No Future for You: Salvos from The Baffler
Edited by John Summers
MIT Press, 2014
French translation: Le Pire des Mondes Possibles, Editions Agone, 2015
“Smart and sobering, eye-opening and irascible, hopeful but not optimistic, this collection offers a clear-eyed perspective on post-recession America and pays readers the ultimate compliment of being able to think for themselves.”
“It is tough talk for tough times—something The Baffler has long been known for. The collection serves as a powerful summation of the systemic challenges we face as a nation, and a welcome reminder that we need strong, dissenting voices like The Baffler more than ever.”
Books
Cotton Tenants: Three Families
by James Agee and Walker Evans
Edited by John Summers
Melville House, 2013
French translation: Une Saison de Coton: Trois Familles de Métayers, Christian Bourgois Editeur, 2014
Spanish translation: Algodoneros: Tres Familias de Arrendatarios, Capitán Swing Libros, 2014.
“Open it and you are transported to ‘a brief account of what happens to human life,’ specifically the lives of three impoverished tenant farmers—Floyd Burroughs, Bud Fields, and Frank Tingle—and their families, captured in Agee’s honest, unflinching, and brilliant prose.”
“A masterpiece of the magazine reporter’s art. It is lucid, evocative, empathetic, deeply reported, consistently surprising, plainly argued, and illuminated, page after page, with poetic leaps of transcendent clarity.”
“It is a pleasure to report that Agee’s work is entirely deserving of our praise. The stark, haunting photographs by Walker Evans, some of which had never been published, embody what critic Hilton Kramer called ‘the moral and aesthetic texture’ of the era. Cotton Tenants demonstrates the pleasure to be found, as Agee writes in these pages, when someone does ‘the work he cares most to do and is best capable of doing.”
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
by Dwight Macdonald
Edited by John Summers
New York Review Classics, 2011
“Most of Macdonald’s work is out of print, and the appearance of this new collection, edited by John Summers, is a reason to raise a glass of good bourbon in tribute.”
“Macdonald made modern American English seem like the ideal prose medium: transparent in its meaning, fun when colloquial, commanding when dignified, and always suavely rhythmic even when most committed to the demotic.”
“Considering the current cultural landscape, in which many view Lady Gaga and Damien Hirst as idiosyncratic luminaries, Macdonald’s views on the commodification of culture were nothing if not prophetic.”
The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills
Selected and introduced by John Summers
Oxford University Press, 2008
“Choosing from a pletheora of Mills’s publications is no easy task. Summers has handled this chore wisely, rejecting a handy potpourri in favor of concentrating on what Mills had to say about a particular problem: the role intellectuals should play in contemporary society.”
“John Summers, who has been working with the Mills legacy for years, has done us the large service of collecting in The Politics of Truth many essays, lectures, and sketches. Summers provides an ample biographical sketch of Mills as well as a first-rate representative selection of his occasional writing.”
“The essays in this anthology have much to tell us about the way knowledge becomes the handmaiden of social desires and social corruption. There isn’t a false note in the bunch.”
Every Fury on Earth
Davies Group, 2008
“Summers writes pieces that traverse multiple disciplines—history, sociology, literature—and bristle with elegant pugnacity. Whether he is blowing the dust off late-nineteenth-century sex scandals or slashing at the parlous state of adjunct labor in the academy, his sentences resound with the clatter and clank of fresh thought coming hard up against the intellectual armor protecting powerful institutions.”
“Summers shows a mastery of the drily ironic style that would stand any social critic in very good stead. It won’t endear him to university administrators. But he knows that. It will be fun to see him develop it.”
“Something of the maverick sociologist’s feeling for intellectual craftsmanship runs throughout Summers’ work. I don’t recall the last time I read anything so ardent about scholarship as a means to soul-making—or, for that matter, so angry at how academic life can distort that process. One of the remarkable things about Summers as a writer is that his frustration never runs to sarcasm—no small accomplishment.”