Hooray, hooray, itâs time for Friday Reads! Iâm getting my borscht on with Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (and feeling weirdly nostalgic for the huge brown semi-sour loaves that I lived on for two years in Pragueâ mmmm, chleb).Â
Intern Megan says Where the Bird Sings Best is âevery bit as bonkers and mindblowing as I feel like Jodorowsky probably is.â
Mr. Bob Mondello reports, âIâm getting a jump on Shakespeareâs Birthday (April 23) by reading accounts of the Astor Place Riots in Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now. Amazing story about a time when folks took theater reeeeeeally seriously: On May 19, 1849, more than 15,000 fans of American actor Edwin Forrest, descended on the Astor Place Opera House where his British rival William Charles Macready was performing Macbeth. The rioting not only stopped the show, but also resulted in 20 deaths and more than 100 injuries. Those were the days, no?âÂ
Founding Mother Susan Stamberg is reading Listener Supported as she prepares an obituary for Don (not Dan) Quayle, NPRâs first president â tune in to tonightâs All Things Considered to hear it.
Editor Nina has a little light weekend reading, Vincent Crapanzanoâs Recapitulations.
And Code Switchâs Karen Grigsby Bates has an ARC of Wednesday Martinâs Primates of Park Avenue. âMartin, an anthropologist, moved with her husband and child from downtown to Manhattanâs Upper East Side and used her anthropological skills to explain the social mores of the 1%. Equal parts frightening and entertaining.â
How about you? Whatâs on your shelf this weekend?
Cover Reveal! Alejandro Jodorowsky's Where the Bird Sings Best
As io9 revealed yesterday, the new cover art for Alejandro Jodorowsky's Where the Bird Sings Best is here!
Designed by Richard Ljoenes to resemble an old-timey circus poster, the visually explosive cover forecasts the religious and mystical facets of a book that teems with imagery and iconography. A Heraldic eagle, symbols from the Tarot (including from the thirteenth card, Death, which Jodorowsky always keeps on his person), bees and honeycomb, a kingly lion with a crown of thorns, and a Star of David all spread before the background of a circus tent.
Enticed? The hardcover is due for release on March 31, 2015. Learn more about the book here, check out the an excerpt in VICE here, and pre-order the print edition or buy the eBook below.
Where the Bird Sings Best
by Alejandro Jodorowsky
Translated from the Spanish by Alfred MacAdam
There has never been an artist like the polymathic Chilean director, author, and mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky. For eight decades, he has blazed new trails across a dazzling variety of creative fields. While his psychedelic, visionary films have been celebrated by the likes of John Lennon, Marina Abramovic, and Kanye West, his novelsâpraised throughout Latin America in the same breath as those of Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquezâhave remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. Until now.Â
Where the Bird Sings Best tells the fantastic story of the Jodorowskysâ emigration from Ukraine to Chile amidst the political and cultural upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jodorowskyâs book transforms family history into heroic legend: incestuous beekeepers hide their crime with a living cloak of bees, a czar fakes his own death to live as a hermit amongst the animals, a devout grandfather confides only in the ghost of a wise rabbi, a transgender ballerina with a voracious sexual appetite holds a would-be saint in thrall. Kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, and erotic, Where the Bird Sings Best expands the classic immigration story to mythic proportions.
October 15th is our one-year anniversary, and we're having a special, one-day only sale to celebrate! Join our newsletter group for all the details:Â http://www.restlessbooks.com/newsletter-sign-up/
Weâre thrilled to announce that our author Hamid Ismailov, a novelist, reporter, poet, translator, and BBC writer in residence whose works include The Railway, A Poet and Bin-Laden, and The Underground, will be making a rare U.S. appearance for the Restless Books Brooklyn Book Festival Bookends Event this fall. Of his choice to write fiction deemed âsubversive,â (eventually forcing him to flee Uzbekistan under threat of arrest), Ismailov has said âMy first novel was in Uzbek. I showed the novel to an older writer who had lived through Stalinâs purges. He told me, âThis will never be published. Youâll be arrested. You need to drop this and write in Russian.â I realized that, because of my experience, I was holding an entire civilization in my hands. I knew the Soviet experience, and its aftermath, from so many perspectives. The whole civilization was exploding inside me and it started to come out in the form of novels.â Ismailov will be in conversation with the Brooklyn-based Russian writer and critic Boris Fishman, author of the acclaimed novel A Replacement Life , for what promises to be a lively evening of cocktails, gourmet Russian cuisine, and discussion of the state of contemporary Russian literature and society at Karloff. We hope youâll join us for this very special gathering and encourage you to reserve tickets early, as space is limited.Â
This week, in the wake of the murders of four teenagers, a hundred Gazans have been killed by Israeli forces and Israeli civilians have been wounded and homes destroyed by Hamas missiles.Â
Tal Nitzan, author of the poetry collection At the End of Sleep, published by Restless in June, lives in Tel Aviv. Long active in the anti-occupation movement, Tal correspondsâwith the aid of Google Translateâwith the Palestinian poet Basem Al-Nabriss. Once a Director General of the Ministry of Culture for the Palestinian Authority, he was ousted from his post after Hamas took control in 2007. Tal and Basem have exchanged messages again this week, and Tal has shared her latest reply with Restless.
