sudhanva deshpande

Our Marie Kondo book lists: Vijay Prashad and Sudhanva Deshpande

Marie Kondo, the Japanese television star of Tiding Up with Marie Kondo (Netflix), wrote in her book The Changing Magic of Tidying Up – ‘I now keep my collection of books to about thirty volumes at any one time’. The phrase was misquoted on social media, as if she had implied that one should only have thirty books. That was not what she wrote. But it got us thinking: what are the thirty books that have most influenced us?There’s the perennial ‘desert island’ challenge. What is the on[...]

Letter to the Book Club Members

  Dear Book Club member, Greetings from LeftWord! Over the years, you've been our staunchest supporter. You've responded to our books with comments and feedback. You've promoted our books on social media, in educational institutions and libraries, and through word of mouth. You've also been a source of tremendous financial support for us, by buying directly from us, rather than through a bookseller. For all this, and more, we are truly grateful.   Many of you have expressed a desire for t[...]

Letter to Our LeftWord Community (May 2017)

Dear Comrades and Friends, We are now in the midst of 2017 – the centenary year of the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union, which was built after the Revolution, lasted a mere seventy years. This is far too short a time in the span of human history to make any kind of judgment about either socialism or communism.  Great strides were made, certainly, but there were also grievous wrongs. Two of our new books offer a sense of the Revolution and of the USSR: Cecilia Bobrovskaya’s Rank and [...]

Vas Bien, Fidel.

In 1999, LeftWord Books – only a few months old – decided that one of our early titles must be from Fidel Castro. Castro had delivered two speeches that year, one at the University of Venezuela and the other at a conference on culture and development in Havana. These were incredible speeches – vintage Castro – laying out his assessment of the world through the experiences of Cuba and through the emergence of what he called ‘imperialist globalisation’. One of the key elements of Castr[...]