Written Works – Write Brain TV

Guerilla Days in Ireland

BozoGene5 — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 19:55:27 +0000

One of the most complicated and incisive books ever written on Ireland’s liberation efforts, Tom Barry’s Guerilla Days in Ireland is an explosive memoir that details the writer’s unlikely journey from serving in the British Army during World War I to his membership in the IRA as one of its most lethal volunteers.

Barry was fighting battles for the Brits against the Ottoman Empire in modern-day Iraq when he first heard of the Easter Rising back in his homeland of Ireland. Immediately inspired by the event, Barry asked to have his rank dropped in the English Army and soon returned home to join the Irish republican movement.

Upon his return to Ireland, Barry infiltrated an ex-servicemen’s organization at the behest of local IRA officials, collecting information and forming contacts with his soon-to-be enemies. From there, Barry, using his battle experience and regimented militarism, began training the 3rd Cork Brigade’s ‘flying column’, a small band of guerilla fighters capable of rapid mobility. Heading a number of successful raids against the ‘Black and Tans’, the Brits, despite outnumbering Barry’s fighters 4-to-1, withdrew from the area on account of the staggering fatality rate they incurred.

Barry soon became a commander in the IRA, and fought against pro-Treaty Irish in the subsequent civil war. However, the bloodshed with fellow Irishmen disheartened Barry, and he resigned from his leadership posts. This disillusionment continued, on-and-off, until his death in 1980.

Borstal Boy

BozoGene5 — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 20:48:31 +0000

The infamous, rabble-rousing revolutionary Irish author Brendan Behan’s darkly humorous landmark autobiography Borstal Boy solidified the writer’s role as rebel Ireland’s resident scéalaí (storyteller). Based on Behan’s time in an Irish juvenile reformatory, and his subsequent experiences in prison, Borstal Boy crackles with colloquial banter and beams with the youthful vigor characteristic of classic coming-of-age tales, juxtaposed against the authentically grim realities of incarcerated life.

Behan came from radical roots; his father a veteran of the Irish War for Independence and his mother a revolutionary activist who was close associates with National hero Michael Collins. Joining the Irish Republican Army’s youth organization at the age of fourteen, he became a full member of the IRA at 16, and soon after was arrested after being found with explosives while en route to bomb a British shipyard. Refusing to inform on his associates, Behan was sent to a series of prison camps and English reform schools where he was condemned to serve alongside British and Irish juveniles alike, reshaping his understanding of the widespread bloodshed and deep disparities between Irish Catholics and English Protestants.

While surprisingly devoid of political pontifications, Behan’s lively command of “gutter-talk” and an array of poetic and musical interludes dissolve the national and religious divisions and emphasizes a working-class ethos that offers a Marxian critique of “The Troubles”.

Write Brain TV is proud to present this singularly radical and stylistically brash work of Irish literature.

My War With The CIA: The Memoirs Of Prince Norodom Sihanouk

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:57:43 +0000

Born as Prince Norodom Sihanouk – his career was polarizing & prolific in the history of Cambodia – this provocative memoir since the 70’s has reportedly been confiscated in airports across America. Sihanouk’s career in politics begin when he was coronated in 1941, but soon stepped down from the position of King shocking both his family & the country. Planning to leave palace intrigue behind to connect with the working class & poverty-stricken farmers across the country, Sihanouk entered politics & was elected to prime minister. Soon his journey would involve destroying political agitators & enemies, often backed by the US & Western imperialists, the Khmer Republic would eventually force him on the run being exiled to China. Later, his journey would grow more intense when he’d align with the Khmer Rouge & other guerrilla factions to take the country back after the United States bombed neutral Cambodia leaving an opening for a communist takeover. Installed as the new head of state, with Pol Pot as a leader from the shadows, Sihanouk would soon discover the Khmer Rouge’s true aim of a “Year Zero” mass extermination & attempt to create the perfect race. From the labor camp conditions to the Killing Fields, Sihanouk would immediately resign, ending up on house arrest until the Khmer Rouge fell. This book outlines his harrowing journey to fight of the CIA’s deadly intentions through every aspect of his career, with the agency even backing the Khmer Rouge by the end, after once opposing them.

Khmer Folk Dance

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:55:14 +0000

Written and compiled by ethnomusicologists Sam-Ang Sam and Chan Moly Sam, a Cambodian-American couple who both spent their formative years steeped in their homeland’s art and dance traditions, this meticulously-researched work illuminates the ancient folk dances and songs of their beloved Cambodia. As a teen, Sam-Ang Sam studied at both the Ecole Nacional de Music and the then-newly-formed University of Fine Arts, specializing in these very folk dances. After graduating, Sam-Ang was apprentice to two of the royal palace’s master musicians, performing for tourists and state-sponsored emissaries by day, and learning from village musicians in the art of shadow puppet dramas by night. Later, he received a scholarship to study Western compositions at the University of the Philippines. Chan Moly Sam was schooled at the Royal University of Fine Arts, where she received guidance from dance masters, quickly becoming a master herself in both the male and female roles. It was during this time that she met and married Sam-Ang, and after the couple’s stint in the Phillipines, they were unable to return home due to the Khmer Rouge’s stranglehold, and were forced to move to Philadelphia. Despite finding themselves stateside, the couple never gave up on the Cambodian arts, soon forming the Apsara Ensemble, which not only organizes performances in the US, but acts as a spotlight for up-and-coming dancers in Cambodia. Throughout Cambodia’s tumultuous history, various ruling factions have tried to obliterate these sacred tribal artforms, but the Sams have been steadfast in keeping these traditions alive.

