Beste Unseen Book Club Podcasts (2024)

1
Event Factory by Renee Gladman 1:17:22

10M ago1:17:22

1:17:22

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, eva…

1
Publishing The Commune, w/ Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press 29:28

1y ago29:28

29:28

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

1
The Commune by Marios Chakkas, w/ translator Chloe Tsolakoglou 1:23:41

1y ago1:23:41

1:23:41

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 mem…

1
Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko 1:40:29

1y ago1:40:29

1:40:29

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, an…

1
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie 1:27:28

1+ y ago1:27:28

1:27:28

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.…

1
The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov 1:53:35

1+ y ago1:53:35

1:53:35

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 ci…

1
The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier 59:09

1+ y ago59:09

59:09

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 eye…

1
Danton's Death by Georg Büchner 1:34:58

1+ y ago1:34:58

1:34:58

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 int…

1
El Apando by José Revueltas 1:15:25

1+ y ago1:15:25

1:15:25

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 …

1
Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest with Jimmy Cooper and Lyn Corelle 1:31:38

2y ago1:31:38

1:31:38

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…

1
Mezzanine with Mitch Anzuoni and Peter Christian 1:34:27

2y ago1:34:27

1:34:27

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 art…

1
The Tricking Hour and My Pleasure by Irene Silt 1:13:33

2y ago1:13:33

1:13:33

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 …

1
Episode 18.1 Translating Marx’s Capital into Spanish 11:13

2y ago11:13

11:13

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…

1
Lo Terciario/The Tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera 55:10

2y ago55:10

55:10

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…

1
Minneapolis Book Event Recap 23:32

2y ago23:32

23:32

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.Von The Unseen Book Club

1
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 with authors M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi 1:32:47

2y ago1:32:47

1:32:47

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…

1
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño 1:06:53

2+ y ago1:06:53

1:06:53

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 Literatu…

1
Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany 1:31:23

2+ y ago1:31:23

1:31:23

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 liv…

1
Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan 1:07:17

2+ y ago1:07:17

1:07:17

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 lov…

1
Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge 1:10:59

2+ y ago1:10:59

1:10:59

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…

1
Reflections on Mumbo Jumbo 17:02

2+ y ago17:02

17:02

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 UlmerVon The Unseen Book Club

1
Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed 58:01

2+ y ago58:01

58:01

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 or…

1
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Parts IV-V 1:11:43

2+ y ago1:11:43

1:11:43

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, whic…

1
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Parts I-III 1:17:02

2+ y ago1:17:02

1:17:02

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 t…

1
Post-exoticism in 10 Lessons: Lesson 11, by Antoine Volodine 1:08:08

3y ago1:08:08

1:08:08

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’ …

1
His Name Was Death by Rafael Bernal 1:29:14

3y ago1:29:14

1:29:14

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 Dir…

1
Too Salty Too Wet by Tiffany Sia 1:55:39

3y ago1:55:39

1:55:39

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, a…

1
Industrial Park by Patrícia Galvão 1:06:35

3y ago1:06:35

1:06:35

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…

1
Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif 1:26:22

3y ago1:26:22

1:26:22

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 …

1
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy 1:03:09

3+ y ago1:03:09

1:03:09

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…

1
Memory of Fire, Vols. II and III by Eduardo Galeano 1:08:40

3+ y ago1:08:40

1:08:40

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 short, fictionalized vignettes depicting historical figure…

1
Memory of Fire, Vol. I: Genesis by Eduardo Galeano 1:22:43

3+ y ago1:22:43

1:22:43

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 short, fictionalized vignettes depicting historical figure…

1
Embassytown by China Mieville 1:22:00

3+ y ago1:22:00

1:22:00

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 Trotskyist? // October, Miéville's history of the Russ…

1
The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini 1:11:47

3+ y ago1:11:47

1:11:47

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 would-be urban insurgents. The joy of young people claimin…

1
Introduction 25:00

3+ y ago25:00

25:00

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 decent audio quality. **EPISODE RECORDED IN MAY 2020…

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Unseen Book Club Podcasts

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