Podcast
The Unseen Book Club
Hosted by The Unseen Book Club · EN
Anarchist novels, communist poetry, uncategorizable anticolonial texts, unapologetically utopian science fiction. Close readings of stories of collective resistance and research into their contexts. A search for narratives of "we" instead of "I," observing the becoming of political subjects. A conversation between two curious non-experts and the occasional guest. It's not necessary to read the books to enjoy the show, but they're worth reading for their own sake.
15episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
The Death Ship by B Traven
Mar 900:53:30Tap to summarizeThe Death Ship was the first major novel by the legendary, anonymous anarchist novelist, B Traven (188? - 1969). Traven’s adventure novels of the ‘20s and ‘30s document proletarian struggle, as outcasts and downtrodden workers confront the absurdity and agonies of capitalist exploitation, borders, and statecraft. Most of his novels are set in Mexico, and are uniquely concerned with Mexico’s rural and indigenous proletariat.The Death Ship stands out in Traven’s oeuvre primarily for its setting. It follows an American-borne sailor whose lost passport leaves him both jobless and stateless. Through landlocked European misadventures, he eventually finds work as a coal-drag on a broken-down steamship whose owners’ relentless drive for profits lead to the barest condition of life for the ship’s polyglot crew of luckless proles. Through his unnamed protagonist, Traven mocks the border regimes and bureaucracies, the petty caste systems that emerge amongst workers, and the innumerable insults of life as a forgotten debt-slave. He also searches, relentlessly, for connection, solidarity, and a contradictory affirmation of life through common struggle and shared labor.We also discuss B Traven’s remarkable life.Traven biography: B._Traven:_The_Life_Behind_the_LegendsOutro Music: Lord Creator - John BSign up for our newsletter!Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
Transcribe →Tuesday Or September Or The End by Hannah Black
Feb 500:38:31Tap to summarizeHannah Black’s superb novella Tuesday Or September Or The End (Capricious, 2022) is a science-fictionalized account of 2020 and its twinned world-making events of the pandemic and riot. The novella is caustic, hilarious, and written with both an unflinching eye for this world’s stifling and tragic conditions and a wide-open heart for its undoing and rebirth.https://capriciousfoundation.org/publications/tuesdaySign up for our newsletter!Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
Transcribe →On and Off-Screen Imaginaries with Tiffany Sia
Nov 801:28:16Tap to summarizeOn and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024) is a collection of six essays by filmaker, artist and writer Tiffany Sia. Sia joins us to discuss how media depictions of political practice and identity are produced, negotiated, memorialized, and transformed through censorship, surveillance, diaspora, and time. On and Off-Screen Imaginaries: https://primaryinformation.org/product/on-and-off-screen-imaginaries/Tiffany Sia: https://www.tiffanysia.com/HTHQ Workshop: https://hq.creativetime.org/calendar/sonic-literacy-with-tiffany-sia-and-jordan-lord/Sign up for our newsletter!Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
Transcribe →Full Circle: A Life In Rebellion, by Ben Morea + 1000 Voices Collective, w/ Ariel Uesseler and Sabu Kohso
Sep 2201:21:31Tap to summarizeBen Morea is primarily known for his central involvement with the print magazine Black Mask and the militant anarchist group Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. Both were active in New York City in the late 1960’s. In the 1970’s, Morea went underground and lived for forty years in the Southern Rockies, immersing himself in ceremonial practice with indigenous communities. In the 2010’s, he returned to New York City. Full Circle is an autobiographical account of his political, artistic, and spiritual life, edited from a series of interviews with 1000 Voices Collective.We speak with Sabu Kohso and Ariel Uesseler about the process of creating Full Circle, and Morea’s fierce dedication to revolutionary living.Full Circle: A Life In RebellionOur review of Full Circle will be appearing in print in the upcoming issue of Heatwave Magazine. Check out their first issue online.Sabu Kohso’s writings and translation about the Japanese ultra-left can be found here and here.Sign up for our newsletter!Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
Transcribe →RELAUNCH: The Unseen Book Club returns!
Sep 2200:16:57Tap to summarizeThe Unseen Book Club returns! Max and Dan do some light bibliomancy, reflect on the past and cast our gazes to the horizon and discuss the future of the show.Sign up for our newsletter!Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
Transcribe →Event Factory by Renee Gladman
Dec 30, 202301:17:22Tap to summarizeEvent 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. Sign up for our newsletter!Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
Transcribe →Publishing The Commune, w/ Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press
Oct 30, 202300:29:28Tap to summarizeMitch 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 ReviewSign up for our newsletter!Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
Transcribe →The Commune by Marios Chakkas, w/ translator Chloe Tsolakoglou
Oct 27, 202301:23:41Tap to summarizeMarios 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/Sign up for our newsletter!Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
Transcribe →Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko
Sep 5, 202301:40:29Tap to summarizeLeslie 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/Sign up for our newsletter!Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
Transcribe →Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Jul 25, 202301:27:28Tap to summarizeMontaillou: 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/Sign up for our newsletter!Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack
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