January 17
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“The course of history does bend toward justice,
but it must be gripped hard by those who seek it.”
- Justin Sayre
In a few days, our great nation will officially put a man into office. We all know who that man is, and his name strikes great chords of fear and confusion within our democracy. But it is not his name we fear, it’s what he represents.
March 06
"They are making bourgeois garbage and I have been making revolutionary garbage." Thus quoth Jean-Luc Godard, about his former friends, the "bourgeois" filmmakers Truffaut and Coutard, in this 1970 interview with the Evergreen Review's Kent Carroll. It's a fascinating text, in which Godard, along with Jean-Pierre Gorin, his partner in the class-conscious Dziga-Vertov Group, discuss American students, revolutionary struggle, and "what the Chinese call a bullet wrapped in sugar." We hope you enjoy!
December 20
by Derrick Jensen
When I find myself in times of trouble, I’m less interested in Mother Mary’s wisdom than I am in Joe Hill’s: Don’t mourn; organize.
There’s a sense in which Trump’s election is a surprise, similar to how we somehow seem to be continually surprised when easily predictable negative consequences of this way of life come to pass. So we’re surprised when bathing the world in insecticides somehow causes crashes in insect populations, when covering the world in endocrine disrupters somehow leads to the disruption of endocrine systems
December 02
The death of Fidel Castro has occasioned mourning, celebration, a New York Times obituary sixty-seven years in the making, and appraisals of El Comandante’s political work from all across the globe.
Castro is man about whom it’s impossible to be objective. There’s no denying that the Times obituary, for instance, is measured and thoughtful, and yet a cold eye can detect The Gray Lady tipping her hand at times.
January 10
Ricardo Piglia, one of Argentina’s greatest writers, is dead. In 2013, we published Piglia’s afterword to Rodolfo Walsh’s Operation Massacre. It contains not only a penetrating analysis of Walsh’s book,
March 06
March 6th marks the publication day of Martin Dubmernam’s extraordinary Novel/History Jews Queers Germans.
June 05
The Seven Stories fiction list began with Nelson Algren stories, with titles like "The Face on the Barroom Floor" and "The Lightless Room." These are not exactly beach reads, nor are the books you'll find below. What you will find are novels rooted in this world, presenting the dignity of people struggling to make sense of it and in one way or another to change it.
So, this is another kind of summer fiction list. We hope you'll find much that will challenge, inspire, and engage, in times of darkness and of light.
All titles 50% off for one week only, through June 14, 5:00PM EST.
July 17
"But the bohemian narrative needed tweaking, as the old East Village went on dying. So I fudged together a grandiose tale of survival. I was the Last of the Mohicans, I told myself (“aha!”), citing the opening on Avenue A of the gourmet delicatessen Gracefully in 1999 as proof that our values were under attack by capitalism. I, descendant of Richard Hell, was to hold a valiant last stand before the neighborhood surrendered its anarcho-populism to commercial hegemony. Then, having decided my time was up, I would flee to the Upper East Side (I did just that), now the token artist moonlighting as an ironic has-been, raconteur to starchy lawyers and doctors. I would tell myself and everyone else that I’d been part of something real, something raw, something so unlike the preppy invasion, something no algorithm could ever predict, something unannounced."
Carlos Dengler writes about gentrification, social conscience, and more.