There is that scene in the film Henry and June where Henry Miller reaches over to the radio blaring Hitler’s voice, and he snaps it off. He’s been having a beautiful moment with June, and they’re in love. Hitler’s not going away, and they can feel the presence of his very real, dark world-view closing in, but just the same they’re having their beautiful moment together inside the darkness. Eileen Myles is the living embodiment of this very kind of force that transmutes the aura of bondage into standing free, blatantly and beautifully free, from all the evil bastards of the world.

my need to say
that you can

That’s a quote from the brand new Myles poetry collection Snowflake/different streets from Wave Books. “[M]y need”—she says, and she’s not kidding—“to say / that you can.” Infectious, genius exuberance awaits! The poet Frank Sherlock recently showed me a list published in the International Business Times of the top five regrets people have on their deathbeds. Things like “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Eileen Myles is like a study in the emancipation of a life, for instance her reader’s life. Meaning YOU!

Read the full interview in BOMB

Let’s play the Ivyland drinking game. What you do is, you search for a review of Ivyland online, and every time they mention Pynchon you have to take a drink. Pynchon’s shadow (drink) falls on Ivyland. Pynchon’s influence (drink) is, as I believe the Troggs suggested (though they might have been talking about something else, thinking about it) ‘all around’.

Which, depending on your thoughts on Pynchon, (drink) is either a good thing or a bad thing. Happily for me, we are talking here of the Pynchon (drink) of The Crying of Lot 49, not the Pynchon (drink) of, say, Mason & Dixon. The prose is thick but the book isn’t. Ivyland weighs in at under 250 pages. This sounds like an astoundingly ignorant observation but if your method is to try to push the methodology of the short story to the length of a novel, size does matter.

Ivyland is a broken, twisted novel. When it shines, it shines gloriously, but the reader does spend time trying to weave its splintered narrative into a whole, doing long division with plotlines when they should be concentrating on the story. It is not a novel for reading in five minute bursts. It demands your attention. Chapters are headed “Last Winter” “Thirteen Years Ago” “One Year Ago” “Last Summer”. Time flickers. Landscapes bend and shift as if seen through a trick mirror. People are moulded and remoulded, viewed through pharmaceutical and philosophical filters. Plotlines embrace each other in double helixes and stretch out to the horizon.

Read the full review in Bookmuch

This book by two leading US civil rights lawyers provides both documentary evidence and a clear accessible narrative to clarify a number of disputed aspects about the life and death of Argentinian revolutionary, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, and the early years of the Cuban Revolution. The principal facts established are: 1) that Che did not leave Cuba in 1965 because of a split with Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution of 1959; 2) ‘that the US government, particularly its Central Intelligence Agency, had Che murdered, having secured the participation of its Bolivian client state’; and 3) that the Cuban’s foreign policy was independent of, and even antipathetic to the interests of the USSR.

These facts may not be controversial to supporters of the Cuban Revolution and those knowledgeable about US imperialism’s modus operandi in Latin America. However, as the authors point out, the idea that ‘the United States, and particularly the CIA, was not implicated in Che’s murder, has been accepted by almost every writer on the subject’. This includes the authors of the major biographies of Che published around the 30th anniversary of his execution in Bolivia in 1997; ‘none of these writers consider the CIA’s own admission that it had tried to assassinate Che, as well as Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, on various occasions when they were in Cuba’. Likewise, the notion of a split between Che and Fidel, and the crude caricature of Cuban internationalism as an instrument of USSR’s foreign policy, continue to be repeated by bourgeois and left commentators.

Read the full review on The New Left Project

See additional footage on RT America

“If you’re trying to understand China the language issues are secondary. The real problem is this is a country ruled through the suppression of historical memory. The Communists’ legitimacy rests on the claim that only stultifying bureaucracy and patriarchy can keep it together; that it is “not ready” for democracy; indeed that it was never ready.

