These are tough times for publishers. The closure of hundreds of high-street stores, the power wielded by online retailers such as Amazon, the turbulence of the digital transition, shrinking review space in the broadsheets: this litany of anxieties is hard to escape.

Yet talk to smaller radical publishers and a less doomy picture emerges. Whether it’s Verso (who brought out Owen Jones’s Chavs and Paul Mason’s Meltdown), The New Press (Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, a study of the mass incarceration of black Americans, has become a New York Times bestseller), or OR Books (whose titles include the well-received, rapid-response Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America), progressive houses are finding that readers are hungry for incisive analyses of capitalism’s failures, exposés of the flawed infrastructure of liberal democracy, passionate dispatches from the frontlines of social change.

Read the full article in the Guardian

In April, OR Books published Tweets from Tahrir, a book of tweets sent from Ground Zero of the democratic revolution that played out in Egypt last year. The book, its promotions declare, “brings together a selection of key tweets in a compelling, fast-paced narrative, allowing the story of the uprising to be told directly by the people in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. History has never before been written in this fashion.”

But tweets are fragile things. A year after the Tahrir’s tweets were posted, much of the information they first shared has gone missing. According to a study conducted by Hany SalahEldeen Khalil, a phD student in computer science and Web preservation at Old Dominion University, a third of the images initially included in Tweets from Tahrir — 7 out of 23 — seem to have disappeared entirely from the Web. A small slice of the historical record, gone — archived not digitally, but in the pages of a book.

Read the full article in The Atlantic

There have now been thousands of blogs, news articles and critical commentary on the Occupy movement since it emerged last September in Wall Street. This book, as the title would indicate, contains the “inside story” of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and what it was like to be on the ground.

It begins with how the Occupy movement was inspired by the Arab revolutions and the Spanish indignados. Each chapter begins with pictures sketched directly from the occupation, some smudged with charcoal, others with line drawings and sketches of people and placards, which adds to the feel that this book really was created by the 99%. With all proceeds going to the OWS movement you can’t help but feel that this book, with its cardboard, seemingly handwritten cover, came directly from a tent somewhere in Zuccotti Park. It really is a lovely book to touch!

Read the full article in Socialist Review

Paul Mason has had a busy year. As well as the day job as economics editor for Newsnight, he brought out not one but two books, Why its Kicking Off Everywhere (Verso 2012) and this, his first novel. Compared to the highly-topical book about the upheavals of 2011, from the revolutions of the Arab Spring to the English riots, Rare Earth risks being known as ‘the other Paul Mason’, but this is not entirely fair to it. It is unlikely to persuade anyone that Mason is a better novelist than he is a journalist, but it has its fascinating moments.

The story starts with a group of British journalists trying to film a report on the Chinese government’s ‘fight against environmental depredation’. Destined for a short slot in a programme sponsored by the government, it is not supposed to be critical. All their employers want is something pointing out the ‘new China’ for their coverage of the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square. The journalists are being carefully escorted by their Chinese minder, Chun-Li, and everything is going to plan, until they end up by accident in the desert town of Tang Lu and get some film of residents complaining about the appalling environmental conditions. From there, it all starts to spiral out of control.

Read the full review on Counterfire

With the publication of a lyrical novel written by a promising young author, Jeffery Eugenides’s long awaited tale of books and boyfriends, Steve Job’s biography and Christopher Hitchens’ collections, we can’t complain about 2011’s literary turn-out.

But we’re only one month into 2012, and we have to say, we’re pretty impressed. There seems to be something for everyone this month, so whether you’d prefer to thumb through a linguistically-oriented meta-narrative, the touching tale of an aspiring Girl Scout or a thoughtful analysis of the FBI’s history, check out our recommended reads for January and February:

See the selections and full article on The Huffington Post

It’s a conspiracy theorist’s dream. One nation holds most of the planet’s supply of “rare earths”, the metals and alloys key to building many of the developed world’s must-have items, including mobile phones, computers, cameras and precision missiles. And that country happens to be China: the world’s last great bastion of communism (if you don’t count its basket-case dependent, North Korea) and for centuries the focus of western fear, loathing and grudging admiration. This is the dramatic factual premise behind this febrile but enjoyable first novel by Paul Mason, Newsnight’s economics editor.

