Recommendations from the staff at Seven Stories Press

And we're back! Again! But this time for good. Probably!

This latest installment of Seven Stories Staff Picks, all of our book recommendations (where possible*) link directly to our comrades at Stories Books & Cafe. Pay them a visit the next time you're in LA!

*Where it's not available, we link to either Alibris or the book's publisher. 

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Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin

This book is wild, and less than 200 pages. Revenge of the Scapegoat follows Iris, an adjunct professor at an arts college, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, who recieves a box of letters from her estranged father. The letters, which he'd given her previously, when she was a teenager, outline all of the ways in which the crises her family endured were, as her father says, entirely her fault. Thrown for a loop and reeling from the cruelty this act, as well as the chaos of her marriage (her husband is self-medicating his alcohol addiction by "microdosing heroin"), Iris takes off in her friend's busted old Subaru, adopts the name Vivitrix Marigold, and finds herself covered in manure, trapped below the hoof of a Nazi cow (long story) on the grounds of a rural art museum. Throughout all of this, we become acquainted with her trusty companions, her rheumatic feet named Bouvard and Pécuchet (after Flaubert). It's a delightfully bonkers story, perfect for fans of Kathy Acker, Guadalupe Nettel, Sarah Rose Etter, Pola Oloixarac, or even Ottessa Moshfegh.

Also, listen to the band Pylon. Especially if you're into Gang of Four or X or Pixies or The Fall. They're incredible, and I'm thrilled that they're finally on streaming platforms after so long. Listen to this song first, and then watch this music video. You won't regret it.

—Allison

Pina by Titaua Peu, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Titaua Peu's Pina translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, out soon from Restless Books, is an extraordinary novel that brings to mind the fiction of Emile Zola, depicting dehumanization in a highly nuanced social setting, and with a lush naturalist eye. And although the book is written in French, it is infused at the same time with a syntax and vocabulary and style that derives from the Polynesian dialect spoken in Tahiti. And it will almost certainly be the first work of Tahitian literature you've ever read. 

—Dan

Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie

The overturning of Roe v. Wade has had me thinking about the connections between abolition and reproductive justice and abortion access. Like the writer Charlotte Shane tweeted recently “If nothing else please let this be the moment that cements your commitment to prison abolition. They are going to incarcerate people for miscarriages. They are going to incarcerate mothers and aunts and big sisters for helping teenage relatives abort.” 

Abolition. Feminism. Now. is both a call to action (“Now.”) and a genealogy of abolitionist movements, from the beginning of abolitionist feminist conferences and thought to current-day movements like No New Jails NYC. A stark reminder that our liberation is collective. 

—Eva

Black Country, New Road

UK band Black Country, New Road came out of nowhere. They arrived fully formed, with two singles that harkened back to a beloved period of late-80s/early-90s indie rock. With lyrics that aimed to take pop-culture mundanity and find transcendence in it, and drawing inspiration from heavy-hitters like Sonic Youth, Slint, and The Fall, they immediately found themselves adrift in an ocean of buzz. For the first time, their debut album, fleshed out the prickly, stand-offish sound of the singles, adding elements of jazz and Eastern European folk music to their guitar noise meltdowns. 

Their second album, released in early 2022, was a complete re-direction. Pivoting away from abrasion and ugliness, and toward something deeply personal and musically accessible, Ants From Up There draws from the sounds of early 2000s indie rock (specifically, early Arcade Fire maximalism).The album has been a bittersweet triumph—universally acclaimed, full of recurring themes and motifs that all build toward the breathtaking final three minutes. And yet, days before the album’s release, and just before the band were slated to begin their first US tour, singer Isaac Wood announced that he was leaving the band, citing mental health issues (he works in a bakery now, and has reportedly never been happier).

The rest of the band has opted for an unusual path—continuing on in a new iteration. They wrote new songs, and have refused to play any of the material from their first two albums during their live shows, out of respect for their friend. Their constant evolution, close-knit group dynamic, and the fact that all 7-ish members of the band are unbelievably talented, has made them the most exciting band in the world (at least to me). We’re lucky to be along for the ride.

