Books by Esther Leslie

Mad Pride is set to become the first great civil liberties movement of the 21st century. Sick of discrimination, marginalisation, medication and being treated like shit, psychiatric patients are preparing to rise from the ghettos and make the world a fit place to live in. Featuring 24 authors - including Nick Blinko, Luther Blissett, Chris P and Fatma Durmush - boasting about the wild things they've done when they've been losing it and sharing their accounts of liberation through madness, this collection celebrates madness in all its forms as a means to all-out social revolution. Tough, uncompromising, subversive and very funny, this is a book that no one in their right mind will read. It reveals that madness, normally considered an unglamorous subject, is in fact all about sex, drugs, and rock n roll!

New in the Critical Lives series, this is the first new biography of Walter Benjamin in more than a decade.

Esther Leslie's path-breaking study of Walter Benjamin is unlike any other book presently available in English on Benjamin, in seeking to make a case for a more politicised reading of Benjamin's oeuvre. In looking at the entirety of Benjamin's work - rather than the four or five essays available in English which tend to form the Benjamin 'canon' - Leslie offers powerful new insights into a key twentieth-century political thinker, correcting the post-structuralist bias that has characterised so much Benjamin scholarship, and repositioning Benjamin's work in its historical and political context. *BR**BR*In her examination of Benjamin's commentary on the politics and aesthetics of technology - from Benjamin's work on nineteenth-century industrial culture to his analyses of the Nazi deployment of the bomber - Esther Leslie re-contextualises Benjamin's writings in a lucid and cogently argued new study.