The PM Press Tabling Tornados are bringing the noise to these upcoming book festivals, conferences, radical gatherings, punk fests, and more. Look up these events and support their work! Come find our tables and say hello. Follow us on Twitter & Instagram to learn more.

• Autoptic Festival in Minneapolis, MN on August 17

• Fuck the DNC Book Fair in Chicago, IL on August 17 and 18

• Southeast Punk Rock Flea Markets from Columbia, SC on August 17 and 18

• Lehigh Valley Pride Festival in Bethlehem, PA on August 18

• Socialism conference in Chicago, IL from August 30 to September 1

• NOFX / Punk in Drublic Last Shows Tour in Boston, MA on August 31 and September 1

• Bread and Roses Heritage Festival in Lawrence, MA on September 2

• San Francisco Zine Fest in San Francisco, CA on September 1

• Philadelphia Trans Wellness Conference in Philadelphia, PA from September 5 to 7

• Sacramento Anarchist Book Fair in Sacramento, CA on September 7

• Trenton Punk Rock Flea Market in Edison, NJ on September 7 and 8

• Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago, IL on September 7 and 8

• Worker Co-op Conference in Chicago, IL on September 13 and 14

• Ithaca Is Books Festival in Ithaca, NY on September 14 and 15

• SacTown VegFest in Sacramento, CA on September 14

• Riot Fest in Chicago, IL from September 19 to 22

• Seattle Punk Rock Flea Market in Seattle, WA from September 2o to 22

• NYC Anarchist Book Fair in New York, NY on September 21

• Victoria Anarchist Book Fair in Victoria, BC on September 21 and 22

• Awkward Nerd Book Fair in Milwaukee, WI on September 22

• Baltimore Book Festival in Baltimore, MD from September 27 to 29

• Sonoma County Veg Fest in Sonoma, CA on September 28

• Brooklyn Book Festival in Brooklyn, NY on September 28 and 29

• Vermont AFL-CIO Annual Convention in Randolph Center, VT on September 28

• Furnace Fest in Birmingham, AL from October 4 to 6

• Decatur Book Festival in Decatur, GA on October 4 and 5

• NOFX / Punk in Drublic Last Shows Tour in Los Angeles, CA from October 4 to 6

• Atlanta Radical Book Fair in Atlanta, GA on October 5

• Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair in Oakland, CA on October 6

• O+ Festival in Kingston, NY on October 12

• Twin Cities Book Festival in Minneapolis, MN on October 19

• Easton Book Festival in Easton, PA on October 20

• Northwest Teaching for Social Justice in Seattle, WA on October 26

• Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, TN on October 26 and 27

• Litquake Book Fair in San Francisco, CA on October 26

• National Lawyers Guild Convention in Birmingham, AL from October 30 to November 2

• Brooklyn Folk Festival in Brooklyn, NY from November 8 to 10

• And many more… so stay tuned!
  

Autumn Leaves Books in Ithaca, NY is excited for the Ithaca is Books Festival this September 12-15! We will be hosting an event series with amazing events on everything from disability justice to crime novels to fossil fuel abolition, all co-sponsored by PM Press, Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, and more TBA. Join us on The Commons at 115 E State St, Ithaca, NY 14850. Here’s a Facebook event for the overall event series, which then includes links to each individual event.

A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice with Katie Tastrom
Thursday, September 12th 6pm to 7:30pm

From Sun to Sun with Kenneth Wishnia
Friday, September 13th, 8pm to 9pm

Karl Marx: Private Eye with Jim Feast in conversation with Jonathan Lethem
Saturday, September 14th, 2:30pm to 4pm

Zapatista Stories of Dreaming for Dreaming An-Other World with Antonia Carcelen
Saturday, September 14th, 6pm to 7:30pm

Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won with Kevin Young in conversation with Sasha Lilley
Sunday, September 15th, 5pm to 6:30pm

A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice with Katie Tastrom

Join PM Press at Autumn Leaves for our first event of the 2024 Ithaca is Books Festival, “A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice” with author Katie Tastrom. Co-sponsored by Cornell’s Society for the Humanities.

Thursday September 12^th, 6:00-7:30pm

Disability justice and prison abolition are two increasingly popular theories that overlap but whose intersection has rarely been explored in depth.

A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice explains the history and theories behind abolition and disability justice in a way that is easy to understand for those new to these concepts yet also gives insights that will be useful to seasoned activists. The book uses extensive research and professional and lived experience to illuminate the way the State uses disability and its power to disable to incarcerate multiply marginalized disabled people, especially those who are queer, trans, Black, or Indigenous.