—James

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

Right now I'm reading Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, a short, elusive novel about a mother and daughter who take a trip to Japan. They go to bookstores and museums and restaurants; they try to communicate but can't seem to reach one another, leaving the most important things unsaid. That makes it sound a bit sad, and it is, but here the difficulties of communication are as miraculous as they are frustrating—it reminds me of the Rilke line about love as two solitudes side by side. I'm halfway through and reading it slowly to make it last.

—Lauren

Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin

While I sit baking in my house in the burbs, I've also been walking the streets of Paris, London, Tokyo, Venice and New York (well, I get there on my own for real sometimes) with Lauren Elkin, the author of—and a partaker of the lifestyle of a—Flâneuse. Yes, perambulating through the world's great cities is an activity for those with the time and money for such leisurely and indulgent activities, but if armchair travel or upending the male-dominant view is your summer jam, then I highly recommend a cosmopolitan, woman-centered, art and literature-filled jaunt with Elkin. However, if you haven't read Annie Ernaux's Happening yet, or seen Audrey Diwan's powerful film of the story, you must (!) put it at the top of your list, well ahead of any flaneuse-ing.

—Ruth

 
X by Davey Davis

X begins with an S/M waterboarding scene and opens up into a not-so-distant future in which undesirables (the racialized, dissident, transexual, drug using, poor, and immigrant) are forced to “export” themselves to other countries at the prodding of the US government. Amidst this ongoing descent into fascism, our protagonist Lee, a sadist and asshole with arguably good intentions, finds themself searching for X — a “femdom nightmare” who tops them at a warehouse party in Brooklyn. I don’t read a lot of thrillers or noir, but this isn’t genre for genre’s sake— X’s vampiric tone is the perfect cover for a deep consideration of how ordinary life persists amidst political crisis. The author of the earthquake room and a newsletter about people called David, Davis writes brilliantly about how the state infects our desires and decisions; if all of our hands are in the dirt, what makes you feel good, and what lengths do you go to get it? (In COVID quarantine in a world that feels pretty identical to X’s, I have a few pages left, but it’s too good to not be included on this list.)

—Tal

“We can allow the future to influence our present. That opens up all kinds of new possibilities.” 

To celebrate the publication of Kraken Calling, the fiction debut of Canadian activist and author Aric McBay, we are proud to share a short interview with the author, whose previous book, Full Spectrum Resistance, told a comprehensive history of various social movements, offering both strategies for future actions and cautionary tales of what to avoid. McBay's newest book, a near-future speculative novel about direct action against a repressive regime, follows activist groups organizing in two different time periods, 2028 and 2051, and contending with a sharply increasing authoritarianism over the course of that generation.

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Q: Your debut novel, Kraken Calling, spans two interconnected time periods – one 2028, one 2051 – to tell the story of activist groups attempting to organize and fight back against an increasingly oppressive regime. What compelled you to write this book with this sort of timeline? How does this asynchronous chronology serve the story? 

By telling a story in two different time periods we can sharpen the contrast between them. I wanted to tell two interconnected stories a generation apart – one similar to our own time, and one more authoritarian and wracked by disaster – to really tease apart the differences and heighten the contradictions between the two.

Of course, I could have told the stories in Kraken Calling one after the other, chronologically, instead of interleaving them. But alternating between the two created a more powerful dramatic result. 

First, it creates more tension for the reader, because we don’t know the fate of our favourite characters until late in the book. 

Second, interleaving the stories – taking characters a generation apart and placing them side-by-side – means that we automatically compare and contrast their choices and their experiences. It makes everything in the book feel more vivid. 

And third, it creates a puzzle, a mystery that the reader can try to solve. At the beginning, we don’t know all the connections between the different characters, we don’t know who we can trust. I really enjoy stories that reward thoughtful engagement, that encourage us to read between the lines. (I’ve even heard from a few people who finished the book, and then immediately went back to the start because they wanted to find all of the little clues and easter eggs that weren’t obvious on their first pass.)

I wanted to offer the reader the joy of puzzling out those connections – or they can just be swept up in the story, whatever their preference! 

Telling the story in an asynchronous way also mirrors a lot of my own experience as a non-fiction author and a student of social movements. I’m always looking a generation (or more) back to see what we can learn, and how decisions people made then affect us now. What could we have done better?

