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 tw ..read more

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 ..read more

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 po ..read more

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 take ..read more

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 ..read more

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 w ..read more

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 pol ..read more

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 1969. 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. W ..read more

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 boo ..read more

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 c ..read more