Though to Exist in the Wild wins 2008 Eric Hoffer Award

The Hoffer Award was founded at the start of the 21st century by award-winning author Christopher Klim (with permission from the Eric Hoffer Estate) to honor freethinking writers and independent books of exceptional merit. The commercial environment for today’s writers has all but crushed the circulation of ideas. It seems strange that in the Information Age, many books are blocked from wider circulation, and powerful writing is barred from publication or buried alive on the Internet. Furthermore, many of the top literary prizes will not even consider independent books or previously unpublished prose, choosing instead to become the marketing arms of large presses.

The “Hoffer” honored prose is largely unpublished and the books are chiefly from small, academic, and micro presses, including self-published offerings. Throughout the centuries, writers such as Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Wolfe have taken the path of self-publishing rather than have their ideas forced into a corporate or sociopolitical mold.

The books and prose of the Hoffer Award are nominated by the people and judged by independent panels. Since its inception as the Writers Notes Award, the Hoffer Award has grown in prominence. Winners of the “Hoffer” are given prizes, honors, and worldwide media exposure, as well as being covered in the annual anthology, Best New Writing.

The Hoffer Award will continue to be a platform for and the champion of the independent voice.

Derrick Jensen named Press Action Person of the Year

From the Press Action website: "The recipient of this award was never in doubt. Derrick Jensen's Endgame, released in late spring, was the best work of nonfiction in 2006. Given the significance of its subject matter and the urgency of Jensen's message, Endgame is the most important book of the decade and could stand as the must-read book of our lifetimes. But be careful. The book is likely to send you into periods of despondency over the bleak future of the planet. But Jensen explains that if enough of us stand up and work together to fight the fascists, the crash won't be as devastating. And the long struggle will eventually result in an explosive renewal of all forms of life on the planet."

Read the full listing at Press Action website.

Putting corporate disregard for ecology on trial, this novel follows Vexcorp, a wealthy corporation that, at a safe distance, counts both the lives of others and the health of the environment as expenses on a balance sheet—but that distance is about to collapse. Malia is an activist who has lost faith in systemic reform, and Dujuan is a street thug torn by grief at his younger sister’s death. When Dujuan mugs Malia, she compares him to Vexcorp, triggering a storm inside him. That storm only clears when he identifies the real agent of his pain: Larry Gordon, Vexcorp’s CEO. Injury requires justice, so Dujuan kidnaps Gordon and presents him to Malia for judgment. As bystanders become involved and time runs out, Malia is forced to make grueling moral decisions between survival and loyalty, safety and courage, and agency and despair.

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A serial killer stalks the streets of Spokane, acting out a misogynist script from the dark heart of this culture. Across town, a writer named Derrick has spent his life tracking the reasons—political, psychological, spiritual—for the sadism of modern civilization. And through the grim nights, Nika, a trafficked woman, tries to survive the grinding violence of prostitution. Their lives, and the forces propelling them, are about to collide. And what hangs in the balance is the fate of life on earth. With Songs of the Dead, Derrick Jensen has written more than a thriller. This is a story lush with rage and tenderness on its way to being a weapon.

What We Leave Behind

What We Leave Behind is a piercing, impassioned guide to living a truly responsible life on earth. Human waste, once considered a gift to the soil, has become toxic material that has broken the essential cycle of decay and regeneration. Here, award-winning author Derrick Jensen and activist Aric McBay weave historical analysis and devastatingly beautiful prose to remind us that life—human and nonhuman—will not go on unless we do everything we can to facilitate the most basic process on earth, the root of sustainability: one being's waste must always become another being’s food.

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How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth From Civilization

Derrick Jensen discusses the destructive dominant culture with ten people who have devoted their lives to undermining it in this collection of interviews.

Whether it is Carolyn Raffensperger and her radical approach to public health, or Thomas Berry on perceiving the sacred; be it Kathleen Dean Moore reminding us that our bodies are made of mountains, rivers, and sunlight; or Vine Deloria asserting that our dreams tell us more about the world than science ever can, the activists and philosophers interviewed in How Shall I Live My Life? each bravely present a few of the endless forms that resistance can and must take.

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Now This War Has Two Sides (Double CD)

Examining the premises of his latest controversial work, Endgame, as well as core elements of his ground breaking book Culture of Make Believe, this two hour lecture and discussion offers both a perfect introduction for newcomers and additional insight for those already familiar with Derrick Jensen's work.