The Politics Of Heroin In Southeast Asia

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:50:29 +0000

No trip to the Golden Triangle would be complete without understanding the United State’s government & the CIA’s complicity in the opium & heroin trade in Southeast Asia. Few writers have done a better job exposing this connection than historian Alfred W. McCoy’s explosive journalistic deep dive The Politics Of Heroin In Southeast Asia. Causing a media firestorm upon its release due to its revelations (with the CIA trying to stop its release) this non-fiction book remains the gold standard in investigative journalism on the American empire & one of the first books to truly expose the US government’s culpability in drug trafficking, illegal coups, & murder, willing to use any means to dominate global regions for its own ends – no matter the cost. Spanning the end of World War II – largely considered one of the only just wars – to the Vietnam war, the book chronicles the United State’s direct involvement not only in trafficking drugs from the Golden Triangle, but how Air America directly transported the drugs for shadow military operations with the proceeds funding further overseas conflict off the books. This black book operation’s effects would ripple from a growing opioid epidemic in the United States to a destabilization of Vietnam that would cause the death of thousands & impact millions. We’re proud to present Alfred W. McCoy’s masterpiece, an exposes the depths of evil the imperialists will go to fund their clandestine plans – even if congress won’t foot the bill – & even if it destroys civilians here & abroad.

On The Socialist Revolution In Vietnam

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:45:27 +0000

Covering the rise of socialism & communism in Vietnam in the aftermath of fighting off the French colonizers in the first Indochina War all the way to right before the Vietnam war, communist icon / politician / revolutionary Lê Duẩn’s part-manifesto / part-historical tome analyzes the philosophy behind Marxism & how it applies to Vietnamese culture, as well as the implications of long-standing colonialism & imperialism in Vietnam by the West. Rising through the ranks of the stalwart revolutionary organization Central Committee Of The Communist Party Vietnam (VCP), Lê Duẩn’s experience wasn’t limited to simply studying communism, but fought as a brave revolutionary soldier in the first Indochina war that warded off the colonizers risking his life for his country. After chairman Hồ’s untimely death in the second Indochina war, Lê Duẩn rose to become the leader of the party. He would continue this role until his tragic death in 1986. His experiences on the field would extend to Vietnam’s eventual invasion of Cambodia to the battle the dangerous & unfortunately China-backed Khmer Rouge run by the deranged & sadistic despot Pol Pot, a battle they would lose in 1979. Lê Duẩn’s experience on the battlefield fighting to the imperialists to his deep understanding of Marxist philosophy is one of the rare instances where one can see the words being put into practice. With a wide net that covers history, ideas, & a fascinating vantage point, Lê Duẩn’s book is one you won’t wanna miss!

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:05:40 +0000

Continuing our exploration of the media’s role in the war machine; We bring this trailblazing book by Chomsky that took the world by storm upon its release in 1988; arguing that the media operates as an ideological institution that employs a system of filters and biases that function to limit public imagination and discourse in order to maintain the prevailing status-quo. Herman and Chomsky outline their ‘Propaganda Model’ of US corporate media, as well as their Five Filters of Media Bias, revealing mass media as merely an exploitative tool for the powers that be, rather than a true Fourth Estates serving public interests. Throughout the book, the authors eviscerate the idea that American journalism is a bulwark against governmental overreach, arguing that the media ultimately act as a rubber stamp, justifying and reinforcing the worst excesses of US hegemony and imperialism while co-opting dissident voices that are deemed ‘too extreme. Interestingly enough, Herman and Chomsky had first-hand knowledge of the press’ reactionary censorship, as their first collaboration together, a book called Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda, was prevented from release when Warner Publishing shut down its subsidiary who planned to print the book. Fortunately, by the time Manufacturing Consent was released, Herman and Chomsky had enough academic influence to see the book through, unleashing a powerful critique of US empire that still proves incredibly useful to this very day.

New York Trilogy

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:04:44 +0000

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Faggots

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:03:36 +0000

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Steal This Book

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:02:56 +0000

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Venus In Furs

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:44:56 +0000

Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s masterful and infamously scandalous novella Venus in Furs is yet another eye-opening entry into Write Brain TV’s ever-expanding radical library. Extremely controversial at the time of its release due to its daring and shameful portrayal of sexual mores, the book has gone on to become an underground literary classic and even the inspiration for a song by the similarly disaffected cult heroes The Velvet Underground! Severin von Kusiemski is a stoutish and refined German man who, while entertaining a love-struck old friend, lends a manuscript named Memoirs of a Suprasensual Man, a detailed account of another roguish protagonist’s attempts to overcome his own infatuation with … a marble statue of Venus. In this story-within-a-story, the protagonist’s pining for the sculpted idol grows to an unbearably fiendish fetish when he meets an idyllically beautiful neighbor named Wanda, who bears a striking resemblance to his beloved Venus. For her part, Wanda, having spent most of her life as a promiscuous cosmopolitan socialite, enjoys the man’s company, and even more, the way she can bend his singular will on her command. Paralyzed by his lust for her and a twisted desire to submit to her in every and all fashions, the man Sacher-Masoch’s depiction of this cruel and humiliating relationship was so remarkable that ‘sadomasochist’ —- the namesakes of the notorious libertine Marquis de Sade and Sacher-Masoch —- was adopted as the term used to identify this type of sexual partnership.

Tulsa

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:43:35 +0000

In 1971, after a tour-of-duty in Vietnam, legendary cult director, photographer, and writer Larry Clark (Kids) went back to his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma to document the rampant drug use, sexual escapades, and gun play of his old gang of friends from a decade earlier. Many hadn’t left the scene, and Clark himself still had the itch, as he states in the book’s introduction: “when i was sixteen i started shooting amphetamine. i shot with my friends everyday for three years and then left town but i’ve gone back through the years. once the needle goes in it never comes out.” Photographing himself as a participant in the scene, rather than as an onlooker, Clark avoids the pitfalls of exploitation and instead imbues the work with authentic visceral danger and a casual intimacy that shocked readers, making him a controversial figure from the very start of his career. Using a series of unusual techniques — which include shooting ‘against the light’ and bleach treatments to the film — Clark produced countless stark black-and-white photos that certainly do little to glorify the behavior, but instead, document the sometimes grotesque and heinous acts as something of a foregone conclusion in a deteriorating society in a town that had raised a generation of disaffected teenagers that went searching for something to numb their feelings of alienation. Write Brain TV is proud to add this shocking book of photography to our ever-expanding library of underground literature!