Because disabled people are much more likely than nondisabled people to be locked up in prisons, jails, and other sites of incarceration, abolitionists, and others critical of carceral systems must incorporate a disability justice perspective into our work. A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice gives personal and policy examples of how and why disabled people are disproportionately caught up in the carceral net, and how we can use this information to work toward prison and police abolition more effectively. This book includes practical tools and strategies that will be useful for anyone who cares about disability justice or abolition and explains why we can’t have one without the other.

Katie Tastrom is a disability justice activist and writer who has worked as a lawyer, social worker, and sex worker. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Burn It Down: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution and Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid, as well as all over the internet including: Truthout, Rewire, and Rooted in Rights. She resides in Syracuse, NY.

From Sun to Sun: Reading and Discussion with Kenneth Wishnia

Join PM Press at Autumn Leaves for our second event of the 2024 Ithaca is Books Festival, a reading and discussion of “From Sun to Sun” with author Kenneth Wishnia. Co-sponsored by Cornell’s Society for the Humanities.

Friday September 13^th, 8:00-9:00pm

From Sun to Sun presents two parallel stories separated by twenty-five centuries: The first, set in modern New York City, features a hardworking, smart-mouthed Latina investigator, Felicity Ortega Pérez, as she hunts for a missing person who holds the clue to an ancient mystery. Little does she realize how deep the criminality goes and what she will learn about her own hidden past.

The ancient story is a radical revision of the biblical Book of Ruth: When her husband dies under strange circumstances, Ruth must join the exiles returning to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple in order to secure a future for herself and her grieving mother-in-law, Naomi. Unfortunately, the returning exiles include religious leaders who plan to “purify” the land by expelling all the foreign women.

From Sun to Sun is a tale of love, devotion, and sacrifice depicting the challenges facing two determined women as they confront ignorance, hatred, and indifference in their pursuit of justice—a seemingly endless struggle in a time of social upheaval, fluid identities, and diverse cross-cultural complexities. This novel is about who gets to decide who’s one of us and who’s a foreigner, and what it takes to prove you belong.

Kenneth Wishnia’s novels include 23 Shades of Black, which was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel and an Anthony for Best Paperback Original; Soft Money, a Library Journal Best Mystery of the Year; and Red House, a Washington Post Book World “Rave” Book of the Year. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Queens Noir, Long Island Noir, Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail, and elsewhere. He edited the Anthony Award–nominated anthology Jewish Noir and coedited Jewish Noir II with Chantelle Aimée Osman. He teaches writing, literature, and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College on Long Island.

Karl Marx: Private Eye with Jim Feast and Jonathan Lethem

Join PM Press at Autumn Leaves for our third event of the 2024 Ithaca is Books Festival, a book talk on “Karl Marx: Private Eye” with author Jim Feast in conversation with Jonathan Lethem. Co-sponsored by Cornell’s Society for the Humanities.

Saturday September 14^th, 2:30-4:00pm

A rattling good yarn and a suspenseful whodunit, against the backdrop of real historical events, that brings sixteen-year-old Sherlock Holmes together with Karl Marx and his brilliant daughter Eleanor to solve a cascading series of murders at a Bohemian spa. Karl Marx Private Eye is a page-turner filled with tricky clues, colorful detectives, and an “exotic” setting. Written in a brilliant parody of Arthur Conan Doyle, this cozy historical mystery will keep readers guessing until its shocking final pages.

Jim Feast helped found the action-oriented literary group the Unbearables, known for such events as a protest against the commodification of the Beats at NYU’s Kerouac Conference; annual readings with poets spread out across the Brooklyn Bridge; and a blindfold tour of the Whitney Museum. In the early 1980s, he met and married Nhi Chung, author of Among the Boat People. She introduced him to Chinatown movie theaters, which played the path-breaking Hong Kong noir detective films of those days, giving him a new way to look at the murder mystery. Feast has worked for Fairchild Publications and later taught at Kingsborough Community College. He edited seven books by Ralph Nader, including his three novels, and worked with Barney Rosset on his autobiography. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, as well as more recent best-sellers, The Feral Detective and The Arrest. Several of his novels have been made into major movies, and his shorter works can often be found in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and many other venues. One of the MacArthur “Genius” grant winners, Lethem is well-known and widely respected for his vivid literary style, sardonic humor, and deep understanding of American culture. He recently published The Collapsing Frontier with PM Press.