Whether exposing the ravages of industrial civilization, relaying humorous anecdotes from his life, or bravely presenting a few of the endless forms that resistance can (and must) take, Jensen leaves his audience both engaged and enraged.

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As the World Burns: 50 Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial

Two of America's most talented activists team up to deliver a bold and hilarious satire of modern environmental policy in this fully illustrated graphic novel. The US government gives robot machines from space permission to eat the earth in exchange for bricks of gold. A one-eyed bunny rescues his friends from a corporate animal testing laboratory. And two little girls figure out the secret to saving the world from both of its enemies (and it isn't by using energy-efficient light bulbs or biodiesel fuel). As the World Burns will inspire you to do whatever it takes to stop ecocide before it's too late.

Derrick Jensen, activist, author, and philosopher, is the author of Endgame, volumes one and two; A Language Older Than Words; and The Culture of Make Believe (a finalist for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize), among other books. Jensen's writing has been described as "breaking and mending the reader's heart" (Publishers Weekly).

Activist and artist Stephanie McMillan began syndicating her daring political cartoons in 1999. Since then her work has appeared in dozens of publications and has been exhibited in museums across the country. A book based on her comic strip, Minimum Security, was published in 2005.

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Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos

"A zoo is a nightmare taking shape in concrete and steel, iron and glass, moats and electrified fences. It is a nightmare that for its victims has no end save death..."

No Voice Unheard is proud to present its next title, another unique, beautiful, and powerful voice on behalf of the animals - those captive in zoos. Thought to Exist in the Wild is a passionate and unflinching examination of zoos in our society.

Combining elegant, stunning photos with a deep and probing essay, this book presents a critical look at these institutions, the individual animals who live in them, and, of oursevles. (Read an extract from the book here.)

Author Derrick Jensen , is a well known and respected environmental writer and activist with nine award-winning books to his credit. Photographer Karen Tweedy-Holmes, also brings impressive credentials to the project, including photography for National Geographic magazine. (See more information on the author and photographer here.)

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Endgame (two volumes)

Hailed as the philosopher poet of the ecological movement, best-selling author Derrick Jensen returns with a passionate forecast of how industrial civilization, and the persistent and widespread violence it requires, is unsustainable. Jensen's intricate weaving together of history, philosophy, environmentalism, economics, literature and psychology has produced a powerful argument that demands attention in the tradition of such important books as Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Brigid Brophy's Black Ship to Hell.

In Volume I: The Problem of Civilization, Jensen lays out a series of provocative premises, including “Civilization is not and can never be sustainable” and “Love does not imply pacifism.” He vividly imagines an end to technologized, industrialized civilization and a return to agragrian communal life.

If Volume I lays insightful framework for envisioning a sustainable way of life, Volume II: Resistance catapults this discussion into a passionate call for action. Using his premises as guidelines for exploring real-world problems, Jensen guides us toward concrete solutions by focusing on our most primal human desire: to live on a healthy earth overflowing with uncut forests, clean rivers, and thriving oceans that are not under the constant threat of being destroyed.

Visit Endgame's website.

Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control

Take the humanity, the unpredictable humans, out of the never-ending loop. Move toward a fully automated world. Welcome to the machine.

From biometric passports to identity chips in consumer goods, from nanoparticle weapons to body-enhancing and mind-altering drugs for soldiers, Welcome to the Machine shows how we are all trading our humanity for a place at the consumer table.

Award-winning authors Derrick Jensen and George Draffan reveal the modern culture of the machine, where corporate might makes technology right, government money feeds the greed for mad science, and absolute surveillance leads to absolute control and corruption. Through meticulous research and fiercely personal narrative, Jensen and Draffan move beyond journalism and exposÈ to question our civilization's very mode of existence. Welcome to the Machine defies our willingness to submit to the institutions and technologies built to rob us of all that makes us human: our connection to the land, our kinship with one another, our place in the living world.

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Walking on Water: Reading Writing and Revolution

Remember the days of longing for the hands on the classroom clock to move faster? Most of us would say we love to learn, but we hated school. Why is that? What happens to creativity and individuality as we pass through the educational system?

Walking on Water is a startling and provocative look at teaching, writing, creativity, and life by a writer increasingly recognized for his passionate and articulate critique of modern civilization. This time Derrick Jensen brings us into his classroom -- whether University or maximum security prison -- where he teaches writing. He reveals how schools are central to perpetuating the great illusion of our culture, that happiness lies outside of ourselves and that learning to please and submit to those in power makes us all into life-long clock-watchers. As a writing teacher Jensen guides his students out of the confines of traditional education to find their own voices, freedom, and creativity.

