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

Saturday, 29 September 2018 17:54

José Saramago: visions of a better world

Written by Jenny Farrell

in Fiction

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…

Friday, 03 August 2018 15:39

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

Written by Jenny Farrell

in Fiction

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

K2_PUBLISHED_ON Saturday, 31 March 2018 12:56

Dreaming of communism: News from Nowhere by William Morris

in Fiction

Written by John Ellison

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…

K2_PUBLISHED_ON Wednesday, 28 February 2018 11:57

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

in Fiction

Written by Phil Brett

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

K2_PUBLISHED_ON Tuesday, 13 February 2018 20:07

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

in Fiction

Written by Jenny Farrell

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…

Tuesday, 30 January 2018 11:16

The Profit Motive

Written by Owain Holland

in Fiction

The Profit Motive - Part One by Owain Holland I speak to you from a secret Government facility named 'Arthur's Grave' on Lundy Island. My name is Doctor Cynthia Doyle. The Government rounded us up. All the healthy, uninfected medical professionals they had left, and sent us here. I'm the…

Monday, 11 December 2017 09:52

Swift's satires of English colonialism

Written by Jenny Farrell

in Fiction

On his 350th anniversary, Jenny Farrell outlines how Jonathan Swift's books expressed and strengthened Ireland's cultural struggle against English colonialism. Jonathan Swift was born 350 years ago, on 30th November 1667. Swift belongs to both the literature of Ireland and to that of England. Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal…

Saturday, 23 September 2017 08:17

Witness to the Revolution

Written by John Ellison

in Fiction

John Ellison sketches out the life of Maxim Gorky, the righteous, relentless witness of the revolution who evoked the wretchedness and terror of living under Tsarist violence. The life of Maxim Gorky, author of three unforgettable volumes of autobiography covering his first two decades (‘Childhood’, ‘My Apprenticeship’, and ‘My Universities’),…

Russian Revolution Maxim Gorky

Thursday, 25 May 2017 16:11

Radical Children's Literature

Written by Julia Mickenberg

in Fiction

Julia Mickenberg discusses some recently published radical children's literature. As Philip Nel and I suggested in “Radical Children’s Literature Now!", the contemporary field of radical children’s literature is so large that it is impossible to encompass. Still, several recently published, self-consciously radical books that directly or indirectly aim to motivate…