In the bestselling tradition of The Interestings and A Little Life, this “cleverly constructed and emotionally compelling” (Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation) novel follows four longtime friends as they navigate love, commitment, and forgiveness while the world around them changes beyond recognition—from the author of the “savvy, heartfelt, and utterly engaging” (Alice McDermott) Bed-Stuy Is Burning. New York City is still regaining its balance in the years following September 11, when four twenty-somethings—Tess, Tazio, David, and Angelica—meet in a bar, each yearning for something: connection, recognition, a place in the world, a cause to believe in. Nearly fifteen years later, as their city recalibrates in the wake of the 2016 election, their bond has endured—but almost everything else has changed. As freshmen at Cooper Union, Tess and Tazio were the ambitious, talented future of the art world—but by thirty-six, Tess is married to David, the mother of two young boys, and working as an understudy on Broadway. Kind and steady, David is everything Tess lacked in her own childhood—but a recent freak accident has left him with befuddling symptoms, and she’s still adjusting to her new role as caretaker. Meanwhile, Tazio—who once had a knack for earning the kind of attention that Cooper Union students long for—has left the art world for a career in creative branding and politics. But in December 2016, fresh off the astonishing loss of his candidate, Tazio is adrift, and not even his gorgeous and accomplished fiancée, Angelica, seems able to get through to him. With tensions rising on the national stage, the four friends are forced to face the reality of their shared histories, especially a long-ago betrayal that has shaped every aspect of their friendship. Elegant and perceptive, “The Body Politic is a book about many things—what it means to be unwell, what it means to heal, how deep and strange friendships can be, and how hidden things never stay hidden for long” (Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites).

"Christine de Pizan's Body Politic (1406-1407) is the first political treatise to have been written not just by a woman, but by a woman capable of holding her own in a normally male domain. It advises not just the prince, as was traditional, but also nobles, knights, and the common people, promoting the ideals of interdependence and social responsibility. Rooted in the mind-set of medieval Christendom, it heralds the humanism of the Renaissance, highlighting classical culture and Roman civic virtues. The Body Politic resounds still today, urging the need for probity in public life and the importance of responsibilities as well as rights"--

"I read My Body Politic with admiration, sometimes for the pain that all but wept on the page, again for sheer exuberant friendships, for self-discovery, political imagination, and pluck. . . . Wonderful! In a dark time, a gift of hope. -Daniel Berrigan, S.J. "The struggles, joys, and political awakening of a firecracker of a narrator. . . . Linton has succeeded in creating a life both rich and enviable. With her crackle, irreverence, and intelligence, it's clear that the author would never be willing to settle. . . . Wholly enjoyable." -Kirkus Reviews "Linton is a passionate guide to a world many outsiders, and even insiders, find difficult to navigate. . . . In this volume, she recounts her personal odyssey, from flower child . . . to disability-rights/human rights activist." -Publishers Weekly "Witty, original, and political without being politically correct, introducing us to a cast of funny, brave, remarkable characters (including the professional dancer with one leg) who have changed the way that 'walkies' understand disability. By the time Linton tells you about the first time she was dancing in her wheelchair, you will feel like dancing, too." ---Carol Tavris, author of Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion "This astonishing book has perfect pitch. It is filled with wit and passion. Linton shows us how she learned to 'absorb disability,' and to pilot a new and interesting body. With verve and wonder, she discovers her body's pleasures, hungers, surprises, hurts, strengths, limits, and uses." -Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature "An extraordinarily readable account of life in the fast lane... a brilliant autobiography and a great read." -Sander L. Gilman, author of Fat Boys: A Slim Book While hitchhiking from Boston to Washington, D.C., in 1971 to protest the war in Vietnam, Simi Linton was involved in a car accident that paralyzed her legs and took the lives of her young husband and her best friend. Her memoir begins with her struggle to regain physical and emotional strength and to resume her life in the world. Then Linton takes us on the road she traveled (with stops in Berkeley, Paris, Havana) and back to her home in Manhattan, as she learns what it means to be a disabled person in America. Linton eventually completed a Ph.D., remarried, and began teaching at Hunter College. Along the way she became deeply committed to the disability rights movement and to the people she joined forces with. The stories in My Body Politic are populated with richly drawn portraits of Linton's disabled comrades, people of conviction and lusty exuberance who dance, play-and organize--with passion and commitment. My Body Politic begins in the midst of the turmoil over Vietnam and concludes with a meditation on the U.S. involvement in the current war in Iraq and the war's wounded veterans. While a memoir of the author's gradual political awakening, My Body Politic is filled with adventure, celebration, and rock and roll-Salvador Dali, James Brown, and Jimi Hendrix all make cameo appearances. Linton weaves a tale that shows disability to be an ordinary part of the twists and turns of life and, simultaneously, a unique vantage point on the world.