Dear Basem,
It is the fourth day of the war between my country and yoursâif the tormented Gaza strip could even be called a country. My government and Hamas are carrying it out, our peoples pay the price, and the end is not in sight. You write that you pray for the peace and safety of both peoples. You never forget to pray for us, even when your family is under Israeli fire. I don't know how to pray, and no words can express now my pain and rage and anxiety.
I think about your lone voice, ceaselessly and bravely advocating peace and non-violence in the face of a regime that wouldn't tolerate such opinions, and about the price you paid. I think about your absurd fate, persecuted and bombed alternately by Hamas and by the IDF, about the cruel choice you were forced to make, remaining with your family or saving your own life. I can't think of you as belonging to another people. For me, you are my people, beyond any doubt, and this is not a mere phrase: you are my brother in the most obvious, natural way. You share my most essential beliefs, you speak my deepest language.
You wrote to me today: "We need the voices of Israeli intellectuals, those voices that did not lose the essence of human values nd nobility. We need the voice of reason on both sides, the words that would abolish the barrier between our two peoples."
I promise you that these words are spoken here, and written and published, and shouted in parades, by the same voices that have been speaking against the ongoing occupation of Palestine and against the Israeli government's policy of war and aggression rather than striving for peace. Voices very much like yours, trying to break this vicious circle of suffering and hopelessness. It's hard to be heard now under the explosions and cries of incitement, and tragically, hate, fear, and vengeance spread much faster, like fire.
Hamas missiles have reached my town, for three days now I've been woken up by the sounds of alarm and explosions and shaking windows, but it's your family who is in immediate mortal danger every day and every hour. Gaza is threatened by a power cut, but I feel as if I'm writing to you from a bottomless darkness. Yet I don't renounce my hope that you and I and my children and yours and your little granddaughter Tal* will emerge from these sick, dark times and live the lives we deserve. It's your unyielding optimism that gives me hope.
I hold on to this light.
All my thoughts are with you,
Tal.
*Note: Al-Nabriss named his first granddaughter after NitzĂĄn.
It is the fourth day of the war between my country and yoursâif the tormented Gaza strip could even be called a country. My government and Hamas are carrying it out, our peoples pay the price, and the end is not in sight. You write that you pray for the peace and safety of both peoples. You never forget to pray for us, even when your family is under Israeli fire. I don't know how to pray, and no words can express now my pain and rage and anxiety.
I think about your lone voice, ceaselessly and bravely advocating peace and non-violence in the face of a regime that wouldn't tolerate such opinions, and about the price you paid. I think about your absurd fate, persecuted and bombed alternately by Hamas and by the IDF, about the cruel choice you were forced to make, remaining with your family or saving your own life. I can't think of you as belonging to another people. For me, you are my people, beyond any doubt, and this is not a mere phrase: you are my brother in the most obvious, natural way. You share my most essential beliefs, you speak my deepest language.
You wrote to me today: "We need the voices of Israeli intellectuals, those voices that did not lose the essence of human values nd nobility. We need the voice of reason on both sides, the words that would abolish the barrier between our two peoples."
I promise you that these words are spoken here, and written and published, and shouted in parades, by the same voices that have been speaking against the ongoing occupation of Palestine and against the Israeli government's policy of war and aggression rather than striving for peace. Voices very much like yours, trying to break this vicious circle of suffering and hopelessness. It's hard to be heard now under the explosions and cries of incitement, and tragically, hate, fear, and vengeance spread much faster, like fire.