The Torture Garden

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:41:41 +0000

After spending the beginning of his career as an esteemed ghostwriter inspired by the Bonapartists (the movement that succeeded Napoleon) French novelist Octave Mirbeau finally carved out his own name in literature with his sadistic psychological fiction. No work helped him escape the confines of other people’s credits than his classic literary novel “The Torture Garden”. With the physical body horror of the disturbing political satirist Marquis De Sade, and the twisted linguistic skills of more trained French poets, Mirbeau’s book captured the hearts (and stomachs) of the reading public when it first arrived, shocking the censors by bringing a certain romantic eroticism to torture and violence. A harsh critique of French politics masked under the macabre, the novel concerns multiple characters and scenarios sketched out over multiple decades of Mirbeau’s career, with the defining chapter concerning a political aid sent to China to meet the sadist Clara: A femme fatale that derives pleasure from her authority and the flaying and suffering of men in creative ways. Write Brain TV is proud to present this disturbing farce, a horrifying and hilarious anthology about the beauty of depravity.

The Short Timers

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:38:13 +0000

Written by former U.S. Marine Gustav Hasford and later faithfully adapted for the screen in Stanley Kubrick’s famed Full Metal Jacket (1987), The Short-Timers is a gut-wrenching semi-autobiographical war novel chronicling protagonist “Joker” T. Davis’s grueling military experience during the Vietnam War. Divided into three parts, the novel first tracks Joker in boot camp, then to his first tour of duty as a war correspondent, and then to Khe Sanh, where he is reassigned to join a platoon led by his old friend Cowboy. Hasford expertly details the grittiest and most harrowing aspects of combat duty, writing each of the three sections in different styles to reflect Joker’s ever-shifting perspective. Serving as a war journalist, Joker is often left to observe or react to the madness and inhumanity around him, and it is through his eyes that we the reader are urged to eventually ask “why the hell was the U.S. involved in Vietnam anyway?” Write Brain TV presents this out-of-print masterpiece The Short-Timers, a primal, yet philosophical nightmare scribed by the kind of traumatized mind that spent time on the killing fields of one America’s biggest mistakes; One of its most violent and needless wars… And lived to tell the tale.

The Red Room

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:36:20 +0000

Swedish author and playwright Augustus Strindberg’s 1879 Stockholm satire Röda rummet (The Red Room) is the newest entry into the digital vaults of our ever-expanding radical underground library! Considered Sweden’s first Modernist, Strindberg fastidiously details the hypocrisy and lunacy of a modernizing world and the inherent corruption that was already becoming normalized decades before the turn of the twentieth century. Through the idealist young protagonist Arvid Falk — drawing heavily on Strindberg’s own life —, the reader follows the soul-sucking nature of bureaucratic work before Falk quits his job, realizing that he has rendered his life meaningless with menial busy-work. Becoming a writer and journalist, Falk starts to collaborate with a fringe-thinking group of bohemians who meet regularly in a local red-walled club to discuss artistic and philosophical matters and drive down on the question of “how should one lead their life?”. Falk becomes increasingly disgruntled at the prospect that art and scripture are nonetheless bought like most other commodities, which leads him to conclude that almost all of Stockholm’s society is fraudulent. Through this lens, Strindberg viciously and mockingly condemns his hometown and the religious and governmental structures operating therein, resulting in a controversial text that was originally lampooned upon its release, being labeled as, according to one review, “dirt”. In fact, a few years later, Strindberg was tried — and thankfully acquitted — on charges of blasphemy for his atheistic stance and criticisms of wealth inequality and Capitalism.

The Jungle

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:32:02 +0000

“I aimed for their hearts, but I hit their stomachs”, Upton Sinclair famously remarked after the public outcry in response to his muck-racking novel about the brutal conditions of the meatpacking plants in America at the turn of the century. Sinclair’s first journalistic breakthrough follows the exploits and exploitation of Jurgis, a meat-packer, and his immigrant family, after they migrate from the farmlands of Poland to the gritty streets of Packington, a meat-packing district in downtown Chicago. In search of the American dream, Jurgis soon realizes the cost. Are Jurgis and the exploited immigrants the meat sacrificed to keep the corporations in power, or is the farm animals? Sinclair was so determined to answer that question, he disguised himself as a meat-packer to infiltrate slaughterhouses to research materials for the book. From the same author that brought you “Oil!”, which was later adapted for Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece There Will Be Blood, comes his magnum opus, a family saga drenched in the blood, sweat, and tears of the vulnerable, with unfettered capitalism its symbolic abattoir. A book so shocking that Teddy Roosevelt tried first tried ban it, then later used it at hearings to pass the Meat Inspection Act, missing the major point of the book: It’s indictment of worker’s rights and the brutal sweatshops that powered America through the boom years of industrialization.

The Devils Of Loudin

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:28:53 +0000

The Devils

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:20:18 +0000

“The Devils” is known as legendary Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky’s most violent and bloody work, a stroke of brutal satire and sinister storytelling. Considering his bibliography which includes such literary classics as Crime And Punishment and Notes From The Underground, saying this book is the bloodiest is a hard to believes, but make no mistake, Dostoevsky crafts a gruesome and darkly comical takedown of the growing political nihilism amongt the youth born from a growing wealth gap and period of austerity in Russia at the time. The story takes us to a fictional town ruled by old money and long-established power structures amongst the rich. The story introduces a dense list of characters (as is typical with Dostoevsky, especially when hes writing a family saga). This time, our protagonist is retired college professor named Stepan. Considered a “dangerous thinker”, he was forced out of the university by the government and spent his time raising his son Pyotr in a love-less marriage. Stepan passes all of his “dangerous” wisdom down to Pyotr and his childhood friend Nikolai who later attend boarding school. A letter written by Stepan to Pyotr becomes a catalyst for their return to the town with one plan in mind: To create chaos and launch a violent revolution that forever changes the power structures of their hometown. This chilling novel would inspire “The Third Generation” and “Le Chinoise” by two of the most profound new-wave filmmakers of all time.

