The Next Generation of Cultural Criticism

Another nice article on Zero books, this one in The Guardian. It’s well worth checking out.

Yet talk to smaller radical publishers and a less doomy picture emerges. Whether it’s Verso (who brought out Owen Jones’s Chavs and Paul Mason’s Meltdown), The New Press (Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, a study of the mass incarceration of black Americans, has become a New York Times bestseller), or OR Books (whose titles include the well-received, rapid-response Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America), progressive houses are finding that readers are hungry for incisive analyses of capitalism’s failures, exposés of the flawed infrastructure of liberal democracy, passionate dispatches from the frontlines of social change.

One of the most exciting radical presses at the moment is Zer0 books. A shoestring operation begun in 2009 by the novelist Tariq Goddard, its impressive backlist covers philosophy, political theory, music criticism, contemporary cinema and much more. Its highlights include: Ivor Southwood’s mordant Non-Stop Inertia, about the culture of precariousness that defines the modern workplace; and Marcello Carlin’s The Blue In The Air, gorgeously constructed essays about pop, written by a widower while waiting for his new wife to fly over from Toronto so that they can start their new life together.

Zer0 has been particularly good at identifying a nexus of young, savvy writers – such as Owen Hatherley, Laurie Penny, Nina Power and Mark Fisher (better known as K-Punk) – whose work had previously surfaced mainly on blogs and whose bylines now regularly appear but in mainstream newspapers and journals.

Zer0 titles are commissioned, edited and published quickly – and that energy and velocity carries through to the writing itself. Zer0 writers share an ability to write passionately, avoiding the clunky prose of academia and generating new lines of inquiry rather than just regurgitating critical clichés.

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