Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism and everyday life in the late twentieth cenlury. Now finally available in a superb English translation approved by the author, Debord's text remains as crucial as ever for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image/information culture.

The manifesto that launched the Situationist International (SI) into the public eye and sparked an uprising is back-with the story of its creation and the histories of its publication told like never before. When the Situationist International was a little known revolutionary art group, before Guy Debord's philosophical masterpiece Society of the Spectacle was published, and before Paris' universities were occupied in May '68, a pamphlet titled On the Poverty of Student Life spurred a scandal that would turn into a global revolt. On the Poverty of Student Life was a match that recognized and described student and youth alienation, and the way it was printed and distributed spread that fire. For the first edition, supporters of the SI (mis)appropriated school funds to create and distribute 10,000 copies of the pamphlet. From there, dozens of editions were produced by worker- and student-run printing presses around the world, from Paris to East London, from Tokyo to Detroit. This new edition highlights this global underground circulation and brings attention to the common conditions of students, workers, and anti-imperialist resistance in the world of the sixties-bringing that historic reckoning to the present. Featuring the original English adaptation by former SI member and celebrated translator Donald Nicholson-Smith, an interview with primary author Mustapha Khayati where he traces his map from colonial Algeria to imperial France to the university and the streets, and essays about the political relevance of the manifesto (then and now)-an edition like this has never before existed. With beautiful photographs of nearly one hundred different editions this book provides a cartography of a world uprisings.

Michel Hartog, a sometime architect, is a powerful businessman and famous philanthropist whose immense fortune has just grown that much greater following the death of his brother in an accident. Peter is his orphaned nephew--a spoiled brat. Julie is in an insane asylum. Thompson is a hired gunman with a serious ulcer. Michel hires Julie to look after Peter. And he hires Thompson to kill them. Julie and Peter escape. Thompson pursues. Bullets fly. Bodies accumulate.
The craziness is just getting started.
Like Jean-Patrick Manchette's celebrated "Fatale," "The Mad and the Bad" is a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, pitch-perfect work of creative destruction.

When Guillaume Apollinaire was sent to the trenches during World War I, he had already published his groundbreaking book of poems, Alcools, inspiring artists of the budding Surrealist movement and making a foundational mark on twentieth-century literature. The letters he sent to his fiancee Madeleine Pages while fighting on the front in Champagne offer an unprecedented look into the life and mind of this literary great. Ranging from memories of his childhood in Rome with his mother (a Polish noblewoman) to his reflections on literary giants like Racine and Tolstoy, the letters also chronicle his daily life as a soldier in the brutal Great War. Letters to Madeleine is a moving portrait of a poet facing one of humanity's starkest realities, and it will be of interest not only to fans of Apollinaire but to those interested in personal accounts of the First World War as well.

"Mygale" MIG-uh-lee] n.: a genus of large tropical spiders. . . .

Richard Lafargue, a well-known plastic surgeon, pursues and captures Vincent Moreau, who raped Lafargue's daughter and left her hopelessly mad in an asylum. Lafargue is determined to exact an atrocious vengeance, and an ambiguous, even sadomasochistic relationship develops between self-appointed executioner and victim.

"Great art in nightmarish darkness."--Michel Lebrun

Thierry Jonquet (b. 1954, Paris) is an exponent of the hardboiled style of French noir that is inflected by post-May 1968 politics and social critique. His crime novels and children's books have garnered many literary prizes.

In sixteen ferocious short stories French author Luc Lang encapsulates the brutality of everyday life. Each tale is an admixture of tragedy, comedy, ridicule, and pain. Compassion lurks somewhere, perhaps, but pity is conspicuous by its absence. Lang's curt, agitated prose disassembles daily life with a swift, unflinching hand and examines it with a sharp, analytic eye. Skinning quotidian moments to bare, raw impulses, confusions, and the agonies underneath, the stories in Cruel Tales from the Thirteenth Floor show the mundane grind of the everyday forces that are fueled by cruel calculation and amoral happenstance and shot through with bizarre surprise. The results are at once coldly comic and powerfully tragic. Interpreting human interactions as a series of precise jabs and desperate flailings, Cruel Tales from the Thirteenth Floor tells truths about the darker sides of our potential and our well-meaning urges dimmed by chance.

Seraphin, dreaming of gardens full of birdsongs, sunny avenues, and flowers, works as a ticket seller in a metro station underground. One day, after being scolded by the stationmaster for trying to save a butterfly that had flown into the station by accident, he learns that he has inherited an old, dilapidated house. Overjoyed by the possibilities, he and his friend Plume set about building the house of their dreams, and much more besides! In a fresh translation, Seraphin now allows a new generation to experience the wonder and inventive spectacle of the original.

