Books
For the past forty years, LAB has published a range of books on social, political, economic and cultural issues in Latin America.
In 2015 LAB started a new publishing partnership with Practical Action Publishing. All new LAB publications will be co-publications with our new partner, 
who will produce, promote, sell and distribute the titles on LAB’s behalf, freeing us to do what we do best: define themes, identify authors, commission, translate (where necessary) and edit wonderful new books.
Meanwhile Practical Action Publishing has also taken over distribution of all LAB’s in-print books, via their Development Bookshop. For a full list of available titles and to place an order, click here.
Practical Action is also busy digitising well over 100 LAB titles from LAB’s back catalogue. These will soon be made available as e-books, either to individual order, or via a subscription (especially suitable for universities and libraries) to the entire collection. Subscriptions are managed via Development Bookshelf.
Latest Publications
LAB’s most recent major publication, Voices of Latin America – Social movements and the new activism was published in London in January 2019 and in New York (in association with Monthly Review Press) in May 2019.
Voices is a worthy successor to LAB’s Faces of Latin America, originally published in 1992, and which ran to four editions. We hope that Voices of Latin America will reach a similar audience of all those curious about, visiting, studying or researching the region, and that it will be used as essential reading in undergraduate and post-graduate courses throughout the English-speaking world.
The book is accompanied by a special website which has a page for each chapter/theme, with details of the authors, interviewees, references, further reading, videos and the latest news relating to the chapter.
Future publications
We have a busy publishing schedule ahead of us:
Colombia Inside Out by Huw Hennessy, which will be the second in our country guide series, following on from Brazil Inside Out (2016). Target publication date: March 2020
The Past is an Imperfect Tense by Bernardo Kucinski, translated from the Portuguese by Tom Gatehouse. By the same author as K (2013), this book tells the story of a relationship between father and son that begins intense and loving and ends in wreckage. The struggle begins in the boy’s adolescence, marked by involvement with marijuana, crack and amphetamines, a process described by the narrator as a frantic search for an artificial paradise. Three factors are intertwined in this life story: adoption, drug dependency and racism. Target publication date: February 2020
Crossed off the Map – Bolivia and the world by Shafik Meghji. A journey across Bolivia, from the Andes to the Amazon, explores the country’s turbulent history and current challenges. It tells the improbable – and, outside of South America, largely unknown – story of how Bolivia was once one of the richest places on earth, kickstarted globalisation, influenced the industrial revolution in Europe and dynastic collapse in China, and played host to everyone from rubber barons to Che Guevara. Target publication date: March 2020
Community Resistance to Mining in Latin America by Tom Gatehouse. A detailed investigation of the impact of this most destructive form of extraction, source of hundreds of conflicts in almost every country in the region as the large multinational mining companies and their local associates bewitch governments with exaggerated or illusory promises of wealth, plunder landscapes, displace local populations, pollute air and drinking water and distort entire economies. Target publication date: November 2020
To be notified of our releases please follow our facebook or twitter page.