Vida (71 page)
PM Press was founded at the end of 2007 by a small collection of folks with decades of publishing, media, and organizing experience. PM Press co-conspirators have published and distributed hundreds of books, pamphlets, CDs, and DVDs. Members of PM have founded enduring book fairs, spearheaded victorious tenant organizing campaigns, and worked closely with bookstores, academic conferences, and even rock bands to deliver political and challenging ideas to all walks of life. We’re old enough to know what we’re doing and young enough to know what’s at stake.
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Dance the Eagle to Sleep:
A Novel
Marge Piercy
ISBN: 978-1-60486-456-4
$17.95 208 pages
Originally published in 1970, Marge Piercy’s second novel follows the lives of four teenagers, in a near future society, as they rebel against a military draft and “the system.” The occupation of Franklin High School begins, and with it, the open rebellion of America’s youth against their channeled, unrewarding lives and the self-serving, plastic society that directs them. From the disillusionment and alienation of the young at the center of the revolt, to their attempts to build a visionary new society, the nationwide following they gain and the brutally complete repression that inevitably follows, this is a future fiction without a drop of fantasy. As driving, violent, and nuanced today as it was 40 years ago, this anniversary edition includes a new introduction by the author reflecting unapologetically on the novel and the times from which it emerged.
“Dance the Eagle to Sleep
bears a strong family resemblance, in kind and quality, to William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
and to Anthony Burgess’
A Clockwork Orange.
It would be no surprise to see it become, like these others, a totem and legend of the young.”
—
Time
“Dance the Eagle to Sleep
is a vision, not an argument… It is brilliant. Miss Piercy was a published poet before she resorted to the novel, exploiting its didactic aspect, and her prose crackles, depolarizes, sends shivers leaping across the synaptic cleft. The ‘eagle’ is America, bald and all but extinct. The ‘dance’ is performed by the tribal young, the self-designated ‘Indians,’ after their council meetings, to celebrate their bodies and their escape from the cannibalizing ‘system.’ The eagle isn’t danced to sleep; it sends bombers to devastate the communes of the young… What a frightening, marvelous book!”
—
New York Times
“It’s so good I don’t even know how to write a coherent blurb. It tore me apart. It’s one of the first really honest books this country has ever produced. In lesser hands it would’ve been just another propaganda pamphlet, but in Marge Piercy’s it’s an all-out honest-to-God novel, humanity and love hollering from every sentence and the best set of characters since, shit I dunno,
Moby Dick
or something. At a time when nearly every other novelist is cashing in on masturbation fantasies, the superhip college bullshit stored up in their brains, even on the revolution itself, here is somebody with the guts to go into the deepest core of herself, her time, her history, and risk more than anybody else has so far, just out of a love for the truth and a need to tell it. It’s about fucking time.”
— Thomas Pynchon, author of
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Wild Girls
Ursula K. Le Guin
ISBN: 978-1-60486-403-8
$12.00 112 pages
Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the forty years since
The Left Hand of Darkness,
her works have changed not only the face but the tone and the agenda of SF, introducing themes of gender, race, socialism and anarchism, all the while thrilling readers with trips to strange (and strangely familiar) new worlds. She is our exemplar of what fantastic literature can and should be about.
Her Nebula winner
The Wild Girls,
newly revised and presented here in book form for the first time, tells of two captive “dirt children” in a society of sword and silk, whose determination to enter “that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice” leads to a violent and loving end.
Plus: Le Guin’s scandalous and scorching Harper’s essay, ‘Staying Awake While We Read’, (also collected here for the first time) which demolishes the pretensions of corporate publishing and the basic assumptions of capitalism as well. And of course our Outspoken Interview which promises to reveal the hidden dimensions of America’s best-known SF author. And delivers.
“Idiosyncratic and convincing, Le Guin’s characters have a long afterlife.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry.”
—
The Library Journal
“If you want excess and risk and intelligence, try Le Guin.”
—
The San Francisco Chronicle
“Her characters are complex and haunting, and her writing is remarkable for its sinewy grace.”
—
Time
“She wields her pen with a moral and psychological sophistication rarely seen. What she really does is write fables: splendidly intricate and hugely imaginative tales about such mundane concerns as life, death, love, and sex.”
—
Newsweek
SWITCH BLADE
1-5
Summer Brenner
ISBN: 978-1-60486-019-1
256 pages $15-95
A novel of crime, transport, and sex,
I-5
tells the bleak and brutal story of Anya and her journey north from Los Angeles to Oakland on the interstate that bisects the Central Valley of California.
Anya is the victim of a deep deception. Someone has lied to her; and because of this lie, she is kept under lock and key, used by her employer to service men, and indebted for the privilege. In exchange, she lives in the United States and fantasizes on a future American freedom. Or as she remarks to a friend, “Would she rather be fucking a dog … or living like a dog?” In Anya’s world, it’s a reasonable question.