Sunday, May 25, 2025, 17.30 to 19.00pm UK time (Please check your own time zone).

You are warmly welcome to join us for the launch of Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture, edited by Abigail Susik and Paul Buhle and published in January 2025 by PM Press.

The event will feature an interview with Paul Buhle, hosted by Brittany Rosemary Jones, a writer, curator, and PhD candidate in Art History at the University of St Andrews. She is currently writing a dissertation on Chicago surrealism.

Register for the event here.

Purchase the book here.

Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture is a collection of Franklin Rosemont’s writings on popular culture since the 1960s. Rosemont, an autodidact scholar, poet, and artist, playfully uncovers the writers and artists who managed to be both popular, vernacular, and in their own ways profoundly revolutionary.

The labor culture of the nineteenth-century anarchist movement gains new meaning when connected to the work of blues and jazz musicians. His interests extended from his favorite animators and comic art to the barely remembered best-selling utopian writer Edward Bellamy. Palindromes and other wordplay counted along with radical environmentalism, modern dance, and self-taught artists like the writer-artist Henry Darger.

Paul Buhle, retired senior lecturer at Brown University, founded the SDS journal Radical America and is the author or editor of dozens of books, including historical graphic novels such as Wobblies!

Franklin Rosemont was born in Chicago in 1943. His work was deeply connected with both the history of surrealism and the radical labor movement in America. He and Penelope Rosemont combined such interests in helming the venerable radical publishing house, the Charles H. Kerr Company.

Abigail Susik is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester University Press, 2021) and joint editor of the Bloomsbury Transnational Surrealism Series.