The Mental Load: A Feminist Comic

May 1st marks International Workers’ Day, a worldwide celebration of worker-power dating back to May 1, 1886, when roughly half a million workers across the United States walked off their jobs in their fight for an eight-hour workday.

To celebrate these radical roots, we're happy to share 30% off our May Day Reading List, a selection of writings we recommend from some of our favorite authors, activists, and agitators.

An extract from from author and essayist Artem Chapeye’s debut novel, The Weathering, which follows two struggling freelancers who return from a relaxing country vacation to find their home city of Kyiv transformed into an apocalyptic dystopia. As they contend with the aftermath of an earth-shattering event that they didn’t witness, the couple must align themselves with the rest of the survivors to retain their humanity and forge a new world in the ashes of the old. As award-winning author Kalani Pickhart (I Will Die in a Foreign Land) says, The Weathering is “[a]n empathetic, emotionally raw account that is as darkly humorous as it is horrific, [and] balances the universality of humankind’s survival in a post-apocalyptic world through a uniquely Ukrainian perspective.”

Below, you’ll find the first chapter of the book, which introduces the aforementioned struggling freelance couple and sends them on a relaxing vacation full of car troubles (the car is named Raquel), dusty roads, and rumbling trucks.

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CHAPTER ONE

The two of us, Zoïa and I, were dog tired.

For the past few years, we had been working two-and-a-half jobs each. An office job, a work-from-home job, and another side gig. All of our temporary and unstable work we referred to as freelance. Because, you know, we practically do it for free.

“Almost sounds dignified, the word ‘freelance,’ even if we are really scrabbling for scraps,” Zoïa said.

We had both left our humble beginnings in the Ukrainian countryside to make new humble beginnings in the capital, Kyiv, where we entered university. We started working alongside our studies to save for our own flat. Rent ate up most of what we’d set aside. We comforted ourselves with rumors off the internet that, in some cities, people live their whole lives this way.

“What did you expect? Kyiv’s the new Berlin,” said Zoïa, then snorted into her coffee.

One day, we decided to count how much we had saved up since we were teenagers. Our sanity perished with the realization.

Zoïa perched on the balcony, rocking and making an ‘O’ with her fingers.

“One does not simply get a flat in Kyiv. Not through honest work. You need someone else’s money, an inheritance or help. And associating with Ukrainian banks is practically taboo. We’re not in Europe, tsenk you very mach, even if we are the new Berlin. You know, when one of my friends from university hit thirty and we asked him what his greatest achievement was, he just said, ‘I’m not in debt.’ We’re still young but we’ve lived through crisis after crisis—national and international. One just rolls into the next in those terrains.”

What would happen next? The two of us, Zoïa and I, were unprepared for that. We had to take a break.

We had to recalibrate, as Zoïa put it.

In the beginning of June, we both took unpaid leave (as dictated by the chivalric code of the realm of the freelancer), went to our landlords in their nice downtown neighborhood and paid for two months’ rent up front, turned off our gas and water, and before dawn one day we got in our car, the trusty Raquel—a second-hand gray Daewoo Lanos that ran on the cheapest gas—and set off towards the Carpathian Mountains.

Raquel, the old mare, got into her stride after we passed Zhytomyr. But then the acceleration cut out. A dull thud and we lost power. No matter how hard I pressed my foot on the gas, the revs kept falling, and Raquel died.

“What, again?” said Zoïa, apathetically.

“Christ’s sake. We haven’t even done a thousand k yet.”

“Ah yes! Didn’t you say last week, ‘Funny, the car hasn’t broken down in a while’?”

I laughed, nervous.

I climbed out and lifted the bonnet. Ah. As expected: The O-ring had come off. Piece of shit. It’s this little rubber ring that covers the mixer system connecting the engine to the fuel tank. I think. It had been less than a month since it was last changed. Maybe there really was something wrong with my driving. The ring had pinged off so many times that even I knew what to do: seal the joint up with a bandage from the first aid kit, then drive to the nearest garage.

“Is that safe?”

“Devil knows.”

Nowhere was open yet. Only the birds in the forest lining the road were awake with a busy twittering.

We stopped for repairs in Radyvyliv nearly 300 km later. A young lad in oil-stained coveralls silently installed a new rubber ring. A routine procedure.

“What you doin’ that it keeps comin’ off then?” he looked at me with pity, as practical guys look at helpless intellectuals.

Then, when we passed Stryi another 180 km later, the damn drive shaft came loose. This is the part that connects the gearbox to the wheels. I think. This time, I was most certainly to blame for maiming our dear Raquel. I had been stuck behind three trucks on a winding road and there was no way in hell I could get past; I trailed them for half an hour until I finally lost my temper and, while conducting a flash overtake, I must have shifted into a lower gear too abruptly without pressing on the clutch or taking my foot off the gas. I might even have switched the gearstick into reverse while moving. I’ve done that before: muscle memory kicks in and I act without thinking. The old mare’s ball joints started to grind and come loose; then, her bones started rattling terribly, poor old Raquel shuddered with pain and limped onto the hard shoulder—and that was the end. She lay there, not breathing.

Thank God we did not cause an accident.

Zoïa said nothing. I knew this state of hers, what she called her ice-cold fury. I just sniffed and kept silent, to avoid an argument.

We waited on the roadside and we watched the trucks. Every time I bypass Stryi on the motorway, I am always struck by the reams of dust thrown up by caravans of heavy vehicles. The trucks seem to congregate here, gaggling into herds that stretch on and on like the great migration on the African savanna I saw on National Geographic. Only these cows never stop flowing past, on and on and on.

A nice man in an old-school, cherry-red Lada towed Raquel to a garage, then refused to accept any money. By then it was lunchtime, and the repairs took the remains of the day. The kind old uncle at the garage phoned around for new ball joints, drove to Stryi, bought them, and then kept working until the car was fixed, which was after dark. We gratefully slipped him a few extra notes when he gave us the bill.

