F. Scott Fitzgerald published America’s favorite novel, The Great Gatsby, at the young age of twenty-eight. Despite this extraordinary early achievement, Fitzgerald finished just one novel in the next (and last) fifteen years of his life, ending as a mostly unemployed Hollywood screenwriter. Taking Things Hard reveals the story behind the now-iconic Gatsby, along with Fitzgerald’s struggle to write anything that matched its brilliance.Robert R. Garnett’s ...

Knowledge, Class, and Economics: Marxism without Guarantees surveys the "Amherst School" of non-determinist Marxist political economy, 40 years on: its core concepts, intellectual origins, diverse pathways, and enduring tensions. The volume’s 30 original essays reflect the range of perspectives and projects that comprise the Amherst School—the interdisciplinary community of scholars that has enriched and extended, while never ceasing to interrogate and recast, the anti-economistic...

Using hundreds of primary sources, Charles Dickens in Love narrates the story of the most intense romances of Charles Dickens' life and shows how his novels both testify to his own strongest affections and serve as memorials to the young women he loved all too well, if not always wisely. When Charles Dickens died in 1870, he was the best-known man in the English-speaking world - the preeminent Victorian celebrity, universally mourned as both a noble spirit and the greatest of novelists. Ye...

Since the end of the Cold War, the human face of economics has gained renewed visibility and generated new conversations among economists and other social theorists. The monistic, mechanical "economic systems" that characterized the capitalism vs. socialism debates of the mid-twentieth century have given way to pluralistic ecologies of economic provisioning in which complexly constituted agents cooperate via heterogeneous forms of production and exchange. Through the lenses of multiple dis...

Who the Cap Fits follows the trials and tribulations of Khrawbor, a young man lured into the life of a militant. Set in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya in the North-Eastern region of India, the story follows the pattern familiar to many who live in militancy infected areas. His ideology is symptomatic of the frustrations experienced by many youth, living in similar circumstances, who do not see a future for themselves within the existing system. This story is told from the eyes of the father,...

The extensively revised and updated second edition combines carefully chosen primary quotes with wide-ranging discussion and everyday illustrative examples to provide an in-depth introduction to classical and contemporary sociological theory.Combines classical and contemporary theory in a single, integrated textShort biographies and historical timelines of significant events provide context to theorists' ideasInnovatively builds on excerpts from original t...

In 1978 Warren Fellows, Paul Hayward and William Sinclair were convicted of heroin trafficking between Thailand and Australia. They were sentenced to life imprisonment in Bangkok's notorious Bang Kwang men's prison, the Bangkok Hilton. For Warren Fellows, it was the beginning of twelve years of hell.The Damage Done takes you behind the bars of a Bangkok prison. A place where sewer rats and cockroaches are the only nutritious food, where autocratic prison g...

Flapper is a dazzling look at the women who heralded a radical change in American culture and launched the first truly modern decade.The New Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern women take for granted.Flapper is an inside look at the 1920s. With tales of Coco ...

Yascha Mounk shows why a focus on personal responsibility is wrong and counterproductive: it distracts us from the larger economic forces determining aggregate outcomes, ignores what we owe fellow citizens regardless of their choices, and blinds us to key values such as the desire to live in a society of equals. In this book he proposes a remedy.

Shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award 2018Five runaways ride the bus from Bayelsa to a better life in a megacity.They are unlikely allies -- a private, a housewife, an officer, a militant and a young girl. They share a need for escape and a dream for the future.Soon, they will also share a burden none of them expected, but for now, the five sit quietly with their hopes, as the billboards fly past and shout: W...

This groundbreaking collection explores the profound power of Social Reproduction Theory to deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression.In this book, leading writers suc...

From the desks of Nigeria's newsrooms, two journalists are recruited to find the kidnapped wife of a British oil engineer. Zaq, an infamous media hack, knows what's in store, but Rufus, a keen young journalist eager to get himself noticed, has no idea what he's let himself in for.Journeying into the oil-rich regions of South Africa, where militants rule and the currency dealt in is the lives of hostages, Rufus soon finds himself acting as intermediary between editor, husband, capti...