Join our live book chat about How To Date A Fanatic (Harper, 2026) by Aruni Kashyap. Moderated by Bhakti Shringarpure. Buy the book here.

Event will be livestreamed on Substack, YouTube, Facebook and X on Friday, July 25, 2026 at 1pm New York. Set a reminder below to join!

About the book
In this compassionate, poignant novel set in contemporary India, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval. As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men in the city, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.

Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country’s political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape. Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world.

About the author
Aruni Kashyap is a writer, translator, and academic. He is the author of The Way You Want To Be Loved, The House With a Thousand Stories, and editor of the story collection How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency. He is the translator of four novels from Assamese to English. Aruni is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Georgia (Athens).

About the moderator
Bhakti Shringarpure is the creative editor of the Radical Books Collective.

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Previous Book Clubs and Events

Join our live book discussion about Homosexual Intifada: A Queer Palestinian Anthology (Interlink Books, 2026), edited by Hannah Moushabeck and George Abraham. Moderated by Bhakti Shringarpure. Buy the book here.

Event will be livestreamed on Substack, YouTube, Facebook and X on Friday, July 10, 2026 at 1pm New York. Set a reminder below to join!

Homosexual Intifada is a powerful and groundbreaking anthology spotlighting the voices of queer Palestinian writers from both the diaspora and homeland. This first-of-its-kind collection features a dynamic range of LGBTQ+ Palestinian perspectives through deeply personal essays, short stories, poetry, comics, photo essays, and memoir. Centering queer Palestinian identity and experience, this essential volume explores themes of displacement, assimilation, belonging, and love across geographies—from Jerusalem and Ramallah to New York, Beirut, and beyond. These stories, often silenced or misrepresented in Western media, challenge false narratives, boldly reclaim agency, and dismantle stereotypes.

Contributors include celebrated and emerging queer Palestinian authors such as Noor Hindi, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, Elias Jahshan, Randa Jarrar, and more. More than just a literary work, Homosexual Intifada is a radical act of visibility. It challenges the pinkwashing of queer identities in service of imperial agendas and affirms the existence, resilience, and diversity of LGBTQ+ Palestinians worldwide. This collection is a vital contribution to queer literature, Arab identity, and decolonial thought.

About the editors
Hannah Moushabeck is a Palestinian American writer and book worker. She is the author of Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine and co-owner of Interlink Publishing, the only Palestinian-owned publishing company in the United States.

George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet and author of When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America and Birthright, as well as the co-editor of Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry.

About the moderator
Bhakti Shringarpure is the creative editor of the Radical Books Collective.

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Buy the book here.

About the novel
At Sea is propulsive novel of ambition, greed, and the deadly fury of Mother Nature, as a female driller takes charge of an isolated offshore oil rig with an entirely male crew. When Zainab, an expert driller, is tasked with overseeing a high-stakes oil rig operation, she leaves behind her pregnant sister to embark on the most challenging assignment of her career. But there’s a catch. The rig is teetering on the edge of disaster—and Zainab is the only woman among a crew of hardened men who want absolutely nothing to do with her. At the helm, but forced to prove herself at every turn, Zainab investigates the issues that have plagued the operation. When all her warnings are ignored, she quickly grasps that the real danger may lie in the cold calculations and base desires of the men determined to finish the operation as quickly and cheaply as possible. As tensions rise and secrets unravel, Zainab races to prevent the looming catastrophe that threatens the rig, the lives of the crew and the welfare of the sea before it’s too late.

