When it was published in 1996, Dead Meat, Sue Coe’s graphic exposé of the meat-processing industry, was as shocking as Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle 90 years earlier. Both captured the horror of the slaughterhouse while critiquing the underlying barbarity of capitalism. This month, OR Books is publishing an update called Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation ($25), which draws on Coe’s “life” in slaughterhouses and stockyards, tackling subjects that she didn’t feel qualified to deal with earlier—such as the infectious diseases that are now systemic in industrialized food and can spread globally in a matter of days. I asked Coe to discuss the artistic, aesthetic, and moral implications of a subject that has occupied more than 20 years of her life.

Read more in Print magazine

A collective of writers for the 99 percent have created a very interesting new book for OR Books, distributed by Haymarket Books. They’ve employed a unique writing method to chronicle the many details within the movement of Occupying Wall Street. A team of nearly 60 writers with rotating membership, collaborated on the describing the intricate structures and daily life of the movement such as running the general assembly, how the security and medical center operate and then the stories of the activists involved.

Hear the interview on Law and Disorder Radio

You may not have heard of the “Creech 14,” but they have a special place in the heart of the anti-drone movement. If you saw a photo of the group, you might think they had just walked out of Sunday mass; indeed, some of its members are priests and nuns. But whether clergy or not, all are spiritually rooted in a theology that calls on people of faith to stand up against injustice-in deeds, not just words.

And so on April 9, 2009, the group of fourteen activists entered Creech Air Force base-where teams of young soldiers remotely operate many of America’s killer drones-protesting what they considered war crimes taking place inside. As they crossed onto the base, the group invited staff nearby to share a Good Friday meal with them. They were then told to leave, and when they refused, they were arrested, charged with trespassing and held in jail until Easter Sunday.

Read the full excerpt in AlterNet

Listen to the interview on The Progressive here.

Putting aside the question of nature versus nurture and focusing on the (semi-)recent ruling in New York regarding gay marriage, it is possible to imagine proud parents George Saunders and Philip K. Dick (using Margaret Atwood as a surrogate mother) raising Miles Klee’s Ivyland (OR, 250 pages, $16.00) as their own lovechild. The features of all three great authors (and doting parents) can be found in this first novel: a somewhat dystopic present/future; mandatory and recreational drug abuse; nature gone wild; protagonists prone to accidental violence; shadowy government and corporate agencies; miracles; terrorism; New Jersey.

Mr. Klee, 26, whose prose has appeared on The Awl and in McSweeney’s, Vanity Fair and various other very hip publications (including this one), has tackled—successfully—an oversaturated subject: his generation’s obsession-with-slash-suspicion-of the pharmaceutical industry. (Full disclosure: The writer of this review is familiar with Mr. Klee through New York publishing circles, and once punched him at the Brooklyn bar Last Exit.) The book is set in Ivyland, N.J. (no relation to the real borough of Ivyland, Pa.). Some of this plays out in the grand tradition of science fiction satire: children are required (or advised) by the government (or a pharmaceutical company called Endless) to get a quick, painless procedure—the Van Vetchen operation—which uses a patented brand of anesthetic gas called Hallorex, produced by Endless.

Read the full article in The New York Observer

Rather than let the relentless absurdity of headline news get us down, my friends and I like to play the occasional e-mail round of “Real News or Onion Headline?” You’ve probably played some version of it before (or watched The Daily Show). It’s a good way of laughing to save our sanity, rather than altogether cracking up. My most recent entry that wasn’t from the Republican debates came from the sports world (which, much like the primary elections, is run by corporation-persons; in fact, probably many of the same corporation-persons!). It read: “Indiana Pacers’ Arena Renamed Bankers Life Fieldhouse.”

I thought of “Bankers Life Fieldhouse” when I came to a passage early in Miles Klee’s darkly funny debut novel, Ivyland. There’s a rolling blackout in the book’s eponymous town, and when the characters DH and Leviticus go outside to investigate, they register—with prescription drug subdue—a riot scene, apparently in response to the territorial encroachment of the town’s monopoly subsidizer, a faceless pharmaceutical corporation(-person):

If the bright new street sign isn’t a prank, Clark Ave. has been renamed “Bladderade Boulevard.” As in, the Adderade flavor that helps old folks with urine flow and control.

In this and so many other too-real moments, Ivyland hits too close to home to be read as a satirical lens on a bleak future—or even on a bleak near-future. Given the actual existence of once-civic gathering places now bearing names like Bankers Life Fieldhouse, the future has arrived. Ivyland’s vignette-like episodes, which alternate between banal and high-stakes absurdity, are definitely sketches of the end-times; but they spare us any finger-wagging didacticism about the perils of social media as substitute for real experience. Instead, Ivyland is preoccupied with the waning sense of place that sets in when every dimension of civil life is sponsored by your friendly neighborhood behemoth. Contrary to the techno-dystopia leanings of novels like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, it’s not the gadgetry of social networking that alienates us from a sense of belonging in a world. It’s that the world is always and everywhere brought to you by . . .

