Presenting the Next Books in the Restless Classics Series

With the Kickstarter campaign for launching Don Quixote as the first Restless Classic well underway, Restless Books is pleased to announce the next four books due to get the same treatment—deluxe editions, new supplementary content and context, and interactive features with passionate teachers via video series and online book club discussions. These timeless works still speak to our time and place—and especially to our “restlessness.” We’ll be bringing them back in splendid fashion, and we hope you’ll join us for the conversation.

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Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe 

This classic about a shipwreck survivor—often framed as as a parable of English pluck and industry (and cannibals)—is due for a reboot. Written in 1719 during the crescendo of the British empire, the book has fascinating things to tell us about colonialism and globalization. The Restless Classics edition will include perspectives on the book from writers and thinkers across the world and history whose own cultural inheritance was shaped by imperial expansion.

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The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois

Born in Massachusetts three years after the abolition of slavery, W.E.B. Dubois’s life as an activist, leader, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar spanned the the course of civil rights history from emancipation to the marches and movements of the 1960s. Unprecedented in its time, his monumental work The Souls of Black Folk remains a profound and essential exploration of questions of race, justice, and the human spirit. The restless classics edition will explore what Dubois’s wisdom can still teach us today.

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Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

No, you’ve been getting it all wrong: The doctor is Frankenstein; the one with the bolts in its neck is Frankenstein’s monster. Wait, he doesn’t have bolts in his neck? We’ll have to revisit this grotesque, thrilling tale that spawned the horror and science fiction genres, and still resonates with today’s debates about the limits and frightening power of science and human ambition.

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Poems, Protest, and a Dream, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

The original badass nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote this fierce injunction against the bishop who wanted to stymie her intellectual pursuits in the 1600s, during a time when the Spanish empire (in what would later become Mexico) gave little credence to women’s capabilities. This remarkable collection is a foundational work not only of feminism, but also of Hispanic literature.

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Restless Women Travelers Is Back for Summer 2015!

At last, summer has arrived!  A great book is the perfect accompaniment to summer travels, whether you're adventuring abroad or to the beach. Restless is pleased to bring you more of our favorite classic and contemporary travel narratives through our Restless Women Travelers series, now in its second summer. Published as affordable eBooks, they're optimized for reading on the go.

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Kira Salak became the first person in the world to kayak alone the 600 miles on the Niger River of Mali to Timbuktu, retracing the fatal journey of the great Scottish explorer Mungo Park. Enduring tropical storms, unruly hippos, fierce rapids, and the unrelenting heat of the Sahara desert, Salak traveled solo through one of the most desolate and dangerous regions in Africa, where little had changed since Mungo Park was taken captive by Moors in 1797. Finally, weak with dysentery but triumphant, she arrived in the fabled city of Timbuktu and fulfilled her ultimate goal: buying the freedom of two Bella slave women. The Cruelest Journey is an unputdownable adventure story as well as a meditation on courage and self-mastery by one of our most accomplished travel writers.

List Price $14.99

Buy from: Amazon | iBooks | Kobo

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A vivid, varied account of a globally-minded woman’s intriguing adventures and evolving worldview, Santha Rama Rau’s autobiography covers a life defined by almost perpetual motion—from her birth in India to an upbringing in England and South Africa, from her education at Wellesley College in the United States to far-flung travel to China, Japan, Indonesia, Russia, Afghanistan, Kenya, Spain, and beyond. Part memoir, part journalism, Gifts of Passage is at once intimate and expansive, taking the reader on a tour of Indian family life, repression in South Africa, the trial of Jomo Kenyatta, and the early stirrings of Indian democracy.

List Price: $9.99
Buy from: Amazon | iBooks | Kobo

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More on Restless Women Travelers:

Authors Around the World: Cuba

Authors Around the World is a new series from the Restless Blog through which we’ll be bringing you interviews with global authors about the places they hail from.

With us in this first installment is Cuban author, photographer, and blogger Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo. Now a resident of the United States, OLPL (as he is known) is the webmaster for the blogs Lunes de Post-Revolución and Boring Home Utopics and the author of Abandoned Havana, a book of original photographs and short essays about Cuba, out now from Restless Books.

Here, OLPL talks with us about what Americans misunderstand about Cuba (and what Cubans misunderstand about America), what the Castros read, and "the beauty" of the island's "barbarity."

1. Describe your preferred writing space when you’re in Havana and how you write while you're away from home.

A very old house where I lived last year in the corner of 66th and 23rd streets, in the famous Buenavista neighborhood. After midnight, when neighbors remain silent, and Havana is as mute as its capital letter H in Spanish. Now, my homeland is my laptop. My preferred space to write is, by force, my own body. There's no home anymore for me. I hope my literature will take advantage of such intense isolation, instead of complaining from "northtalgia" as many Cuban-American writers do.

2. As a writer, what’s the most inspiring thing to you about Havana?

The beauty of its barbarity, the rhetoric of its ruins. Tons of tender details in the time of totalitarianism. People. I miss looking people in the eye and reading what's hardly hidden for me as a writer: how perverse and how naïve they can be. I haven't departed in many ways. If I realize I'm not there anymore, I will stop writing all of a sudden.

3. What about living in Havana (or Cuba) is most difficult to convey to people from elsewhere?

We are not there. Take a look at Cuban official suicide statistics, for example. We are anywhere else. Please, do not give credit to half a century of Castros administration. It's our fate as irreplaceable imaginary island.

4. What’s the first book you would recommend to a visitor to Havana who wants to understand the place?

Hopefully, Milan Kundera's novels and short stories. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for sure. Kundera is not only actual in Cuba today: he comes right from our futile future. Given that the Nobel Prize is denied to him for being obsoletely anti-communist, The Cuban Ministry of Culture should award him with our National Literature Prize.

5. What is your favorite idiom in Spanish? What is the most difficult word or phrase to translate from Spanish, and how would you define it?

I'm an idiot with idioms: all of them seem out-fashioned to me. But the most difficult word to translate from Spanish is a name: Rosa María. I dare not define it.

6. What’s the literary culture like in Havana today? Who are its literary icons, past and present?

There is literature and there is culture in Havana today, but there is no literary culture at all. Castroism has made it impossible for Cubans to create credible icons anymore. That's one thing we should be grateful for ever after these never-ending years of Revolution.

7. What do Americans misunderstand about Cuba? What do Cubans misunderstand about America?

Americans ignore that Cuba is not the victim in this equation, but the imperialistic radical right-winged State monopoly.

Cubans know more of America than most Americans: We feel that this is the country that has come closest to the concept of communism. That's why we keep coming here to the point that our population is now decreasing.

8. What do you think the Castros read?

I can publicly guarantee that Fidel Castro has never read a single book written by a Cuban author (while in university, he memorized many José Martí's quotes only to imitate his speeches). And Raul Castro reads Fidel Castro. That's it.

9. What’s an apt metaphor for being a writer in Cuba?

Absolute white, snow blindness, Alaskabana, a deserted desert, Habanalliteration, and other metafossil metaphors….

10. Tell us your favorite local joke.

There were many jokes in Revolutionary Cuba involving Fidel and the American and Soviet Presidents. But nowadays we laugh much less in Cuba. Then, the last joke I ever heard on the Island was kind of a post-modern meta-joke:

Fidel and Gorbachev and H. W. Bush suddenly died at the same time. They found themselves at hell's gates and the Devil cannot believe his own eyes: "What?! I guess now you are gonna tell me this is just one of those old Cuban jokes."