“Enough. We should relax now and spend the night here,” Zoïa sighed, then stroked my neck. I flinched from the unexpected contact to my clammy skin, but I was grateful to Zoïa for this deliberate, even forced, sign of tenderness.

“Sure,” I replied.

The word “relax” was said with tension. We needed to recalibrate—again. We were suffering from chronic fatigue. The kind of fatigue you can’t overcome with a good night’s sleep. You can’t recover from it over a weekend, or even a week of rest.

Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow we would travel slow and steady, just like that: slo-o-ow and steady. Meditatively. Just breathing deeply if something goes awry.

Besides, tomorrow we’d no longer be driving on paved road, and it’s best to avoid the dirt roads after dark, which is why we made a healthy detour around Stryi to stay on the tarmac for as long as we could. A while back, I attempted to turn off at Dubno for Kolomyia, going via Ternopil and Horodenka out in the sticks of western Ukraine, my home. A risky business. As one of my old schoolfriends put it, “Just picturing the roads there is enough to send me in the other direction.” That one time, caught on a dirt track in a deep, thick fog, I encountered a magnificent mechanical farm beast that looked like a diplodocus, melancholically chewing plant stems and lumbering across the beat-up track from one edge to the other. I was extremely lucky to push through at 20 km after that, meandering around the potholes in the fog. No, not again. Better the dusty detour. Even if the detour means being lost among the herds of trucks around Stryi.

We spent the night in a tacky “pay-by-the-hour-chic” motel, as Zoïa put it. The room had a mirror covering the whole wall, sequined wallpaper, and three condoms in pink wrappers on the bedside table.

“Ooooh!” cooed Zoïa, reaching after them in pure jest: we were already fucked without the sex.

The trucks rumbled, honked, and hissed outside the window. Its exterior glass pane was coated in a thick layer of dust.

We left at four thirty in the morning. We could hear the scream of lung-bursting birdsong in the lulls between trucks. We drove on in a melancholy mood, taking our time, listening to Tom Waits, and did not hit a single pothole. Raquel didn’t start sneezing or limping or sagging, and so Zoïa and I could turn our attention to the beauty of the misty blue mountains on our approach. They parted before us and closed behind us, and by noon we arrived without incident.

“Praise Jesus! I was expectin’ yous yesterday.”

The gruff voice with its highlander accent belonged to Uncle Vasyl. He greeted us as he came out the gate.

“The car broke down.”

“Agh no, let the devil eat ’em both,” Vasyl sympathized abstractly, not putting much feeling into the esoteric expression. “But still. Yer made it.”

“Yep, wer made it,” I replied.

Vasyl opened the gate of the fence made from long, narrow, smooth planks of pine stacked horizontally. Or were they spruce? A shaggy, dirty-white dog that looked like a polar bear from a video about climate change jumped out to greet us, but was restrained by the thick chain around its neck. Vasyl shooed him away.

“Oi, Overko, back in the doghouse wit yer!”

Around the hut, in a radius the same length of the chain, the grass was trampled “to nowt,” as they say in these parts. Well-trodden paths led from the house to the barn, and to the road.

The rest of the grass in the large yard was a juicy green, neatly mowed. The horse and livestock grazed further up the mountain.

“Wer made it,” Zoïa said. Stepping on the soft grass, she inhaled deeply and held her breath. A pause. “And . . . exhale.”

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Award-winning Ukranian author Artem Chapeye’s new novel follows a young couple who escape city life to the mountains in Ukraine, only to discover an altered reality upon their return.

As in Ling Ma’s Severance and Emily Mandel’s Station Eleven, the survivors must seek ways to retain their humanity and help to build a new world in a post-apocalyptic dystopia.

After a young couple return from their summer in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine, they discover that the world as they once knew it no longer exists. Survivors are forced to adapt to the harsh conditions of their new reality: a place where erosion floats in on a breeze, and ceasing to exist comes with a deceptively joyous capitulation. Overcoming deeply rooted fears, they try to forge another world, uniting with those who continue to fight the darker urges that can emerge when a society must rebuild.

Will the couple be able to survive, make alliances with others, and give birth to a new generation? Will the insidiousness of human nature manifest itself in this new, post-apocalyptic world? Filled with beautifully melancholic and black humor, The Weathering becomes a kind of study of behavior in critical situations when everything that once seemed stable falls apart.

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An author of both creative nonfiction and popular fiction, ARTEM CHAPEYE was born and raised in the small Western Ukrainian city of Kolomyia and has spent much of the last twenty years living in Kyiv. He has authored two novels and four books of creative nonfiction, and is a co-author of a book of war reportage. A five-time finalist of the BBC Book of the Year Award, his recent collection The Ukraine was one of three finalists in the award’s new nonfiction category in 2018. Artem is an avid traveler who has spent approximately two years living, working, and traveling in the U.S. and Central America—an experience that has greatly informed his writing. His work has been translated into seven languages, and has appeared in English in the Best European Fiction anthology and in publications such as Refugees Worldwide in translation by Marian Schwartz. Artem is a past recipient of the Central European Initiative Fellowship for Writers in Residence (Slovenia) and the Paul Celan Fellowship for Translators (Austria), as well as a finalist of the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism.

Last month, we published North Irish poet Eoghan Walls’ second novel, Field Notes from an Extinction, the diary of a fictional 19th-century ornithologist who has sequestered himself on a remote Irish island during the famine to study the endangered Great Auk, which has since gone extinct. One day, upon receiving his monthly deliver of supplies from the mainland, he finds an unexpected item among the provisions: an abandoned and clearly malnourished Irish child. Things go even further sideways, and up, and down — and perhaps even diagonally — from there.

We were delighted to have a chance to talk with Eoghan at Seven Stories HQ during his New York stop on the Field Notes book tour. That evening, he shared the stage with Claire Luchette for a lovely conversation at Brooklyn indie stalwart Books are Magic, before continuing onwards to Mystic, CT, and Boston, MA, for the final leg of his U.S. tour. During his office visit, we spoke with Eoghan about his background as a poet, the irony of anti-immigrant politics in Ireland, and the laying cycle of the Great Auks (RIP </3), among other things.