Not funny ha-ha; more like funny uh-oh. Something, this place, our place in it, is at stake. “What strikes me as so funny,” DH observes after the riot scene, “is that nothing’s funny at all, and I take a moment to collapse with painful gasps of laughter that are themselves the funniest things and over too soon.”

Read the full interview in BOMB magazine

Via Al Jazeera English

Miles Klee’s intense debut, “Ivyland” (OR Books, 262 pages, $16), starts where “Arcadia” leaves off. At some point in the near future, the threat of a viral pandemic has led Americans to submit to a bizarre surgical procedure said to immunize them. But the procedure has grotesque side effects, and the corporation that provides it has become the country’s de facto governing body. Drug use and crime are rampant, and infrastructure is collapsing—even the Statue of Liberty has begun to slump over.

In jagged, non-chronological chapters, Mr. Klee follows a group of boys from a New Jersey suburb called Ivyland (likely meant to evoke Princeton). Their exploits play out alongside harbingers of End Times: anarchic violence, insect plagues and messianic cults.

Mr. Klee depicts the chaos with verve—he reads like J.G. Ballard zapped with a thousand volts of electricity. One drug trip yields a Book of Ezekiel-inspired doomsday vision of “Zeros spinning in the sky. Wheels, gears, interlocking in pairs and pairs of pairs, scrolling mosaics, transparent geometries brushing vision.” For all the flash, though, Mr. Klee is attuned to the individual behavior of his characters, who either try to preserve some measure of common kindness or speed the decline through amorality and solipsism.

Read the full review in The Wall Street Journal

The world is a dangerous place. In Miles Klee’s Ivyland (OR Books), the author vividly imagines a violent future where a giant pharmaceutical company rules most of New Jersey. Spiked with the lusty, random bloodletting of A Clockwork Orange and Orwellian in scope, Klee redefines and redesigns the Garden State, writing of a landscape where cops are more brutal than the pill-popping gangs who run the highways and memories of a time before drugs and corporations controlled the lives of citizens are getting hazier with every medical induced high. In short chapters that focus on the various citizens of Ivyland, Klee captures humanity at both its most depraved and its most innocent: people who have been forced to live in a not-so-brave new world where weakness is met with death. We spoke with Klee about violence and how it can take us over, Google’s sinister information gathering, different flavors of Coke, revenge and medication.

ROYAL YOUNG: What happens when you become used to violence, even begin to expect it?

MILES KLEE: There’s an acceptance of chaos, a belief in a vengeful God, maybe. You probably stop seeing the causes of the violence as well. That’s why you have places where the cycle is perpetuated so easily.

Read the full interview in Interview

The UK’s first book award celebrating radical, leftwing writing has been launched, with a tweet-by-tweet history of the Egyptian revolution and Owen Jones’s exploration of the demonisation of the working classes, Chavs, competing for the inaugural prize.

The Bread and Roses award for radical publishing – named after the slogan chanted in 1912 by striking textile workers in Massachusetts, who struck for “bread, and for roses too” – is looking for books “informed by socialist, anarchist, environmental, feminist and anti-racist concerns”, which also “inspire, support or report on political and/or personal change”. Run by the newly-formed Alliance of Radical Booksellers, the prize has no corporate sponsorship and believes it is the UK’s only literary award with explicitly leftwing entry criteria.

“Radical publishing is going through a renaissance, making the establishment of the Bread and Roses award timely,” said trustee Ross Bradshaw from Five Leaves Publishing, a literary and radical press. His fellow trustee Nik Gorecki, of Housmans Bookshop, added that “the central involvement of radical bookshops in the establishment and running of the Bread and Roses award also really sets it apart from other book prizes”.

Read the full article in the Guardian

Guevara was a fragile asthmatic, born to wealthy Argentineans who settled into a bohemian life. These political dissidents transmitted their fervor to their eldest son. By college, Guevara had embraced Marxism. He became a doctor, but was equally eager to heal the body politic. In 1953, Guevara moved to Guatemala and saw firsthand the power of American colonialism; United Fruit Company, backed by the government, had installed a literal banana republic to ensure unimpeded profits. Guevara fled, but his commitment to vanquish American-led puppet governments had been bolstered.

Guevara would soon join forces with Fidel Castro to overthrow the US supported government of Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista. When Castro took control of the tiny island on January 8, 1959, it was a jubilant time. What the authors sidestep is how quickly Castro became dictator and made Communism a yoke of the common man.

Read the full review in Chronogram