Approaching the Absolute

Daniel Guebel’s The Absolute is structured as six books that move from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century and recount a family’s secret interventions in music, mysticism and revolutionary thought over the course of history. The reader meets with:

1: Frantisek Deliuskin, a libertine who experiments with the sensations of women to write a musical composition;

2: Andrei Deliuskin, a seeker disillusioned by love, who makes an annotated copy of the Spiritual Exercises of the Jesuit Ignatius of Loyola, later read by Vladimir Lenin and applied to politics, then joins Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egypt campaign, where he seeks to decipher the Rosetta stone;

3: Esau Deliuskin, a political revolutionary who, after failing to assassinate the archduke Franz Ferdinand, is locked in a desert jail, where he engages in power games with his captor, breaks free and organizes a new society;

4: Alexander Scriabin, the famous Russian pianist, who works for Madame Helena Blavatsky (a Russian writer who cofounded the Theosophical Society of esoteric philosophy, which draws from Hinduism, Buddhism and Neoplatonism) and studies the teachings of Pythagoras, preceding his discovery of the mystic chord and his drafting of an unfinished symphonic masterpiece, the Mysterium;

5: Sebastian Deliuskin, the twin brother of Scriabin, separated from him in childhood, who reaches Argentina by ship and becomes a minor pianist in the provinces — as lovingly described by Sebastian’s daughter, the narrator of the entire book, interested in probing her family’s history;

6: the daughter’s ten-year-old son, a kid who builds a time machine in search of immortality.

Each figure engages in obsessive, absurd acts that might be genius or madness, indistinguishable as they exist in a process in which one finds oneself and thus cannot objectively know; deemed one or the other by those who control a narrative, they remain somehow both and neither, wave-particle duality forever uncertain. In other words, free. Countless minor characters also appear, intersecting with these stories yet spinning out on their own trajectories that suggest infinite parallel narratives.

A book called The Absolute is destined for evocative incompleteness. What an attractive concept, but also — what an absurd attempt to take it on! To do so, one must be comfortable with the notion of a productive defeat. What is success? And in any case, can’t the ill-fated striving to connect to an “absolute” nevertheless itself be art? Guebel’s work draws attention to its status as a failed project, and is self-aware and humorous about this in a Jewish tradition. The capricious and suggestive cut may always fall short of a true Absolute, yet there need not be anything melancholy about failure. The very effort is a joyful throwing of oneself into the world, a taking up of everything at hand not just to capture life but to create it, within and through words.

Although the book contains an overwhelming amount of “stuff,” it is never mere information. As the pages turn, there are both unfurlings and fallings short, moments of development and moments of rupture, mostly unanticipated. These change the course of self and society. Failure is as much a part of the personal and historical journey as success; Guebel is fascinated by the overly ambitious plans that end in unforeseen catastrophes and lead to new beginnings, leaving an object as testament.

Pluck the daisy petals: madman, genius, madman, genius. What seems to be bad, stupid, misguided, offensive or erroneous turns out, at a different historical moment, to be — instead or also — beautiful, intelligent, creative, visionary and avant-garde. How can one know which is which? Is there a greater reason or divine force behind our activity that keeps the wheel turning in revolutions? A vibration, perhaps? Here readers knock against a great, perhaps unknowable, philosophical question. In the meantime, Guebel narrates, and through his attention to detail and the stories of his individual characters, his work traces out a larger arc of events, both human and cosmic.

It’s possible a reader will pick up a title like this one with some trepidation, as I did at first and perhaps still do, even after having spent a number of months with its pages. Yet what most astonishes me — and the book has much that astonishes — is its sensuous approach to the abstract. Every character or episode along the way seems insignificant when viewed up close, yet is a luminous and self-contained unit. And when viewed from a different temporal perspective, each of these units is shot through with the whole. Whatever its spiritual or cosmic forays, Guebel’s book always continues to see, hear, smell, touch, taste. Forgive me if I put this in insufferable terms: The Absolute is an absolute of absolutes, but never forgets it has five (or more) senses.

History’s scope is suggested here, but also boldly embodied in style and language, which unceasingly change. The sensual is rationalized and the abstract incarnated, while time seems to move in not progressive but spiral form, plunging forward yet forever turning toward an echo of the same. An eternal return — until cataclysm breaks the account, yet again, into further multiplicities. The single narrative of philosophical history is shattered into literature. What other work has done something like this? Here one can find views from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, set out not by a historian with today’s perspective but portrayed through the eyes of characters themselves in a stylistic free indirect discourse. The line between not only life and literature, but also history and literature, blurs and melts away.

As translator, it now feels strange to deliver up this absolute book — one that is philosophical, political, historical, literary, sentimental, erotic, religious, scientific and artistic — to the usual cycles of publication and criticism. It asks for so much more than that: a fuller interrogation, a deeper consideration. The salvation of the universe. Those who wish to go straight to “the thing in itself ” are welcome, but if you’ve got a moment (or have already finished reading), I’d like to share a few thoughts — smaller infinities based on concrete objects, tangible ways I’ve found into this immensity, stylistic aspects that startled me into thinking.

Egg (Philosophy)

The egg on the cover is a symbol of the absolute, both contained whole and origin. (Which came first . . .) A single detail — for instance, an immigrant grandmother’s pronunciation of “boiled egg” as “bodeg” — can contain infinite stories. The concept of the absolute is rooted in a paradoxical desire to encompass an abstract totality, yet simultaneously refer to each unique part. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel developed this in his version of idealism. Every possible being is fully itself yet dissolves into nothingness when contextualized in the greater whole of the Absolute Spirit. Through the use of reason, I, me, the ego, the subject, comes to know an object and acts. For Hegel, History was the unfolding of a universal Reason led by great men such as Napoleon. The Absolute Spirit is the perfection of this logic, the infinite self-conscious sum of being.

Or could one think of this another way, from different philosophical traditions? I and Other, Son and Father, Nature and Spirit, Atman and Brahman — each pair may be intimately related, as both recipient and wellspring; and ultimately the duality of these pairs or complements may prove to be illusory, a non-duality.

Guebel, as a novelist, avoids the hairsplitting, book-swallowing speculations of the halls of Jena or the rishi’s ashram. But his characters and their actions give body to ideas and suggest new theories.