Steppenwolf

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:18:40 +0000

In Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse’s 1927 early-modern classic, a reclusive and shyly awkward middle-aged man named Harry leaves behind a manuscript named Harry Haller’s Records (For Madmen Only) for his boarding house neighbor. In this story-within-a-story, Harry details his feelings of despair and loneliness and reflects upon his distaste (and morbid fascination) for the homogeneity of burgeoning bourgeois society. Harry’s protagonist writes of a mysterious meeting with a man advertising for a ‘Magic Theater” who gives him a book titled Treatise on the Steppenwolf. Harry is frightened to learn that it describes him with great accuracy, even down to names and specific events in his life. The book also convinces Harry of man’s dual-nature; part man and part wolf, which further splits his psyche and intensifies Harry’s self-imposed alienation from society, leading him to fixate on the prospect of taking his life. However, a series of chance encounters fuels a dreamy and drug-fueled love affair with a pair of sexually-liberated working girls who try to show him how to find enjoyment in life. Because of these lurid passages, Hesse’s novel was extremely controversial upon release and garnered a taboo reputation over the subsequent years, although Hesse contended it was the most understood of all of his books. With philosophical influences from both the West and Eastern traditions and poignant reflections on death and suicide, Hesse’s novel is far more than just a shocking pulp story.

The Complete Stories Of W. Somerset Maugham

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:16:40 +0000

Somerset Maugham didn’t become one of England’s most celebrated wordsmiths without breaking barriers and shattering stigmas about the working class in England. Having served in the World War I as an ambulance driver, he saw the trauma firsthand of and understood the generational trauma as a cost of war. Even a just one. Equipped with a signature stutter from an illness as a child paired with the loss of his mother at a young age, Maugham managed to live the life of a tortured artist, while blending in with the literary giants of England. This made a perfect cloak to help him get published, while also laying bare all of the worst issues with the country’s hierarchy that were being censored at the time. With protagonists that often included failed artists, sex workers, laborers, war veterans, and other people from the underbelly of the former monarchy, his work put a microscope on the most villainized people of the working class, portraying them with humanity. With his poetic prose and page-turning ability to captivate readers, he gave a heart to the kinds of people that were only reduced to tropes at the time. His work “Of Human Bondage” would be his first celebrated masterpiece, following a prostitute that ends up a relationship with a club-footed artist that hopes to tame her. As with many of his stories, the separation of class and the liberation of women continues to be a striking theme for a turn-of-the-century writer.

Rogue Nation

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 07:42:05 +0000

Australian writer Caitlyn Johnstone is a force to be reckoned with. If you haven’t seen her public verbal lashings that strike like a cat-a-nine-tails at her enemies in the political sphere, you may be living under a rock. Her targets tend to include the dogs of war that lead our destructive military industrial complex, the gears and cog pullers of unfettered capitalism, or the colonial oil barons and oligarchs that slowly consume our planet. What many don’t know, is beneath Caitlin’s hard-nosed journalism and soul-crushing musings, is a passion for prose and poetry that is both tragic and darkly funny. And by dark, we mean a smoldering abyss that if looked at close enough, reflects the intricate layers of human suffering and self-reflection that often hits so close to home in these turbulent times. Rogue Nation is collection of poems that is both stark and endearing, striking a perfect balance of comedy and tragedy, miracles and nightmares, a strangely well-measured world where not one word is wasted on the page. Rogue Nation: A Psychonaut Adventure remains an anthology of works by one of this world’s most prophetic minds.

The Revolt of the Cockroaches

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 07:40:04 +0000

In the depraved ethos of Gonzo journalism, few are more celebrated than the cigarette-chomping, drug-fueled, mumbling wordsmith Hunter S. Thompson. As much of character within his blood and rum soaked pages as he was outside, its his name that is synonymous with the free-flowing stream-of-conscious POV writings that encompassed the controversial high-speed genre. But one can argue it was Dr. Gonzo aka Oscar Zeta Acosta, the mysterious larger-than-life wingman on Thompson’s one-way ticket to hell to witness the funeral of the American Dream than “Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas”, that revolutionized the genre of Gonzo journalism. Behind the maniacal and beastly behavior a chemical gorging neanderthal (more beast than man) that Thompson painted on the page, was a more thoughtful, gentle, and intellectual character, far more complex than the writer gave him credit for. A Chicano lawyer with a tough-as-nails attitude with the corrupt government and a warrior against the war on drugs, Oscar Zeta Acosta was a phenomenal lawyer, often representing hippies and immigrants with little means to pay. But what even less people know, is he wrote two semi-autobiographical books about his life and upbringing, before take a mysterious boat trip and vanishing, never to be seen again. The Revolt Of The Cockroaches represents some of the brown buffalo’s most profound work.

P.F.L.P – Resistance Until Victory

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 07:33:28 +0000

Written in February of 1969 during a Congress held by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, this revolutionary blueprint lays out both a theoretical program and an actionable strategy for the Palestinian People in their struggle of resistance against the multi-pronged forces of global colonialism, fascism, and Zionism. Taking an academic and analytical, historical materialist approach to the then-recent history of the Palestine and Israel conflict, the radicals and guerillas of the Popular Front succeeded in writing one of the most illuminating and tangible re-workings of Marxism to ever hit the page and battlefield. Regarded as a very accessible work, this is an absolute must read for anyone who wishes to better understand life under a vicious and brutal apartheid regime, as well as the legacy of horrors wrought by this conflict. Despite having since gone through numerous ideological shifts and degrees of institutionalization, the PLO remains staunchly adversarial to all those Western powers intent on outsourcing their psychopathic genocidal aspirations to Israel. Because of this, the group has been outright dismissed by the United States as merely a terrorist organization, although they remain recognized by the Arab League and the United Nations as the official and legitimate representatives of the Palestinian People. Write Brain proudly presents this liberating landmark of revolutionary theory and action.

PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 07:30:00 +0000

If you haven’t heard of the psychedelic sorcerer / chemist Alexander Schulgin, it’s likely you or your parents tried his product in your partying youth (we make no judgements). Being the first person since 1912 to brew MDMA, the “Godfather of Psychedelics” managed to also, for better or worse, birth “designer drugs”. With a twist of a molecule, Sculgin created hundreds of new drugs in his lab that hadn’t been discovered yet, ingeniously dodging the DEA’s draconian drug laws against psychedelics by creating substances that were unknown to mankind, thus not regulated. Soon his concoctions were tested on close friends in the academic world, while his research stayed a step ahead of the law. Much of this research became PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Know And Love) and its sister book TIHKAL. This book not only serves as a controversial recipe book to synthesize his creations (DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, though without a degree in chemistry and a University lab, it’d be impossible), but also gives data on the experiences each drug gives, following the “Sculgin Rating Scale”, a standard to academically describe trips. The book would get Shulgin raided by the DEA and his license taken away to synthesize drugs. Written with his wife Ann, it serves as the gold standard for academic psych literature.

Mules And Men

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 07:24:15 +0000

Zora Neale Hurston’s seminal collection of African-American folklore is an authentic and active exploration into the oral mythmaking tradition of the American South. As important and relevant today as it was when it was orginally published in 1935, this one-of-a-kind historical document tells the ongoing story of Black struggle by recounting the songs, stories, church hymns, sermons, superstition, and black magic that have helped Southern Blacks overcome oppression since before the time of Slavery. Written in the regional dialect and split into two parts, the first section sees Hurston documenting a return to her small, rural home of Eatonville, Florida, where she cultivates many stories — as well as some old hometown enemies — in an attempt to better understand her difficult childhood. Part two examines the spirited environs of New Orleans, where Hurston’s commitment to her journalism finds her diving headfirst into a ritual initiation to become a Voodoo Priestess. Zora Neale Hurston was born January 7, 1891 and raised primarily in the South as a child before moving North to attend college. And while her education and success as a writer alienated her from some in her hometown, Hurston was still respected more-than-enough to come away with this magnificent and towering anthology of storytelling.

On The Art Of Cinema

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:36:54 +0000

“Revolutionizing cinema is the means of revolutionizing the whole of art and literature and exposing society to the Worker’s Party monolithic ideology and Juche.”

Few laid their intentions as bare as as cinema theorist and former leader of DPRK, as well as father of Kim-Jung-un, Kim Jong-il. By coining the cinematic style “Juche realism” and inspired by purist Marxist philosophies (with a clear disdain for the what he beloved as a devolving of the ideology into a “cult of personality”), Kim’s passion for cinema inspired him to write down his theories, crafting one of the most significant books of its time in the country, one that would path film’s past, present, and future in the DPRK. Part-manifesto, part-film criticism essay, On The Art Of Cinema captures an isolated country beginning to unlock the true potential of film and its limitless possibilities in shaping culture and the communication of a country’s ideals, while creating a harmony that can bring a the nation together. Applauded by the citizens of DPRK at the time, many believe it was this book that established Kim Jong-il as a household name, more for his contributions to the art world than his clear political connections, which would help him become the successor.

Selected Stories Of Franz Kafka

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:33:38 +0000

If you’ve never journeyed down the twisted spiral into one of German literature’s most paranoid and prophetic minds, you are missing out on the late great canon of Franz Kafka. A man who’s mysterious and fragmented output almost never came to be seen by the public, the word “Kafkesque” would later be inducted into the lexicon of disturbingly accurate terms to describe our current reality. The legend goes, that Kafka was so deeply introverted and private due to his own paranoia and self-doubt, that he never told anyone about his ambitions of writing and nearly took it to his death bed. After confessing it to a friend in his last dying breaths (not in a hospital, but an poverty-ridden apartment in the slums he resided in), his work was discovered in a chest buried amongst his few belongings. What was unearthed, were stories like “The Penal Colony” and other various writings that laid out his vision of the world of government surveillance, arbitrary bureaucracy ruled by secret fascist police, and a world held together by puppet-teer like authoritarians that lived in the shadows. This vision would pre-date the rise of the nazis years later, making his chilling view of Germany at the time all the more horrifying. Franz Kafka’s work is also darkly funny, a satire of the police state protecting unfettered capitalism in a hyper-realized way, a world we now find ourselves trapped in.

Pimp: My Story My Life

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:30:29 +0000

“A pimp has gotta know his whores, but not let them know him; he’s gotta be god all the way.”

Seen as ground-breaking upon its release for opening the public’s eye to a culture of prostitution and pimping, Pimp: My Story My Life was a surprising hit upon its release with over a million copies sold.

Born Robert Beck in the roaring twenties to a single mother in Chicago, Slim grew up middle-class thanks to his mother’s hard-work at a salon, but Slim found himself more attracted to the streets where his friends hustled every day to survive.After being expelled from college for bootlegging, he embraced a life of crime and became a full-time pimp (with over 400 women working for him at various times).

As his coke addiction spiraled out-of-control, he ended up incarcerated for 10 months. Upon his release, he declared pimping a “young man’s game” and moved to California. At his wife Betty’s urging, he composed his memoirs which later became his landmark book, making him a famous novelist overnight.

Like the work of Donald Goines (Dopefiend), it remains highly controversial, yet an incredibly influential part of the lexicon of urban literature, impacting on everything from hip-hop, to fashion, to the growing popularity of true-crime.

Ho Chi Minh On Revolution

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:27:14 +0000

A controversial historical figure in his own right, revolutionary statesman Ho Chi Minh was a pivotal force that fought back against America’s imperial forces in the Vietnam war. Considered a strategic mind, integral in North Vietnam’s defense against the United States and South Vietnam, few knew that off the battlefield he was a prolific writer and poet, too. Inspired by the teachings of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, Minh imagined Vietnam as a communist nation with complete independence, introducing concepts to North Vietnam, such as land and rent reform. Minh’s experience on the battlefield fighting imperialism traces back to leading the The Republic Of North Vietnam against the French Union in 1945, defeating them and establishing independence, despite being outmanned and outgunned. Living under hundreds of aliases throughout his life, little is known about his past is known. With dreams to see the reunification of Vietnam in his lifetime, he fought the US imperialist forces and Southern Vietnam, using guerilla combat to force a stalemate. Known as having a tactical mind for politics and warfare, Minh was also fluent in many languages due 18 month exile earlier in his life, which lead to many of his writings. This collection is edited by famed war correspondent and Vietnam historian Bernard B. Fall, who predicted the US’s failures in Vietnam before tragically stepping on a land mine a year before the book’s release.

