Drawing in real time from inside the courtroom, cartoonist and WikiLeaks activist Clark Stoeckley captured first-hand The United States vs. Pfc. Bradley Manning, one of the most important and secretive trials in American history. While US prosecutors sought to lock Private Manning away for the rest of his life, he insisted that his release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs was an act of conscience. Stoeckley’s vivid sketches provide both a vital record and a uniquely compelling read.

Re-learn the ABCs at Dazed.

Now approaching his 80th year, the writer, teacher and editor Gordon Lish has dedicated his life to redefining the frontiers of American fiction. It’s no overstatement to say that Lish is to the second half of the 20th century what Gertrude Stein was to the first. Mention Lish to most readers, though, and they’ll react in one of two ways: if not with a flummoxed “Who?” then worse, with an “Oh … do you mean the guy who chopped Raymond Carver?”

Read the entire article at the Guardian.

An experimental work that reads more like a wandering through the contents of one’s mind than a novel, Schwartz’s latest will appeal to readers interested in blurring the boundaries between fiction, poetry, and history.

Read the full review at Publishers Weekly.

Paradoxically, the deluge of writing itself contributes to declining readership. It’s not just that if you’re writing then you can’t be reading. It’s also that the sheer volume of what is now available acts as a disincentive to settle down with a single text. The literary equivalent of channel surfing replaces the prolonged concentration required to tackle a book. Condensed capsules of digital communication are infecting all forms of reading. But books, the longest form that writing takes, are suffering disproportionately in the reduced attention spans of readers.

Read the full essay at the Guardian.

This book is a celebration of Hemingway’s oeuvre by a lifelong devoted admirer and a valuable piece of interpretive criticism.

Read the full review at Publishers Weekly.

Our society isn’t well disposed to listening to witnesses, but is there a tipping point where the actions of a whistleblower induce a reaction while so many other witnesses have not?

Chase Madar is a New York attorney who closely followed the trial of the whistleblower Bradley Manning. His recent book, The Passion of Bradley Manning, published by OR Books and then Verso, offers insight into the trial. It also brings to mind another work, first published in 1989 and still studied in law and philosophy courses today: I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates.

Read the full review at Waging Nonviolence.

Clark Stoeckley is a graphic designer, artist and lecturer using his artistic background to report the controversial trial of Bradley Manning. Back in 2010, he transformed a former U-Haul truck into a symbol of political activism with the ‘WikiLeaks Top Secret Information Collection Unit’, a move which he describes as “part art, part activism and part prank”. With news breaking that Manning’s maximum jail sentence has just been cut from 136 to 90 years, we spoke to Clark about turning his court drawings into a graphic novel – a Watchmen for the WikiLeaks generation.

Read the full interview at Dazed.

In Drone Warfare, Benjamin has succeeded in undermining the “all other things being equal logic” underlying popular support of the drone program. She effectively argues that a persistent failure to confront the facts about summary execution by drone has not only moral but also strategic implications, demonstrating yet again that anti-war activists are anything but naïve. The solution to the problem of terrorism is emphatically not to turn Pakistan into a parking lot, razing the northwest provinces followed by every successive place to which the hydra-like enemy decides to relocate. There would be no end to such a process, and erecting drone control bases in every country on the map will not solve but only exacerbate the problem. Medea Benjamin deserves praise not only for her courageous activism, but also for her fact-filled and vividly written contribution to the drone debate.

Read the full review at New Politics.

According to a Spanish-speaker in our office, “essentially it seems to be a committee report on intelligence from the Mexican congress that quotes Cypherpunks and says the Snowden affair shows that Assange was right.”

Read the full report (in Spanish) here.

I have been a proud member of the credentialed media since March of 2012, attending nearly everyday. I have been hired to illustrate a book of the pretrial, trial, and sentencing; and my drawings have been used by a wide variety of media organizations. Aside from part-time teaching, this work is my livelihood and drawing the proceedings has been a dream-come true. Since I began covering this trial, I have received over a dozen anonymous death threats, and I live every day fully understanding that intimidation, no matter how abstract, should never be taken lightly.

Read the government’s letter and Clark’s response.

It was the day of the defense’s closing argument and Clark Stoeckley did not want to upstage the defense by trying to grab headlines with his side of the story on what happened, but that day Stoeckley was escorted after being told he was banned by the garrison commander because he had sent out what had been perceived as threatening tweets.

Stoeckley described how he had walked back into the courtroom when a paralegal officer pulled him aside and walked to a location near the courtroom, where had never been before. Essentially, he said it was where Manning goes every time he is taken out of court.

Read the full article at Firedoglake.

A loyal OR Books reader created this video as he unboxed his Collector’s Edition of Acorn by Yoko Ono

Watch the video here.

I started WikiLeaks because I understood that simple, direct engagements in politics don’t work, that everything that is politically possible is defined by what is possible to report in the media. That we’ve been in a media-ocracy, which means that presently, spin masters are those people who rise to the top. That has something to do with the nature of media reporting, the lack of diversification of media ownership in Australia, the constraints on good, quality of investigative journalism.