Magazine Page (Eroticism)

Guebel explores an array of erotic practices in intimate situations, from temporary infatuations to long-term partnerships, sadomasochist encounters to tender friendships, lesbian relationships to heterosexual marriages. Only a few pages in, the reader is treated to a description of how a libertine great-great-grandfather “composed” his musical masterpiece on the basis of the reactions of female bodies. Nowadays this might make for uncomfortable reading, but it would be a shame to stop there.

For this account — set in the eighteenth century — is very much in tune with the refined chronicles of scandal and treatises of eroticism by writers such as Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Denis Diderot and Marquis de Sade, read all over Europe in their time. There is curiosity but no cruelty in Guebel’s account, and the whole section is a tongue-in-cheek version of the Marquis de Sade’s excess rationalism, in which the sexual act is obscured by a too logical attention given to poses and variations.

More importantly, Guebel’s work, moving chronologically through history, adopts the tastes and styles of the people he describes, even if they’re no longer “appropriate” from today’s perspective. The reader may experience heady moments when coming across — in the very same set of pages — attitudes they consider barbaric, excessively rational, illuminated, disquieting or unfamiliar. Guebel’s scandal is not conscious of itself in each scene, but is so within the context of the work. While a negative reaction to certain passages might be understandable, this disgust or repulsion, too, forms a part of the book’s fascination. We are not in the realm of the safe and correct, and all seven of the traditional Catholic deadly sins are represented. If some parts are offensive to contemporary readers, that’s because much of history is also offensive from today’s perch. But to lose such “outdated” views, and the language that encrypts them, would also be to lose the history of ideas, the history of failures, the history of History.

Sex appears often in these pages — incarnated for a variety of tastes — but the real eroticism in Guebel’s work is his tender description of sensual being in the world through noticing. The pleasure is in the anticipation, and all the characters of the Deliuskin family hold dreams in their heads that make them savor what’s around them, from a listing of edible delicacies at a country lunch spot, to ink leakages through the transparent pages of a magazine that inspire fantasies of Eva Perón. Often this attention is more satisfying than the final outcome, if it comes into existence at all. Imagination and the processes of creation are ultimately erotic, beyond the result — there’s eroticism even in failure, if the ideas are caressed well enough along the way.

Talking Fish (Religion)

For Guebel, religion is based in the belief that all people and events are connected at the deepest level. The scenes slide from situation to situation, person to person, in absurd yet flowing transitions. Characters are sui generis personalities — again, thanks largely to the deft use of free indirect discourse — yet they form part of the same story, or historia. Shards from the same luminous whole.

The Kabbalah is important: Guebel’s Jewishness is in the tradition of Kafka and Babel, and like his admired Borges, he always seeks the Aleph. A deep mysticism, the direct relationship between self and the absolute, is achieved by characters through an extraordinary variety of experiences, from the discovery of a talking fish by a shopkeeper in Finland, to the annotation of a Catholic manuscript, to the practical savvy of a Jesuit priest who advises Lenin, to the doubt-filled grappling of a mother unsure her story bears meaning, to the stubborn proofs of love by a young boy who builds a machine to launch into the absolute silence of the cosmos. And every fragmented part in this broken, impure world is a gleaming spark of a fractured totality.

The Jesuits play a key role too, for they are the enactors of abstract religious ideas and secret agents of history, an ideal combination of the spiritual and the practical. Ideally, the order is focused on helping others, and on seeking the divine where it is not obviously to be found. Yet its probabilistic sophistries are also able — flexibly, hilariously, dangerously — to justify about anything.

Japanese Battleship (History)

History is always a narrative, after all. This is a book about everything, but it focuses on the lived stories of a few beings. In Borges’s anecdote “On Rigor in Science,” a map is built of the same scale as a territory, but its obsessive level of detail is precisely what renders it useless. Mapping the world one-for-one as literature would be a similarly impossible project. One must select certain points that represent but also contain the absolute. Naturally, this requires techniques of exaggeration and caricature, selectiveness and a zoom lens, to condense and sharpen the narratives, which — like Borges’s map — would otherwise suffer from an unwieldy excess of information. Or as Georges Canguilhem put it, “Often a caricature reveals the essence of a form better than a faithful copy.”

Napoleon, Lenin, Eva Perón, Rasputin, Madame Blavatsky — Guebel shows us these great figures as obsessive megalomaniacs, eccentrics with foibles, well-situated actors on the “world stage.” A writer can make us see someone we think we know with fresh eyes. Ricardo Piglia, through an essay, made Che Guevara famous as a reader as well as a guerrilla. Guebel, through his imaginary reconstructions, indelibly alters how we think of such “greats.”

At the same time, he recounts a generational family history — a history of lesser-known figures with scattered ambitions, poorly placed or ignored, yet equally important to the story. And he recounts the story of the physical objects — books, bones, boxes, battleships — that shift the course of history as much as any human might.

Pyramid of Acrobats (Politics)

The absolute turns with ease into absolute power, the supreme God or dictator, the international trafficking of senselessness. Napoleon, on a whim, commands that a man be enclosed in a sarcophagus and sent as a spy to France, and that a pyramid of acrobats be ordered from this same France to stand still as long as possible. In parallel he conducts active maneuvers intended to prove his love for Joséphine and along the way conquer Egypt, with no better results; politics comes to seem a farce of personal passions and idealistic obsessions, with “action” the amoral conduit toward this or that fantasy.

Karl Marx famously criticized Hegel for his philosophy of absolute knowledge with a self-conscious, estranged mind that abstractly comprehends itself. For Marx, this was yet another form of alienation, given that “man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigor” with “real, sensuous objects as the object of his being or life.” Marx emphasized action upon the material things around us, and change undertaken not just by self-proclaimed great men but by entire oppressed social classes. Yet such ideas have resulted in their own complications and tragedies.

For his part, Guebel parodies grand gestures of both intentionality and action, which casting toward new visions of past or future, trample with oblivious violence through the present. The Absolute is an extended critique of the saying “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” But it also knows eggs will inevitably break, and there might be nothingness within: the ovule of would-be genesis, leaving behind its shattered, beautiful shell.