The interview has been very lightly edited for clarity.

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Seven Stories Press: You’ve written one book prior to this, The Gospel of Orla, which we published three years ago. How was the process of writing Field Notes different compared to writing The Gospel of Orla? Did you have a different approach this time around?

Eoghan Walls: I have a really annoyingly clean process. For the Gospel of Orla, I mulled ideas around my head for years, and I didn’t put pen to paper. I just kept mulling the idea. I started off with a weird idea of a girl finding an un-dead cat, and her mother was dead, and that’s the idea that spawned the book. But I don’t write them until I’ve got time. I’ve got some privilege in my job now, which is that I’m paid a decent wage. I also sometimes get to take six or 10 weeks off work, and that gives me time to dedicate to properly writing it.

Instead of doing lots and lots of redrafts at the start, one day, I’ll sit down and spend an afternoon with a box of cigars and spend maybe three hours writing out the plot. I’ll plan out everything. It’s that easy. I think of five climactic scenes. I normally have those climactic scenes in my head, and then I build up to them. I link them together in a plot that has a crescendo, or that has a number of smaller crescendos that build up together. I’ll play around with that plot [in my head] for a few weeks, but then when I come to write it, I’ll take six weeks or eight weeks and just thrash it out. I’ll write one chapter in the morning and one in the afternoon, and after six weeks, I’ll have 50,000 to 70,000 words written. That’s how I write the book.

Now I can be editing that big, ugly first draft for years. But that big, ugly first draft is the only thing that makes the book happen. Without doing that, nothing gets done. Of course, I explore a bit during the writing process, but I need my plan set so I can write it out like I’m laying bricks. I find it’s as soon as you get the voice that the writing comes easy. Sometimes that takes some false starts, but when I get the voice and I know the plan, then I can write it programmatically in six weeks, beginning to end, and then edit that.

SSP: Well, speaking of voice, the protagonist in Field Notes, Ignatius Green, is such a distinct character that we come to know and see evolve through his journal entries. When did the idea for Ignatius come into your head, and what was it like inhabiting the mind of a nineteenth-century, English ornithologist?

EW: Ignatius Green was hard to find. I got the idea for his voice reading Darwin and other naturalists from the 1800s. I just saw the amount of privilege and arrogance in the way they talked about the people who were helping them, and it struck me as bizarre and blinkered. I really wanted Ignatius, who was one of these rich, reportedly brilliant men, to take responsibility for a child. In this book, the child’s mother is responsible for much of the action and high drama, and the man is doing the caring job. So there’s a bit of gender fuckery in the book. In some ways Ignatius was a hard voice to inhabit, because I consider myself more Irish than anything else, and Ignatius is English. So sometimes his opinions or his politics, or even the way he describes my city, Londonderry—I would always call it Derry—got stuck in me craw. But it became a voice I could inhabit.

SSP: Field Notes takes place during the Great Famine, which was the cause of a mass exodus of over one million Irish refugees from Ireland. When Ignatius first begins taking care of the child that was sent to him, he disparagingly comments that maybe she came from an Irish woman who couldn’t pay for her child’s passage to Boston. I’m wondering, how did you want ideas of emigration to come through in your writing? Were you thinking about particular discourses of exile when you were writing the book?

EW: Very much so. There were loads of threads of tributaries that went into the book. One of the things that has annoyed me most has been the rise of an anti-immigrant movement in Ireland. It has been slower to take place in Ireland than the rest of Europe, in fairness. Many countries like Britain or Italy had suffered strong anti-immigrant rhetoric throughout the 2000s. Later than some, Ireland got its own little body of jumped up men using their granny’s curtains to make swastikas, or whatever symbol that echoes the swastika for their own anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s embarrassing, and it’s awful.

All countries tell stories about themselves. We see ourselves through stories, and Irish stories have always, at least since the famine, if not before, been stories of immigration, emigration and oppression. These are stories we still tell ourselves today. I’ve been walking around America the last few days, and the Americans I’ve met with Irish heritage say yes, when we came here, we had nothing. Or they’ll talk about their own status as an oppressed immigrant.

I think for an Irish person to be anti-immigrant is bizarre. It lacks any sense of irony or history, and some of these things were what I wanted to address in the book. When doing historical research, I read a lot of Punch, which was a British satirical magazine of the 1800s. It continues to be published now, but it had a very anti-immigrant and an anti-Irish immigrant message during the famine. I wanted people to be aware of that language that we may use casually today, about countries being full, about not needing more immigrants, and show how it was applied to the Irish during the famine.

SSP: One aspect of Field Notes I was also really struck by was the sheer level of ornithological detail. You mentioned Darwin earlier, and I was wondering, what level of natural history or scientific research did you do while writing? Did you look at any ornithological archives?

EW: I read loads of ornithological texts. There’s an awful lot written about the Great Auk during that time. It’s great. There’s loads of books available, and thankfully, I’m attached to a university, so I could use our university library to read through them. But I wasn’t sure of all my materials, so I had them double checked by Professor Colin Beal from York University. He’s the most excellent scholar, and he was so generous in giving me his time. His knowledge was really useful in developing some of those texts. I may have diverged from some of his advice, where it became pertinent, so I hope he’s not chasing me with a scalpel. But I’ve got to thank him for the level of truth he gave the book.

SSP: The book is narrativized through Ignatius’s unfolding journal entries. What was the editing process like for that style of writing, where you’re writing in these dated journal entries? Did it come with any specific challenges or any special considerations?

EW: Well, you’re going to expose me now. Yes, it was really bloody tricky. I had to work out the dates, and I had to work out the journal entries by a number of things, such as the actual laying cycle of the Auks. I had to work out my timelines by British and Irish history, working out when the super kitchens were there, for example, or what was going on politically at the time. These were two of the big features. So I had a diary, and I worked out every day what happened. This was my plan for writing the book. I had something like a calendar page, and I would write it all out.

