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Keep the Arctic cold: A letter from Subhankar Banerjee
May 17, 2013
Subhankar Banerjee, a leading international voice on issues of arctic conservation, indigenous human rights, resource development and climate change, recently shared some important updates about the future of drilling in the Arctic and President Obama’s recent announcement:
I wrote a letter to the editor as a follow up to the generous review “In the Beautiful,Threatened North” by Ian Frazier in The New York Review of Books of the anthology, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point that I edited. My letter, “Can Shell Be Stopped?” has just been published in the New York Review.After the June 6 issue (with my letter) went to the printer a few significant things happened that relate to the letter that I’ll mention here briefly.On May 10, the White Housepublished a 13-page document, “National Strategy for the Arctic Region.” It opens with a one-page introduction by President Obama.Tags: Arctic, arctic voices, drilling, environment, global warming
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Joel Berg Fights to End Hunger
May 16, 2013
Fighting hunger means more than donating cans to a food drive, says Joel Berg, an expert on hunger and food security, and the head of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. Hunger is a larger societal problem, and people need to change the way they think about it before they can begin to fight it.
Berg, the author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America? (Seven Stories Press, 2008), writes in an article in the New York Nonprofit Press that volunteering once a year on the holidays is not enough to fight hunger either. With hopes of connecting people with ways they can fight food insecurity, Berg and NYCCAH have launched the Ending Hunger Through Citizen Service initiative. People interested in the new program can go to HungerVolunteer.org, where they will find downloadable toolkits for service work, as well as ways to match their own skills, interests, resources, and time availability.
Tags: All You Can Eat, all you can eat:how hungry is america?, Ending Hunger Through Citizen Service, food security, Hunger, Joel Berg, New York City Coalition Against Hunger, NYCCAH
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What Makes a Baby: “A story about where we’re from tells us where we are—and where we should be going”
May 7, 2013
What Makes a Baby, on sale May 21st, written by sexuality educator Cory
Silverberg and illustrated by Fiona Smyth, offers answers to every child’s question about how they came to be— however it is they came to be!In a recent review by Noah Berlatsky in The Atlantic, Silverberg is praised for “includ[ing] all children, regardless of whether they have a mommy and daddy who had sex, or adopted them, or whether they have two mommies, or two daddies, or (as Silverberg mentioned in the guide) a trans daddy who gave birth to them, or any of a myriad of other possibilities. The book, then, tries not to impose one truth, but rather to open up possibilities and conversations.”
To read the full review, go to The Atlantic online. This truly inclusive explanation of the birds and the bees is available in stores in two weeks!
Tags: cory silverberg, fiona smyth, lgbt, parenting, The Atlantic, Triangle Square, what makes a baby?
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Parecomic: get your economic theory in palatable graphic novel form
May 7, 2013
Parecomic: Michael Albert and the Story of Participatory Economics is on sale today!
Sean Michael Wilson and Carl Thompson, the creative team behind the progressive comic strip “Green Benches,” have united once more to bring us Parecomic—the story of political and economic revolutionary Michael Albert and his ideas for an alternative to capitalism.
Noam Chomsky, in his first ever introduction for a graphic novel, calls the book and its message “a vital stimulus for the activist engagement that contemporary society desperately needs if urgent problems are to be confronted seriously and constructively.”Michael Albert has spent years developing an alternative economic vision, called “participatory economics,” and Parecomic outlines the principles of Albert’s ideas in a dynamic and accessible fashion, with appearances from Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, and the ghost of Karl Marx. Albert has traveled around the globe for more than thirty years to investigate working conditions, political movements, and alternative systems of management and compensation.
Tags: carl thompson, michael albert, noam chomsky, parecomic, Parecon, participatory economics, sean michael wilson
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One Struggle rally in South Florida: “Walmart profits come in coffins!”
May 6, 2013
Here’s an update from Stephanie McMillan, author of The Beginning of the American Fall, and the upcoming collection The Minimum Security ChroniclesOn May 04, 2013, about 45 South Floridians rallied at Walmart Super Center in Davie to express solidarity with workers in Bangladesh. The death toll of the Rana Plaza building collapse in Savar, Bangladesh currently stands at 547.
The protesters chanted, “Walmart profits come in coffins!” “When human rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!” and “Hey Walmart, what do you say, how many workers have you killed today?”
Walmart makes $15.4 billion annual profit by maintaining exploitative and dangerous working conditions around the globe. In the last 6 months, at least 659 Bangladeshi workers have been killed making clothing for them and other retail brands. In the U.S., Walmart store employees and
warehouse workers suffer low wages, long hours, no benefits, and no union organization.Tags: One Struggle, Rana Plaza building collapse, Savar Bangladesh, stephanie mcmillan, The Beginning of the American Fall, The Minimun Security Chronicles
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Celebrate Earth Day with “Arctic Voices” and “The Story of the Blue Planet”
April 22, 2013
Celebrate Earth Day with two recently released books focused on preserving and protecting our environment: The Story of the Blue Planet and Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point
We’re celebrating Earth Day with two recently released books which advocate for the preservation of the environment: the children’s book The Story of the Blue Planet by Icelandic author Andri Snaer Magnason and a collection of essays about the dangers facing the people, the animals, and the land of the Arctic, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, edited by photographer, writer and activist Subhankar Banerjee.