Graffiti On The Window

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:23:25 +0000

Kansas City writer/vagabond Alexej Savreux unleashes an ecstatic rush of linguistic fury and esoteric imagery in this obscure poetry collection from 2015. Written while the author was living in seclusion and severely struggling with schizophrenia and depression, these diaristic entries are an unfiltered look at madness and malady.

Part One is visceral and raw, an unencumbered manic attempt to arrive at the end of a thought so a new one can begin. By Part Two, a more refined form and flowery style emerge, establishing an unexpected Ethos, a redemptive character stricken with grand Blake-ian delusions and Whitman’s adventurous ambition.

Savreux subverts the Classicists he clearly admires by adopting a Homeric sense of style to deliver a brutal critique of the tortuous banality of modern society. At turns invective, insightful, primal, and sophisticated, Savreux plumbs the depths of human empathy and desire in an earnest effort to reconcile Art, Philosophy, and Science.

Write Brain TV is proud to add this profoundly disturbing volume of satire and verse to our ever-growing library of radical literature!

The Aesthetics of Hunger

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:18:35 +0000

Brazilian film director Glauber Rocha’s “The Aesthetics of Hunger” is Rocha’s radical manifesto for a global Third World Cinema, providing an antithetical alternative to European-and-Hollywood-style modes of production. Instead, Rocha advocates for his fellow countrymen to embrace and celebrate the burgeoning Cinema Novo movement because it fundamentally subverts the viewpoint of Brazil’s colonizers, confronting the oppressors not just with the tragic ramifications of their inhumane policies, but more importantly, the violent and revolutionary fervor it inspires. Rocha states “ … to this day, only distortions of the truth (a formal exoticism that vulgarizes social problems) have been widely communicated, provoking a series of misunderstandings which go beyond the arts and contaminate the political domain.” He argues that Brazilian cinema, outside of the Novo films, do one of two things; either presenting comedic technicolor spectacles of consumerism and excess (an attempt to over compensate the primary conditions), or a cinema that wallows in its misery, offering only images that “satisfy his nostalgia for primitivism,” a European’s hollow and perverted interest in the plight of others. Rocha astutely lays the theoretical foundation of a Brazilian cinema that its citizens and audience can feel proud of. Understanding that oppressing a population and starving them out is a form of violence that will necessarily be answered with that of rebellious violence, Rocha pleads with readers to consider the full scope of atrocity that these viceroys and overlords enact.

Dark Alliance

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:16:17 +0000

What does the CIA, drug cartels, a shadow war in Nicaragua, and Iran Contra scandal all have in common? This is the question posed in the late journalist Gary Webb’s explosive three-part investigation that would later make up the controversial best-selling book Dark Alliance. Largely rejected by the political establishment, the war machine, and the intelligence community upon its release, Webb’s reputation was hurt which would later lead to his suspicious death that would be ruled a suicide (despite doctors admitting its impossible for one to shoot themselves in the head twice). The book uncovers the explosive plot by Ronald Reagan to use South American drug traffickers and violent cartels to create a clandestine drug enterprise, getting a large portion of inner cities in America addicted to crack to fund a shadow war in Nicaragua for fear of the communist government, then known as the Sandinistas, having control over the Panama Canal and vital trade routes to America’s economy. Connecting the dots between the rising 80’s drug kingpin Freeway Rick Ross, his supplier (who turned out to be one of the suspects involved in funding Reagan and the CIA’s war), and the eventual cover-up which included Reagan publicly demonizing the crack epidemic, while secretly using it to fund black ops regime change, is as relevant as it was upon the time of its release. Webb’s painstaking stitching of witness testimonies, public records, and off-the-record sources, weaves a web of crime, imperialism, and the creation of one of the most devastating drug epidemic in poor communities in American history.

Blood Meridian

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:13:14 +0000

When Cormac McCarthy set out to commit utter destruction of the Western genre glorified by dime novels and John Wayne, he ironically placed his magnum opus Blood Meridian at the top of the list as “The Great American Western”. Through his destruction of the genre came his creation, considered the most brutal and realistic novels about the west ever written. Part twisted coming-of-age story, part anti-Western, a deconstruction of the white-washed portrayals of indigenous people as savage, the book takes us back to 1850 and follows “The Kid”, a teenage runaway that ends up recruited by group of violent scalp hunters contracted by the US government to kill indigenous people on the US / Mexican border. Cormac spent nearly a decade doing research for the book, including traveling the dusty trail his characters take through Mexico. This novel takes the reader on a journey paved in blood, as the incredible prose-style paints the bleakest portrait of the American West ever written, describing a wasteland of unspeakable horror. “The Judge”, the novel’s antagonist, is one of the most terrifying portrayals of American colonialism ever written.

Bananas: Fruit Empire Of Wall Street

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:09:42 +0000

It may come as a surprise to a lot of people that ‘Banana Republic’ isn’t just that trendy, fast-fashion brand at the mall; the term ‘banana republic’ actually refers to the brutal colonialist projects undertaken in Latin America and the Caribbean by American fruit producers and agricultural expropriators in the first half of the twentieth century. In this informative pamphlet produced by the John Reed Club in 1933, writer Luis Montes and illustrator William Siegel depict the ways in which The United Fruit Co. (now Chiquita) and the Standard Fruit Company (now Dole) co-opted the coercive might of the US Military and Wall Street finance to seize huge swathes of agricultural lands all along the Caribbean. Montes astutely recounts how these institutions employed the historical lessons learned from slave-owners, industrialists, and coal mine owners to establish near-totalitarian corporate controls in the region and condemn both native and migrant workers to perpetual poverty and servitude. At a compact 26-pages, this Marxist mini-lesson is a stark and honest examination of US hegemony and so-called gunboat diplomacy, a couple topics that are usually left out of History textbooks. And for that reason, Write Brain TV is proud to feature Bananas as part of our ever-growing radical library!

