Short Fiction to Cleanse the Palate

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.

To celebrate the release of Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh, translated by Olena Jennings and Oksana Rosenblum, we're proud to share an excerpt from this "tender, sharply-imagined coming-of-age novel, full of clarity and bleak humor" (Elaine Castillo). 

Rock, Paper, Grenade is a gritty and bald bildungsroman, a lilting picaresque of a life lived in the shadow of someone else’s war.

A realist depiction of Ukraine and the post Soviet world, this novel offers an affecting yet honest look into the life of someone suffering from PTSD. It is a story of growing up without much hope for a better future, and yet intense moments of connection and kindness persist. Just when things begin to seem insurmountably dark, a friendship begins, a kind word is said, or a hand reaches out and opens the curtains, letting in a little light.

When Tymofiy is five years old, his small family in Cherkasy, Ukraine grows by one. Not with the birth of a baby sister or brother, but with the appearance of Felix—mentor and tormentor, enemy and friend—Tymofiy’s grandmother’s sometime-boyfriend. “Who are you?” Felix screams in the depths of a confused and drunken rage at all who cross his path, his memories of the Soviet-Afghan war clouding his eyes and senses. “Who are you?” Tymofiy asks himself as he drifts through the streets of his hometown, searching for love and protection, for a better, happier way of life.

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A POLONAISE FOR FELIX

Lida had never been afraid of anything. Maybe because she did not watch TV or read the newspapers. Lida would listen to the radio and knit. She would sit in her small, cramped room on the bed under a monochrome tapestry (a naked woman on a riverbank), knit, and, of course, listen to the radio.

Lida swam in the Dnipro all year. Almost every day, fearless and hardened by nature, she went to the river, resolutely crossed the long sandy beach covered with islands of ice and mounds of snow, walked out on the frozen surface, looked for an ice hole left by fishermen, took off her clothes, but for a faded-pink and at one time red swimsuit, firmly rested her hands on the edges of the hole, and dove in. And all this happened year after year, until one February day she didn’t resurface from beneath the ice. For almost a minute, an unexpected force carried her away from the ice hole through the dark waters of the Dnipro, farther from the light and closer to death.

Felix rescued Lida. He often accompanied her when she was swimming. He walked into the distance, smoked, walked carefully along the icy quiet surface of the reservoir, looking toward the fairway, as if expecting desert caravans of dushman armed with Stingers to swim out of the frosty haze. But, of course, there were no caravans. And, of course, no dushman either. And when he looked back, there was no Lida. Felix rushed to the ice hole and beneath the murky ice he saw her gray flailing body. He threw off his jacket, plunged to the waist, slid his fingers along her body, looked for something to grab onto, finally grabbed her hair, pulled. Lida hit her head on the bottom of the ice, scratched her face and hands, had almost stopped breathing, and, as was made clear later, had said goodbye to life. In the murky crystal of the cold water, she managed to catch a glimpse of the light edge of the sky, remembered the summer and the sound of reeds in the backwaters between the villages of Chervona Sloboda and Lesky, the tall pines of the Sofiyivka Park, and the spring morning draft that swayed the whitewashed lace curtains hanging in the cottage’s summer kitchen. And most of all, she thought about how it was a pity that there was so little and that there could have been a little more: summer, reeds, sunshine, forest skirted with dried mushrooms, limitless lawns of heather, and silver poplars in the wind, pouring over the transparent afternoon splendor. And this was the most frightening of her fleeting thoughts.

After this, Lida didn’t swim in winter anymore.

Perhaps the river’s ice was the only thing that frightened her.

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Felix was discharged in ’89. After he was wounded, shell-shocked, and held in captivity, the Moscow leadership started to seriously doubt his usefulness. According to the law, while waiting for retirement, he had to work somewhere, so he was taken on as a truck driver for a pasta factory. His influential friends from the Soviet party got him the job. At first, before he got used to it, Felix wandered around the factory open-mouthed. He hardly understood anything and did not trust anyone. The consequences of the shell shock did not let up for a long time. He was allowed not to work, so he wandered between the shops, sat for hours beneath the leaky shed roof, and smoked, watching the measured flow of factory life. Curiously, he repaired the fence around the flowerbed, poisoned a hornet’s nest near the public toilet, and drew a realistic penis for the funny bear on the May Day poster.

And finally, he found his way. He joined a group of veterans of the Afghan war (some criminals among them), who drove around the grounds in a truck with black plates, while workers, those who couldn’t get away with not working, filled the truck with groceries: Soviet cognac, condensed milk, butter, sacks of flour and pasta, boxes of candies and cakes. After the truck passed the checkpoint without obstacle, it rolled in the direction of the Eastern Borderlands and finally unloaded on the right bank of the Western Bug River. The patrons of the party got part of the money, something was thrown to the director of the factory, and everything else was divided and spent on booze. At the same time, Felix collected payments at the central market. They resold purchases there, provisions bought from the villagers. The payments were small, but the market was big. Sometimes he took goods instead of the money. A silver-haired Azerbaijani with a missing ear got him sweet peppers and tomatoes. Fat-bottomed Ada specialized in meat. One agreeable old man brought eggs and farmer’s cheese directly to Felix’s apartment.

The building he lived in was right across from the market. It was a new, brick building from ’86 with large bright rooms and glassed-in balconies. The neighbors were mostly officers of the 40th Army of the Soviet Ground Forces and their families. Felix got a three-room apartment on the fourth floor. His wife, Tanya, and daughter moved in while Felix was still stationed in Afghanistan. Just like a thousand of his army friends, he outfitted the apartment with Japanese appliances hauled on donkeys and camels by caravanners from Pakistan and covered the living room with a fluffy, patterned rug requisitioned from the Bagram market. The furniture, however, was from Romania, but beech wood, a bespoke order from the factory in Baia Mare. His wife took care of decorating the apartment. In the beginning, Felix did not care about the apartment, the appliances, not even the rug, though he had taken a long time selecting it and was anxious about it, asking the seller detailed questions and bargaining for each afghani, and having reached an acceptable price, he came away with it for free. And when he returned, he still did not care. He was used to an austere life; he couldn’t care less about the cozy apartment. Then he came to his senses, looked around, but it was too late to change anything.

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ARTEM CHEKH is a Ukrainian author and soldier. He is the author of some sixteen books, including Absolute Zero, and his work has been translated into English, Polish, Czech, and Russian. Chekh is currently serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

ANNOUNCING SEVEN STORIES PRESS x TWO DOLLAR RADIO

April 15, 2025, New York, NY – Seven Stories Press publisher Dan Simon and Two Dollar Radio publisher Eric Obenauf announce today the acquisition of Two Dollar Radio, an Ohio-based independent, by New York City-based Seven Stories.

Founded in 2005 by Eric Obenauf and Eliza Wood-Obenauf, Two Dollar Radio publishes bold works of literary fiction and essay collections. Eric Obenauf joins Seven Stories as publisher of the Two Dollar Radio imprint, which will continue to publish four to six original titles per year on average, including their New Classics series.

Penguin Random House Distribution Services will be tasked with sales and distribution in the U.S., Canada and globally, beginning January 1st, 2026. In the UK, sales and distribution will be with Turnaround Distribution.

Ingram Distribution Services will continue to sell and distribute the Two Dollar Radio list through 2025.*

Also joining Seven Stories is Two Dollar Radio staffer Brett Gregory, who will act as publicity and marketing coordinator for the Two Dollar Radio imprint and for certain Seven Stories titles.

Co-founder Eliza Wood-Obenauf will continue to work on special projects. The Obenaufs and Gregory will work remotely from Ohio.

Two Dollar Radio Headquarters, a bookstore and café, will remain under the ownership of the Obenaufs.

“Seven Stories has been one of our literary polestars since before we launched Two Dollar Radio,” Obenauf says. “I’m a great admirer of their list, and I believe that ours complements theirs in very intriguing ways. I look forward to being a part of their team, and to learn from them and their expertise. It’s been a sometimes exhausting and yet monstrously rewarding journey to reach this point, and Eliza and I couldn’t be more thrilled to strengthen Two Dollar Radio under the Seven Stories umbrella so that it can continue to prosper for the next twenty years and beyond.”

