Content:

Join us in celebrating this long-awaited collection by Chicago author and agitator Jarrod Shanahan, who will appear in conversation with members of Lake Effect Collective. Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help (PM Press, 2025) collects a decade of reflections on recent US struggles—Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Rebellion—alongside accounts of the rise of Trumpism, the alt-right, and an apocalyptic shift in popular culture, to paint a dense and complex portrait of a decade of protracted social crisis.

Jarrod Shanahan reports from the ground. On the streets in 2014, from the depths of the Rikers Island penal complex, inside the alt-right underground and the carnival of Trump rallies, and in the line of fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, among other scenes that Shanahan accessed not as a credentialed observer but an active participant: prisoner, infiltrator, activist. The resulting essays outline the pitfalls and opportunities facing those seeking to reverse the suicidal course of capitalist society and build a liberated world.

Jarrod Shanahan is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage (Verso, 2022) and co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform and America's Punishment System (Field Notes/Reaktion, 2022), City Time: On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island (NYU Press, 2025) and Skyscraper Jails: The Abolitionist Fight Against Jail Expansion in New York City (Haymarket, 2025).

Lake Effect Collective (https://lakeeffect.noblogs.org) is a many-headed hydra spreading communism and living anarchy in Chicago.