“But delve into Chinese literature, and history, and a more much more complex picture emerges. After the May Fourth 1919 protests, the intelligentsia embraced modernity and fought for it. The early 20th century produced the Chinese Dickens and a whole legion of Orwells. The late 20th century produced a generation of novelists whose sufferings during the Cultural Revolution pushed them towards everything from magic realism to cyberpunk.

“What follows are 10 books that influenced me in the writing of Rare Earth: five must-read Chinese novels, five western-authored non-fiction books worth reading.”

Read his Paul Mason’s list in the Guardian

It’s probably no accident that the minimalist brown cover of Occupying Wall Street, the new title from OR Books about the now world-famous Manhattan movement, resembles the posters that, for a few months in 2011, came to define Zuccotti Park’s skyline. The title and subtitle—”The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America”—are written in black scrawl, adding extra authenticity to the stylization. It’s not just a book you’re holding, a reader soon realizes, it’s also a mini-protest sign.

Fair warning up front: A little rectangular box on the back cover reads, “All profits from this book will be donated to Occupy Wall Street.” If you’re certain you disagree with OWS and don’t want to support their cause, then this book is probably not for you. But if you’re at all interested in how the now-global movement began, there’s probably no better resource than this.

Though Occupying’s author is a collective of roughly 60 unnamed people calling themselves “Writers for the 99%,” the book is not a disjointed assortment of individual essays. Rather, and perhaps surprisingly, it acts as a concise historical account that sheds light on the varied and interesting minutia of OWS, covering everything from the guidelines of the General Assembly to the infamous Brooklyn Bridge protest to the drama created by class and racial tensions within the movement. So thorough is Occupying that even the thousands of people who lived in Zuccotti’s tent city themselves last year could probably learn something about the inner workings of the mass they once helped compose, or reinvigorate the fire that brought them there in the first place.

Read the full review in Good

These are tough times for publishers. The closure of hundreds of high-street stores, the power wielded by online retailers such as Amazon, the turbulence of the digital transition, shrinking review space in the broadsheets: this litany of anxieties is hard to escape.

Yet talk to smaller radical publishers and a less doomy picture emerges. Whether it’s Verso (who brought out Owen Jones’s Chavs and Paul Mason’s Meltdown), The New Press (Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, a study of the mass incarceration of black Americans, has become a New York Times bestseller), or OR Books (whose titles include the well-received, rapid-response Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America), progressive houses are finding that readers are hungry for incisive analyses of capitalism’s failures, exposés of the flawed infrastructure of liberal democracy, passionate dispatches from the frontlines of social change.

Read the full article in the Guardian

In April, OR Books published Tweets from Tahrir, a book of tweets sent from Ground Zero of the democratic revolution that played out in Egypt last year. The book, its promotions declare, “brings together a selection of key tweets in a compelling, fast-paced narrative, allowing the story of the uprising to be told directly by the people in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. History has never before been written in this fashion.”

But tweets are fragile things. A year after the Tahrir’s tweets were posted, much of the information they first shared has gone missing. According to a study conducted by Hany SalahEldeen Khalil, a phD student in computer science and Web preservation at Old Dominion University, a third of the images initially included in Tweets from Tahrir — 7 out of 23 — seem to have disappeared entirely from the Web. A small slice of the historical record, gone — archived not digitally, but in the pages of a book.

Read the full article in The Atlantic

There have now been thousands of blogs, news articles and critical commentary on the Occupy movement since it emerged last September in Wall Street. This book, as the title would indicate, contains the “inside story” of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and what it was like to be on the ground.

It begins with how the Occupy movement was inspired by the Arab revolutions and the Spanish indignados. Each chapter begins with pictures sketched directly from the occupation, some smudged with charcoal, others with line drawings and sketches of people and placards, which adds to the feel that this book really was created by the 99%. With all proceeds going to the OWS movement you can’t help but feel that this book, with its cardboard, seemingly handwritten cover, came directly from a tent somewhere in Zuccotti Park. It really is a lovely book to touch!

