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Anarchist novels, communist poetry, uncategorizable anticolonial texts, unapologetically utopian science fiction. Close readings of stories of collective resistance and research into their contexts. A search for narratives of "we" instead of "I," observing the becoming of political subjects. A conversation between two curious non-experts and the occasional guest. It's not necessary to read the books to enjoy the show, but they're worth reading for their own sake.
37 Episodes
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Ben Morea is primarily known for his central involvement with the print magazine Black Mask and the militant anarchist group Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. Both were active in New York City in the late 1960’s. In the 1970’s, Morea went underground and lived for forty years in the Southern Rockies, immersing himself in ceremonial practice with indigenous communities. In the 2010’s, he returned to New York City. Full Circle is an autobiographical account of his political, artistic, and spir...
The Unseen Book Club returns! Max and Dan do some light bibliomancy, reflect on the past and cast our gazes to the horizon and discuss the future of the show. Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
Event Factory is the first in a cycle of novellas by Renee Gladman. An unnamed linguist-traveler arrives in the city-state of Ravicka, whose inhabitants speak a uniquely place-based, relational, and physically gestural language. The narrator is on a quest for meaning, understanding, and connection, but everything, even the buildings themselves, evade her. Gladman is especially interested in language, architecture, and meaning; Event Factory echos Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, Italo Calvi...
Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press on discovering Marios Chakkas and finding a translator who would do justice to Chakkas’ unique voice. Review of The Commune in Jacobin Magazine Mikis Theodorakis' obituary in Monthly Review Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
Marios Chakkas wrote The Commune in 1972 shortly before his death of cancer at the age of 41. Chakkas was a prolific Greek writer who lived through decades of hope, aspiration, repression and ultimately defeat for the country’s Left. A unique and unclassifiable novella, The Commune charts the state of Chakkas’ psyche through a dense sequence of memories, dreams, and imagined bureaucratic procedures. He reflects on his youth as communist militant during the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949, the na...
Leslie Marmon Silko, Laguna Pueblo author and prominent figure in the first of wave of the Native American Renaissance, spent ten year crafting Almanac of the Dead, published in 1991. Almanac is a sprawling, prophetic, epic novel populated by coke smugglers, arms dealers, sex workers, homeless veterans, scheming businessmen, corrupt politicians, and the people worldwide whose dreams are troubled by the fallout of the spiritual death of European descendants, or touched by the hope, however vio...
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, by French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, is a landmark work of social history first published in 1974. Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the lives, relationships, and theological worldview of everyday people in the small village of Montaillou in the Pyrenees mountains at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The narratives are sourced primarily from a document known as the the Fournier Register: a collection of interrogations of common people as the In...
Writer and translator Bela Shayevich joins the Unseen Book Club to talk about Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard. Bulgakov is primarily known in the West for his novel The Master and Margarita, but his most successful work in his lifetime was The Days of the Turbins, a wildly successful play about a family of White Guard officers in the besieged city of Kiev during the winter of 1918. The White Guard, first serialized in 1925, was the model for this work. Bulgakov was a doctor-turned-literary...
The Kingdom of this World, written by French-born Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in 1949, is a cosmologically immersive novel of Haitian society and its ruptures during the Haitian Revolution. Carpentier sought to evoke the texture of 18th century Haiti through exploration of what he termed lo real maravilloso, or the marvelous real. Through the eyes of its central character Ti Noel, we encounter historical figures like Mackandal, Boukman, Henri Christoph, Pauline Bonaparte, and General ...
Sasha Warren of the Unsound Mind blog returns to the Unseen Book Club to talk with about the life and work of revolutionary, proto-communist German playwright Georg Büchner (1813 - 1837). Büchner’s sparse writings were influential in the development of German modernist literature and socialism, mixing Hegelian materialism with biting satire and intimate psychological portrayals of political actors and working class characters. We focus on his first play, Danton’s Death, about the famed trial ...