Watch the full interview at VICE.

To say a book about Hemingway was written in “lean, muscular prose” would stretch many kilometers beyond cliché at this point. But if the shoe fits…and Clancy Sigal’s Hemingway Lives! most certainly does.

Hemingway Lives! is not so much a biography (there’s little in it we all haven’t read or heard before) as an exegesis. Sigal closely examines the work and the mind behind the work, using incidents from the life for reference and supporting documentation.

If anyone wonders how such a thoroughly “politically incorrect,” hyper-macho oaf as Hemingway could at the same time write some of the most robust yet exquisite prose of the century, changing not only the way Americans read and write but even speak the language, Sigal explains it here. He also insinuates that reports of Hemingway’s machismo, bravado and boorishness have been “greatly exaggerated.”

Sigal corrects the politicos with much insight and critical analysis, but no apologies.

Read the full article at CounterPunch.

I think the trial has had unprecedented case of censorship, starting with the fact that no legal filings and no official transcripts were coming from the court. This is very shocking. This is a trial about secrecy and they’ve emphasized the fact that they’re keeping track of all social media and the messages coming out. We’ve had armed MPs standing behind us while we are tweeting, posting our stories. It’s an environment that’s very tense.

Watch the full segment at MSNBC.

Jason Schwartz’s new novella John the Posthumous is strong, strange literature, a terrifying prose-poem that seizes history and folklore, science and myth—entomology, etymology, gardening, the architecture of houses, the history of beds, embalming practices, marital law, biblical citations, murder, drowning, fires, knives, etc.—and distills it to a sustained, engrossing nightmare.

Read the full review at Biblioklept.

Arguably, the most impressive part of Hemingway Lives! is the “scholarly” part, the purely “literary” part, the part where Sigal steps up to the plate and nimbly summarizes each of Hemingway’s novels and short stories. It’s an impressive performance. In this eloquent tour de force, he takes Hemingway’s books and stories, one by one, and concisely analyzes and rates each of them . . . Read it carefully.

Read the full review at CounterPunch.

Speaking of which, the appearance (or more aptly, the apparition) of Jason Schwartz’s John the Posthumous marks, for me, the publishing event of the summer. Schwartz is without doubt the most challenging author I’ve ever tried to review; truly, a prose stylist without example.

Read the full post at 3:AM.

I visited the trial a few weeks ago and spent some time with Clark, watching him do his work and watching the expressions on the faces of the guys on base when he drove up in the Wikileaks Truck, emblazoned with “Release Bradley Manning” on the back and “Mobile Information Collection Unit” on the side. He’s one dedicated artist, and it takes a special kind of grit to pull that off.

Read the full story at BoingBoing.

August 1960, Miami: a telltale bargain was struck between exiled Cuban politician Manuel Antonio Varona and organized crime leader Meyer Lansky. Lansky, the impresario of the Mafia gambling colony in Cuba since the 1930s, had owned Havana’s Hotel Riviera and the Montmartre nightclub and their fabulous casinos.

In Cuba, Lansky was known as the “Little Man” for his five-foot-four- inch stature, but his cold, hard eyes and intense demeanor were physical expressions of a man used to wielding power and getting his way. His dream of turning Havana into a tropical paradise for North American tourists had come true. Havana had a reputation for the best gambling and wildest nightlife in the Western Hemisphere in the 1950s. And since Lansky shared the Mafia’s profits with General Fulgencio Batista and senior Cuban army and police officers, that gambling paradise became the cornerstone of a full-fledged Cuban gangster state.

Read the full excerpt at Salon.

August 1960, Miami: a telltale bargain was struck between exiled Cuban politician Manuel Antonio Varona and organized crime leader Meyer Lansky. Lansky, the impresario of the Mafia gambling colony in Cuba since the 1930s, had owned Havana’s Hotel Riviera and the Montmartre nightclub and their fabulous casinos.

In Cuba, Lansky was known as the “Little Man” for his five-foot-four- inch stature, but his cold, hard eyes and intense demeanor were physical expressions of a man used to wielding power and getting his way. His dream of turning Havana into a tropical paradise for North American tourists had come true. Havana had a reputation for the best gambling and wildest nightlife in the Western Hemisphere in the 1950s. And since Lansky shared the Mafia’s profits with General Fulgencio Batista and senior Cuban army and police officers, that gambling paradise became the cornerstone of a full-fledged Cuban gangster state.

Read the full excerpt at Jacobin magazine.

This past Thursday, July 27th, our show was devoted to the topic of Bradley Manning. Host Nicole Powers and guest co-host Dell Cameron (VICE) were joined via Skype by independent journalist Alexa O’Brien, artist and activist Clark Stoeckley (Wikileaks Truck), and RT America reporter Andrew Panda Blake, who have all spent quality time on the Fort Meade base observing the trial.

Read the full piece and listen to the interview at the SuicideGirls blog.