In addition to having been longlisted for the National Book Award, Brothers of the Gun is continuing to receive some wonderful reviews from all over the world. 

The New York Times recently reviewed several illustrated pieces including Brothers of the Gun for an article entitled “Comics of Violence and Nostalgia from War-Torn Syria”. Be sure to take a look and see some more complex and creative opinions about the Syrian war.

Middle East Eye profiled Marwan for this piece, “The road from Raqqa: A Syrian author lives to tell his tale” where he speaks about collaborating with Molly, and the effects the war has had on him saying “War brings out the best and the worst in people. It is indeed a process of extraction. Only in the imponderable calamity of war one learns what he is truly capable of.”

1843, The Economists’ magazine about culture and ideas, featured Brothers of the Gun in it’s book review “Coming of Age in Syria” saying about the risks that were taken to write the book; “The danger and defiance of Hisham’s and Crabapple’s work only adds to the excitement of reading this dazzling, evocative account of innocence and survival.”

Hong Kong Free Press included Brothers of the Gun in its most recent list of “Best Human Rights Books“, saying “Hisham’s story gives as vivid a sense as any of what it has been like to live through it.” If you’re looking for more amazing literature about human rights, this list is definitely worth looking at.

Brothers of The Gun is available now on amazon and through many major booksellers.

Next Monday Molly will be speaking at Chicago Ideas Week. She’ll be joining former Mayor of New Orleans Mitch Landrieu, activist David Hogg and several other esteemed activists and entrepreneurs for a panel entitled “Raising Your Hand: What leadership looks like in 2017.” The panel will take place Monday, October 15th at the Harris Theater in Chicago. Tickets are $15, and there are plenty of other fascinating events throughout the week-long the festival. Get your tickets here.

“As the country faces a dearth of leadership from more traditional sources, “accidental leaders” are stepping up and sparking change, often in unexpected ways. At this Talk, a collection of inspiring forerunners will share their personal narratives, and explain what happened when leadership opportunities were thrust upon them. There is a case to be made that the country is in need of a new generation of people in power who are not afraid to challenge the status quo. At this event, you’ll have the opportunity to hear from four people who are quickly becoming the faces of that generation.”

-Chicago Ideas Week on the “Raising Your Hand” panel 

“There is a myth that, before Israel, Jews did not fight. Even Hannah Arendt, making her controversial claim that Jewish leadership collaborated across the board with Nazis, falls into this error. The Bund, the elected leadership of Europe’s largest Jewish community, fought from the first day of the occupation to the last.”

After a year of research and hard work, this long form article on the history of the Bund, a jewish, armed, socialist, anti-zionist group, and Molly’s great-granfathers involvement within the movement, is finally available. 

“Though the Bund celebrated Jews as a nation, they irreconcilably opposed the establishment of Israel as a separate Jewish homeland in Palestine. The diaspora was home, the Bund argued. Jews could never escape their problems by the dispossession of others. Instead, Bundists adhered to the doctrine of do’ikayt or “Hereness.” Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood.”

Check out the full article here, at the New York Review of Books.

Brothers of the Gun has been longlisted for the most prestigious literary award in America, the National Book Award. Molly and Marwan would like to congratulate their fellow longlisted authors; Dunya Mikhail, Rebecca Solnit, Steve Coll, and Tayari Jones. Thank you to everyone who has bought the book so far, and The National Book Foundation for this incredible honor.

You can read more about the other books on the longlist here.

Molly will be in Jakarta, Indonesia next week to participate in The House of the Unsilenced, an art event “bringing together artists, writers, and sexual assault survivors to create new works about survivors’ life and what it means to speak up.”

“We imagine a safe space and strong support for survivors who want to tell their stories, a place where they can explore various possibilities to express themselves”

– Eliza Vitri Handayani, initiator and director of HOUSE OF THE UNSILENCED

Featuring workshops in visual art, performance, writing and creating through various mediums, survivors will be working with participating artists to create work that speaks about their story, and addressing attitudes about sexual assault around the world. Molly will be there creating work about stigma and the ability to safely access reproductive healthcare. You may remember her powerful article in Vice in 2013, speaking up about her own experience with abortion. 

