Fiction

Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the tragedy and the comedy of the Mexican political system than Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote. They're much better than any column of political analysis.

Subcomandante Marcos

Wednesday, 05 December 2018 18:14

Decolonising the mind: the life and work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Written by Jenny Farrell

in Fiction

Jenny Farrell celebrates the life and work of the African Marxist writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Ngũgĩ turned 80 this year. He was born into colonial Kenya in 1938 and witnessed in his youth the Mau Mau War of Independence, which ended in1962. Ngũgĩ has written prolifically. His first major novel…

The "War to End All Wars," like all the wars that have followed it, discarded human lives on all sides. Here, a German prisoner helps British wounded make their way to a dressing station. Image: Imperial War Museum

Wednesday, 07 November 2018 13:37

The Discarded Soldier

Written by Jenny Farrell

in Fiction

Jenny Farrell introduces a little-known short story by Liam O'Flaherty 11 November 2018 marks the centenary of the ending of World War I. During that bloody slaughter, the propagandists described it as the “war to end all wars”. One hundred years and as many wars on the militarists in the…

Remembrance Day WW1

K2_PUBLISHED_ON Saturday, 29 September 2018 17:54

José Saramago: visions of a better world

in Fiction

Written by Jenny Farrell

Jenny Farrell pays tribute to the communist writer José Saramago, whose vision of another, possible world is still relevant today. Twenty years ago, on 8 October 1998, the communist writer José de Sousa Saramago was the first Portuguese author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The first fifty years of…

K2_PUBLISHED_ON Monday, 03 September 2018 22:31

Cré na Cille: a comedy and a bald statement of unacceptable class rule

in Fiction

Written by Eoin Ó Murchú

Eoin Ó Murchú reviews Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille, translated from the Irish as The Dirty Dust by Alan Titley, Yale University Press 2015 Cré na Cille is regarded as the greatest modern prose work written in the Irish language. Its depiction of the reality and context of peasant life is…

Ulysses Flann O'Brien James Connolly

K2_PUBLISHED_ON Friday, 03 August 2018 15:39

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: a literary exposure of The Great Money Trick of capitalism

in Fiction

Written by Jenny Farrell

Jenny Farrell discusses one of the great working class novels in English literature, a literary exposure of the 'Great Money Trick' - the exploitation inherent in capitalism. Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is the first important working-class novel in English literature. It was written between 1906 and 1910 and…

Robert Tressell social realism the great money trick

K2_PUBLISHED_ON Friday, 22 June 2018 22:52

Emily Brontë, Heathcliff and imagining a classless society

in Fiction

Written by Jenny Farrell

Jenny Farrell discusses ‘Wuthering Heights’, and its subtle, skilful imagining of a more humane, classless society, where unequal gender difference is replaced by an equality of personhood. 30 July 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth. Her novel “Wuthering Heights” (1847) is an amazing, creative challenge to the…

Wuthering Heights

Saturday, 14 April 2018 20:32

Crime in a Bi-Polar World: Good and Evil, Poor and Rich in the Globalized Economy

Written by Dennis Broe

in Fiction

Dennis Broe reports on the crime novelists' festival at Quais du Polar in Lyon, France. This is Bro on the World Literary Beat and I’ve just come back from this year’s Quais du Polar in Lyon France, one of the world’s largest gathering of crime novelists – in France crime novels…

Saturday, 31 March 2018 12:56

Dreaming of communism: News from Nowhere by William Morris

Written by John Ellison

in Fiction

John Ellison offers an appreciation of 'News from Nowhere', by William Morris. Opening salvo There can be no denying that the content of News from Nowhere, the utopian romance penned by painter, poet and designer William Morris, was heavily indebted to the writings of Karl Marx. Morris was exploring these…

Wednesday, 28 February 2018 11:57

'The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter': Dashiell Hammett vs. Joe McCarthy

Written by Phil Brett

in Fiction

Phil Brett tells the story of when Dashiell Hammett faced Senator Joseph McCarthy. Sixty five years ago, on March 26th 1953, Dashiell Hammett, the famous novelist who was responsible for popularising the hard-boiled private eye novel,…

Maltese Falcom Humphrey Bogart Lauren Bacall IWW Trump

Tuesday, 13 February 2018 20:07

This harp shall never be silent: Tomás Mac Síomóin at 80

Written by Jenny Farrell

in Fiction

Jenny Farrell marks Tomás Mac Síomóin's birthday on 19 February with an essay on this subversive, internationalist writer, who translated the Communist Manifesto into Irish, satirises contemporary neoliberal Ireland in poetry and prose, and is ignored and unofficially censored by the Irish literary-political establishment. One of the tragedies that befell Ireland…