This is Jensen's great gift as a teacher and writer, to bring us fully alive at the same moment he is making us confront our losses and count our defeats. It is at the center of Walking on Water, a book that is not only a hard-hitting and sometimes scathing critique of our current educational system; not only a hands-on method for learning how to write; but, like Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, a lesson on how to connect to the core of our creative selves, to the miracle of waking up and arriving breathless (but with dry feet) on the far shore.

Derrick Jensen is the prize-winning author of A Language Older than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Listening to the Land, Railroads and Clearcuts, and most recently, Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests. He was one of two finalists for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, which cited The Culture of Make Believe as "a passionate and provocative meditation on the nexus of racism, genocide, environmental destruction and corporate malfeasance, where civilization meets its discontents." He lives on the coast of northern California.

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Strangely Like War

Derrick Jensen and George Draffan's exciting new book, Strangely LIke War: The Global Assault on Forests, was released in October 2003 in North America from Chelsea Green Publishing Company.

This book, which features a preface by the internationally renowned environmentalist Vandana Shiva, exposes the destructive impact of industrial forestry and the escalating global war on trees.

In this short, hard-hitting expose, the authors detail the activities of an industrial forestry system increasingly globalized, operating outside of any local or even national controls, and now threatening the basic life support systems of the planet itself.

The book is certain to have global implications and to appeal to readers internationally who are concerned about unchecked corporate power and the fate of the planet.

Here is just some of the advance praise for the book:

"Thank you, Jensen and Draffan. You awaken our hearts and our commonsense at the same time. You help us see the massive destruction of life built into the dominant, now globalizing, belief system.Your passion and your hard, cruel facts give us courage to imagine another possibility and to act."
Francis Moore Lappe, co-author, Hope's Edge:The Next Diet for a Small Planet

"Strangely Like War is must reading for anyone in the least concerned with either the fate of future generations or, indeed, the planet itself. The kind of scholarship and intelligence displayed by Draffan and Jensen demands both integrity and courage. All of us owe them a debt of gratitude for their work."
Ward Churchill, aurthor of Struggle for the Land

READ THE FIRST 5 PAGES

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The Culture of Make Believe

Derrick Jensen takes no prisoners in The Culture of Make Believe, his brilliant and eagerly awaited follow-up to his powerful and lyrical A Language Older Than Words. What begins as an exploration of the lines of thought and experience that run between the massive lynchings in early twentieth-century America to today’s death squads in South America soon explodes into an examination of the very heart of our civilization. Readers of Jensen’s earlier work will recognize his deft and startling interweaving of the deeply personal, the political, the historical, and the philosophical, as he attempts to understand the atrocities that characterize so much of our culture, from the 8,000 dead at Bhopal to the more than twenty million people enslaved today (more than came over on the dreaded Middle Passage), to the destruction of the natural world. The book makes clear that it is only through understanding these atrocities, and by feeling the sorrow and despair caused by them, then moving through that despair, that we will be able to make significant movement toward halting them. With The Culture of Make Believe, Jensen has written a book that is as impeccably researched as it is moving, with conclusions as far-reaching as they are shocking. After A Language Older Than Words, readers began calling Jensen the philosopher poet of the deep ecological movement. This new book, The Culture of Make Believe, will introduce a new wave of readers to this important writer and thinker.

"Derrick Jensen is a man driven to stare without flinching at the baleful design of our culture, which encourages us to honor those who wreak the most havoc on the world (and on human lives) and to scorn those who protest against the havoc as opponents of decency and good order. In fact, The Culture of Make Believe so explicitly reveals the intimacy between the murder of the world and "decency and good order" that I'm surprised any author would dare write it and any publisher would dare bring it to print. His analysis of our culture's predilection for hatred and destruction will rattle your bones."
Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael

"Derrick Jensen tears our illusions from us with his shocking yet graceful prose. It might numb us, but no. The Culture of Make Believe is a masterpiece. It stirs us with the excitement of being in a truer world, being our truer selves. Derrick Jensen is a public intellectual who who both breaks and mends the reader's heart."
Frances Moore Lappe, author of Diet For A Small Planet

