To read the excerpt, visit Business Insider.
Latest News: Author Archive
Business Insider excerpts A NARCO HISTORY
Tuesday, September 15th, 2015In an excerpt of SYRIA BURNING published on Mondoweiss, CHARLES GLASS asks whether Syria’s revolution could have been different
Friday, September 11th, 2015Could Syria’s revolution have been different? At its birth in the spring of 2011, it promised hope for a better, freer life for Syria’s people. Syrian aspirations resonated with lovers of liberty everywhere: an end to governmental corruption and arbitrary arrest; an independent judiciary; a free press; equality before the law; abolition of torture; genuine elections leading to legitimate authority; and democratic institutions responsible to the governed. The state responded with arrests and violence. Dissidence evolved into war. Those who eventually captured the revolution dropped its original objectives in favor of supplanting a secular dictatorship with a dictatorial theocracy. The revolution was defeated from within, albeit with much assistance from outside powers motivated by anything but the good of the Syrian people.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit Mondoweiss.
“The clearest and simplest account of events in Iraq and Syria leading up to the present nightmare” THE JIHADIS RETURN praised by Financial Times
Friday, September 11th, 2015The shortest, and the one that gives the clearest and simplest account of events in Iraq and Syria leading up to the present nightmare, is by Patrick Cockburn, whose reports on the Middle East for the Independent have won him almost universal respect among specialists. He certainly deserves high marks for spotting the importance of Isis earlier than most. In fact, his book was first published, as The Jihadis Return, a year ago. But it so quickly established itself as essential reading on the subject that Verso republished it as The Rise of Islamic State in February, with a new afterword.
To read the rest of the review, visit Financial Times.
ANDREW SMART joins The Moncrieff Show to discuss artificial intelligence and BEYOND ZERO AND ONE
Wednesday, September 9th, 2015To listen to the segment, visit The Moncrieff Show.
MILES KLEE talks about “Everybody’s Bluffing” with Halimah Marcus on Electric Literature
Tuesday, September 8th, 2015Halimah Marcus: In his introduction to the story, Matt Bell remarks on the range of styles in your writing. “Unlike most writers,” he writes, “who are so grateful to find something that succeeds that they end up mining that same patch of ground for most of their careers, Klee seems capable of writing any kind of story he wants, often starting by mimicking different genres and forms, then subverting those existing tropes to serve his own needs.” Is this range something you’ve intentionally cultivated? When write a story, to you set out to write something unlike anything you’ve written before?
Miles Klee: I’m lucky to have ideas at all. If one looks much different from another it’s surely because I’ve gone to the trouble of dressing them up in exotic new disguises—and the trappings of genre do go a long way there. When that stuff is working well, you get to be a virtuosic chameleon; the rest of the time, you’re blind in the wilderness. It’s a tricky sleight of hand, as Matt notes, that sets up an array of expectations to knock down. I’m not sure how conscious I am of this as it’s happening. Often I’ve just hit upon an inhabitable voice (e.g., the classic hardboiled narrator) that strikes me as lively and worth pursuit. I’ll let it spool out until a sharp left turn derails it—then I try to keep going. I guess that while I’m slavishly devoted to the styles and mannerisms of authors I admire, I remain a bit obsessional about narrative originality. A plotty resemblance to fiction another person has published can be unforgivable. A single repeated word can kill a whole page for me. It speaks to the fact that I’m trying to entertain and surprise myself as much as I seek to impress any theoretical reader.
To read the rest of the review, visit Electric Literature.
“The Lishiest Lish” Biblioklept reviews CESS
Tuesday, September 8th, 2015And then, of course, there are all sorts of digressions that digress, maybe, around language’s gaps, its failures to mean with the absolute authority we might wish it to possess. Which is what Cess is about. And is. But like I was saying, there’s a lot in that second note—a riff on the Lish-narrator (Gordon!) going on a date with Marlon Brando’s mistress, for example. Lots of fun funny stuff, and as always, it’s the voice, the force of the language that compels us to read Lish.
To read the rest of the review, visit Biblioklept.
“A welcome counter-manifesto, with fangs” Broadly reviews LEAN OUT
Friday, September 4th, 2015Shevinsky’s cutting compilation of essays doesn’t specifically ask why tech is so congenitally sexist. Sexism in Silicon Valley is an observable, quantifiable reality. More daringly, Lean Out questions whether the tech industry even deserves women at all. When highly criticized tomes like Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead tout the importance of proactively turning yourself into a workplace commodity, Lean Out comes as a welcome counter-manifesto, with fangs. The problem isn’t necessarily that women don’t care about programming, or that women in tech aren’t measuring up to their male peers. According to Lean Out contributors, they do, and they are. The problem is that some cocktail of internalized misogyny and financially-reinforced tokenism runs through the veins of tech.
To read the rest of the review, visit Broadly.
The Huffington Post explains how ANDREW ROSS‘s labor advocacy got him banned from the UAE and what that could mean for NYU’s UAE branch campus
Thursday, September 3rd, 2015Ross is not surprised that the UAE has also leveraged its wealth and power to shape United States foreign policy, including through luxurious junkets that highlight glamorous aspects of the UAE while concealing less savory elements.
“It is amazing what money will do,” Ross said. “It is not a whole lot different from Saudi Arabia in that regard. Abu Dhabi has the third-largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. With that kind of money you can buy the world’s top cultural brands. What they are paying for these brands is nothing to [the UAE] — so what is a few U.S. congressional representatives?”
To read the full article, visit the Huffington Post.
METHOD AND MADNESS reviewed on Red Dirt Report
Thursday, September 3rd, 2015If you are tired of the pro-war, pro-Israeli propaganda and want to know what’s really going on in Gaza, I highly recommend Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Assaults on Gaza.
To read the rest of the review, visit Red Dirt Report.
MILES KLEE‘s “Everybody’s Bluffing” featured on Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2015From Matt Bell’s introduction:
Unlike most writers, who are so grateful to find something that succeeds that they end up mining that same patch of ground for most of their careers, Klee seems capable of writing any kind of story he wants, often starting by mimicking different genres and forms, then subverting those existing tropes to serve his own needs.
To read the story, visit Electric Literature.
ELISSA SHEVINSKY named in Bustle‘s roundup of women-run tech companies combating sexism
Tuesday, September 1st, 2015“It’s hard for all new founders, and women face their own set of challenges. When I first became a CEO, I was still very unproven. It was hard for me to find good collaborators,” she said. “My advice to young women getting into startups is to just level up as fast as you can. Find a way to become an expert, and to get yourself noticed. Find mentors that you can trust.” Another way to advance women in tech is to have “more women investors and more women entrepreneurs,” she added. “That’s how you get women in the boardroom.”
To read the rest of the article, visit Bustle.
“Personal and intimate” Counterfire explains the importance of SYRIA BURNING
Tuesday, September 1st, 2015Glass offers a personal and intimate journey through decades of history, providing the reader with a sense of the tragedy that has gripped the country since it was plunged into chaos over four years ago.
To read the rest of the review, visit Counterfire.
SHELL-SHOCKED excerpted on Huffington Post
Monday, August 31st, 2015As shouts of celebration about the cease-fire ring out across Gaza, 10-year-old Thaeer Juda lies in Gaza’s Shifa hospital ICU unit.
He’s badly injured and has had his right leg and some of his right fingers amputated. His left side is only marginally better off. His hands have been shattered, while his face and chest have been pocked by shrapnel that ripped through his little body after an Israeli strike.
Thaeer will survive, but will have to do so without many of the loved ones he expected to know for the rest of his life. He doesn’t know what happened to his mother, Rawia, or his two sisters, Tasnim and Taghreed, nor his brothers Osama and Mohammed. But they are all gone — killed in one foul swoop by the same Israeli strike that landed Thaeer in hospital and will keep him there, long after the “victory” cries outside have died down.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit Huffington Post.
TechCrunch calls LEAN OUT “disconcertingly thought-provoking”
Monday, August 31st, 2015In an article on the importance of having a diverse social media network, TechCrunch author Jon Evans praises Elissa Shevinsky’s Lean Out:
TechCrunch has had a fantastic run of posts on diversity in tech of late (especial shout-out to Megan Rose Dickey) which I’ve contemplated at some length. I also found Elissa Shevinsky’s book Lean Out: The Struggle For Gender Equality In Tech And Start-Up Culture disconcertingly thought-provoking.
