Annalee Newitz reads at City Lights July 27, 2006

Join Annalee Newitz at City Lights Bookstore for an evening devoted to monster movies, economic horror, and a little H.P. Lovecraft. It's the release party for her book "Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture" (Duke University Press). If you like B-movies, pulp horror, and science fiction, it's high time you found out why class anxiety drives doctors mad and makes androids rape Julie Christie. Plus, you'll discover how alienated labor turns people into flesh-eating zombies, and what's really so scary about Tron. There will be a reading followed by a B-movie trivia contest with excellent prizes! July 27, 7 PM, City Lights Bookstore (261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco). Free.

*** "Pretend We're Dead" also is the first book published by Duke University Press under a Creative Commons license. W00t!

*** Here's what they're saying about "Pretend We're Dead":

"Pretend We‘re Dead sets our monsters free of the dank laboratory of psychosexual studies and sends them rampaging across the landscape of economic reality. A sweeping, liberating, and wonderfully readable book."
—Gerard Jones, author of "Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book"

"[A] terrific survey of 'monster' movies of the last 20 or so years and pop culture well before that. . . . [Newitz] brings zest and wide ranging cultural references to her topic, plus a knack for presenting complex ideas out of Marx, Benjamin, Baudrillard, and Horkheimer, explaining them clearly and using them to illustrate how cinema has become a canvas upon which the culture has been grappling in fantasy with overwork, bad bosses, and meager returns."
--D.K. Holms, from QuickStopEntertainment.com

Annalee Newitz writes about the politics and weirdness of geek culture. She is a contributing editor at Wired, and also publishes in Popular Science, Alternet.org, Salon.com, New Scientist and The Believer. Her syndicated column Techsploitation deals with all things nerdy and runs in newspapers throughout the U.S. and Canada – as well as locally in the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Silicon Valley Metro.