Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Shivaun O’Casey, Sean O’Casey’s only daughter and now sole surviving child, has published a remarkable memoir. Born in 1939, she grew up in a highly political household: Sean defined himself as a communist for most of his life, and Eileen shared his convictions. Their home was filled with modernist art, […]
Jack London’s journey as a socialist and a writer is a story of dramatic ascent and tragic decline. His socialism grew from lived experience: childhood poverty, hard labour in factories, and firsthand exposure to capitalism’s exploitative logic, crystallised in 1894 during his time as a hobo. On “The Road,” travelling […]
A Monument of Witness and Sumud Leila Majaj Kirkconnell’s novel Under the Same Sky is a profound act of witnessing. It transforms an immense geopolitical catastrophe into an intimate, sensory, fully human experience. Its epigraph, “Gaza Interlude,” evokes sumud – steadfast, everyday resistance expressed through the act of living. One of the novel’s greatest […]
From the Bog to the Cloud is the bestselling book Ireland needs—a rigorous analysis of the nation’s place in the world and a strategic guide for how to change it through principled, anti-imperialist struggle. Authors Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie dissect an Ireland locked snugly between the competing yet collaborative […]
Liadán Ní Chuinn’s stunning short story collection is a courageous, unflinching diagnosis of an open wound. That wound is the legacy of the conflict in the British-occupied Six Counties. Ní Chuinn’s genius is to move beyond the strictly political to explore its precise, cellular-level damage within the nationalist community—how state […]
Ten years on from the unlikely victory of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Labour Party leadership contest, and his subsequent exile from the Labour Party following a Zionist-led smear campaign over accusations of antisemitism, it has to be asked if there’s anything new to say about that brief moment when […]
The existential threat posed against humans are climate change, nuclear war and AI, all three are linked to a capitalist mode of production and the production relation it entails. The last time an apocalypse happened was 65 million years ago when an asteroid collided with earth before the emergence of […]
Trade unions resist capitalism but do not abolish it. However, Lenin said trade unions are the schools for revolution: it is from there the communist parties traditionally draw their cadres. For a worker, trade union consciousness is natural because they fight for wages to survive, but the fight for socialism […]
When Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp became the first Kannada work—and first short story collection—to win the 2025 International Booker Prize, it marked more than a literary triumph. It marked a pivotal recognition of regional Indian literature and brought overdue attention to the voices of Muslim women in rural Karnataka. Translated by Deepa […]
Michael Crummey’s The Adversary, winner of the 2025 Dublin Literary Award, is a dark, atmospheric novel that probes the brutal complexities of early colonial Newfoundland through themes of power, class, and survival. Set in a remote coastal community marked by hardship and hierarchy, the narrative interrogates the moral and human costs […]
Western Marxism (WM) by Dominico Losurdo, translated into English and published recently by Monthly Review, is an important work exposing the idealism, pro-imperialism and eurocentrism (i.e. the paternalistic approach towards struggles in the periphery) of western Marxists. In the introduction, the book explains that WM is not a geographical orientation […]
Ilan Pappé, as readers may know, is one of the most controversial of Israel’s “new historians” after having sacrificed his academic career there by publishing extensively on the buried history of the Nakba and challenging official Zionist accounts of the colonisation of Palestine. His most recent work, Lobbying for Zionism […]
Diarmaid Ferriter, who has come to be something resembling the public face of “History” in the respectable Irish media, has cannily inverted the title of his popular 2004 work The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 in his latest book The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020, which represents a sequel of sorts outlining […]
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, authors of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, successfully cover an impressive range of topics in a coherent, extremely readable volume. When we speak of the book’s readability, in this case it is a testament to superb skill in using technical language when […]
“Let us outdate my book”, Ståle Holgersen writes on the last page of his book, Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World. “We must change reality so that librarians will be able to move this book from the political section to the historical one.” His critical optimism […]
Heinrich Mann, brother of Thomas Mann and in his own right one of the most significant German writers of the 20th century, died in exile in California 75 years ago, on March 11, 1950. His literary work, deeply concerned with social justice and political change, remains relevant today. Mann’s writing […]