Hamas missiles have reached my town, for three days now I've been woken up by the sounds of alarm and explosions and shaking windows, but it's your family who is in immediate mortal danger every day and every hour. Gaza is threatened by a power cut, but I feel as if I'm writing to you from a bottomless darkness. Yet I don't renounce my hope that you and I and my children and yours and your little granddaughter Tal will emerge from these sick, dark times and live the lives we deserve. It's your unyielding optimism that gives me hope.
I hold on to this light.
All my thoughts are with you,
Tal.
Tal Nitzån is an Israeli poet, editor, and translator of Hispanic literature.  She is the author of At the End of Sleep.
INTERNATIONAL SCI-FI: GREAT SCIENCE FICTION BOOKS IN TRANSLATION
We're thrilled that our author and translator Michael Kandel will be a featured speaker at Readercon this week! A prolific writer and editor, Kandel will talk about Russian SFF and the Polish sci-fi master Marek S. Huberath, whose Nest of Worlds Kandel translated for Restless Books.
Readercon is an annual convention devoted to "imaginative literature" of all varieties. It draws authors, editors, and readers from around the world. Thanks to the work of translators like Kandel, sci-fi novels from far-off places in this world are becoming available to a wider, global readership. In honor of that effort, we've created a list of must-read, international science fiction. Even if you can't get to Readercon, grab one of these great sci-fi reads and let your imagination run wild!
                  LUIZ BRAS, PARAĂSO LĂQUIDO
Luiz Bras doesnât exist. It is the pseudonym of Nelson de Oliveira, an award-winning Brazilian writer who became Luiz Bras when he took up the sci-fi genre. ParaĂso Liquido is a collection of short stories, widely considered to be one of the best contemporary Brazilian Science Fiction collections.
                 CARLOS ORSI, GUERRA JUSTA
A Brazilian sci-fi writer who is also a science journalist, Orsiâs Guerra Justa is a story of cyberpunk conspiracy set in post-apocalyptic earth featuring the Pontifica Cult, a religious sect that rules the world through a dangerous mix of violence and benevolence.
                  JAN POLĂÄEK, SPÄĆ NĂ VLAK CH. 24. 12 (TRAIN 24.12.)
Dark sci-fi from the Czech Republic set in a society after Germany triumphs in WWII, this is widely considered to be one of the best European science fiction novels of the decade.
                   YOSS, PLANET FOR RENT
                   ANDRI MAGNASON, LOVESTAR
Thanks to Seven Stories Press, Icelandic author Andri Magnason's LoveStar is now available in English. Both a romance and a satire of modern corporate control, in this world âhowlersâ pay back debts by impulsively shouting ads to passersby and the dead are no longer buried, but shot through the atmosphere like shooting stars. A tender love story set in a world where any second might lead to annihilation by falling coffin or consumption by a ferocious mutant Mickey Mouse, LoveStar is a must-read for fans of literary science fiction.
                  MAREK S. HUBERATH, NEST OF WORLDS
In this dystopian story, Polish author Marek Huberath describes a world where the inhabitants are forced to move to a new âLandâ every thirty-five years, and each land is a rigid caste society based on hair color. Addressing moral and philosophical issues, the story is a mysterious adventure that explores the space between love and the darkest aspects of human nature.
Graphic Art Is the Ideal Language for Action: An Interview with Eko
On June 23rd, 2014, the one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Zacatecas in the Mexican Civil War, Restless Books released Pancho Villa Takes Zacatecas, an epic graphic novel commemorating the pivotal victory for the División del Norte. With a story by prolific and award-winning writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II and stark illustrations by the artist Eko, this book not only depicts one of the most decisive moments of the revolution, it also profiles, in glorified action, one of the most beloved heroes of contemporary Mexico.
The cartoonist, engraver, and painter known as Eko has collaborated on projects for The New York Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and El PaĂs, in addition to having published numerous books in Mexico and Spain. He taps into a broad tradition of Mexican folk art with his erotic and often controversial wood etchings, which can be found on his website.
IS and JS: Tell us about your process for making engravings.
E: In the beginning, I think and imagine each scene. Then, I take my knife and attack the plate with furious lines, like a battle between my mind and the iron plate. I make hundreds of drawings, but taking them to the plate is a fatal process, absolute, with no return. When the drawing is finished, the plate is dipped in nitric acid and burns the drawing while its vapors invade my lungs. After some cases when you print it, it is a tragedy. In others, itâs close to the initial intention, but itâs never perfect.Â
How is the eBook version of Pancho Villa Takes Zacatecas different from the print edition?
