The Unseen Book Club

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 Ulmer Sign up for our newsletter ! Buzzsprout Instagram Music by Ex-Official Art by Eli Mack

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 orders seeking to stamp out a literally infectious d...

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, which, by the middle of his life, were already being c...

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 the French Revolution (1789-1792), it was actually...

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’ to communicate with each other using new subjecti...

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 Directions). Bernal is well-known in Mexico for his s...

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, and the ephemera of digital communication to docume...

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 the Brazil’s decadent bourgeoisie, and an eyewitn...

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 invite American companies to prospect for oil. The...

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 follows lives, grudges, and romances across the...

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 figures at iconic moments, scenes of daily life, class c...

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 figures at iconic moments, scenes of daily life, class c...

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 Russian Revolution // untranslatable langu...

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 claiming space and infrastructure contrasts with crushing...

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**   https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub Music...