Micropolitics is macro: any character of his, with the smallest unintentional gesture, and without realizing it, can produce outcomes as grand as floods, wars, peace, the alteration of perception. Genius, an “absolute” idea from Romanticism, here could find a twenty-first-century twist. If genius is the single-minded pursuit of self-realization, then perhaps the concept remains a vital one — should “self ” be capacious enough to contain alter egos and other people. Self-realization exists in infinite forms, and everything is bound to everything else. When the talking fish is cooked into a gefilte fish, sacredness is distributed throughout the community.

Note the supposed author of this book does not self-define as a genius, and although she suffers from doubts, she gets the work done. Individual geniuses burn fast and flame out, while perhaps those who create in a community are more like scribes, in the tradition of Kafka.

Ham-and-Tomato Sandwich (Sentimentality)

In an old notebook, I found scrawled a favorite line, by Rilke to his wife. It speaks of “we most changeable ones who walk about with the urge to comprehend everything, and (because we’re unable to grasp it) reduce immensity to the action of our heart, for fear that it might destroy us.” The Absolute is a great book because it is often a sentimental one, unafraid of emotions from love to jealousy to despair. The suffering of women and men, the close relationship of a boy with his grandmother (manifested through a loving description of the ham-and-tomato sandwiches she sat and ate with him), the heaviness of family expectations, the intensity of small affections, betrayals, sadnesses and loyalties, the importance of tenderness, faith and nostalgia — if “the Russian novel,” beyond its specific practitioners, has become shorthand for the expression of philosophy and human emotion in a big work of fiction, without fear of kitsch, then Guebel has written a Russian novel.

Rosetta Stone (Literature)

In The Literary Absolute, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy describe literature as “the production of its own theory” and a “poetics in which the subject confounds itself with its own production.” The Absolute is a novel that is fully aware of itself, and contains within it rewrites or parodies of almost every genre of novel, from the detective story to the adventure tale to the science fiction utopia. It abounds with aphorisms, the most condensed literary form, in which one line can allude to an entire unspoken tradition. Any “theory” in the book is embedded in its structure and infused in its stories, which are random yet coherent. Many mysterious signs are traced on the same stone for possible future decoding. Guebel himself has said in several interviews that the plots and preoccupations of all his previous novels are contained within this one.

The Absolute pays homage to specific writers, works and traditions, such as Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (Alexander Scriabin / Adrian Leverkühn), the Argentine movie El Fausto criollo (1979), Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (especially the Grand Inquisitor section), Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Lamborghini’s condensed writings, and Nabokov’s various tongue-tapping works, from Speak, Memory to — perhaps especially — Ada, or Ardor. From the latter there are not only moments quoted (such as the line “to leave is to die a little, to die is to leave a little too much,” in turn borrowed from Edmond Haraucourt), but also similar imaginaries like Anti-Earth, symbols and erotic episodes, as well as the broader theme of how a family might attempt to alter the Universe.

But, of course, this is a book chock-full of references, and looking for “influences,” versions or thefts in Guebel’s extended wink only gets you so far. What matters is how he transforms or transmogrifies them into his particular and moving style. Often lyrical, he is also fond of resources that poetically condense material, such as lists, anecdotes and jokes, as well as jack-in-the-box surprises and other forms of humor. Both the possible failures and the possible powers of literature are gloriously affirmed. As a writer, Guebel has been associated with the “Generación Babel,” which published the ’90s magazine Babel; while avoiding shock value for its own sake, the writers in this loose group did subscribe to the belief that no topic or style is off limits in writing if taken on with audacity, in the search for meaning.

Literature is ultimately a wager. The Absolute is composed by a mother writing a history of her family’s geniuses. By imagining their various attempts at mastery and entering into details, she discovers the specific luminosity of each life; she makes them geniuses. Yet this activity eats away at her own life. Are these biographies worth her soul? What is the value of her productions within art and eternity? Literature is a time machine, but it is also the great consumer of time.

Keyboard with Lights (Music)

While translating I listened constantly to the piano music of Alexander Scriabin, a character but also the theoretical impetus behind Guebel’s novel. Scriabin, a Russian composer and “tone poet,” was linked to theosophical ideas and practiced an exhilarating synesthesia on the basis of mathematical chord progressions. In his works for pianoforte — from the études to the sonatas to the preludes to the symphonies — notes clatter, crash and thunder in dissonant sonorities, not a continuous flow but a discrete overlap of sounds. Yet somehow this remains satisfying to the ear.

A couple of years ago, Scriabin’s notebooks were published by Oxford University Press, ecstatic declarations in Russian cursive that radiate freedom and bliss, torment and ecstasy. They do not touch earth, but remain high above in a mystic flight of the spirit, far from graspable material objects and tangible desires. There are no small moments of affection and humor; the senses are everything, but the body is missing. Only extremes reign, and a whole range of colors is absent from the palette. They are fascinating, yet I can live in his words for only a short time.

But his music — his music! His music is everything. It exalts, it melts ice blocks within you. What fatigues in literature intrigues in music. Scriabin aimed to play upon all the senses through his art, working with lights and sounds and colors to raise listeners to a higher plane of existence. To watch Glenn Gould play Scriabin’s chords, raising a hand up and then letting it drift slowly down, is, indeed, ecstasy . . .

The special piano — the tastiera per luce — that Scriabin invented does truly exist, as does the mystic chord, even if he died before they were put into action. Scriabin’s great project, to bring together humanity in a community through music and change the course of the planets and history, is perhaps the greatest failed project of the twentieth century, the awesome “what might have been.” Or perhaps its failure is an acknowledgment that we cannot realize the absolute in mediated fashion, and will forever stop just short of knowing.

Music, as many have argued, is the purest art; it does not allow for representation, for concept, for the intervention of language or image. Scriabin’s music does not seem abstract like this, however. It is more like literature, accessing fundamental ideas through superficial symbols, and through surfaces, colors, textures. Idea and substance. At its best, Guebel’s writing extends the project of Scriabin’s music, embodying a similar sensorial exaltation, lyrical yet avant-garde. It is art because of the intention and beauty of its process, but also as a created object — the work.

