The Unseen Book Club

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 Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Henri Lefabvre's work on the production of space. We are joined by two friends, Sirin Cucek and Auden Kotz, to explore the ever-shifting  semiotic and physical landscape of Ravicka. We talk about the violence of premises, ontologies of architecture, crises without conflict, the sensory allure of salsa dancers, and the explicitly political content in this enigmatic and abstract novella. 

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 MagazineMikis Theodorakis' obituary in Monthly Review

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 nature of the self, individual and relational, coming to a profound and contradictory understanding of political belonging and collective memory. Having discarded the trappings and failures of political parties and society at large, he seeks communion with his fellow outcasts in his imagined eponymous commune: barely described, only gestured at.We speak with translator Chloe Tsolakoglou about 20th century Greek political history, theories of translation, texts that produce their own language of understanding, pathos and failure, and the ever-distant horizon of the commune.Inpatient Press: https://www.inpatientpress.net/Chloe Tsolakoglou: https://fridaycowgirl.com/Unseen Book ClubTwitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 violent and tenuous, of the re-ascent of indigenous and African gods in the Americas. Much of Almanac takes place in Chiapas, Mexico, the plains of Colombia, or Los Angeles, but the story centers around Tuscon, Arizona and Lecha, a TV psychic who has given up her career and returned to the ranch of her smuggler sister Zeta, to transcribe the Almamanc of the Dead, a centuries old palimpsest of stories, memories and observations given to her by her Yaqui grandmother. Meanwhile, the colonial border societies of Arizona and Chiapas careen towards their reckoning with the disaffected and the dispossessed.We are joined by friend and scholar E Ornelas to talk about non-linear time and ‘Native Slipstream,' the solidarity through the rejection or refusal of the racial order of colonial white supremacy, prophecy and political conjunctures, indigeneity and revolutionary politics, and are continuously astounded by Leslie Marmon Silko’s mastery of narrative craft.Check out E’s band, E.T. https://e-t-music.bandcamp.com/musicMusic of Crepusculo Negro can be heard here: https://crepusculonegro.bandcamp.com/ The lyrics accompanying the Vohlan/Blue Hummingbird on the Left split release are available on the Metal Archiveshttps://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Volahn/Debajo_del_s%C3%ADmbolo_del_Sol Unseen Book ClubTwitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 Inquisition sought to root out the last strongholds of a popular heretical tendency long referred to as ‘Catharism.’We’re joined by friend and scholar Joe Albernaz to talk about the enduring legacy of the Cathars, heretical and weird cosmologies, the nature of history, interrogation as a narrative mode, and the origins of modernity. Joe’s writings can be found here.He is also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/albernajFor more information about the Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade, check out:This article by historian Elaine Graham-Leigh, andThis english translation of the Fournier RegisterUnseen Book ClubTwitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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-bourgeois with reactionary sympathies who sought success from life and work in the Soviet Union. His work was praised by Stalin, yet by the 1930’s he was all but banned from publishing.The White Guard is an incredible document of nostalgia, family, sacrifice, and the fraying social fabric of a beloved city. Russian intelligentsia, Ukrainian nationalists, peasants, Jews, Cossacks, Germans and at least one Bolshevik clash, scheme, betray and survive in the complex wartime politics of Kiev. We talk about the political chaos of the Civil War, artistic and aesthetic reaction, bourgeois nostalgia in a revolutionary society, and for the very first time on the Unseen Book Club, address ‘the Jewish question.’Bela Shayevich:https://www.belashayevich.com/https://twitter.com/bela6_belaUnseen Book Club:Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastMusic by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 Leclerc. However, Carpentier all but ignores the political dimensions of the revolution in favor of the social, the spiritual and ultimately, the liberatory.We pair The Kingdom of this World with C.L.R. James’ historical masterpiece, The Black Jacobins. The reading is productive, in that both cast Black Haitians as historical protagonists in their liberatory struggle for emancipation; both attend to the dialectic of the Atlantic encounter, and both explore the tragedies and contradictions of Haitian independence. However, these texts are, in multiple dimensions, inverses of one another. We talk about vodou and the enlightenment, agency and structure, history and literature, and Carpentier’s excellent prose (masterfully translated into English by Harriet de Onís).Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastMusic by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 and execution of Georges Danton during the French Revolution. We talk about Büchner’s revolutionary political work with the Young Germany movement and its contextual influence on Karl Marx, youthful angst and obsession, the French Revolution as a model of political struggles, and the madness of history.Sasha Warren is on twitter and instagramTwitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 lumpenproletariat and the institutions that oppress them as an essential social and political question. We talk about gender, the fractal nature of prisons and social violence, tropes of prison narratives, and how fun it is to talk about a book for nearly as long as it takes to read it.The Hole translated by Sophie Hughes and Amanda HopkinsonEl Apando (1976), dir. Felipe Cazals: linkTwitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 Jimmy and Lyn about the collection and how its many authors interpreted the call for submissions. The book is a constellation of steaming hot, down and dirty, genuinely freaky erotica, studies of sex in nature//nature as sex, critiques of the political horizons of sex, queer scene reports, and more. We talk about sexual utopias, transcending our own thresholds of desire, and the thrills of imagining our unknown pleasures.Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest is available to purchase!Twitter: https://twitter.com/sex_forestTheresa Sweetheart is on Bandcamp, Instagram, and many other platforms!Jimmy Cooper is on Twitter, Instagram and elsewhere.Lyn Corelle is on Twitter, Instagram, and their visual work is online.Stewart Van Cleve’s Land of 10,000 Loves: A History Queer Minnesota is mentioned in the episode.The Unseen Book Club:Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 multimedia tech boom, and its ideological soup of neo-liberal counterculture psychedelia, libertarian capitalism, and deep state surveillance.We talk about the occult methodologies used to create Mezzanine and their resonance with Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, fictional and historical narrative in immersive game environments, the construction of our contemporary digital subjectivities through conspiracy, and so, so much more.Inpatient Press:Mezzanine is free to play via Inpatient Press,  and on Steam. Instagram: https://instagram.com/inpatient_pressMake the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest: https://maitlandsystems.bigcartel.com/Unseen Book Club Podcast:Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 positions, the politics that emerge from criminalized labor, collective and anonymous composition, boundaries and their essential permeability, intimacy, sexuality and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and how hard it is to remember your literary influences. We barely talk about queerness, love, or Sade.Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 of the 1960s and 70s. Download the essay here. 

