Kristian Williams

Orwell for Beginners has been updated expanded as George Orwell Illustrated.

The new edition includes a previously undiscovered manifesto authored by Orwell, with revisions by Arthur Koestler and Bertrand Russell, calling for the creation of an international democratic-socialist human rights organization.  Unfortunately, however, the volume’s illustrations have not improved over the past 35 years.  Still, it serves as a pretty good introduction to Orwell’s life and thought.

Read my full review at Toward Freedom.

My pamphlet Whither Anarchism? has received its first review.  It’s mostly positive, though it points to some things I maybe should have been clearer in discussing.  You can read it over at the Institute for Anarchist Studies website.

My work has gotten a little attention the past few weeks, with interviews and reviews on a number of topics:

Anarchy!  Anarchy?

I did an interview with KBOO about my pamphlet Whither Anarchism? I think the host, Bill Resnick, is more optimistic about the left than I am, but we still had a friendly chat.

Orwell?  Orwell!

Two reviews of Between the Bullet and the Lie:

Antoine Capet offers a mostly favorable review, with an exhaustive summary of the collection’s contents.  Hans Rollmann at Popmatters offers a more mixed review, and on the whole like Eric Laursen’s Duty to Stand Aside better.  (Laursen is a friend, so I don’t mind.)

And then, torture:

Years and year ago I did an interview with Humboldt Grassroots about my short collection Hurt: Notes on Torture in a Modern Democracy.  For some reason the interview just ran.  Hurt collects short pieces that I wrote alongside American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination.  It mostly captures the analysis without the gruesome details.  American Methods is now out of print, but Hurt is not.

I missed this when it first posted, but last month Labor Wave Revolution Radio ran a recording of my lecture from the Radical Imaginations conference on Orwell and pessimism.  The talk begins at 16:45, but the rest of the show is pretty interesting as well, with coverage of the Burgerville Workers Union among other things.