The publisher responsible for “Going Rouge: Sarah Palin — An American Nightmare” will publish a book about the Occupy Wall Street movement in December.

OR Books said “Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America” will be written by Writers for the 99%, a group of writers and researchers who are actively supporting the movement.

Read the full article in The Washington Post

How do you tell the story of Occupy Wall Street? An anonymous collective called “Writers for the 99%” is trying to do just that, creating a book for progressive publisher OR Books using a revolutionary writing method inspired by the movement’s own democratic structure.

The book was announced yesterday, and OR Books co-founder, Colin Robinson, told The Huffington Post that their chosen writing method is both “terrifying and exhilarating.” He spoke to us on the telephone from his home in New York.

Read the interview in The Huffington Post

​Occupy Wall Street, largely organized and advertised on the Internet, has spawned a surprising amount of old-fashioned print media, including the Occupied Wall Street Journal and n+1′s Occupy! gazette. Now the next step is here: an Occupy Wall Street book.

The book is being put out by OR Books, the small independent publishing company that’s behind Sarah Palin essay collection Going Rouge. The working title: Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed the Course of America. The author: a collective called “Writers For the 99%.”

We spoke with OR Books co-founder Colin Robinson today (who also gave an interview to Daily Intel). He wouldn’t tell us who exactly was writing the book, though he’d allow that “there are some quite well-known writers involved in this.”

Read the full article in The Village Voice

Progressive publishing house OR Books will release a 200-page first draft of a history entitled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America as soon as December 17, using volunteers from the movement’s Education and Empowerment Committee, and including work by both “sympathetic writers and people who are active in the occupation,” OR co-founder Colin Robinson told New York. The book’s release date will mark the protest’s three-month anniversary — assuming it survives the onset of winter. By then, the demonstrations will have already have been the subject of an MTV special and plenty of news coverage, but Robinson hopes his “interventionist book” will provide the most extensive chronicling so far. “Although you can’t deliver definitive opinions at the moment or set out a course of action, you can record the details of what has happened so far in Zuccotti Park,” he said.

The publisher — whose anti-Sarah Palin essay collection Going Rouge wound up a New York Times bestseller — will release Occupying Wall Street as a print-on-demand product and independent e-book, with all profits going back to the occupation.

Read the full article in New York Magazine

Che and the CIA in Bolivia

Why did Che choose Bolivia? Landlocked, Bolivia was Latin America’s poorest, most illiterate, most rural and most Indian country. It was also the most unstable country in Latin America, having gone through more than 190 changes in government since it became an independent republic in 1825. Like Mexico in the years 1910 to 1920, and Cuba more recently, Bolivia was a Latin American country whose revolution in 1952 was based on popular participation. And, of course, Bolivia is a neighbor to Che’s home country of Argentina.

Constantio Apasa, a Bolivian tin miner, summed up the political situation in his country in the year that Che arrived: “When the MNR (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement) came to power in 1952, we felt it was a workers’ party and things would be different. But then the MNR politicians organized a secret police and filled their pockets. They rebuilt the army which we had destroyed, and when it got big enough, the army threw them out. Now the army has new weapons which we cannot match.” The 1964 military coup ended the MNR’s twelve-year reign. The military officers who now ran Bolivia were all U.S.-trained.

Che arrived in Bolivia via Uruguay in early November of 1966 disguised as a Uruguayan businessman. So deceptive was his appearance—shaved beard, horn-rimmed glasses, tailored bank suit—that Phil Agee, the CIA agent in Uruguay charged with finding Che and who would later quit the agency and become a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, wrote that Che easily avoided Uruguayan officials despite a warning leaflet Agee had prepared and passed out at the airport in Montevideo. In fact, Fidel told author Ignacio Ramonet that even Raul Castro failed to recognize Che upon meeting him before he left Cuba for Bolivia.

Read the full excerpt in Guernica

Nathanael West was born on Oct. 17, 1903 in New York City in a house his father built. West, like his father, was an ambitious builder — but instead of hotels and apartments he constructed small, lyric novels out of plans and schemes. In spare and haunting prose, West worried over America as it battled the Great Depression and the beginnings of World War II. His two most recognized works are surely Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939).

West loved dinner parties and parlor games. As I did research for his biography at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., I came upon a cache of letters and taped interviews that an earlier biographer (Jay Martin) had secured and saved. Martin’s respondents were, in each case, discussing their association with and knowledge of the real Nathanael West — or “Nat,” as some of them called him, or “Pep” as still others called him. No one called him by his real name: Nathan Weinstein.

Read the full article in The Huffington Post

Bill McKibben is one of the most effective and widely-respected writers on environmental issues today. Starting with The End of Nature in 1989, he’s written and published a long line of powerful works that make complex environmental issues accessible to a general audience.

In recent years McKibben has taken a more active role by organizing and inspiring people across the planet to work toward addressing global warming. In 2007 he founded Step it Up, which organized hundreds of rallies throughout the United States demanding that Congress take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2008 Bill co-founded 350.org, a global grassroots campaign that has since ignited a spark in the international and domestic environmental movements.

Read the full interview on firedoglake.com

“There are plenty of people who will write for free.”

Jason Boog has heard this argument before.

“‘Writers are complaining? There are more pressing issues in the world today.”

He’s heard that one too.

“The publishing industry is scaling right back. Newspapers are disappearing. Stores are undercutting publishers’ prices. Jobs are non-existent. New formats are slashing prices.”

Boog is quoting arguments that were spoken not yesterday, or last year – but more than 80 years ago, during the Great Depression. This was a time when the publishing seemed to be about to collapse, yet writers believed in a new kind of industry, and helped to build it through organized dissent.

As he works on a new book exploring parallels between then and now, Boog is wondering if such moves could be possible today – and if writers could ever organize themselves in such a manner again.

Read the full article in The Huffington Post