Latest News: Author Archive

“What is QAnon?” — CHAMELEO author Robert Guffey writes for Salon

Tuesday, August 18th, 2020
A not-so-brief introduction to the conspiracy theory that’s eating America

Read the article here.

NEW PODCAST: Episode #5 of LUCID DREAMING with author Pamela Cohn and filmmakers Miko Revereza & Shireen Seno

Monday, August 17th, 2020

“A tool to help us understand and change a system that has already condemned millions of people to sickness and death in the interests of profit.” — THE MONSTER ENTERS reviewed by ResoluteReader

Monday, August 17th, 2020
As in all his work, Mike Davis writes eloquently and clearly with a sympathy for ordinary people. His implicit call for us to challenge the status quo in order to prevent further pandemics is the biggest lesson we can take from this book. His clear analysis is a tool to help us understand and change a system that has already condemned millions of people to sickness and death in the interests of profit. One monster has entered the door, but further ones lie waiting outside.

Read the full review here.

“Don’t Be Hoodwinked by Trump’s UAE-Israel ‘Peace Deal'” — INSIDE IRAN author Medea Benjamin writes for the LA Progressive

Monday, August 17th, 2020
“HUGE breakthrough today,” crowed Donald Trump on Twitter as he announced the new peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The deal makes the UAE the first Gulf Arab state and the third Arab nation, after Egypt and Jordan, to have diplomatic ties with Israel. But the new Israel-UAE partnership should fool no one. Though it will supposedly stave off Israeli annexation of the West Bank and encourage tourism and trade between both countries, in reality, it is nothing more than a scheme to give an Arab stamp of approval to Israel’s status quo of land theft, home demolitions, arbitrary extrajudicial killings, apartheid laws, and other abuses of Palestinian rights.

Read the full article here.

“We need wartime communism” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek interviewed on RT

Monday, August 17th, 2020

UPCOMING WEBINAR: “Science Fiction and the Milford Connection” — with WELCOME TO DYSTOPIA editor Gordon Van Gelder and Samuel R. Delaney

Friday, August 14th, 2020
Sep 13, 2020 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

More details here.

“A Life-Long Fight For Justice Spurred Alvin Bragg Into the Manhattan DA Race” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN author Theodore Hamm interviews Alvin Bragg for the Indypendent

Friday, August 14th, 2020
Alvin Bragg is a former chief deputy attorney general of New York. Born and raised in Harlem (where he still lives), Bragg is now co-director of the Racial Justice Project at New York Law School and a board member of the Legal Aid Society.

Along with co-counsel Gideon Oliver, Bragg is currently representing the families of Eric Garner and Ramarley Graham (as well as other criminal justice activists) in a lawsuit against the NYPD and de Blasio administration. The goal of the suit is to produce full transparency regarding the investigations conducted by the NYPD into Garner’s death.

Read the interview here.

“The Rise of Hakeem Jeffries Is Being Disrupted From Below” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN author Theodore Hamm writes for the Intercept

Friday, August 14th, 2020
After Rep. Joyce Beatty’s primary in Ohio, Hakeem Jeffries was feeling good. Cori Bush and the New York insurgents snuck up on him.

Read the article here.

“We need to be together in our aloneness, to see each other being solitary, for being to be bearable” — TALES OF TWO PLANETS editor John Freeman writes for the Kenyon Review

Thursday, August 13th, 2020
A church which is shut—a neighborhood [book]shop that has no one on its floors: they don’t bind us in the way they can when full. We need to be together in our aloneness, to see each other being solitary, for being to be bearable. How else to turn the exhaust of simply existing into the hope necessary for living?

Read the article here.

“Dreaming of a More Lucid Being” — LUCID DREAMING author Pamela Cohn interviewed for OpEdNews

Thursday, August 13th, 2020
Lucid dreaming means to be aware that you are dreaming while doing so. Probably we’ve all had these kinds of dreams. Therapies have been built around lucid dreaming. Books have been written, sometimes equating it to an outer-body-experience inside the mind, and websites have popped up, including Lucidity.com. Philosophers have weighed in. As Nietzsche once said, in Human, All Too Human, “Misunderstanding of the dream. In the ages of crude primeval culture man believed that in dreams he got to know another real world; here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without the dream one would have found no occasion for a division of the world.”

