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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
35 episodes
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 uniquel...
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Episode 29
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1:17:22
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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 ...
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Episode 28
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29:28
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...
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Episode 28
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1:23:41
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 no...
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Episode 27
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1:40:29
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 every...
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Episode 26
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1:27:28
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 ...
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Episode 25
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1:53:35
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 1...
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Episode 24
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59:09
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 spa...
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Episode 23
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1:34:58
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 h...
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Episode 22
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1:15:25
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
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Episode 21
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1:31:38
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 ...
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Episode 20
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1:34:27
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 (2019-2...
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Episode 19
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1:13:33
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<...
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Episode 18
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11:13
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 conce...
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Episode 18
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55:10
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,...
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23:32
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, econ...
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Episode 17
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1:32:47
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 encyclo...
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Episode 16
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1:06:53
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 g...
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Episode 15
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1:31:23
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 Lebanes...
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Episode 14
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1:07:17
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 an...
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Episode 13
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1:10:59
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
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17:02
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 writi...
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Episode 12
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58:01
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....
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Episode 11
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1:11:43
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 cou...
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Episode 10
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1:17:02
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-...
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Episode 9
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1:08:08