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  • Published: 15 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9781685892692
  • Imprint: Melville House
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $39.99

On Resistance

A Manifesto




From the writer Elle calls the "most inspiringly wicked social critic of the moment" comes a hands-on, don't-lose-hope study of how writers, painters, musicians, and other cultural figures respond to fascism …

From a veteran writer and activist comes a concise yet potent guide to standing up to the myriad tyrannies of our current political landscape. We live in a time where independent thinking, love of literature and ideas, and passion for human expression are all under attack from a ruthless and uncaring government and a culture that values only immediate gratification and digital flash.

In On Resistance, Curtis White offers spiritual hope and intellectual fortification for those in despair about the bankruptcy of American life. Drawing on a range of books, films, essays, and artworks, White shows how our rich collective literary heritage gives us mental ammunition for our fight against the forces that would reduce us all to commodities and consumers. In doing so, he has penned a new classic in the noble history of American polemics.

  • Published: 15 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9781685892692
  • Imprint: Melville House
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $39.99

About the author

Curtis White

Curtis White is a novelist and social critic whose works include Memories of My Father Watching TV, The Middle Mind, and, more recently, The Science Delusion, We Robots, and Lacking Character. His essays have appeared in Harpers and Tricycle.He taught English at  Illinois State University. He is the founder (with Ronald Sukenick) of FC2, a publisher of innovative fiction run collectively by its authors. He lives in Port Townsend, WA.

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Praise for On Resistance

"In On Resistance: a Manifesto, Curtis White offers us a trail guide through our disorienting and perilous political landscape. It’s a concise and sharply envisioned look forward, into the darkening now. White is less concerned with how we got here than how we get out, alive, spiritually intact, and together, as a community of resistance against the growing forces of dehumanization and planetary ruin. Like everything White has written, On Resistance hums with moral clarity in our increasingly obscure times and, as such, is a visionary text that has arrived at precisely the desperate moment we need it most." —Jeffrey St. Clair, editor of CounterPunch, author of Born Under a Bad Sky

PRAISE FOR CURTIS WHITE
“White has the courage, rare in our time, to associate the right and the good explicitly with the beautiful.” —Mark Greif, author of Against Everything

“The most inspiringly wicked social critic of the moment.” —Will Blythe, Elle

"White makes a convincing case that will resonate with progressives seeking to 'free ourselves from the world that we were born into' and 'change the way we live.'" —Publishers Weekly