The Unseen Book Club

The Unseen Book Club
  • 4.9 (17)
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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.

  1. 12/30/2023

    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 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...

    1h 17m

  2. 10/30/2023

    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 MagazineMikis Theodorakis' obituary in Monthly Review

    29 min

  3. 10/27/2023

    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 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...

    1h 24m

  4. 09/05/2023

    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 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...

    1h 40m

  5. 07/25/2023

    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 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...

    1h 27m

  6. 05/17/2023

    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 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...

    1h 54m

  7. 04/12/2023

    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 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 ...

    59 min

  8. 03/16/2023

    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, 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 a...

    1h 35m
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Ratings & Reviews

4.9
out of 5
17 Ratings

About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    The Unseen Book Club
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2023
  • Episodes
    35
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2023 The Unseen Book Club
  • Show Website
    The Unseen Book Club

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