A literary ode to peace, presence, and fulfillment inspired by a walk taken with a most surprising creature."The demon of speed is often associated with forgetting, with avoidance . . . and slowness with memory and confronting," observes Milan Kundera in his novel Slowness. With that purpose in mind-a search for slowness and tranquility, Andy Merrifield sets out on a journey of the soul with a friend's donkey, Gribouille, to walk amid the ruins and spectacu...

Modern life is being destroyed by experts and professionals. We have lost our amateur spirit and need to rediscover the radical and liberating pleasure of doing things we love.In The Amateur, thinker Andy Merrifield shows us how the many spheres of our lives-work, knowledge, cities, politics-have fallen into the hands of box tickers, bean counters and rule followers. In response, he corrals a team of independent thinkers, wayward poets, dabblers and square pegs who challen...

The New Urban Question is an exuberant and illuminating adventure through our current global urban condition, tracing the connections between radical urban theory and political activism.From Haussmann's attempts to use urban planning to rid 19th-century Paris of workers revolution to the contemporary metropolis, including urban disaster-zones such as downtown Detroit, Merrifield reveals how the urban experience has been profoundly shaped by class antagonism and been the battle-grou...

*Shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Prize, 2012*Andy Merrifield breathes new life into the Marxist tradition.Magical Marxism demands something more of orthodox Marxism - something more interesting and liberating. It asks that we imagine a Marxism that moves beyond debates about class, the role of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In escaping the formalist straitjacket of typical Marxist critique, Merrifield argues for a reconsideration of Marxism and its p...

A remarkable personal journey through the life and writings of the great Sardinian Marxist, Antonio GramsciIn June 2023, author Andy Merrifield and his partner and their daughter moved from the UK to Rome, she to take a new job, he to get his creative juices flowing again, and both to begin a new life. A short time later, he visited Gramsci’s grave at the Non-Catholic Cemetery, home as well to the great Romantics, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Soon he took a...

A contemporary interrogation of Marx’s masterworkKarl Marx saw the ruling class as a sorcerer, no longer able to control the ominous powers it has summoned from the netherworld. Today, in an age spawning the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, our society has never before been governed by so many conjuring tricks, with collusions and conspiracies, fake news and endless sleights of the economic and political hand. And yet, contends Andy Merrifield, as our moder...

Our cities have been plagued by economic injustices and inequalities long before COVID-19 upended urban life everywhere. Beyond Plague Urbanism delves into this zone of urban pathology and asks what successive lockdowns and exoduses, remote work and small-business collapse, redundant office space and unaffordable living space portend for our society in cities? Andy Merrifield journeys intercontinentally as he reflects on these questions, in a narrative that moves imaginatively bet...

Mindy Thompson Fullilove traverses the central thoroughfares of our cities to uncover the ways they bring together our communitiesAfter an 11-year study of Main Streets in 178 cities and 14 countries, Fullilove discovered the power of city centers to “help us name and solve our problems.” In an era of compounding crises including racial injustice, climate change, and COVID-19, the ability to rely on the power of community is more important than ever. However, Fulli...

Marxism and Urban Culture is the first volume to reconcile social science and humanities perspectives on culture. Covering a range of global cities—Bologna, Buenos Aires, Guatemala City, Liverpool, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mahalla al-Kubra, Mexico City, Montreal, Osaka, Strasbourg, Vienna—the contributions fuse political and theoretical concerns with analyses of urban cultural practices and historical movements, as well as urban-themed literary and filmic art. Conceived as a response t...

The Politics of the Encounter is a spirited interrogation of the city as a site of both theoretical inquiry and global social struggle. The city, writes Andy Merrifield, remains "important, virtually and materially, for progressive politics." And yet, he notes, more than forty years have passed since Henri Lefebvre advanced the powerful ideas that still undergird much of our thinking about urbanization and urban society. Merrifield rethinks the city in light of the vast changes to...

Accessible, entertaining, anecdotal. A good introduction to issues in contemporary civics as well as a measured and thoughtful response to major themes and figures in cultural studies.Civility in politics is a subject throughout, and analyses of both Obama's rhetoric and the use of lowest-common-denominator insults in public debate will be well-timed going into the 2012 election campaignNot just formal essays: some are dialogues, some personal meditations, some direct addre...

There was no Reichstag fire. No storming of the Bastille. No mutiny on the Aurora. Instead, the mediocre have seized power without firing a single shot. They rose to power on the tide of an economy where workers produce assembly-line meals without knowing how to cook at home, give customers instructions over the phone that they themselves don’t understand, or sell books and newspapers that they never read.Canadian intellectual juggernaut Alain Deneault has taken on all kinds of evi...