There are lots.
My recent favourite explicitly Leftish sci fi thriller was China Miéville's Kraken.
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leftist novels
I was wondering if any one could inform me of any leftist novels. I have looked every where but can't seem to find any. I have already read 1984 and animal farm so anything along those lines or just any leftist novel will do. thanks comrads.
There are lots.
My recent favourite explicitly Leftish sci fi thriller was China Miéville's Kraken.
Agreed with blake. Pretty much anything by Mieville is worth reading.
Hmmm....there's also Kim Stanley Robinson. Science fiction writer who is pretty open about his left-wing views, and who portrays alternatives to capitalism in his novels.
There's also the classic author of hardboiled detective stories Dashiell Hammett, famous for novels like The Maltese Falcon. He was also a card carrying member of the Communist Party USA.
Also pretty much anything by John Steinbeck. Graham Greene is also pretty good as well.
There's also the classic anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun, which was written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the notorious Hollywood Ten.
Oh, and if science fiction is your game....how about a science fiction novel written by an honest-to-God Bolshevik? Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov. It's an old school scientific romance a la H. G. Wells.
I would recommend Victor Serge's trilogy; 'Men in Prison', 'Birth of our Power', and 'Conqured City'. They are novels, but follow his life to a certain extent, and go from A French prison in the First World War to Petrograd in 1921 via the workers uprising in Spain in 1919. The first one is in my opinion the weakest, but they are related by theme, not chars gets so you can read then in any order you like.
Devrim
I recommend a novel called How the steel tempered by Nikolay Ostrovsky. Its about a young man in Russia, he gets invoved with the revolution, the civil war, joins the bolsheviks. Its a good read.
The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols
"Win, lose or draw...long as you squabble and you get down, that's gangsta."
Atlas Shrugged
Just Kidding! Native Son is a great book.
What about chinese author Mo Yan? He won the literary nobel not long ago and if I recall correctly, he was criticized by bourgeois liberals for supposedly being too close to Mao. I personally have not had the chance to read any of his novels but his style of hallucinatory realism sounds very promising.
Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. - V.I. Lenin
La Condition Humaine by Malraux is awfully good. Also Out of the Night by Jan Valtin I found amazing, even if it is written in Socialist Realist style. I was delighted that comrades mentioned The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuinn and The Milagro Beanfield War. I must admit I never thought the latter was exactly a "leftist" novel, but I loved it because it was so funny and had such a wide reach. To me it was the perfect antidote to the wearying 100 Years of Solitude, which I could barely get through.
There is a brazilian writed named Jorge Amado who was a member of the CP for most of his life, and a communist for all of it.
He had works translated to many languages, I would suggest for you to look for "Mar Morto" about the lives of the sailors, "Capitães da Areia", about a gang of homeless kids and "O Cavaleiro da Esperança", a rather sensationalist biography of Luis Carlos Prestes, but an interesting read nonetheless.
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'q' by luther blissett or really anything by this group of authors, now using the pseudonym 'wu ming'
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
"100 Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez has some themes leftists might find interesting. Corporate hegemony, civil wars, labor massacres, that kind of stuff.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”
-James Baldwin
"We change ideas like neckties."
- E.M. Cioran
Also Gorki.
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Don't just read novelists.
There's stuff like The Grapes of Wrath and Out of Eden that's left wing and excellent, but there's also stuff that's not novelized which is excellent.
Road to Wigan Pier is highly recommended.
Now the reaction is beginning - inspired by Ireland and Russia. Scotland must again have independednce, but not to be ruled over by traitor cheifs and politicians. The communism of the clans must be re-established on a modern basis.
We can safely say, then: back to communism and forward to communism.
-John MacLean
the jungle by upton sinclair
Letters of Insurgents by Fredy Perlman (I think it's one of his best books.)
You bend your will power and you dare to call yourselves free.
You become accustomed to slavery
Down with dogmatism, down with law.
Some I wanted to say have been mentioned (The Dispossessed, Jungle, Mars Trilogy, Steinbeck), but here's a ton more:
"The Iron Heel" by Jack London is one of his more explicitly socialist works. Among the earliest dystopian books, it that takes the form of a future socialist society looking back at a failed socialist uprising against an oligarchic dictatorship in the United States taking place in the early 20th century. Trotsky acknowledged the book as one that kind of anticipated Fascism- having been published in 1908- which the dictatorship in the book "Iron Heel", bore many similarities to (in the sense of a capitalist democracy in crisis giving rise to an oppressive regime to protect the elite). London had some race problems regarding Asians unfortunately, though they do not come up in the book.
Some of London's other books are good too. Of note his nonfiction "People of the Abyss" is an interesting look at the working class East End of London at the turn of the century, though brutally realistic.
Another leftist alt-history is "Fire on the Mountain" by Terry Bisson detailing a successful, socialist-inspired slave rebellion in the American south, though it's difficult to find a physical copy.
Another interesting book is Emile Zola's Germinal. Germinal was one of several in a book series by Zola but is probably the better known among them. The book is set in a mining town that undergoes a strike- Zola shows a pretty convincing scene of a working-class city and the pains it goes through when it has a strike. The ending is more dramatic, but still a good read to me.
If you're interested in seeing older (and different) perceptions, you can read "Looking Backward", which is a rip-van-winkle type story where a man from the late 1800s wakes up in a socialistic-future utopia. It's more of a state-run affair though. Another book along similar lines is HG Wells "The Sleeper Awakes". Wells was a self-professed socialist too (the technocratic sort though), his other works are cool.
There are also books with leftist themes or subject matter though not explicitly leftist.
Ernest Hemingway had some leftist sympathies, his "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was set in the Spanish Civil War though you should be aware he was not too warm towards the anarchists or POUM if that's something that doesn't work for you. If you liked that, his other books are along the same lines (The Old Man and the Sea being an exception if your talking strictly about "leftist").
Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy is a pretty interesting story that is used as social commentary on the American social system and the drive towards wealth, as was his earlier novel Sister Carrie.
Similar themes are in F. Scott Fitzsgerald's This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby or Sinclair Lewis's Babbit (It Can't Happen Here is also interesting...). William Faulkner also tackled class and race in his books like The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. There was also John Dos Passos's USA trilogy, which is a similar series though the author did a 180 in his political views after it and became a conservative.
The classic Les Miserables by Victor Hugo concerned itself a lot with class and poverty, though these help to provide the setting more than the primary focus. It was written about the time Hugo had begun to shift from his previous consrevative views to a more liberal-republican one.
I've always had a soft spot for Kurt Vonnegut's books. Some leftist themes end up in them though they aren't explicit (the author was a self-professed socialist however), some of his notable works include Slaughterhouse Five and Sirens of Titan.
The book "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman is a take on the effects of war and other topics. The author is a Vietnam vet too so he draws on personal experience. A nice foil (imo) to the hawkish Starship Troopers.
A modern sci-fi writer with leftist themes is Iain M. Banks and his Culture novels. More of a technocratic-vibe but some interesting themes none the less.
Last edited by Red Commissar; 5th June 2013 at 03:29.
I recall seeing a book called "The Harbor" in a book store. It was a Penguin Classics book, the front cover was that old "The IWW is coming" poster.
A quick google reveals the author to be Ernest Poole. So uh, yeah, try that out
I ALMOST DIED OF A DRUG OVERDOSE BECAUSE OF ANARCHISM AND PUNK ROCK
jean-patrick manchette wrote some post-68 leftish noir novels of which unfortunately only a few are in english but have also been made into cool graphic novels.
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