There was a third secret element that I’m hesitant to expose to your readers, which is, I wanted to work out the journal entries by the moon cycles as well. Just in case the moon cycles should be relevant for any potential mystical readings some may have of the book. Hint hint.

SSP: Do you see Field Notes in conversation with any other books in the Seven Stories backlist? Or, more generally, with other writers that have also explored the Great Famine and the effects of colonialism on Ireland, whether contemporary or historical?

EW: I do, though it may seem a slight reach. I know you don’t publish Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, but I kept thinking about it when I was writing the book. Not just because it takes place on an island where the last remnants of a civilization is trying to survive. I love the social consciousness that Vonnegut has, which, aye, all Seven Stories writers have as far as I can see. Vonnegut has an awareness of the absurd, held in tandem with political anger, that I wanted to carry through Field Notes.

There’s another book I want to mention that’s not on the Seven Stories list, which is Flan O’Brien’s An Béal Bocht, translated as The Poor Mouth from Irish. He writes absurdly and comically about the suffering of the Irish in the West of Ireland, and his level of absurdity is something I can only ever aspire to.

SSP: Do you feel like your background as a poet came through when you were writing Field Notes? Or do you think it influences the register in which you write in, on either a broader level or a sentence level?

EW: When I read through some reviews for my first book, The Gospel of Orla, sometimes people said “the language here is utterly unpoetic”, or, “there is nothing beautiful about the language at all.” I find that so interesting and so true.

I think being a poet gives me an ability to cut out anything that feels poetic, and to never sound like I’m trying to write anything arch or postured. Being a poet, I know that the first thing that will kill a poem is an archness of tone. A certain pretension. Maybe, as poets, we’re over-aware, and we want our speech to sound brutal and forthright and gripping and physical from the start.

And look, I don’t know this. I don’t want to try to say I’m doing something amazing. But if I’ve learned something from poetry, it is that there’s no time for beauty or metaphor. You have to make a world that is breathable and effective. That world may be beautiful, but the language itself should serve to transport you to that world and to that voice. I wouldn’t say, like some writers have, that they want the right reader to forget they’re reading a book. I don’t believe in that. I do want the reader to feel the weight of the book and to enjoy the book, but I don’t want them to spend time listening to my beautiful comparisons. I want them immersed in the language of my characters and my world.

SSP: Okay, one more bonus question. You’ve been on tour across the Northeast U.S. for the past three days. How has it gone? How has the reception been? Is there anything that’s surprised you since you’ve been on tour?

EW: Can I please say a warm thank you to the amazing women of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, who were so brazen and brilliant, who deeply cared about the book, and who, when they met me, were happy to tell me that I got the ending wrong. We had a strong debate for an hour, and the level of care I got from those readers was astounding. I came braced, in fairness, for a rockier road in America right now. But that’s because I lack context. It’s my first time being here. I’ve seen some racism, a bit. But I’ve seen mostly friendliness, warmth and kindness. Definitely, in Point Pleasant, that’s what I saw. I’m hoping for a good night tonight in New York as well.

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Fast-paced and funny. Scientific and tender. A literary thriller featuring Auks. As if Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien met Robinson Crusoe, here is a story of one man’s growing humanity amidst famine and extinction.

Told in the vernacular of the day, this novel-as-notebook features a 19th-century ornithologist on a remote Irish island — from the author of indie favorite The Gospel of Orla.

“A unique and richly imagined novel.“
—Graeme Macrae Burnet, The New York Times Book Review

Written in the form of a 19th-century notebook of ornithological observations, Field Notes from an Extinction follows the life and work of one Ignatius Green, a fictitious English scientist dispatched by the Royal Society to the remote island of Tor Mor off the northern Irish coast. Green, a widower, is single-minded and self-righteous, brilliant and bumbling. He is determined to set the scientific record straight on the mating rituals, feeding and care of hatchlings,
and other minutiae he can gather about the Great Auk (pinguinus impennis).

Green’s world is shattered when his monthly goods delivery arrives ravaged by the local Irish townsmen. His fury at their impertinence is matched only by his dismay at finding a small child amid the shipment—dirty, abandoned, mute, and utterly feral and unmanageable. Worse, the locals are growing restless and hungry. And there is talk sweeping the land of a terrifying woman with unnatural power.

Green fights for his survival against brigands and hunger and, most fearsome, the resolve of a fierce and angry child. And, perhaps, for a wider understanding of family amidst roiling societal unrest.

We’re thrilled to share the news that Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated by Natasha Lehrer, is the winner of this year’s National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Prize for Books in Translation!

Thank you to the National Book Critic Circle’s Translation Committee, helmed by committee chair Mandana Chaffa, and to everyone else who has championed this book. And a huge congratulations to Neige and Natasha for this powerful text and wonderful and very well-deserved achievement.

MORE ABOUT THE BOOK:

Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and has become an international phenomenon.

“Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers.” —Annie Ernaux

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was 7 years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her and at 14 or 15 the abuse stopped. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.

Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, woven together with documents and thoughts like a peculiar personal investigation, Sinno explores the different facets of memory—her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others.

Sad Tiger—the title inspired by William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”—is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.