Simon adds, “Eric and I are very similar in that we personalize our work to an extreme degree. This has its advantages and its disadvantages, but on the plus side it can inspire loyalty in our authors and colleagues and strengthens our ability to be really good editors and publishers. I deeply admire the twenty-year history of Two Dollar Radio and all that Eric and Eliza Jane have done here. I’m also really interested in their aesthetic and cool sense that literature belongs in a fundamental way in contemporary life.”

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READ THE ANNOUNCEMENT IN PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Dan Simon, the publisher of Seven Stories Press in New York City and Eric Obenauf, the publisher of Two Dollar Radio in Columbus, Ohio have announced that Seven Stories has acquired Two Dollar Radio. The acquisition was finalized on April 1 and the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Two Dollar Radio, which releases four to six frontlist titles each year and has approximately 80 titles in print, becomes Seven Stories’ fourth imprint, joining its Spanish-language imprints Siete Cuentos and Ocean Sur, and children’s imprint, Triangle Square Books for Young Readers. Obenauf remains publisher and editorial director, while his spouse, Eliza Wood-Obenauf remains consulting editor. Brett Gregory will continue to coordinate marketing and publicity for Two Dollar Radio, and also serve as marketing and publicity manager for Seven Stories. The trio will work remotely from Columbus.

Obenauf and Wood-Obenauf retain ownership of Two Dollar Radio Headquarters, the bookstore/café/bar they have operated in Columbus since 2017.

With the deal, Simon remains the majority owner of Seven Stories, while Obenauf and Wood-Obenauf have become minority partners as have Seven Stories national sales director Bill Rusin and co-publisher/publicity director Ruth Weiner. “It’s an acquisition,” Simon told PW in an interview conducted with him and Obenauf. “At the same time, it’s an initial step toward there being multiple stakeholders here and minority partners.”

Obenauf said he and Wood-Obenauf regard the transition as “sort of the next generation of Two Dollar Radio.” He noted that while operating a small indie press “is incredibly rewarding,” it "can also be incredibly mentally exhausting, [especially] if you don't have access to gobs of capital.” He and Wood-Obenauf launched Two Dollar Radio in 2005 because, he said, “we just wanted to work on books; we just wanted to edit books and work with authors, and that sort of thing.”

“Our authors and our books aren't benefiting when we're spending all of our time poring over spreadsheets and just trying to exist on a day to day basis,” he said, “So we see this as the next iteration of Two Dollar Radio that doesn’t just benefit our books and authors, but also sustains Two Dollar Radio into the future for the next 20 years and beyond.”

Two years in the making

Obenauf reached out to Simon two years ago to discuss the possibility of Seven Stories acquiring Two Dollar Radio. The two first met in 2009 at BookExpo America, and Simon was instrumental in helping Two Dollar Radio obtain U.K. distribution with Turnaround Publisher Services. Obenauf noted that there is a “great confluence” between Seven Stories and Two Dollar Radio, both in their approaches to publishing and in their lists. Seven Stories is known for its mix of literature and politics with a decidedly left-wing bent, while Two Dollar Radio is renowned for its quirky, edgy list of primarily fiction and essay collections.

“It was incredibly important that Two Dollar Radio remain independent,” Obenauf said. “Being acquired by one of the multinational corporations wasn’t ever something that we considered. We wanted to feel invested continuing forward, not just with Two Dollar Radio, but with Seven Stories as well.”

"Eric and I really are true believer publishers in exactly the same way,” Simon added. "It's so personal for him, and that's like looking in the mirror for me; it's so personal to me. I think it strengthens our ability to be really good editors and publishers, and I think that the loyalty of our authors to Seven Stories and to Two Dollar Radio reflects this."

Simon praised Two Dollar Radio for “punching way above its weight” by publishing such authors as Hanif Abdurraqib, Nora Lange, Bennett Sims, and many other critically-acclaimed writers. “At the same time,” he said, “it’s a manageable entity, in relationship to our size.” Two Dollar Radio will continue to be distributed by PGW through the fall, and then will switch to Seven Stories’ distributor, Penguin Random House Distribution Services, on January 1, 2026. Turnaround will continue to distribute Two Dollar Radio in the U.K.

Reflecting upon the acquisition – the first in Seven Stories’ 30-year history – Simon said both presses "are kind of alternative in the best sense: we’re not part of the club. We're most excited when we want to publish something that nobody else wants to publish. You know, we're very rarely in an auction situation. I have so much respect for so many independent publishers, but at the same time, I don't want to be part of the club. And Two Dollar Radio is certainly not part of the club; after all, they're in Columbus, Ohio.”

With the addition of Two Dollar Radio, Simon said, Seven Stories "has an extraordinary brain trust now, including Eric, Eliza Jane, and Brett. We, I think, are positioned for success and growth -- it's the only way to survive in this pretty merciless marketplace that we're in.”

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SEVEN STORIES PRESS is an independent publisher based in New York City specializing in literature and politics, for adults and children, in English and Spanish. Besides the Seven Stories adult imprint there is Triangle Square Books for Young Readers and the Ocean Sur and Siete Cuentos imprints for Spanish language titles. Among its authors are Nelson Algren, Octavia Butler, Artem Chapeye, Noam Chomsky, Liliana Corobca, Angela Davis, Ariel Dorfman, Alan Dugan, Annie Ernaux, Barry Gifford, Barbara McQuade, Clyo Mendoza, Lee Stringer, Kurt Vonnegut, Howard Zinn, and many others. Awards include the 2022 Nobel Prize for Annie Ernaux, the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry for Alan Dugan, the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize for Kia Corthron’s The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, and countless others.

Over the last twenty years, books from TWO DOLLAR RADIO have been honored by the National Book Foundation, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and named finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and more. Us Fools by Nora Lange was shortlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction; Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims was a finalist for The Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in 2024; They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib’s breakout, genre-defying 2017 essay collection, has appeared in music videos, as a B-side to a single by The National and Julien Baker, and was adapted into an ESPN film.

 

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For further information, please contact Ruth Weiner, ruth@sevenstories.com.

*All orders and returns of TDR books should be processed through PGW/Ingram until 1/1/2026.

March 31st marks Trans Day of Visibility. Created in 2010 by trans advocate and human rights activist Rachel Crandall, Trans Day of Visibility is a celebration of the extraordinary lives and cultural contributions of trans people. It is also a moment to acknowledge and campaign against the disproportionate levels of discrimination, violence, and political repression faced by trans communities all over the world, and especially in the United States in 2025.

To mark the occasion, we are proud and excited to share an exclusive excerpt from our forthcoming new edition of Hello Cruel World by the iconic Kate Bornstein. This excerpt, an afterword written by trans writer, theorist, and advocate Paul B. Preciado, specifically speaks to the importance of representation as a way of offering an option for people who may find themselves at odds with their assigned gender. As he says in the latter half of the afterword, "Knowing our own desire requires research, experimentation, invention, and risk." In other words: it requires having access to the knowledge that gender is not fixed and can be transformed. It requires a sort of visibility. This is especially important given the newly emboldened right-wing effort to silence, criminalize, and even disappear the very notion of gender variance — criminalizing not only gender-affirming care and trans pedagogy, but removing the concept of trans existence from public schools and libraries. Visibility is important to combatting these efforts: in many ways, it is the first step to fighting back. 

The 20th anniversary edition of trans trailblazer Kate Bornstein’s unconventional guide to staying alive for teens, freaks, and gender outlaws.

This new edition of Bornstein's groundbreaking Hello, Cruel World features a catalog of 121 alternatives to suicide that range from the playful (moisturize!), to the irreverent (shatter some family values), to the controversial, fun, challenging, and easy. Encouraging readers to unleash their hearts' harmless desires, the book has only one directive: "Don't be mean." It is this guiding principle that brings the reader on a self-validating journey and toward a resounding decision to embrace life.

Suicide rates among LGBTQ+ teens are much higher than for their cis peers; with love and humor and confession and insight, Bornstein hopes to keep every freak out there alive. She is a radical role model, an affectionate best friend, and a guiding mentor all in one. This one-of-a-kind guide to staying alive is a much-needed, sometimes unorthodox approach to life for those who want to stay on the edge, and alive.