A paunchy middle-aged reporter called Brough – “a has-been hack with a Yorkshire accent” reeking of whisky – washes up in deep northwest China in May 2009, to make a documentary about the state of the Chinese environment. He is accompanied by his producer, Georgina, a ruthless blonde alumna of Cheltenham Ladies College desperate to swing a Chinese television distribution deal; by an even more washed-up cameraman called Carstairs; and by Chun-Li, their enigmatic Chinese interpreter. After an afternoon filming townspeople sick from factory pollution, the crew is arrested and barely escapes an assassination attempt by a crazed underling from the local propaganda office.

While Brough fakes his own death and flees into the Gobi Desert, Chun-Li (a freelance spy, we learn) promptly dopes a psychotic Mongolian sex maniac with Russian truth-drug, and discovers the area is ruled by a cartel – half-gangster, half-government – that has enriched itself on illegal mining of rare earths.

Read the full review in the Guardian

Gramsci’s advice to revolutionaries was to maintain “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. For the first decade of the new millennium, however, much of the left seemed to pay heed to only the first part of this injunction. In an editorial to mark the relaunch of New Left Review in 2000, Perry Anderson wrote: “The only starting point for a realistic left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat. Capital has comprehensively beaten back all threats to its rule.”

Near the opening of his account of “the new global revolutions”, Paul Mason launches an impassioned j’accuse against such fatalism. He denounces the “zeitgeist of impotence” that led the left to believe that City banks were no less immutable than Arab dictatorships. Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is a rapid-fire attempt to make some sense of the tumultuous events of the past two years. “This book makes no claim to be a ‘theory of everything’,” Mason writes. “And don’t file it under ‘social science’: it’s journalism.” Journalism it is, a finely executed example of what John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, called “intensified history”.

Mason, economics editor of the BBC’s Newsnight, has emerged as possibly the most engaged mainstream journalist of our age. He was there when anti-austerity protesters stormed the Greek parliament, when students occupied Millbank Tower and when Cairo cast off the shackles of tyranny. He has reported from the slums of Manila and, retracing the route of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, from the new dust bowl of Oklahoma. Mason draws on all these experiences to support his thesis that several factors – the growth of social media, “the graduate with no future”, the collapse of the neoliberal consensus – have combined to form a global rebellion without parallel.

Read the full article in the New Statesman

Occupy Wall Street is wintering. That’s not to say its seasoned recruits are taking time off, though there surely are equivalents of the “summer soldier and sunshine patriot” that Tom Paine invoked in his address to the Valley Forge winter encampment of the revolutionary Continental Army 236 years ago. But it’s been business as usual at 60 Wall Street, in the cavernous atrium of the Deutsche Bank building, where OWS working groups have been meeting continuously since the early weeks of the occupation. In those well-attended huddles, all sorts of plans are being made for re-occupations in the months to come – an American Spring to rival the Arab one – and the air is thick with proposals for ever bolder actions.

Still, it’s not a bad time to take stock of the early months of the movement. The publication of two books is an occasion either to reminisce about, or catch up with the momentous events that originated in Lower Manhattan just one week after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The respective publishers, Verso and OR Books, are natural allies of the movement, and are to be saluted for delivering the first two book-length treatments – there will be many others in the year ahead.

Read the full review in The Guardian

‘It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are,’ writes Nathanael West in The Day of the Locust (1939), commonly regarded as the best novel ever written about Hollywood, that factory of broken dreams. West’s sad, even pathetic characters yearn for something they can never have—which can’t be had—and their lives spiral into chaos, slipping towards a violence that is beyond them and which no effort can bring under control.

The Great Depression took root in West (1903-1940), an American writer whose wild, sometimes grotesque fantasies have become part of our collective imagination. In this fresh, elegant biography by Joe Woodward—the first in four decades—West comes alive, a strange young man on the prowl, a crazy fool, a fantasist. ‘The dream life of Nathanael West,’ writes Woodward, ‘was surely a vivid one—well-suited for novel writing and less-suited for Hollywood pictures.’ Yet he managed, in thirty-seven years, to assemble a small but permanent body of work, and—like Keats or Rupert Brooke or any writer of immense talent whose vision is cut short—one can only guess where he might have gone.

