Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives
Eds. Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim

Publisher Comments
The Feminist Theory Reader provides a revolutionary new approach to anthologizing the important works in feminist theory by incorporating the voices of women of color and postcolonial scholars throughout. Classic works in feminist theory by scholars such as Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Charlotte Bunch, Adrienne Rich, Donna Haraway and Monique Wittig appear alongside Amrita Basu, Gayatri Gopinath, Ji Yeon Lee, Gloria Anzaldua, and Chandra Mohanty, providing both local and global perspectives and infusing the collection with the vitality needed for contemporary study.

By incorporating global perspectives throughout the anthology, the Reader itself offers a challenge to the hegemony of white, Western feminism, providing an approach to feminist theory for the twenty-first century. This approach includes the conversations among postcolonial women and women of color about issues of gender, race, colonialism, and sexuality as paramount to understanding the concerns of feminism. This important new Reader will soon become the definitive collection of classic and contemporary readings in feminist theory.

Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil: My Life and Times in a Racist, Imperialist Society
Inga Muscio

Publisher Comments
In her widely anticipated follow-up to Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, controversial author Inga Muscio asserts that the history we learn in school and throughout life is, in fact, a marketing brand developed by white men who maintain the right to spin their ideologies as hard as facts. Muscio draws insight from personal experience, tackling a wide array of topics—from white normativity to gentrification to U.S. foreign policy—with dissension and unflinching self-awareness.

Reviews
“I have a new mantra—read Inga. Her passion, her courage, and her incisive words on the most pressing issues of our time are a wonder to read and experience. She speaks with truth and imagination. She's funny and dead serious. On race and the travesties of our 'official' history, she's simply brilliant. What can I say, everyone should read Inga.”
-Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.

“I honestly did not think Cunt could be topped. Then, that 'blue-eyed devil' Muscio generates a compelling, fact-laden, amusing, enraging narrative, unspinning white supremacist ideology from its ugly spool, unpinning duplicitous notions of 'democracy' from the (his)torical corkboard, and opining for a braver, lovelier world. Inga is my newest shero!”
-Alix Olson, performance artist, poet, and activist

“Muscio [is] one of the smartest and most honest thinkers I've ever encountered. [Her] wry and entertaining stories are really daggers and hand grenades ripping away at both the spectacular and everyday forms of racism that have become the new common sense in the U.S. Poetic, funny, biting, disturbing, transformative . . . this is the kind of ride some folks dread but everyone requires.”
-Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Bait and Switch: the (futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Barbara Ehrenreich

Publisher Comments
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible résumé of a professional “in transition,” she attempts to land a middle-class job—undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover, works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and—again and again—rejected.

Bait and Switch highlights the people who’ve done everything right—gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés—yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today’s ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their “surplus” employees—plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable workers—and little security even for those who have jobs.

Like the now classic Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch is alternately hilarious and tragic, a searing exposé of economic cruelty where we least expect it.

Scheherazade: Comics about Love, Treachery, Mothers, and Monsters
Ed. Megan Kelso

Publisher Comments
For years Kelso wanted to edit an anthology of female cartoonists, but didn’t know what would tie it together. A few years ago, she noticed an explosion of younger female cartoonists who were really ambitious and promising, and got this idea to work with them as a very active, hands-on editor, which is all too rare in comics. In Queen Scheherazade of the 1001 Nights, Kelso has found a role model: the archetypal (female) storyteller, cheating death by enthralling her royal captor with new installments of a vast, interconnected story. Like her stories, the tales in this book take on broad human concerns: love, life, death, money, food, shit and treachery, mothers and monsters. (A framing story by Ariel Bordeaux will bookend the collection and thread between all the other stories, which range from 5 to 14 pages each.) But the fact that they are all women is secondary to their promise as important contributors to a new era in the medium of comics, one marked by their energy, their potential and their ferocity. Further uniting this group is their belief in the story. Scheherazade is a celebration of narrative, the simple, human joy of spinning yarns.