In Join the Revolution, Comrade, Charles Foran brings to the essay form the same restlessness and originality that mark his novels and non-fiction. Foran visits places in Vietnam that have been 'colonized' by western war films, talks to Shanghai residents about their colossal city and commiserates with the people of Bali about the effects of terrorist bombs on their island. In Beijing he looks up old friends he had known back in 1989 during the days before and after the June 4th massacre. "Join the revolution, Comrade," a friend had loved to say, quoting a line from a Bertolucci film. Foran also 'encounters' Miguel de Cervantes, the Buddha of Compassion, and the pumped-up American Tom Wolfe. He maps the geography of Canadian literature and pinpoints the 'inner-Newfoundland' of Wayne Johnston. He defends the novel against those who would tame it and uses an ancient Chinese philosopher to explain how one imagination -- his own-- works. Whether exploring the waterways of Thailand or the streets of his childhood in suburban Toronto, meditating on raising children in post-9/11 Asia or the music of good prose, Charles Foran's writing is fresh, alert, and free of convention.

Thank you, our Stalin, for a happy childhood." "Thank you, dear Marshal [Stalin], for our freedom, for our children's happiness, for life." Between the Russian Revolution and the Cold War, Soviet public culture was so dominated by the power of the state that slogans like these appeared routinely in newspapers, on posters, and in government proclamations. In this penetrating historical study, Jeffrey Brooks draws on years of research into the most influential and widely circulated Russian newspapers--including Pravda, Isvestiia, and the army paper Red Star--to explain the origins, the nature, and the effects of this unrelenting idealization of the state, the Communist Party, and the leader. Brooks shows how, beginning with Lenin, the Communists established a state monopoly of the media that absorbed literature, art, and science into a stylized and ritualistic public culture--a form of political performance that became its own reality and excluded other forms of public reflection. He presents and explains scores of self-congratulatory newspaper articles, including tales of Stalin's supposed achievements and virtue, accounts of the country's allegedly dynamic economy, and warnings about the decadence and cruelty of the capitalist West. Brooks pays particular attention to the role of the press in the reconstruction of the Soviet cultural system to meet the Nazi threat during World War II and in the transformation of national identity from its early revolutionary internationalism to the ideology of the Cold War. He concludes that the country's one-sided public discourse and the pervasive idea that citizens owed the leader gratitude for the "gifts" of goods and services led ultimately to the inability of late Soviet Communism to diagnose its own ills, prepare alternative policies, and adjust to new realities. The first historical work to explore the close relationship between language and the implementation of the Stalinist-Leninist program, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! is a compelling account of Soviet public culture as reflected through the country's press.

'You cannot kill ideas. Fidel, for the Third World, was not merely another leader. He was the mirror of its aspirations. That mirror will never be shattered.' - From the Introduction.//Fidel Castro's speeches were classrooms for the revolution. Through these speeches, Fidel came before the people to explain the conjuncture and problems the government faced with honesty and by putting them into historical context. Each of his speeches is a tour de force of explication, a history lesson, a sociology lesson, a political lesson, and even a lesson on literature. Fidel reached back to revolutionaries from an earlier time and dug into the data produced by the government. The traditions, experiences, and oral histories of national liberation and Marxism-Leninism articulated by Fidel came alive as he spoke to new audiences engaged in building a socialist experiment just miles away from the heart of the empire.Fidel Castro launched a battle of ideas in defense of socialist thought and the permanent mobilization of the people's consciousness. The speeches collected in this book carry forward the battle of ideas that framed the last decades of Fidel's life until he left us on 26 November 2016 at the age of ninety.

In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of the Caribbean island country of Grenada, establishing the People’s Revolutionary Government. The United States under President Reagan infamously invaded Grenada in 1983, staying until the New National Party won election, effectively dealing a death blow to socialism in Grenada. With Comrade Sister, Laurie Lambert offers the first comprehensive study of how gender and sexuality produced different narratives of the Grenada Revolution. Reimagining this period with women at its center, Laurie Lambert shows how the revolution must be recognized for its both productive and corrosive tendencies. Lambert argues that the literature of the Grenada Revolution exposes how the more harmful aspects of revolution are visited on, and are therefore more apparent to, women. Calling attention to the mark of black feminism on the literary output of Caribbean writers of this period, Lambert addresses the gap between women’s active participation in Caribbean revolution versus the lack of recognition they continue to receive.

The summer of 1972, before I turned nine, danger began knocking on doors all over China. Nine-year-old Ling has a very happy life. Her parents are both dedicated surgeons at the best hospital in Wuhan, and her father teaches her English as they listen to Voice of America every evening on the radio. But when one of Mao's political officers moves into a room in their apartment, Ling begins to witness the gradual disintegration of her world. In an atmosphere of increasing mistrust and hatred, Ling fears for the safety of her neighbors, and soon, for herself and her family. For the next four years, Ling will suffer more horrors than many people face in a lifetime. Will she be able to grow and blossom under the oppressive rule of Chairman Mao? Or will fighting to survive destroy her spirit—and end her life? Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

When people say “comrade,” they change the world In the twentieth century, millions of people across the globe addressed each other as “comrade.” Now, among the left, it’s more common to hear talk of “allies.” In Comrade, Jodi Dean insists that this shift exemplifies the key problem with the contemporary left: the substitution of political identity for a relationship of political belonging that must be built, sustained, and defended. Dean offers a theory of the comrade. Comrades are equals on the same side of a political struggle. Voluntarily coming together in the struggle for justice, their relationship is characterized by discipline, joy, courage, and enthusiasm. Considering the egalitarianism of the comrade in light of differences of race and gender, Dean draws from an array of historical and literary examples such as Harry Haywood, C.L.R. James, Alexandra Kollontai, and Doris Lessing. She argues that if we are to be a left at all, we have to be comrades.

One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead on the street, and the search for the killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence—at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But The Case of Comrade Tulayev, unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state. Marked by the deep humanity and generous spirit of its author, the legendary anarchist and exile Victor Serge, it is also a classic twentieth-century tale of risk, adventure, and unexpected nobility to set beside Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and André Malraux's Man's Fate.