Read the full review in Literary Review

There’s not much doubt that for the foreseeable future 2011 will be remembered as the ‘Year of Protest’. When a mainstream magazine like Time selects ‘The Protester’ as their cover-story 2011 Person of the Year then something of significance is clearly happening. Though whether the last twelve months will in the long-term come to represent anything as significant as 1989’s fall of the Berlin Wall or 1968’s extraordinary mix of Paris, Prague and Vietnam is probably too early to judge.

However what can be claimed already with a degree of confidence is that the organisational forms of protest in 2011 changed decisively. Certainly if we are making any kind of comparison with those led by a traditional ‘Bolshevikised Left’ these were protests that looked very different in the manner they were organised.

The aspirations of those that had always preferred to organise horizontally and cut out the middle man vanguard party have been realised via a mix of the internet, smartphones, twitter, facebook, flickr and more. This is a culture of dissent that is deeply distrustful of leaders and takes producing a movement that has the evolution of forms that are participative and pre-figurative as one of its founding principles.

This is an approach epitomised in the West by the Occupy Movement, chronicled in the instant journalism of Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America written by the Writers for the 99%. This is activist authorship at its best. Messy, from the frontline, loyal to the ethics of the movement in its form, written up by those who took part almost as soon as the action comes to some sort of an end. The detail is impressive, the basis of the various affinity groups, the spreading of the message across New York, the courage in the face of brutal policing. There is a real sense of a making of community, but also the divisions that would on occasion erupt.

Read the full review in Philosphy Football

Other TV types have been disappointingly slow to respond to the gauntlet thrown down by Kay Burley’s raunchy novel First Ladies last year, but at last a challenger has emerged in the unlikely form of Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason. Mason’s just-published debut novel Rare Earth (“a washed-up TV reporter stumbles on a corruption scandal in China”) has moments that leave the Sky News anchor looking prim, including a standout scene distinctively fusing economics and erotica. In it a character called Khunbish explains a business deal while he and his lover Chun-li try out “tantric position 103” – she mounts a stuffed horse while he clings head-down to its side. “He began thrusting wildly in the general direction of her chrysanthemum but missing, his paunchy frame shuddering with the effort of remaining rigid and upside down. ‘The cartel, sells, to the global market,’ he panted. ‘The price is inflated because production has been capped!’ She began to pant in unison with him … ‘Cartel evades export controls. Market capitalisation of western miners stays low. Massive, one-way, bet’… He switched to some ancient steppe language as he ejaculated, blubbering and incoherent. Chun-li faked an orgasm, keeping her mind focused on an eighth-century lyric of sadness.” Let’s hope Jeremy Paxman is in too good a mood to tease him.

Read the full article on The Guardian’s Media Monkey

On the last day of 2011, I went for a stroll towards Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. As late as mid-November this clump of off-Broadway public space, usually the preserve of Financial District workers, was a congested tent city teeming with thousands of men and women protesting against an economic system stacked in favour of a plutocratic and often tax-evading minority.

Now, barely six weeks later, it was empty: police had placed barricades all around to make entry difficult; flustered out-of-town shoppers milled about in search of discount department stores, enterprising vendors hawked tatty Occupy Wall Street badges, the smell of cheap muffins wafted from a food truck.

A few defiant protesters remained. One wore a V for Vendetta mask and held up a piece of cardboard with the slogan “Capitalism Has Failed” for tourists to photograph. A woman of pensionable age recited from memory Adrian Mitchell’s “To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam)”. But the passion and rebellion that had been staged here and broadcast all across the world appeared to have been extinguished. By the time I returned home and switched on the television, the evening news was taken up by politicians chundering forth an idiot argot of fudge, cliché and parochial mendacity. Had Occupy Wall Street been just a dream?

A slew of new books offer convincing and often thrilling evidence to the contrary. They include Occupying Wall Street: the Inside Story of an Action That Changed America (OR Books) assembled by a collective made up of dozens of freelance journalists, students and activists, that goes under the name of Writers for the 99 per cent; Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America (Verso, £9.99) edited by Astra Taylor and Keith Gessen and featuring many contributors drawn from savvy New York-based journals such as n+1, Triple Canopy, Dissent and The New Inquiry; This Changes Everything by the staff of YES! magazine that collects speeches and essays by the likes of Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit and Ralph Nader.

Read the full article in The Daily Telegraph

Chase Madar joins Ted, Maegan and Kristen to preview his new book, “The Passion of Bradley Manning.”

Listen to the podcast on “Wilshire & Washington”.

