped by the telephone, the typewriter, the elevator, the email, the copier, the cubicle, the personal computer, the personal digital assistant. Amid the formality, restraint and order of office life, too, he discovers a world teeming with dramas great and small, of boredom, betrayal, distraction, discrimination, leisure and lust, meeting along the way such archetypes as the Whitehall mandarin and the Wall Street banker. Far from simply being a place we visit to earn a living, the office emerges as a way of seeing the entire world.               

Release Date:
May 2012                   

Thinking the Twentieth Century is a major new history of modern intellectual life by the renowned author and historian Tony Judt. As a history of ideas, it is unconventional.

The book was created in the last two years of Judt’s life as he faced a neurological disease, which left him paralyzed and physically unable to write: working with Yale historian Timothy Snyder, Tony Judt thus ‘talked’ the twentieth century.

The result is an original and moving blend of intellectual history, personal reflection, and passionate debate spanning continents and generations. From fascism and communism to liberalism and social democracy, Judt reflects on the ironies and paradoxes of twentieth-century thought and the legacy left to us today. 

Thinking the Twentieth Centuryis a classic work of history and a heartfelt tribute to the life of the mind.


Release Date: April 2012

Pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws describing the universe supplementary to this one.

Alfred Jarry's posthumous novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, his pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard.

In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found the College of 'Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal was the first to elaborate upon Jarry's unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician.

Pataphysical Essays collects Daumal's overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, "The Pataphysics of Ghosts." Daumal's "Treatise on Patagrams" offers the reader everything from a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer to instructions on how to drill a fount of knowledge in a public urinal.

This volume also includes Daumal's column for the Nouvelle Revue Française, "Pataphysics This Month." Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, "Pataphysics This Month" describes a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrates that the twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.

Release Date: June 2012

I'm Aboriginal. I'm just not the Aboriginal person a lot of people want or expect me to be.
What does it mean to be Aboriginal? Why is Australia so obsessed with notions of identity? Anita Heiss, successful author and passionate campaigner for Aboriginal literacy, was born a member of the Wiradjuri nation of central New South Wales, but was raised in the suburbs of Sydney and educated at the local Catholic school. She is Aboriginal - however, this does not mean she likes to go barefoot and, please, don't ask her to camp in the desert.
After years of stereotyping Aboriginal Australians as either settlement dwellers or rioters in Redfern, the Australian media have discovered a new crime to charge them with: being too 'fair-skinned' to be an Australian Aboriginal. Such accusations led to Anita's involvement in one of the most important and sensational Australian legal decisions of the 21st-century when she joined others in charging a newspaper columnist with breaching the Racial Discrimination Act. He was found guilty, and the repercussions continue.
In this deeply personal memoir, told in her distinctive, wry style, Anita Heiss gives a first-hand account of her experiences as a woman with an Aboriginal mother and Austrian father, and explains the development of her activist consciousness.
Read her story and ask: what does it take for someone to be black enough for you?