Also this week Vishwajyoti Ghosh gave a wonderful review of Brothers of the Gun for The Wire. He calls the memoir “The account of a real insider, whose stories come to life with the raw, energetic art of Molly Crabapple…This isn’t just a rare book, but also a real one. ..Brothers of the Gun is a heroic effort to weave the tapestry of a saga still unfinished, and yet to be made sense of.”

Book blog Bouxoul also had high praise for the book, saying “It had all the elements that seduce me into reading – History, War, Politics and a Memoir, and to top it with chocolate cream it had stunning Illustrations by Molly Crabapple”

If you haven’t already gotten your copy, its available through amazon, but you can also support Syrian refugees by buying it through the Karam Foundation. 

“Pretty Things” by Virginie Despentes is now available for pre-order! The latest novel by  Despentes features stunning cover art of Rachel Rabbit White illustrated by Molly Crabapple. 

“It’s pulp in every sense: propulsively readable, violent, sexy, with all the satisfaction of an inevitable ending. And yet it’s also a feminist parable, blunt and unrelenting in its wrath, and it feels as fresh now as it would have ten years ago.” —The Paris Review

You can order your copy now from Feminist Press, and check out some of the other covers Molly has created for Virginie Despentes’s novels, using her friends as models.

Model – Kim Boekbinder

Model – Chelsea G Summers

This week Cengiz Yar interviewed Molly and Marwan on Roadsandkingdoms.com for a discussion about what it was like to write a book while one of them was living in an active war zone. Check it out here!

“If you provide an environment where people can return and rebuild their houses without the fear of bombs or getting arrested, people will not hesitate to return home. The major concern for everyone there is the uncertainty of not knowing who’s going to control the city next.” – Marwan

TheFeministani.com said “This story is enthralling… Crabapple has done something extraordinary with these illustrations” in this review. 

“Brothers of the Gun is the story of that takeover, seen through the eyes of a young man, who along with his friends Nael and Tareq, finds his life turned upside-down by revolution and then war. This is the story of people who attempted to live normal lives, as their homes were being blown to bits around them, as enslaved women were paraded in front of them, as European jihadis invaded their land and established the Islamic State.”

And finally this week, the book got this lovely shoutout in the Times Literary Supplement 

“Molly and Marwan’s collaboration began when the latter was living in ISIS-occupied Raqqa: he would smuggle out photos of the city and Molly would turn them into drawings, exposing the brutal reality of ISIS rule without endangering her source. Marwan joined the uprising against Assad in 2011 when he was a student, and the book tells the story of one of the world’s most protracted conflicts through his eyes.”

Have you gotten your copy of Brothers of the Gun yet? It’s available on Amazon in hardcover and for Kindle!

Blood Money at Lucas Lucas NYC

Opening Receptions: August 10th 7PM, August 11 5-8PM

This intimately interactive art show, hosted by Lucas Lucas (57 Conselyea St BK) features art by Molly Crabapple, Stoya, and many more sex workers and allies. Molly’s portrait of Akynos will be on display, and this six foot tall hyper-detailed painting is best experienced in person. There will be visual art, burlesque performances, exotic dancers, sex worker vendors and much more. The show will up until the 19th, but the real fun will be happening on the 10+11th with an afterparty on the 10th hosted by Domina collective Tailer Group.

This is guaranteed to be a very sexy time where you’ll be able to support sex workers and their art. Hope to see you there!

Molly has written and illustrated a new article for The Baffler about Puerto Rican political prisoner Nina Droz Franco, who was arrested in the 2017 May Day protests. This article is part of Issue 40 of The Baffler entitled “Forced Exposure” which is focusing on privacy and surveillance.

Droz has spent the last year in federal prison, waiting to receive her sentence. Outside, while the island combats the overlapping cruelties of fiscal austerity and post-Maria neglect, players on each end of the political spectrum have adopted Droz as a symbol. To many pro-independence leftists who supported the protests, she is a political prisoner. For the pro-statehood right, she is a folk demon, half-witch and half-terrorist: “The Girl Who Breathes Fire.”