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’ colonial response to Puerto Rico’s “national debt crisis.”It’s a conceptually dense hook, but the poems are lucid, rich and intimate. We expose our status as deeply amateur Marxologists, talk about how poetry is a perfect medium for theoretical exposition, and raise unanswerable questions about the politics of translation.Raquel Salas RiveraMax wrote a *great* article about Pedro Scarón 1976 translation of Capital, which we speak about in the episode. Download it here.DisemPOWERed: Puerto Rico’s Perfect Storm (2019) is an excellent documentary about Puerto Rican political economy, debt, and austerity.

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.

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 social order. When regimes of the nation state, markets, family and gender have fractured, the forces of counter-revolution are unable to coalesce, and people have nowhere to turn but to each other, what emerges is worth striving for.We interview Eman and M.E. about the use of utopian imagination, writing about the future, the oral history form, trauma, healing and mass consciousness, the roles of culture and ideology, and collective power in crisis.M.E. O’Brien is on Twitter @genderhorizon.We reference the 2019 article in PInko Magazine, ‘Communizing Care’ in the episode.NYC Trans Oral History Project: https://nyctransoralhistory.org/.Eman Abdelhadi is on Twitter as @emanabdelhadi and instagram as @eabdelhadi.Everything for Everyone is published by Common Notions.Guest music by Hidden Benjamin:  Soundcloud and Bandcamp.Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 questions: Why did Bolaño write this book? Why conjure this cabinet of literary monsters? What can be said about history through fiction that cannot be explored through other means? We talk, (or avoid talking about) genealogies of fascism, freaks of Futurism, the political right in the Americas, and the fascination our political enemies' creative, expressive endeavors sometimes provokes in us.The Hispanic Community of Nations: the Spanish-Argentine nexus and the imagining of a Hispanic Cold War bloc, Daniel Gunnar Kressel (2015)Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastMusic by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 exquisite science-fictional word-building and the rich meta-textual study Delany is known for.We are joined by artist and fellow Delany enthusiast Lyn Corelle. Although the book´s meaning is evasive, we have an amazing time discussing utopias and their discontents, political economy and war, the futurity of individualism and gender, and Delany´s peculiar interrogation of the political through relational tension.Samuel R. Delany: ´To Read the Dispossessed´ (1976)On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany (1990)Joanna Russ: ´Recent Feminist Utopias´ (1981)Michel Foucault: On Other Spaces: Utopias and HeterotopiasLyn Correlle can be found at:Instagram: https://instagram.com/lyncorelleTwitter: https://twitter.com/sex_forestTwitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastMusic by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.comArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

Sitt Marie Rose, by Lebanese-American poet-painter Etal Adnan (1925-2021?), is a searing, vibrant statement on the paradoxes of a society erupting into violence. Published in 1978, it is an intimate depiction of the earliest days of the Lebanese Civil War through the lens of one (or two) young, female narrators as active witnesses. Violence and love clash across lines of class, sectarian and religious identity, political solidarities, nationalism and gender.We are joined by poet and friend, Nora Treatbaby. We attempt to anchor our discussion in a rough-cut survey of the conflict, and are quickly thwarted by its complexity. Nora challenges us on collapsing the vibrancy of the poetic into mere contextual or historical readings. We discuss the psychology of fascism, the politics of language, and the possibilities of love against the tragedy of history.Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation, by Fadi A. Bardawil: https://www.dukeupress.edu/revolution-and-disenchantmentMiddle East Research and Information Project (MERIP): https://merip.org/2021/10/capturing-the-complexity-of-lebanons-civil-war-and-its-legacies/Beirut: War Generation (1989) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-15KBICWiQNora Treatbaby´s first full-length publication Our Air is forthcoming through Nightboat Press https://nightboat.org/nightboat-poetry-prize-winners/Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastMusic by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

Victor Serge (1890-1947), Belgian-Russian revolutionary, novelist, intellectual, political prisoner, and stalwart comrade to countless others, wrote his memoirs towards the end of his life while living stateless in Mexico. An insurrectionary anarchist in his youth, he joined the Bolshevik party in the early years of the Russian revolution. He was a steadfast defender of party democracy and freedom of intellect until his expulsion, and remained in the Soviet Union through imprisonment and exile until his deportation to Europe and ultimately to Mexico.Memoirs is a stunning and immersive first-hand account of the contradictions and hopes of the revolutionary times he witnessed. Despite the relentless hardship, tragedy he and his fellows endured, Memoirs is deeply compassionate, intellectually rigorous and at times, spiritually resonant. He reflects on the decadent and stagnant conditions of pre-WWI Europe; the hungry yet hope-filled first years of the Russian Revolution, and the creeping horror of totalitarian party leadership. Above all, Serge is unsparingly passionate and generous in his portraiture of his revolutionary compatriots--both his friends and his enemies. We discuss the weirdly contemporary feel of anarchist subculture of Brussels in the 1910s, the enduring spirit of solidarity, and the consciousness that emerges from a lifetime of shared struggle.Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastMusic by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/