As those of you who've found your way here via this link know, this blog has been listed as one of the presumably top "50 Places to Find Literary Criticism Online" at Online University Lowdown. I don't know anything about the site, and I haven't had a chance to review the list they've posted so I can't vouch for it, but it's good to be included. Even if I barely squeaked in, at 49th.
For new visitors to Read Red, welcome. Spend some time here. Read old posts. Review the list of books I've written about, favorably if I've read them, hopefully if I want to. See if anything I say makes sense to you. If it does, come back. I usually post several times a week. About books, about the literary world, about publishing news, about the arts in general, and about how all this connects to a revolutionary Marxist approach to reading, writing, and fighting for a better world. Sometimes my life makes an appearance here too.
If I'm doing things right, you'll find quite a different take on literary matters here than at other sites you might check out. To my knowledge, this blog is unique. I don't know of any other English-language site where an active participant in the working-class struggle--a communist activist who is also a reader who is also a writer--addresses questions of literary culture. What I write here is informed by my world view as a Marxist-Leninist, a partisan for the international movement to overturn the capitalist system and replace it with a society based on liberation and equality: socialism.
What you'll find here, then, is, frequently, dissent from the standard version. Rants. Outrage. Also cheers. Celebration. New information. About books and writers ignored or discounted by the bourgeois literary establishment. About events, political-activist and/or literary-cultural. And, yes, literary criticism and analysis--but written from a class-conscious rather than an academic angle.
If any of this interests you, stick around. At the moment I'm in the midst of an ongoing muse about the uses of literature in service of the class struggle. That's what I'll get back to shortly.