To read the rest of the article, visit TechCrunch.
TRUE FALSE praised in Heavy Feather Review
Friday, August 28th, 2015The influence and style is truly one of contemporary means, a collage so dense that it becomes wholly original itself. Pieces of Barthelme and Lipsyte and Lutz and Hempel and so many more are everywhere, with Klee’s imagination gluing it together in the biggest of ways.
To read the rest of the review, visit Heavy Feather Review.
Read MILES KLEE‘s “Quick” on The Lit Hub
Friday, August 28th, 2015The pool was bleeding. Byron noticed, adrift in shade on my shark floater: an acorn hit him on the head and he’d opened his eyes to find it bobbing in the water, ribbons of red uncoiling beneath. Came and got me and I got mom and she got dad.
“It’s not blood,” mom said, squinting. “What is it.”
“Not blood,” dad agreed.
No swimming till our pool guy Darren gave the OK. Byron and Mackenzie fought on the rock waterfall while he worked, Kenz fussing her bikini for tanline checks, Byron plugging the spout with his foot for fields of spray, gagging when he glimpsed the Runt’s flatness. That plus Darren’s screaming equipment plus Berkie pawing the door to go out were fucking up this Mozart piece, and just as I banged the piano shut, Kenzie materialized, dripping on hardwood. She did her who-wouldn’t-love-this smile, ran a tongue over top teeth. The braces were finally gone, but not the nightmares: threaded metal tightening, the crank when gum and bone pulled apart.
To read the rest of the story, visit The Lit Hub.
“A weighty, hugely informative effort, one befitting a subject of Eastwood’s continued importance” The Film Stage recommends CLINT
Monday, August 24th, 2015The personal and political life of Eastwood is here, as well, right down to his infamous dialogue with an invisible” Barack Obama — well, a chair, really — at the 2012 Republican National Convention. “It is possible the memory [of Eastwood’s appearance] will never fade,” writes McGilligan, and while that may be true, far more time is spent on the man’s cinematic output. The book is a weighty, hugely informative effort, one befitting a subject of Eastwood’s continued importance.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Film Stage.
In the New York Times, MOHAMMED OMER argues that international indifference leaves Gaza in ruins and far from a meaningful peace
Monday, August 24th, 2015After last summer’s horrors, most Gazans simply want to secure a better life for their children. International donors, including Arab states, must transform pledges into facts. The United States and the European Union must find a moral commitment to assist Palestinians who are striving for freedom and control over their lives.
To read the rest of the piece, visit the New York Times.
Andrew Ross explains the origins and goals of the Gulf Labor Coalition in a TruthDig excerpt of THE GULF
Monday, August 17th, 2015Though its name did not always appear alongside those of the NGOs and high-profile advocacy groups, the Gulf Labor Coalition has played a key role in raising awareness of labor exploitation, especially in the UAE. An international network of artists and writers, energetically focused on Abu Dhabi’s development of a new cultural zone on Saadiyat Island, Gulf Labor was able to do and say things that the more official organizations could not. Our creative approach to activism was inspired and innovative, and, in some respects, unique in the field of labor advocacy. More decisive was the position of our artist members as coordinators of cultural value, with some leverage over the politics of constructing museum branches of the Guggenheim and Louvre on Saadiyat.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit TruthDig.
“Clear, concise and evocative” Counterfire reviews SHELL-SHOCKED
Monday, August 17th, 2015This book tells the story of the seven weeks of Operation Protective Edge, launched by Israel in July 2014, from the perspective of the people of Gaza. Each chapter is a journalistic record of what is happening as seen through the eyes of Mohammed Omer. The writing is clear, concise and evocative whilst remaining professionally detached. Within that attempt to provide a detached, historical record, a sense of deep and burning anger shines brightly without ever detracting from the author’s task. That task, it seems to me, as Eduardo Galeano argues in Days and Nights of Love and War (Monthly Review Press 2000), is to ‘make audible the voice of the voiceless’ (Galeano, p.8) and so to expose the ‘distorted reality’ (Omer, p.8) in which the people of Gaza live. In this, the author absolutely succeeds and it is a crucial task as the ‘Palestinian narrative is underrepresented in the media’ (p.10). Not only is this view underrepresented, but the horrific human cost in terms of lives lost and people being forced into abject, inhumane conditions, is rarely if ever told when covering this or any conflict. The inhumanity of violence and its consequences told through real-life stories is an essential lesson about this or any conflict.