About the author
Born in Sudan, Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s first job as a teenager was in a coal mine in rural Australia. After graduating with first-class honours in Mechanical Engineering, Abdel-Magied trained and worked as an MWD (Measurement While Drilling) contractor and drilling engineer. She is a also screenwriter and award-winning social advocate. Abdel-Magied’s debut literary novel At Sea was a Dua lipa Service95 ‘Must Read’ for 2026. Previous titles include action packed teen fantasy Silverbrook: Yumna and the Golden Horse, the essay collection Talking About A Revolution and two novels for younger readers, You Must Be Layla and the award-winning Listen, Layla. She is currently a writer on British continuing drama Emmerdale and her original drama series Cruise Control is in development with the BBC. Abdel-Magied is the creator of Keep Eyes on Sudan and adviser on the Sudan Digital Archive. She is dedicated to the civilian movement in Sudan and the celebration and amplification of Sudanese culture. Follow her on Instagram and on Good Chat with Yassmin Abdel-Magied on Substack.

About the moderator
Bhakti Shringarpure is the founder and creative director of the Radical Books Collective.

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About the book
A provocative history of Disney’s rise to cultural dominance, pulling skeletons from the corporate closet to decode the political messages hidden in all of your favorite childhood movies. In The Extended Universe, Vicky Osterweil takes us on a quest to discover how Disney’s “imagineers” have made it impossible to reflect on the wonders of growing up without thinking of Disney’s movies, amusement parks, and merchandising. Drawing on extensive interviews with filmmakers, screenwriters, union organizers, and Disney “adults” alike, Osterweil unearths reactionary political commitments and maleficent legal maneuvers so cartoonishly evil they would make one of Walt’s own animated villains blush. Along the way, Osterweil braids together corporate skullduggery with a not entirely unsympathetic analysis of some of Disney’s most famous movies. The result is an entertaining and convincing case that Disney’s entire business model has been built upon a ruthless and fanatical insistence on intellectual property rights—from Steamboat Willie to Avengers: Infinity War and beyond!

Watch on YouTube

About the author
Vicky Osterweil is a Philadelphia-based writer, agitator, and worker whose first book, In Defense of Looting, described historical struggles for liberation in the US. She is a member of the anarchist journal CAW and has written about the intersections of film, politics, and culture for publications such as The Paris Review, Art in America, Al Jazeera America, The Baffler, Dissent, Lux Magazine, and The New Inquiry, where she was also a culture editor for many years.

About the moderator
Sherry Zane is a historian, cultural critic and scholar whose research explores the intersection of visual culture, public memory, and feminist historiography. Her recent essay Michael Jackson, Palestine and the Erasure of Solidarity was published on Radical Books Collective. Her article “’I Did It for the Uplift of Humanity and the Navy’: Same-Sex Acts and the Origins of the National Security State, 1919–1921” was published in the New England Quarterly in 2018 and has since been featured in The MIT Press Reader and 19th News. She writes at The Lioness Archive substack.

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About the book
Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.

About the author
Ainehi Edoro is a Nigerian literary scholar who focuses on African literature and digital culture. She is the founding editor of Brittle Paper, a leading platform for African literary culture, and faculty of English and African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Buy the book here: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/forest-imaginaries/9780231565073

Register here: https://radicalbookscollective.com/products/perfect-victims-mohammed-el-kurd

As this spare and luminous novel begins, we meet Miriam, Helen and Maggie—three friends who, years ago when they were school children, survived capture by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Now, as the women go about their new lives in the city, shopping, caring for their children, planning and thinking about what the future might hold, we come to understand how deeply their past haunts the present. In graceful yet unflinching prose, Otoniya Okot Bitek weaves vivid folk tales with taut realism, revealing flashes of life before the war that ravaged Uganda, unspooling the terrible events that led to abductions of children from supposedly safe schools, and tracing perilous journeys home again.

Also available: A conversation with Otoniya J. Okot Bitek for BookRising.

We will gather to talk about two powerful works: Isabella Hammad's Recognizing The Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative (2023) and And Still We Write, a chapbook featuring Palestinian writers in and from Gaza.

You can also read Mohammed Hanif's introduction to the novel's re-release on ArabLit here.

