Hasana Sharp’s "Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization" is one the most invigorating books published in philosophy this year. Where Deleuzian and post-Althusserian accounts of Spinoza occasionally take all the affect out of one of the tradition’s most effective writers, Sharp’s book is eminently readable and clear about the stakes of rethinking Spinoza after the linguistic and discursive turns of the last half of the twentieth century.

"Timepass" is an extraordinary book in which Craig Jeffrey makes a layered argument about the ways in which lower middle-class Jat (middle-caste) men from provincial India negotiate their experiences of ‘surplus time’ as unemployed youth.

One can't help but be stunned by the range of work being done in the nexus connecting the humanities to geography. As a reference tool for collating such information, "GeoHumanities: art, history, text at the edge of place" certainly succeeds, assembling between covers source material and web-links to send off the curious reader for months of profitable digging through the archives.

"Gourmets in the Land of Famine" argues that during the construction of the modern Chinese nation-state, scientific approaches to grain policy and rice production were central to constructing national identity.

From the subtitle, "The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International", one might assume "The Beach Beneath the Street" is yet another winking, frolicking romp through the voluptuous Saint-Germain existence of the ever-titillating Situationist International (SI; 1957-72). However, Wark’s wonderfully written, brilliantly researched, expansive, and decidedly timely monograph about the movement is no less of a manifesto than are his earlier contributions.