"Our Enemies Know the Power of Books" - Louis Allday and Liberated Texts

In this episode we talk to Louis Allday, writer, historian and founding editor of Liberated Texts.

Liberated Texts is an independent book review website which features works of ongoing relevance that have been forgotten, underappreciated, suppressed or misinterpreted in the cultural mainstream since their release.

Louis gets into a more detailed description of the site’s purpose and some of the reviews they’ve featured since its founding just over a year ago. He also talks about the importance of books to anti-imperialist struggle, and ways that the publishing industry has been targeted by counterintelligence and counterinsurgency operations by the likes of the CIA and other related agencies.

The inaugural Liberated Texts Collected Reviews volume is now available. Published by Ebb books, we’ll include links to where you can order it in the show notes.

As we mention in the episode, Liberated Texts is a resource that we use to find interesting subject matter for this podcast. We’ve previously featured a couple of discussions directly based on reviews from the site, and also featured folks who have gone on to write reviews for Liberated Texts. We’ll include some links to those in the show notes as well.

As Louis mentions in the episode, Liberated Texts is going to soon begin republishing or publishing books in English for the first time starting in July of this year. Their first book will be an English translation of Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature. Proceeds from the sales of their first volume of collected reviews will go towards that publishing work.

And as always if you like what we do here at Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, the best way that you can support our work is to become a patron of the show. You can do that for as little as $1 a month or a yearly membership of $10.80. If you’re not able to do that right now, please do what you can to like, share, retweet and spread the word.

Links:

Liberated Texts

Order Liberated Texts from Bookshop.org

Another interview we did which talks about Walter Rodney's time in Tanzania and relationship with Nyerere.

Our episode with Bill Rolston and Robbie McVeigh

Our episode with Alex Turrall

Our previous conversation with Ju-Hyun Park.