But that’s not what Pamela Cohn’s on about in Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers. Not exactly. Cohn is more interested in a parallel hyper-seeing — waking up into your life and using a camera to help you do it, producing a cinematic experience, and reframing your way of thinking along the way. The 29 filmmakers Cohn interviews come from all parts of the world — Asia, Europe and the Americas — and their filmmaking covers the usual panoply of social issues, including immigration, race, gender issues, economics, surveillance state, selfhood, and the phenomenological use of the camera. Cohn writes, “My hope is that the effect of disparate personalities gathered together in one volume evokes an expansive and global conversation, not merely a series of dialogues strung together.”

Read the interview here.

UPCOMING WEBINAR: “How the News Became a Twisted Branch of Show Business—and What We Can Do About It” — with HATE INC. author Matt Taibbi

Thursday, August 13th, 2020
Sep 17, 2020 04:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Register here.

“Crusoe 300: The Myth of the Rugged Individualist” — CRUSOE AND HIS CONSEQUENCES reviewed by OpEdNews

Wednesday, August 12th, 2020

Dunkerley suggests that in our re-reading of Crusoe we put away the Little Boy/Little Girl glasses we were handed in class as kids, and read the parable, as literate adults, with new eyes, for the first time.

Read the review here.

“John Oakes on Grove Press Publisher Barney Rosset” — ROSSET editor and OR Books cofounder interviewed on the Biblio File

Tuesday, August 11th, 2020

Barnet Lee “Barney” Rosset, Jr. (1922 – 2012) was owner of Grove Press publishing house and publisher and editor-in-chief at the Evergreen Review. He led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and later was the American publisher of Henry Miller’s controversial novel Tropic of Cancer. The right to publish and distribute Miller’s novel in the United States was affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1964, in a landmark ruling for free speech and the First Amendment. Under Rosset  Grove introduced American readers to European avant-garde literature and theatre, publishing, among others, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco. Most importantly, in 1954, Grove started publishing Samuel Beckett.

John Oakes is the co-founder and 50% owner of OR Books, and publisher of the Evergreen Review, an online revival of the venerable counter-cultural literary magazine originally published by Grove Press under Barney Rosset, whose memoir Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship OR Books published in 2017.

NEW PODCAST: Episode #4 of LUCID DREAMING with author Pamela Cohn and filmmaker Alexander Nanau

Monday, August 10th, 2020

“Profound” — PANDEMIC! reviewed by Scroll

Monday, August 10th, 2020

Read the review here.

“Boccaccio Says Goodbye” — New short story by CAUTIVOS author Ariel Dorfman in the New York Review of Books

Monday, August 10th, 2020
You want me to repent, here on my death-bed, Friar, you say I should abjure my Decameron or I will not be granted a pathway to Heaven, you whisper in my ear with a tongue that would rather be caressing a woman’s thighs, that tongue of yours warns me that the hundred tales told by my characters, those seven women and those three men on the hills of Fiesole as the plague raged below in the city, your tongue demands, Friar, that what their tongues and throats brought forth over those ten days should be consigned to flames so I be not cast into perdition when I depart for the other world. You accuse my stories of mocking the Church and promoting ribaldry and lechery and frivolous fun, you demand that I atone for suggesting to women that they should seek more freedom and less obedience, all of this you ask of me as I succumb to the Death who did not take me all those years ago. No, I am not referring to the plague. I was not in Firenze when it struck. Do not listen to what the rumors say, rumors I myself disseminated to make my work more popular among those who had survived that terror.

Read the complete short story here.

“A mosaic-like compendium of short works… Excellent environmental writing” — TALES OF TWO PLANETS reviewed by the New Republic

Monday, August 10th, 2020
Tales of Two Planets is a mosaic-like compendium of short works compiled and introduced by John Freeman, former editor of Granta. The collection includes Edwidge Danticat writing about Haiti, a poem by Margaret Atwood, and a new Lauren Groff story about a mother immobilized by climate change-related depression, among 30-odd other views on ecological disaster across the world.

Read the review here.

“Read Up on the Links Between Racism and the Environment” — TALES OF TWO PLANETS featured in the New York Times

Monday, August 10th, 2020
The unequal impact of climate change is chronicled in a collection of essays, poems and stories called “Tales of Two Planets.”

Read the article here.

