Eco-Gowanus: Urban Remediation by Design
by Richard Plunz & Patricia Culligan

Paperback $ 19.95

This richly illustrated volume documents two years of research into the Gowanus Canal region, presenting the area as a potential incubator of possible urban strategies, engaging issues of remediation, brownfields redevelopment, watershed restoration, and industrial recycling. It includes scholarly essays by the editors, Richard Plunz and Patricia Culligan, in addition to more than a dozen research projects and design proposals.

Last Last Chance: A Novel
by Fiona Maazel

Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

From Publishers Weekly
A sprawling debut with an alternately absurdist and sardonic tone, Maazel’s debut follows the tribulations of Lucy, a young drug addict who works at a New York City kosher chicken plant. Lucy’s father was a Centers for Disease Control bigwig who’s recently committed suicide, presumably due to fallout from his perceived role in an outbreak of plague that is spreading across America. Her mother, Isifrid, is a crack-addled gazillionaire, while grandmother Agneth talks incessantly of reincarnation, and younger half-sister Hannah harbors a huge obsession with disease. As the novel opens, Lucy sets off with her alcoholic, over-50 co-worker, Stanley, to attend the wedding of her best friend, Kam—who is marrying Eric, whom Lucy met first and fell in love with. After some hijinks, Lucy heads to a rehab facility in Texas. Over the course of Lucy’s wild road trip, Maazel, daughter of conductor Loren, delivers some electric writing: the novel is brimming with wit, ideas and delightfully screwball humor. But the whimsy undermines the story, especially on the abundant substance abuse material. The novel’s earnest, surprising conclusion feels out of sync with the zingy, existential banter of its core. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Haunted
by Philippe Dupuy

Hardcover $24.95 - 10%

Ten years after finishing the original French edition of Maybe Later—the book in which the French superstar cartooning duo Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian worked separately for the first time—Dupuy set out on his own again with Haunted. Gone are the tightly constructed narratives and urbane, elegant graphics of his projects with Berberian. In their place, roughed-in drawings give an urgent,
spontaneous feeling to a series of hallucinatory stories and dreamlike sequences that register the raw distress of solitude and self-doubt—the dark core of the material held in balance by Dupuy’s acid humor and lyrical sensibility.

A jogging Dupuy runs around and sometimes through the stories of the misfit characters that haunt him: a self-amputating dog, a Left Bank artist in search of emptiness, an art-collecting duck, Lucha Libre wrestlers, and a group of single guys at the watering hole imagined as the anthropomorphic “Forest Friends.” Heart pumping, gaze turned inward, the ground occasionally giving way beneath his feet, this alter ego concludes that sometimes you need to cross the line to figure out where it is.

The original French edition of Haunted was nominated for the 2006 award for Best Comic Book at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf

Hardcover $26.00 - 10%

From Publishers Weekly
Books on world elites tend to focus on the superwealthy, but political scholar Rothkopf (Running the World) has written a serious and eminently readable evaluation of the superpowerful. Until recent decades, great-power governments provided most of the superclass, accompanied by a few heads of international movements (i.e., the pope) and entrepreneurs (Rothschilds, Rockefellers). Today, economic clout—fueled by the explosive expansion of international trade, travel and communication—rules. The nation state’s power has diminished, according to Rothkopf, shrinking politicians to minority power broker status. Leaders in international business, finance and the defense industry not only dominate the superclass, they move freely into high positions in their nations’ governments and back to private life largely beyond the notice of elected legislatures (including the U.S. Congress), which remain abysmally ignorant of affairs beyond their borders. The superelites’ disproportionate influence over national policy is often constructive, but always self-interested. Across the world, the author contends, few object to corruption and oppressive governments provided they can do business in these countries. Neither hand-wringing nor worshipful, this book delivers an unsettling account of what the immense and growing power of this superclass bodes for the future.

New European Poets
Edited by Wayne Miller & Kevin Prufer

Paperback $18.00