SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
Resistance is not futile
RON JACOBS welcomes the long overdue translation of an epic work that chronicles resistance to fascism during WWII
MURDER AFORETHOUGHT: The execution of 56 Poles in Bochnia, near Krakow on December 18 1939
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
RON JACOBS welcomes the translation into English of an angry cry from the place they call the periphery
GUILLERMO THOMAS recommends a useful book aimed at informing activists with local examples of solidarity in action around the world
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III: A Novel
Peter Weiss, Duke University Press, £26.47
THE third volume of Peter Weiss’s masterwork The Aesthetics of Resistance opens with the narrator describing the murder of dozens of innocents by Nazi troops. In actuality, he is watching his mother lost in a hallucinatory vision brought on by the madness she and her husband have witnessed in their forced exile from their home in Bohemia.
It is not until near the novel’s end that we discover that not only did she witness such executions — soldiers lining up civilians in front of a ditch then shooting them from behind so they fall face first into their mass grave — but that she fell into such a pit alive, wrestling with the dying humans to get out after the shooting ended. It was this moment that her mind broke and began to withdraw from the deranged reality of the Nazi frenzy of murder and annihilation.
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The Morning Star sorts the good eggs from the rotten scoundrels of the year
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HENRY BELL steps warily through the collection of a Glaswegian war profiteer to experience his collection of Degas’ remarkable images of working people
ANDY HEDGECOCK celebrates the way that US writers have always used crime and sci-fi to explore and express dissident ideas