2026 Public Library Association conference and IndieLib Forum in Minneapolis

Annie Ernaux in 1988. Image: Sophie Bassouls / Sygma

In following passage from Writing, The Other Life, excerpted below in full, 2022 Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux offers her thoughts on the significance of the 1789 Revolution to her political awakening — and her continued political ideology. Relevant as ever, especially given the current uprisings in France (which Ernaux herself has participated in), this passage confirms Annie Ernaux as a writer of literature and a writer of the left, and the inextricable link between artistic practice and political practice.

 

With the Smile of Saint-Just, 1988

By Annie Ernaux
Translated by Frank Wynne

Excerpted from Writing, the Other Life: Text and art by and about Annie Ernaux

The French Revolution entered me when I was fifteen. It had the smile and the gentle face of Saint-Just, so handsome under his romantic black fedora, on the right-hand page of my ninth-grade history book. He was the man I would have chosen to initiate me into love, since I believed that the first revolutionary act of a young citizen was to lose her virginity. I found Robespierre more intimidating, but I admired him. If Saint-Just was the embodied beauty of the Revolution, Robespierre was its intelligence. For the verbal violence, for the rage I felt capable of and which I repressed, there was Hébert and his newspaper Le Père Duchesne. And that same name was also mine (before later I lost it); it was obvious that I was descended from the sans-culottes.

Even now, I feel sure I was “born” in 1789. The Ancien Régime inspires no dreams or desires in me. By an effort of will, I can understand its structure, admire the classical tragedy that is both its emanation and its apotheosis, but I am not of that world. Proust’s fascination with the Guermantes is, for me, the silent part of In Search of Lost Time. The only beauty I can find in this old world where, two centuries ago, in the 1780s, Marie-Antoine played at being a shepherdess while real peasants went hungry, is this: he is going to die and he doesn’t know it. Despite the warnings, and despite the cry of the prophetic philosopher Rousseau, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The Ancien Régime never spoke to me, in the literal sense of that phrase. Its vocabulary is, for example, “divine right,” “a man of quality” . . . The people are referred to as “the common herd” or “the rabble.” To me, the Ancien Régime is a dead letter.

It is during the Revolution that I hear these phrases spoken and blossoming, phrases whose meaning is formed as much in the chest, in the tightness of the throat, as in the mind, phrases that we feel as much as understand, especially when they resonate in a memory that has been humiliated. “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” Freedom, equality, justice, tolerance. And happiness, finally, in the here and now rather than the hereafter. Saint-Just’s admirable formula: “Happiness in Europe is a new idea.” Before words, there is nothing; to express things is to bring them into existence. The new world inaugurated by the Revolution is a world in which it is possible to think everything in terms of freedom, justice and happiness, and long for these values to be fulfilled. Afterwards, it becomes impossible to act as though these words were never spoken, as though the oath taken in Pontivy in June 1790, “Live free or die,” was not still carved on our walls.

It was during the Revolution that I see peasants and locksmiths, the chambermaids and the porters invade the space and time of history. The people no longer stay in their place, that fixed by birth and social status. They break down the doors and occupy places that are refused or denied them: Versailles, the Tuileries, the châteaux where the lord once greeted them (if indeed he greeted them at all) with a “ . . . and what do you want, my man?” The people come within reach of the king and queen, they touch them, not, as before, to be cured of scrofula, but to verify the simple humanity of these ancient sacred bodies. They now know that “The great appear great to us, only because we are on our knees” (resist the temptation to constantly quote the countless magnificent slogans that sprang up at the time). There is a painting by [Jacques-Louis] David depicting a woman of the Revolution. It’s called “La Maraîchère”—“The Market Gardener.” She is a woman with a weathered face, though probably still young. Her long black hair tumbles down her back, but is held in place by a headband. She stands very straight, forehead high, lips parted, unsmiling. What is most striking are her folded arms and her direct gaze, devoid of gentleness but also devoid of hatred, eyes that will no longer be lowered. This woman is the Revolution. (Rimbaud: “The people is no longer a whore.”)

In the history of France, I cannot think of an equivalent to the unprecedented undertaking of the revolutionaries of 1789. Since them, time has stood still. From universal suffrage to compulsory state education, from divorce to adopting the meter as a unit of length, nothing seems to be able to escape their desire to refashion the world. I see the most beautiful, the most insane symbol of this desire in the invention of the republican calendar. Changing time itself, obliterating past centuries! And counting the months and the days with the names of fruits and flowers, glorious names, clear or coppery, which smell of skin and sun: Floréal, Messidor, Vendémiaire. . . They were poets, too.

As you will have realized, the Revolution never left me. I forgot to say this: I discovered it at the same time as I discovered Rimbaud and the desire to love. It was like the same thing. Even today, I cannot tell the difference between literature, the coming revolution and love.

