Literature
Events
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Chile’s 9/11: Fifty Years of Literary Resistance
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsReading group in progress, ending 2/8/24. September 2023 marked fifty years since the overthrow of Salvador Allende's socialist government on September 11, 1973. To honor the struggles and sufferings of the Chilean people, the MEP's Literature Group is reading Chilean writers active before, during, and since the Pinochet dictatorship.
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Palestine: Celebrating 75 Years of Literature
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsRead Palestinian fiction, poetry, and related literature in weekly meetings with the MEP's Literature Group. The ongoing catastrophe in the Middle East breaks our hearts daily. As part of our mission to explore creative political resistance to oppression, we will read several novels and poems by Palestinian authors.
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Reading Science Fiction Politically: Diverging Futures
FeaturedIn Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba, edited by Basma Ghalayini, as well as other recent books, Palestinian authors have begun to discover the power of science fiction. "Everyday life, for is a kind of dystopia." In this situation, "The real future --the actual future -- is unknowable. But for SF writers, ... Read more
Free – $75.00 -
Summer Noir 2024
FeaturedThe MEP Literature Group’s Summer Noir tradition of enjoying the bracing vitality of pulp continues with six short novels on the themes of difficult trips and political mayhem. Be warned: Do not expect happy endings in novels featuring corruption, futility and deception. Enrollees need not attend all sessions; to accommodate summer travel, we selected short ... Read more
Free – $65.00 -
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Celebrating 75 Years of Palestinian Literature – Final Series
Three weekly sessions on Thursdays at 7 pm US ET, Starting January 9 The MEP’s months-long reading of Palestinian literature concludes in January with a reading of the recently issued memoir My Palestine: An Impossible Exile by Mohammad Tarbush. This highly praised memoir written by a man born during the Nakba and who died after ... Read more
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Reading Science Fiction Politically: In Ascension
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants"To build a better future, we have to envision it first." Reading science fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for "envisioning" a future worth building. This fall, we continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.
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Exploring the Literature of Afro-Surrealism
Thursdays, 7-9 pm ET, beginning April 24 This spring, the MEP Literature Reading Group takes up novels loosely grouped as "Afro-Surrealism." Borrowing from use by Amiri Baraka in the 1970s, D. Scot Miller encouraged use of the term through his 2009 essay, “Afrosurreal Manifesto." Writers and artists in the African diaspora have now reclaimed the ... Read more
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Darkest Los Angeles
Institute for the Radical Imagination NY, United StatesDennis Broe leads a group reading of his five Los Angeles novels set in the film-noir period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The contradictions we will unearth in that postwar period, the period of crime films that visually documented this seedy reality, have never been resolved, only continually papered over, and so they resound today.
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Reading Death of the Author by Nigeria’s Nnedi Okorafor
Featured Science and Visionary FictionOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants"To build a better future, we have to envision it first." Reading science fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for "envisioning" a future worth building. We continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.
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Reading Science Fiction Politically: Severance by Ling Ma
Featured Science and Visionary FictionOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants"To build a better future, we have to envision it first." Reading science fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for "envisioning" a future worth building. We continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.
Get Tickets Free -
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Summer in France in the Shade of Noir
FeaturedOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe MEP Literature Group continues its tradition of easy summer reading focusing on the noir genre. Our two selections - 'Command Performance' and 'Creation Lake' - are both set in France and both deal with corruption in high places by right-wing politicians and corporations who manipulate inept investigators of low social standing and morals.
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Resisting Oppression: Reading Science Fiction Politically
Featured Science and Visionary FictionOnline: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants"To build a better future, we have to envision it first." Reading science fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for "envisioning" a future worth building. We continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.
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The Politics of Collecting with Eunsong Kim
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn her new book, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a ... Read more
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Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary, with Mitchell Abidor
FeaturedRecording available on YouTubeJoin us for a conversation with Mitchell Abidor, author of the forthcoming book, "Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary."
Today, thanks to his classic memoirs and novels, Victor Serge is highly esteemed by virtually all segments of the left. But who was this man, who led such a thrilling life on the frontlines of history? -
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Octavia Butler: ‘Positive Obsession’ and ‘Wild Seed’
Alternate Mondays, Next on December 8, 5-6:30 pm ET Watch for new selections coming soon, featuring Frankenstein and the Chicano Frankenstein. Join us for a new appreciation of Octavia Butler, beginning with Susana M. Morris’s pathbreaking new biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia Butler followed by Butler’s prophetic Wild Seed and other ... Read more
Free