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  • Red Love Book Club: A Communist Fiction Reading Group

    The People’s Forum and 1804 Books invite you to join us as we explore the genre of communist and radical fiction. How does a text change when we read it not only for the plot, but for the injustices it reveals? How does a story’s meaning transform when we think of it as a prompt to organize and take action? We’ll meet once a month to discuss a featured novel, talk about the history it comes from and responds to, and how we can understand its meaning in our own contexts and work. Please join us in this collective practice of revolutionary reading and imagining!

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  • Pick a session, or pick them all!

    Let us know which books you're interested in – we'll keep you updated before each session! See covers and descriptions for each story below.

  • MARCH: Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us – Joseph Andras (Algeria)

    The moving story of a revolutionary during the Algerian War, who is captured, tortured, and sentenced to death. But what happens to a ‘pied-noir European’ who chooses the side of anti-colonialism?

    APRIL: This Earth of Mankind – Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Indonesia)

    Written while the author was imprisoned during the struggle for Indonesian independence. It tells the story of a young Javanese student, living among the colonists and colonized of the 19th-century, battling against colonial structures – all the while nourished by a love that keeps him strong.

    MAY: Palestine's Children by Ghassan Kanafani (Palestine)

    An innovator in literature and art, Palestinian militant Ghassan Kanafani presents a collection of short stories that captures the struggles of Palestinians as they fight for liberation.

    JUNE: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (US)

    Ursula K. Le Guin’s famed utopian novel imagining a scientist who attempts to reunite his long-isolated anarchist world with its mother planet – a civilization of warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth.

    JULY: Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (US)

    Baldwin's classic is a deeply moving story of death and passion, where a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality as he wrestles between his fiancee and Giovanni, a young bartender he meets.

    AUGUST: General Sun, My Brother by Jacques Stephen Alexis (Haiti)

    Authored by the father of Haitian literature and militant Marxist, this book follows the life of Hilarion as he is imprisoned with an activist who schools him in the Marxist view of history, and later in life becomes embroiled in a strike that ends in the "Dominican Vespers," the 1937 massacre of Haitian workers by the Dominican army. The novel personifies the sun as the ally, brother, and leader of the peasants.

    SEPTEMBER: State of War by Ninotchka Rosca (Philippines)

    An endless festival amidst an endless war is the central image of this novel of the Philippines of the time of Marcos as three young people seek relief from the suffocating repression and brutality of the Dictatorship.

    OCTOBER: Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo/US)

    Almanac of the Dead is a brilliant, haunting, and tragic novel of ruin and resistance in the Americas. Seese encounters a well-known psychic whose duty is to transcribee the ancient, painfully preserved notebooks that contain the history of her own people — a Native American Almanac of the Dead. A many-layered narrative unfolds to tell the magnificent, tragic, and unforgettable story of the struggle of native peoples in the Americas to keep, at all costs, the core of their culture.

     

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