Zapatista Stories for Dreaming Another World with Antonia Carcelén

Join PM Press at Autumn Leaves for our fourth event of the 2024 Ithaca is Books Festival, a talk on “Zapatista Stories for Dreaming Another World” with coauthor Antonia Carcelén. Co-sponsored by Cornell’s Society for the Humanities.

Saturday September 14^th, 6:00-7:30pm

In this gorgeous collection of allegorical stories, Subcomandante Marcos, idiosyncratic spokesperson of the Zapatistas, has provided “an accidental archive” of a revolutionary group’s struggle against neoliberalism. For thirty years, the Zapatistas have influenced and inspired movements worldwide, showing that another world is possible. They have infused left politics with a distinct imaginary—and an imaginative, literary, or poetic dimension—organizing horizontally, outside and against the state, and with a profound respect for difference as a source of political insight, not division. With commentaries that illuminate their historical, political, and literary contexts and an introduction by the translators, this timeless, elegiac volume is perfect for lovers of literature and lovers of revolution.

Antonia Carcelén is the coauthor of Zapatista Stories for Dreaming Another World and teaches oral and postcolonial literature at USFQ, Ecuador and Sarah Lawrence College in the United States. She traverses disciplines and borders to weave the histories of Muslim, Black, and Indigenous peoples and their literary imaginations as they articulate a decolonial resistance against contemporary regimes of oppression.

Abolishing Fossil Fuels with Kevin Young and Sasha Lilley

Join PM Press at Autumn Leaves for our final event of the 2024 Ithaca is Books Festival, a talk on “Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won” with author Kevin A. Young in conversation with Sasha Lilley (Against the Grain, editor of the Spectre series). Co-sponsored by Cornell’s Society for the Humanities and Extinction Rebellion Ithaca.

Sunday September 15^th, 5:00-6:30pm

Climate destruction is a problem of political power.

We have the resources for a green transition, but how can we neutralize the influence of Exxon and Shell? Abolishing Fossil Fuels argues that the climate movement has started to turn the tide against fossil fuels, just too gradually. The movement’s partial victories show us how the industry can be further undermined and eventually abolished. Activists have been most successful when they’ve targeted the industry’s enablers: the banks, insurers, and big investors that finance its operations, the companies and universities that purchase fossil fuels, and the regulators and judges who make life-and-death rulings about pipelines, power plants, and drilling sites. This approach has jeopardized investor confidence in fossil fuels, leading the industry to lash out in increasingly desperate ways. The fossil fuel industry’s financial and legal enablers are also its Achilles heel.

The most powerful movements in US history succeeded in similar ways. The book also includes an in-depth analysis of four classic victories: the abolition of slavery, battles for workers’ rights in the 1930s, Black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and the fight for clean air. Those movements inflicted costs on economic elites through strikes, boycotts, and other mass disruption. They forced some sectors of the ruling class to confront others, which paved the way for victory. Electing and pressuring politicians was rarely the movements’ primary focus. Rather, gains in the electoral and legislative realms were usually the byproducts of great upsurges in the fields, factories, and streets.

Those historic movements show that it’s very possible to defeat capitalist sectors that may seem invulnerable. They also show us how it can be done. They offer lessons for building a multiracial, working-class climate movement that can win a global green transition that’s both rapid and equitable.

Kevin A. Young teaches history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has published several other books, including Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It (with Tarun Banerjee and Michael Schwartz) and the edited volume Making the Revolution: Histories of the Latin American Left.

Sasha Lilley is a writer and radio broadcaster. She is the co-founder and host of the critically acclaimed program of radical ideas, Against the Grain. Sasha Lilley is the author of Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult, coauthor of Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, and series editor of PM Press’s political economy imprint, Spectre.

Magic is an essential tool for healing and social change within our communities. Join Liberation Tarot organizer Elicia Epstein and essay contributor lawrence barriner ii for a conversation on this unique deck that seeks to serve as a tool for those inspired towards revolution in the face of the able-centered, capitalist, heterocis-normative, white-supremacist patriarchy.

Liberation Tarot is a collection of 79 tarot cards and accompanying guidebook, created over the course of four years by more than thirty artists and writers living in the US, Canada, France, Brazil, Palestine, and Mexico. The booklet includes an introduction from deck organizer Elicia Epstein, insightful essays by adrienne maree brown and lawrence barriner ii, and beautifully crafted card descriptions from poet emet ezell.