And as a climate justice activist, I have to look forward, to think about how our actions affect the future. I’m always looking in both directions. 

In Kraken Calling, there’s a 23-year gap between the two time periods. And as I approach middle-age, I’ve realized that 23 years can pass surprisingly fast. That can feel terrifying – not because of my own mortality, but because we have very little time to act to prevent climate catastrophe and rampant authoritarianism.

We usually think of time as a one-way process: our actions in the past (or present) determine the future. And that’s largely true – but through speculative fiction, by envisioning possible futures and experiencing them vicariously, we can reverse that causality. 

We can allow the future to influence our present. That opens up all kinds of new possibilities.

Q: Technological advances are integral to both the successes and failures of the activist movements throughout Kraken Calling. Can you tell me a little bit about the technology you write about in the book? Also, how do you see the relationship between anti-authoritarian activism and technology, particularly given our current corporatist (and arguably authoritarian) technological landscape?

The characters in the future of Kraken Calling live under an overtly authoritarian “Emergency Authority”. Repression and surveillance limits what activists can do, their ability to organize, to meet. 

In our highly technological society, it’s easy to forget that most authoritarian states in the twentieth century had rather primitive surveillance systems. For example, in East Germany during the Cold War, surveillance by the Stasi (secret police) was incredibly labour-intensive. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, up to 1 of 6 people in East Germany were serving as informants for the secret police. That’s a lot of people. And even with all those citizen-spies, the Stasi ultimately failed, and that authoritarian government was overthrown.

Those historical authoritarians were horrible, violent, and repressive, but their surveillance powers were weak by modern standards. These days almost every one of us has a device in our pocket that knows whether you are sleeping or awake, who you are with, where you go, what you are reading, every minute of the day.

We haven’t really been able to counter that effectively even now, and it’s not difficult to imagine how a truly fascist state could use all that information and power.

Hence, in Kraken Calling, activists living under the Emergency Authority have very few opportunities to communicate safely. Their daily movements are tracked and restricted, and the Emergency Authority (which emerged during a period of epidemics) uses contact tracing to find and destroy political movements. So dissidents have developed their own workarounds.

Perhaps the most important technology used by activists in the future is something called “Samizdata”. It’s a tool, a coin-sized solar-powered wireless module. It’s something they can slip into their pockets or hide on a rooftop. It produces a very slow, clandestine, ad hoc wireless network.

Samizdata allows activists to communicate with each other, to share news and information that they couldn’t through official channels. The name is inspired by samizdat, a secret communications system that people living under Stalinism used to share banned books – often copying them out by hand. 

However, the samizdata system also reflects the state of resistance in Kraken Calling – at least at the start of the novel. Resistance is isolated, sporadic, and mostly rather timid. But as the novel progresses, and resistance grows, samizdata becomes an even more important tool.

That said, tech is just a tool. Movements are made of people. And to succeed, we need to forge individuals into groups, and to mobilize groups to take bold action.

Good technology can facilitate movement-building, but it will never do that work for us.

Q: You have written extensively about the successes of, and failures of, activist movements throughout history, most recently in your two-volume tome Full Spectrum Resistance. What were some of the real-world activist influences on Kraken Calling?

I mentioned samizdat above; many historical anti-authoritarian movements influenced the book, including struggles against Nazi and Soviet authoritarianism.

I’m especially inspired by anti-colonial movements in the Global South. The structure of Emergency Authority reflects techniques the British used to colonize Africa, and in particular to deal with the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s. I’ve also drawn a lot from the African National Congress and movements against South African apartheid.

But closer to home, and especially in the 2028 timeframe, much of the narrative is shaped by things I’ve experienced in my own lifetime as a grassroots activist. For example, the tactics that some activists in the novel use against a fossil fuel site – protests, sit-ins, mass defiance of police, and other forms of non-violent direct action – are all tactics that I’ve used (and taught) in my own activist career. (I wrote about those in Full Spectrum Resistance as well as in Direct Action Works with Pamela Cross.)

Of course, making that kind of action happen on a large scale involves some pretty complicated community alliances and politically strange bedfellows. Those often-tense dynamics are a key thread in Kraken Calling. 

