The Unseen Book Club

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 Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Henri Lefabvre's work on the production of space. We are joined by two friends, Sirin Cucek and Auden Kotz, to explore the ever-shifting  semiotic and physical landscape of Ravicka. We talk about the violence of premises, ontologies of architecture, crises without conflict, the sensory allure of salsa dancers, and the explicitly political content in this enigmatic and abstract novella. 

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

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 nature of the self, individual and relational, coming to a profound and contradictory understanding of political belonging and collective memory. Having discarded the trappings and failures of political parties and society at large, he seeks communion with his fellow outcasts in his imagined eponymous commune: barely described, only gestured at.We speak with translator Chloe Tsolakoglou about 20th century Greek political history, theories of translation, texts that produce their own language of understanding, pathos and failure, and the ever-distant horizon of the commune.Inpatient Press: https://www.inpatientpress.net/Chloe Tsolakoglou: https://fridaycowgirl.com/Unseen Book ClubTwitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 violent and tenuous, of the re-ascent of indigenous and African gods in the Americas. Much of Almanac takes place in Chiapas, Mexico, the plains of Colombia, or Los Angeles, but the story centers around Tuscon, Arizona and Lecha, a TV psychic who has given up her career and returned to the ranch of her smuggler sister Zeta, to transcribe the Almamanc of the Dead, a centuries old palimpsest of stories, memories and observations given to her by her Yaqui grandmother. Meanwhile, the colonial border societies of Arizona and Chiapas careen towards their reckoning with the disaffected and the dispossessed.We are joined by friend and scholar E Ornelas to talk about non-linear time and ‘Native Slipstream,' the solidarity through the rejection or refusal of the racial order of colonial white supremacy, prophecy and political conjunctures, indigeneity and revolutionary politics, and are continuously astounded by Leslie Marmon Silko’s mastery of narrative craft.Check out E’s band, E.T. https://e-t-music.bandcamp.com/musicMusic of Crepusculo Negro can be heard here: https://crepusculonegro.bandcamp.com/ The lyrics accompanying the Vohlan/Blue Hummingbird on the Left split release are available on the Metal Archiveshttps://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Volahn/Debajo_del_s%C3%ADmbolo_del_Sol Unseen Book ClubTwitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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 Inquisition sought to root out the last strongholds of a popular heretical tendency long referred to as ‘Catharism.’We’re joined by friend and scholar Joe Albernaz to talk about the enduring legacy of the Cathars, heretical and weird cosmologies, the nature of history, interrogation as a narrative mode, and the origins of modernity. Joe’s writings can be found here.He is also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/albernajFor more information about the Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade, check out:This article by historian Elaine Graham-Leigh, andThis english translation of the Fournier RegisterUnseen Book ClubTwitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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_belaUnseen Book Club:Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastMusic 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/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastMusic 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 instagramTwitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt 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 HopkinsonEl Apando (1976), dir. Felipe Cazals: linkTwitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt 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_forestTheresa 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/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/