Latest News: Author Archive

“This moment is not a tunnel with a bright light at the end.” — THE MONSTER ENTERS author Mike Davis interviewed for Salon

Monday, July 13th, 2020
Author and activist on Trump, the pandemic and the crisis of capitalism: “The lives of several billion are at risk.”

Read the full interview here.

“The Problem with Dr. Fauci” — THE MONSTER ENTERS author Mike Davis interviewed on the Nation’s Start Making Sense podcast with Jon Wiener

Monday, July 13th, 2020


Mike Davis argues that, while Dr. Anthony Fauci has been handed a golden opportunity to speak truth to power, America’s most respected doctor remains a team player in an administration bent on disaster.

“The most important Marxist historian of the past fifty years… Of [Mike Davis’s] many books, none has been so darkly prescient… There will perhaps be no better guide to the next decade than this.” — THE MONSTER ENTERS reviewed by Jacobin

Tuesday, July 7th, 2020

Mike Davis Tried to Warn Us About a Virus-Induced Apocalypse

Mike Davis has good claim to being the most important Marxist historian of the past fifty years. While his work may not have the vast geographical or temporal scope of Perry Anderson, Ellen Meiksins Wood, or Robert Brenner, nor has it mined a particular period or subject with the focus of a figure like E. P. Thompson, Robin Blackburn, or Christopher Hill, its influence and its singular depth makes Davis’s work stand out.On the surface, his writings may appear disparate, ranging from the early essays on the history of the US working class to his more recent studies of Third World slums, the history of the car bomb, and the radical history of Los Angeles in the 1960s, to name just three examples. Yet the diversity of Davis’s interests are linked by his near singular focus on global class relations and his writing is marked by a startling prescience. His oeuvre has opened entire continents of research, each one written in his typically sparkling, lucid prose.

Of his many books, none has been so darkly prescient as The Monster at Our Door, first published fifteen years ago, and now, amid the first wave of COVID-19, reissued by OR Books as The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism.

Read the full review here.

“Why We Need Muriel Rukeyser Now” — THE DEEP END author Jason Boog writes for the Jewish Book Council’s PB Daily

Tuesday, July 7th, 2020
Rukeyser’s gen­er­a­tion endured a dizzy­ing series of cat­a­stro­phes; as soon as one had end­ed, anoth­er would appear with sting­ing sud­den­ness. Now, her work can help us to under­stand our own tur­bu­lent times, and the reshap­ing of our future from these colos­sal events.

Read the full article here.

“Six books we recommend for understanding the deadliest global health crisis of our time” — THE MONSTER ENTERS featured on Climate & Capitalism’s “Ecosocialist Bookshelf”

Tuesday, July 7th, 2020
[Mike] Davis sets the current crisis in the context of previous viral catastrophes, and surveys the scientific and political roots of today’s viral apocalypse. He shows how agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments and a capitalist global system careening out of control, created the ecological pre-conditions for the new plague.

See the full list here.

NEW VIDEO: PEOPLE’S POWER author Ashley Dawson in conversation with Craig Morris

Monday, July 6th, 2020

TALES OF TWO PLANETS featured in Wired‘s “Ultimate Summer Reading List”

Monday, July 6th, 2020
Maybe it’s not a beach read, unless you want to spend your lounging time contemplating rising seas, superstorms, and the grinding inequalities that will only be further entrenched by the wave of changes beating against the shore of our unstable climate. Editor John Freeman assembled notable writers from around the world (including Margaret Atwood, Edwidge Danticat, Yasmine El Rashidi, and Chinelo Okparanta, among others) and tasked them with commenting on where climate change is and will be most acutely felt, which often is where the writers themselves are from. The result is a collection of poems, short fiction, essays, and reportage that is fascinating in the way staring down a tsunami is fascinating. The book charts twinned humanitarian and ecological crises from Bangladesh to Egypt to Florida to Haiti in tones that range from galvanized and angry to haunted and elegiac. If you’ve only ever read the headlines about climate change wreaking its worst havoc on the world’s most vulnerable, Tales of Two Planets is likely to shock you. For everyone else, it will be a humanization of the broad trends you’ve read about, rendered with poignant specificity by writers who have actually lived them.

See the full list here.

“Matt Taibbi discusses the irony of critically acclaimed and best selling book ‘White Fragility’ as a corporate version of fighting racism” — HATE INC. author interviewed on Rising

Monday, July 6th, 2020

“Mike Davis on Covid-19, Street Uprisings & the Failure of Government” — THE MONSTER ENTERS author interviewed on Letters and Politics

Monday, July 6th, 2020

Listen to the interview here.

