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Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!: Stories of Crime, Love and Rebellion
Burn, Baby, Burn. An incendiary mixture of genres and voices, this collection of short stories compiles a unique set of work that revolves around riots, revolts, and revolution. From the turbulent days of unionism in the streets of New York City during the Great Depression to a group of old women who meet at their local café to plan a radical act that will change the world forever, these original and once out-of-print stories capture the various ways people rise up to challenge the status quo and change up the relationships of power. Ideal for any fan of noir, science fiction, and revolution and mayhem, this collection includes works from Sara Paretsky, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Cory Doctorow, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Summer Brenner.
356 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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81 people want to read
About the author
Gary Phillips
201 books230 followersGARY PHILLIPS has been a community activist, labor organizer and delivered dog cages. He’s published various novels, comics, short stories and edited several anthologies including South Central Noir and the Anthony award-winning The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir. Violent Spring, first published in 1994 was named in 2020 one of the essential crime novels of Los Angeles. He was also a writer/co-producer on FX’s Snowfall (streaming on Hulu), about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central where he grew up. Recent novels include One-Shot Harry and Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem. He lives with his family in the wilds of Los Angeles.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 15, 2016
I found this collection uneven. There were some great stories in here, several ok ones, and others that I just didn't like. Definitely an interesting theme - the stories all deal with resisting and fighting back. Some stories show the moment of resistance, others show the build-up or aftermath. Several show the resistance from multiple directions (such as across time or through multiple voices), making them dense and thought-provoking.
My favorite was The Lunatics by Kim Stanley Robinson. Others that I particularly enjoyed were Berlin: Two Days in June (Rick Dakan), I Love Paree (Cory Doctorow and Michael Skeet), Masai's Back in Town (Gary Phillips), Look Both Ways (Luis Rodriguez), a Good Start (Barry Graham), and Orange Alert (Summer Brenner).
My favorite was The Lunatics by Kim Stanley Robinson. Others that I particularly enjoyed were Berlin: Two Days in June (Rick Dakan), I Love Paree (Cory Doctorow and Michael Skeet), Masai's Back in Town (Gary Phillips), Look Both Ways (Luis Rodriguez), a Good Start (Barry Graham), and Orange Alert (Summer Brenner).
November 5, 2011
This is a great anthology themed around revolution and uprisings. Mostly general fiction stories with a couple of SF stories thrown in (by people such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow and Michael Moorcock). I'll write a full review in the next few days for www.tor.com, which I'll copy here once it's up on that site.
June 17, 2019
This was probably the worst thing I’ve ever read that PM Press has put out. The only reason I gave it 2 stars rather than 0 or 1 is that Kim Stanley Robinson and Corey Doctorow have interesting stories, alongside 2-3 other ones by folks I discovered for the first time. The rest of the collection is borderline to explicitly offensive in racist and sexist stereotypes, with far too many Vietnam-era burnouts and cops as protagonists (which yea maybe comes with the genre territory, but I expected much better from PM - that’s why I picked up a book from them in this genre!)
October 16, 2018
The six or so stories I read were a pretty mixed bag. Short fiction is not really appealing to me, which is why I gave up after just six; and I avoided the space sci-fi stories entirely.
My favorite was "Nickels and Dimes" - about a small-time drug dealer and half-hearted revolutionary, written in a slightly manic gonzo style that I liked.
My favorite was "Nickels and Dimes" - about a small-time drug dealer and half-hearted revolutionary, written in a slightly manic gonzo style that I liked.
September 13, 2016
Send My Love And a Molotov Cocktail!, a short fiction anthology from PM Press, will interest readers of both the science fiction and mystery genres. Editors Gary Phillips and Andrea Gibbons have put together an interesting mix of pulp, hard-boiled and noirish mysteries along with several science fiction stories, many with a decidedly political bent. The editors are quite clear about this, right on the cover page -- "Stories of Crime, Love and Rebellion".
The anthology opens with "Bizco's Memories", a grim little tale of prison, politics and soccer, by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated by editor Andrea Gibbons.
John A. Imani contributes "Nickles and Dimes", a story set during the student protests of the late 1960s/early 1970s involving naïve middle class students, Black Power radicals, and FBI informants. Just as the protagonist encourages the students to attack the police for the fun of seeing middle class white kids beaten and arrested, so too is his radical group urged into actions they might not otherwise have taken by the undercover FBI agent in their group.
