Last-minute gifts, and FREE (save for the cost of you printing them in pretty paper)!!!

Give the gift of these and other zines that I’ve somehow managed to crank out in (Gregorian calendar and christofascist) 2025. Guaranteed to bring inspiration to those who are already anarchists, supply much encouragement to your liberal relatives, friends, and neighbors to embrace anarchism instead—or your no-money back ;)

You can pick from one or all of the six zines in my curated series—filled with various beautiful anarchist voices+stories, each zine on a different theme—and/or some of the zines made from pieces by yours truly. And all but one feature gorgeous anarchist art on their covers.

To not-buy these last-minute (or anytime) gifts, you can:

DM me your email, and I’ll send you the FREE readable and print-ready PDFs.

or

Freely order them from the wonderful @sheerspite, where you’ll find so many other amazing zines (though not all free, but definitely affordable)

Lest you’re wondering, I’m still all about my campaign to #AbolishXmas! (And sadly missing the resistance afforded by Hanukkah now that it just ended.) But alas, Xmas still seems to be happening this year, so why not give some zines and make some good trouble?!

with love and solidarity from a Jewish anarchist grinch whose heart hasn’t warmed to Xmas
🖤🩷🐈‍⬛🔥🪬🦝🩷🖤

“Double dysphoria.”

That’s all I could think as I walked out of the post office today after the clerk “ma’am”’d and “merry Christmas”’d me in quick succession—too quick, especially with a long line of customers behind me, to come up with a remotely coherent, incisive yet kind retort.

So I scurried out of the post office, doubly grouchy at this time of year—the “season” when the dominance of xtian hegemony rings as loud and clear as Salvation Army bells; when it’s somehow socially acceptable to assume that everyone celebrates xmas and jesus and bio-families and capitalist excess.

Never mind that “merry” or the equivalently exasperating “happy” Christmas greetings, mouthed routinely in place of “have a good day,” feel so utterly tasteless against the repast of genocide and authoritarianism being served up this year. That should surely be bad enough. (It is!)

But on the more micro level of me—a “they,” a godless Jewish anarchist—it sticks in the craw. Every micro interaction in the course of my day feels like being jabbed by pine needles—each a reminder of 530+ years of the christofascist theft of calendars and rituals, communities and languages, foods and cultures, genders and lifeways. Anything and everything at odds with a landscape of white male Santa Clauses supposedly gifting us the world while we passively slumber—but only if we’re good at fitting into the supremacy of cheerful obedience and conformity.

Usually I’m “merely” enraged during December, wishing the Grinch would change their mind and #AbolishXmas after all. Maybe it’s because I’m in a part of this imperiled world where people find it “polite” (in that shutdown, rote sort of WASPy way) to presume and add 1-of-2 genders to every sentence (“yes, sir” or “thank you, miss”), but this “season” I’m equally eager to #AbolishGender. And it’s hitting me how xtian hegemony at xmas is wrapped up neatly with a binary bow in ho(ho)mophobia and transphobia.

So I’m feeling doubly dysphoric toward the “holidays” that aren’t mine, grumpy about being labeled “xtian” and “female” when I’m neither, doubly filled with wrath at this homogeneously oppressive social order that must be abolished.

(Photo: cheerful stickers seen last autumn in the queerly beautiful space of @roomofonesownbooks 💗🖤)

[Update: I “sold out” of Rebellious Mourning, Deciding for Ourselves, and Anarchism+Its Aspirations—go fundraiser!—but still have some copies of Try Anarchism for Life]

Last call for my mini-fundraiser for @ratzonpgh and @pinkpeacock—while my dwindling supplies of these four books last.

Yesterday, I tried to mail two packages of some of these titles to two kind contributors to this sliding-scale funder. I walked through a downtown bedecked in red-and-green Xmas decorations while the Muzak lyrics of “Christ the savior is born” blared out of public loudspeakers at me until I finally reached the post office, only to find that Monday was a “legal holiday.”

All that not only underscored the need for an ongoing “war on Christmas”—even after it’s allegedly over—and its Christian (fascistic) hegemony but also, in counterpoint, the need for illegal or at least subversive holidays and spaces that embody dreamy-queer, anarchistic-liberatory lifeways. Like Ratzon, a center for healing and resistance in Pittsburgh, and Pink Peacock, a pay-what-you-can-down-to-nothing Yiddish anarchist café and infoshop in Glasgow—both self-organized and collectively rebellious projects.

Hence my second round of this fundraiser: because such spaces are precious and fragile. They show us a glimpse of the world to come in the here and now. And especially because the here and now is so absurdly difficult, making many of us feel all-too-fragile, even the idea that such spaces are doable and possible and beautiful—even if one isn’t in Pittsburgh or Glasgow—is heartening.

And if nothing else, I hope this pretty arrangement of the books on offer warms up your day a bit.

All proceeds, minus my actual costs, will be divided between these two projects. So, decide which book(s) you want, DM me and name your price from the range below, I’ll let you know the media mail cost ($3-5), and soon the books will be on their way to you.

Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief (AK Press): $9-16

Deciding for Ourselves: The Promise of Democracy (AK Press): $9-15

Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press): $6-9

Try Anarchism for Life (Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness): $8-15

(Note: All of these books, and others by me, are always available at akpress.org, including ebook versions)

#AbolishXmas
#BeGayDoIllegalHolidays
#BooksNotBorders
#AlwaysCarryABook

Chanuka/Hanukkah/Janucá/Khanike/Xanuqa (etc.) fundraiser for two Jewish anarchist spaces that are near and dear and queer to my heart: @ratzonpgh and @dirozevepave!

Because it’s that time of year when I want to #AbolishXmas (along with capitalism, cops, christian fascism, and so much) and lean into the time-space of eight nights of much-needed light, illuminating resistance and resilience. And because I have some brand-new copies of six of my books “leftover” from a few events that got cut short by me sadly catching COVID this fall, after 2.5 years of being communally careful.

So rather than these titles getting lonely in boxes on my floor—I can always get more when I have the delight of trying again to do book-related events (DM or email me if you ever want to host one)—I’m turning them into this modest fundraiser!

Whether you’re Jewish or not, whether you hate Xmas or not, join in raising some gelt. I’ll donate anything over the material cost to me of each book to the two projects above.

DM or email (cbmilstein at yahoo) me if you want any of the following titles, sliding scale (or more) plus media mail ($3-5 per book) via my PayPal, while supplies last (alas, only for shipping in the US):

Anarchism and Its Aspirations, $6-9

Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism, $6-9

Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, $9-16

Deciding for Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy, $9-15

There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists, $10-19

Try Anarchism for Life, $8-15

(photos, featuring the covers of all six books, borrowed from @camasbooks, @cryptotaenia.plant.sanctuary, and @scottcampbell, with much appreciation; all these books are also available from @akpressdistro, with #TryAnarchismForLife at @tangled_wilderness too)

#AlwaysCarryABook
#AllChanukkahsAreBeautiful