Elicia Epstein (they/she) is a seminomadic multimedia artist and organizer. Their creative inquiries manifest conceptually and promiscuously across a broad range of media including sculpture, installation, photo, video, performance, publication, printmaking, collage, and cross-media collaboration. eliciaepstein.com

lawrence barriner ii (he/him) is a Black queer coach, facilitator, and liberation worker who most values love, justice, community, and transformation. His unpaid work includes visionary fiction, (r)evolutionary uncling, community-focused healing, and creating post-patriarchal futures. lqb2.co

Join us for a short reading and book party for Kenneth Wishnia’s From Sun to Sun at Quimby’s Bookstore NYC on Thursday, September 19th from 6pm to 8pm. 536 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211.

Join us for this series of events in Europe for Black Metal Rainbows with coeditors Daniel Lukes and Stanimir Panayotov.

Follow the BMR Instagram and Twitter for updates and info.

Book launch for Taking the State out of the Body: A Guide to Embodied Resistance to Zionism with author Eliana Rubin and special guest adrienne maree brown, and music by Sijal Nasralla & DUNUMS on Friday, September 20th in Durham, NC at Northstar Church for the Arts. Join us! Learn more here.

Together we can create a world beyond borders that transcends the State and returns power to our bodies, communities, and the land…

Join us for the Book Release of Taking the State Out of the Body.

Dive into musings on freedom and embodied resistance as we celebrate the release of this timely book. This will be an abundant night of weaving our connections together including discussion with the author, Eliana Rubin and special guest, adrienne maree brown along with music by Sijal Nasralla & DUNUMS.

Join Ian Brennan and others to celebrate and discuss Missing Music: Voices from Where the Dirt Roads End, a new collection of field note manifestos about Ian’s ongoing quest to provide musical platforms for underrepresented nations & populations. The book has an Introduction by Marilena Umuhoza Delli and Foreword by Dame Evelyn Glennie.

Tuesday, September 24th – Book Soup (Los Angeles, CA) with Gary Phillips, Los Angeles author and community activist

Saturday, September 28th – Grammy Museum (Los Angeles, CA) with Raymond Antrobus, British writer and educator

Sunday, September 29th – Powell’s Books (Portland, OR) with Larry Crane, editor & publisher of Tape Op Magazine

Monday, September 30th – City Lights (San Francisco, CA) with Peter Case, American singer-songwriter and guitarist

Ian Brennan is Grammy-winning producer who has produced three Grammy-nominated albums and published seven books while also teaching violence prevention around the world since 1993 for organizations such as the Smithsonian and the National Accademia of Science (Rome). Brennan released his first album in 1987 and in the past decade has produced over forty records by international artists from five continents, which have resulted in the first widely released original music albums from nations such as Rwanda, Malawi, Kosovo, South Sudan, Romania, Comoros, and Vietnam. He has worked with artists as diverse as Fugazi, country legend Merle Haggard, Sleater-Kinney, and Green Day. His work has appeared in the New York Times, PBS television, and in an Emmy-winning segment of 60 Minutes. He is the author of Missing Music: Voices from Where the Dirt Roads End, Muse-Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes, and Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth.

Join us for this talk with Chris Robé on Abolishing Surveillance: Digital Media Activism and State Repression

The talk is entitled, Abolishing Surveillance: A Brief History of Copwatching, Community Organizing, and Media Activism on Friday, September 27, 6:00 pm at NYU in the Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor

More information https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/events/fall-2024/book-talk-abolishin-surveillance
Register here https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-abolishing-surveillance-by-christopher-robe-tickets-1007701481257?aff=oddtdtcreator

Book Talk and Panel with Chris Robé  on Abolishing Surveillance: Digital Media Activism and State Repression

Monday, September 30, 2024 in Philadelphia, PA

5:00pm-6:30pm

University of Pennsylvania

Annenberg School in Room 500

3620 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Hosted by the Media, Inequality & Change Center

Learn more here.

Chris Robé’s primary research concerns the use of media by various communities and social movements. In the twenty-first century, media does not simply offer a representational platform for different communities but more importantly serves as a material practice to engage in collective struggles for a wide variety of purposes.

He has written about the emergence of anarchist-based video activism in his book Breaking the Spell: A History of Anarchist Filmmakers, Videotape Guerrillas, and Digital Ninjas (PM Press, 2017). His co-edited collection with Stephen Charbonneau InsUrgent Media from the Front: A Media Activism Reader (Indiana University Press, 2020) investigates global trends in media activism through a historic lens. His most recent book Abolishing Surveillance: Digital Media Activism and State Repression (PM Press, 2023) concerns the relationship between video/digital media activism and state repression pertaining to animal rights campaigns, counter-summit protesting, Latinx copwatching and community organizing, and Muslim-American youth resistance.