Read the full article in Socialist Review

Paul Mason has had a busy year. As well as the day job as economics editor for Newsnight, he brought out not one but two books, Why its Kicking Off Everywhere (Verso 2012) and this, his first novel. Compared to the highly-topical book about the upheavals of 2011, from the revolutions of the Arab Spring to the English riots, Rare Earth risks being known as ‘the other Paul Mason’, but this is not entirely fair to it. It is unlikely to persuade anyone that Mason is a better novelist than he is a journalist, but it has its fascinating moments.

The story starts with a group of British journalists trying to film a report on the Chinese government’s ‘fight against environmental depredation’. Destined for a short slot in a programme sponsored by the government, it is not supposed to be critical. All their employers want is something pointing out the ‘new China’ for their coverage of the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square. The journalists are being carefully escorted by their Chinese minder, Chun-Li, and everything is going to plan, until they end up by accident in the desert town of Tang Lu and get some film of residents complaining about the appalling environmental conditions. From there, it all starts to spiral out of control.

Read the full review on Counterfire

With the publication of a lyrical novel written by a promising young author, Jeffery Eugenides’s long awaited tale of books and boyfriends, Steve Job’s biography and Christopher Hitchens’ collections, we can’t complain about 2011′s literary turn-out.

But we’re only one month into 2012, and we have to say, we’re pretty impressed. There seems to be something for everyone this month, so whether you’d prefer to thumb through a linguistically-oriented meta-narrative, the touching tale of an aspiring Girl Scout or a thoughtful analysis of the FBI’s history, check out our recommended reads for January and February:

See the selections and full article on The Huffington Post

Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith are the co-authors of a new book about the U.S. role in the killing of Cuban revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Born in Argentina in 1928, Che rose to international prominence as one of the key leaders of the 1959 Cuban Revolution that overthrew U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. After a period in the new Cuban government leadership, Che aimed to spark revolutionary activity internationally. On October 8, 1967, he was captured by Bolivian troops working with the CIA. He was executed one day later. In their book, Who Killed Che?, Ratner and Smith draw on previously unpublished U.S. government documents to argue the CIA played a critical role in the killing. The authors also discuss the early life of the revolutionary hero, as documented by his own diaries.

Listen to the episode on Democracy Now!

On February 7, 2002—ten years ago to the day, tomorrow—President George W. Bush signed a brief memorandum titled “Humane Treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda Detainees.” The caption was a cruel irony, an Orwellian bit of business, because what the memo authorized and directed was the formal abandonment of America’s commitment to key provisions of the Geneva Convention. This was the day, a milestone on the road to Abu Ghraib: that marked our descent into torture—the day, many would still say, that we lost part of our soul.

Drafted by men like John Yoo, and pushed along by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, the February 7 memo was sent to all of the key players of the Bush Administration involved in the early days of the War on Terror. All the architects and functionaries who would play a role in one of the darker moments in American legal history were in on it. Vice President Dick Cheney. Attorney General John Aschroft. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. CIA Director George Tenet. David Addington. They all got the note. And then they acted upon it.

When we talk today of the “torture memos,” most of us think about the later memoranda, like the infamous “Bybee Memo” of August 1, 2002, which authorized the use of torture against terror law detainees. But those later pronouncements of policy, in one way or another, were all based upon the perversion of law and logic contained in the February 7 memo. Once America crossed the line 10 years ago, the memoranda that followed, to a large extent, were merely evidence of the grinding gears of bureaucracy trying to justify itself.

Read the full article in The Atlantic

It’s a conspiracy theorist’s dream. One nation holds most of the planet’s supply of “rare earths”, the metals and alloys key to building many of the developed world’s must-have items, including mobile phones, computers, cameras and precision missiles. And that country happens to be China: the world’s last great bastion of communism (if you don’t count its basket-case dependent, North Korea) and for centuries the focus of western fear, loathing and grudging admiration. This is the dramatic factual premise behind this febrile but enjoyable first novel by Paul Mason, Newsnight’s economics editor.

