Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb

Ken Knabb is well known for his translations of works by Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Public Secrets is the first comprehensive collection of his own writings.

One of the texts in the book, “The Joy of Revolution,” has recently been reissued separately in an updated and expanded edition (PM Press, 2026), but Public Secrets contains more than 300 pages of other interesting and informative material, including pamphlets, posters, comics, and articles on Wilhelm Reich, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, radical Buddhists, Japanese anarchists, Chinese dissidents, the 1970 Polish revolt, the 1979 Iranian uprising, and the 1991 Gulf War.

The book also includes a short autobiography, “Confessions of a Mild-Mannered Enemy of the State,” in which Ken recounts his adventures and misadventures in Berkeley and San Francisco during the 1960s and his projects and encounters in the international situationist scene during the following decades.

“Ken Knabb’s two distinctive qualities, clarity and simplicity, distinguish him from the situationists yet at the same time mark him as one of their authentic successors. Does this mean that his work is a sort of ‘Situationist International for Dummies’? No, but it could certainly serve as such—anyone who is unfamiliar with the SI should put this book at the very top of their reading list.”
—Jean-Pierre Depétris (reviewing the French edition of Public Secrets)