—Annie Ernaux, 1988

  

Excerpted from Writing, the Other Life: Text and art by and about Annie Ernaux, edited by Pierre-Louis Fort, featuring translations by Alison L. Strayer, Frank Wynne, Emma Ramadan, Ros Schwartz, Sophie Lewis, and Dan Simon

 

A stunning celebration of Annie Ernaux’s work, featuring interviews, critical analyses, and 24 unpublished writings that offer unprecedented insight into her life, writing style, thoughts, and influence.

Drawings, photos, handwritten manuscripts, and other visual materials make this a beautiful keepsake for new and longtime fans.

Magisterial in scope and size, Annie Ernaux: Writing, The Other Life was compiled and edited by Pierre-Louis Fort and was first published in France by Éditions de L’Herne in 2022, a few months before she received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The anthology includes twenty-four previously unpublished Ernaux pieces, as well as literary criticism, essays, interviews, diary entries, a song by Jeanne Cherhal, newspaper clippings, a comic strip by Aurélia Aurita, letters from Simone de Beauvoir.

Never before published in English, this beautifully visual collection includes an 8-page color photo insert with images, handwritten manuscript pages, and drawings sprinkled throughout. It is the fruit of collaboration between six celebrated translators and a groundbreaking work of scholarship and rumination.

PUBLISHING OCTOBER 27TH:
TWO NEW BOOKS BY ANNIE ERNAUX

We are delighted to announce two brand new English translations of books by 2022 Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux: Hotel Casanova and Other Brief Texts, the first-ever collection of stories and essays by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer, and Writing, The Other Life: Text and Art by and About Annie Ernaux, edited by Pierre-Louis Fort and featuring translations by Alison L. Strayer, Ros Schwartz, Frank Wynne, Emma Ramadan, Dan Simon, and Sophie Lewis.

In twelve short texts written between 1984 and 2006, here is Annie Ernaux at her most incisive and intimate, presenting readers with yet another new experience of the razor’s edge of the author’s sensibility, this time in the form of brief works of fiction or nonfiction.

In “Hotel Casanova,” the title story of this collection, Ernaux describes a series of hotel-room trysts with a man who holds no interest for her other than sexually, just after her mother is admitted to hospital suffering from severe dementia. The story brilliantly captures the loss of sense of self, and at the same time the intense pleasure and pain that she experiences through a kind of cascade of alienation. Then, in “Histories,” Ernaux recalls a time in her childhood when she was the older girl responsible for a younger neighbor, holding her hand and bringing her to school and then home again, and the feelings of loss that ensued when this ended.

Another memory inhabits “Returns,” this time of her last visit to her mother at home, and how the collision of their two fragile emotional states plays out during the hours spent together, like a collision of the past and the future.

These personal narratives are joined by more journalistic essays on such themes as the true relationship between literature and politics, discourses on Cesare Pavese and Pierre Bourdieu—both of whom were major influences on Ernaux, though in very different ways—travel journals of Moscow, Leningrad, Leipzig, and short personal essays on writing and other subjects. A mix of seemingly unrelated texts that comprise the song of a considered life.

A stunning celebration of Annie Ernaux's work, featuring interviews, critical analyses, and 24 unpublished writings that offer unprecedented insight into her life, writing style, thoughts, and influence.

Drawings, photos, handwritten manuscripts, and other visual materials make this a beautiful keepsake for new and longtime fans.

Magisterial in scope and size, Writing, The Other Life was compiled and edited by Pierre-Louis Fort and was first published in France by Éditions de L'Herne in 2022, a few months before she received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The anthology includes twenty-four previously unpublished Ernaux pieces, as well as literary criticism, essays, interviews, diary entries, a song by Jeanne Cherhal, newspaper clippings, a comic strip by Aurélia Aurita, letters from Simone de Beauvoir.

Never before published in English, this beautifully visual collection includes an eight-page color photo insert with images, handwritten manuscript pages, and drawings sprinkled throughout. It is the fruit of collaboration between six celebrated translators, making this a groundbreaking work of scholarship and rumination.

Below, you will find an excerpt from Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings by Zapatista insurgent, spokesperson, and revolutionary figure Subcomandante Marcos. Published as an open letter to commemorate Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 1995, it is an ode to anti-colonial resistance and an invitation for continued collective action against imperial power.

Five hundred and three years ago today, October 12, the word and the silence of Power begin to die. Five hundred and three years ago today, October 12, our word and our silence began to resist, to fight, to live.