The reader could be forgiven for assuming that Rare Earth, the first foray into fiction by Newsnight’s economics editor Paul Mason, is little more than an extended libel against the Communist Party of China, if not the whole nation.

The cartoonish front cover doesn’t help. Neither does the orientalist mention of feng-shui on the first page.

Yet Mason is too thorough a journalist and too engaging an author to construct anything other than a remarkably multidimensional account of China’s struggles with a social market economy.

He paints the conflicts of greed and principles, freedom and order in outrageously vivid hues, proving that fiction can tell big truths that factual accounts sometimes miss.

Read the full review in Morning Star

Hot on the heels of the aforementioned book come OR Books addition. Titled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America, this work covers similar ground to Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America. What it lacks in graphics, it makes up for in content. Written in a continuous narrative broken into chapters, Occupying Wall Street differs from the collection of vignettes contained in the Verso Books text, while also maintaining a more or less chronological telling of the original Zurcotti Park encampment from its beginning to its eventual destruction by the police on November 15, 2011. In addition, Occupying Wall Street spends more time placing the Occupy movement in the context of the international wave of protest that has swept from Greece to Britain to Tunisia and Egypt to the United States and a multitude of other localities around the globe.

Read the full review in CounterPunch

So, you’ve written a novel [Rare Earth]… presumably because there simply isn’t enough economics news at the moment?

I actually wrote it in 2009 when we were in a bit of a lull. And I was in China and it just hit me that you are never going to tell the story of China factually because so much of it is hidden from you. They’re going to have their Katrina and their riots and you’ll never know about it. The novel starts in the same way as the Newsnight story I did, in pursuit of corruption and a pollution scandal and I just saw where that took me. Although when the ghosts come in is when it slightly diverges from reality. The ghosts and the crazed female biker gang.

Ah yes, the ‘Steel Fuchsias’ girl gang…they seemed like they might be the construct of some sort of middle-aged male fantasy?

Well, they’re not a male fantasy because if you saw the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China you would have seen a bunch of women goose-stepping through Tiananmen Square in pink miniskirts and white leather boots. I was wondering whose male fantasy that was to put them in the Communist party parade.

Read the full interview in The Observer

On October 2nd, a few weeks after Occupy Wall Street began, Colin Robinson, a British man with a head of loose gray curls, fished a Natural Light beer case out of a trash can in Chelsea. He tore off a rectangle of brown cardboard, folded it into the shape of a book’s cover and spine, and wrote, in Sharpie, “Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America.” Where the author’s name would normally go, he scribbled, “Writers for the 99%.” He did not yet know who the writers would be, but he set out to find volunteers. Robinson, an erstwhile Trotskyist and a current “unapologetic leftist,” is the co-publisher of a boutique press called OR Books. He has published Christopher Hitchens and Noam Chomsky, but this is his first book by a leaderless movement. “I wanted to audition writers, but it became very clear that would not fly. So I thought, Let’s just try it and see what happens.” Eventually, a group took shape, with a rotating membership of about sixty—“some more involved than others,” Robinson admitted—who interviewed key figures in the movement and wrote collaboratively in Google Docs. In 1948, the editors of the Washington Post promised their readers “a first rough-draft of history.” Now, thanks to digital print-on-demand technology, historians can work like journalists.

Read the full article in The New Yorker

This book is the result of the slow but eventual workings of the US Freedom of Information Act. In 1997, the authors made a request for documents on the US government’s monitoring of Che Guevara, and the material they received became their 1997 book, Che Guevara and the FBI: The US Political Police Dossier on the Latin American Revolutionary. Then in 2007, ten years after the initial request, another package of documents arrived. They are published here with an introduction which summarises Che’s life but which concentrates on the main question on which they shed new light; his death.

Che Guevara was Fidel Castro’s second-in-command in the successful Cuban revolution. He left Cuba in 1965 first for the Congo and then Bolivia, where he organised a guerrilla movement against the government army of US-trained officers, which had overthrown the previous government in a coup in 1964. The expedition to Bolivia was in many ways a test of the idea that Cuba could export its revolution to other countries in Latin America, and its importance was clearly appreciated not just by the Cubans but also by the US.

Read the full review in Counterfire

When Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion landed on shelves in January 2011, the media was abuzz with word of a ‘Twitter revolution’. Tunisian activists, having spent years fighting Zine el Abidine Ben Ali’s iron rule, had managed to effect more change in a few short weeks than they had previously in two decades, greatly enabled by their use of social media. Egyptian activists had begun to take to the streets to protest the 20-year rule of Hosni Mubarak.