“Israel’s crimes against humanity” — I ACCUSE! author Norman Finkelstein interviewed on RT

Friday, August 7th, 2020

“How Brooklyn Turned Bernie Sanders Into a Democratic Socialist” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN author Theodore Hamm interviewed on Scheer Intelligence

Friday, August 7th, 2020

“We have to fight for the truth in wars and pandemics” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn writes for AlterNet

Friday, August 7th, 2020
The struggle against Covid-19 has often been compared to fighting a war. Much of this rhetoric is bombast, but the similarities between the struggle against the virus and against human enemies are real enough. War reporting and pandemic reporting likewise have much in common because, in both cases, journalists are dealing with and describing matters of life and death. Public interest is fueled by deep fears, often more intense during an epidemic because the whole population is at risk. In a war, aside from military occupation and area bombing, terror is at its height among those closest to the battlefield.

The nature of the dangers stemming from military violence and the outbreak of a deadly disease may appear very different. But looked at from the point of view of a government, they both pose an existential threat because failure in either crisis may provoke some version of regime change. People seldom forgive governments that get them involved in losing wars or that fail to cope adequately with a natural disaster like the coronavirus. The powers-that-be know that they must fight for their political lives, perhaps even their physical existence, claiming any success as their own and doing their best to escape blame for what has gone wrong.

Read the article here.

“Points to the vacuity of our central premises regarding what it means to be American and, presumably, Middle Class” — THE SINKING MIDDLE CLASS reviewed by CounterPunch

Friday, August 7th, 2020
How the Middle Half Lives

Read the review here.

NEW PODCAST: Episode #3 of LUCID DREAMING with author Pamela Cohn and filmmaker Kirsten Johnson

Friday, August 7th, 2020

“It Takes Many Voices to Find the Truth” — TALES OF TWO PLANETS editor John Freeman writes for Lit Hub

Thursday, August 6th, 2020
John Freeman on the origins of Tales of Two Planets

Read the article here.

“In This Phase In The 58th American Presidentiad (United States)” — Poem by Lawrence Joseph from TALES OF TWO PLANETS published on Lit Hub

Wednesday, August 5th, 2020
Read the poem here.

“What Would a 21st-Century Federal Writers Project Look Like?” — THE DEEP END excerpt published in Full Stop

Wednesday, August 5th, 2020
Jason Boog asks, What can we learn from labor organizing of writers during the Great Depression?

Read the excerpt (with subscription) here.

“Following in the footsteps of Viscount Edward George William Omar Deerhurst” — SURF, SWEAT AND TEARS author Andy Martin writes for TripFiction

Wednesday, August 5th, 2020
I first met Ted in France, in the late 1980s. He was competing at the Quiksilver Pro surf contest in Lacanau, on the wild Atlantic coast of France, north of Bordeaux, and I was a surfing correspondent. The last time I saw him, nearly ten years later, was in Hawaii, where he was still in search of the perfect wave and, in his phrase, “the perfect woman” – and where he died too young, on the North Shore of Oahu, aged 40.But how did he die exactly? I wrote his obituary for The Independent, but it was another 20 years before I could cut through the typically Hawaiian mix of myth, omertà, and mystification, and get close to the truth. To solve the mystery of his death I needed to reconstruct his life. To do that I had to retrace Ted’s steps around the world.

See the article here.

“Ljubljana’s most famous son is already thinking of the next book” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek interviewed for the Irish Times

Monday, August 3rd, 2020
Given the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Ljubljana’s most famous son is already thinking of the next book. It will be “something like Hegel in the Viral World”, he says, having already brought out a short tract called Pandemic! in April.

Read the interview here.

“Climate Activist Amy Brady Recommends Five New Books on the Climate Crisis” — TALES OF TWO PLANETS featured on Lit Hub

Monday, August 3rd, 2020
John Freeman, founding editor of Freeman’s magazine, published in 2017 to great acclaim Tales of Two Americas, an anthology about income inequality. Tales of Two Planets poignantly extends that focus to the rest of the world, revealing how climate change exacerbates inequalities of all kinds in communities impacted hardest. The collection includes essays, fiction, and poems by some of today’s brightest writers. Edwidge Danticat writes about life in Haiti, while Anuradha Roy describes the floods and droughts that have ravaged the Himalayas. Tahmima Anam brings us to a climate-changed Bangladesh, while Lauren Groff illuminates life in Florida, one of America’s most threatened states.

See the full list here.

NEW VIDEO: PEOPLE’S POWER author Ashley Dawson in conversation with Stephanie LeMenager

Monday, August 3rd, 2020

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