Theater Provokes!

A collaboration between Revolution Books and New York Theater Workshop

NYTW

RB

During the 2011-2012 theater season, Revolution Books is partnering with the New York Theater Workshop to recommend a reading list for each of the four new plays produced at NYTW.  

The books and DVD to the left are available at Revolution Books, 146 W. 26th Street, NY, NY. Stop by the bookstore for a conversation and to look around. You will find a unique and provocative place -- a center of a movement for revolution. We can also mail the books, or you can request our new “FRESH BOOKS DIRECT” service: a store volunteer will deliver the books free to you. (Revolution Books is all-volunteer and not-for-profit.)

Revolution Books and New York Theater Workshop will also co-sponsor panel discussions in connection with their plays FOOD AND FADWA (January 2012) and AN ILIAD (Spring 2012) on topics related to the plays’ themes. These events will take place at Revolution Books and will feature theater artists, writers, and speakers from NYTW and RB.

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Upcoming productions at New York Theater Workshop:

ONCE (Fall 2011)
On the streets of Dublin, an Irish musician and a Czech immigrant are drawn together by their shared love of music.

FOOD AND FADWA
(Jan 2012)
A play about an unmarried, 30-something Palestinian woman living in Bethlehem in the politically volatile West Bank in the West Bank.

AN ILIAD
(Spring 2012)
Visionary creators Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare have crafted a sprawling yarn based on Homer’s epic poem.

Look for Revolution Books’ upcoming readings lists and announcements of panel discussions on this page.

Click here to buy tickets and to see descriptions of the 4 plays from the NYTW.

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REVOLUTION BOOKS
LIBROS REVOLUCIÓN

Scientific and poetic, wrangling and visionary –– Revolution Books is alive with a defiant spirit that refuses to accept that the horrors of today's world have to be. People come into Revolution Books from all over the world to find the books and the deep engagement with each other about the possibility of a radically different way the world could be. A bookstore at the center of building a movement for revolution.

At the heart of Revolution Books is the cutting edge work of Bob Avakian, whose new synthesis of communism envisions a radically new society that is overcoming all of the oppression of the current world while giving great scope to intellectual work, ferment, and dissent as integral to the complete emancipation of humanity.

Revolution Books has an extensive collection of books on history and political theory, novels and poetry, atheism and science, world geopolitics and philosophy, as well as DVDs, children's literature and books in Spanish. Check out the nightly discussions, author readings, open-mics, film screenings, and major forums.

Come browse the shelves, sit and read, or discuss the burning issues of our time. At Revolution Books you can meet the movement that is changing the world.

Revolution Books /
Libros Revolucion

146 W. 26th Street
212-691-3341
Open every day 12 noon til 7pm

 

Suggested Readings to accompany
Elevator Repair Services' production of
THE SELECT (THE SUN ALSO RISES)
at the New York Theater Workshop

Revolution Books’ reading lists for the New York Theater Workshop plays will include books and DVD’s which illuminate the history and themes in the plays. We looked for companion novels, films and non-fiction works which reveal something about the deep-structure contradictions beneath the play’s plot/setting. The recommendations reflect RB’s purpose as a place to find the books and engagement about why the world is the way it is and how it could be radically changed. 

sar   THE SELECT (THE SUN ALSO RISES) began previews on August 19; the play opens on September 11 and closes October 9, 2011. The play is “a fresh take on Ernest Hemingway’s tale of young ex-patriots living in Europe after World War I. Journalist Jake Barnes, his former lover Lady Brett Ashley and the writer Robert Cohn inhabit Europe to cope with post-war realities and enter the Age of Anxiety following the end of the war.” (NYTW)

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eaw  To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918,
by Adam Hochschild
World War I stands as history's first great imperialist world war, a war that also gave rise to the first communist revolution. In a riveting narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, historian Adam Hochschild focuses on Britain and the long-ignored moral drama of the war's brave critics up against the patriotic loyalists backed by the UK government’s “xenophobic torrent” of pro-war propaganda.  This was replicated by the other imperial powers-- a flood amounting to “the greatest political propaganda barrage history had seen.” Washington Post: “Hochschild’s depiction of life in the trenches is so vivid that some readers may have difficulty stomaching it…”