PRAISE FOR SAD TIGER

"I need everyone to stop what they're doing and read this book; I started it last night and finished it this morning, breaking only to sleep." —Catherine Lacey

"[A] richly literary and starkly shattering account of childhood sexual abuse. . . [T]he author of ‘Sad Tiger’ is aiming for her own quiet revolution.” —Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker

“‘You have looked evil in the eye,’ Sinno writes in “Sad Tiger,” her achingly vivid, cerebral memoir of her abuse and its long aftermath, ‘and now no one can look at you.’ First published in France in 2023, where it won multiple awards including the Le Monde Literary Prize, the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens, “Sad Tiger” eschews the 10-foot pole for the scalpel, approaching the subjects of pedophilia and incest with the determined curiosity of a forensic pathologist. Sinno dissects not only her own memories and their impact on the ensuing decades of her life but also the perspective of her abuser. . . . Close-reading her own shards of memory alongside these texts, Sinno contends with both the power and the inevitable impotence of writing, particularly about abuse.” —Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

“The U.S. debut from French writer Sinno blends autobiography and literary criticism for a staggering portrait of her rapist. . . . Sinno’s prose is equal parts raw and lucid, and it’s enriched by fascinating readings of the sexual abuse depicted in Lolita and other works of literature.This is brilliant.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A work of immolation and rebirth, of winking and wincing, Neige Sinno's mesmerizing interdisciplinary memoir, in Natasha Lehrer's excellent translation, illuminates the darkness and it burns the house down.” —Chad Felix, Center for the Art of Translation

“When it came out in France, Neige Sinno’s heart-stopping Sad Tiger, which pieces together in fragments the lifelong impact of the sexual abuse of a girl in the French Alps by her mountain guide stepfather, blew the literary world apart. Its experimental form of creative nonfiction – a memoir that ditches linear narrative, yet races along like a thriller – was hailed as groundbreaking, the book an instant classic.” —Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian

“[An] extraordinary personal and literary examination of child sexual abuse and its aftermath. . . . What makes Sinno’s deeply personal book exceptional is that so many impersonal questions crop up again and again, ones that cannot be answered but all the same must be asked.” —Elias Altman, Bookforum

“In spite of her reservations about making art out of trauma, Sinno braids together personal narrative with cultural and literary criticism, analyzing the portrayal of victims and perpetrators across books and film. She toys with the nuances of genre and various storytelling forms, invoking fairy tales, poetry, and legal documents. . . . Sinno has compiled a precise and sweeping depiction of the harm wrought by childhood sexual abuse. . . . Sinno refuses to impose an artificial happy ending and invites the reader into the ambiguity of living with trauma. Sad Tiger extends to its reader the opportunity to witness, and to wrestle.” —McKenzie Watson-Fore, Full Stop

Cuba has long occupied the imaginations of imperialists, beginning with the Spanish colonial invasion up through the present day. In its most recent assault on Cuba sovereignty, the United States, both emboldened by the 'success' of the Venezuelan coup and reeling from the highly disorganized (and likely doomed) illegal war on Iran, has erected a blockade against Cuba, preventing the import of oil, medicine, and other crucial supplies. This is just the latest example of the U.S. imperial force beseiging the island nation, solely due to Cuba's political affiliations and longstanding resistance to the U.S. interference.

For further reading on Cuba, the Cuban Revolution, and the Untied States' perpetual war on the country, we've compiled a reading list of books by authors such as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Tom Hayden, José Martí, Fabián Escalante Font, Sonia Rivera-Valdéz, Aleida March, Iván de la Nuez, and more.

Behold, the complete catalog for 2026 from Seven Stories Press, Two Dollar Radio, and Triangle Square Books for Young Readers. Below, we're proud to share dozens of titles from all over the world:

Of the books published by Seven Stories Press, you'll find literature and poetry from Kim Thúy, Artem Chapeye, Keletso Mopai, Clyo Mendoza, Cat Fitzpatrick, Eoghan Walls, Alex DiFrancesco, Roque Dalton, Alan Dugan, Barry Gifford, and more; memoir and biography from Annie Ernaux, Barbara Seaman, Ramzy Baroud, Su Friedrich, and Fidel Castro; graphic works from Liv Strömquist and Jesús Cossío Guevara, Judah Rubin, and Luis Rossell; political non-fiction from Che Guevara, Mike Davis, Jonathan Kozol, Roberto Saviano, and more. 

From Two Dollar Radio, you will find new fiction from Nora Lange, Grace Krilanovich, Julian Zabalbeascoa, and Brenda Iijima, and reissues of iconic TDR books from Kathryn Bromwich and Sarah Gerard.

And from Triangle Square Books for Young Readers, you will find an extensively updated edition of A Different Mirror for Young People, along with the first adaptation for young readers of the iconic history book The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk. You'll also find a children's picture book by Sara Lundberg, a young adult novel by Jerome Charyn, Maryam Shojaei's young adult memoir of fighting for gender equality in Iranian soccer, Devra Lehmann's YA biography of Augustine of Hippo, and many more books for kids of all ages.

 

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE CATALOG

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Today, March 17th, begins this year's Trans Rights Read-a-thon! Started by journalist and speculative fiction author Sim Kern, Trans Rights Read-a-thon is an annual initiative for readers and book lovers to celebrate trans literature in the weeks leading up to Trans Day of Visibility on March 31st.  It's a great initiative that's super easy to join: to participate, all you have to do is prioritize reading, reviewing, or otherwise uplifting books written by and/or featuring trans, non-binary, or otherwise gender non-conforming people. During this time, participants are also very much encouraged to donate to trans organizations to the best of their abilities. 

Below, we've pulled together a selection of books written by trans and non-binary authors, books about trans politics and trans liberation, and books that otherwise seem just perfect for a Trans Rights Read-a-thon.

From the official Trans Rights Read-a-thon website:

How Does the Read-a-thon Work?
During the two weeks of the readathon (March 17-31), read trans* books and donate to trans* organizations. This is a decentralized fundraiser, so how you participate is up to you. You can read 1 book or 20 books. You can donate to a large organization or a personal GoFundMe.

For more information, including a list of suggested organizations for donations, visit the official website for Trans Rights Read-a-thon. You can also follow them on Instagram and TikTok at @transrightsreadathon, and at @trreadathon on Twitter, and use #transrightsreadathon and #TRR26 when you post.

An excerpt from Field Notes from an Extinction, the second novel by indie bookstore darling and acclaimed poet Eoghan Walls, we're proud to share an excerpt from the book, described by Graeme Macrae Burnet, in a new review in The New York Times, as "a unique and richly imagined novel." The extract, taken from the start of the book, begins the moment protatonist Ignatius Green realizes that a small child has stowed away on his boat and crashed his fieldwork mission to study the Auks on Tory Island, Ireland. 

from
Field Notes on the Final Colony of Garefowl, vol. II

Monday, 31st May, 1847

The islandmen have smuggled a child onto Tor Mor Rock.

