“That shift, from narratives of the revolution to stories about the psychological ramifications of those narratives, marks a natural evolution in the realm of Egyptian literature after Arab Spring.”
Category: fiction
Lorissa Rinehart: “A Graphic Novel Looks at the Limits of Freedom in Revolutionary Cuba”
“In Goodbye, My Havana, the Cuban revolution’s prescribed limits of freedom are most evident in the relegation of women and LGBTQ individuals to the periphery, where their rights quickly erode and their personhood is more easily dismissed. The benefit of hindsight shows Castro’s regime working inward from there. Once it had stripped the most vulnerable…
“Revolutionary Crime Fiction”
21 crime novels set during rebellions.
“Night School on Anarres”
Night School on Anarres is an educational experiment examining the utopian proposals of twentieth-century anarchism, drawing from Ursula K Le Guin’s seminal sci-fi novel The Dispossessed. … Part sci-fi set, part classroom, part roundhouse theatre, the Night School on Anarres installation is a site where utopic ambitions can be collectively imagined, performed and discussed.”
Caryl Emerson: “The Revolutionary Specters of Russian Letters”
The great Russian writers between “apocalypse and nihilism.”
Mariana Alessandri: “In Praise of Lost Causes”
In his Don Quixote, “Cervantes detailed a life in praise of futilely resisting a corrupt world. Quixote fought giants because he could not, in good conscience, not fight them. We can similarly transform ourselves into quixotic pessimists — the kind who are called dreamers, idealists or lunatics — by reading more, rejecting common sense and…
Laurent Dubois: “Heroines of the Haitian Revolution”
“What is the role of an artist in the face of political repression? What is the place of culture in the midst of injustice and terror? Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet (1916–1973), author of powerful novels representing the experience of living under the Duvalier dictatorship, confronted such questions throughout her life. One of Vieux-Chauvet’s earliest novels,…
Sunil Iyengar reviews ‘Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris’ (2017) by Peter Brooks
“When Flaubert came to write Sentimental Education, he was looking back on at the failed revolution of 1848. … In 1870-1871, soon after Sentimental Education saw print, Paris was gripped by another revolution, leading to another radical experiment in self-government (the ill-fated Paris Commune), which yet again provoked a brutal crackdown from reactionary forces.”
Tariq Ali: “How Lenin’s love of literature shaped the Russian Revolution”
Literature shaped Russian political culture: “The classicism that was so deeply rooted in Lenin acted as a bulwark to seal him from the exciting new developments in art and literature that had both preceded and accompanied the revolution. Lenin found it difficult to make any accommodations to modernism in Russia or elsewhere. The work of…
Alex Clark: “Writers unite! The return of the protest novel”
Writing for the reader-citizen: “From Ali Smith’s Brexit book to Howard Jacobson’s Trump satire, writers are responding to the political moment. But can art bring real change?”