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HELLO CRUEL WORLD (SECOND EDITION)
101+ Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws
BY KATE BORNSTEIN

AFTERWORD BY PAUL B. PRECIADO
Translated by Jayrôme C. Robinet 

Some babies are born with a star on the wrong side. Like Kate Bornstein, I was born into a family with strong religious beliefs — hers was Jewish, mine Catholic. She was born in 1948 in an America characterized by McCarthyism, the persecution of homosexuals, and racial segregation. I was born in 1970 in Franco’s Spain. I spent the Saturdays of my childhood at church while others went to the disco. We Catholic children read the Bible, staged plays inspired by the lives of the saints, prepared packs of aniseed doughnuts which we sold on Sundays at church. Everything was separated by gender: boys studied to be altar boys, varnished wooden clothespins, and assembled them into crosses; girls embroidered their names on white handkerchiefs. Some children grew up with a star nailed to the palm of their hand. I loved Masses, the rituals, the glow of candles, the smell of incense, the body of Christ and Mary Magdalene’s hair, the water turned into wine, the retreat of the enlightened in the desert, the apostles who became polyglot when they were filled with the Holy Spirit coming in the form of a dove and the apparitions of the angels. But I hated sewing. My handkerchiefs were dirty rags filled with knots.

Some teens grow up with a star staked through their heart. On my tenth birthday, two events occurred, both unexpected and unfortunate: I fell in love with my friend Elena, and Elena fell in love with Leo, the only Black boy in town. We both had the worst summer of our lives. I sought refuge in Luis Cernuda’s poems. Elena ended up dating Tomás, a white neighbor. Leo and I didn’t date anyone. Shortly thereafter, Leo’s parents moved to another city. That’s how I realized love wouldn’t be easy for me. Nor for Leo. And, perhaps, not even for Elena. Another day of the same year, in winter, a group of boys was waiting for me after school. They shouted “tortillera” (dyke) as they threw a snowball in my face. The ice burned my cheeks. I wasn’t surprised that they insulted me, I was surprised that they knew I was a lesbian before I’d gone out with anyone. I wiped my face and continued on my way as if nothing had happened. Some teens grow up with a star stuck to their foreheads. I went home and locked myself in my room. At home, the situation wasn’t better: my mother, alerted by a nun about my “male behavior” (what did they actually mean?) was monitoring my actions, choosing my clothes, judging my friendships.

What did others really know about my desire? I grew up thinking that I was a monster and that if I didn’t run away the others would end up killing me. At that time, my only political body of freedom was imagination: when the door to my room was closed, I dreamed that aliens would come to my town and save me. The problem is not that you can’t do something, but that you can’t even imagine it. The aliens were like me: skinny and kind monsters who wrote poems and mathematical equations, beings who were neither men nor women, neither animals nor humans, neither white nor black. But the aliens never came, and back then, in a small town in northern Spain, there was no organization, no book that could help me. I think I was still a teenager when I made the decision to leave and never come back. Seven years later, I began a sexual and intellectual exile that led me from book to book, from place to place, from language to language, from identity to identity, until I became what I am now.

On this road, in the different passages of the deserts of the norm that I have crossed and keep on crossing, Kate Bornstein’s books and performances have been like stars in a night sky for monsters in exile. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (1994) was one of my bedside books when I was twenty years old in New York. In the 1990s I self-identified as “tortillera.” I reclaimed the slur with which I had been insulted in my childhood, but like Kate I felt neither male nor female. Unlike the queer academic books of Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gender Outlaw was a true first-person cartography of dissent: the diary of a survivor of gender and sexuality, a navigation manual for the beginners and the migrants. Kate was able to talk to my injured inner child and encourage him to explore a new territory: desire beyond sexual and gender binaries. Little by little, and against the expectations of my Catholic teachers, her life and work would be the equivalent of what, in the tradition of devotion, was the life of the saints. For me, Kate Bornstein became Saint Trans of Gender Outlaws, Saint Masochist of Good Love, Saint Borderline of Freaks and Suicides.

On September 11, 1998, I went to listen to Kate Bornstein’s presentation of her book My Gender Workbook in New York. At the end of the reading, I overcame my shyness to ask if she would give me her address so I could invite her to participate in a publication. Kate immediately pulled out a business card and handed it to me. I put it in my pocket, happy to have her home address, and it was only several years later that I realized there was no postal address or phone number on the card. There were only three words printed: Kate Bornstein. Traveling. Some monsters carry stars in their pocket. This card is a political fetish that still accompanies me. The absence of an address, telephone, or profession was an active resistance to the imposition of an identity, a hymn to freedom: Kate Bornstein was on a journey.

To a specific theory of gender or sexual identity, Kate Bornstein opposes a general philosophy of travel. According to her, we are not male or female, heterosexual or homosexual: we are travelers. Sexual or gender identity is only a “means of transport”: An identity, she says, is used for taking you somewhere . . . but it cannot take you to all places. If you want to go elsewhere, you will have to change your identity. To live is to leave the known place of assigned identity and norm and begin to explore the unknown territory of desire. This is the paradox that Bornstein confronts us with: in order to know our own desire, it is necessary to dare to change, because the ready-to-wear desire, the desire based on a fixed identity, has been territorialized by power and imposed through norm, violence, and abuse. Knowing our own desire requires research, experimentation, invention, and risk. To know our own desire means abandoning our assigned identity and going on a journey.

This philosophy of travel is based on a psychobiological theory of transformation: in the same way that the chameleon is characterized by its ability to shift skin colors in order to adapt to its environment, the human being, with its linguistic complexity and cerebral plasticity, is characterized by the ability to change, to learn, and to modify itself. Against the tide, Bornstein teaches us that what is natural for human beings is not identity, but shift. It is power over, with its ambition to control the processes of reproduction, that prevents identity from shifting.

Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook helped me overcome the fear of transforming my subjectivity by taking testosterone. Her books helped me overcome the fear of changing my voice, my name, and my body. Fear of being judged, rejected, or persecuted. For those of us who have taken to the road and begun a gender transition at the beginning of the new millennium, Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg are our grandparents; Del LaGrace Volcano and Ashley Hans Scheirl are our older brothers. Bornstein and Feinberg invented a language, they made it possible to have a body, opened a path. Volcano and Schreil invented an aesthetic, an image. Some of us walk with a thousand bright stars above our heads.

Bornstein’s politics, as presented here in Hello, Cruel World, is a broad feminism in which the category “transgender” serves as a means by which to transcend and overcome differences in identity. Bornstein teaches us that the first duty of a feminist is not to defend the identity of “woman,” but to defend the freedom to transgress what society expects of us. The prime directive of a feminist is to survive the imperative of death faced by sexual and gender minorities. Bornstein rejects medical and legal categories and replaces them with political definitions: feminists, homosexuals, and transsexuals are “transgender” to the extent that they transgress heteropatriarchal norms. The proposal is to go beyond identity politics (feminist, gay, lesbian, trans) in which everyone identifies with the identity that oppresses them in order to build a transversal alliance of dissidents of sexuality, gender, class, race, disability . . .

There is another social group that Bornstein considers to be transgender: teens. Neither children nor adults, neither totally submissive nor totally free, teens are gender mutants whose gender is in a constant shift, and so they suffer like no other social group from the pressure of the norm. Hence the wave of teenage suicides that succumb each year to the imperative of becoming male, female, and heterosexual. Hello, Cruel World is also a love letter addressed to teens. But it is not a book just for teenagers aged thirteen to nineteen years old. For Kate Bornstein, adolescence is not an age or syndrome, but the moment when our ability to mutate is expressed with the most vehemence, grace, and fragility, just before being silenced by society. This book is written for the teen locked inside each of us: the one who has lost their dream, forgotten their infinite desire for transformation, the one who has gotten used to accepting the desires of others rather than pursuing their own. Hello, Cruel World is for the teen who still lives in you. Now open this book, and travel.

—Paul B. Preciado
September 17, 2018
Venice, Italy

José Martí organized and unified the movement for Cuban independence and died on the battlefield. His dedication to the goal of Cuban freedom made his name a synonym for liberty throughout Latin America.

This José Martí anthology brings together his bilingual poetry, political essays, cultural writing, and letters, into one definitive volume. Readers will discover a literary genius and an insightful political commentator on the troubled relationship between the United States and Latin America.

As Cuban revolutionary leader Carlos Rafael Rodríguez once wrote, "Martí was the guide of his time but also stands as the anticipator of ours." 