The Death of Artemio Cruz

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:05:21 +0000

Check out the newest addition to Write Brain TV’s ever-expanding radical library! Mexican author Carlos Fuentes’s landmark 1962 novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz) has remained one of the most enduring and influential works of literature from the so-called Latin American Boom, an era in the 60s and 70s when European publishers were finally paying attention to writers from Central and South America. Fuentes’s utilizes his signature flashback and narration changes throughout the novel to tell the story of the wealthy, aging industrialist Artemio Cruz, a man who years before fought in the Mexican Revolution, only to have become a corrupt newspaper magnate with myriad dirty political connections, and even more secrets. Lying on his deathbed, Cruz recollects both monumental and mundane moments of his life as his family pries for their inheritances and a priest furiously attempts to extract a final rite of confession. With swirling, revelatory prose and a cinematic scope, Fuentes outlines the moral pitfalls of the former revolutionary’s ascension to national prominence, along the way critiquing the class exploitation and extensive blackmail/bribery rackets required to make one wealthy/ Fuentes’s jumpy style and keen sense of detail magnifies the extent of the corrupting influences so familiar to the spheres of politics and power. Write Brain TV is proud to present this cautionary tale from Mexico’s most celebrated novelist.

Amphigorey

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 05:47:31 +0000

For every happy child that grew up reading the amusing and quirky nursery rhymes of Dr. Seuss, another child with a taste for something morbid sat in the dark reading the macabre poems of Edward Gorey, equipped with his own style of sinister sketches. Known for his seminol classic “The Grashlycrumb Tinies”, which teaches children their ABCs with rhymes about kids meeting a tragic end in darkly humurous ways, Gorey was born in Chicago to less than humble means. While many children were reading Roahl Dahl, Gorey preferred Edger Allen Poe and admiring Goya, which helped shape his creepy Victorian style of drawing. He’d later study poetry and art at Harvard, being one of the founders of the Cambridge Poetry Society. For the next 5 decades he’d build himself as a household name from the United States to the United Kingdom, writing and illustrating hundreds of poems, including a book about cats he co-authored with legendary poet T.S Elliot. In the pages of Amphigorey: 15 Books you’ll find some of the work Edward Gorey created that truly helped build his reputation. Living most of his life as a recluse, Edward Gorey were largely considered “a-sexual” spending his time peacefully residing at his infamous gothic manor on Cape Cod in Massachussetts, where he was known to keep to himself, fully engaged in the world of comedy and despair that occupied the pages of his books.

The Diary Of A Drug Fiend

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 05:41:57 +0000

Before he became known as the “Wickedest Man On Earth”, occultist Aleister Crowley penned this semi-biographical novel of a drug addicted couple caught in a web of self destruction, debauchery, and magic. When aristocrat Sir Peter Pendragon, a former WWI air force pilot, comes into a large inheritance from his uncle after coming back from the war, he’s at a stand-still in his life. All that changes when he has a chance encounter with the seductive Louise, an earnest femme fatale and devoted follower of Basil King Lamus. So begins their honeymoon across Europe, which quickly dissolves into a heroin bender. Can they find salvation in the world of magic and demons? Or will they slowly be dragged back into the pits of chemical dependency? “Diary Of A Drug Friend” is a brutally honest work from one of America’s more elusive and mysterious figures. Ahead of its time for its frank portrayal of drug use, this book remains a powerful piece of literature in the canon of drug diaries that trail blaze a path for writers like Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs.

Men In The Sun And Other Palestinian Stories

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 09:42:33 +0000

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Poetry of Resistance In Occupied Palestine

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 09:43:46 +0000

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In The Presence Of Absence

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 09:45:05 +0000

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Zapatistas: Documents Of The Mexican Revolution

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 09:46:17 +0000

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Hollywood Babylon

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 09:47:40 +0000

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Krautrocksampler

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 09:49:54 +0000

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The New Negro

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:42:15 +0000

Announcing the arrival of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke’s publication of The New Negro saw the work of various Black artists & Intellectuals of the era anthologized in one book. Compiling essays, stories, and poems by Black artists, this book marked a definitive shift in the attitudes of people in color in how to achieve social and economic progress. A champion of Folk Art, Locke felt that by demonstrating a strong and proud culture independent of white Americans, Black Americans would ultimately gain civil freedoms.

Locke, along with W.E.B. Du Bois, disregarded this notion, as they felt a strategy of acceptance would only further the prosecution and oppression of black people by whites. In his introductory essay, Locke uses The Old Negro as a strawman / metaphor for a Black man who was filled with confusion and constantly reckoning with the horrid past of slavery. Locke’s New Negro is a man who has understood his past and and vaulted past it, concerning themselves now with self-understanding and dependence, as well as a proud artistic identity. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen are among the luminaries featured in this anthology of black enlightenment at the dawn of Jim Crow.

The Interesting Narrative Of The Life Of Olaudah Equiano

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:37:01 +0000

Olaudah Equiano’s memoir is among a handful few of surviving first-hand accounts of the Trans-Antlantic Slave trade. Born in the Kingdom of Benin (modern-day Nigeria) around the year 1745, Equiano was born free, but was captured, sold, and enslaved as a young child. Being transported as a child from Africa to the Caribbean, and then numerous trips back-and-forth between the Caribbean to the American South throughout his life, Equiano developed impressive skills as a seaman and merchant that would eventually allow him to make enough money to purchase his own freedom.

The treacherous heft and brutal inhumanity of European/American chattel slavery fill every page of Equiano’s life story. Notably, Equiano’s slave narrative is unique because he was mostly a personal assistant as opposed to a field worker. This elevated stature allowed Equiano to eventually become a renowned abolitionist and advocate for the rights of enslaved Africans.