The author is best known for “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa” (1998). Hochschild will appear at Revolution Books in October, watch for announcement.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, hardbound, 480 pages, $28.00

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three soldiers   Three Soldiers, by John dos Passos
Written about World War 1 in 1920, Three Soldiers broke new ground as the first realist war novel. The book follows three privates from different class backgrounds, revealing the process by which their patriotism dissolves.  H.L. Mencken (one of the literary critics Hemingway references in “The Sun Also Rises”) had this to say about Three Soldiers:

“…At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather. It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war; it even changed the recollections of actual veterans of the war. They saw, no doubt, substantially what Dos Passos saw, but it took his bold realism to disentangle their recollections from the prevailing buncombe and sentimentality."

Paperback, $10.00
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bcp  The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd,
by Alexander Rabinowitch
This book gives some sense of the drama and colossal historical impact of this first-ever successful proletarian revolution. Emerging out of the first world war, the Soviet revolution opened the door to a new kind of society on the planet—one without the exploitation of the millions by a small capitalist class, and the whole dog-eat-dog ethos that flows from that. This absorbing history explores the changing situation and aspirations of the workers, soldiers, and sailors, and the role of Lenin’s revolutionary party in leading them to seize power in October 1917 and establish an unprecedented new society. Written by a non-Marxist academic at University of Indiana.    It’s worth pondering the fact that Hemingway’s characters, who had all just lived through WW1 and were searching desperately for meaning in life, do not reference this earthshaking social experiment that was unfolding at the same time.

Haymarket/Pluto Press, 1976, revised 2004, paper, $19.00

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pog  Paths of Glory
(DVD film- 1957) is a masterful, unsentimental anti-war film about World War I. It was 28 year-old Stanley Kubrick's fourth feature-length film, and starred Kirk Douglas… An independent 87-minute black and white film, shot on location in Germany with a budget of less than $1 million, it is a harsh indictment of the first imperialist world war. The film exposes the gap between those who take orders and fight the wars in muddy trenches, and those who give the orders for the ruling powers, safely shielded from the ravages of war.

DVD, $18.00

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wed debs  Writings of Eugene V. Debs
Debs was founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Socialist Party. His speech denouncing American participation in World War I led to his arrest and conviction in 1918 under the Espionage Act of 1917. He was sentenced to 10 years.

Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These autocrats, these tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the “patriots,” while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims—they are the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight…”
- from Debs’ Canton, Ohio Anti-War Speech - June 16, 1918
Paperback, $12.99
Speech is also online at:  http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1918/canton.htm

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frFailure of a Revolution: Germany 1918-1919
by Sebastian Haffner
Hard-to-find non-fiction work, written in German in 1968 by the author of the well-known “Defying Hitler: A Memoir.” Haffner’s “Failure of a Revolution” presents the turbulent atmosphere in defeated Germany and chronicles “the betrayal” of the social democratic (leftist in words) German government who ruthlessly went after the revolutionary movement and crushed it, including killing its leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Extreme right wing paramilitary forces were the government’s instrument. The author, Sebastian Haffner grew up during the 30s in Germany and he finds parallels in 1918-19 period with the Nazis’ rise to power.  

Translated from German, published in the U.S. in 1986 by Banner Press, $15.00
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sar   The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
The play is loosely based on this novel about young ex-patriots, a “lost generation” living in Europe after World War I. Written in 1925.
Scribner, paperback, $15.00
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basics  BAsics from the Talks and Writings of Bob Avakian  
Revolution Books also recommends this new book of quotations and short essays which we are selling by the hundreds on campuses, in Harlem and the Village, at rock concerts and all over NYC this fall. The book speaks powerfully to questions of revolution and human emancipation. Avakian is the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

"There is a place where epistemology and morality meet. There is a place where you have to stand and say: It is not acceptable to refuse to look at something -- or to believe something -- because it makes you feel uncomfortable. And: It is not acceptable to believe something just because it makes you feel comfortable."                  
-- from "BAsics from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian" Chapter 5, # 11
RCP Publications, 2011, $10