INTRODUCTION
BY IVAN SCHULMAN

José Martí (1853–95) was a revolutionary writer in every sense of the word. Born of Spanish parents in colonial Cuba, he witnessed the oppressive measures imposed on the island by the Spanish colonial administration. Early in his life he made the decision to fight for the liberation of his country and similarly oppressed Antillean peoples. But Martí was not merely a political revolutionary: he was a revolutionary in literature who gave expression to the emerging ideas and emotions of a modernizing world in a language and style that perplexed and fascinated many of his contemporaries. Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859– 95), for example, wrote of the Cuban that at times he could not follow his ideas, “because his ideas have sturdy wings, strong lungs, and rise inordinately… [in his] magical style we lose ourselves from time to time, like Reynaldo in the garden of Armida…”

Martí’s conscious resolve to devote himself to revolutionary political and literary ideals became clear shortly after the first Cuban war against Spain (1868). During this period he participated in the publication of clandestine newspapers and circulars, including El Diablo Cojuelo (The Crippled Devil), and later, La Patria Libre (Free Homeland). In the latter, in 1869, he published a dramatic poem, “Abdala,” in which the main character sacrifices his life to defend his country against its oppressors. For a while the colonial regime took no action against Martí; but in 1869, when he and a friend, Fermín Valdés Domínguez, signed a letter questioning the political behavior of one of their classmates, Martí was accused of treason against the Spanish colonial regime. He was tried and condemned to six years’ hard labor in the quarries of San Lázaro in Havana.

The San Lázaro experience is recorded in a political essay “Political Prison in Cuba,” published in 1871, that is both moving and revealing: moving, because it records an adolescent’s reaction to the harsh, sometimes nightmarish conditions of a forced labor camp; revealing, because it foreshadows the expressive force of a mature writer. “Political Prison in Cuba” is directed to the Spanish authorities; it is a plea for humanity and reform in the administration of the island. It is also a milestone in the evolution of the prose in a period of metamorphic change called Modernismo in Latin American literature and culture. “Political Prison in Cuba” was followed by a companion piece entitled “The Spanish Republic and the Cuban Revolution,” written in Spain in 1873, where the young Martí was exiled after his sentence was commuted.

Martí’s Spanish exile marks the initiation of a lengthy period of peregrination: Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, and, finally the United States, a productive period during which he wrote, spoke to Cuban and Hispanic revolutionary and cultural societies, and organized the invasion of colonial Cuba in 1895.

Spain is where Martí received his formal education: at the universities of Zaragoza and Madrid he earned degrees in philosophy and law. Late in 1874 he left Spain for Mexico, with a brief stay in France. After Europe, Martí found Mexico to be a hospitable environment. He participated widely in the country’s cultural life, wrote for the Revista Universal, helped found the Sociedad Alarcón, debated the merits of spiritualism and materialism in a national forum, wrote a play entitled Amor con amor se paga (Love is Repaid with Love), which premiered in 1875. It was in Mexico where Martí met Carmen Zayas Bazán, who was to become his wife and, subsequently, the symbol of a painful, frustrated domestic life. The rise of the dictator Porfirio Díaz signaled the end of Martí’s Mexican residence and the renewal of his wanderings in search of a place where he could work with personal freedom. He returned briefly to Cuba, responding to the pull of family and a desire to resettle in his homeland.

Guatemala was Martí’s next resting place. His stay there also proved to be brief. He was appointed to the faculty of the Escuela Central de Guatemala where he taught French, English, German and Italian literature as well as the History of Philosophy. For a while life seemed prosperous and serene; he married Carmen Zayas Bazán, contributed to Guatemala’s developing cultural life, and wrote of his gratitude to that country in a slender volume entitled “Guatemala” (1878). A shift in political factions made life there untenable for him. Once again Havana drew him; but while working in the Havana law offices of Miguel Viondi, his revolutionary activities resulted in his second deportation to Spain in 1879.

Instead of staying there, he left almost immediately for France, and then to the United States. While in New York, he met Charles A. Dana who invited him to write for the New York Sun; but New York was not to become Martí’s home until after he attempted life in Venezuela. In 1881 he went to Caracas with the hope of finding refuge and solace in “Our America,” as he called the Hispanic countries of the New World. Things went well in Venezuela, but again, for an extremely short period. Nevertheless, in that time he succeeded in founding an important Modernist magazine, the Revista Venezolana. In its second issue of July 15, 1881, he defended his magazine’s style, and in the course of this defense, developed one of Modernism’s early manifestos:

Some of the “simple” pieces that appeared in our last issue have been tagged and polished exquisite. What follows is not a defense, but a clarification. Private speech is one thing; passionate, public discourse, another. Bitter polemics speak one language; quite another, serene biography… Thus, the same man will speak in a different language when he turns his searching eyes to past epochs, and, when with the anguish and ire of a soldier in battle, he wields a new arm in the angry struggle of the present age… The sky of Egypt ought not be painted with London fogs, nor the youthful verdure of our valleys with the pale green of Arcadia, or the mournful green of Erin. A sentence has its adornments, like a dress, and some dress in wool, some in silk, and some become angry because their dress is wool and are displeased to see another’s is silk. Since when has it become a defect to write in polished form?… It is essential that notice be taken of the following truth about style: writers should paint just as the painter does. There is no reason for one to use different colors from the other.

When Martí left Venezuela for New York, he renewed his writing for the Sun. New York was to be Martí’s permanent home until he returned to Cuba, just prior to his untimely death fighting for Cuba’s liberation on May 19, 1895. In New York, which both attracted and repelled Martí, he wrote his best prose and poetry. Amidst the din and clatter of an industrializing society, plagued by labor strikes, anarchist terrorist attacks, and racial and religious conflicts, Martí peered into the fortune of a capitalist society, and from this vantage point drew conclusions he described in his prose pieces about life in the United States written for Latin America’s major newspaper, La Nación (Buenos Aires). His association during 1883 with this newspaper was followed by invitations from others, among them La República (Honduras), La Opinión Pública (Uruguay), and El Partido Liberal (Mexico).

To earn enough for survival, this extraordinary writer became a versatile professional: a translator for Appleton, a clerk for Lyon and Company, a consul for Uruguay (1887) and Argentina (1890). Writing and political organization took up the rest of his energy and time. Martí immersed himself in the careful planning of the Cuban revolutionary process. He organized patriotic clubs not merely in the New York area, but all along the Eastern seaboard, especially in Florida among the tobacco workers of Tampa and Key West. Addressing these working class groups he displayed a passion and fervor that transfixed his audiences. Unfortunately, many of these speeches have been lost. A few that have survived, such as “Los pinos nuevos” (“The New Pines”) show the hand of a writer of learning, passion, and rhythmic prose, and of an accomplished political tactician who skillfully swayed his audience.

With the generals of the revolutionary forces, Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, Martí organized and monitored the émigré groups. In 1884 he had a falling out with the generals, especially Gómez; but later he worked with them again to raise the funds and provide the organization and arms for the 1895 invasion of Cuba. Martí’s was a Herculean task, superior to his dwindling physical strength, vitiated years before by lesions and diseases contracted in the quarries of San Lázaro. Yet such was his determination to see the liberation of his homeland that will and desire sustained a calendar of activities which would have sent more robust souls to an early grave.

Patriotism and martyrdom in the cause of Cuba and Puerto Rico consumed his being. Writing and his faith in the revolution kept him alive. To be sure, there were frequent moments of despair. His experiences with human cruelty were such that at one point he wrote: “It is with horror that one looks within many intelligent and attractive men. One leaves in fright, as from a lion’s den.” This modern Machiavellian analyst wrote: “Men like to be guided by those who abound in their own shortcomings.” Cognizant of human foibles, but committed to social redemption, he noted: “Man is ugly, but humanity is beautiful.” Martí’s was an 18th century faith in the perfectability of humankind, in social progress and in the feasibility of socioeconomic reform. Like the thinkers of the Enlightenment, he needed to be persuaded of the inevitability of violent change, which he espoused only when all other viable channels were exhausted.

Martí found temporary release from anguish in poetic creation. Poetry had a double interface for him: “To create beautiful poetry one has only to turn one’s eyes outward: to Nature; and inward: to the soul.” Nature was an enchantress, who consoled, fortified and soothed. By contrast, internal suffering purified inspirations and provided release from the oppressive realities of everyday existence. Pain, said Martí, “matures poetry… Man needs to suffer. When he lacks real pain, he creates it. Pain purifies and prepares.” Convinced that suffering engenders art, the poet poured his personal anguish into his verses.