Lastly, even in 2028 there are ample forms of government and corporate repression (surveillance, agents provocateurs, infiltrators, and so on), just like in real life. That was very much influenced by 21st century events like the Green Scare, the G20 Conspiracy case in Ontario, and many other examples.

Many of the movements that influenced the novel have been successful. But we can learn a lot even from (and maybe especially from) failures.

Q: Speaking of failures: Kraken Calling is not shy about addressing the mistakes and miscalculations of its characters, particularly when it comes to a general failure to recognize the urgency of the 2028 movements and organize accordingly. That said, while the 2051 of the novel is clearly dystopian in part because of that lack of urgency, it is not by any means a novel that presents a fatalistic or hopeless view of the future. Can you tell me a little bit about the way that failure factors into the story, and how this relates to where we find ourselves today, living in a period of significant backlash to the social progress of the past decade+? How do you see the relationship between hope for the future and political failures of the past/present?

There’s a quote from Latin American independence leader Símon Bolivar that comes up a couple of times in Kraken Calling: “The work of the revolutionary is to plow the sea.” In other words, social change or revolution is not an endpoint. It’s an effortful process, we have to keep doing it, or we’ll lose the progress we’ve already made.

It’s easy to treat social progress as some kind of historical inevitability. It would be nice if we could kind of sit around and just watch things get better no matter what we did. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But that’s not a physical law – King was an organizer and activist, and he understood that the arc of history doesn’t bend automatically. If it bends toward justice, that’s only because of the struggles and sacrifices of many different people in many different movements. 

Social progress is never guaranteed. The belief that social progress is simply result of time, rather than struggle, is a really demobilizing and demoralizing idea. I see that as a fundamentally conservative belief, because it says, essentially: activism doesn’t matter. “We just need more time, and we’ll get there eventually.” And that’s very wrong!

In any case, backlashes are a critical part of understanding how social change happens. Because history is not a one-way straight line. Especially now, we see that in the US. But it’s happened many times.

Consider the end of slavery and the civil war in the US. After 1865, things actually started to get better for a lot of Black people in the American South. There was growing economic equality, and even Black legislators were elected. But that same progress provoked an enormous backlash, which led to the rise of the KKK and a massive level of state-sponsored terrorism to repress marginalized communities. It took a hundred years, and many waves of activism, before Black legislators were elected again and civil rights more firmly established.

The more you succeed as an activist, the stronger the repression is likely to be. I don’t say this to be cynical or fatalistic. Quite the opposite: It’s important to understand backlashes so we can be ready for them, and so that we aren’t naïve. So that we don’t just give up when things get difficult.

Things can get very, very bad – as they have many times in history – and we can still come back from that and build societies that are more fair, and just, and worth living in, and even beautiful. (Periods of crisis can actually yield major change, if we’re adequately prepared, and if we can use the principles of effective resistance I’ve written about in my non-fiction books.)

To return to the part of your question about the characters in Kraken Calling, you are exactly right: they make a lot of mistakes. And that was an intentional choice, because it’s realistic.

When we read a streamlined view of historical movements, a lot of the mistakes get left out of the summary. But mistakes are actually an essential part of making change, because if you are unwilling to make mistakes as an activist you’ll be unable to learn. In fact, if you’re too afraid of making mistakes you’ll never be able to do anything!

That’s important to remember, because some activist scenes can be perfectionist, rigid, and unforgiving. But it’s okay to make mistakes. I’ve made plenty! That doesn’t make you a failure, and it doesn’t make you a bad person. The key is to learn, to recognize mistakes, to try to fix them. 

And crucially, to keep making new mistakes that open up new possibilities. And ideally to mostly learn from other people’s mistakes. If you can only learn by making mistakes for yourself, well, that’s a slow and uniquely excruciating way to create change.

Q: Is there anything specifically you would like the reader to consider while reading this book? What conclusions – or questions – would you like the reader to walk away with? 

I think – or hope – that people will be reflecting on the choices of the characters in the novel. Asking: What would I have done differently if I were these characters, in their shoes? What should they be doing next? And what should I do right now, in real life?