The Word and the Silence

October 12, 1995

To the people of Mexico

To the peoples and governments of the world

Brothers and sisters:

Today we are remembering our eldest elders, those who initiated the long struggle of resistance against the arrogance of Power and the violence of money. They, our ancestors, taught us that a people with pride are a people who do not surrender, who resist, who have dignity. They taught us to be proud of the color of our skin, of our language, of our culture. More than 500 years of exploitation and persecution have not been able to exterminate us. We have resisted since that time because history has been made with our blood. …

What matters is our eldest elders who received the word and the silence as a gift in order to know themselves and to touch the heart of the other. Speaking and listening is how true men and women learn to walk. It is the word that gives form to that walk that goes on inside us. It is the word that is the bridge to cross to the other side. Silence is what Power offers our pain in order to make us small. When we are silenced, we remain very much alone. Speaking, we heal the pain. Speaking, we accompany one another. Power uses the word to impose his empire of silence. We use the word to renew ourselves. Power uses silence to hide his crimes. We use silence to listen to one another, to touch one another, to know one another.

This is the weapon, brothers and sisters. We say, the word remains. We speak the word. We shout the word. We raise the word and with it break the silence of our people. We kill the silence by living the word. Let us leave Power alone in what the lie speaks and hushes. Let us join together in the word and the silence which liberate.

Five hundred and three years ago today, October 12, the word and the silence of Power begin to die.

Five hundred and three years ago today, October 12, our word and our silence began to resist, to fight, to live. 

Today, 503 years later, we are still here. There are more of us and we are better. We are of many colors, and many are the languages that speak our word.

Today there is no shame in our heart because of the color of our skin or our speech.

Today we say we are indigenous, and we say it like giants.

—Subcomandante Marcos

 

Linda Asher in her Manhattan apartment. Photo by Bryan Schutmaat.

Remembering Linda Asher
(November 27, 1932 - September 15, 2026)

A friend of Seven Stories, the descerning and hugely talented French translator Linda Asher, died last Tuesday. Linda Asher (November 27, 1932 - September 15, 2026) helped us bring several astonishing and challenging novels into superlative English editions—Yasmina Reza's Babylon, the marvelous late 19th and early 20th century French bestseller Jean-Marie Déguignet's Memoirs of a Breton Peasant, and Martin Winckler's (pseudonym for Marc Zaffran) The Case of Doctor Sachs. Linda also translated Balzac, Simenon, Victor Hugo, Kundera and others. In her previous life as longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker, she worked with Murakami, Louise Erdrich, Beckett and A.S. Byatt among others. She will be missed.

We encourage those with photos and memories and memories to share to email LindaAsherStories@gmail.com.

In July 1997, the remains of Che Guevara and his compañeros killed in combat were discovered in Bolivia and returned to Cuba. The following speech, excerpted in full below, was delivered by Fidel Castro in Santa Clara, Cuba, on October 17, 1997, at the memorial honoring the return of Che’s remains to Cuba.

The speech appears in Che, A Memoir by Fidel Castro.

In this uncharacteristically gentle epitaph in book form, Castro brings Che Guevara—the man, the thinker, and Fidel’s greatest fan—back to life. He recounts his long friendship and collaboration with Che, from their meeting in Mexico City to the military campaigns of the Cuban revolution and includes a frank assessment of the mission to Bolivia where Che was killed. Castro gives us a moving portrait of his long-lasting friendship with Che, including the last days together in Cuba, and offers remarkable insight into the political partnership that changed the face of Latin America forever.

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On the Return of Che's Remains to Cuba
October 17, 1997

With profound emotion we experience one of those moments that will never again be repeated.

We are not here to say farewell to Che and his heroic compañeros. We are here to welcome them.

I see Che and his men as reinforcements, as a movement of invincible combatants, which on this occasion not only includes Cubans, but also Latin Americans who came to fight with us and write new pages of history and glory.

I also see Che as a moral giant who grows with each passing day, whose image, strength, and influence have multiplied throughout the earth.

How can he fit beneath a memorial stone?

How can he fit into this square?

How can he fit into our beloved, but small, island?

Only in the world that he dreamed of, which he lived and fought for, is there enough space for him.

The greater the injustice, the greater the exploitation, the greater the inequality, the greater the unemployment, the greater the poverty, hunger, and misery that prevail in human society, the greater his figure will be.

The values he defended will appear more elevated in the face of growing imperialist power, hegemony, domination, and interventionism that deny the most sacred rights of humanity, particularly the rights of the weak, underdeveloped, and poor peoples in what were for centuries colonies of the West and sources of slave labor.

His profound humanism will always stand in stark contrast to growing abuse, egotism, alienation, discrimination against indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, women, and immigrants. It will stand against child labor and the sexual commodification of hundreds of thousands of children. It will stand against ignorance, disease, unemployment, and insecurity.

His example as an upright, revolutionary, and principled man will be ever more outstanding, as long as corrupt politicians, demagogues, and hypocrites exist everywhere.