Martí wrote three major books of poetry: Ismaelillo (1882), Versos sencillos (Simple Verses, 1891), and Versos libres (Free Verse, 1913). A fourth volume, entitled Flores del destierro (Flowers of Exile, 1933), somewhat loosely organized by Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda, and some other poems have been traditionally included in other volumes. Ismaelillo and Simple Verses were published in New York during the poet’s lifetime; he read the proof for both works. Free Verse was first published posthumously, transcribed inaccurately from complex manuscripts and corrected by the present writer.

All of the volumes have one element in common: one which Karl Vossler described as the characteristic of all poets of intense fantasy: a capacity for liberating themselves from the norms of the linguistic community; by passing under or over words, such poets create works by means of notes, melodies, rhythms, images, gestures and dances. This is the case with Martí and that of other Modernist poets of his generation: they were subjective creators, attentive to internal flux. In this connection, Fina García Marruz finds syllabic groupings of suffering in Free Verse, and Cintio Vitier senses the voice of a poet of light and movements, who creates a baroque, obscure, foaming, volcanic, abrupt and strange world. Martí’s is a highly original verse, in which there is both innovation and tradition, a paradoxical admixture common to the poets of the Age of Modernity, intent upon recasting the past to express an unstable present.

Of Martí’s three principal poetic works, Ismaelillo is a free, luminous volume, written largely in Caracas, and published in New York. Its imagery is so singular that the poet felt compelled to comment on its oneiric quality in a letter to Diego Jugo Ramírez on May 23, 1882:

I’ve seen those wings, those jackals, those empty goblets, those armies. My mind was the stage, and on it all those visions were actors. My work, Jugo, consisted of copying. There isn’t one single mental line there. And, how should I be responsible for the images which come to me without calling them? I have done nothing more than put my visions into verse.

The volume is dedicated to the poet’s absent son. The poet occupies the center of a visionary space in which the perils of modern life assault the poet/narrator. “Alarmed by everything, I take refuge in you,” he writes to his son in the brief introduction. The absent son is ever-present in verses whose levels of reality and dreams reach beyond the limits of 19th century positivism and reason. “I dream with open eyes,” reads the first line of “Sueño despierto” (“I Dream Awake”). The visionary quality is sometimes surrealistic: “And on the backs/ Of giant birds/ Endless kisses/ Awaken.” Though a process of inversion, a metamorphosis is effected by filial love; the father conjures up the vision of the son, and in this vision is reborn through the son: “I am the son of my son!/He remakes me!” This identification of father and son orchestrates and unifies the metaphoric eruptions of a volume, which, at bottom, is a musical concert centering around three motifs, filled with chaotic, tender and troubled leaps to a loosely associated poetic space. Ismaelillo’s motifs are the poet, the son, the world; the leaps are executed in the form of voyages in which traditional time and space concepts are unhinged so that the poet-son can move freely outside the limitations of a traditional Logos. In “Musa traviesa” (“Mischievous Muse”) he writes: “Often, a rider/ In momentous dreams,/ I ride long hours,/ Through the air./ I pierce rosy clouds/ I fathom deep seas,/ And in the eternal bowels/ I travel.”

In these travels the poet/son/seer comes upon battles, visions of martyrdom, caves, dances, erotic scenes, heights of idealism and depths of materialism; it is a confusing world the narrator captures: reflecting the frightening realities of modern life. We witness torments, confused scenes, temptations, moments of disarray, and spirited battle. It is a spectacle of “splendid transformations” that boils, creaks, bites and assaults the agonists of modern life. In keeping with these decentered, fragmented visions, the son is Ismael, Jacob, the object of pleasure, love, tenderness, the heart, the soul of the father and, finally, not merely his reflection but his very being. Thus, this volume, more than the lyric prayer book Rubén Darío found it to be, more than the “Art of Being a Father” which he saw in it, is rather a voyage that incarnates a modern mythic sense of experience and existence.

Equally personal, and equally anguished are the poems of Free Verse. Darío said of them that they were free verse, produced by a free man. Martí called them “my irritated Free Verses,” “my rough hendecasyllables, borne of great fears, or of great hopes, or of an unbridled love of liberty, or of a painful love of liberty…” In his preface, Martí insisted, once again, as in his Ismaelillo, upon the visionary quality of his verses, visions that he “copied” and for whose strangeness, singularity and passion he alone was accountable. These are verses written, “not in academic ink, but rather in my own blood,” an image used by the poet to refer to their personal quality as well as the aura of sacrifice and martyrdom that pervades so many of the poems. Their key words are love, liberty, unconquered, passionate, natural, vigorous. To this linguistic base, José Olivio Jiménez adds another that centers around the terms circumstance, nature, transcendence, and three concepts: love, suffering, duty. The originality of these poems consists in their anguish. It is a poetry of existence in which the poet/narrator confronts the imperative to transmit an authentic, sincere, necessary reality. “What matters in poetry,” he wrote, “is to feel, regardless of whether it resembles what others have felt; and what is felt anew, is new.”

Images of nature, often traditional in origin, appear in this volume as in others by the Cuban, but it is man, not nature, that occupies the center of his poetic discourse. It is a poetry that speaks of daily cares, experiences, existences; it radiates in circular patterns, reaching toward the upper spheres, that is, toward a quality of transcendence noted by Jiménez, and which in spatial form points to the fundamentally realistic; it is based upon specific, concrete circumstances: those of his life, and of the emotions of his existence. Unamuno called Martí’s words “acts”; but when the Cuban poet harnessed his words to his thoughts he created novel structures which even today surprise us by dint of their modernity.

The visionary quality of his first volume persists in Free Verse; present also are the dualities of experience, the antithetical images that constitute Martí’s assumption of the contradictions of modern life and the aspirations of perfection and idealistic placement of his visionary poetics. The dualities sometimes represent a world truncated, or the poet’s simple vision of life: “I have lived: I have died.” The poet in his anguish wishes to sacrifice himself to his fellow man, for that is his mission in life. At times, he feels useless, unable to realize the martyrdom that will release him from his terrestrial struggle and allow him, finally, to seek an undefined solace in a vaguely expressed afterlife.

Less anguished, at least at first glance, are the poems of Simple Verses. Their apparent serenity is linked to their traditional, popular metrics, and to the poet’s insistence upon more direct and unencumbered forms of expression in comparison with the “volcanic eruptions” of the previous volumes. In this volume there is an emphasis upon the harmony of life and philosophy, or at least upon a system of transformation from crass, material forms to noble, ideal objects. And this search for and belief in idealism and harmony lends the volume a placid quality which has disquieting moments, for the Simple Verses are poems born of pain and anguish: “My friends know how these verses were born in my heart. It was in that winter of anguish, in which out of ignorance, or due to fanatical faith, or fear, or courtesy, the Spanish American republics met in Washington, in the shadow of the dreaded eagle,” wrote Martí in the introduction. Martí represented Uruguay at the International Monetary Conference in Washington, D.C., called by the United States to standardize currency in Latin America. Martí led the opposition of the Latin American countries to the plans of the United States to impose a silver standard.

Elsewhere, the poet explained that “To suffer is a duty. With what does one write well in prose or verse, but with blood?” The poet’s anguish is personalized. The verses speak of his individual view of the world, as the poet/seer turns his eyes upon the universe internalized, and describes its external and internal structures. The poet has assumed the universe, and from a symbiotic stance he offers new insights into its meaning. Martí’s experience is broad: it includes the divine spirit, the terrestrial clamor of voices, envy, hate, human ugliness, materialism, idealism, the metamorphosis of reality. The nature of writing poetry is also present here as in previous volumes. But, unlike these, experience is expressed from the viewpoint of a compendium, seen, to be sure, from the interior world (“I know,” “I’ve seen,” “I hear,” “I am,”) of the creator in search of harmony:

All is beautiful and constant,

All is melody and reason,

And all, like a diamond,

Is dark before light.

In Simple Verses one finds the most frequently cited Martí verses: IX is devoted to “La niña de Guatemala” (“The Girl From Guatemala”), and X to “La bailarina española” (“The Spanish Dancer”). Other sections may be less musical and more anguished, but all point to the future in modern poetry. In VIII and XI the poet carries on a dialogue with his doubles: a page/skeleton; a dead friend. In the end, in XLVI a conversation is established between the poet and his verse in which he declares, “Verse, as one our fates are sealed:/We are damned or saved together!”

