An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.

  • On World-Building: Lessons From a Martyred Teacher

    On World-Building: Lessons From a Martyred Teacher

    Bayan Haddad once taught literature to Oudeh Hathaleen, who would become a teacher himself, as well as Palestinian community advocate and consultant on the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. In July, Oudeh was murdered by an Israeli settler. Haddad reflects on the lessons taught by colonial violence.

  • We Had it Coming [EXCERPTS]
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    We Had it Coming [EXCERPTS]

    Three new short stories by Luke O’Neil—”The rules,” “How to live,” and “Something that was once potentially good”—are excerpted here from his new book of stories, We Had it Coming, out from OR Books.

  • The Workplace Arms Race

    The Workplace Arms Race

    Shane Boyle reviews Craig Gent’s Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management. “Rather than representing a step towards scientific perfection, algorithmic management is simply the latest episode in capital’s interminable struggle to subjugate labor.”

  • Extractive Frontiers: An Interview With Thea Riofrancos

    Extractive Frontiers: An Interview With Thea Riofrancos

    In this extensive, wide ranging interview, Laleh Khalili speaks with Thea Riofrancos about her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, the political economy of lithium mining, the possibility of a just climate transition, and more.

  • On World-Building: Lessons From a Martyred Teacher

    On World-Building: Lessons From a Martyred Teacher

    Bayan Haddad once taught literature to Oudeh Hathaleen, who would become a teacher himself, as well as Palestinian community advocate and consultant on the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. In July, Oudeh was murdered by an Israeli settler. Haddad reflects on the lessons taught by colonial violence.

  • We Had it Coming [EXCERPTS]
    ,

    We Had it Coming [EXCERPTS]

    Three new short stories by Luke O’Neil—”The rules,” “How to live,” and “Something that was once potentially good”—are excerpted here from his new book of stories, We Had it Coming, out from OR Books.

  • An image of a sword hilt and blade leaned against a tree. "Logar's Sword (4)" by Avegost is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

    Live Action Role Play

    In “Live Action Role Play,” poet Christopher Blackman considers the linkages among LARPing, imperial decay, and the splendor of a full moon.

  • An image of an Israeli bomb hitting Rafah beyond a border wall; the smoke above the wall forms a halo. "Israeli Rockets hitting Rafah, Palestine" by Gigi Ibrahim is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

    Threadbare in Rafah

    Poet Ahmad Ibsais’s “Threadbare in Rafah” narrates the steadfastness of Palestinian children against the unimaginable terrors of Israel’s genocide.

  • The Workplace Arms Race

    Shane Boyle reviews Craig Gent’s Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management. “Rather than representing a step towards scientific perfection, algorithmic management is simply the latest episode in capital’s interminable struggle to subjugate labor.”

  • Horizons of Youth Liberation

    Sarah Brouillette reviews Madeline Lane-McKinley’s newest book, Solidarity With Children, from Haymarket. Lane-McKinley’s text conceptualizes the full scale of injustice perpetrated against children worldwide. By invoking Marxist-feminist theory, interpreting cultural texts, and critiquing sociopolitical conditions, Lane-McKinley surveys the horizons of a world in which children are no longer regarded as…

  • A History of Violence

    Noah Kulwin reviews Seth Harp’s new book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel,” tracing the historical continuities between Vietnam War-era drug smuggling operations and the overwhelming present-day criminality taking place at the Fort.

  • Incendiary Schemes

    Charlotte Rosen reviews Bench Ansfield’s new book, Born in Flames—a stunning and revelatory analysis of the systematic, profitable, and deadly arson schemes that were perpetrated by landlords and insurance companies in the Bronx during the 1970s.

  • Romance of the Class Traitor

    Urvi Kumbhat reviews the new novel from author Vivek Shanbhag (trans. Srinath Perur). Originally written in southwest India’s Kannada language, Sakina’s Kiss has been republished in the U.S. by McNally. Trading keenly on romance tropes and genre signifiers, Shanbhag uses the figure of the class traitor to turn up bourgeois…

  • Yugoslavia at Scale

    For more than a century, socialists in South East Europe strove to enact their politics at a scale between the national and the global. Jonah Walters reviews James M. Robertson’s Mediating Spaces, a new book that describes the rise and fall of the supranationalism in the Balkans by examining the…

  • Extractive Frontiers: An Interview With Thea Riofrancos

    In this extensive, wide ranging interview, Laleh Khalili speaks with Thea Riofrancos about her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, the political economy of lithium mining, the possibility of a just climate transition, and more.

  • Victor Serge, Turncoat Radical?

    Andrew Holter interviews Mitchell Abidor on Abidor’s new book, Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary, out from Pluto Press. “It seems like we in the English-speaking world, at least, have misunderstood some pretty important things about him”—including what Abidor argues was his late-life turn to reactionary anti-communism.

  • People Without Exception: An Interview With Divya Dwivedi

    Dialogue with the revolutionary philosopher Divya Dwivedi is never a neutral interaction. As we spoke with Dwivedi, she was facing death threats on social media platforms, including of threats of decapitation and calls for funding assassins. Concurrently, two prominent English-language Indian media outlets, India Today and News18, published articles depicting Dwivedi and her associates as…

  • Love Spells, Dying Empires: A Conversation with Lupita Limón Corrales

    Mallika Singh interviews poet and organizer Lupita Limón Corrales, whose new collection, ESTA BOCA ES MÍA, has now been published by nueoi press. Corrales’s poems, Singh writes, are “a testament to the dissolution of self, to the collective voice.”

  • To Gaza: An Interview with Nasser Rabah

    Writer and translator Alex Tan speaks to renowned Gazan poet Nasser Rabah on his new collection, Gaza: The Poem Said its Piece, selected and translated by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, and Khaled Al Hilli.