Glenn Beck: An Anarchist Book’s Best Friend
Posted by Erin Brown in Bookselling E-books books trends uncategorized on February 23, 2010
In a surprising twist, it appears that Fox News’s Glenn Beck has helped to make a best seller of The Coming Insurrection, an incendiary text written by French anarchists under the pseudonym “Invisible Committee,” whose call to arms “takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life.”
Written in the aftermath of the 2005 riots in the Paris suburbs and published by La Fabrique in 2007, L’insurrection qui vient was denounced by the French government as a terrorist manual. The text first gained significant attention in 2008, following the arrest of its alleged authors, a group of youths now known as the Tarnac 9, on charges of sabotaging French train lines.
The English translation was published last year in the United States by Semiotext(e), a leftist California press known for publishing such household names in French cultural theory as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Beaudrillard. The Semiotext(e) edition had an initial print run of only 3,000 copies. Incidentally, too, the text is available for free online in both French and English. And yet the book is now in its sixth printing, and M.I.T. Press, its distributor, reports that it can barely keep enough copies in stock.
How has this fringe book become such a hot item? Some initial U.S. publicity for the book was generated by a guerrilla-style reading event in New York last June. But the real force behind sales appears to be the conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who launched a seven-minute diatribe against the book last July, which concluded with the inadvertent plug: “I am not calling for a ban on this book,” Beck explained. “It’s important that you read this book, [so] you know [what is coming,] and be ready when it does.” Recently Beck devoted an entire segment to the book, calling it “quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read.” A Publishers Weekly article cites MIT Press associate publicist Diane Denner as saying that the book experiences a spike in sales every time Beck mentions it.
Ironically, while Michael Moore mentioned the book as his most recent read in an August 2009 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, his own “endorsement” had no such effect.
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