since, as he avers, “Doubts about literature as an academic subject produced much opposition to its acceptance as a legitimate subject for university study, and the hostilities did not end when its supporters were victorious.” The question of whether going to university and joining its self-congratulatory safe spaces makes one a professional critic is still open, particularly at a time when gig-economy faculty are increasing. As Tom Lutz’s self-awareness is at pains to discern in “In the Shadow of the Archive,” the financial rewards of being a distinguished professor, or not, are no guarantee that the personal matters in your criticism, or that your practice will be ameliorated by the love of the amateur he prefers to professionalism . As Lutz argues, to say that everyone’s a critic does not mean that everyone writes criticism. The three essays included under the rubric “The Critic as Amateur in Old and New Media,” the third and final part, are refreshing overviews that curb the enthusiasm about new media, especially when some of their users’ intransigence undermines the case against print media. The topics are amateur and professional exchanges in film culture, the small press and the feminist critic (in which Melanie Micir makes an excellent point that should be obvious to all stakeholders: “the vocabularies of amateurism are deployed and received differently across racial, national, and class lines”), and the recovery by Emily Bloom of radio as a medium for institutionalizing criticism in the first half of twentiethcentury England. If Bloom’s fascinating “New Judgments: Literary Criticism on Air” does not seek clairvoyance about our time, her recovery and conclusion that “here we see not the passive listener that Adorno and others describe as an outcome of mass media” is eerily timely. Based on her research in BBC archives that convincingly proves that those programs “brought together an eclectic combination of talk, dramatic dialogue, reenactment, and readings and, in so doing, formally reimagined literary criticism for a new Voices of a Massacre: Untold Stories of Life and Death in Iran, 1988 Ed. Nasser Mohajer London. Oneworld. 2020. 480 pages. Saeed Yousef Lives Lost: In Search of a New Tomorrow Trans. Ahad Bahadori. Toronto. Trace. 2019. 64 pages. TWO NEW BOOKS surface, with urgency, the 1980s executions of thousands of political prisoners in Iran. Voices of a Massacre: Untold Stories of Life and Death in Iran, 1988 provides a multifaceted record of state violence and its astounding impacts. It arrays testimony and analysis from prison survivors, grief-mobilized activist mothers, and the grown children of the executed, placing these alongside historical essays and documents that consider both the event and its aftermath. Survivors here provide not just testimonial but analysis, vision, and leadership. Nasser Mohajer’s substantial compilation is a vital contribution to the record of this still-suppressed history. Lives Lost: In Search of a New Tomorrow is an illustrated, bilingual edition of Saeed Yousef’s remarkable 1994 poem about the mass executions of the 1980s. Using traditional rubä’ï stanzas, Lives Lost triggers an artistic confrontation with state terror that resonates powerfully with Mohajer’s volume. Striking forewords by Angela Davis (Voices) and Shahrzad Mojab (Lives Lost) guide Western readers’ twenty-first-century encounter with this history, making it impossible either to read these condemnations of a theocratic regime through the bellicose filter of Western Islamophobia or to sustain blind spots about the nature of this hard-right authoritarian government in the name of anti-imperialism. Rather, we are challenged to step up in solidarity with the leftists and the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, a militarily focused opposition group, victims of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who fought against the Shah’s rule and then saw the fruits of the revolution dashed and commandeered by the Islamic regime. Voices is a book about words in key ways. For many contributors, the drive to honor dead comrades means the retrieval of extensive detail and a pained apology for all that might be forgotten. Where the killings and cover-ups intended to silence and annihilate dissent, this accumulated telling, this layering of many voices talking—together—is the unstoppable reply. We also hear the bleak absurdity of enforced...