To read the rest of the review, visit Counterfire.
“CESS: A SPOKENING has a power and pointed veracity as a language game and fiction of distinction.” Tears in the Fence reviews CESS
Wednesday, August 12th, 2015The sentences are rich in rhythms, asides and resonate with biographical detail creating a memorable persona. The reader tends to look back on the long list as a conceit, a way into the deeper layers of language, and wants more engagement with the nature and uses of language. This then becomes the point of the list an insistence on grappling with the use of words within lived experience and literature. The final note succinctly illustrates this with its combination of a probing, quizzical tone and continual search for the right word. The narrator drew lessons from his Aunt and her witty and joyous list. Who would not like to discover more about such words as fent, spall, fard, slub, doce, pelf, frit, sot, ort and orse?
Cess: A Spokening has a power and pointed veracity as a language game and fiction of distinction.
To read the rest of the review, visit Tears in the Fence.
Electronic Intifada reviews SHELL-SHOCKED
Tuesday, August 11th, 2015“Shell-shocked” is a term that was used commonly to describe veterans of the First World War suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, the term more commonly used today. One year after the onslaught, the whole of Gaza remains in the cross-hairs, the whole of Gaza remains an open-air prison, and this account leaves little doubt that the whole of Gaza must inevitably be shell-shocked.
To read the rest of the review, visit Electronic Intifada.
“From my point of view there is little reason to write if you’re not communicating with someone who in some important way is not like you.” DALE JAMIESON explains why he co-wrote LOVE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
Tuesday, August 11th, 2015In your forthcoming book Love In The Anthropocene, you use fiction and essays to imagine a future where the environment has been profoundly altered by climate change. What made you want to explore this topic through fiction and essays?
The first climate change paper I wrote in 1988 talked about how bloodless and abstract scientific concepts such as “global mean surface temperature” are, and said that if you want people to understand what it would be like to live in a climate change world you would have to write stories. It took me about 30 years to get to it, but finally the stories are here!
Stories can do many things that my academic writing cannot do nearly as successfully. The two most important to me are these.
First, climate change is happening in a world in which lots of other things are happening, too—technological change, growing inequality, political unrest, and so on. What happens to professors is that we fixate on the particular topic of our own research (e.g., climate change, ethnic conflict, whatever), and then act as if that’s the only thing that’s going on in the world. That’s part of why so many of us are bores at parties (“Enough about me,” says an academic at a party, “what do you think of my book?”). Writing stories forces you to think more holistically.
The second thing I’m especially interested in is what you might call “the banality of climate change.” It was the psychologist Daniel Kahneman who first got me thinking about this. He’s talked and written a lot about why it is that disabled people tend to report higher levels of subjective happiness than non-disabled people would imagine. Part of the answer, according to Danny, is because, disabled or not, most of us think about love, money, jobs, and so on rather than our disabilities or lack of them. Our abilities and disabilities are things that we mostly take for granted—they are part of the baseline from which we judge our happiness. On the other hand, when you ask people to imagine what it would be like to be in some other physical state than they one they are actually in (e.g., paraplegic), they focus laser-like attention on that state, and so exaggerate its importance. I started thinking that something like is true when we think about climate change. For most people climate change will become part of the baseline. In a climate change world, middle class people will think about what they think about in this world—jobs, status, money, and so on, with of course love being at the center. It might be harder to get these things in the world we’re creating—and for people at the bottom the suffering will broaden and intensify—but unless the absolute worst scenarios come true, for many well-off people climate change will just be part of the background of their lives. This is very hard to express outside of fiction in a way that is both compelling, and also conveys how truly horrifying this really is, at least to me.
To read the rest of the interview, visit New York Institute for the Humanities.
“A gift” Leena van Deventer reflects on reading LEAN OUT
Tuesday, August 11th, 2015I often say it’s hard to speak up against injustice when you’re on your own, but with other women behind you, you feel like you can do anything. This book brings a gift to those who read it; Lean Out immediately provides 19 siblings to women feeling isolated and struggling to find their place in tech culture.
To read the rest of the review, visit Leena van Deventer’s blog.
“I can’t tell you what was taken out of the book without flirting with another lawsuit.” PATRICK MCGILLIGAN interviewed about CLINT on Salon
Tuesday, August 11th, 2015People around Clint, those that work for him, won’t talk without his permission. Even many people who had known him for years — or hadn’t seen him in years — wouldn’t talk to me without his permission. They did not get that permission. He has been the master of his own image and publicity. He is a very different kind of actor than Jack, and a different kind of person — and people feared his reaction in a way that was not true of Jack. On the other hand, Clint has left many people behind in his career — personally and professionally — in problematic ways; and many people had never been approached before for their views of and experiences with him. More than one key person left behind told me that I was the first person who had ever asked for an interview about Clint. And for the first time, in any of my books, many people asked to speak to me “off the record” or went “off the record” during their interviews. I tended not to use what was off the record, but what I heard informed my portrait.
To read the rest of the interview, visit Salon.
“Wherever we are, we will understand [the Syrian conflict] better with a book like this behind us.” The Observer reviews SYRIA BURNING
Monday, August 10th, 2015One of the problems of writing about the current situation in the Middle East, as Glass, a veteran journalist, knows only too well, is that today’s certainties are tomorrow’s laughable speculations. Iran may still refer to the US as the “Great Satan”, but the two states now share some strategic interests. Although the US used to insist that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad must step down, it is now considering the very real possibility that he could survive the war and, like America’s lamentable “red line” of chemical weapons, what was unthinkable recently could soon be the acceptable status quo. But if news moves fast, assessments have not, which is one reason why we should all read Syria Burning.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Observer.
“Lively, opinionated and eye-opening” We Make Money Not Art reviews THE GULF
Monday, August 10th, 2015The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor is lively, opinionated and eye-opening book. It is an important publication because of the realities it reveals and investigates. But it does more than that. The essays it contains can be read as a series of lessons for anyone, journalists, artists or activists, who want to take a stand, protest and challenge every complicit element leading to a situation of abuse and injustice.
To read the rest of the review, visit We Make Money Not Art.
Wendy Grossman praises LEAN OUT on ZDNet
Friday, August 7th, 2015In 1977, when I was 23 and working to create a career as a folksinger, I occasionally ran into middle-aged, British male folksingers whose music I admired who told me I was pushy to approach people for work, and that when I was good enough people would let me know by offering me bookings. The question of how they would know was never addressed. I didn’t think they were sexist, just out of touch and with poor business sense, maybe because 20 years earlier that approach actually worked for them.
These guys were a tiny minority and they had no control over my career. Now imagine that you’re in a business where almost everyone around you is like that and they’re your co-workers, managers, bosses, and they can control your life. That is the experience recounted by the many authors of Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture. They work — or, sometimes, worked — in start-ups and major companies, in venture capital firms and research labs, mostly in Silicon Valley.
To read the rest of the review, visit ZDNet.
“This book will ensure that Israel’s war crimes in Gaza will never be allowed to be swept under the carpet.” Middle East Monitor reviews in SHELL-SHOCKED
Thursday, August 6th, 2015Timely and filled with harrowing accounts of life on the ground during Israel’s brutal carnage in the tiny, besieged coastal enclave, Omer’s eyewitness dispatches make a profound contribution to our understanding of Gaza’s tragic plight. In 300 pages, Shell-Shocked bears testimony to Omer’s extraordinary professionalism and amazing tenacity to capture in words the horror unleashed by the occupying power, Israel.
To read the rest of the review, visit Middle East Monitor.
Gulf Labor Coalition stage BDS intervention
Thursday, August 6th, 2015Gulf Labor Coalition (GLC) creatively interjected Palestinian resistance and BDS into the 56th International Contemporary Art Exhibition 2015 Venice Biennale, in Venice Italy on Sunday. GLC’s exhibition artists in residence, G.U.L.F. (Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction), staged an intervention performance adding a stencil of Handala to their exhibition banner hung prominently in the Pavilion Arsenale exhibition hall, read a ‘Statement on Palestine’ and occupied the 2nd floor of the Israeli Pavilion at the exhibit, with visitors in tow.
To read the rest of the article, visit Mondoweiss.