I want people to think (and feel) about the kind of future they want to leave the next generation, and to act accordingly. I want to prime them to think about authoritarian trends in a proactive way; not to just wallow in dystopia, but to consider what might happen in the world in the aftermath of pandemic, as climate change gets worse, as authoritarians become more bold, and to think about how we can best intervene.

The novel has twenty-four chapters – twelve in each time period. Kraken Calling begins in the future of 2051, but it ends in the “past” of 2028. That was a very deliberate choice. I didn’t want to end in 2051, where the dystopian future feels fixed or inevitable, like a fait accompli. 

I wanted to end the story near our own time, where we still have a chance, collectively, to change the course of history. To build and to fight for the kind of future we actually want to live in.

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Aric McBay is an organizer, a farmer, and author of four books. He writes and speaks about effective social movements, and has organized campaigns around prison justice, Indigenous solidarity, pipelines, unionization, and other causes. You can find his work at aricmcbay.org.

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

Born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928, and killed on October 9, 1967, the short life of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna is that of one of the greatest and most enduring revolutionary figures of all time, named one of Time magazine's "icons of the 20th century." He was politicized first-hand during his travels as a young man around Latin America, and especially by witnessing the CIA-backed overthrow of the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 in Guatemala. He sought out a group of Cuban revolutionaries exiled in Mexico City. And, in July 1955, immediately after meeting their leader Fidel Castro, enlisted in their expedition to overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The Cubans nicknamed him "Che," a popular form of address in Argentina.

Four years later, after a fierce revolutionary struggle, General Batista fled on January 1, 1959, and Che became a key leader in the new revolutionary government. Che was also the main representative of the Cuban revolutionary government around the world, heading numerous delegations to Asia, Africa, Latin America and the United States. Beginning in 1965, Che lead two Cuban missions to support revolutionary struggles elsewhere in the world, first in Congo and then in Bolivia. Both of these interventions failed, and Che's accounts of these struggles in Congo Diary and The Bolivian Diary show the lessons learned and the humility and fierce intelligence with which Che approached every revolutionary struggle.

To celebrate the publication of The NBA in Black and White: The Memoir of a Trailblazing NBA Player and Coach by Ray Scott, we are proud to share an excerpt from his book, a memoir of hard lessons learned in the racially segregated NBA of the early 1960s. In this passage, Scott offers some stats about the racial demographics of the 1960s NBA as a lead-in to sharing one of his favorite memories of his fellow player, perhaps the most iconic basketball player of all time, Wilt Chamberlain.

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On November 8, 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected the thirty-fifth president of the United States. In his speeches, before and after this occasion, JFK’s “New Frontier” signaled that African Americans could now be included in the American Dream. By themselves, JFK’s words and the sentiments behind them improved the quality of lives for millions of people of color by encouraging us to feel better about who we were and what we could possibly achieve.

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.

Also, at the conclusion of the 1959–60 season, ninety-nine players appeared on the rosters of the eight NBA teams. Twenty-four of these players were African American, with the easy math coming to virtually 24 percent. However, subtracting the minuscule on-court time credited to the Celtics’ Maurice King (who only played 19 minutes in a single game), and Cal Ramsey (who played four games in St. Louis and seven with New York), the meaningful number is reduced to slightly less than 22 percent. This percentage increased every year while JFK was still in office, eventually reaching 38 percent in the year he was assassinated.

A huge step was also taken with the record number of African American players named to the 1964 Olympic team, which I believe had a great deal to do with the words and deeds of both JFK and LBJ. The 1960 team had only three Black players—Oscar Robertson, Bob Boozer, and Walt Bellamy. Four years later, Jim Barnes, Joe Caldwell, Walt Hazzard, Luke Jackson, and George Wilson constituted nearly half of the twelve-man squad.

