Sukebe_GG Yes, the mystery surrounding B. Traven adds a dimension to his work that makes it all the more fascinating. Thanks for the recommendation once again. Oh, the old board... those were the days!
Are you familiar with Ambrose Bierce? He mysteriously disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to him. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. calls his An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge the best American short story. It made me hunt for Bierce's work in second hand book shops for years - what's the fun in buying new stuff online? Finding a book of his was a glorious moment. I remember enjoying An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge a lot. Worth checking out.
I scrolled through the first couple of pages of Land des Frühling, a book by Traven which has been translated in Dutch but apparently not in English, and they were about about Chiapas, Mexico. Chiapas came on my radar as a youngster because of the Zapatista movement and Succommandante Marcos, subject matter no left leaning punk with an interest in anarchism could ignore at the time. There seemed to be a lot of attention for it in the squat scene. Not that I was part of that, but I was exploring politics at the time. Anyway, coming across Chiapas in those first couple of pages made me wonder about radical left politics in Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Socialism seems to have a very different face in that part of the world.
Never read any of the authors writing from Mexico you listed. All I know about Lowry is that Bukowski considered him a bad drunk, because he choked on his own vomit. The interview Hank makes this point never fails to make me laugh. Brutally funny stuff.
I still need to read Trotsky's books on the Russian Revolution. Like all of the big name Bolsheviks he was ruthless, but he probably was also the most intelligent and wrote a lot about art and culture.
At the moment I'm reading Franklin Foer's World Without Mind; the existential thread of Big Tech, which is very readable and interesting, but already out of date. Instagram and Tic Toc were still to appear on the scene when it was published. Most other stuff is in Dutch so not of interest.
