Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Yet another Frankenstein film has appeared on screens. Despite acclaim, it bears little resemblance to Mary Shelley’s novel. For readers interested in Shelley’s political vision and the historical pressures shaping her work, the 1818 text remains indispensable. To mark the 175th anniversary of Mary Godwin Shelley’s death, we revisit this […]
Pundits estimate there are somewhere between 50 and 80 million Irish people around the world. Our 17th-century ancestors rebelled against plantation owners in the Caribbean, only to then shape racialist police departments across the USA. We spread the fiddle, the Pope and the craic as far as the Guinness family’s […]
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 […]
“Tá dualgas ar gach saoránach Gaeilge a labhairt.” [“Every citizen has a duty to speak Irish.”] These words of Máirtín Ó Cadhain, spoken in an earlier era of struggle, are finding new resonance in today’s Ireland. Across the nation, and particularly among the younger generations, a quiet but determined reconquest […]
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 […]
Music, poetry, comedy and theatre performances at Connolly Books during December. Leading musicians, comedians and actors will perform live shows in Connolly Books, and its associated New Theatre, every Thursday, Friday and Saturday in December. Launching on the 4th, it is a celebration of the largely youth-driven renaissance in Irish […]
The 3rd International Meeting of the Theoretical Publications of Leftist Parties and Movements (15–17 October) and the 1st Festival Granma Rebelde (17–19 October) constituted an important programme leading to the Cuban National Culture Day on 20 October this year. Organised in a period of extreme difficulty for the people of […]
In 1962, Shostakovich composed his 13th Symphony, based on five poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. These poems reflect on Soviet society during the 1950s and 60s, exploring themes ranging from the suffering caused by Nazi Germany and the resilience found in humour, to the trauma of Stalinism and the strength of […]
Ireland’s working-class communities have lived with the shadow of the drug trade for decades. From the heroin epidemic of the 1980s to today’s cocaine economy, drugs have carved deep scars through families, schools, and neighbourhoods. Entire generations were written off, while governments looked away. Today, the problem remains as sharp as ever. […]
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 […]
Forbes magazine is calling them a “good investment”, a “strong market collectible for years to come”. From K-pop superstars Blackpink, to Karl Marx’s grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery, Labubus (small, rabbit-eared plush toys) are taking the world by storm. With the rarest varieties selling for up to $150,000, fans have […]
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 […]
It was about time. Clíodhna Bhreatnach’s Pink roses, green is a collection of poems about working time. While that may, at first, seem as a reductive description of the broad set of themes Bhreatnach captures in her verse, this collection reminds us just how wide and all-encompassing the concept is. […]