blog — May 06

Announcing SEVEN STORIES x OCEAN PRESS

Seven Stories Press to become exclusive publisher of Ocean Press books in English and Spanish outside of Cuba

The partnership between two leading international presses is announced 54 years after Che Guevara’s death.

New York, NY, May 6, 2021 — Ocean Press and Seven Stories Press jointly announced today a unique partnership for the promotion of Ocean Press and Ocean Sur (Spanish-language) titles in North America and around the world. The legendary Ocean, founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1989 by the team of David Deutschmann and Deborah Shnookal, has created one of the world’s foremost publishing programs of Latin American politics and culture. Deutschmann approached Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon about forming a partnership for the distribution of the Ocean lists, both in English and in Spanish, throughout North America and around the world.

“I only approached Seven Stories because, one, I knew I could trust them, and two, our publishing programs aligned perfectly due to our shared commitment to politics and literature.”

The focus initially will be on the complete works of Che Guevara in newly redesigned editions, with authoritative text created by Ocean together with the Che Guevara Studies Center of Havana, whose director is Aleida March, Guevara’s partner. Seven Stories will release the complete backlist of nine titles, at the rate of roughly one a month, starting with The Motorcycle Diaries in July 2021, featuring a new introduction by Walter Salles, the director of the acclaimed film based on the book. In September 2021, the first new Che Guevara title will appear, I Embrace You with All My Revolutionary Fervor: Letters 1947–1967. Eighty percent of the letters in this first-ever collection of Che Guevara’s letters have never before appeared in English.

Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon said: “Despite Che’s icon status, the world has yet to really get to know him. His passion is extraordinary, and so is his optimism. Our job is really to just do whatever we can to encourage people everywhere to take a deeper look. I’m very grateful to Deb and David for trusting us with bringing Che and the many other important authors and series they publish back into wider circulation.”

Besides the roll out in the US this coming summer and fall, Seven Stories rights director Silvia Stramenga has negotiated partnerships for foreign rights to many of the Che Guevara titles, including with Penguin Classics in England, and many other publishers around the world, as well as deals with Audible for both English and Spanish audiobooks. She is also fielding film rights inquiries.

Seven Stories books, including those in English and Spanish in the Ocean-Seven Stories partnership, are sold and distributed by Penguin Random House in North America and worldwide, and through Seven Stories UK by Turnaround in England.

Seven Stories Press is the American independent publisher of many voices of conscience and literary authors including Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, Barry Gifford, Greg Palast, Nelson Algren, Octavia Butler, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Ralph Nader, Project Censored, Howard Zinn, Innosanto Nagara, Cory Silverberg, and Human Rights Watch, among many others. Seven Stories publishes books for adults in English, and in Spanish under the Siete Cuentos imprint, and books for children under the Triangle Square Books for Young Readers imprint.

The Ocean Press list includes a deep catalogue of books by Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, among many others. Together with the Pablo Neruda Foundation and the Foundation Guayasamín, Ocean published a bilingual edition of selections of Neruda’s most famous epic poem “Canto General” illustrated by the Ecuadoran indigenous artist Oswaldo Guayasamín. In 2006, Ocean began a new Spanish-language imprint, Ocean Sur. In collaboration with his family, Ocean has published the collected works in 15 volumes of one of Latin America’s most famous rebel poets, Roque Dalton. Other highlights of Ocean’s Spanish list include John Reed’s eyewitness accounts of the Russian and Mexican revolutions, key Marxist classics, works by notable liberation theologists of Latin America such as Frei Betto, Miguel d’Escoto and Camilo Torres, and two series: Vidas Rebeldes (Rebel Lives) and Historias desde abajo (History from Below).

For further information about foreign, film, or audio rights, contact Silvia Stramenga at silvia@sevenstories.com.

For further information regarding Ocean Press or Seven Stories Press, contact Ruth Weiner at ruth@sevenstories.com.