Fans of the hard-boiled private investigator subset of the mystery genre will recognize Sara Paretsky's name. She contributes "Poster Child", a Warshawski-less story featuring Jewish Chicago PD detective Liz Marchek and the murder of an aggressive anti-abortion protester. Lots of politics in that story.
Editor Gary Phillips contributes the fabulous, fun "Masai's Back in Town", a hard-boiled homage to blaxpoitation films featuring Masai Swanmoor a revolutionary still on the run from the law and at war with the Aryan Legion. Of course, the fight with the neo-Nazis is really just a distraction from Masai's real goal: the 2.7 million he stashed from a robbery of COINTELPRO funds back in the day.
On the more science fictional end of the spectrum, names fans will recognize include Kim Stanley Robinson, who contributes "The Lunatics", a mystery set on the moon, and Cory Doctorow, who has co-written "I Love Paree" with Michael Skeet, a story staring an ex-pat American caught up in a not so distant future Paris reactionary revolution to restore the Paris Commune. The middle of the book is anchored by a Michael Moorcock novella, "The Gold Diggers of 1977 (Ten Claims That Won Our Hearts)", featuring Jerry Cornelius and his family. If you are not a fan of Moorcock or his Cornelius stories, just skip the middle of the book.
Other authors in the anthology include Luis Rodriguez, Larry Fondation, editor Andrea Gibbons, Penny Mickelbury, Kenneth Wishnia, Benjamin Whitmer, Rick Dakan, Summer Brenner, Barry Graham, and Tim Wohlforth. If you do not want to read a book with overtly leftist politics featuring union organizers of the 1930s, oppressed lunar mine workers, and grandmothers plotting revolutionary acts, then Send My Love And a Molotov Cocktail! is not for you. If you do not mind a book that wears its politics on its sleeve, then you should give it a chance as you'll be exposed to the work of some very interesting authors many of whom you are probably not already familiar with.
The anthology opens with "Bizco's Memories", a grim little tale of prison, politics and soccer, by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated by editor Andrea Gibbons.
John A. Imani contributes "Nickles and Dimes", a story set during the student protests of the late 1960s/early 1970s involving naïve middle class students, Black Power radicals, and FBI informants. Just as the protagonist encourages the students to attack the police for the fun of seeing middle class white kids beaten and arrested, so too is his radical group urged into actions they might not otherwise have taken by the undercover FBI agent in their group.
Fans of the hard-boiled private investigator subset of the mystery genre will recognize Sara Paretsky's name. She contributes "Poster Child", a Warshawski-less story featuring Jewish Chicago PD detective Liz Marchek and the murder of an aggressive anti-abortion protester. Lots of politics in that story.
Editor Gary Phillips contributes the fabulous, fun "Masai's Back in Town", a hard-boiled homage to blaxpoitation films featuring Masai Swanmoor a revolutionary still on the run from the law and at war with the Aryan Legion. Of course, the fight with the neo-Nazis is really just a distraction from Masai's real goal: the 2.7 million he stashed from a robbery of COINTELPRO funds back in the day.
On the more science fictional end of the spectrum, names fans will recognize include Kim Stanley Robinson, who contributes "The Lunatics", a mystery set on the moon, and Cory Doctorow, who has co-written "I Love Paree" with Michael Skeet, a story staring an ex-pat American caught up in a not so distant future Paris reactionary revolution to restore the Paris Commune. The middle of the book is anchored by a Michael Moorcock novella, "The Gold Diggers of 1977 (Ten Claims That Won Our Hearts)", featuring Jerry Cornelius and his family. If you are not a fan of Moorcock or his Cornelius stories, just skip the middle of the book.
Other authors in the anthology include Luis Rodriguez, Larry Fondation, editor Andrea Gibbons, Penny Mickelbury, Kenneth Wishnia, Benjamin Whitmer, Rick Dakan, Summer Brenner, Barry Graham, and Tim Wohlforth. If you do not want to read a book with overtly leftist politics featuring union organizers of the 1930s, oppressed lunar mine workers, and grandmothers plotting revolutionary acts, then Send My Love And a Molotov Cocktail! is not for you. If you do not mind a book that wears its politics on its sleeve, then you should give it a chance as you'll be exposed to the work of some very interesting authors many of whom you are probably not already familiar with.
September 6, 2014
While I did enjoy the book, I was expecting more Cold War inspired stories than what was in there. Enjoyable, but I probably won't re-read.
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September 20, 2018Not really what I was looking for.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews