Loved Metropolitans for its filthy, unromantic radical resurrections? Kenyon Zimmer's Immigrants Against the State keeps digging through the anarchist wreckage.

If Metropolitans fed your hunger for archival resurrection of Yiddish radicals who lived dirty, fought dirtier, and left no tidy legacies, Zimmer's Immigrants Against the State delivers the same unflinching excavation. Here are the bomb-throwers, poets, and tenement philosophers whose infighting and ideological chaos shaped labor insurgency—no hagiography, just raw humanity stinking of sweat, ink, and gunpowder.

Zimmer nails the street-level swagger Gittlitz perfected: hyper-localized dives, charismatic felons masquerading as theorists, and the profane wit that exposes arrested-development romance beneath every manifesto. This is pre-sanitized New York with its teeth bared.

Meet the misfits who blurred art, felony, and ideology without asking permission.