Red Love

Revisiting the ideas of a Russian revolutionary and feminist on such topics as sexual politics, free love, and motherhood. Alexandra Kollontai was a prominent Russian revolutionary, a commissar of Social Welfare after the October revolution in 1917, and a long-term Soviet ambassador to Sweden. As a cofounder of the Zhenotdel, the “Women's Department” in the communist party, she introduced abortion rights, secularized marriage, and provided paid maternity leave. Kollontai considered “comradely love” to be an important political force, elemental in shaping social bonds beyond the limitations of property relations. Red Love stems from a yearlong research by CuratorLab at Konstfack University together with Tensta konsthall, that led up to Dora García's exhibition Red Love and its related public programing. A number of artists and thinkers revisit Kollontai's ideas on the politics of love and their relation to current political, social, and feminist struggles. The publication also includes the biographical play Kollontai from 1977 by distinguished Swedish writer Agneta Pleijel. Part critical analysis and part artist book Red Love seeks to address the ongoing relevance of Kollontai's thought, and the increasingly complex sphere of love relations in advanced capitalism. Is there a place for Kollontai's vision of comradely love today and how could it be formed?

Winner of the European Book Prize "The East isn't far away at all. It clings to me, it goes with me everywhere. It's like a big family that you can't shake off ..." "Tender, acute and utterly absorbing" Anna Funder, author of Stasiland "A wry and unheroic witness... an unofficial history of a country that no longer exists" Julian Barnes Growing up in East Berlin, Maxim Leo knew not to ask questions. All he knew was that his rebellious parents, Wolf and Anne, with their dyed hair, leather jackets and insistence he call them by their first names, were a bit embarrassing. That there were some places you couldn't play; certain things you didn't say. Now, married with two children and the Wall a distant memory, Maxim decides to find the answers to the questions he couldn't ask. Why did his parents, once passionately in love, grow apart? Why did his father become so angry, and his mother quit her career in journalism? And why did his grandfather Gerhard, the Socialist war hero, turn into a stranger? The story he unearths is, like his country's past, one of hopes, lies, cruelties, betrayals but also love. In Red Love he captures, with warmth and unflinching honesty, why so many dreamed the GDR would be a new world and why, in the end, it fell apart. "Tender, acute and utterly absorbing. In fine portraits of his family members Leo takes us through three generations of his family, showing how they adopt, reject and survive the fierce, uplifting and ultimately catastrophic ideologies of 20th-century Europe. We are taken on an intimate journey from the exhilaration and extreme courage of the French Resistance to the uncomfortable moral accommodations of passive resistance in the GDR. "He describes these 'ordinary lies' and contradictions, and the way human beings have to negotiate their way through them, with great clarity, humour and truthfulness, for which the jury of the European Book Prize is delighted to honour Red Love . His personal memoir serves as an unofficial history of a country that no longer exists... He is a wry and unheroic witness to the distorting impact - sometimes frightening, sometimes merely absurd - that ideology has upon the daily life of the individual: citizens only allowed to dance in couples, journalists unable to mention car tyres or washing machines for reasons of state." Julian Barnes, European Book Prize With wonderful insight Leo shows how the human need to believe and to belong to a cause greater than ourselves can inspire a person to acts of heroism, but can then ossify into loyalty to a cause that long ago betrayed its people." Anna Funder, author of Stasiland "Heartbreaking... This very personal account allows us to better understand the reality of a kafkaesque regime, and the blindness of its elite that allowed it to survive for so long." La Tribune "The great charm of this book, about the gradual disintegration of the GDR, lies in the level-headed but loving attitude with which it investigates the interweaving of the private and political [in Communist East Germany], revisiting a child's-eye view of the era." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung "A crucial book ... poignant ... a tragedy reminiscent of the great narrative poets, Dostoevsky or Koestler. Maxim Leo has earned his place alongside them." Sud Ouest "A lyrical story about a family in a divided city" Hamburger Abendblatt Maxim Leo was born in 1970 in East Berlin. He studied Political Science at the Free University in Berlin and at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. Since 1997 he is Editor of the Berliner Zeitung . In 2002 he was nominated for the Egon-Erwin-Kisch Prize, and in the same year won the German-French Journalism Prize. He won the Theodor Wolff Prize in 2006. He lives in Berlin.

This book examines the Red Love vogue that swept across the Asia-Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s as part of a worldwide interest in socialism and follows its trails throughout the twentieth century. Encouraging both political and sexual liberation, Red Love was a transnational movement demonstrating the revolutionary potential of love and desire.

