While suburbs provide a rich field of research for sociologists, architects, urbanists and anthropologists, they have not been given much attention in literary and cultural studies. The Suburbs: New Literary Perspectives sets out to enrich the limited existing body of critical analysis on the subject with a landmark collection of essays offering a far larger perspective than the books or collections published so far on the topic. This interdisciplinary and wide-ranging approach includes literary and art studies, philosophy, and cultural comment. It examines the suburbs across cultural differences, contrasting British, South African and North American suburbs. The specificity of this book therefore lies in a cross-national and cross-continental exploration of these unchartered territories. The suburbs are redefined as those rebellious margins whose geographical borders are necessarily fuzzy and sketch out a common place where cultural frontiers can be transcended. They are, to use Sarah Nuttall’s terminology, places of “entanglement” where contraries meet and where new ways of being in the world is reborn. Seen through the prism of art and literature, the suburbs may then be recognized, as philosopher Bruce Bégout argues, as a “new way of thinking and making urban space.”

Originally published in hardcover in 2013.

Takes a critical look at the spiritually corrosive influence of suburbia and suburban life, identifying eight toxic elements in the suburban lifestyle and introducing eight corresponding disciplines designed to nurture one's spiritual life.

More than half of Americans live in the suburbs. Yet for many Christians, the suburbs are ignored, demeaned, or seen as a selfish cop-out from a faithful Christian life. What does it look like to live a full Christian life in the suburbs? Ashley Hales invites you to look deeply into your soul as a suburbanite and discover what it means to live holy there.

America’s suburbs are not the homogenous places we sometimes take them for. Today’s suburbs are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse, with as many Democratic as Republican voters, a growing population of renters, and rising poverty. The cliche of white picket fences is well past its expiration date. The history of suburbia is equally surprising: American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially-conscious design, and integrated housing. We have forgotten that we built suburbs like these, such as the co-housing commune of Old Economy, Pennsylvania; a tiny-house anarchist community in Piscataway, New Jersey; a government-planned garden city in Greenbelt, Maryland; a racially integrated subdivision (before the Fair Housing Act) in Trevose, Pennsylvania; experimental Modernist enclaves in Lexington, Massachusetts; and the mixed-use, architecturally daring Reston, Virginia. Inside Radical Suburbs you will find blueprints for affordable, walkable, and integrated communities, filled with a range of environmentally sound residential options. Radical Suburbs is a history that will help us remake the future and rethink our assumptions of suburbia.

Through stories, cartoons, interviews, disses, parodies and original research, Bomb the Suburbs challenges the suburban mind-set wherever it is found, in suburbs and corporate headquarters, but also in cities, housing projects and hip-hop itself, debating key questions within the urban black community. Aimed at hip-hop insiders and outsiders alike to elevate hip-hop, pop culture and ourselves to a higher standard of art, ethics, intellect, strategy, adventure and honesty, this humorous, incisive treatise from the author of No More Prisons. With b/w illustrations throughout.

For decades the suburbs have been where art happens despite: despite the conformity, the emptiness, the sameness. Time and again, the story is one of gems formed under pressure and that resentment of the suburbs is the key ingredient for creative transcendence. But what if, contrary to that, the suburb has actually been an incubator for distinctly American art, as positively and as surely as in any other cultural hothouse? Mixing personal experience, cultural reportage, and history while rejecting clichés and pieties and these essays stretch across the country in an effort to show that this uniquely American milieu deserves another look.