Religious Bodies Politic examines the complex relationship between transnational religion and politics through the lens of one cosmopolitan community in Siberia: Buryats, who live in a semiautonomous republic within Russia with a large Buddhist population. Looking at religious transformation among Buryats across changing political economies, Anya Bernstein argues that under conditions of rapid social change—such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union—Buryats have used Buddhist “body politics” to articulate their relationship not only with the Russian state, but also with the larger Buddhist world. During these periods, Bernstein shows, certain people and their bodies became key sites through which Buryats conformed to and challenged Russian political rule. She presents particular cases of these emblematic bodies—dead bodies of famous monks, temporary bodies of reincarnated lamas, ascetic and celibate bodies of Buddhist monastics, and dismembered bodies of lay disciples given as imaginary gifts to spirits—to investigate the specific ways in which religion and politics have intersected. Contributing to the growing literature on postsocialism and studies of sovereignty that focus on the body, Religious Bodies Politic is a fascinating illustration of how this community employed Buddhism to adapt to key moments of political change.

Christine de Pizan was born in Venice and raised in Paris at the court of Charles V of France. Widowed at the age of twenty-five, she turned to writing as a source of comfort and income, and went on to produce a remarkable series of books, including poetry, politics, chivalry, warfare, religion and philosophy. She is considered to be France's first female professional writer. This was the first translation into modern English of Christine de Pizan's major political work, The Book of the Body Politic. Written during the Hundred Years' War, it discusses the education and behaviour appropriate for princes, nobility and common people, so that all classes can understand their responsibilities towards society as a whole. A product of a time of civil unrest, The Book of the Body Politic offers a medieval political theory of interdependence and social responsibility from the perspective of an educated woman.

This book rethinks the body in global politics and the particular roles bodies play in our international system, foregrounding processes and practices involved in the continually contested (re/dis)embodiment of both human bodies and collective bodies politic. Purnell provides a new, innovative, and detailed theory of bodily (re)making and un-making that shows how bodies are simultaneously (re)made and moved and (re)make and move other bodies and things. Presented in the form of reflective/reflexive and theoretically innovative essays, the book explores: bodies in general and their precarious, excessive, ontologically insecure, and emotional facets; the fleshing out of contemporary necro(body)politics; and the visual-emotional politics embodied through the COVID-19 pandemic. The empirical analyses feed into contemporary IR debates on British and American politics and international relations and the Global War on Terror, while also speaking to broader and interdisciplinary, theoretical literature on bodies/embodiment, visual politics, biopolitics, necropolitics, and affect/emotion, and feelings.

Building on contemporary research in embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind, this book explores how social institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states systematically affect our thoughts, feelings, and agency. Human beings are, necessarily, social animals who create and belong to social institutions. But social institutions take on a life of their own, and literally shape the minds of all those who belong to them, for better or worse, usually without their being self-consciously aware of it. Indeed, in contemporary neoliberal societies, it is generally for the worse. In The Mind-Body Politic, Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna work out a new critique of contemporary social institutions by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind—in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what they call essentially embodied minds—and make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and also our essentially embodied lives for the better.