Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Letters of Insurgents is an 800-page semi-autobiographical epistolary novel by Fredy Perlman (1975). It follows the life-transforming correspondence of Sophia Nachalo and Yarostan Vochek, two characters created by Fredy to narrate the greatest questions of a revolutionary life.
Bring this powerful work to life by receiving in your mailbox two chapters every month, a letter from each Sophia and Yarostan– from September 2026 to June 2027.
Each letter is formatted and printed in a separate zine, for a total of 20 zines!
Expect special unannounced extras in some packages!
It is our hope that this monthly zine format can both help tackle the mammoth undertaking of such a thick book for short attention spanners, and create momentum to regularly share your developing thoughts within your own friend circles. Form your own insurgent book club!
This project funds the rent of the anarchist printshop in St-Henri <3 Contribute directly to sustaining autonomous means of publication! Price to subscribe: 100$
Postage fees are 5$ per mailing + 5$ for each pack of 2 zines (x10)
How to buy your subscription (cash only / in Montréal):
A) Come to the anarchist zine fair on September 19
B) Email cashonly@riseup.net to schedule a drop-in at the St-Henri printshop
C) Drop in at the Dira opening hours on Sunday afternoons
How to subscribe if you are not local or other questions: email insurgentzines@riseup.net
Other ways to read Letters of Insurgents:
1) Buy a copy at l’Insoumise bookshop
2) Borrow a copy at Dira library
3) Read online at theanarchistlibrary.org
4) Listen to the audiobook online
Why read Letters of Insurgents now?
Letters of Insurgents is a book which is difficult to categorise. The novel catapults the reader from the heated debates of a worker’s insurrection to an American-style high school, passing on through brothels, workshops, universities, factories, bedrooms, barricades, prisons and the rural countryside. Everywhere, in short, where the exploited of the world have traveled through in their long ordeal through the turmoil and stagnation of the 20th century. It is not a historical work. It is an emotional interrogation, one which pulls at the very fiber of who we think we are, and how the little compromises we’ve made with ourselves, the deferments of pangs of longing, the excuses made by repeated utterance of a phrase or repeated brandishing of a gesture which, if we were honest with ourselves, felt broken in our mouths, fell discordantly from our bodies. A sign that something was deeply wrong and that nothing swept under the rug will remain dormant.
Each character represents an archetype you’ve met before. The reckless warrior, the optimistic unionist, the naive bureaucrat, the greedy politician, the tunnel-vision ideologue. And yet their choices and perspectives blend into one another, sometimes drawing us into their pleasures and agonies, sometimes pushing us far away. Their conversations so often read like one which you’ve had a thousand times, and yet, have never quite confessed to yourself that you’ve articulated. The subject? It is the story of our inheritance, of how we got here, and that is what gives it this uncanny resonance. How power has changed in order to remain exactly the same? How has the fullness of a life worthy of that name has been pulled from the grasp of the most earnest, ardent and comprehensive human revolts?
It is a book which brings back the psychological dilemmas which have forged the contours of rebel dreams which are almost too painful to desire too lucidly. That is why, although a fiction, although it is such a carefully crafted dialogue slowly unfolding its meanings and nuances, it feels at the same time like a real correspondence we, maybe some kind of ignorant cop or censor, have just stumbled across. The narrative plays with this effect constantly. It is for these reasons which it frequently reduced the writer of these words to tears. Tears for the bitterness of love lost and resistance broken. Tears of joy for the persistence of the human cataclysm, the measureless insurgency, not as certainty, or a magic trick, but much more starkly and unforgivingly: as an open possibility.
Once the book is finished Sophia Nachalo and Yarostan Vochek keep talking to us, sometimes when we least expect it. They are us, their qualities, their weaknesses, their misconceptions, their epiphanies are all ours too. Because the quest for self-realization feeds purpose to a lifetime’s journey. For all those who never give up on their desire, they are accomplices from an elsewhere which crisscrosses with the present, until such time as all walls come down, and the joyous collusion of will and fire destroy the boundary between the fictitious reality we have all become trapped in and these undeniable dreams they put precious words to, perched just on the edge of the possible.