September 1, 2025
Andy Merrifield explores Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Nose," a satirical tale featuring a puffed-up government official who finds himself suddenly nose-less. As the official pursues his formerly attached schnozz through the streets of St. Petersburg, Gogol bestows upon readers a twisted parable revealing the pettiness and indolence pervading the corridors of power.
November 1, 2024
Christian Noakes invites readers into a literary exploration of Franz Kafka's short story, "Josephine the Singer." After all, as the author notes, "Kafka's often nightmarish stories reflect many of the social, political, and cultural dynamics inherent under capitalism." In applying this notion to "Josephine the Singer," Noakes discovers a tale that describes not only the mechanisms of domination that constrain us, but the possibilities of a new consciousness, and a new world.
September 1, 2022
For nearly sixty years, H. Bruce Franklin has built a body of work that touches on everything Herman Melville to the military-industrial complex to a lowly, little-known fish that is a historical keystone of the U.S. fishing history.
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April 1, 2021
Writer, editor, and prison activist Susie Day has written a beautiful, heartrending, and inspiring account of the friendship between Paul Coates and Eddie Conway. Both were born in the late 1940s and grew up in Black communities—Paul in Philadelphia and Eddie in Baltimore. Both were members of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and early '70s, and both were harassed by police for their radical activities as Party members. Eddie was wrongfully convicted of killing a Baltimore policeman and spent forty-four years in prison. Through it all, Paul was his steadfast friend and supporter, as well as partner in their political development and commitment to the liberation of Black people in the United States.
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March 1, 2021
A prolific political writer, Álvaro Cunhal—leader of Portugal's Communist Party for half a century and central figure of the 1974 Carnation Revolution—revealed in 1994 that he had also written several novels under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago. One of these novels, Five Days, Five Nights, was only translated into and published in English in 2020. The novella manages to capture the complexities, loneliness, and bravery of ordinary people, highlighting how we are the ones who keep us safe.
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February 1, 2021
Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star, published in 1908, was an attempt to reenergize the dejected revolutionaries whose efforts had been crushed during the 1905 Russian Revolution. The protagonist, Leonid, is a Russian revolutionary chosen, in the midst of the revolution, by the Martian expedition to visit their planet and learn about the centuries-old advanced form of communism there. Since the triumph of communism in Russia was the cause to which Leonid had decided to devote his life, he agrees to visit Mars so that he can absorb their ideas and principles.
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March 1, 2020
Healing through the stories we rescue and the history we make is what Aurora Levins Morales's Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals is about. The author, a historian curandera, compiled a series of twenty-eight essays in this second edition, published twenty years after the first. Levins Morales theorizes movements for social justice and how to overcome challenges faced by activists and all those fighting and resisting oppression. She does this through accounts of her studies, personal experiences, and social conditions, providing a view of the world that allows collective healing and encourages it in others through a comprehensive understanding of history.
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November 1, 2019
November 5, 2019, is the 225th anniversary of the acquittal of Thomas Hardy on charges of High Treason. Hardy is nearly forgotten today, but for decades workers and democrats in England celebrated November 5 as the anniversary of a major victory, a triumph over a powerful state that had deployed immense resources to crush working-class organizations and suppress popular demands for democratic rights.
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November 1, 2019
In Bill Fletcher Jr.'s first novel, The Man Who Fell from the Sky, the sleepy Cape Cod town of Osterville has blood on its hands. In this murder mystery, Fletcher digs through layers of racism in Southern Massachusetts to uncover more than the killer's identity. The novel compellingly exposes the racism of society, turning its victims against each other.
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May 1, 2019
On February 11, 2019, Ariel Dorfman published an article in the Nation, in which he imagined the advice of the late Chilean president Salvador Allende would supposedly offer Nicolás Maduro in order to confront successfully the challenges of the current Venezuelan conjuncture. This is Allende's fictional reply to Dorfman.
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