Time Machine (Science)

Guebel riffs on the “divine science” of theosophy, as well as on Pythagoreanism, doctors’ jargon, popular science, alternative medicine and astronomy. These are treated as sources of wonder, even as they are affectionately mocked. Science comprises not just theories derived from experimental data, but also theories that cannot be confirmed — fictional constructions, hypotheses, alternative proposed versions that burst open and expand current visions of the known to form new Wissenschafts, anti-systems, other ways to understand or organize the world. Science includes its own paradigmatic critique, and need not be reduced to a system. It does not progress in an obvious way, but continues to discover the essential in kaleidoscopic forms — just as in the last scene, we zoom both toward and away from the Big Bang, as ending becomes origin and the labyrinths, tunnels and wormholes that seemed so disparate connect via looping repetitions, constantly renewed.

Wormhole (Translation)

Is it possible to create a parallel work of art in another language, a wormhole from Spanish to English? The original novel is trying to act, do something, affect bodies and minds. Characters in the book dream of other lands, other forms of communication. The Absolute makes categories like the “national” or “global” novel seem miserly and all too human. Again, the reader comes back to the question of what literature can do. Often, while fiddling with this or that phrase, I thought of the entire translation as a mirror of Guebel’s. A parallel system of relations. Not a ghostly double but solid and material, neither more nor less true. Mirrors hold both horror and fascination, as “fulfillers of an ancient pact / to multiply the world,” as Borges put it. The espejo fiel, or faithful mirror, with its many significances of translation between worlds and texts, is at the heart of the Sephardic Jewish tradition. But faithfulness is an abstraction that can encompass nearly everything . . . Such were my thoughts as I engaged in the foolhardy task of “correcting the Absolute,” at least this translation.

For this is the kind of mirror that doesn’t just reflect and multiply, but lets one fall through to the other side. The word transido repeats throughout the book, and on one page we find the expression transido de escritura, racked by writing. Taking the meaning of rack as torture device, to be “racked” is to be “pierced through,” in agony or ecstasy. The path from writer to page to reader is a wormhole, especially with a mystical and marvelous writing that forges systems of correspondences with a passion for detail. The writer is racked, the reader is racked. But what kind of a wormhole is translation? Is there an absolute of language? How can one set of symbols be racked by or pierce through to another? Is a translation a second wormhole that bifurcates from the first, the creation of a parallel universe?

Two or More Absolutes

Throughout his book, Guebel plays with ways of thinking about the self and the whole found in both nineteenth-century European Romanticism, and in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. He also plays with Eastern settings in other novels; his latest is set in the world of Japanese samurai.

While differences between East and West are exaggerated and do not exist in any real sense anymore, if they ever did, perhaps the historically constructed dichotomies they represent still hold. This book flirts with two visions of the absolute, loosely mapping onto supposed Western and Eastern traditions. The Western Absolute is time, events as unfolding process, with changes and developments in the material tending toward an end (possibly utopia); it favors scientists and revolutionaries, and is ultimately self-creation. The Eastern Absolute is the negation of time, events as illusory succession, with changes and developments in the material unveiling themselves as non-reality that reverts to impersonal silence; it favors mystics and contemplatives, and is ultimately self-abnegation. To reconcile these two visions of the absolute seems impossible. Perhaps any attempt at unity is destined to fail. Or perhaps, just as there are false divisions between geographies, there is also a false division between what is now and what could be.

The Absolute is about building things that are imperfect and transitory — whether these be sculptures, musical works, political structures, poems, relationships or families — but whose effects continue to resound in the universe. Both creation and abnegation form a part of what’s made in practice, and theoretical contradictions cease to be so in the lived paradox of human experience.

Sometimes, when listening to a piece of extraordinary music — or reading an extraordinary novel — I feel myself poised on the brink of something between the physical and the mental, between reality and its negation. On the endlessly delicate, quivering line between This and That, an inviting abyss. Such a singularity, I tell myself, must be Art.

—Jessica Sequeira

DANIEL GUEBEL has published over twenty-five books, including novels, short stories and plays. He won Argentina’s National Literature Prize as well as the Argentine Academy of Letters’ novel prize. The Absolute was chosen by La Nación newspaper as its book of the year and The Emperor’s Pearl won the Emecé Prize. His autobiographical book The Jewish Son also won the Buenos Aires Book Fair’s award for literary criticism. Guebel’s latest novel is A Japanese Crime. A lover of Japanese literature, he owns a sushi restaurant.

JESSICA SEQUEIRA is a writer and literary translator. She is the author of the novel A Furious Oyster, the story collection Rhombus and Oval, the essay collection Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age and the hybrid work A Luminous History of the Palm. She has translated over twenty books by Latin American authors, and in 2019 was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Sara Gallardo’s Land of Smoke. She lives in Santiago, Chile and Cambridge, England.

May 03

Free eBook: The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America

A letter from Robin Marty, activist and author of The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, on the occasion of the Texas Governor Greg Abbott's decision to sign TX Senate Bill 4, in which abortion is criminalized after 6 weeks:

According to a newly enacted Texas law, abortion is now essentially illegal in the state, and anyone who assists someone in getting one can be accused of “aiding and abetting.” Even worse, this law can be enforced by any random person claiming to know that this “crime” has occurred.

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This second edition features extensively updated information on abortion legality and access in the United States, and approximately one hundred pages of new content, covering such topics as independent alternatives to Planned Parenthood, "auntie networks," taxpayer-funded abortions, and using social media wisely in the age of surveillance.

Inextricably connected to issues of autonomy, privacy, and sexuality, the abortion debate remains home base for the culture wars in America. Yet, there is more common ground than meets the eye in favor of choice. Sarah Erdreich’s Generation Roe delves into phenomena such as "abortion-recovery counseling," "crisis pregnancy centers," and the infamous anti-choice "black children are an endangered species" billboards. It tells the stories of those who risk their lives to pursue careers in this stigmatized field. And it outlines the outrageous legislative battles that are being waged against abortion rights all over the country. With an inspiring spirit and a forward-looking approach, Erdreich holds abortion up, unabashedly, as a moral and fundamental human right.

Now a major motion picture directed by Audrey Diwan

Translated by Tanya Leslie

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child.

This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.