A paunchy middle-aged reporter called Brough – “a has-been hack with a Yorkshire accent” reeking of whisky – washes up in deep northwest China in May 2009, to make a documentary about the state of the Chinese environment. He is accompanied by his producer, Georgina, a ruthless blonde alumna of Cheltenham Ladies College desperate to swing a Chinese television distribution deal; by an even more washed-up cameraman called Carstairs; and by Chun-Li, their enigmatic Chinese interpreter. After an afternoon filming townspeople sick from factory pollution, the crew is arrested and barely escapes an assassination attempt by a crazed underling from the local propaganda office.

While Brough fakes his own death and flees into the Gobi Desert, Chun-Li (a freelance spy, we learn) promptly dopes a psychotic Mongolian sex maniac with Russian truth-drug, and discovers the area is ruled by a cartel – half-gangster, half-government – that has enriched itself on illegal mining of rare earths.

Read the full review in the Guardian

Gramsci’s advice to revolutionaries was to maintain “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. For the first decade of the new millennium, however, much of the left seemed to pay heed to only the first part of this injunction. In an editorial to mark the relaunch of New Left Review in 2000, Perry Anderson wrote: “The only starting point for a realistic left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat. Capital has comprehensively beaten back all threats to its rule.”

Near the opening of his account of “the new global revolutions”, Paul Mason launches an impassioned j’accuse against such fatalism. He denounces the “zeitgeist of impotence” that led the left to believe that City banks were no less immutable than Arab dictatorships. Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is a rapid-fire attempt to make some sense of the tumultuous events of the past two years. “This book makes no claim to be a ‘theory of everything’,” Mason writes. “And don’t file it under ‘social science’: it’s journalism.” Journalism it is, a finely executed example of what John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, called “intensified history”.

Mason, economics editor of the BBC’s Newsnight, has emerged as possibly the most engaged mainstream journalist of our age. He was there when anti-austerity protesters stormed the Greek parliament, when students occupied Millbank Tower and when Cairo cast off the shackles of tyranny. He has reported from the slums of Manila and, retracing the route of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, from the new dust bowl of Oklahoma. Mason draws on all these experiences to support his thesis that several factors – the growth of social media, “the graduate with no future”, the collapse of the neoliberal consensus – have combined to form a global rebellion without parallel.

Read the full article in the New Statesman

Occupy Wall Street is wintering. That’s not to say its seasoned recruits are taking time off, though there surely are equivalents of the “summer soldier and sunshine patriot” that Tom Paine invoked in his address to the Valley Forge winter encampment of the revolutionary Continental Army 236 years ago. But it’s been business as usual at 60 Wall Street, in the cavernous atrium of the Deutsche Bank building, where OWS working groups have been meeting continuously since the early weeks of the occupation. In those well-attended huddles, all sorts of plans are being made for re-occupations in the months to come – an American Spring to rival the Arab one – and the air is thick with proposals for ever bolder actions.

Still, it’s not a bad time to take stock of the early months of the movement. The publication of two books is an occasion either to reminisce about, or catch up with the momentous events that originated in Lower Manhattan just one week after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The respective publishers, Verso and OR Books, are natural allies of the movement, and are to be saluted for delivering the first two book-length treatments – there will be many others in the year ahead.

Read the full review in The Guardian

‘It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are,’ writes Nathanael West in The Day of the Locust (1939), commonly regarded as the best novel ever written about Hollywood, that factory of broken dreams. West’s sad, even pathetic characters yearn for something they can never have—which can’t be had—and their lives spiral into chaos, slipping towards a violence that is beyond them and which no effort can bring under control.

The Great Depression took root in West (1903-1940), an American writer whose wild, sometimes grotesque fantasies have become part of our collective imagination. In this fresh, elegant biography by Joe Woodward—the first in four decades—West comes alive, a strange young man on the prowl, a crazy fool, a fantasist. ‘The dream life of Nathanael West,’ writes Woodward, ‘was surely a vivid one—well-suited for novel writing and less-suited for Hollywood pictures.’ Yet he managed, in thirty-seven years, to assemble a small but permanent body of work, and—like Keats or Rupert Brooke or any writer of immense talent whose vision is cut short—one can only guess where he might have gone.

Read the full review in Literary Review