The success of his memoir allowed him to purchase his freedom and become an international sensation, and he used his rights as a freeman to help house and educate any enslaved person he met.

The Paris Commune

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:32:00 +0000

The John Reed Clubs were active from 1929-1935, advancing an explicitly communist agenda with a focus on revolutionary labor rights. International in scope and proudly operating under the aegis of the CPUSA, these clubs attempted to organize and educate “creative workers” from all fields and professions. Much like the aforementioned trio of magazines, JRCs certainly had the revolutionary spirit, but these were also cosmopolitan-based ventures controlled by New York’s bohemian crowd; a critique they certainly weathered at the time, and one that continues to this day. But even for their debatable intelligentsia status, the JRCs put in work. They churned out education literature and held workshops on all sorts of trade and craft work.

Printed in 1932, this pamphlet tells the story of The Paris Commune, a months-long overthrow of the capitalist class by the workers in the city of Paris in 1871; “the first attempt at a proletarian dictatorship.” The narrative is primarily told through pictures illustrated by CPUSA stalwart William Siegel, but a wonderfully simple-yet-thorough introduction by Alexander Trachtenberg lays down the basics and recounts some key passages by Marx on the Communards’s efforts. Siegel’s illustrations of decisive moments during the Commune’s reign show a loving reverence for these revolutionaries who contested oppression with their own lives. Yet, the depictions also have a gritty realness and smokey hue that reminded the viewer of the brutal realities of war.

Howl And Other Poems

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:23:13 +0000

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…”

So begins “Howl”, the poem that would immortalize poet / Beat co-founder Allen Ginsberg into the lexicon of poetry and literature, a jetting stream-of-consciousness prose that remained personal to Ginsberg’s own life, yet defined a generation. Its performance by Ginsberg on October 7th, 1955, as part of the “Six Gallery Reading”, created such a stir it was published shortly after. This event was a culmination of two powerful creative forces growing in the underground art world, and this occurrence fused the like minded, but starkly different San Francisco renaissance movement and the New York beats, their destinies forged in the pages of art history forever. It was at this event where some of the greatest artistic minds of the youth brazenly spoke out against war, McCarthyism, xenophobia, mindless patriotism, racism, labor rights, and many other products of the post-WWII American culture, causing young minds to shatter outward due to its wanton rebellion, against establishment and literary form. With Ginsberg on the map after the performance, publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (a beat figure in his own right), collected it with several other works by Ginsberg, since “Howl” barely filled the book. Many of the works combine Ginsberg’s own experiences of trauma seeing the mental breakdown of his schizophrenic mother and the collapse of the American culture under the weight of its own tyranny, greed, exploitation of the working class, corruption of the education system, and imperialism.5

Abomunist Manifesto

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:19:30 +0000

Often overlooked in the The Beat Generation circles are the black writers, poets, artists, and musicians that in many ways influenced the style, rebelliousness, and free-thinking that gave the movement flight amongst the youth. Surreal jazz poet Bob Kaufman was an integral part of the scene and is too often eclipsed by the more mainstream works of Ginsberg or Kerouac, once transgressive, they now exist on many high school reading lists and in Hollywood film adaptations. Kaufman’s work still remains a well-kept secret to newer generations, but despite this status, its no less potent than it wad first published in 1959. Anarchism is humorously brought to life using vivid metaphors, word play, and is a tongue-in-cheek dig at the very artistic circles he frequented. Using other wordly and metaphysical language, Kaufman creates a surrealist manifesto that both critiques and engages with the ethos of the art movement, exploring the great paradoxes that existed within the new generation that was forming in New York City and San Francisco. Managing to be self-aware enough to not take himself too seriously, while not minimizing the great oppression and strife that was being felt by the working-class at the time, Kaufman’s manifesto becomes a blueprint into the psyche of the beats and their counterparts in Oakland and San Francisco, known as the San Francisco Renaissance. Known for an improvisational style, often recited over a jazz accompaniment, he also was involved in labor organizing and political activism.

The Tentative Description Of Dinner Given To Promote The Impeachment Of President Eisenhower

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:14:05 +0000

Perhaps the single most important player in all of Beatdom, poet/activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in San Francisco in 1953. Starting as a small, paperback press and bookstore for the burgeoning youth and civil rights protest movements, City Lights soon found itself embroiled in controversy when Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s incendiary long-form poem Howl, which almost immediately generated protests and quickly got the attention of the US Government, who attempted to have the book banned on ‘obscenity’ charges. Ferlinghetti stood by Ginsberg and the work, eventually winning the case. However, Ferlinghetti’s own literary works are themselves worthy of recognition, and Tentative Description of a Dinner Given to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower is a blistering example of how poetry can be a catalyst for protest and change.

On The Road

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:08:55 +0000

Few novels were as influential on future generations of the youth than Kerouac’s aptly titled On The Road. After a failed tenture attending Columbia University, the aspiring writer jumped aboard a ship in search of an adventure. After a few years, he arrived in New York City to focus on his writing career. It was here that he’d be blended into the growing collective known as The Beats. After receiving a manic letter from his close-friend and confidant Neal Cassady, he found influence in the spontaneity of stream-of-conscious writing. He soon infused this into his own prose, carrying around notebooks with him at all times. Eventually, finding little success in his aspirations, he hit the road, searching for something deep within himself. Along for the ride was his muse Neal Cassady, a fascinating figure in his own right, and the man that sparked Kerouac’s new form of writing. Cassady was an outlaw, a man that lived by his own rules, an on-again off-again lover of Allen Ginsberg. On their adventures journeying through the broken heart of a “Post-Whitman” America, they encounter a variety of people, including “Old Bull Lee”, which was William S Burroughs. Cassady’s own obsession with writing in free-form was influenced by the jazz movement at the time. Applying similar ethos to literature allowed Kerouac to give movement to his words. This road trip would become fluid, diary-like entries scribed on a long sheet of paper known as “The Scroll”, which was regular size paper taped together to form a bible-like manifesto. Published by Viking Press (though heavily edited), the controversial book would become a smash hit and put The Beat Generation on the map in 1957.