The Unseen Book Club The Unseen Book Club

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_bela
Unseen Book Club:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Music 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/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Music 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 instagram
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art 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 Hopkinson
El Apando (1976), dir. Felipe Cazals: link
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art 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_forest

Theresa 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/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art 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_press

Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest: https://maitlandsystems.bigcartel.com/

Unseen Book Club Podcast:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
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Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/