The director of the cult classic Brother from Another Planet, John Sayles, has, sadly, not made a film since 2013. And his last masterpiece, Amigo, was completed a decade ago. But this does not mean Sayles, one of the greatest leftist filmmakers of the 20th century (he is to the US what Ken Loach is to the UK), was doing nothing during this time. This January, Haymarket Books, a socialist publishing house based in Chicago, released Sayles's Yellow Earth, a 400-page political fiction outing that’s about Native American reservations in Missouri, activism, and petrocapitalism. It's his fifth novel overall. by Charles Mudede