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&a...
Dec 30, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast 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
Oct 30, 2023•29 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast 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 natur...
Oct 27, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast 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 viole...
Sep 05, 2023•2 hr 40 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Inq...
Jul 25, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
May 17, 2023•2 hr 54 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Apr 12, 2023•59 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast 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 an...
Mar 16, 2023•2 hr 35 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast 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 lumpe...
Feb 11, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jan 17, 2023•2 hr 32 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast 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 mul...
Dec 30, 2022•2 hr 34 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast 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 position...
Dec 09, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast 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 o...
Nov 19, 2022•11 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Oct 28, 2022•55 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast 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 .
Oct 15, 2022•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 so...
Aug 01, 2022•2 hr 33 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast 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 quest...
Jul 21, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast 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 exqui...
Jun 13, 2022•2 hr 31 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast 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, Nor...
May 17, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast 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 u...
Apr 11, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast A short supplement to our main episode on Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. We talk about essays in Greg Tate's 'Flyboy in the Buttermilk.' Music by James Blood Ulmer
Mar 21, 2022•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mumbo Jumbo is a “Neo-Hoodoo” detective story, a post-modern satire, a touchstone of Afro-futurist fiction, and an invocation of the artistic and spiritual rebelliousness of Harlem, New Orleans, and Haiti in the 1920s into the time of its writing in 1972. In its account of the nefarious attempts of the centuries-old white, Western conspiratorial orders seeking to stamp out a literally infectious dance craze spread by ragtime and jazz, Ishmael Reed satirizes the spiritual vacuity of monotheistic ...
Mar 14, 2022•58 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast We return to Les Miserables after completing the second half of the book, which depicts the Paris Uprising of 1832 against the constitutional July Monarchy. Spoiler alert: The uprising ends in tragic defeat, but romance and hope prevail. Hugo’s fiery radical liberalism echoes the dreams and ambitions of his antecedent revolutionary generation, which, by the middle of his life, were already being contested by new revolutionary ideologies of class revolution. As a bridge between these eras, Les Mi...
Feb 16, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast Les Miserables, one of the great literary works of the nineteenth century, was written by novelist, poet, statesman, and overall man of affairs, Victor Hugo, in 1862. It’s a tale of romance and revolution, freedom and imprisonment, city and country, and the dialectical ferment of a society desperate to be reborn. Although widely thought to depict the French Revolution (1789-1792), it was actually written about the lesser known Paris Uprising of 1832, which Hugo lived through as a young man. In t...
Feb 01, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast Post-exoticism in 10 lessons is a sweltering, dreamlike study of narrative under conditions of extreme surveillance. Translated into English in 2015 (Open Letter), the book is a part of pseudonymous French writer Antoine Volodine’s larger meta-fictional project. His characters are incarcerated writers, former militants who develop ‘post-exoticism’ to communicate with each other using new subjective forms as the world liberation movements of the 60’s and 70’s are crushed and superseded by the neo...
Jan 13, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast His Name Was Death is a 1947 science fiction novel published by Rafael Bernal, a Mexican writer, scholar, diplomat and activist in the Catholic reaction against the Mexican Revolution as part of the National Synarchist Union (UNS). It was translated from Spanish to English by poet and translator Kit Schluter, and published in October, 2021 (New Directions). Bernal is well-known in Mexico for his satirical crime-noir novel The Mongolian Conspiracy, but his work is wide-ranging, and largely unavai...
Dec 13, 2021•1 hr 29 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast The Hong Kong protests of 2019-2020 were a geopolitical, ideological, and media discourse flashpoint. We talked to artist and filmmaker TIffany Sia about her book Too Salty Too Wet, which also defies simple categorization. In the author’s words, it is “a hellish scroll,” using elements of memoir, family history, post-colonial theory, geopolitics, and the ephemera of digital communication to document the heat, claustrophobia, and embodied intimacy of street protests, police repression and interna...
Nov 23, 2021•2 hr 56 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Patrícia Galvão (Pagu) published Industrial Park in 1933 at the age of 21. It was translated into English by Elizabeth and K. David Jackson in 1993. This modernist proletarian novel is at once an intimate window into the emotional lives of working class women in the industrial district of São Paulo, a biting satire of the social and sexual mores of the Brazil’s decadent bourgeoisie, and an eyewitness account of the fiercely militant labor politics of 1920’s Brazil. We discuss tragedy as a mode o...
Oct 30, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast This first novel in Abdelrahman Munif’s masterful quintet depicts sweeping social and economic transformations in the Arabian peninsula during the development of oil reserves for global export. Written in Paris and first published in Arabic in 1984, Cities of Salt follows members of a Bedouin village somewhere near the Persian Gulf as local elites invite American companies to prospect for oil. Their lives and relationships undergo continuous ruptures as they must adapt to the new world being bui...
Sep 30, 2021•1 hr 26 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is Arundhati Roy’s second novel, written after she spent twenty years producing journalism and political essays. We discuss Ministry alongside her 2019 essay collection, My Seditious Heart , much of which ended up in the novel in one form or another. The result is a sweeping, unapologetically political narrative that follows lives, grudges, and romances across the breadth of modern India. Along the way, Roy charts the violence of capitalism and empire and the gro...
Jul 12, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast 
