Jon Curley is a poet and teacher. His poetry collections include Hybrid Moments (2015) and Scorch Marks (2017). He also wrote Poets and Partitions: Confronting Communal Identities in Northern Ireland (2011) and coedited The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory (2015). He teaches in the Humanities Department of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Curley is originally from Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where Vanzetti’s legal persecution began.
Events and Victims
SKU: 9781629635170
Author: Bartolomeo Vanzetti • Editor: Jon Curley
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781629635170
Published: 4/2018
Format: Pamphlet, ePub, PDF, mobi
Size: 8.5 x 5.5
Page count: 48
Subjects: Fiction/Anarchism
Praise
“To encounter Vanzetti’s ‘Events and Victims’—written in the 1920s
while awaiting his own execution—is to return to that world of man vs.
machine, to witness yet another wave of humanity uprooted from its
commons and forced to live against the infernal clamor of mechanized
death. Lovingly edited and introduced by Jon Curley, this reclamation
from the archive is yet another reminder of just how far we have gone in
the name of progress, and just how high the cost is.”
—Ammiel Alcalay, author of Memories of Our Future
“A mordant critique of modern industrial life told through the story
of a workplace accident, an accident that is in fact the logical outcome
of social and economic imperatives. Blind aspirational faith in the New
Liberian Dream of individual gain leads laborers in a dye factory to
grow ill from chemical exposure, while the young foreman confronts the
calamitous solitude of crass ambition. Even the skeptics are unable to
escape the demands of the new social order. Awaiting his own execution,
Vanzetti takes aim at the burgeoning military industrial complex,
environmental degradation, xenophobia fueled by global labor migration,
stultifying popular culture, compromised press, and greed of industrial
oligarchs in this unexpectedly timely short story.”
—Judith Halasz, author of The Bohemian Ethos: Questioning Work and Making a Scene on the Lower East Side
“After nearly a century of silence, thanks to the life raft thrown by
poet Jon Curley, Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s ‘Events and Victims’ has finally
surfaced. This short story has intense echoes of Melville’s Moby Dick and Sinclair’s The Jungle.”
—Marylou & Jerome Bongiorno, Emmy-nominated, award-winning social justice filmmakers
“Bartolomeo Vanzetti lives in our memory largely as a symbol, martyr
to the mob rule that poses as justice in the United States. Until now,
the man himself was knowable primarily through his prison letters, but
Jon Curley has added to Vanzetti’s legacy by springing ‘Events and
Victims,’ his sole known work of fiction, from its archival shackles.
Published for the first time, the story contributes to the literary
history of anarchism, prison writing, and the canon of resistance and
refusal, composed even as the author himself was continuing to master
English while facing his cruel and unjust death. This story adds greatly
to our historical understanding of Vanzetti—and in its grim vision of a
cruel society in which capital relentlessly harnesses war, media, and
technology to expropriate value even from crushed human bodies, holds
continued relevance even today.”
—Whitney Strub, author of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right
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