Both Martí and his poetry have survived; but not merely Martí the poet. Martí is one of Spanish America’s most original prose writers. “Verses,” he said, “can be improvised, but not prose; prose style comes with maturity.” His early prose works, mentioned above, were followed by a voluminous opus of imaginative, rhythmic, chromatic pieces that found their way into the cultural and literary life of his period through a network of contemporary artists and the columns of the most prestigious newspapers of both North and South America. It is perhaps as a cronista, a chronicler of contemporary events — political, social and literary — that Martí is best known. He read accounts of current events voraciously. Such was his imagination that he was capable of creating visions of them as they occurred, even when he was not a witness to them.

His 1889 account of the opening of the Oklahoma frontier, for example, appears to have been written by a journalist astride a horse, who observed the excitement and violence of the events. His moving account of the 1886 earthquake in Charleston, South Carolina, contained the shrill cries and the emotional despair, the fervent, frightened prayers of the residents, as if the chronicler himself had experienced the tragedy. Martí wrote with vision, compassion, uncanny perception and a highly developed concept of innovative style on subjects as diverse as European monarchs, American anarchists, New York elevated railways, urban tenements, violent crimes, St. Valentine’s Day, Buffalo Bill, the Cody Brothers, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American technology, and agricultural and floral exhibitions. On all of these, and others too numerous to mention, Martí informed his Latin American readers. He was especially careful to show them the advantages as well as the dangers of life in a modernizing, capitalist society such as the United States, hoping to interest his fellow men in technical innovations while avoiding the social, racial, and political strife he observed in New York. For his American readers of the New York Sun he wrote mainly of life in Europe, signing with a pseudonym, M. de S.

Another of Martí’s major undertakings while in New York was La Edad de Oro: Publicación mensual de recreo e instrucción dedicada a los niños de América (The Golden Age: A Monthly Magazine of Instruction Dedicated to the Children of Spanish America). He contributed his own writing to the magazine as well as selecting artists for translations. La Edad de Oro became a milestone in Spanish children’s literature.

Freedom from Spanish rule for his native Cuba, the liberation of Puerto Rico, and economic and political independence for the Antilles and Latin America were constantly on Martí’s mind. In essays, speeches and poems, this liberating discourse — a hallmark of Modernism — is a recurring mark. Though he suffered physically and emotionally at the hands of the Spanish colonial authorities in Cuba, Martí never expressed a sense of animosity toward Spain. Instead, he espoused a doctrine of love and brotherhood; he hoped that the war with Spain, if unavoidable, would be brief and swift. In his writings on Cuba he argued for political unity, economic modernization (without the pitfalls of US capitalism), respect for human rights, and a broad, democratic, participatory social compact. When it was clear there was no other road but revolution to achieve Cuba’s freedom from colonial rule, he organized a political party among exiled Cubans residing in the United States — the Cuban Revolutionary Party — and almost single-handedly planned the 1895 invasion of Cuba. As a political strategist his sights were set on achieving independence for his native island, hence, like so many other Latin American essayists, his political writings are fundamentally instrumental or programmatic. His grasp of contemporary and future social and economic institutions was stunning, so much so that critics such as Cintio Vitier perceive in his essays on Cuba a futurity that guided not merely Martí’s generation, but generations of writers and thinkers since. Martí wrote no single, organic political treatise on Cuba. However, he left a rich legacy of conceptualizations — perceptive and “necessary” — in separate, substantive essays such as “Con todos y para el bien de todos” (“With All and For the Good of All”), “El Partido Revolucionario Cubano” (“The Cuban Political Party”), or “El manifiesto de Montecristi” (“The Montecristi Manifesto”).

Less known, and less studied, are Martí’s letters. His epistolary art fascinated Unamuno and continues to attract devoted readers. Next to his poetry, the medium in which Martí expressed his most intimate thoughts are his letters, especially those to his closest friends and confidants. The letters to his friend Manuel A. Mercado, to María Mantilla, to his mother, are filled with the tenderness and anguish of Free Verse. In his letters Martí dared to bare his soul and allowed the solitude and suffering of a mission-driven artist and revolutionary to surface. The prose of these epistolary pieces is baroque at times, at others, limpid; sometimes convoluted, sometimes succinct; at others telegraphic. He once complained: “Words I cannot.” The reader at such moments is placed in the role of having to add, interpret, complete.

One other prose genre merits special comment: the novel — Martí wrote a single narrative without great enthusiasm as a favor to a friend. She had accepted to write the work for a New York magazine but could not. Under the pseudonym of Adelaida Ral, the Cuban agreed to compose a novel in her place in seven days; its format followed the prescriptions laid down by the editor: lots of love, a death, many young girls, no sinful passions, and nothing that might offend fathers of families or priests. And, it had to have a Spanish American setting. The narrative was not Martí’s favorite genre because, as he put it, one had to feign the existence of people, scenes and dialogues.

In this narrative, in his other prose pieces, his poetry, letters, and in his journals, Martí understood that man stood at the crossroads of an entirely new world order, the Age of Modernity. He understood its metamorphic qualities, he often felt anguished about their influence over man, the socioeconomic progress of Latin America, and the liberation of Cuba and Puerto Rico, always uppermost in his mind. He saw and understood the falling away of traditional institutions — religious, social and economic — and the accompanying cultural and ideological void. This visionary writer was thus able to write as early as 1882: “There are no permanent works, because those which are the product of reframing and recasting are by their very essence mutable and restless; there are no constant roads; the new altars, great and open as the woods, are barely visible.” Though they were invisible to most people, Martí was able to see and foresee, to write and speak the signs of both his age and the future, scanning the past and linking its universal values to an unstable chaotic present.

—Ivan A. Schulman

Seven Stories Press announces the Fall 2025 publication of Darryl Cunningham’s graphic novel ELON MUSK: AMERICAN OLIGARCH, an unvarnished, critical graphic biography of the tech innovator and presidential confidant.

NEW YORK, NY, and London, UK, March 24, 2025 — 

Seven Stories announces the world English acquisition of Darryl Cunningham’s new graphic biography of Elon Musk, a deep dive into the tumultuous life of the world’s richest man. Cunningham uses his signature pictographic style — clean lines, vivid colors, and lean panel compositions—to peel back the layers of myth around Musk, delivering a timely portrait that is provocative and informative. Spanning several generations, the book traces Musk’s journey from his family roots in South Africa and his grandfather’s role in the Technocracy Movement to his current position at the apex of tech power and far-right politics. From Musk’s early education and influences, the rise of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX, to his ascension as a “dark MAGA” influencer and kingmaker, the book reveals Musk’s personal management style that has translated into unprecedented wealth for him individually, while at the same time weakening the public square and the common good that might have benefited from these innovations.Acquiring editor Greg Ruggiero comments, “A critical biography of Musk—the billionaire who is in the process of slashing government spending so corporations and the rich can pay fewer taxes—is absolutely what we need in this moment of oligarchic power and excess. I’m a parent of four smart teens, and I don’t want them to live in the America Musk is trying to create.”

ELON MUSK: AMERICAN OLIGARCH
By Darryl Cunningham
$24.95 | Paperback original | 202 pages | 6-3/8 x 9”
September 23, 2025 US September 25, 2025 SSP-UK
9781911710271 

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DARRYL CUNNINGHAM is the award-winning author of Supercrash: How to Hijack the Global Economy (a New York Times bestseller), Graphic Science; The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis; Putin’s Russia: The Rise of a Dictator; and Billionaires, which won the Best Graphic Nonfiction category in the Broken Frontier Awards 2019. In 2015, he was one of thirty world-renowned photographers, painters, sculptors, writers, filmmakers, and musicians invited to contribute to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Art of Saving a Life project to promote vaccination in the developing world. In 2018, he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Master of Arts from Leeds Arts University. He lives in Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

Guardianas is a bilingual collection of testimonies from midwives in El Salvador who delivered babies during the twelve-year-long civil war and who, today, fight to protect their ancestral role in the midst of ongoing repression.

This edition includes thirty color photographs and five black-and-white illustrations.

