The Unseen Book Club
Episodes
The Death Ship by B Traven
09 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Death Ship was the first major novel by the legendary, anonymous anarchist novelist, B Traven (188? - 1969). Traven’s adventure novels of the ‘...
Tuesday Or September Or The End by Hannah Black
05 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Hannah Black’s superb novella Tuesday Or September Or The End (Capricious, 2022) is a science-fictionalized account of 2020 and its twinned world-ma...
On and Off-Screen Imaginaries with Tiffany Sia
08 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024) is a collection of six essays by filmaker, artist and writer Tiffany Sia. Sia joins us to di...
Full Circle: A Life In Rebellion, by Ben Morea + 1000 Voices Collective, w/ Ariel Uesseler and Sabu Kohso
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ben Morea is primarily known for his central involvement with the print magazine Black Mask and the militant anarchist group Up Against the Wall, Moth...
RELAUNCH: The Unseen Book Club returns!
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Unseen Book Club returns! Max and Dan do some light bibliomancy, reflect on the past and cast our gazes to the horizon and discuss the future of t...
Event Factory by Renee Gladman
30 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Event Factory is the first in a cycle of novellas by Renee Gladman. An unnamed linguist-traveler arrives in the city-state of Ravicka, whose inhabitan...
Publishing The Commune, w/ Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press
30 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press on discovering Marios Chakkas and finding a translator who would do justice to Chakkas’ unique voice.Review of The ...
The Commune by Marios Chakkas, w/ translator Chloe Tsolakoglou
27 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Marios Chakkas wrote The Commune in 1972 shortly before his death of cancer at the age of 41. Chakkas was a prolific Greek writer who lived through de...
Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko
05 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Leslie Marmon Silko, Laguna Pueblo author and prominent figure in the first of wave of the Native American Renaissance, spent ten year crafting Almana...
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
25 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, by French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, is a landmark work of social history first published in 1974. Le ...
The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
17 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Writer and translator Bela Shayevich joins the Unseen Book Club to talk about Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard. Bulgakov is primarily known in the...
The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier
12 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Kingdom of this World, written by French-born Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in 1949, is a cosmologically immersive novel of Haitian society and it...
Danton's Death by Georg Büchner
16 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sasha Warren of the Unsound Mind blog returns to the Unseen Book Club to talk with about the life and work of revolutionary, proto-communist German pl...
El Apando by José Revueltas
11 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
José Revueltas, revolutionary communist and writer, wrote El Apando (The Hole) while incarcerated in the bowels of El Palacio de Lecumberri for his p...
Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest with Jimmy Cooper and Lyn Corelle
17 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Make the Golf a Public Sex Forest is an eponymously themed and self-published anthology of queer smut curated and edited by Jimmy Cooper and Lyn Corel...
Mezzanine with Mitch Anzuoni and Peter Christian
30 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In a break from our usual format, we interview Mitch Anzuoni and Peter Christian of Inpatient Interactive about their video game Mezzanine, a MYST-sty...
The Tricking Hour and My Pleasure by Irene Silt
09 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We talk to poet and writer Irene Silt about their two new books published by Deluge Books in October 2022. The essays in The Tricking Hour (2018-2019)...
Episode 18.1 Translating Marx’s Capital into Spanish
19 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In episode 18, we talked about Raquel Salas Rivera’s use of key lines from Marx’s Capital in Lo Terciario/The Tertiary. Later, Max did some resear...
Lo Terciario/The Tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera
28 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Lo Terciario/The Tertiary, a book of auto-translated poems by Raquel Salas Rivera (based in Puerto Rico and Philadelphia), interrogates the intimacies...
Minneapolis Book Event Recap
15 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Unseen Book Club recaps the Minneapolis Everything for Everyone reading event from back in August, for which Dan and Sasha facilitated a tableto...
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 with authors M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi
01 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, co-authored by Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O’Brien, is a series of fictional...
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
21 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In which Max and Dan tackle a work by Roberto Bolaño, one of the truly great novelists of the late 20th century. Nazi Literature in the Americas, ori...
Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany
13 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1976, one year after the publication of his masterpiece Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany wrote Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia. A prescient, ...
Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan
17 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sitt Marie Rose, by Lebanese-American poet-painter Etal Adnan (1925-2021?), is a searing, vibrant statement on the paradoxes of a society erupting int...
Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge
11 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Victor Serge (1890-1947), Belgian-Russian revolutionary, novelist, intellectual, political prisoner, and stalwart comrade to countless others, wrote h...
Reflections on Mumbo Jumbo
21 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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.&ap...
Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
14 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Parts IV-V
16 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We return to Les Miserables after completing the second half of the book, which depicts the Paris Uprising of 1832 against the constitutional July Mon...
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Parts I-III
01 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Les Miserables, one of the great literary works of the nineteenth century, was written by novelist, poet, statesman, and overall man of affairs, Victo...
Post-exoticism in 10 Lessons: Lesson 11, by Antoine Volodine
13 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Post-exoticism in 10 lessons is a sweltering, dreamlike study of narrative under conditions of extreme surveillance. Translated into English in 2015 (...
His Name Was Death by Rafael Bernal
13 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
His Name Was Death is a 1947 science fiction novel published by Rafael Bernal, a Mexican writer, scholar, diplomat and activist in the Catholic reacti...
Too Salty Too Wet by Tiffany Sia
23 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Hong Kong protests of 2019-2020 were a geopolitical, ideological, and media discourse flashpoint. We talked to artist and filmmaker TIffany Sia ab...
Industrial Park by Patrícia Galvão
30 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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....
Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif
30 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This first novel in Abdelrahman Munif’s masterful quintet depicts sweeping social and economic transformations in the Arabian peninsula during the d...
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
12 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is Arundhati Roy’s second novel, written after she spent twenty years producing journalism and political essays. We...
Memory of Fire, Vols. II and III by Eduardo Galeano
08 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Memory of Fire, Vol. I: Genesis by Eduardo Galeano
26 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Embassytown by China Mieville
27 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We discuss Embassytown, China Miéville's weird science fiction novel about a colonial outpost confronted by sudden upheaval and insurgency. We g...
The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini
02 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Balestrini’s breathless novel of student and worker rebellion during the upheaval of the 1970s in Italy follows its unnamed narrator through student...
Introduction
28 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 questi...