In Who Will Build the Ark?, leading radical thinkers debate left alternatives to runaway global heating, capitalist crisis and wider environmental breakdown, clarifying the stakes in today's key disputes between Green New Deal supporters and proponents of 'degrowth'. In a series of landmark texts first published by New Left Review, Herman Daly and Benjamin Kunkel discusses the possibility of an egalitarian, steady-state economy, while Robert Pollin warns against the worldwide slump 'degrowth' could bring and calls instead for a single-issue campaign - 2 per cent of global GDP dedicated to the switch to renewable energy - as the swiftest solution to the emissions crisis. Nancy Fraser envisages an eco-socialist exit from capitalism's multifold crises, while Troy Vettese advocates eco-austerity and half-earth rewilding. Lola Seaton draws out the strategic implications of these contested perspectives, in a set of unavoidable 'green questions'. In the realm of contemporary politics, Alyssa Battistoni writes on the dead-end of COP diplomacy, Cédric Durand asks whether energy shortages will derail the transition away from fossil fuels, and Thomas Meaney compares Green New Deal proposals to the pinched reality of Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. The world's major powers accept the likelihood of dangerous climate change, yet seem incapable of averting it. Can radical green models generate the social leverage needed to do so? Or, as Mike Davis puts it: Who will build the Ark?

Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle is an irreverent and highly entertaining fantasy about the playful irresponsibility of nuclear scientists, beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range. 'All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.' Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of Ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Will Felix Hoenikker's death wish come true? Will his last, fatal gift to humankind bring about the end that, for all of us, is nigh? Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global apocalypse preys on our deepest fears of witnessing the end and, worse still, surviving it . . . 'The time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting. You read him with enormous pleasure because he makes your hair stand on end' New York Times 'One of the warmest, wisest, funniest voices to be found anywhere in fiction' Daily Telegraph 'Vonnegut has looked the world straight in the eye and never flinched' J. G. Ballard Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922. He studied at the universities of Chicago and Tennessee and later began to write short stories for magazines. His first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1951 and was followed by The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You Mr Rosewater (1964), Welcome to the Monkey House (1968); a collection of short stories, Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick, or Lonesome No More (1976), Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galapagos (1985), Bluebeard (1988), Hocus Pocus (1990) and Timequake (1997). He is also the author of a number of collections of short stories and essays. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

Provocative, romantic, and restlessly exploratory, Peter Handke is one of the great writers of our time. "Slow Homecoming," originally published in the late 1970s, is central to his achievement and to the powerful influence he has exercised on other writers, chief among them W.G. Sebald. A novel of self-questioning and self-discovery, "Slow Homecoming" is a singular odyssey, an escape from the distractions of the modern world and the unhappy consciousness, a voyage that is fraught and fearful but ultimately restorative, ending on an unexpected note of joy.
The book begins in America. Writing with the jarring intensity of his early work, Handke introduces Valentin Sorger, a troubled geologist who has gone to Alaska to lose himself in his work, but now feels drawn back home: on his way to Europe he moves in ominous disorientation through the great cities of America. The second part of the book, "The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire," identifies Sorger as a projection of the author, who now writes directly about his own struggle to reconstitute himself and his art by undertaking a pilgrimage to the great mountain that Cezanne painted again and again. Finally, "Child Story" is a beautifully observed, deeply moving account of a new father--not so much Sorger or the author as a kind of Everyman--and his love for his growing daughter.

After the financial crash and the Great Recession, the media rediscovered Karl Marx, socialist theory, and the very idea that capitalism can be questioned. But in spite of the publicity, the main paths of contemporary critical thought have gone unexplored outside of the academy. Benjamin Kunkel's Utopia or Bust leads readers-whether politically committed or simply curious-through the most important critical theory today. Written with the wit and verve of Kunkel's best-selling novel, Indecision, this introduction to contemporary Leftist thinkers engages with the revolutionary philosophy of Slavoj Zizek, the economic analyses of David Graeber and David Harvey, and the cultural diagnoses of Fredric Jameson. Discussing the ongoing crisis of capitalism in light of ideas of full employment, debt forgiveness, and "fictitious capital," Utopia or Bust is a tour through the world of Marxist thought and an examination of the basis of Western society today.