That I did not adequately register the basket in which the child was stowed is likely due to my state of perturbation at the obvious interference with my supplies. I was awaiting the delivery agreed already on October the 17th, 1846, with Hancock of Londonderry (formally of Staffordshire), in addition to supplemental grains to replace what was hitherto lost to rain, spillage & theft from the last delivery; to wit;

pease, one sack; 
oatmeal, two sacks; 
wheat flour, two sacks;
dried biscuit, one chest;
English cheese, one large wheel;
suet, a five pound slab;
butter, a five pound slab;
coal, five sacks;
whale oil, one bushel;
soured grog, one hogshead;
raisins, ten lbs; 
dried apple, five lbs; 
personal effects (ink, paper, etc), one chest; 
replacement taxidermist’s tools, one chest; 
brandy, two gallons; 
lemon juice, one gallon; 
fine tobacco (provenance immaterial), four lbs; 
London gin, one gallon; 
side of beef, one; 
smoked Galician pig, one half-carcass. 

Provisions enough for one man alone for one month entire on the rock with no need to journey inland. Missing this time was the beef; both sacks of wheat flour; one flask of brandy; the cheese. As further insult, much of the pig had been roughly cut away & but poorly wrapped thereafter, leaving only a ragged shoulder, the spine & bared ribs protruding from the torn bindings, left to rudely flap in the hail. 

Even in the glum half-light of the late hail from Iceland, the theft was obvious, but the men were diffident, blank faced as poachers. Disputed with them at length on the shore. That thin pish Liam McGonigle is the only one of this batch admitting to passing competency in English. 

MYSELF: The garefowl have laid, McGonigle. I cannot leave the island currently. It is an act of thievery that has been carried out here. Theft. 

MCGONIGLE: I can only tell you again what I have told you already, sir, we bring you straightaways what we receive from Hancock. None of my men would dream of touching it, sure don’t we depend on the money you bring in.

His tone circumlocutory, his manner obsequious. His fellows scrawny, muttering their guttural tongue. He held the wet manifest to shield his face from the full force of the hail. I snatched it from him. 

MYSELF: You are honestly trying to tell me you have not nabbed almost half of my provisions? 

MCGONIGLE: I would be offended at the suggestion, sir. 

MYSELF: Speak up, man. 

MCGONIGLE: Offended, sir. I would be offended, sir. That is to say, no sir. 

The ink wet on the page. The rest of the men, done unloading the goods, were already turning back to their vessel. Two thin boys—couldn’t be more than twelve—had already retired from manual labour, having fallen to coughing fits during disembarkation, & wailed loudly from the boat. 

Skinny monkey youths, spluttering under a tarpaulin. 

MYSELF: Do not turn from me, McGonigle. We are not done here. I must tally the rest of the shipment & keep an exact log of delivery. 

MCGONIGLE: I must apologise but I am afraid further dalliance will not be possible tonight, sir. The tides as they are, we must get back before dark if we are to not come afoul of the Blind Rocks. 

All his bluster & wheedling & still his uneven grin. He comes recommended by Sir Phillip. Worked with him on the tea ships for five years, supposedly one of the decent ones, & my reliance upon these islanders must extend another six to ten weeks yet. Sir Phillip will hang his head when he hears of his oversight in judgment! I shd have seized him, made him open each container before me. But his lank shipmen shook, coatless. It had taken three of them to carry a chest I could have easily managed on my own, & Connie’s lamentations of the starving Irish in her broadsheets must have addled my heart. 

But not one of them would meet me in the eye, & one of them, I swear, was laughing into his sleeve. 

MYSELF: What are they saying, Liam? 

MCGONIGLE: What, sir? 

MYSELF: That one there. What did he say? 

MCGONIGLE: It is untranslatable, sir. 

Half of them wading already into the choppy black sea, trousers still dark from disembarkation. McGonigle would only heed me when I held him. 

MYSELF: Do not turn from me! 

MCGONIGLE: (gesturing to youths on the boat) My nephews, sir. I have to get them out of the squall. 

MYSELF: You think I am at your mercy, McGonigle. But it is you & your family who are dependent upon my good graces. Sir Phillip will hear of this. 

MCGONIGLE: (utterly unabashed) I will inform him myself of the missing supplies, sir. Your unhappiness is my unhappiness. But I can only tell you again, I have delivered exactly what we received this morning. 

He squinted into the wind. One of the youths wailed to him from the boat. But before he stepped into the tide, he touched his nose & leaned towards me.

MCGONIGLE: I advise you strongly to unbox the goods tonight. 

MYSELF: What? 

MCGONIGLE: Tonight, sir. Unpack the goods tonight. Before the gulls quite eat your pig away, sir. 

I looked up the beach. The herring gulls were indeed tugging wildly where the meat hung loose. 

MYSELF: In a month, I expect a full half-pig, Liam. 

MCGONIGLE: I will make sure to pass on your words, sir. But unpack it tonight. 

The islanders launched as I headed back up the rock, chasing gulls off the pork with the manifest. I believed I had the size of the matter, by which I mean the theft, but wanted to ensure my tools were intact, & then secure both the oats & the biscuits, as I have missed both sorely, & took my time getting around to the tarpaulins, my sight & hearing much reduced by hail. Odour I detected none; my nose is near bleached by the slant wind & constant exposure to fishy guano. Thus I failed to register the child or even the basket that bore it until the men had nigh passed the Organ Pipes. 

But I could smell it indeed when I bent to examine the barrels. Even in the wind, sour as meat, the stench of human waste. 

It made no discernible sound as I tugged off the tarpaulin. A wicker basket big enough for a live pig. At first, I thought I had found the side of beef gone rancid; but the weight of the basket shifted as it tilted; then I tugged the lid & knew not what I saw. 