“How to Protect Yourself From Retaliation When Filming Police Brutality” — A PUBLIC SERVICE author Tim Schwartz writes for Truthout

Monday, July 6th, 2020
As protesters continue to occupy the streets around the U.S., many are filming police brutality. If you are in a situation with the cops or witnessing one that has the potential to turn violent, whether at a protest or simply while out in your community, you should be prepared to take video and document events with your smartphone. While taking a video isn’t that difficult — we do it every day — recording police brutality or other atrocities comes with a whole set of concerns that many of us don’t have to face on a daily basis.

Read the full article here.

NEW VIDEO: BERNIE’S BROOKLYN author Theodore Hamm interviewed on the Katie Halper Show

Monday, July 6th, 2020

“The Impact of the Assassination of General Qasem Soleimani” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn interviewed on Forthright Radio

Thursday, July 2nd, 2020
Listen to the interview here.

“While we should be ruthlessly critical about our past… we should not succumb to self-contempt—respect for others based on self-contempt is always, and by definition, false.” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek writes for RT

Thursday, July 2nd, 2020
Read the article here.

“The blundering British political class has shown the same incompetence in both fighting wars and coronavirus” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn writes for the Independent

Tuesday, June 30th, 2020
The murder of three people in Reading would have been less likely if Britain and its allies had not helped reduce Libya to murderous anarchy, writes Patrick Cockburn.

Read the article here.

“Makes clear what we’re facing and what lefty lawyers are doing, or have done, to fight the fight… An excellent resource” — LAWYERS FOR THE LEFT reviewed by CounterPunch

Tuesday, June 30th, 2020
Democracy Chasers in a Badly Injured Nation

Read the review here.

“Extraction in the Time of a Pandemic” — PEOPLE’S POWER author Ashley Dawson in conversation with Alok Amatya

Monday, June 29th, 2020

“Filmmaker Sara Fattahi on Bringing a Woman’s Perspective of War” — LUCID DREAMING excerpt published on Lit Hub

Monday, June 29th, 2020
Watching Sara Fattahi’s films is reminiscent of the experience of reading the stories of Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist known for his multi-generational family tales told through a magical realist lens. Sara’s films are intimately told narrative accounts from inside the households of her female relatives and female friends. The penetrating shots and closely-lensed framing of the faces of Sara’s subjects—all women—and the daily household rituals of making Turkish coffee, smoking, talking, praying, and watching soap operas, present a circumscribed, mundane existence residing side by side with the world of Sara’s imagination. Hallucinatory aspects of shock and displacement take hold. The once-familiar surroundings of her native city of Damascus are under siege and memories from the past and present collapse against one another.

Read the full excerpt here.

“Bernie Sanders’s Socialism Is New York Born and Bred” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN author Theodore Hamm interviewed by Public Seminar

Friday, June 26th, 2020

Ted Hamm, chair of journalism and new media studies at St. Joseph’s College is a historian of New York City. His latest book, Bernie’s Brooklyn: How Growing Up In the New Deal City Shaped Bernie Sanders’ Politics (OR Books, 2020) is not just for Sanders fans but for anyone interested in New York City politics. The book traces and untangles the dense political and cultural backdrop of New York City during the 1930s and 1940s when New York was on its way to becoming the most progressive city in the United States. With a cast of characters that include first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Fiorello Laguardia, Robert Moses, Woody Guthrie, Jackie Robinson, and the Brooklyn Dodgers, Hamm describes the landscape where Bernie and his brother would come of age. Perhaps now more than ever, as the city struggles with a severe recession in the wake of the novel coronavirus, it is important that the roots of Sanders’s socialism be understood as the product of a particular place and time.

Read the interview here.

“How growing up in a New Deal city shaped Bernie Sanders’s vision for America” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN excerpt published in Public Seminar

Friday, June 26th, 2020

It is always a surprise–and no surprise–that New York constantly reinvents its political and economic vision. Ted Hamm’s Bernie’s Brooklyn: How Growing Up in the New Deal City Shaped Bernie Sanders’ Politics (OR Books June 2020) explores the thirty years of progressive politics that shaped Brooklyn and New York, decades that made Bernie Sanders the politician he is today.

Read the excerpt here.

“US Indicts Julian Assange Again—But Why?” — HOW I LOST BY HILLARY CLINTON author Joe Lauria interviewed on Loud & Clear with Brian Becker and John Kiriakou

Friday, June 26th, 2020

Listen to “US Indicts Julian Assange Again – But Why?” on Spreaker.

NEW VIDEO: CAUTIVOS author Ariel Dorfman discusses Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera with the Diane Rehm Book Club

Wednesday, June 24th, 2020

“Israel will pretend that illegal annexation is a compromise” — I ACCUSE! author Norman Finkelstein interviewed on Pushback with Aaron Maté

Wednesday, June 24th, 2020

“Seeing Boris Johnson seeking to cope with the pandemic has become more and more like watching Peter Sellers play Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films” — WAR IN THE AGE OF TRUMP author Patrick Cockburn writes for CounterPunch

Wednesday, June 24th, 2020

The BoJo Follies

The ‘Five O’Clock Follies’ was the name given during the Vietnam War to US military press briefings that were infamous for announcing non-existent victories and wildly exaggerated numbers for enemy casualties.