In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

Edited by Barbara Seaman and Laura Eldridge

Science journalist Barbara Seaman (1935-2008) spent the last forty years of her life on the front lines as a women's health advocate. Throughout her career, she was also a tireless supporter of other women's voices. Here she brings together an essential collection of essays, interviews, and commentary by leading activists, writers, doctors, and sociologists on topics ranging across reproductive rights, sex and orgasm, activism, motherhood and birth control. The more than two hundred contributors include Jennifer Baumgardner, Susan Brownmiller, Phyllis Chesler, Angela Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Molly Haskell, Shere Hite, Susie Orbach, Judith Rossner, Alix Kates Shulman, Gloria Steinem, Sojourner Truth, Rebecca Walker, Naomi Wolf, and many others.

May 02

MAY DALE SALE: 40% Off, Plus Recommendations!

Welcome to the 2022 May Day sale!

In celebration of International Workers Day, from now until May 5th you can enjoy 40% off the entire Seven Stories catalog.

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Smart, literary, and downright daring, The Night is a big picture look at language, politics, and the breaking points of both. Switching frantically between crime thriller and metafictional thought experiment, this is the debut novel of a thrilling new force in Latin American fiction. Not to be missed.

In an era of unprecedentedly vicious attacks on journalists and journalism, Project Censored’s annual State of the Free Press is more vital than ever. The 2022 edition takes a look at how America’s abandoning of media literacy is building a focus on information-free clickbait, and how “both-sides” reporting is anything but balanced. Ultimately, the diverse group of contributors in the 2022 edition advocate, optimistically, for a more robust press, and provide ideas and vision for how to restore the integrity of the news.

Award winning playwright, novelist, and activist Kia Corthron returns with Moon And The Mars, a profoundly moving historical novel whose themes and ideas are as relevant as ever. Set in the mid-1800s, as American attitudes are beginning to shift about slavery, class, race, and women’s role in society, Theodora Brigid Brook is coming of age in Manhattan’s infamous Five Points district. Written with unforgettable energy, we follow Theo as she navigates growing up, and finding her place in both a city, and a nation, that are approaching a pivotal moment.

Written with serrated, knife-like prose, A Country For Dying swirls through Paris in the summer of 2010, following a cast of characters through their reckoning with postcolonial life. These interlocking narratives will offer readers an unforgettable view into the inner lives of others.

The Next Republic is a unique and timely book offering a who’s-who guide to the progressive leaders of tomorrow. A deeply hopeful look toward the future of post-Trump America.

All throughout history, the powerful have always fought to restrict the flow of information in ways that will benefit them (see also, Virus and Project Censored's State of the Free Press), and yet, people will always be there to combat this restriction and bring truth to light. In The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge a new contract is established, aiming to help all of us fight against “The Monsterverse” and those that seek to perpetuate it.

If you’re feeling like everyone has lost their minds, let this book be your antidote (or vaccine). Virus: Vaccinations, The CDC, and The Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic offers a clear-eyed road map through a period of near-unrivaled chaos, and how ideology, nativism, and the embrace of conspiracy theories and disinformation in the interest of political power have resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

April 25

634 Ways to Kill Fidel

In 634 Ways to Kill Fidel, Fabián Escalante, the founder of the Cuban intelligence services, and head of the Cuban State Security Department, provides a sprawling account of the various creative, often cartoonish, yet obviously disturbing attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. We’ve compiled a few of the most, at the least on their face, Looney Tunes-esque assassination attempts to share with you today. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll find yourself pleasantly tickled by their bumbling buffoonery.

The Milkshake—

In March of 1963, a counterrevolutionary working with the CIA was stationed at the Havana Libre café in Cuba. He was instructed to poison Fidel Castro's dessert, a chocolate milkshake. He failed, spilling the toxin in the kitchen of a café.

Adding insult to injury, the agent had to watch in despair as Castro enjoyed the regular milkshake that the would-be assassin had prepared himself.

The Seashell—

Castro loved the beach, and thought seashells were great, so the CIA planned to fill a beautiful seashell with explosives. The idea was this: when Castro felt compelled to pick up the shell, the seashell would detonate. Unfortunately for them, they failed to find an appropriately enticing location to place the shell, and thus Castro's life was spared.

The Shoes—

In September of 1960, Fidel Castro was in New York City. While in New York, his shoes were sprinkled with thallium salts, which were designed to make his beard fall out. It was assumed that Castro would be so upset by this, that he would reach for a nearby cigar, which, coincidentally, had been laced with chemicals.

The Softball—

It was simply, really. They would paint a bomb to resemble a softball, and then they would throw it at Castro.

They missed.

The Vat of Molten Metal—

Fidel Castro frequently toured the various working facilities of Cuba—farms, factories, etc.—and in October of 1971, several people were arrested at a steel mill where they had been planning to simply push Castro into a giant vat of molten metal.

The Video Camera—

Two assassins, posing as journalists, were to attend a press conference given by Castro. They had brought with them a video camera, which had been secretly hollowed out to contain a .357 revolver. The idea was to point the camera at Castro and fire the gun out through the lens. The assassins backed out because even they knew this was a bad idea.

~

These stories, and 628 others, can be found in 634 WAYS TO KILL FIDEL — a vital history of all the different ways that US agents, counterrevolutionaries, mobsters, and vigilantes attempted to silence Castro and what he stood for.

Fabián Escalante, the founder of the Cuban intelligence services, and head of the Cuban State Security Department, provides a clear-eyed first-person account of his experiences defending Castro from the extraordinary attempts to take his life. Written in the style of a political thriller, but filled with historical details on Fidel, Cuba, the communist movement, and US attempts to silence rebellion, this book clarifies the inherent danger that comes with fighting for a better world.

634 Ways to Kill Fidel illuminates the threat Castro and the Cuban revolutionary movement posed to US hegemony. The result is a disturbing portrait of how US tax dollars fund campaigns to stifle dissent and attempt to rupture movements in the Global South fighting for sovereignty, justice, self-determination, and ultimately a better world.

"Assassination plans devised against Fidel Castro over many years involved weapons such as lethal poisons, powerful plastic explosives, cigars containing dangerous substances, grenades to be launched in public areas, guns with sophisticated telescopic sights, poison-filled syringes so fine that contact with the skin would be unnoticed, rocket launchers and bazookas, and explosive charges concealed in underground drains with a timer ticking down the minutes and seconds."