José Revueltas, revolutionary communist and writer, wrote El Apando (The Hole) while incarcerated in the bowels of El Palacio de Lecumberri for his participation in the Mexico City student movement of 1968. It is a stark, gritty, and haunting prison novel that pits the petty violence and depravities of incarcerated addicts against the immobilizing horrors of prison as a social institution. Through feverish, claustrophobic, and compassionate prose, Revueltas posits the suffering of Mexico’s lu...
Make the Golf a Public Sex Forest is an eponymously themed and self-published anthology of queer smut curated and edited by Jimmy Cooper and Lyn Corelle. In summer 2021, an anonymous manifesto declared war on the Hiawatha Golf Course in Minneapolis, enrolling regional queer history to catalyze a reclamation of autonomous public spaces: Places to be used for encounter, exploration and eros. The stories, poems and essays in this anthology were written in response to the manifesto. We talk to Ji...
In a break from our usual format, we interview Mitch Anzuoni and Peter Christian of Inpatient Interactive about their video game Mezzanine, a MYST-style point-and-click puzzle game of techno terror and occult mystery. The game relies heavily on textual exploration. The plot emerges from pages of richly composed and frequently hilarious magazine articles, corporate documents, and emails. Mezzanine is a deeply researched and uncannily present invocation of the not-so-lost era of the pre-2000’s ...
We talk to poet and writer Irene Silt about their two new books published by Deluge Books in October 2022. The essays in The Tricking Hour (2018-2019) and the poems in My Pleasure (2019-2021) are expansive, and broadly concerned with sex work, anti-work feeling, and the cultivation of capacity through intimacy and experience. They contain profound insights on the nature and feelings of work derived from the particularities of sex work. We talk about affinities within and between subject posit...
In episode 18, we talked about Raquel Salas Rivera’s use of key lines from Marx’s Capital in Lo Terciario/The Tertiary. Later, Max did some research and wrote more about the Spanish translation/critical edition of Capital that Salas Rivera quotes (and re-translates) in his poems, a collaborative work by Pedro Scarón and Siglo XXI Editores Argentina in the 1970s. Here, Max reads his short essay about that effort and translation in general as a political intervention in Latin American communism...
Lo Terciario/The Tertiary, a book of auto-translated poems by Raquel Salas Rivera (based in Puerto Rico and Philadelphia), interrogates the intimacies of familial bonds, gender, and colonization through a unique deployment of key concepts from Marx. “Formal” exposition of Marxian conceptions of debt, circulation, and the value form entangle moments of autobiographical detail within the history of anti-colonial struggle for Puerto Rican independence, and the context of the United States’ colon...
The Unseen Book Club recaps the Minneapolis Everything for Everyone reading event from back in August, for which Dan and Sasha facilitated a tabletop role-play inspired activity. We talk about game design, collective imagination, and the suburbs. Sasha’s madness blog can be found here. Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, co-authored by Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O’Brien, is a series of fictional interviews with future revolutionaries. Through tumultuous decades of ecological, economic and political crises, people worldwide discover and build the commune form. Everything for Everyone is at once a cartography of revolution, a work of imaginative science fiction, and a hard look at what it might truly mean to envision the end of the current...
In which Max and Dan tackle a work by Roberto Bolaño, one of the truly great novelists of the late 20th century. Nazi Literature in the Americas, originally published in 1996 and translated to English in 2008, is a biographical encyclopedia: a ficitonal canon of pan-American right-wing avant-garde writers. Despite the simple premise, ‘Nazi Literature’ is typical Bolaño: layered, enigmatic, and richly textured with historical and literary references. We find ourselves returning to the same que...
In 1976, one year after the publication of his masterpiece Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany wrote Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia. A prescient, layered and vexing novel, Triton traces the existential crises of gender, sex, alienation and desire plaguing its protagonist Bron Helstrom as he navigates daily life as a white-collar tech worker living in a gender-specified housing cooperative on Neptune´s moon Triton. A story of unrequited desire and petty social complaints unfolds amidst exq...
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