Out of necessity, women in El Salvador began attending births during the twelve-year-long civil war, when pregnant people in rural areas and guerrilla camps could not access medical care. From their mothers and older midwives, these women learned partería—traditional midwifery that was once the norm in El Salvador and has since been prohibited. After the official end to the war, the parteras became central fixtures in the “repopulation” of their country, building new communities, often without electricity or running water or hospitals. In 1994, out of this organizing, the Association of Parteras Rosa Andrade (APRA) was born. Today, the founding members of APRA, along with a younger generation training with them, continue to fight for the reproductive rights of thousands of people living in the municipalities of Suchitoto, Cuscatlán.

Collected in 2019 by Salvadoran American birth worker Noemí Delgado, Guardianas weaves together testimonies from twenty members of APRA to tell a collective story of:

- the experiences of midwives, mothers, guerrilla fighters and “gente de masa” during the armed conflict that took approximately 75,000 lives; 

- the role of the midwife during the period of repopulation after the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords, when thousands of displaced Salvadorans were finally allowed back into their homeland;

- the brutal obstetric violence that people giving birth in hospitals routinely face, and how this mistreatment compares to care provided by a midwife; 

- the extreme repression Salvadoran midwives have faced since 2011, when the health ministry prohibited home births;

- the ancestral nature of partería, an earth-based art practice that is passed down between generations, and derives from an extensive body of knowledge about safe and empowering births.

This anthology is both a safeguarding of the caretaking traditions of partería as well as a broader invitation to consider the role of birth work in organizing against war, imperialism, and corporate power. Here, the beauty of the testimonies—and the care with which they were compiled—ultimately come together to upend our ideas of what a medical ethnography can be and what an oral history can do.

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INTRODUCTION

During an assembly of the Association of Midwives Rosa Andrade (APRA) of Suchitoto, El Salvador, in September 2021, one of the members, Natividad Escobar de Henriquez, got a call for help from another community midwife. While the midwife had been caring for her daughter who was giving birth at home, a government health promoter had arrived and threatened to call the police if they didn’t take her to the hospital to give birth.

“Put the health worker on the phone,” Natividad said to the other midwife.

“You have to let this woman decide where to give birth, and if she wants to give birth with her mom, who’s a midwife, she’s within her rights to do so,” she informed the government health promoter.

With the blessing of her fellow APRA members, Natividad left the meeting to help the midwife defend against the threats of the health promoter. I had the honor of accompanying her and we were both present for a beautiful birth where the woman giving birth could completely trust in her own body and in the wisdom of nature, supported by her mother and her community.

In this case, the health promoter backed off when faced with the fierce bravery of the midwives. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, midwives who had not attended births for many years as a result of government intimidation returned to midwifing for women in their rural communities. Just as the armed conflict had revealed three decades earlier, the pandemic underscored the fact that midwives always offer a fundamental human service. With hospitals overwhelmed, turned into spaces of disease and infection once again, the midwives of APRA drew on their thirty years of organizing to continue to work together to provide health services to their communities without institutional support.

This group of women tell histories of violent repression and survival, but more than anything they tell stories of love for life. Through a practice of transcendental solidarity, APRA has managed to give care to thousands of women, adolescents, and babies who have been excluded from the cruel economic system that still dominates El Salvador. The members of APRA have attended births in the middle of the Civil War, without the proper supplies, while fleeing airstrikes and other extremely difficult aggressions. They were there when women giving birth had nowhere to go: in the guerrilla camps, in the refugee camps of Honduras and Nicaragua, and in their own communities when they returned to El Salvador. Under these conditions, many of them began working as midwives in response to the great needs of the people in their communities. Their fight to defend life from violence has continued since those times.

I learned of APRA’s work for the first time in 2018. I was providing education around contraception and lactation to pregnant teenagers and mothers at the health center in La Libertad, El Salvador, while on break from my university in the United States. I saw that the prenatal care that young people were receiving in the health center was incomplete and at times disrespectful. When I asked the nurses about midwives, they told me, “midwives don’t exist anymore” and “that’s a thing of the past.” Aware that midwives are often invisibilized at the global level, I began to investigate what had happened to them in El Salvador. I quickly learned that all of the people over twenty in my father’s town had been born at home with a midwife. A friend who was living in Suchitoto introduced me to two of the midwives in APRA and I immediately felt inspired by their powerful presence. After graduating from university, I returned to El Salvador to work with the association. When I asked the women how I could support their work, they said that they wanted to make a book documenting their history.

I lived with the members of APRA for ten months, joining them on their prenatal visits, at their monthly assemblies, at their social events and soccer games, while I gathered the testimonies for this book. When I think about those women my very cells fill with love. They have treated me like a daughter and living alongside them has transformed the deepest parts of me. I have even continued attending births as a community doula since returning to California.

This collection of testimonies was born of interviews completed in August of 2019 with all of the founding members of APRA and several of the new generation of midwives. By sharing details from their personal histories, the midwives of APRA tell their collective histories. The format of this collection pays homage to their collective model—a structure for protecting their communities and each other as an organized front. Organizing with APRA is an important aspect of each midwife’s identity as one part of a struggle much bigger than herself.

The association has its roots in the armed conflict that took place in El Salvador from 1979 to 1992. The majority of the midwives of APRA began, or rather continued, the work of attending births in the middle of a war fought between a US-backed dictatorship on one side and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a popular guerrilla movement, on the other. The majority of the midwives were involved in the guerrilla political movement and began attending births in the guerrilla camps or among the gente de masa, civilian groups that mobilized alongside the guerrillas.

The Salvadoran Civil War was a continuation of the violence and repression that began with the arrival of the Spanish in El Salvador in 1524: the first chapter in the ongoing colonizing of Indigenous peoples, including the Náhuat-Pipil, the Lenca, the Maya Ch’orti’, the Maya Pocomam, and the Cacaopera. Four centuries later, virtually all of the land and wealth in El Salvador belonged to fourteen families, descendents of the colonizers. The Fourteen Families controlled coffee production, which was the country’s main export. In 1932, the Armed Forces suppressed a revolutionary movement, murdering over thirty-thousand campesinos and workers—the majority Indigenous—who were fighting for a more just political and economic system. The government began killing people for simply appearing Indigenous or speaking their mother tongue. They also assassinated key leaders such as Farabundo Martí, who was one of the founders of the communist party in Central America and later became an icon for the revolutionary party in the 1980s. After the massacre of civilians in 1932, the coffee oligarchy handed control of the country over to a military regime that immediately robbed the campesinos of the right to organize. The country remained under the control of military dictatorships for the following decades. When the war began, at the end of the 1970s, 2 percent of the population owned 60 percent of the country’s cultivable land.

The midwives explain that the popular guerrilla movement mobilized because the people would no longer endure injustice. In 1979, there was a coup d’etat backed by the United States with the objective of avoiding a leftist revolution. The military continued torturing, abducting, and killing any civil and religious leaders who were considered critics of the regime. In 1980, archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero was assassinated by the government the day after a mass in which he called upon the military to end the repression. That same year, five left-wing parties joined forces to form the FMLN. In her interview, María Dolores Hernández de Rivera recounts how the guerrillas called it “a fight for the poor.” For many of the midwives of APRA there was no option but to join the guerrillas: they joined because the army and the death squads were persecuting them for being campesinos and for being from certain communities that were politically organized, including Suchitoto. The guerrilla was their only protection.

The midwives were politically formed within the guerrilla movement, which was inspired by Marxism and Liberation Theology. They continue bearing a collective and anti-capitalist spirit. They do not charge women for their services and sustain themselves with solidarity and social organizing. Their fight is still a fight for the poor. All of the founding members of APRA are survivors of this war, which took the lives of approximately eighty-thousand people—the great majority at the hands of the Salvadoran government, which received the equivalent of a million dollars of military assistance a day from the United States. Every single founding midwife lost loved ones during the war—husbands, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, cousins. In the midst of this violence, they protected the lives of women giving birth and their babies. They attended births under the most difficult imaginable conditions that the Salvadoran people have lived through.

During the armed conflict, 25 percent of the population of El Salvador was forcibly displaced. Some of the midwives of APRA attended births while fleeing violence, or in refugee camps in Honduras (where twenty-thousand people sought safety) and Nicaragua, where access to health services was extremely limited. The refugee camps were surrounded by soldiers and people were not allowed to leave without permission from the United Nations (UN). On top of that, there were very few doctors to care for thousands of people. The midwives continued to be a fundamental resource for the health of an entire people who had been forced to flee.