Two eyes met mine in the dark. 

A face. A child.

A child blinking in the half-light. 

Two wet eyes. A nest of hair.

MYSELF: Wait! Wait, you madmen! Wait.

MYSELF: Wait! It will die, you madmen! The child will die!

I ran towards the Organ Pipes, skidding, landing heavily off the lower ledge. Rose uninjured, shouting. The islander skiff was maybe three hundred yards out. Faces of the islandmen distant. 

They made as if not to register me.

They saw me though. I know they did. 

I was not done. Ran back to the basket, tugged it loose, heaved it to my chest & bore it on the rocks, tho it was heavy, & dropped it into my little rowboat, whereupon it toppled on its side & the lid slipped & the child rolled onto the shale screaming. Lifted it, tho it arched its back, into the darkening sky. 

MYSELF: Take it back. I cannot take it. Take it back!

Waded in to my waist. Soaked my good green trousers, my boots wet thru, undergarments too. Shouted, at length, holding the child over the sea, a writhing thing, squealing, its apparel stinking. 

The men had their backs to me now, & the boat disappeared behind the waves.

MYSELF: Take it back. It will die here. It will die!

My face & ears stung in the hail & the child’s most likely too, tho it gave up kicking & screaming to simply hang, until I stumbled back to the shore & dropped it to the shale.

The islanders were too far out. 

In the waves & stormy dusk, with their sails up, I would not catch them in my little rowboat.

They have lumbered me with a thing that mewls on pebbles.

MYSELF: Get back in the basket. Get up. Into your basket.

MYSELF: Get in the basket! You are filthy.

No English in the child. It squealed on approach & on contact. All filth & frail wiriness. For humanity’s sake, I might have carried it in my arms, but the bloody thing seized like a board at my touch & writhed, & it proved altogether easier to just drop it back into its basket & carry it like goods.

Its basket now stands at my stove.

Must attend to deliveries. The gulls have picked thru my hasty rewrapping & are worrying my meat once again.

~

My supplies—or what I have of them—are secured.

The child has not moved.

Initially, it seemed entirely mute. 

MYSELF: I must see to the deliveries. I must bind them before the gulls spoil them. (rattling the basket) If I do not go, I will lose the meat. You understand?

The child sobbed, mostly in silence, but yelped at the sight of my hands. So I unpacked my goods, first in hail, then in twilight by lamplight, as the sky cleared to a cosmic chill & Andromeda popped thru the clouds. First carried & hung the meat inside & the various perishables, then the pease & oatmeal, then two chests of tools behind my partition, then bound both dry goods & imperishables in sailcloth in the cabin’s lee. Could tell McGonigle had got back to Inishtrahull as his lighthouse began its repetitive scything across the shale & sea beyond Tor Mor. By the time all was secured, the wind had died & a fat full moon chipped the edge of a clear horizon. 

The brandy—the single flask I have—is unwatered. 

The biscuit coverings are unbroken.

Neither the butter nor the suet have spoiled.

All this time, the child lay silent in its box, by the stove, the fire on full blast, under the bubbling still. It—she, by the pinafore, she—must have been near roasted. The still gives a raging heat at full blast—I have coal enough for weeks, as it appears the Irish cannot eat coal—& the only shelter the child had was its rough & soiled wicker. 

I heaved the basket to the door, naturally.

It—she, she—was silent the whole time & but for the heaviness & rapidity of breathing, I might have thought her dead.

MYSELF: You can come out here if you want to.

MYSELF: Come out. I will not hurt you. You can come out.

MYSELF: I am a good man. I am not unkind.

MYSELF: Are you not able to climb out? I will set the basket on its side. 

Small yelps as I tilted the box, then nothing. At her continued silence, I peered into the depths, where she was coiled like a beast among her particulars, namely: 

Clothing she wore;
a shitten, once white dress; 
one blanket (utterly soiled); 
one pair of wooden clogs; 
one cracked chamber pot, once affixed to the base, now unmoored; 
one rubber-bunged pewter flask.

The latter despite the age of the girl. Eight? Five? Twelve? I can age a puffin reliably to the season but with a human child could easily be off by four years, give or take. Malnourished, by the look of her, which makes the judgment harder. Just over my waist at full extension I would estimate, closer to four foot than three, skinny & dull of wit, lacking in vigour, filth-cauled & whimperish.

MYSELF: You can come out of the basket. I will not hurt you.

CHILD: Wishke.

This it croaked. Its first word: Wishke. Gaelic. Obviously there is opportunity for drollery—even Irish children clamour for whiskey etc—but from conversations with Frank, I know the word to mean water.

MYSELF: Water. You mean water, yes? Do you want a drink?

The child flinched as my hand neared. I took its—she, her—her bunged flask, a filthy receptacle possibly for use at sea or in prisons, & there was no strength in her hold on it. Filled it from the cooling tub by the still, returned it to the lip of her basket, & her little talons snatched it back. 

Watched her drink. The matting of her hair almost total. Waste visible on the remains of what was clearly once a pretty outfit. What were once ribbons are now twisted & frayed.

MYSELF: Wishke. Wishke means water. 

MYSELF: Do you want food?

MYSELF: Where is your mother, child?

Might as well have talked to a stone.

Dinner simple but wholesome. Boiled oats & sliced bacon shoulder. Have missed the bacon much. Must ration it carefully now. Oats too. Dregs of old lemon juice softened the meat & a tumbler of grog. Made a little extra. The child can eat with me one night. As I cooked, I tried to engage her. Box on its side. All I could make out from the shadows was greasy hair.

MYSELF: Grog? Do you want some grog?

MYSELF: Are you hungry? Do you want porridge?

CHILD: Wishke.

Refilled her bottle a second time, had it snatched again.

MYSELF: We will have dinner. We will eat. Food? I can feed you tonight.

MYSELF: Can you speak, child? 

MYSELF: (chopping bacon finely) You can eat with me tonight. You are very welcome. Then, in the morning, I will take you back to the island. Do you understand? Back to your mother. 