About the novel
Published in 1976 as Al-Subar, Wild Thorns is the third novel by Sahar Khalifeh. A young Palestinian named Usama returns from working in the Gulf to support the resistance movement. His mission is to blow up buses transporting Palestinian workers into Israel. Shocked to discover that many of his fellow citizens have adjusted to life under military rule, Usama exchanges harsh words with his friends and family. Despite uncertainty, he sets out to accomplish his mission but with disastrous consequences. Wild Thorns features unsentimental portrayals of everyday life, its deep sincerity, uncompromising honesty and rich emotional core plead elegantly for the cause of survival in the face of oppression.

About the author
Sahar Khalifeh is the author of 11 novels and the winner of many international prizes, including the 2006 Naguib Mahfouz literature medal. She is easily one of the most important living writers today. Khalifeh was born in Nablus in 1941. She entered into a traditional arranged marriage at eighteen, and after thirteen years left her husband and began writing. After the 1967 defeat of Jordan and subsequent occupation of the West Bank, Khalifeh began writing again. She began writing “resistance poetry” but broke away from this genre to focus on stories exploring the lives and worlds of women. Her first novel, After the Defeat, followed the interactions of families in a Nablus apartment building after the war. The only manuscript of this novel was confiscated by Israeli authorities and never published. Khalifeh continued writing and her next novel, We Are Not Your Slaves Any Longer, was published in 1974, and was followed by her best-known third novel in 1976. Wild Thorns that explored class nuances under Israeli occupation. She published The Sunflower in 1980 as a sequel to Wild Thorns to focus on female narratives that were largely absent from the original story. She taught at the University of Iowa and at Palestine’s Bir Zeit University, and founded the Women's Affairs Centres in Nablus, Gaza City and Amman.

Do you refuse to laugh at offensive jokes? Have you ever been accused of ruining dinner by pointing out your companion’s sexist comment? Are you often told to stop being so “woke”? If so, you might be a feminist killjoy—and this handbook is for you. In this book, feminist theorist Sara Ahmed shows how killing joy can be a radical world-making project.

About Ghassan Kanafani's "Men in the Sun"
Originally published in 1962, "Men in the Sun" tells the story of three Palestinian refugees who take on a clandestine, humiliating and dangerous journey from refugee camps in Iraq to find work in Kuwait. The refugees belong to three generations of men who have endured the loss of their homeland, Palestine, and alternate between despair, hope and resilience as the journey unfolds. While themes of exile, resistance, displacement and masculinity seem prominent, Kanafani demands we ask urgent political questions about the aftermaths of the Nakba of 1948: what could have been done? Why were Palestinians abandoned without any allies? Why is everybody immune to Palestinian suffering?

Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) was a writer, activist and a prominent member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He was an advocate of the notion of "resistance literature" for Palestinians and declared that literature was the motivating spirit behind his politics. Kanafani began writing fiction while working as a teacher in a refugee camp and many of his works feature a child's perspective. He had a prodigious output of short stories, essays and novellas. Kanafani was uncompromising and vocal about his commitment to the cause for the liberation of Palestine. In 1972, he was assassinated by the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, in Beirut who planted an explosive in his car instantaneously killing Kanafani and his young niece. He was only 36 years old.

This session was recorded but was not made public. Please email us at decolonizethat@gmail.com requesting a link and explain why you hope to view it.

Also available: A conversation with Tsitsi Dangarembga on BookRising

VIRTUAL book club
November 19th, Saturday, 12pm New York | 5pm London

IN-PERSON: New York, Philadelphia and Johannesburg.

NEW YORK: November 17th, Thursday, 6.30pm
Meet Suchitra Vijayan, Michael Busch and Greg Pierrot
Mika Bar, 25 Thames Street, Brooklyn.

PHILADEPHIA: November 17th, Thursday, 6.30pm
Meet Meg Arenberg and Chris Rogers
Paul Robeson House and Museum, 4951 Walnut Street

JOHANNESBURG: November 19th, Sunday, 1pm
Meet Will Shoki and Sohela Surajpal
Breezeblock Cafe, 29 Chiswick Street, Brixton

Also available: A conversation with Chineo Okparanta for BookRising.

Also available: A conversation with Véronique Tadjo for BookRising.