At the beginning of the nineties, as the war came to a close with the signing of the Peace Accords, thousands of displaced people returned to repopulate the municipality of Suchitoto in the department of Cuscatlán; there, they built new communities with the scarce resources available. In that time, the only hospital in Suchitoto was inaccessible to the people who lived in rural communities, and midwives were the only aid available for births and other medical emergencies. Public health infrastructure was very precarious. Between 1993 and 1998, 42 percent of births in the country took place outside of a hospital; in some places that had been repopulated by former guerrilla combatants and refugees, such as the Cuscatlán department, closer to 70 percent of births took place at home.

Between 1993 and 1994, forty-five women organized to receive a formal training in midwifery through a program established by two nurse-midwives from the International Medical Relief Fund. In 1994, APRA was born, and ever since, the midwives of Suchitoto have been organized. They continue to meet the first Wednesday of every month to share experiences and make a count of the number of people served by the organization. They also sell pupusas to people in the community to raise funds to buy birth control pills and other materials needed in their communities.

The ancestral role of the midwives is a unique one that includes many kinds of community attention. Being members of the same communities that they serve engenders a deep trust in the midwives by the people; this is not always the case with government health promoters. It’s this trust that allows the midwives to offer diverse kinds of care that transcend a single sphere of health: the midwives of APRA offer talks about sexual and reproductive health; they distribute contraceptive methods in the communities; and they also care for people’s emotional health when someone is sick or injured. Attending births is just one piece of their work.

This model of traditional community midwifery has been transmitted from generation to generation. Many of the members of APRA have learned care practices to aid birth and how to use medicinal plants from their own mothers as well as from elder midwives in their communities, even learning from the same midwives who delivered them a generation before. The wisdom that midwives safeguard has survived centuries of colonialism, a colonialism that continues to devalue Indigenous knowledges above all those practiced by women.

Birth has always been a microcosm of our relationship with nature; it’s not a coincidence that the growing medicalization of childbirth has coincided with the neglect of Mother Nature. Midwifery is an art form that seeks to protect our connection with nature and impart the knowledge that our ancestors have passed down.

Midwives have been subject to extreme repression in the last decade. Around 2011, workers from the Ministry of Health began a campaign of intimidation directed toward midwives in their own communities, telling them they did not have the right to attend births—and that, if something went wrong with a birth, they would get sent to prison. That same year, the Salvadoran Ministry of Health published a policy decreeing that all births must take place in a hospital as part of their “Strategic Birth Plan.” In her testimony, Patricia Hernández shares how the director of the Ministry of Health at the time told the association directly that if it were up to her, “midwives wouldn’t exist on this planet.”

This attempt to eradicate community midwives was a response on the part of the Ministry of Health to the United Nations’ “Millennium Development Goals,” instituted in the year 2000, one of which was to reduce maternal mortality by 2015. This goal was in part measured by a specific target of the number of births attended by “skilled health personnel.” For many countries, El Salvador among them, complying with the Millennium Development Goals became one of the conditions required to receive international aid from countries like the United States. In 2010, the UN published a report about the progress of these goals. Just after this report came out, midwives all over the country, including those in APRA, began to receive threats from Ministry of Health workers.

So what happens when dominant powers define and finance “development” in other countries? In The White Man’s Burden, American economist William Easterly classifies the people in charge of establishing objectives like the Millenium Development Goals as “planners” rather than “searchers.” “Planners” set enormous, even utopian, goals for communities that they are not part of. This top-down hierarchical model means that the so-called solutions to problems like high rates of maternal mortality are not based on the needs and desires of the actual people living in the communities. Moreover, these planners measure their results entirely in numbers, and toss out the importance of people’s real, lived experiences.

Instead of investing resources and training in midwives to support their community work, the type of work that has reduced maternal mortality in other countries, the then Salvadoran government excluded midwives entirely from the formal public health system. The repression of midwives represents a threat to the health of many women and babies who live far from a hospital or who don’t trust health institutions.

According to the Ministry of Health, in 2012 five of six of the most common causes of death for women between the ages of twenty and fifty-nine in El Salvador were related to pregnancy and birth complications; the majority of these deaths were preventable. Midwives live in rural communities, ready for any emergency. It should be added that women put their trust in midwives, and tell them if they have any doubt or if something feels off. Community midwives prevent maternal and neonatal deaths thanks to the early detection of obstetric emergencies.

Birth is not by definition an emergency, and in general does not require any intervention; without a doubt, the Westernized health system treats all births as medical emergencies that need to be controlled. Just as the midwives know how to identify the signs of danger and will accompany women to the hospital when they present with emergencies that cannot be treated at home, they also know to treat birth as a natural process that requires patience and intuition. The fundamental difference between the ways that a midwife and a doctor conceptualize birth sheds light on the distinction between delivering at a hospital and giving birth at home with the support of a midwife.

The ritual of giving birth in a hospital under the complete control of a doctor has become a part of the cultural fabric in the last few decades, one that reproduces colonial relationships and results in physical and emotional wounds for many people. These wounds are the result of obstetric violence, a legal term Venezuela powerfully defined as “the appropriation of women’s bodies and reproductive systems by health officials, which expresses itself in dehumanizing hierarchical treatment, and in the abuse of medicalizing and pathologizing natural processes, leading to a consequent loss of autonomy and the ability to freely make decisions about their bodies and sexuality, ultimately negatively impacting quality of life for women.” Unnecessary or forced C-sections are one of the most easily statistically documented kinds of obstetric violence. UNICEF reports that C-sections represent 32 percent of all births in El Salvador, three times the level recommended by the World Health Organization. When the rate of C-sections exceeds 10 percent, there is no evidence that infant mortality goes down.

Unnecessary C-sections are not the only act of obstetric violence, and are probably not even the most common form. Obstetric violence includes violations of the right to receive information and make decisions, as well as the right to protect intimacy and dignity. Episiotomies, where doctors make an incision in the back wall of the vaginal opening, are violent and unnecessary procedures that historically were common in hospitals in El Salvador. In many cases, this procedure has been done without the consent of the woman giving birth. In 2019, in their study entitled a “National Survey on Sexual Violence Against Women,” the Salvadoran General Directorate of Statistics and the Census found that 71 percent of people who gave birth in the hospital were victims of obstetric violence.

The current first lady of El Salvador, Gabriela de Bukele, has taken an interest in the issue of birth, and in 2021 the Legislative Assembly approved her Nacer con Cariño (Born with Love) law, which promotes “birth with kindness and respect, with kind and sensitive care for newborns.” This law established some important rights for women giving birth, including the right to be accompanied by someone for support during birth and the prevention of health personnel from performing any intervention without receiving the informed consent of the person giving birth. It also included plans to train and certify more health workers focused on perinatal care, but it neglected to consider the role of traditional midwives.

Recognition for the work of midwives seeks not only to bring justice to the women who have dedicated their lives to caring for their communities but also to safeguard birth as an event that can bring us closer to our ancestral roots. The physical body can be a medium for spiritual healing and cultural transformation. Experiences where we become portals of power and transcendental love, such as community births, help us recover what we have lost to colonial history. The suppression of traditional midwives results in a tragic loss for families, for communities, and for the people.

The midwives of APRA fight for a future where the autonomy and intuition of each person giving birth is respected, and where new generations can learn and benefit from this irreplaceable tradition. These women teach us that birth should be a territory of nature and of our own communities, not of the State.

—NOEMÍ DELGADO
San Diego, California
2024

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NOEMÍ DELGADO is a doula, body worker, and childbirth educator. Born in San Diego, she began her birthwork journey while living and working with midwives in her family’s homeland of El Salvador, where she received training in traditional birth and postpartum care from members of the Asociación de Parteras Rosa Andrade. In 2019, she was awarded a Public Health Fullbright Fellowship to continue this work. She is cofounder of Cuidando A Las Que Nos Cuidan, a collective generating ongoing support for APRA, and is director of Matronas: The Struggle to Protect Birth in El Salvador (2021), which was an Official Selection at the San Diego Latino Film Festival and the Oakland Short Film Festival and won Best Cinematography at Documentary Short Film Festival. Delgado is dedicated to uplifting ancestral wisdom and challenging the systems that attempt to erase it; Guardianas and Matronas are a part of that effort.
 

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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.