Not a flicker of comprehension, even at the word mother. But surely their Gaelic word must share some root with mater, mere, mutter? I have no idea.

She was entirely fixated on drinking.

Then I noted a puddle seeping from the basket over my boards.

MYSELF: No! No piss in here! 

The child screamed as I dropped the knife & leapt to carry her & the dripping basket into the dark to the shale by the outhouse.

MYSELF: You do not piss in the cabin. Hear me? You do not piss in the cabin. Piss here. Piss out here. No piss in the cabin! Piss out here!

The child, distraught, keening. I thought of house-training hunting dogs, & rattled the basket, & shouted some more. 

MYSELF: Do not piss in here. Children piss outside. We all piss outside. Everyone pisses outside! Not in the house. 

Scrubbed the boards, & once her noise died down, carried the basket inside, dumped it by the stove. Set up table, added brandy to the oats, a sprinkle of sliced apple. Two bowls, two stools, & turned the basket so she would have to face me.

MYSELF: Come out of the basket now. It is time to eat.

MYSELF: Eat. Good food. The porridge is good. 

MYSELF: Child! I will not bite you.

MYSELF: Child. Listen to me. I do not know if you can understand me, but it is only fair that I explain to you the situation. I will feed you & put you up for tonight & we will return you to your island in the morning. Whatever nonsense McGonigle is playing will be short-lived & I am sorry you are suffering but I am as much a victim in all of this as you. I do not know your full situation but I am here on vital scientific business & while I have all the sympathy in the world for the destitute, I cannot allow you or anyone else to interfere with my studies. I will take you home in the morning. So please, I ask you. Take my food. This is a strong & nourishing porridge. Eat it. It is good.

Not a word in her head. Perhaps she is dumb, or an idiot? When I proffered her a spoon, she sucked on her bottle instead.

MYSELF: Damn you so.

Am tired now from manual labour. Gin is a salve. This whole episode a pointless irritation. I must write to Sir Phillip immediately, outlining the loss of provisions as well as the islanders' tomfoolery, & seal it definitively so as to make sure McGonigle cannot doctor the contents.

~

The child spoke as I was writing, but merely to ask for wishke, wishke! Like a wretch in an alley, she had crawled to the edge of her hutch, blinking in lamplight. For the first time I saw the face under her dank fringe, tear-streaks in mud, a moustache of puckered scabs.

Then, as I handed her the bottle, noted once again a thick stream of piss along the boards.

MYSELF: No! I told you! I told you!

Snatched her up, this time my hands in her hot armpits, regretting the closeness instantly as I bore her high & streaming out the door. She had pissed on my overalls, & where I had touched her, there was grime on my hands.

Bellowed at her, somewhat immodestly.

Then had to touch her again as I carried her wailing & dripping back to her box.

I have scoured the piss now, twice. 

I can still smell it. The piss, & the whole child, despite the application of lime. 

The situation is ridiculous. I had heard of such things in Barrackpore. Mothers prepared to risk the life of their offspring on the chance generosity of civilised men. More normally a man is protected by the trappings of civil society, his boy or domestic help interceding before the destitute can encroach. But never have I heard of a scientific expedition so disrupted.

It will not be without repercussions. McGonigle’s men have not only taken my provisions but now threatened my peace of mind. If Sir Phillip cannot guarantee adequate sustenance & appropriate intellectual solitude, the entire venture is imperilled; if further funds are required for the security of the next delivery, he needs but ask the Royal Society. 

Have written him as much.

"A society dominated by militarists distorts its social, cultural, economic, and political institutions to serve the interests of the war industry," says Chris Hedges in The Greatest Evil is War. One can see evidence of this in every stage of the American imperial program, from the beginnings of empire through the so-called “War On Terror,” to today, with the U.S.’s funding of the Israeli war on Palestine and the newly launched illegal war on Iran.***

Below, we've compiled a timely selection of titles on the history of U.S. imperialism in Southwest Asia and beyond, ranging from classic texts by Howard Zinn and Arundhati Roy, to Bush-era pamphlets on Iraq and Afghanistan, to contemporary literature on Palestine and Iran by Marjane Satrapi, Omar Zahzah, Ramzy Baroud, and more.

We're also offering free downloads of Chris Hedges' new book A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine, an intimate and harrowing portrait of Israel and the United States's oppression, occupation, and perpetual violence in Palestine. While A Genocide Foretold specifically focuses on Israel's crimes against the Palestinian people, Hedges also explores the relationship between the US and Israel as "the center of escalating tensions with Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran, and the genocide in Gaza." This perpetual war, facilitated and carried out by the U.S. and Israel, changes shape with the needs of the imperial project, moving from attacks on one country to another with the whims of the military class. It changes shape, but it remains the same goal: to dominate the region and eliminate resistance and dissent.

We hope these readings can provide some clarity and context in this time of (unfortunately, not unprecedented) humanitarian crisis.

***According to Reuters, U.S. and Israeli air strikes have killed over 1,000 Iranian people since February 28th, when the two countries launched an illegal war against Iran. Along with the mass extrajudicial assassinations of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and many of Iran's military leaders, one of the first targets of the bombing campaign was a primary school for girls, where U.S. and Israeli missiles killed ~170 people, the majority of them children. This was later determined to have been a deliberate decision, despite initial statements by the U.S. and Israeli governments declaring otherwise. 

CELEBRATE WOMEN'S HISTORY
EXPLORE HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR CATALOG

Women's History Month can trace its beginnings back to the first International Working Women's Day in 1909. Before it's revival by feminist activists in the 1970's — and the UN's subsequent ratification in 1977 — International Women's Day's first appeared in 1908, when 15,000 women working in the New York City garment industry went on strike to demand better working conditions. The following year, the Socialist Party of America declared the first International Working Women's Day. 

To celebrate these radical roots, we're delighted to share the following works of literary fiction, memoir, political non-fiction, and other writings that we recommend for Women's History Month, and for the rest of the year, too.