Although, as Ahdaf Soueif warns in the foreword of Tweets from Tahrir, a fascinating and uplifting compilation of Twitter messages sent from the now-famous Cairene square, “the causes were many, deep-rooted, and long-seated’, the long-time activist nonetheless states: I think we’re agreed: Without the new media the Egyptian Revolution could not have happened in the way that it did.”

There is no more perfect example of the problem Morozov describes than that of WikiLeaks, the embattled site that in 2010 was denied service by several prominent companies, among them Amazon, PayPal and Visa, after calls from US Senator Joseph Lieberman to terminate services. In WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency, Sifry states that the ‘battle over WikiLeaks’ has “delivered a wake-up call to everyone who thought the free and open Internet was already a fact … [While] the Internet has drastically lowered the barriers to entry into the public sphere, it has not eliminated them.”

WikiLeaks has brought the problem into the public eye, but the case studies Morozov references, such as the removal from Facebook of a Moroccan atheist activist group for unknown reasons, round out the issue for those who might be dismissive of the connection.

Read the full review in Survival: Global Politics and Strategy

It’s fair to say that 2011 has been something of a global cluster-fuddle. If you’re a murderous Arab dictator, a Greek civil servant or a London student, it’s been a total mare. For Paul Mason, however, it has been a year to celebrate. As others have struggled to make sense of the global upheavals, the Newsnight economics editor has communed with protesters at Tahrir Square, smelt the tear gas in Athens, debated situationist theory at Occupy. He has become the Robert Peston of revolution.

It was his blog post, 20 Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, that set the tone. Written one night in February as an attempt to link all the upheaval, it went viral. It has been retweeted hundreds of thousands of times, studied and critiqued by protesters and remains required reading.

Since then, Mason has stood on the BBC picket line during the pensions walk-out, sold out literary festivals, and even been insulted by Nicolas Sarkozy at the G20, for daring to ask (in French) whether he intended to help install any more unelected leaders in European democracies.

Read the full article in the London Evening Standard

This past summer I drove across the country interviewing people who had lost their jobs since 2007 — since the housing market disintegrated, since Lehman Brothers evaporated, since layoffs subsumed the work force. I asked for details about the climactic phone call, the conference room, the look of the sky out the window, the security escort, the drive home: all the particulars of the experience.

I met a mortgage broker who, one morning, learned he had been laid off when he found the door to his office building padlocked. I met an H.R. executive who had laid off a couple of hundred people before she herself was laid off. I met a husband who was laid off two weeks after his wife announced she was pregnant. I met a wife who laid off her husband.

I was collecting these stories for a forthcoming book about the experience of being unemployed. Modeled on Studs Terkel’s “Working,” the genre-defining oral history of what people do all day and how they feel about what they do, this book will be called “Not Working.” Accompanying me on the two-month trip were the filmmaker M J Sieber, who was helping to film a companion documentary, and the playwright Mallery Avidon, who was helping to find subjects, taking notes for a script and discovering a talent for writing haikus. We drove from Orange County, Calif., to New York City in a 1999 Jeep with 142,000 miles on it; we ran on the unexpected and inexplicable stamina that came with hearing mostly demoralizing stories.

Read the full piece in The New York Times T Magazine

Though we’re delighted to have our own online toystore up this holiday season, there are a thousand things we could recommend from elsewhere. Cutting it down to a couple of hundred, for our fourth annual gift guide, wasn’t easy; this year was a fantastic one for books, games, gadgets and much else besides. From stocking stuffers to silly cars, take yer pick.

See the list in Boing Boing

The Global Thinkers’ Book Club

Want to think like the world’s best minds? Start by reading like them. The FP Global Thinkers’ 20 most recommended titles.

Read them in Foreign Policy

Earlier this year, O/R Books published Tweets From Tahrir, a compilation edited by Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle that told the story of the protests to oust Hosni Mubarak from Twitter missives sent as the protests unfurled. With thousands of demonstrators now back in Tahrir to advocate for a handover of power from military to civilian rule, O/R has compiled a live Twitter feed from contributors to its original compilation — perhaps as they Tweet out a sequel in real time?

Read the article in The New York Observer