Remind Me

David Lester -- Night Table Recommendations

Footnotes In Gaza by Joe Sacco (Metropolitan Books)

A truly remarkable accomplishment by graphic novelist Joe Sacco. It is hard to imagine how he will ever top the epic scale of this book. Footnotes in Gaza tells the long-forgotten story of the massacre of 111 Palestinians in Gaza in 1956 by Israeli soldiers. We follow Sacco as he searches for the truth from the remaining witnesses still alive. He sifts through their conflicting memories and uncovers what really happened on that terrible day. All the while, he must contend with Palestinians who just don't see the point in dredging up old history when what's happening now in Gaza is so much more important. But Sacco makes a compelling case as to why the past matters.

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Subversions: Anarchist Short Stories (Les Pages Noires)

Billing itself as the first-ever anthology in English or French of anarchist fiction, this collection is worth reading just for the short story by Montreal's Norman Nawrocki. In "It's the Bomb," he builds amazing suspense about an Italian anarchist in 1926. The book veers between straightforward narratives to more experimental work. Some of the authors included are New York's Cara Hoffman and British Columbian Ron Sakolsky.

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus (HarperCollins)

An extremely well researched and written account of the significant social movement called Riot Grrrl. Sara Marcus brings you into the meetings and dramas that unfolded as the years passed and a movement buckled under its own success. We meet the better-known agitators and many of the individuals who had their lives changed and inspired. Marcus shows the importance that bands played in bringing people together for issues that went well beyond the music. This is an important book about feminism, anger and art.

I Can Hear Me Fine by Jean Smith (Get To The Point)

An extraordinary novel by Jean Smith, my bandmate in Mecca Normal. I have always loved the flow, crispness and humour of her writing. Reading it recently, I came to appreciate it all over again. There is a beautiful mystery to passages like, "Once there was a soft glow of a flare sent, an amber fragment knocking out the sky. Then there was the darkness after too much light." We follow Joelle and Claudine as the characters travel landscapes both geographic and emotional. Also a pleasure is Smith's descriptive powers and attention to detail.

Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened by Hal Heidzviecki (City Lights Books)

Hal Heidzviecki has written a short-story collection about lost souls haggard by time and place. The weary wisdom of the young artist: "We live in peculiar times. I haven't given up on understanding them. There are elections but nobody votes. There are political parties but they all promise the same thing. Why not? We are simple people. We want what they promise." The prose is direct and energetic, and at times, heroic in its depictions of the ordinary, "The whiskers his wife shaves gently each morning have sprouted, yellowing needles of grass pushing up." Heidzviecki has managed to deftly write about contemporary times, but from a distance, which gives this collection levity and depth.

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David Lester is the author of the graphic novel The Listener (Arbeiter Ring Publishing), and the guitarist in the rock duo Mecca Normal (13 albums on K Records, Matador and Kill Rock Starts). His first book, The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism is required reading in a university English course called Studies in Contemporary Literature. He created the poster series "Inspired Agitators," now archived at The Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. Lester also does a weekly illustration, with text by Mecca Normal bandmate Jean Smith, for Magnet Magazine.