Letter from the Editors- September, 2018

Dear LeftWord Books community, In 1943, in the midst of the terrible battles of the Second World War, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre took a massive book – 700 pages – to the publisher Gallimard and asked them to publish it. The book – Being and Nothingness – was a dense philosophical inquiry into human existence. It came out in August 1943. The publisher felt that it would not sell. In times of war, this was not a negligible worry. Paper was scarce, readers of such books even..

Reading Lenin by Vijay Prashad

In March this year, after winning the Tripura assembly elections, BJP cadres demolished the statue of Vladimir llyich Lenin in the Belonia town in south Tripura. Lenin was not only a supporter of worker-peasant movements but also a supporter of anti-colonial struggles. 'Liberation of all colonies' and 'liberation of all dependent, oppressed and unequal nations' was at the heart of the programme of the Bolshevik Party. The statue demolition galvanized the farmers in the Kisan Long March organi..

Activist Arrests in India Are Part of a Dangerous Global Trend to Stifle Dissent

On Tuesday morning, the police from the Indian city of Pune (in the state of Maharashtra) raided the homes of lawyers and social activists across India and arrested five of them. Many of them are not household names around the world, since they are people who work silently on behalf of the poor and oppressed in a country where half the population does not eat sufficiently. Their names are Gautam Navlakha, Sudha Bharadwaj, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira and Varavara Rao. What unites these peop..

LeftWord Recommends: Books on Russian Revolution

It's been hundred years of the Russian Revolution. In all these years, countless books have been written on the revolution, its aftermath and its impact on numerous first world and the third world societies. This reading list is an exploration of the events that changed the course of history and their effects on the world. Note: All these books are available at our bookstore. We only have single copies of the titles from foreign independent publishers. The LeftWord titles are also available at ..

LeftWord Books in 2018

2018 has been an eventful year for us at LeftWord Books. We've published 7 books till now and there are 8 more titles in our schedule for this year. This blog is a brief review of our books this year and also includes the reviews that our books received, their excerpts from various publications, interviews of our authors and events around our books. *********************************** Selected Writings of Lenin 'Struggling uncompromisingly with the reformists and all kinds of distortionists..