"Derrick Jensen is your basic human being, and he sees the world in the basic way all human beings should, but do not. The planet Earth is alive, period. Human beings are one of many living populations on the living Earth, period. Armed with a heart-stopping language older than words, Jensen is a mathematician, a comedian, a fierce critic of decent white male human history and its complex web of racism, sexism, hate; its greed and wanton disregard for life. Read this book. Get it for everyone you care about. Jensen's words are often difficult, but no one ever said facing the past and present of our culture would be a goddamn moonlit stroll down Memory Lane."
Inga Muscio, author of Cunt: A Declaration of Independence

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ERRATA for The Culture of Make Believe



A Language Older than Words

At once a beautifully poetic memoir and an exploration of the various ways we live in the world, A Language Older than Words explains violence as a pathology that touches every aspect of our lives, and indeed affects all aspects of life on earth. This chronicle of a young man's drive to transcend domestic abuse offers a challenging look at our worldwide sense of community, and how we can make things better.

This narrative moves elegantly between the microcosm of the author's dysfunctional family and the macrocosm of History. Readers are initiated into the stifling world of child and spousal abuse, and then beyond, where Jensen finds the same dynamics tricked out on the grand stage of Western civilization. The prose is as lyrical and cogent as it is convincing.

Jensen's vast experiences as an environmentalist, high-jumper, student, teacher, beekeeper, and most importantly, as a human being give rise to the wealth of examples and anecdotes that further illustrate this cry for community. The masterful intertwining of all these elements elevates A Language Older than Words above and beyond an engrossing book, giving readers what might even be described as a curative outlook on life.

"Singular, compelling and courageously honest, this book is more than just a poignant memoir of a harrowingly abusive childhood. It relates the extraordinary journey of one man striving to save his own spirit and our planet's...His visceral, biting observations always manage to lead back to his mantra: "Things don't have to be the way they are." Jensen's book accomplishes the rare feat of both breaking and mending the reader's heart."
—Publishers Weekly

"Among the ambiguities of our time, this memoir stands out for its honesty and purpose. . . . a map to personal healing through the larger historical, economic, cosmological—and mostly mysterious—processes that are source and balm for our traumas. . . . this book shows that when we are fully engage with the world around us, the universe is our greatest ally."
—Luis Rodriguez, author of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A

"When you daily look into the blackened eyes and broken spirits of women who've been beaten by men who "love" them, every fiber in your being screams out, "How could this happen, who could do this, what will it take to stop it?" Derrick Jensen masterfully weaves together ancient wisdom, curiosity, the innocence and courage of a child to profoundly answer these questions. If you're not moved to tears and action, wake up and read it again.
—Charlotte A. Watson, Executive Director of My Sisters' Place, Inc.

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Listening to the Land

Listening to the Land is a collection of interviews with environmentalists, feminists, theologians, philosophers, and Indians centering around the question: If the destruction of the natural world isn't making us happy, why are we doing it?"




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Railroads and Clearcuts

Railroads and Clearcuts reveals how the big four timber companies in the Pacific Northwest got their land illegally from the public domain.

CD – The Other Side of Darkness

This new triple CD contains one CD of Derrick's final Language Older Than Words talk, one CD of his Culture of Make Believe talk, and one of Q and A.

A typical Jensen event is multidimensional and feels a bit like traveling beneath the earth among tree roots, as they twist their way into soil, rock, river beds and accompany fish, insects, discarded tires, cellophane wrappers, animal minds, history, and human instinct on strange and interlocking journey.

Speaking in an almost improvisational style, Jensen explores the nature of injustice, of what civilizations do to the natural world and how, in the face of the resulting horror that is one of the all too apparent consequences of grave injustice, civilized human beings create intricate systems of denial, silence, abnegation, deception and self-hatred to keep it at bay.

He also reaches back to our collective childhoods, to the reality of magic in life, to discuss how nature has spoken to us and to how we must remember all the conversations we've had with her and renew them. It's his antidote to cynicism and apocalypse. That there is a language much older than the lying language we use daily, without being aware, to dispel the horrors of modern living and dying.

If there is a connection between Tiger Woods, newspaper journalism, the bad moods of trees, child abuse, amnesia, school, language, and salmon, Jensen finds those connections in a most personal way and exploits them so that the listener can actually experience the intricacies of Jensen's point of view.

It is indeed a heart rending, mind expanding, and ultimately healing exercise to explore Jensen's root system, with him not so much as a guide, but an experienced fellow traveler.

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CD – Stand Up Tragedy



$10.00, autographed, and postpaid.
One CD is essentially the talk I gave on the Language Older Than Words tour, and the other CD is a "best of" Q and A.

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