Posada to me is the first urban artist, a guerrilla for art. His work is made for the streets and the people. He uses the cheapest paper and makes his prints everyday with gossip, murders, and political criticism. Posada is the teacher of Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and all those new artists. But Posada is different because he worked to the limit, in the middle of a war.Â
Your work interacts with both European and Mexican artistic traditions. German Expressionism (KĂ€the Kollwitzâs prints come to mind) and Day of the Dead imagery seem especially present. Who are your influences, aside from Posada?
Otto Dixâs The War etchings. Frans Masereel and his total black wood cutsâthe constructions of his images and his notion of space. I studied Russian constructivism and Hans Holbeinâs Dance of Death. I think of art as a continuum, and the epic quality of this novel demanded a dangerous language, syncretic and cruel.
Why is Pancho Villa such an icon? What is his ugly side?
The revolution is always ugly for its enemies. Villa is a rebel; he has a natural sense of justice. If Villa were alive now, he surely would make a new revolutionâagainst the financial system, for example.
The book is based on a chapter of Paco Ignacio Taibo IIâs biography of Villa. How did the idea for turning it into a graphic novel come about?
The graphic novel is about heroes and is the ideal language for action. Paco and I are a team, like the Blues Brothers.Â
What happened with all the civilians during the Battle of Zacatecas? They seem conspicuously absent in the book, with one panel noting that the streets were abandoned. Were they evacuated, or did they get caught up in the fight?Â
The Zacatecas natives have their roots from the Chichimecas, a very brave tribe. When the war fell on them they hid in the cellars. They resisted and saw rivers of blood in the streets. The bullets sounded like rain, and they starved.
The bookâs last page clarifies that the book is âa mix of fiction and reality.â Isnât everything in life that way?
Fiction is better than reality. Revolution is a chaos of blood and pain, but in the novel it has a logical order; it is a story with a conclusion.Â
The journalist John Reed was not present at Zacatecas, but his presence serves as a convenient stand-in for the curious reader who needs to ask questions to get acclimated. When is it inappropriate to bend reality like this?
History is a science that implies you can speculate with facts to seek the truth; Reed was a war journalist, the perfect witness. Â
Mexico celebrated the centennial of the revolution a few years ago. Has the revolution really ended?
The revolution is an urgent process to break our state of conformism and apathy; we need a new revolution in the collective mind. The systems are made by the powerful, and they have interests, not missions. We need a different systemâmore egalitarian, more human.
Voluntourism is ultimately about the fulfillment of the volunteers themselves, not necessarily what they bring to the communities they visit.
This must-read article looks at the power of imagery and photography in the growing business of global voluntourism - a popular trend amongst youth from Western countries that involves young, and sometimes inexperienced, individuals paying large amounts of money to travel to âdevelopingâ nations to do everything from teaching, to building schools and providing healthcare.Â
Whilst intentions may be well-meaning, aside from the patronizing aspect of these projects that resemble colonial missionary missions, the very fact that volunteering has been turned into a for-profit business is of major concern. So why does voluntourism still continue to be popular? According to Lauren Kascak & Sayantani DasGupta at the Pacific Standard, photography plays a significant role in the recruiting of people to participate in these programs.
As Kascak and DasGupta say:
Photography is a big part of the answer. Voluntourism organizations donât have to advertise, because they can crowdsource. Photographyâparticularly the habit of taking and posting selfies with local childrenâis a central component of the voluntourism experience. Hashtags like #InstagrammingAfrica are popular with students on international health brigades, as are #medicalbrigades, #globalhealth, and of course the nostalgic-for-the-good-days hashtag #takemeback.
One of the writers themselves was inspired to become a âvoluntouristâ for this very reason citing âphotographs posted by other studentsâ as the inspiration that propelled them to go on their first overseas âmedical missionâ:
When classmates uploaded the experience of themselves wearing scrubs beside adorable children in developing countries, I believed I was missing out on a pivotal pre-med experience. I took over 200 photos on my first international volunteer mission. I modeled those I had seen on Facebook and even pre-meditated photo opportunities to acquire the âperfectâ image that would receive the most Likes.
With time however, she became âuncomfortable with the ethics of those photographsâ and decided not to take her camera along. One of the things Iâve always wondered about concerning voluntourism and other noble charity missions is why the need for all the press and cameras? Why the need to take the same types of photographs of the same kinds of work by the same kinds of people? It seems I, and many others, are not the only ones with these critical thoughts in mind. Thatâs because, as the writers say, âvoluntourism is ultimately about the fulfillment of the volunteers themselves, not necessarily what they bring to the communities they visit.â Itâs a self-serving mission fueled by a mixture of narcissism and ignorance. As Kascak observed whilst on her medical mission trip in Ghana (a hotspot for many western volunteers),
âI realized that local people werenât purchasing health insurance, since they knew there would be free foreign health care and medications available every few months. This left them vulnerable in the intervening times, not to mention when the organization would leave the community.â
Kascak and DasGupta have broken down the three most common types of voluntourist photographs, as per their observations.
