Arun Sundararajan
MIT Press

Here we go: blockchain, Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, ¡°microentrepreneur¡±, ¡°disruptive¡±. Essential reading as much for what it leaves out (no index entries for ¡°union¡±, ¡°workplace safety¡±, ¡°tax avoidance¡±, ¡°free rider¡±, ¡°job security¡± ¨C or ¡°sharecropping¡±) as for what the Stern School of Business scholar makes his techno-utopian focus, namely the digital peer-to-peer details of ¡°blurring the lines between the personal and the professional¡±. Sundararajan¡¯s boosterish analysis of this ¡°intriguing mix of ¡®gift¡¯ and ¡®market¡¯¡± urges ¡°new generalists¡± to get some of that rentier action ¨C via your flat, or perhaps some lowest-bidder floor-scrubbing. The other term that crops up in such discussions is ¡°gig economy¡±. If you¡¯re not sure why that sounds an ominous note, ask a musician.

Walter Benjamin
Verso

Named for his 1936 essay on Nikolai Leskov, this ¡°first major collection of short stories¡± from that most literary and magpie of philosophers is both more and less straightforward than billed. A curate¡¯s egg, inevitably; a jumbled, Hoffmanesque Wunderkammer of dreams, riddles, novella fragments, children¡¯s rhymes, traveller¡¯s yarns, a stalkerish Still Story and Four Tales¡¯ gnomic folkery. Benjaminites, schooled in sifting, will be as beguiled by the textual orts and oddments as by Nordic Sea¡¯s incantatory opening: ¡°¡®The time in which even he who has no home lives¡¯ becomes, for the traveller who left none behind, a palace.¡±

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Kristen Ghodsee
University of Chicago Press

This slim, jam-packed, how-to book by a gender scholar and author of several fine studies of post-communism Europe is, she says in a position-staking introduction, ¡°Why Write Clearly?¡±, ¡°the book I wish I had as a graduate student trying to figure out how to write my dissertation and as a junior scholar struggling to transform that dissertation into a book¡±. The chapter headings tell the tale, and sell it splendidly: choose a subject you love; put yourself into the data; integrate your theory; embrace dialogue; minimise scientism; unclutter your prose; revise!

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Marwan M. Kraidy
Harvard University Press

A US-based media scholar argues that the human body, not Twitter or texts, was the key medium of political expression in the Arab Uprisings, from fruit vendor Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Al-Bouazizi¡¯s self-immolation to the titular blogger Aliaa al-Mahdi, an American University in Cairo student later granted political asylum in Sweden. Kraidy¡¯s study takes in the digital body politic and street murals; Morsi and Sisi; ¡°virginity examination¡± rape-by-police; the rap of El G¨¦n¨¦ral and the protests of Baguette Man and Captain Bread; Quahera comics and Syrian web satire Top Goon and ¡°the creative-curatorial-corporate complex¡±.

??igo Errej¨®n in Conversation with Chantal Mouffe
Lawrence & Wishart

In a book whose publication came at the urging of the late geographer Doreen Massey, the past, present and future of the Left are chewed over by a University of Westminster political theorist and the persuasively low-key political secretary of Spain¡¯s burgeoning anti-austerity party, Podemos (¡°We can¡±). We get Gramsci and Greece, Latin America and Le Pen, populism and Spain¡¯s transition to democracy, and although Marxism¡¯s greatest hits play on (¡°struggle for hegemony¡±, ¡°false consciousness¡±), the conversation (in Sirio Can¨®s Donnay¡¯s limpid translation) is thoughtful, not theory-strangled. Owen Jones¡¯ foreword, whistle-stopping through Sanders-Blair-Trump-E.P. Thompson-Corbyn for context, is an upbeat scene-setter.

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karen.shook@tesglobal.com