Sundial - Catriona Ward (Macmillan) * Pick of the Month* Catriona Ward has created one of the most enticing, addicting, and frankly devastating horror novels of the year, while also crafting one of the most incisive meta-narratives about the generational consequences of abuse. Ward’s prose is reminiscent of the stream-of-consciousness

Over the past few months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical right-wing coalition government has moved to curtail the independence of Israel’s judiciary and weaken the democratic separation of powers, against the backdrop of a frightening uptick of settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. This

While the selections this month all may have been amongst my most anticipated, this was not the strongest month in 2023 thus far. Each book had some reason I had been tracking it: the second in one trilogy, the long belated conclusion to a comic miniseries (and thus setting the

The alt-right may not have become a known term until 2015, but early on there were major controversies centering on movement founder Richard Spencer. The first was reported by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow that singled out an article by British white nationalist Colin Liddell on Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com. Amidst

You may have noticed a panic brewing across hashtags and trending Twitter topics last week, one echoed in endless emails from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “White supremacist groups are trying to organize antisemitic activities as a ‘National Day of Hate’ throughout this coming weekend and especially this Saturday,” read one

We’ve seen a flurry of new horror releases so far in 2023, particularly coming out of the world of TorDotCom and publications with a strong online footprint. What’s interesting is that this is leaning back into the direction of anthologies, chapbooks, and novellas, three formats that tend to

“Software is more than just a commodity, it replicates itself. When it is decentralized, it becomes a means of production all its own,” a friend of mine professed, with a slight drunken slur, amidst gulps of warm Pabst. He was an organizer who had been lured to socialism through open-source

We first learned about Black Metal Rainbows a few years ago when they did a Kickstarter campaign to fund their book. The volume is an anthology of writing on black metal that takes a decidedly antifascist, antiracist, radical, and, perhaps most of all, queer, claim on the black metal scene.

Like most things in Judaism, trees are rarely just imposing plants. The Jewish holiday Tu B'Shevat powerfully locates the pathway God takes through us, from this distant and unknowable force into the bittul, the transcendent materiality of our bodies and lives, taking root through Torah, wisdom, and, ultimately, the action

Part of the story of antifascism of the last decade is that it sits at the intersection not just of race, gender, identity, and oppression, but social movements themselves. The internal conversation between mass activist projects of different varieties is how modern antifascism is constantly evolving, thinking about what kinds

This month was a catch-up with some recently concluded mini-series and evaluating some recent cult favorites that had been appearing on “must read” lists. All things considered, folk horror remains a decisive trend, both in our reading lists and the widening horror film world. This speaks to the lasting hold

As 2015’s pre-political season became centered on the arrival of Trump and the public emergence of the alt-right, some peculiarities started to show up at rallies and online. Accusations were abounding that a secretive “cabal” of elites was exploiting our country’s youth for some type of blood ritual,

A while back I did a lengthy interview with socialist author and organizer Daniel Randall about his new book, Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists [https://www.nopasaran.media/confronting-antisemitism-on-the-left-arguments-for-socialists/] , which is a series of interlocking essays confronting the issue of left-wing antisemitism from an organically left-wing perspective. The

To close out the year I collected a slightly larger list of titles to review, some of which are somewhat older yet still within the last decade, and others that are new releases from 2022. The year itself saw certain trends rise to the top of the horror pile, particularly

“So when do you think we might be able to get rid of the Christmas Tree? It’s taking up an entire shelf in the garage,” my wife gently pressed me, easily for the third time. It was December 10th and we had no plan for erecting our plastic imitation

To many, last month’s brutal attack on a queer nightclub in Colorado Springs, in which five people were killed and 25 were injured, was the logical [https://religiondispatches.org/colorado-springs-massacre-captures-the-christian-nationalist-monster-in-the-mirror/] conclusion [https://religiondispatches.org/when-violence-is-inevitable-club-q-and-the-success-of-the-system/] of the Right’s increasingly dehumanizing rhetoric against the LGBTQI+ community. This tragic event

Despite conservatives in America feigning their undying support for “free speech,” when it comes to Israel, those convictions often vanish when it comes to even mild criticism of Israel. A recent Texas state bill [https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/31/texas-boycott-israel-lawsuit/] was introduced that, among other things, barred any

If there’s one word I never want to hear in a major news story ever again, it’s “antifa.” Part of this is because of the massive conspiracy infrastructure the right has built around it [https://politicalresearch.org/2021/07/13/great-2020-antifa-scare]. It has created a new incarnation of

This was a particularly strong month, and we are going to return to this month’s top pic pick shortly as part of our series on Jewish horror. As with the rest of the year, horror comics continue to outpace particularly short horror fiction, part of the momentary popularity of

As the ballots cast on November 8th reveal, our entire political system has been cast into a catastrophic state of flux. This may be most true for the GOP, whose search for identity continues to walk further into the previously fringe elements of their base. Backing their star quarterback (Trump)

With Halloween closing out October (the day this is published), you'd think there would be a denser list of titles, but this is actually more of a list of books straddling the line between traditional horror and adjacent genres. It is also a comics heavy month, and we will likely