"Such was the battle that raged between Cousin K and me: good done badly; evil done well." And such is the twisted logic of good and bad, right and wrong, knitted into this novella by one of the most powerful voices to emerge from North Africa in our time. With his father brutally killed as a traitor during a national liberation war and his older brother an army officer far away, the young narrator lives reclusively with his mother, who scorns him. He turns to his young cousin for affection, only to be mocked and humiliated so deeply that his love becomes hopelessly entangled with hatred. Fate places a young woman in the narrator's path when he rescues her from a violent attack, and the reawakening of his confused passions proceeds toward terrible vengeance. In this nameless narrator's tormented reflections, played out against the backdrop of an indifferent world, Yasmina Khadra plumbs the mysteries of the crippled heart's desires.

"His books are all action, unfolding with a laconic efficiency that would make his killers proud."-The Economist Businessman Georges Gerfaut witnesses a murder-and is pursued by the killers. His conventional life knocked off the rails, Gerfaut turns the tables and sets out to track down his pursuers. Along the way, he learns a thing or two about himself. . . . Manchette-masterful stylist, ironist, and social critic-limns the cramped lives of professionals in a neoconservative world. "Manchette has appropriated and subverted the classic thriller [with] descriptions of undiluted action, violence and suspense [and] a perspective on evil, a disenchanted world of manipulation and fury. . . ."-Times Literary Supplement "The petty exigencies of the classic thriller find themselves summarily reduced to cremains by the fiery blue jets of Jean-Patrick Manchette's concision, intelligence, tension, and style."-Jim Nisbet, author of Lethal Injection and Prelude to a Scream "Manchette is a must for the reading lists of all noir fans. . . . Manchette deserves a higher profile among noir fans."-Publishers Weekly "Manchette . . . performs miracles within this simple story. His style is very matter of fact, stark and almost cool like the jazz his hero or anti-hero Gerfaut devours at every opportunity. Yet in this short novel there is no lack of atmosphere, excitement, characters or descriptive writing, it is just the total lack of unnecessary material that makes the story seem so lean and mean."-Norman Price, EuroCrime "A social satire cum suspense equally interested in dissecting everyday banalities and manufacturing thrills. Writing with economy, deadpan irony, and an eye for the devastating detail, Manchette spins pulp fiction into literature."-Kirkus Reviews "While there isn't much that's obviously moral-in the good-versus-evil sense-[this novel] demonstrate[s] why Manchette is hailed as the man who kicked the French crime novel or 'polar' out of the apolitical torpor into which it had fallen by the time he started publishing his 'neo-polars' in the 1970s. . . . Grim and cerebral as they feel, it's remarkable how comic-in an absurdist, laugh-or-you'll-cry way-these books are, as if Manchette had decided that poking fun at the products of the capitalist system were the fittest way to attack the system itself."-Jennifer Howard, Boston Review "The pace is fast, the action sequences are superb, and the effect is just as striking as it must have been when the book was first published in 1976."-Laura Wilson, The Guardian "[T]he novel is brilliantly written, replete with allusions to art, literature, and music, papered with the very texture and furniture of our lives. Manchette is Camus on overdrive, at one and the same time white-hot, ice-cold. He deserves much the same attention."-James Sallis, Review of Contemporary Fiction Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) rescued the French crime novel from the grip of stodgy police procedurals-restoring the noir edge by virtue of his post-1968 leftism. Today, Manchette is a totem to the generation of French mystery writers who came in his wake. Jazz saxophonist, political activist, and screen writer, Manchette was influenced as much by Guy Debord as by Gustave Flaubert. City Lights has published more of his work, including The Gunman.

A poet, philosopher, essayist, playwright, actor, and director, Antonin Artaud was a visionary writer and a major influence within and beyond the French avant-garde. A key text for understanding his thought and his appeal, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic is rooted in the nine years Artaud spent in mental asylums, struggling with schizophrenia and the demonic, persecutory visions it unleashed. Set down in a dozen exercise books written between 1946 and 1948, these pieces trace Artaud's struggle to escape a personal hell that extends far beyond the walls of asylums and the dark magicians he believed ran them. The first eleven notebooks are filled with fragments of writing and extraordinary sketches: totemic figures, pierced bodies, and enigmatic machines, some revealing the marks of a trembling hand, others carefully built up from firm, forceful pencil strokes. The twelfth notebook, completed two months before Artaud's death in 1948, changes course: it's an extraordinary text on the loss of magic to the demonic--the piece that gives the book its title. "Artaud matters," wrote John Simon in the Saturday Review years ago. Nearly seventy years after his death, that remains true--perhaps more than ever.