Winner of the European Book Prize “Altogether extraordinary.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books “Family memoirs don’t come wittier than this little marvel.” —Irish Times Following three generations of German Jews, this “absolutely enthralling” family memoir about life in the GDR during and after World War II reveals what held East Germany together—and what tore it apart (New York Times Book Review). Now, married with two children and the Wall a distant memory, Maxim decides to find the answers to the questions he couldn't ask. Why did his parents, once passionately in love, grow apart? Why did his father become so angry, and his mother quit her career in journalism? And why did his grandfather Gerhard, the Socialist war hero, turn into a stranger? The story he unearths is, like his country's past, one of hopes, lies, cruelties, betrayals but also love. In Red Love he captures, with warmth and unflinching honesty, why so many dreamed the GDR would be a new world and why, in the end, it fell apart. Growing up in East Berlin, Maxim Leo knew not to ask questions. All he knew was that his rebellious parents, Wolf and Anne, with their dyed hair, leather jackets and insistence he call them by their first names, were a bit embarrassing. That there were some places you couldn't play; certain things you didn't say.

Red Love, set in modern Communist China, traces the story of three best friendsJianfei, Huifang, and Lishanas they cross from adolescence to adulthood during the uncertain decade preceding the Cultural Revolution. For each of them, it is a time of self-definition and sexual awakening within a prudish Chinese culture, a culture itself in the midst of political tumult. Chinas quickly shifting political winds provide the treacherous ground upon which the three women voice their first tentative and brave expressions of love, in spite of the obstructions erected by family, school, the military, Maoist doctrine, and the whole of Chinese society. Huifang is desperate to overcome her parents blackened Nationalist reputations and falls for a Peoples Liberation Army soldier. She carries out a discreet affair despite the possibility of his discharge. Jianfei, a politically astute and rabidly idealistic Maoist, idolizes her childhood sweetheart. She finally fulfills her desires when the two enter college in Shanghai, only to be forced to abandon her lover as affirmation of her own political ideals. Lishan, a bookish painter, wrestles with her own unspeakable yearningsan overwhelming infatuation with her best friend. In a world lacking a word for sex, let alone homosexual, Lishan defiantly rejects everything except for the passions that compel her. All three dare to pursue their own visions of love, and all three come to learn that a love, persistent in the face of rejection, hate, and violence, brings with it tragedy.

The author of "Incorrigibility" now presents you with a completely different animal: "Red Love," a book of misanthropy, licentiousness, vengeance and blood-thirsty vampirism. It is what happens when two diabolical embodiments of unlimited power, capable of almost anything, become self-righteous, and allow themselves to be led by the impassioned guise of their idealism. With a very ambiguous past, the only things they love are each other and the taste of blood. Now all must taste the wrath of their self-conceit, in particularly that of Paul, a conflicted beast of prey, utterly vexed by the human race, and at the threshold of madness - that is, if he has not crossed it already. The world is surely his and Damineh's for the taking - or so they think. WARNING: BLASPHEMY, SEX AND VIOLENCE ABOUND!! Reader discretion is strongly advised.

A brilliant tragicomedy based on the most infamous espionage trial of the twentieth century Thirty years after they walked hand in hand to the electric chair, sentenced to die for giving the gift of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union, Solomon and Dolores Rubell are the targets of a new investigation—conducted not by the FBI, or some paranoid Senate subcommittee, but by Gerald Lerner, boyhood Communist and author of such classic chronicles of the American Jewish experience as Hot Pastrami Sandwich and Kosher and Topless. What does Gerald hope to find, all these years later, by placing ads in the Jewish Daily Forward and Screw seeking former Soviet spies willing to chat? The short answer: His sanity. With a gleam in its eye and tenderness in its heart, David Evanier’s irreverent and incisive novel peers into one of the darkest chapters in American history—the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of spying for the Soviet Union. Because, as Suzie Sizzle—great-niece of Dolly and Solly Rubell and star of a “goodly number” of hardcore films—explains to Gerald, this is not really a story about death, despite its gloomy ending. It is a story about love—the true love two proud Jewish underdogs had for each other, and the misguided love an entire generation of American leftists had for a political system whose grand promises masked terrible, irreconcilable truths. They say love will make you do crazy things. So, too, will Communism.

“At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” —Plato “Who, being loved, is poor?” ?Oscar WildeLove is all around us, and it has inspired the most moving words ever spoken or set to the page. Inside The Little Red Book of Love, you’ll find a broad range of sentiments and musings on the topic of love. Love affects everyone in different ways. Inspire yourself and others with the words of: • Dr. Seuss • Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. • Mother Teresa • Marilyn Monroe • Jane Austen • Robert Frost • John Lennon • And many, many more!