March 28

Joy Fun: An Excerpt From Barry Gifford’s New Book, “The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea”

To celebrate the publication of The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea: Stories by Barry Gifford, the latest installment of his beloved Roy tales, we're proud to share a story from the book, in which a young man named Bobby Dorp teaches 13 year-old Roy Colby how to steal a car.

Joy Fun

“When it’s cold like this guys leave their cars runnin’ while they go inside to pick up their order. They leave the heater and headlights on and the key in the ignition, so you just jump in as soon as the guy’s out of sight and drive it away. Make sure there ain’t nobody sittin’ in the car, of course, or a kid in the backseat or maybe on the floor playin’ with a toy. If there is, back off and wait for another customer.”

Bobby Dorp was explaining to Roy how to boost cars from the parking lot alongside Joy Fun Chinese Restaurant. It was a snowy night, and icy wind was blowing in off the lake, and there was fog, too. The two boys waited in a dark corner of the lot. Dorp was seventeen; according to him he had been stealing cars since he was fifteen.

“How old are you, Roy?”

“Thirteen and a half.”
“You know how to drive?”
“I’ve watched plenty of people drive.”

Bobby Dorp laughed, then said, “We’ll find out now. Look, this guy even left the door to his Pontiac open. Can you drive a stick?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s new, probably an automatic, go and see. If it is, you’re good to go.”

Roy had driven a short distance in a pickup truck on a construction site in Tampa, Florida, where his Uncle Buck was building houses. Roy worked mostly shoveling lime rock off curbs after bulldozers and steam rollers had flattened and smoothed down new streets where the houses were being built. At one point Cleanhead Sam, the foreman, had ordered Roy to drive his white pickup to a location a quarter of a mile away. When Roy, who was not yet thirteen, told Sam he didn’t know how to drive a stick shift, the foreman shoved it into second gear and told Roy to keep his foot on the gas pedal and drive the truck in second, then turn off the ignition when he got to where he was going, leave it there with the keys on the floor and walk back.

The Pontiac was an automatic so Roy put it into drive and slowly headed toward the driveway leading to the street. He stopped the car at the end of the driveway so Bobby Dorp could climb in.

“Okay, kid, turn right and then hang a left on Minnetonka. Go slow. Tap the brakes when you need to stop so we don’t skid.”

“Where are we going?”

“Don’t matter. Maybe pick up some chicks.”

“You really think there’ll be girls out walking in this weather?”

“People in Chicago are used to it, a little snow don’t stop ’em.”

Roy kept the Pontiac between fifteen and twenty miles per hour. Cars around them were spinning out on icy patches and snow began falling harder.

“You can go a little faster, Roy. Be careful when you turn not to spin the steering wheel too far ’cause of the power steering. You don’t want to end up in traffic going the other way.”

The night before he stole the car from in front of Joy Fun, Roy had watched a movie on TV called The Wild Man of Borneo, which was about an old, destitute actor who is reduced to playing the part of an uncivilized savage in a carnival side show. The actor wears a bone through his nose, a frizzy fright wig, blackface, a tiger-striped loincloth and carries a spear. He tries to prevent his daughter, with whom he lives in a dilapidated boardinghouse in New York City, from discovering that he has sunk so low and can no longer get roles in legitimate theater. The movie had some good actors in it, including the man who portrayed the Wizard of Oz as the bogus wild man, but the dialogue was pretty bad. Roy liked the movie anyway, even though the play was poorly written and the story overly sentimental. He sympathized with the disgraced, pathetic actor and felt sorry for the man’s disappointed daughter who was aware of the bad shape her father was in both emotionally and physically, especially after she finds out about his shameful wild man act.

Roy thought about this story as he tried to concentrate on controlling the stolen Pontiac over the slippery streets. The humiliated actor had probably considered killing himself. He had no real friends left, hardly any money, realized he was a failure and that his daughter would be better off without him. If Roy crashed the Pontiac or ran down a pedestrian his own life would be over, he would be doomed like the old actor. He tapped the brakes, pulled the car over to the curb and let it glide to a full stop.

“I’m gettin’ out,” Roy said, and opened the driver’s side door.

“You were doin’ fine,” said Dorp. “What’s the matter?”

Roy got out of the car and watched Dorp slide over to the driver’s side and drive away. He began walking through the white streets in the direction of his house. Roy was certain that Bobby Dorp would not trust him again but he didn’t really care.

At the corner of Ojibway and Kankakee a man draped in an oversized dark coat was stumbling along. As Roy and the man approached each other the man suddenly shouted, “Where’s my hat? Who took my hat?”

“You must have left it in the bar,” Roy said.

“Rooster stole it. He’s only one would.”

Roy kept walking. It was easy to fail in life, he thought, like the fake wild man or the drunk whose hat Rooster had taken. Now he had failed to follow through with stealing a car, though that wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. Roy figured if Dorp got caught by the cops he wouldn’t rat on him. His hair was wet from the blowing snow. Roy realized that he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Not yet, anyway. If he were, he would have worn a hat.

The author of more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into over twenty-five languages, BARRY GIFFORD writes distinctly American stories for readers around the globe. From screenplays and librettos to his acclaimed Sailor and Lula novels, Gifford’s writing is as distinctive as it is difficult to classify. Born in the Seneca Hotel on Chicago’s Near North Side, he relocated in his adolescence to New Orleans. The move proved significant: throughout his career, Gifford’s fiction—part-noir, part-picaresque, always entertaining—is born of the clash between what he has referred to as his “Northern Side” and “Southern Side.” Gifford has been recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. His novel Wild at Heart was adapted into the 1990 Palme d’Or-winning film of the same name. His novels include Black Sun Rising / La Corazonada, Wyoming, The Sinaloa Story, Port Tropique, Memories from a Sinking Ship, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, Landscape with Traveler, and The Up-Down. His short stories and poetry are collected in American Falls, Do the Blind Dream?, The Cuban Club, Imagining Paradise. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

March 25

Celebrating 10 Years of Triangle Square Books for Young Readers

"I always take in books as a reader first—I want to know how the book makes me feel, what’s the human reaction, before I consider it as a publishing opportunity. My favorite kids’ books have characters that any reader at any age can relate to because the perspective and the emotion reflected there are true—whether the character is joyous or sad or afraid or curious or feeling silly, or maybe they’re feeling a feeling they can’t yet identify. I always hope to find that moment of emotional recognition and/or to see the character have agency, whether that’s achieved through imaginative writing or expressive illustrations or both, and whether the intended reader is young or old. Answers aren’t always easy to come by in the real world when you’re a kid—sometimes it’s enough to ask a question and feel supported while you work out an answer for yourself. I love books that embrace that ambiguous, uncertain space. . . . that push the boundaries of what a kids’ or an adult book “should” be."