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:

Boston: Bill Russell, K.C. Jones, Sam Jones, and Maurice King
Cincinnati: Wayne Embry
Detroit: Walter Dukes, Earl Lloyd, and Shellie McMillon
Minneapolis: Elgin Baylor, Alex “Boo” Ellis, Ray Felix, Ed Fleming, and Tom Hawkins
New York: Johnny Green, Willie Naulls, and Cal Ramsey
St. Louis: Sihugo Green
Syracuse: Dick Barnett, Hal Greer, and Bob Hopkins
Philadelphia: Andy Johnson, Guy Rodgers, Woody Sauldsberry, and the most impactful rookie in the history of the NBA—Wilt Chamberlain

I was fourteen when I first saw Wilt play. He was sixteen and already an amazing player at Overbrook High School back when the games consisted of four 8-minute quarters. He was 6'11", 240 pounds at the time, and could run like the proverbial deer, jump out of the gym, and single-handedly prevented layups and short-jumpers on defense. At the other end of the court Wilt averaged well over 40 points per game, often scoring 60 or 70, with his high being 90. That’s 90 points in 32 minutes!

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.

In my junior year at West Philadelphia High School, we finished the season with a record of 17–3. We would have gone undefeated but for the three losses to Wilt’s Overbrook dynasty. We seldom guarded each other, but he scored his usual 40-plus (and I was usually in foul trouble when he did), while I struggled to put up double figures.

My all-time favorite memory of Wilt took place when I was seventeen and riding my bike to the Haddington Recreation Center to see if there was anything happening on the basketball court. Wilt was nineteen, was playing at Kansas, and was already a much-celebrated All-American. I found him on the court engaged in a solo workout. I was thrilled when he invited me to join him. For what seemed like hours we shot, retrieved misses, passed to each other, and ran some sprints (when Wilt always left me behind).

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.

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Philly native JOHN RAYMOND "RAY" SCOTT's college career began at the University of Portland, and he was chosen as the 4th pick in the 1961 NBA draft by the Detroit Pistons. He spent six years with the Pistons, as a stand-out rebounder and deadly shooter from the perimeter, and another five years playing for other teams. Then in October 1972, Scott was promoted from Assistant to Head Coach of the Detroit Pistons, thanks in part to the strong support from retiring coach Earl Lloyd who, a decade earlier had scouted Scott and recommended that he be the Pistons top pick. Two years later he was named NBA Coach of the Year, the first African-American to win the coveted award. From 1976 to 1979, Scott was Men’s Basketball Head Coach at Eastern Michigan University. Today, Ray lives with his family in Eastern Michigan, not far from Detroit. This is his first book. 

CHARLEY ROSEN is one of the most respected writers of books on basketball, including both fiction like NYT Notable Book The House of Moses All-Stars, and nonfiction like his telling of the Jack Molinas story in The Wizard of Odds. He has also been a sports commentator, at FOXSports.com and HoopsHype.com. He lives in Woodstock, N.Y.

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

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To celebrate the publication of The Absolute, Daniel Guebel’s English debut, we are proud to share Jessica Sequeira’s compelling Translator's Note, in which she breaks down the process, the complexities, and the joys of translating this multi-faceted novel, and rendering into English the many metaphors, layered references, and stylistic choices employed by Guebel.

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

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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

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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. 

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.
 
This is exactly the scenario we always feared: strangers deputized as an anti-abortion crime watch, creating a massive surveillance system to ensure every pregnant person gives birth to a live child — or goes to jail if they do not. Today, it’s Texas. Tomorrow it will be the next red state, and then the one after that.
 
Nothing has changed about the procedure or its safety — all that has changed is on August 31st, abortion was legal in Texas and today it is not. Does that seem like justice to you? If not, then grab a book and get ready to fight.

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

The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America is a comprehensive and user-friendly manual for understanding and preparing for the looming changes to reproductive rights law, and getting the health care you need — by any means necessary. Activist and writer Robin Marty guides readers through various worst-case scenarios of a post-Roe America, and offers ways to fight back, including: how to acquire financial support, how to use existing networks and create new ones, and how to, when required, work outside existing legal systems. She details how to plan for your own emergencies, how to start organizing now, what to know about self-managed abortion care with pills and/or herbs, and how to avoid surveillance. The only guidebook of its kind, The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America includes new chapters that cover the needs and tools available for pregnant people across the country.

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.

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.

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A book that only grows more urgent by the day, The New Handbook For A Post-Roe America is a thoughtful, nuanced, and well-researched look at where we are, how we got here, and where we’re headed.

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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.

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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."

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. 

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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. 

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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.