Check out Molly’s full article here: “Trial by Fire – Molly Crabapple”

Or read all the articles featured in Issue 40

Tonight (June 29th), Molly’s original paintings of life in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria will be on view at the Clemente Abrazo Interno Gallery at 107 Suffolk Street in New York. The show accompanies a book anthology of art and writing  on contemporary activism, in which Molly’s work is also included.  The opening reception starts at 7pm and will go until 10pm. 

Join us Friday, June 29th, 7-10pm for the opening reception of When We Fight, We Win! / ¡Cuando Luchamos, Ganamos!   The night’s program will include brief comments from the curatorial team and When We Fight, We Win! authors, as well as performances by AgitArte | Papel Machete and the inaugural presentation of the End the Debt! Decolonize! Liberate! Movement Unity Scroll. 

The When We Fight, We Win! / ¡Cuando Luchamos, Ganamos! exhibition features over 40 artists, cultural organizers and artist collectives whose work bolsters people’s movements and builds solidarity across place, culture and struggle. 

The opening reception will serve as the culminating event of the year-long When We Fight, We Win! Arts & Culture Tour and a celebration of AgitArte’s 20th anniversary. We hope you’ll help us celebrate this project and our victories in struggle. 

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Únanse a nosotrxs el viernes 29 de junio, de 7 a 10 pm para la apertura de When We Fight, We Win! / ¡Cuando Luchamos, Ganamos! El programa de la noche incluirá comentarios breves del equipo curatorial y lxs autorxs de When We Fight, We Win!, así como presentaciones de AgitArte | Papel Machete y el estreno de End the Debt! Descolonize! Liberate! Movement Unity Scroll.

La exposición When We Fight, We Win! / ¡Cuando Luchamos, Ganamos! presenta a más de 40 artistas, organizadorxs culturales y colectivos de artistas cuyo trabajo refuerza los movimientos populares y crea solidaridad a través de lugares, culturas y luchas.

La apertura de la exposición será el evento culminante de la Jornada de Arte y Cultura de When We Fight, We Win! Esperamos que nos apoyen a celebrar este proyecto y nuestras victorias en la lucha.

Molly will be participating in this year’s Logan Symposium in London during October 19th and 20th. 

Conspiracy! is about the growing machinery of surveillance and censorship, and what might be our response to it. Then there’s official propaganda and subterfuge. From paid Russian Trolls toiling to Western-funded “media activists” in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, what are the chances for real freedom and democracy when the new media machinery becomes a powerful new weapon of war? The proposed new Espionage Act in the UK, and the renewed threat of prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act in the US, deliberately blur the distinction between information-seeking investigative journalists and spies from a hostile state.

More info at their site: https://tcij.org/conspiracy

Molly has a new Sketchbook article published in the Paris Review about her experience at a recent presentation by New York’s 12th congressional district representative Saraj Patel regarding striking down SESTA and FOSTA

“As crises so often do, SESTA and FOSTA provoked unprecedented activism: art shows, protests, performances, fund-raisers. There was powerful, beautiful work that made me proud to belong to this harlot mafia. (I had too many friends of too many years in that room, friends who I’ve drank with till too many bleary dawns, to fake some sterile sort of distance.)”

Full article here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/20/sketchbook-the-first-sex-worker-town-hall/

Boston –  June 12th at 7pm  – Harvard Bookstore

In the final stop on her U.S. tour, Molly will be in Boston to speak about Brothers of the Gun, in conversation with journalist Jonathan Guyer at Harvard Bookstore. More info on the Harvard Bookstore website and RSVP on Facebook.

Harvard Bookstore is located at 1256 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge MA

The Guggenheim Museum – Summer of Know – June 19th at 7pm

Summer of Know is a conversation series pairing contemporary artists with practitioners and thought leaders at the forefront of today’s most urgent social, political, environmental, and legal issues. Held in The Wright restaurant, these informal discussions are moderated or introduced by Guggenheim curators and engage with current issues as they are filtered through the generative lens of art.

Molly and writer Anand Giridharadas will be in conversation, speaking about the nature of journalism as activism in the age of Trump. The session will moderated by  Nancy Spector, Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator at the Guggenheim Museum. The event is free for museum members and students, and $10 for guests but the price of the event may be deducted from cost of admission to the museum. More details about the event are available here on the Guggenheim website. 

The Guggenheim is located on the upper east side of Manhattan at 1071 5th ave.