PM Press strana 2 z 2

Almost all of our stories follow the same basic pattern: beginning, middle, end: exposition, action, and climax. It''s a neat and tidy way of telling a story. But life''s not like that, is it? It doesn''t obey the rules. Life''s stories - like the stories told here in But, personal and impersonal, historical and contemporary - are punctuated by disruption, derailment, and digression. Stories where the good guys lose. Stories where the bad girls win. Stories that just stop in the middle. Stories that fizzle out or simply never get going. Stories that don''t make sense. Stories that start where they should end and end where they start. Stories that go round in a cyclical loop, forever. Unfinished stories. Unstarted stories. Stories that stutter and mumble, that cough and splutter. That''s what we have here in this book: real stories, that do all of the above. That''s why this book is called But. Because the but is there to disrupt the easy normality of the way we tell our stories. This book is a collection of stories about real lives, real people, and real life. Stuttering, wayward, disjointed, funny, ridiculous, and unplanned.

The Housing Monster is a scathing illustrated essay that takes one seemingly simple, everyday thing - a house - and looks at the social relations that surround it. Moving from intensely personal thoughts and interactions to large-scale political and economic forces, it reads alternately like a worker''s diary, a story, a psychology of everyday life, a historical account, an introduction to Marxist critique of political economy, and an angry flyer someone passed you on the street. Starting with the construction site and the physical building of houses, the book slowly builds and links more and more issues together: from gentrification and city politics to gender roles and identity politics, from subcontracting and speculation to union contracts and negotiation, from individual belief, suffering, and resistance to structural division, necessity, and instability. What starts as a look at housing broadens into a critique of capitalism as a whole. The text is accompanied by clean black-and-white illustrations that are mocking, beautiful, and bleak. This new edition includes analysis situating and exploring the text''s impact around the world by Lazo Ediciones in Argentina, Ben Kritikos in Scotland, and Sean KB in the US.

Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues is a collection of Franklin Rosemont''s writings on popular culture over a period of more than forty years. Rosemont, a self-taught scholar, poet, and artist, playfully uncovers the sometimes hidden-in-plain-sight writers and artists who managed to be both popular, vernacular, and in their own ways profoundly revolutionary. Rosemont skillfully weaves together what most would regard as unlikely threads. The labour culture of the nineteenth-century anarchist movement gains new meaning when connected to the famed Chicago musicians of blues and jazz. His interests from childhood extended from his favourite animators and comic art - Mel Blanc and Tex Avery, Scrooge McDuck, Mighty Mouse, Krazy Kat, Smokey Stover, and Powerhouse Pepper - to nineteenth-century drug-taker Benjamin Paul Blood, or the barely remembered best-selling utopian writer Edward Bellamy. Palindromes and other wordplay counted along with radical environmentalism, modern dance alongside the ''mad'' self-taught writer-artist Henry Darger. Find all these and much more, exploring the inventory of Franklin Rosemont''s discoveries and his luminous, unpredictable exploration of himself. An introductory essay by Abigail Susik and an afterword by Paul Buhle frame his work and life.