The children’s book The Story of the Blue Planet (November 27, 2012 with the paperback coming out November 26, 2013) by Andri Snaer Magnason, has just won a Green Earth Book Award honorable mention during the Salisbury University Read Green Literature Festival on April 5, 2013. The literature award, sponsored by the environmental nonprofit The Nature Generation, is given to authors and illustrators whose books best inspire young readers to appreciate and care for the environment. Says Magnason about the inspiration behind the story, “Mythology and fairy tales were written before we knew we were living on a planet.
Tags: Andri Snær Magnason, arctic voices, Chukchi and Beaufort seas, Dan O'Neill, Green Earth Book Award, Ian Frazier, Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Pamela Miller, Sarah James, subhankar banerjee, The Nature Generation, The New York Review of Books, The Story of the Blue Planet
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Sam Pizzigati talks about the decline of taxes on the super-rich with Laura Flanders on GritTV
April 17, 2013
The struggle against inequality continues as Tax Day highlighted just how little the wealthiest Americans pay in taxes. Sam Pizzigati, author of the recently released, The Rich Don’t Always Win, talked with Laura Flanders about the battle against plutocracy that everyday Americans waged in the first half of the 20th century, when the upper class ruled and inequality was at its peak. Pizzigati compares 2007, the year before the financial meltdown, when the richest 400 people were taxed just 16.6% of their total income (which averaged $345 million), to 1955 when the richest 400 paid 51.2% of their total income (after exploiting all the loopholes).
It’s almost laugh-out-loud ridiculous to think that in the 1950s the top tax bracket was 91% on those making over 200,000 a year. But the 1950s were times of great prosperity, and it was because of the little guys fighting for economic equality, over many decades, that progressive taxes were implemented.
Tags: grittv, laura flanders, sam pizzigati, Tax Day, The Rich Don't Always Win
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Congrats to Andri Magnason, his fantasy novel LoveStar was awarded a special citation of excellence at the Philip K. Dick awards
April 3, 2013
The Philip K. Dick Award, for science fiction books originally published in paperback instead of hardcover, was awarded last Friday at the annual Norwescon conference and Andri Snær Maganson‘s LoveStar was given a special citation of excellence.LoveStar was originally published in Iceland, and was named “Novel of the Year” by Icelandic booksellers and received the DV Literary Award and a nomination for the Icelandic Literary Prize.
“Lovestar is a dystopia for the information age. But unlike most dystopias, the LoveStar world is also shocking in its beauty.”—Ploughshares Literary Magazine
“Orwell, Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams are felt on every page, though Magnason is never derivative. His satire and insightful social commentary sweeten the pot and the sheer wackiness of Magnason’s oversized imagination is invigorating.”—Publishers Weekly
“Strange and refreshing—a lushly imagined future that reminded me of Vonnegut and Brautigan.”—Ed Park, author of Personal Days
Tags: Andri Magnason, Andri Snær Maganson, Ed Park, LoveStar, Philip K. Dick award, Ploughshares Literary Magazine
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Happy Birthday, Nelson Algren
March 28, 2013
Our longtime readers will remember that Seven Stories Press derived its name from the seven authors whose works were the foundation of our catalog from the outset. We love each and every one of our authors, but we hold a special place in our heart for the late Nelson Algren, the brilliant author of The Man With the Golden Arm, The Devil’s Stocking, and much more, whose death in 1981 left a hollow place in American literature. He was born on March 28th, 1909, and today would have been his 104th birthday.Born Nelson Algren Abraham in Detroit, Algren wrote his first story, “So Help Me,” in 1933, and won his first award–an O. Henry prize for his short story “The Brother’s House”–two years later, in 1935. The same year, he also published his first book, Somebody in Boots, which he later disowned, saying that it was politically naive. Algren is certainly best known for The Man With the Golden Arm, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1950 and was adapted into a film starring Frank Sinatra in 1955 (which Algren abhorred).
Tags: chicago tribune, chicago's nelson algren, ernest hemingway, frank sinatra, kurt vonnegut, nelson algren, peter plate, the devil's stocking, the man with the golden arm
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Project Censored to premier film at Sonoma Festival
March 22, 2013
Project Censored members Doug Hecker and Christopher Oscar, local real estate
professionals and family men of the suburban Sonoma, have written and directed a film about Project Censored that will be premiering at the Sonoma Film Festival on April 12th.Hecker and Oscar have made it their goal, alongside the media watchdog group started by Carl Jensen at Sonoma State University, to return journalism to be used ethically as a means of educating the voting public with honest, need-to-know stories. With their film, they hope to ignite a grassroots effort to take back control of the media and make sure those stories that are under-reported, ignored by the media, or covered up all together are heard by the public.
In the article “Digging for the truth” on Petaluma360, Sehldon Bermont lays out the films main points:
• Abandon complacency concerning potential threats to our ability to be informed citizens; turn off corporate media, referred to by Hecker and Oscar as “Junk Food News”
• Research and experience alternate media.
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