Showing results by publisher "Haymarket Books" in Literature & Fiction

Whether writing about the genesis of his plays, such as Aunt Dan and Lemon; discussing how the privileged world of arts and letters takes for granted the work of the “unobtrusives”, the people who serve our food and deliver our mail; or describing his upbringing in the sheltered world of Manhattan’s cultural elite, Shawn reveals a unique ability to step back from the appearance of things to explore their deeper social meanings.

Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances - blues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects - hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook - as precious icons.

Chicago is one of the most widely celebrated, routinely demonized, and thoroughly contested cities in the world.Writing in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Kevin Coval’s A People’s History of Chicago celebrates the history of this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins, whose stories often go untold. These 77 poems (for the city’s 77 neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city’s workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social landscape.

Although he is guided and inspired by the people he respects, and despite the insufficiency of his knowledge and experience - an insufficiency shared by most (or all) other humans, Wallace Shawn can’t see any real alternative to trying to figure out his own answers to the most essential questions about the world he lives in.

Broken down by a variety of subject matter, each section begins with a selection from an interview between NBA star Etan Thomas and political sportswriter Dave Zirin, followed by a Thomas poem and the writings of talented young poets.

“Don’t you wonder: why is it necessary to declare me dead again and again?” This is the question posed by Karl Marx in Howard Zinn’s witty and insightful “play on history.” The premise of this one-man performance is that history’s most famous, and oft-misrepresented, radical is resurrected after agitating with the authorities of the afterlife to clear his name. Through a bureaucratic error, however, Marx lands in modern-day Soho, New York, rather than his old stomping grounds in London, to make his case.