The Unseen Book Club
by The Unseen Book Club
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.
Episodes
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Our Death by Sean Bonney
Our Death is the final book of poems by the late, great, communist poet Sean Bonney. Published in 2019 shortly before his passing, Our Death is a series of prose poems, translations, and odes to fellow travelers of bohemia, insurrection, and the militant avant-garde. It is a book of ghosts, lost...
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The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist by Emile Habibi
The Secret Life of Saeed: the Pessoptimist (1974) is a masterwork of tragicomedic narrative by Palestinian writer, poet and politician Emile Habibi (1922-1996). It is a monumental expression of Palestinian self-hood, in particular for the Palestinians who made lives under occupation in the…
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The Death Ship by B Traven
The Death Ship was the first major novel by the legendary, anonymous anarchist novelist, B Traven (188? - 1969). Traven’s adventure novels of the ‘20s and ‘30s document proletarian struggle, as outcasts and downtrodden workers confront the absurdity and agonies of capitalist exploitation…
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Tuesday Or September Or The End by Hannah Black
Hannah Black’s superb novella Tuesday Or September Or The End (Capricious, 2022) is a science-fictionalized account of 2020 and its twinned world-making events of the pandemic and riot. The novella is caustic, hilarious, and written with both an unflinching eye for this world’s stifling and…
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On and Off-Screen Imaginaries with Tiffany Sia
On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024) is a collection of six essays by filmaker, artist and writer Tiffany Sia. Sia joins us to discuss how media depictions of political practice and identity are produced, negotiated, memorialized, and transformed through censorship,...
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Full Circle: A Life In Rebellion, by Ben Morea + 1000 Voices Collective, w/ Ariel Uesseler and Sabu Kohso
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...
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RELAUNCH: The Unseen Book Club returns!
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. Sign up for our newsletter! Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
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Event Factory by Renee Gladman
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…
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Publishing The Commune, w/ Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press
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 Sign up for our newsletter! Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art…
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The Commune by Marios Chakkas, w/ translator Chloe Tsolakoglou
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…
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Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko
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...
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Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
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...
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The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
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…
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The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier
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…
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Danton's Death by Georg Büchner
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,...
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El Apando by José Revueltas
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...
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Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest with Jimmy Cooper and Lyn Corelle
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...
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Mezzanine with Mitch Anzuoni and Peter Christian
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...
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The Tricking Hour and My Pleasure by Irene Silt
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...
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Episode 18.1 Translating Marx’s Capital into Spanish
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...
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Lo Terciario/The Tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera
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...
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Minneapolis Book Event Recap
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. Sign up…
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Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 with authors M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi
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...
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Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
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…
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Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany
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...
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Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan
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,...
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Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge
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…
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Reflections on Mumbo Jumbo
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 Sign up for our newsletter! Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
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Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
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…
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Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Parts IV-V
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...
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Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Parts I-III
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...
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Post-exoticism in 10 Lessons: Lesson 11, by Antoine Volodine
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...
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His Name Was Death by Rafael Bernal
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...
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Too Salty Too Wet by Tiffany Sia
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,...
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Industrial Park by Patrícia Galvão
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...
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Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif
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...
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The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
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…
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Memory of Fire, Vols. II and III by Eduardo Galeano
Memory of Fire, a trilogy written by Eduardo Galeano between 1981-86 while in exile from his native Uruguay, traces the history of the Americas from the earliest periods of European contact through conquest, colonization, independence, revolutions, imperialism and globalization. Composed of…
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Memory of Fire, Vol. I: Genesis by Eduardo Galeano
Memory of Fire, a trilogy written by Eduardo Galeano between 1981-86 while in exile from his native Uruguay, traces the history of the Americas from the earliest periods of European contact through conquest, colonization, independence, revolutions, imperialism and globalization. Composed of…
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Embassytown by China Mieville
We discuss Embassytown, China Miéville's weird science fiction novel about a colonial outpost confronted by sudden upheaval and insurgency. We get wrapped up in allegory, metaphor, and how living through crisis can sometimes be the only way to find the necessary language for survival. What is a...
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The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini
Balestrini’s breathless novel of student and worker rebellion during the upheaval of the 1970s in Italy follows its unnamed narrator through student occupations, wildcat strikes and sabotage, the formation of squatted social centers, and the fracturing of left autonomism into armed bands of...
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Introduction
Why the Unseen Book Club? How is it that everything is political but it is so difficult to act politically? How can Spinoza help us answer that question? Long readings of Italo Calvino and Andrei Platonov. Dan and Max become friends and experiment with the podcast form at the temporary expense of...
About this show
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.
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The Unseen Book Club