100 Books Like Twelve Fingers

Paradoxes—a 2010 translation of his 2001 work—was an important addition to the emerging literature on anarchist cultural politics—a literature that began with a fellow Argentinian historian Dora Borrancos, who wrote Anarquismo, educación y costumbres en la Argentina de principios de siglo (1990). My book built on this emerging exploration of anarchists outside the workplace. Paradoxes explores anarchist newspapers, culture, plays, meetings, and other activities radicals used to promote anarchism while also offering entertainment and relaxation. Suriano is not myopic. He notes that in a time when other forms of entertainment like cinema emerged, workers had competing forms of commercialized amusement to pursue. This book—like other cultural histories—breathes life into old histories of anarchism that often were boring “ABC histories,” i.e., stories of one union acronym after another.

Hernández’s book is one of the latest to pick up on the growing trend of studies about or that include anarchist women activists. What is particularly alluring about her book is its transnational focus as she explores how Mexican women agitated for anarchism in the decades preceding, during, and following the violence of the Mexican Revolution. Hernández focuses on one woman in particular: Caritina Piña Montalvo, an anarcho-syndicalist whose fight for gender equity linked anarchists on both sides of the border. Besides its important focus on gender and women’s issues, Hernández’s study illustrates how so much of the writing about Latin American anarchism has become transnational in focus as activists crossed borders—either physically or through correspondence—to promote the anarchist ideal.  

Craib’s Renegade uses a biographical approach to explore larger cultural and transnational politics—this time in early twentieth-century Chile. Again, migration—so crucial to the history of Latin American anarchism—plays a central role in understanding the multinational dimensions of anarchism in countries across the region. Craib uses the life and death of the anarchist poet Domingo Gómez Rojas, along with his friends and comrades, to explore the Chilean anarchists and their relations with student rebels. The book illustrates how anarchists in Chile created urban “transnational communities” of anarchists born in Santiago, anarchists who moved to the capital, and anarchists who immigrated to Chile. They then used their culture and multinational experiences to forge transnational connections beyond Chile.

Spanish-speaking anarchists from Spain and Latin America often circularly migrated between the United States and Latin America, especially Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, and Mexico. Writing Revolution’s fifteen chapters explore the transnational and print culture of these anarchists in the United States as they communicated with, learned from, and supported their colleagues across Latin America. Correspondence and newspapers from Latin America fueled their support for Cuba’s War for Independence in the 1890s, the Mexican Revolution, social justice campaigns across the Americas, and hemispheric-wide efforts to support the Spanish Civil War and Revolution in the 1930s. Again, anarchist culture and transnational politics are intimately interlinked and illustrate how these two approaches provide a wealth of material to write the histories of radical leftists who agitated for anarchism decades before the emergence of Moscow-influenced Marxist political parties.  

Bottici is another such friend at first reading, another partisan of the Spinozan current, but one deeply immersed in the feminist thought that Colson regrettably ignores. Hers is a fully intersectional feminism, attending especially to the margins of society, where its freaks and pariahs live. Like Colson, she offers opportunities for difficult thinking that reward us with new vistas, new possibilities for life.

First published in 1935, The Green Child is among the strangest books you’ll ever read. It enchanted me, forcing me to believe that Olivero, a South American dictator, could fake his own assassination, return to his roots in England, and save a speechless translucent creature, the Green Child, from her sadistic husband. I revelled in the exquisite writing – Sir Herbert Read was a renowned stylist who penned the classic English Prose Style -- and the improbable’s being made real. At one time Norton Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard, Read called his novel a philosophical myth to which ‘all types of Fantasy should conform’. It was his only long fiction. One reviewer called it an ‘organic fusion of thought and imagination into a crystalline beauty’.

Translating this book from the French was a slow process, the slowest reading I have ever done, and some of the most rewarding. This book did not just return me to my pre-existing ideas; it changed my way of thinking permanently. Colson writes to us from a world that is full of unexpected possibilities for life, a “world within which many worlds might fit,” as the Zapatistas have it—possibilities for the better and the worse that are screened off from our view. Difficult, demanding reading, but it too suggests a way of living that is premised on finding good connections with others (ones that expand your “collective force”) and withdrawing from relations characterized by “error and sadness,” linking people to “the dominations that, internally and externally, chain them to their own misfortune.” In other words, Colson is drawing from the same Spinozan currents as Bergman and Montgomery, that… show more.

Transgender anarchist author Margaret Killjoy’s collection of short speculative fiction stories, We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow, is a stark contrast to the dazzling high-tech fantasies and cinematic adventures of my first three recommendations. Most of these stories are set in disturbingly plausible and not-at-all-distant futures, and veer into the territories of dark fantasy, gritty dystopianism, and atomspheric horror. No interplanetary space opera here; Killjoy’s protagonists are earthbound, anarchistic outcasts and misfits struggling to survive on the edges of society or in society’s ruins, in worlds gone unfathomably strange. And Killjoy writes it all beautifully, with a clarity of description that often left me stunned by its simple poetic power. This one’s for you if you like your speculative fiction close to the bone.

One of the first political thrillers, and still one of the best, this tale is based on a true story about an anarchist devoted to blowing up the Greenwich observatory—if only his family will stop getting in the way. It portrays spies as not the superhumans of most thrillers but ordinary men bumbling through their private lives while trying to steer the public toward their grander schemes. A welcome antidote to the superhero model we see in James Bond and 24.

Durruti is a massive 800-page biography of a Spanish anarchist that carried “the future in is heart and a gun in each pocket” and, at the same time, portrays the twists and turns of the Spanish Revolution and the millions of people who made it. A model of how to place a radical, working-class life within a broader context, Durruti is also a blow-by-blow account of a revolution and its battles, trials, and upheavals. I shamelessly tried to re-create such a gripping biography when writing my own book. Who would have thought an 800-page brick could be such a page-turner?