—Ruth Weiner, publisher of Triangle Square Books for Young Readers and publicity director of Seven Stories Press

**Visit Words Without Borders to read all about our decade of publishing unconventional world literature for children of all ages.**

If publishing imprints were people, 10-year-old Triangle Square Books for Young Readers would be Seven Stories’ Mini-Me. The concept for an activist children’s line parallels the adult division, with books for “skeptical young readers.” The resulting titles have sold so well, particularly during the pandemic, that TSBYR is about to double its list and introduce two new series.

“The children’s division is thematically and philosophically an offshoot of Seven Stories,” said Seven Stories publicity director and newly appointed TSBYR publisher Ruth Weiner.

“We believe at Seven Stories, and I do, first and foremost, that books can change the world,” added Seven Stories founder Dan Simon. “It can seem a little bit earnest in the adult world, but it works in the kids’ world.”

**Visit Publishers Weekly to learn more about Triangle Square Books for Young Readers, and our decade of publishing radical books for children and young adults.**

March 17

Announcing the Ernesto Che Guevara bilingual curriculum guide in collaboration with the Center for Latin American, Carribean, and Latinx Studies (CLACX) at Vanderbilt University

Bilingual curriculum guide for The Motorcycle Diaries and other
Che Guevara Library titles

Seven Stories Press and The Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (CLACX) at Vanderbilt University have collaborated to create a bilingual curriculum guide for The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Che Guevara, a popular title taught in introductory and intermediate Spanish-language courses. The guide also features discussion questions for the other eight initial titles in the Che Guevara Library, the new book publishing project from Seven Stories Press to reintroduce the great essays, journals, and diaries of Che Guevara and other essential works from Latin America in both English and Spanish editions.

Download the Che Guevara Library bilingual curriculum guide here >

Bilingual Curriculum Guide

The teaching resource offers pre-reading activities, guiding questions, post-reading resources, a suggested student project, and an essay assignment, and is intended for use in upper-level high school Spanish classes and intermediate to upper-level college Spanish courses. It was written by Elyssa Cross, a high school Spanish teacher in the Metro Nashville Public School system and Kai Gardner, who also has experience teaching Spanish in a secondary charter school, and is currently a student in the International Education Policy and Management program at Vanderbilt University and a graduate assistant at the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies.

"This partnership to create an educational resource for teachers and professors to use in high school and in higher education courses will bring the legacy of Che Guevara to a new audience of students," said Claire Kelley, Director of Academic and Library Marketing at Seven Stories Press. "We are thrilled to work with CLACX to utilize their pedagogical expertise in order to engage and assist educators who would like to adopt this new beautifully designed and repackaged collection of books for their classes."

The Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (CLACX) is a new research center at Vanderbilt University, created in Fall 2021 to bring together the former Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and the Program in Latino and Latina Studies (LATS). CLACX fosters research and teaching that examine the borders and intersections between Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies, enriching all through comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives.

"This new resource will enhance the use of the Che Guevara Library as an interdisciplinary tool in the classroom," said Colleen McCoy, CLACX Outreach Coordinator. "We look forward to sharing it with our educator networks."

CLACX is a National Resource Center on Latin America, designated by the US Department of Education. Alongside providing Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants, NRC funding supports professional development workshops, summer institutes, and cultural arts events to engage K-16 educators and the community. This bilingual curriculum guide is part of that work to engage and to further the teaching of Latin American cultures, languages, and histories.

Edited by Maria del Carmen Ariet Garcia and Disamis Arcia Munoz
Foreword by Aleida Guevara

Ernesto Che Guevara was a voyager—and thus a letter writer—for his entire adult life. The letters collected here range from letters home during his Motorcycle Diaries trip, to the long letter to Fidel after the success of the Cuban revolution in early 1959, from the most personal to the intensely political, revealing someone who not only thought deeply about everything he encountered, but for whom the process of social transformation was a constant companion from his youth until shortly before his death. His letters give us Che the son, the friend, the lover, the guerilla fighter, the political leader, the philosopher, the poet. Che in these letters is often playful, funny, sometimes sarcastic, and deeply affectionate. His life was short, and these twenty years, from when he was 19 until days before his death, show it was also incredibly rich and full.

As his daughter Aleida Guevara, also a doctor like her father, writes, "When you write a speech, you pay attention to the language, the punctuation and so on. But in a letter to a friend or a member of your family, you don't worry about those things. It is you speaking, in your authentic voice. That's what I like about these letters; they show who Che really was and how he thought. This is the true political testimony of my father."

Las obras completas del Che Guevara - Español

Edited by Maria del Carmen Ariet Garcia and Disamis Arcia Munoz

La primera edición de las cartas del Che Guevara, la mayoría nunca antes publicadas en inglés.

"El Che no era solamente un intelectual, era el ser humano más completo de nuestra época."
–Jean Paul Sartre

"En el presente, cuando para muchos la ética y otros profundos valores morales se consideran fácilmente comprados y vendidos, el ejemplo del Che Guevara toma una dimensión aún mayor."
–Rigoberta Menchú

"Los poderosos del mundo deben prestar atención: profundamente dentro de la remera en la que hemos tratado de atraparlo los ojos del Che Guevara permanecen llameantes con impaciencia."
–Ariel Dorfman

Ernesto Che Guevara fue un viajero—y por lo tanto un escritor de cartas—a lo largo de su vida de adulto. Las cartas coleccionadas aquí incluyen un amplio rango, de cartas a sus padres durante su viaje en motocicleta a la extensiva carta a Fidel luego del éxito de la revolución cubana a comienzos de 1959, de lo más personal a lo intensamente político, revelando a alguien que no solo ahondaba a través del pensamiento en todo lo que encontraba, pero para quien el proceso de transformación social fue un compañero constante desde su juventud hasta poco antes de su muerte. Sus cartas nos dan al Che hijo, amigo, amante, guerrillero, líder político, filósofo y poeta. En estás cartas el Che es juguetón, gracioso, a veces sarcástico y profundamente cariñoso. Su vida fue corta, y estos veinte años, desde los 19 hasta días antes de su muerte, muestran que también fue increíblemente valiosa e intensa.