British government briefings about the Covid-19 epidemic have taken a shorter period to gain the same dubious reputation for making over-optimistic claims. Supposedly crucial advances in the battle with coronavirus are greeted with fanfare only for these successes to evaporate mysteriously or be downplayed as marginal a few weeks later.

Read the full article here.

“We are in the midst of a unique historical moment. We will have to invent a new way of life, new rituals.” — PANDEMIC! author Slavoj Žižek interviewed by the Times of Israel

Monday, June 22nd, 2020

Slavoj Zizek is considered a rock star philosopher. One of the most important popular thinkers of the 21st century, he is wild and funny and bursting with charisma. A scholar rooted in the here and now and a philosopher who references Jacques Lacan and Quentin Tarantino in equal measure, he is a sought-after lecturer and a learned provocateur.

With the outbreak of the global COVID-19 health crisis, Zizek published a book called “Pandemic!” which triggered a maelstrom of reactions. The text is a brilliant analysis, delivered in real time, of the significance of the crisis that has swamped the world.

Read the full interview here.

“A penetrating look at the intersection of threats from new diseases as they mix with the much older maladies of capitalism, greed, and inequality” — THE MONSTER ENTERS reviewed by the Progressive

Friday, June 19th, 2020

It’s a rare occurrence for a writer to reissue an older work because it has acquired new relevance, but such was the case for Mike Davis. His 2005 study of the risks of an avian flu pandemic, The Monster at Our Door (New Press), has come back with a vengeance in the emergence of COVID-19, under a new title, The Monster Enters.

It was a book Davis himself no longer even owned a copy of. “I wanted it off my bookshelf in order to exorcise the anxiety involved in its writing,” he writes in the new introduction, while in lockdown in his home in San Diego, California.

Davis’s forty-four-page intro is, by itself, worth the price of admission. Crafted in his distinctive prose (“I write this . . . bunkered in my garage with innumerable cans of Chef Boyardee, a few pints of Guinness, and some virology textbooks.”), he takes the reader through an analysis of our present moment that is part history lesson, part detective story, part science class, and most of all, cogent political analysis.

The book is well researched, with twenty-three pages of notes and citations, but nonetheless accessible, with a penetrating look at the intersection of threats from new diseases as they mix with the much older maladies of capitalism, greed, and inequality.

Read the full review here.

“The World in Which Bernie Sanders Grew Up” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN excerpt published on Lit Hub

Thursday, June 18th, 2020
Theodore Hamm on WWII-Era Brooklyn, the New Deal, and Commies Fightin’ Fascists

Read the full excerpt here.

“To Survive This Era, Writers Must Rejoin The Working Class” — THE DEEP END author Jason Boog interviewed by HuffPost

Thursday, June 18th, 2020
Jason Boog, author of “The Deep End,” sees a template for writers and publishing workers today in the political activism of Great Depression writers.

Read the full interview here.

“Why Policing Is Broken” — HATE INC. author Matt Taibbi writes for Rolling Stone

Thursday, June 18th, 2020
Years of research on brutality cases shows that bad incentives in politics and city bureaucracies are major drivers of police violence.

Read the full article here.

“Heastie-Controlled Slush Fund Props Up Embattled NY State Assembly Incumbents” — BERNIE’S BROOKLYN author Theodore Hamm writes for the Indypendent

Thursday, June 18th, 2020
As the June 23 primary nears, money is flowing in multiple directions.
While candidates backed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders — including second-term Manhattan Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou and aspiring Brooklyn State Senator Jabari Brisport — have amassed hefty sums of small contributions, many long-term incumbents are relying on large transfers relayed by New York’s Democratic Party leadership.

The main account delivering five-figure sums to candidates is the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee (DACC), which is controlled by Speaker Carl Heastie. As of last week’s 11-Day Pre-Primary filing, DACC had nearly $4 million to spend. In the first two days of this week, nearly $100,000 has poured into its coffers.

Read the full article here.

“Masego Panyane talks the legacy of the Black Consciousness Movement” — THE BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS READER co-author interviewed by Independent Online

Wednesday, June 17th, 2020

We caught up with Masego Panyane, the co-author of “The Black Consciousness Reader”, to talk about her journey as a young writer and how she became part of this remarkable book.

The Soweto-born writer, singer and content creator says the book is about the “legacy” of the Black Consciousness Movement.

The 26-year-old writer said, “The book came about as a conversation that the co-authors and I were having, about what the Black Consciousness Movement looks like, 40 years after the death of one of its more prominent leaders, Steve Biko.

“We thought it would be a good idea to find all the activists and champions of the Black Consciousness Movement to have that conversation with them. And to take the story forward by looking at how the philosophy of Black Consciousness keeps playing a role in South Africa today.”

Read the full interview here.

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