Sixty years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found. 2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.

Ghosts and specters, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The concept of Hauntology has evolved since first emerging in the 1990s, and has now entered the cultural mainstream as a shorthand for our new-found obsession with the recent past. But where does this term come from and what exactly does it mean? This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the history of our fascination with the uncanny from the golden age of the Victorian ghost story to the present day. From Dickens to Derrida, MR James to Mark Fisher; from the rise of Spiritualism to the folk horror revival, Hauntology traces our continuing engagement with these esoteric ideas. Moving between the literary and the theoretical, the visual and the political, Hauntology explores our nostalgia for the cultural artifacts of a past from which we seem unable to break free.

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.

Exemplified by President Donald J. Trump’s slogan “Make American Great Again,” white masculinity has become increasingly organized around melancholic attachments to an imagined past when white men were still atop the social hierarchy. How and why are white men increasingly identifying as victims of social, economic, and political change? Casey Ryan Kelly’s Apocalypse Man seeks to answer this question by examining textual and performative examples of white male rhetoric—as found among online misogynist and incel communities, survivalists and “doomsday preppers,” gender-motivated mass shooters, gun activists, and political demagogues. Using sources ranging from reality television and Reddit manifestos to gun culture and political rallies, Kelly ultimately argues that death, victimhood, and fatalism have come to underwrite the constitution of contemporary white masculinity.

'there is no more relevant source for the renewal of today's Labour Party in its orientation towards bringing energy and life back to the regions of England ... a very important contribution to the debate on how Labour can renew itself as a national party with roots in working communities throughout the country.' Maurice Glasman The socialist tradition in Britain is diverse and multi-layered. Its pattern of development differed markedly across the great industrial centres where it first put down roots. In this new book - which is so much more than a work of history - Paul Salveson re-asserts the strength and distinctiveness of the socialism which emerged in the mills, mines and railway yards of the North of England. The core of his argument is that popular socialism today needs to reconnect with its local and regional roots, and relocate power to the regions and localities. Central to Salveson's account is his discussion of the rise of the Independent Labour Party, which was formed in Bradford in 1893, and whose character differed markedly from the metropolitan-based socialism of the Marxist-inclined Social Democratic Federation. Its emphasis was on ethical values, community and culture; and it was decentralist and democratic rather than centralist and authoritarian. And, as the book also documents, a number of outstanding women - including Katharine Bruce Glasier, Caroline Martyn, Sarah Reddish and Enid Stacy - played a central role in its campaigning. Salveson reminds us of the role of working-class writers such as Allen Clarke, who converted thousands of his readers to socialism 'by making them laugh', and of the Clarion cycling clubs, which introduced a generation of working men and women to a new kind of politics, one which was fun and recreational. He also shows how the co-operative movement and the trades unions, alongside the ILP, helped shaped a working-class culture which was remarkably durable and independent. As Salveson argues, in reconnecting with these local radical traditions in a modern context Labour could find valuable resources for its renewal. Paul Salveson is a professional railwayman and visiting professor at the University of Huddersfield. He originated and developed the community rail concept, and was awarded an MBE for services to the railway industry in 2008. He is vice-chair of Colne Valley Labour Party and active in his union TSSA. He has written widely on labour movement history in the North; his previous books include Allen Clarke/Teddy Ashton: Lancashire's Romantic Radical (Little Northern Books 2009). His most recent book is Railpolitik (Lawrence & Wishart 2013).

The Little Mermaid is one of the most haunting stories ever written. Its author, Hans Christian Andersen, made the literary fairy tale so much his own that even today no writer has surpassed him. This collection, with an introduction and fresh new renderings of the tales by Neil Philip, includes not just "The Little Mermaid" but also such favorites as "The Tinderbox," "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," and "The Little Match Girl." Philip also includes some lesser known tales that reflect different facets of Andersen's genius, such as the tall tale "The Flying Trunk," with its witty story-within-a-story, the charming fantasy of "Little Ida's Flowers," the comic fable "The Collar," and a story about the magic of everyday reality, "The Gardener and His Master." A special feature of the book is the inclusion of several fairy tales of spiritual search and redemption, including "The Bell," "The Toad," and, of course, "The Little Mermaid." The book is illustrated throughout by Isabelle Brent's magical watercolors, lavishly embellished with gold leaf, making this handsome volume a book the whole family will treasure.

The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels' revolutionary 1848 summons to the working classes, is one of the most influential political theories ever formulated. After four years of collaboration, the authors produced this incisive account of their idea of Communism, in which they envisage a society without classes, private property, or a state. They argue that increasing exploitation of industrial workers will eventually lead to a revolution in which capitalism is overthrown. Their vision transformed the world irrevocably, and remains relevant as a depiction of global capitalism today.