THE SUFFERING OTHER
In a photograph taken by a fellow voluntourist in Ghana (not shown), a child stands isolated with her bare feet digging in the dirt. Her hands pull up her shirt to expose an umbilical hernia, distended belly, and a pair of too-big underwear. Her face is uncertain and her scalp shows evidence of dermatological pathology or a nutritional deficiencyâmaybe both. Behind her, only weeds grow.
Anthropologists Arthur and Joan Kleinman note that images of distant, suffering women and children suggest there are communities incapable of or uninterested in caring for its own people. These photographs justify colonialist, paternalistic attitudes and policies, suggesting that the individual in the photograph âŠ
⊠must be protected, as well as represented, by others. The image of the subaltern conjures up an almost neocolonial ideology of failure, inadequacy, passivity, fatalism, and inevitability. Something must be done, and it must be done soon, but from outside the local setting. The authorization of action through an appeal for foreign aid, even foreign intervention, begins with an evocation of indigenous absence, an erasure of local voices and acts.
THE SELF-DIRECTED SAMARITAN
Here we have a smiling young white girl with a French braid, medical scrubs, and a well-intentioned smile. This young lady is the centerpiece of the photo; she is its protagonist. Her scrubs suggest that she is doing important work among those who are so poor, so vulnerable, and so Other.
The girl is me. And the photograph was taken on my first trip to Ghana during a 10-day medical brigade. Iâm beaming in the photograph, half towering and half hovering over these children. I do not know their names, they do not know my name, but I directed a friend to capture this moment with my own camera. Why?
This photograph is less about doing actual work and more about retrospectively appearing to have had a positive impact overseas. Photographs like these represent the overseas experience in accordance with what writer Teju Cole calls the âWhite Savior Industrial Complex.â
Moreover, in directing, capturing, and performing in photos such as these, voluntourists prevent themselves from actually engaging with the others in the photo. In On Photography, Susan Sontag reminds us:
Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing â which means thatâŠit is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.
On these trips, we hide behind the lens, consuming the world around us with our powerful gazes and the clicking of camera shutters. When I directed this photo opportunity and starred in it, I used my privilege to capture a photograph that made me feel as though I was engaging with the community. Only now do I realize that what I was actually doing was making myself the hero/star in a story about âsuffering Africa.â
THE OVERSEAS SELFIE
In his New York Times Op-Ed, that modern champion of the selfie James Franco wrote:
Selfies are avatars: Mini-Meâs that we send out to give others a sense of who we areâŠ. In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, âHello, this is me.â
Although related to the Self-Directed Samaritan shot, thereâs something extra-insidious about this type of super-close range photo. âHello, this is meâ takes on new meaningâthere is only one subject in this photo, the white subject. Capturing this image and posting it on the Internet is to understand the Other not as a separate person who exists in the context of their own family or community. but rather as a prop, an extra, someone only intelligible in relation to the Western volunteer.
On Sunday, June 22, we had the rare thrill of celebrating our series Restless Women Travelers at one of the most beautiful places in the country: Edith Wharton's home in the Berkshires, The Mount. Speaking at the event were three travel writers who kept the audience at rapt attention as they discussed what it means to be a travel writer, how to succeed as a woman traveling alone, and how to remain open to newâand sometimes frighteningâexperiences: Lavinia Spalding, author of the introduction to our edition of A Motor-Flight Through France, Marcia DeSanctis, who's just finished a book called 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, and Colleen Kinder, who teaches travel writing at Yale. Take a look at the stunning photosâand be sure to sign up for our newsletter for information on fabulous Restless events in the future!
Giveaway Contest: Tickets to Alejandro Jodorowsky Screening of The Holy Mountain
We're giving away a limited number of tickets to our book launch party and screening of Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain this Friday at Nitehawk Cinema! Just reblog this post and enter here.
Men play the game Dame, in the village of Karango, South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo. June 2014. Photo by Jana AĆĄenbrennerovĂĄ @asenbrennerova #drc #drcongo #asenbrennerova (at DR Congo)