Su hija Aleida Guevara, también doctora como su padre, escribe en el prólogo, "Cuando escribes un discurso, prestas atención al lenguaje, la puntuación y demás. Pero cuando escribes una carta a un amigo o a un miembro de tu familia, no te preocupan esas cosas. Eres tú quién habla, en tu voz autentica. Por eso me gustan estas cartas; muestran quien era realmente el Che y cómo pensaba. Este es el verdadero testimonio político de mi padre."

An Interview with J. Malcolm Garcia

July 30

by Seven Stories Press

The Fruit of All My Grief: Lives in the Shadows of the American Dream

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Celebrate the life of Che Guevara with 40% off all Che titles!

He didn’t live long enough to legislate what he sought, so it was left to his successor, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, to fulfill JFK’s dreams.

This major change in the Olympics signaled a similar change in the NBA. In the subsequent 1964–65 season, 48.7 percent of NBA players were African Americans. This represented an increase of 10.7 percent over the previous 1963–64 campaign.

Even so, the African American presence back in that 1959–60 season was particularly revealing and important. The Celtics were in the early stage of their dynasty, yet two franchises—Cincinnati and St. Louis—demonstrated their continued resistance to this new wave of outstanding players.

Here’s a list of the total population at the time:

Yet Wilt’s offense didn’t really develop during the three years he subsequently spent at the University of Kansas. In fact, it was while he spent one year with the Globetrotters that he developed his fadeaway bank shot that made him such a dynamic scorer when he got into the NBA.

After we were done, I was ready to bike my way back home, but Wilt had another idea. He put my bike in the trunk of his car and said, “I’m driving you home.”

This meant a lot to me. He saw me as a real player but more importantly as a person. Indeed, his respect helped me to increase my own self-respect.

Take up to 80% off hardcover editions from authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Abdellah Taïa, Guadalupe Nettel, Haifa Zangana, Martin Duberman, Ivan Goncharov, Chavisa Woods, Russell Banks, Ivana Bodrožić, Barry Gifford, Ralph Nader, and so many more!

Offer valid until June 30, 2022 at 11:59pm PST.

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Recommended Reading | Books by Kurt Vonnegut | Books by Octavia Butler | Books by Barry Gifford | Books by Ralph Nader | Fiction | Memoir | Politics | Writing on Writing | Kids Books | Teen/Young Adult

Winner of Premio Municipal de la Novela, 2021 Winner of Premio Nacional de Literatura Argentina, 2018 Winner of Premio Literario de la Academia Argentina de Letras, 2017 Winner of Best Novel Award by La Nación, 2016

Approaching the Absolute

Daniel Guebel’s The Absolute is structured as six books that move from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century and recount a family’s secret interventions in music, mysticism and revolutionary thought over the course of history. The reader meets with:

1: Frantisek Deliuskin, a libertine who experiments with the sensations of women to write a musical composition;

2: Andrei Deliuskin, a seeker disillusioned by love, who makes an annotated copy of the Spiritual Exercises of the Jesuit Ignatius of Loyola, later read by Vladimir Lenin and applied to politics, then joins Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egypt campaign, where he seeks to decipher the Rosetta stone;

3: Esau Deliuskin, a political revolutionary who, after failing to assassinate the archduke Franz Ferdinand, is locked in a desert jail, where he engages in power games with his captor, breaks free and organizes a new society;

5: Sebastian Deliuskin, the twin brother of Scriabin, separated from him in childhood, who reaches Argentina by ship and becomes a minor pianist in the provinces — as lovingly described by Sebastian’s daughter, the narrator of the entire book, interested in probing her family’s history;

6: the daughter’s ten-year-old son, a kid who builds a time machine in search of immortality.

Egg (Philosophy)

Guebel, as a novelist, avoids the hairsplitting, book-swallowing speculations of the halls of Jena or the rishi’s ashram. But his characters and their actions give body to ideas and suggest new theories.

Magazine Page (Eroticism)

Talking Fish (Religion)

Japanese Battleship (History)

Pyramid of Acrobats (Politics)

Note the supposed author of this book does not self-define as a genius, and although she suffers from doubts, she gets the work done. Individual geniuses burn fast and flame out, while perhaps those who create in a community are more like scribes, in the tradition of Kafka.

Ham-and-Tomato Sandwich (Sentimentality)

Rosetta Stone (Literature)

Keyboard with Lights (Music)

Time Machine (Science)

Wormhole (Translation)

Two or More Absolutes

Throughout his book, Guebel plays with ways of thinking about the self and the whole found in both nineteenth-century European Romanticism, and in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. He also plays with Eastern settings in other novels; his latest is set in the world of Japanese samurai.

—Jessica Sequeira

A letter from Robin Marty, activist and author of The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, on the occasion of the Texas Governor Greg Abbott's decision to sign TX Senate Bill 4, in which abortion is criminalized after 6 weeks:

The end of Roe is coming. How will you prepare?

Now a major motion picture directed by Audrey Diwan

Translated by Tanya Leslie

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child.

In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

Edited by Barbara Seaman and Laura Eldridge

Welcome to the 2022 May Day sale!

In celebration of International Workers Day, from now until May 5th you can enjoy 40% off the entire Seven Stories catalog.

Below, you can browse books hand-picked by Seven Stories staffers, as well as other noteworthy titles, ranging from stylish fiction from all over the globe, to thought-provoking examinations of our current moment.

Winner of Premio Municipal de la Novela, 2021
Winner of Premio Nacional de Literatura Argentina, 2018
Winner of Premio Literario de la Academia Argentina de Letras, 2017
Winner of Best Novel Award by La Nación, 2016