Last month, my book on Oscar Wilde and anarchism, Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde was published by AK Press. The book examines Wilde’s political thought and the way it shaped his writing and his life, and it situates him in the tradition of left-wing anarchism, drawing from influences like Kropotkin and Proudhon, and influencing Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman in turn.
The unrivaled Alan Moore wrote the foreword.
You can read excerpts on the AK Press Blog and at LitHub.
I have also given a couple interviews, both of which managed to be genuine dialogues rather than rote question-and-answer rituals.
One, for the ANews Podcast, begins with a conversation about near-anarchists whom anarchists claim, or who had a sizeable influence on anarchism.
The second, for Interchange, covers both Wilde and Orwell, and focuses quite a bit on the problem of moral saints — that is, with the paradox articulated by the philosopher Susan Wolf that it is possible to be too moral. The moral saints issue has haunted me since college, and I wrote about the question in relation to Wilde and Orwell in my book Between the Bullet and the Lie: Essay on Orwell. In my opinion, this is one of the best interviews that I have done.
