A Communist Fiction Reading Group
Red Love Book Club
Red Love Book Club
So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.
– Eduardo Galeano
How do we imagine the new world that we are building?
Whether it be stories borne of the brutal violence of imperialism, or futures where working people have triumphed over their oppressors, fiction gives us the opportunity to experience the truth of another life, allowing us to experience the fullness of their emotions, their struggles, and their dreams.
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? Fiction can be a tool for exploring the conditions of the world, a way of understanding how things are, for what changes we demand, and what futures we can dream. There is so much literary fiction that is produced by struggle and that are in and of themselves beautiful works of revolutionary art and culture.
We’ll meet once each 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!
Book Calendar
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: 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
All That’s Left to You
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
Ursula K. Le Guin
(United States)
Ursula K. Le Guin’s famed utopian novel: a scientist 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
James Baldwin
(United States)
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
Jacques Stephen Alexis
(Haiti)
Authored by the father of Haitian literature and militant Marxist: Hilarion 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
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
Leslie Marmon Silko
(Laguna Pueblo/U.S.)
Almanac of the Dead unfolds to tell the unforgettable story of the struggle of native peoples in the Americas to keep, at all costs, the core of their culture. A well-known psychic’s duty is to transcribe the ancient, painfully preserved notebooks that contain the history of her own people — a Native American Almanac of the Dead.