In Concrete Dreams Nicholas D’Avella examines the changing social and economic lives of buildings in the context of a construction boom following Argentina's political and economic crisis of 2001. D’Avella tells the stories of small-scale investors who turned to real estate as an alternative to a financial system they no longer trusted, of architects who struggled to maintain artistic values and political commitments in the face of the ongoing commodification of their work, and of residents-turned-activists who worked to protect their neighborhoods and city from being overtaken by new development. Such forms of everyday engagement with buildings, he argues, produce divergent forms of value that persist in tension with hegemonic forms of value. In the dreams attached to built environments and the material forms in which those dreams are articulated—from charts and graphs to architectural drawings, urban planning codes, and tango lyrics—D’Avella finds a blueprint for building livable futures in which people can survive alongside and even push back against the hegemony of capitalism.

Between 1990 and 1994, Manic D Press produced a dozen 20-page photocopied and stapled books by some of the most talented young writers from the Bay Area and beyond, including Jon Longhi, Bucky Sinister, Sparrow 13 LaughingWand and Wendy-o Matik. Now collected in a single trade paperback facsimile edition, these heartfelt and beautiful works reveal the origins of one of the US's most alternative literary presses, whose books have received literary awards from the American Library Association and the Firecracker Alternative Book Awards.

Pour Me Another Poem is the sixth book of poetry composed by RD McManes. Written in a similar style to his last two books We Ain't in Kansas No More and Don't Read Me Like Some Poem this book is a blend of surreal and more traditional verse. Geared to touch the heart and soul of a reader it contains 92 pages of poetry. The title poem is "Pour me another poem" a metaphoric creation which compares poetry to a good stiff shot of whiskey. "Cloudy dreams" and "Prairie Sea" are examples of traditional free verse and "Almost once, I did" can only be classified as surreal. The author fills the book Pour Me Another Poem with metaphor, which opens the door for interesting interpretation by the reader.

This collection of essays highlights the variety of 1970s culture, and shows how it responded to the transformations that were taking place in that most elusive of decades. The 1970s was a period of extraordinary change on the social, sexual and political fronts. Moreover, the culture of the period was revolutionary in a number of ways; it was sometimes florid, innovatory, risk-taking and occasionally awkward and inconsistent. The essays collected here reflect this diversity and analyse many cultural forms of the 1970s. The book includes articles on literature, politics, drama, architecture, film, television, youth cultures, interior design, journalism, and contercultural “happenings”. Its coverage ranges across phenomena as diverse as the Wombles and Woman’s Own. The volume offers an interdisciplinary account of a fascinating period in British cultural history. This book makes an important intervention in the field of 1970s history. It is edited and introduced by Laurel Forster and Sue Harper, both experienced writers, and the book comprises work by both established and emerging scholars. Overall it makes an exciting interpretation of a momentous and colourful period in recent culture.

From the late Herbert Muschamp, the former architecture critic of The New York Times and one of the most outspoken and influential voices in architectural criticism, a collection of his best work. The pieces here—from The New Republic, Artforum, and The New York Times—reveal how Muschamp’s views were both ahead of their time and timeless. He often wrote about how the right architecture could be inspiring and uplifting, and he uniquely drew on film, literature, and popular culture to write pieces that were passionate and often personal, changing the landscape of architectural criticism in the process. These columns made architecture a subject accessible to everyone at a moment when, because of the heated debate between modernists and postmodernists, architecture had become part of a larger public dialogue. One of the most courageous and engaged voices in his field, he devoted many columns at the Times to the lack of serious new architecture in this country, and particularly in New York, and spoke out against the agenda of developers. He departed from the usual dry, didactic style of much architectural writing to playfully, for example, compare Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao to the body of Marilyn Monroe or to wax poetic about a new design for Manhattan’s manhole covers. One sees in this collection that Muschamp championed early on the work of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Thom Payne, Frank Israel, Jean Nouvel, and Santiago Calatrava, among others, and was drawn to the theoretical writings of such architects as Peter Eisenman. Published here for the first time is the uncut version of his brilliant and poignant essay about gay culture and Edward Durrell Stone’s museum at 2 Columbus Circle. Fragments from the book he left unfinished, whose title we took for this collection—“A Dozen Years,” “Metroscope,” and “Atomic Secrets”—are also included. Hearts of the City is dazzling writing from a humanistic thinker whose work changed forever the way we think about our cities—and the buildings in them.

In 1963, British inventor Alex Moulton (1920-2012) introduced an innovative compact bicycle. Architectural Review editor Reyner Banham (1922-1988) predicted it would give rise to "a new class of cyclists," young urbanites riding by choice, not necessity. Forced to sell his firm in 1967, Moulton returned in the 1980s with an even more radical model, the AM--his acclaim among technology and design historians owed much to Banham's writings. The AM's price tag (some models cost many thousands of dollars) has inspired tech-savvy cyclists to create "hot rod" compact bikes from Moulton-inspired "shopper" cycles of the 1970s--a trend also foreseen by Banham, who considered hot rod culture the "folk art of the mechanical era." The author traces the intertwined lives of two unusually creative men who had an extraordinary impact on each others' careers, despite having met only a few times.