Critical Theory

Beginning Theory has been helping students navigate through the thickets of literary and cultural theory for over two decades. This new and expanded fourth edition continues to offer listeners the best single-volume introduction to the field. The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unravelled.

"Critical Race Theory" is consuming conservative America. The mounting attacks on a once-obscure legal theory are upending public schooling, legislating censorship, driving elections, and cleaving communities. In this much-needed response, renowned scholar David Theo Goldberg cuts to the heart of the claims expressed in these attacks. He punctures the demonization of Critical Race Theory, uncovering who is orchestrating it, funding the assault, and eagerly distributing the message.

In the aftermath of World War II, America stood alone as the world's premier military power. Yet its martial confidence contrasted vividly with its sense of cultural inferiority. Still looking to a defeated and dispirited Europe for intellectual and artistic guidance, burgeoning transnational elite in New York and Washington embraced not only the war's refugees but many of their ideas as well, and nothing has proven more pernicious than those of the Frankfurt School and its reactionary philosophy of "critical theory".

LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE A “powerful and devastating” (The Washington Post) call to free those buried alive by America’s legal system, and an inspiring true story about unwavering belief in humanity—from a gifted young lawyer and important...

Deeming the Whore's Head Inn no longer safe to hide in, the gang decide to take a more proactive role in their pursuit to get back to reality, or at least to keep Mordred from doing so.

Like F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises moved beyond economics in his later years to address questions regarding the foundation of all social science. But unlike Hayek's attempts, Mises' writings on these matters have received less attention than they deserve. Theory and History, writes Rothbard in his introduction, "remains by far the most neglected masterwork of Mises". Here Mises defends his all-important idea of methodological dualism: one approach to the hard sciences and another for the social sciences.

Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment.

Abridged for audio. Read by the author, Clive James. With fascinating essays on towering figures from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career as a critic...

Designed to be used with any deck, Red Tarot interrogates the images, themes, and power structures that have been read into and onto the cards—and guides readers to radical and empowering reclamation. Today, we have a wealth of tarot resources with many goals—but few address the historically...

An audio tour of the structures and patterns we call "math" This is an audiobook about math, but it contains no numbers. Math Without Numbers is a vivid, conversational, and wholly original guide to the three main branches of abstract math—topology, analysis, and algebra—which turn out to be...

You're no idiot, of course. You know Heisenburg's uncertainty principle has nothing to do with where you put your car keys. But modern cosmology is relatively complicated. The mystery of the universe definitely isn't one we can flip to the end to see whodunit. That hasn't stopped physicists...

In this powerful book, an award-winning scholar of white supremacy tackles her toughest research assignment yet: the unsolved murder of a Black man in rural Mississippi while her grandfather was the local sheriff—a cold case that sheds new light on the hidden legacy of racial terror in America...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A powerful study of how to bear witness in a moment when America is being called to do the same.”—Time James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. What can we learn from his...

A rallying cry striking at the roots of today’s major issues, Jesse Kelly uses his trademark bombast, intelligence, and humor to take down the most dangerous philosophy in history and address its resurgence in America. This instant bestseller is for anyone who feels alienated by political and...

A groundbreaking exposé of racism in the American taxation system from a law professor and expert on tax policy NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND FORTUNE “Important reading for those who want to understand how inequality is built into the bedrock of American society, and...

From the moderator of The New York Times philosophy blog "The Stone," a book that argues that if we want to understand ourselves we have to go back to theater, to the stage of our lives Tragedy presents a world of conflict and troubling emotion, a world where private and public lives collide...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A must-have guide to raising inclusive, antiracist children from educator and advocate, Britt Hawthorne. Raising antiracist children is a noble goal for any parent, caregiver, or educator, but it can be hard to know where to start. Let Britt Hawthorne—a nationally...

In the tradition of Shadow Divers and The Wager, the incredible true story of the pirate slave ship Guerrero, which wrecked in the Florida Keys, and the scuba divers who tracked it down nearly 200 years later. In 1827, the brig Guerrero was racing across the Florida Straits with 561 kidnapped...

A groundbreaking exploration of grief and racial trauma through the eyes of a Black end-of-life caregiver. Most of us understand grief as sorrow experienced after a loss--the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, or a change in life circumstance. Breeshia Wade approaches grief as...

One of Barack Obama's Recommended Reads for Summer “[A] brave and necessary book . . . Anyone interested in the future of liberal democracy, in the US or anywhere else, should read this book.” —Anne Applebaum “A convincing, humane, and hopeful guide to the present and future by one of...