Admiration for his personal bravery and revolutionary integrity will grow as long as the numbers of cowards, opportunists, and traitors on earth increase. While others flinch from their duty, the greater will be the respect for his iron will. The more people lacking integrity, the greater his sense of honor and dignity; the more skeptics there are, the greater his faith in humanity; the more pessimists there are, the greater his optimism; the more fear there is, the greater his daring; the more idlers there are who waste the products of the labor of others in luxury and leisure, the greater his austerity and his spirit of work and study.

Che was a true communist and is today an example and a paradigm of the revolutionary and the communist.

Che was a teacher who forged men and women like himself. Consistent with his actions, he never failed to do what he preached, or demand of himself what he demanded of others.

Whenever a volunteer was required for a difficult mission, he was the first in line, both in war and in peace. His great dreams depended on his willingness to give his life generously. Nothing was impossible for him, and he was capable of making the impossible possible.

The invasion from the Sierra Maestra through vast and unprotected plains and the capture of the city of Santa Clara with just a few men are among those feats that show his amazing capabilities.

His ideas on revolution in his own country and in the rest of Latin America, in spite of enormous difficulties, were possible. Had he made them a reality, perhaps today the world might be different. Vietnam proved it could fight against the interventionist forces of imperialism and defeat them. The Sandinistas triumphed against one of the most powerful puppet governments of the United States. The Salvadoran revolutionaries were just about to win victory. In Southern Africa, apartheid was defeated in spite of the state possessing nuclear weapons. China, thanks to the heroic struggle of its workers and peasant farmers, is today one of the most promising countries in the world. Hong Kong was returned after 150 years of an occupation established through the Opium Wars.

Not all historical eras or circumstances require the same methods and the same tactics. But nothing can stop the march of history; its objective laws are immutable. Che based himself on these social laws and had an absolute faith in humanity. Very often revolutionaries and those seeking profound social change do not have the privilege of seeing their dreams realized as quickly as they had hoped or desired, but sooner or later they are victorious.

A combatant may die, but not their ideas. What was a man from the US government doing up there where Che was wounded and taken prisoner? How could they believe that by killing Che he would cease to exist as a combatant? Now, he is not in La Higuera; instead he is everywhere, wherever there is a just cause to defend. Those who wanted to kill him, to make him disappear, were not able to understand that he would leave an indelible footprint in history and that his luminous prophet’s gaze would transform him into a symbol for all the earth’s poor in their millions upon millions. Young people, children, the elderly, men and women who have learned about him, honest people throughout the world, regardless of their social background, admire him.

Che is taking up and winning more battles than ever.

Thank you, Che, for your history, your life, and your example!

Thank you for coming to fortify us in this difficult battle we are engaged in today to save the ideas you fought so hard for, to save the revolution, our country, and the achievements of socialism, where some of the great dreams you cherished have come true!

To carry forward this heroic achievement, to defeat the imperialists’ plans against Cuba, to resist the blockade, to achieve victory, we count on you.

As you can see, this land is your land, these people are your people, and this revolution is your revolution. We continue to fly the socialist banner with honor and pride.

Welcome, heroic compañeros of the reinforcement! The trenches of ideas and justice that you defend together with our people will never be conquered by the enemy! And together we will continue to fight for a better world!

¡Hasta la victoria siempre! [Ever onward to victory!]

On the publication of Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror & MAGA Fascism, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar shares a letter to the reader on the making of her new book and the devastating circumstances under which the text emerged.

I put together the manuscript of Breaking ICE during the worst period of my life. At a time when the United States is undergoing its greatest contemporary challenges to democracy and equality, I too find myself in the midst of a topsy turvy world.

In fairness, I did expect 2026 to be a year of great personal turmoil. My oldest child—I’ll call her N—would find out if and where she got accepted into university, and would be leaving the nest. I braced myself for the coming emotional upheaval.

But nothing prepared for what actually came next. On January 4, 2026, the day I turned 51, my older sister Sameera experienced an unexpected and catastrophic heart attack. The next day I flew out to Calgary where she lived, and spent the night in her hospital room as she lay hooked up to tubes that kept her artificially alive. I whispered tearful entreaties into her ear to please wake up. The next day, they pulled the plug and I bade my childhood companion a final goodbye.

I returned home to Los Angeles, gutted and hollowed out. In between great bouts of grief, during which I forced myself to cover the murders of Keith Porter, Renee Goode, and Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE agents—after all I am a journalist—my long-time editor Greg Ruggiero approached me to put together a book of interviews with people fighting ICE terror.

Plot twist: It would have to be fast tracked to meet the moment, and would publish by the end of the summer.

I don’t know what possessed me to say yes to Greg other than the very real understanding in the wake of Sameera’s death that our fragile lives are never neat, nor predictable. And that we make meaning any way we can, for that makes us human. And I desperately needed to feel human.

Figuring out how to make sense of my sister’s loss was something I was utterly unprepared for (and still struggle with daily). But, putting a book together? That I could do. So, I accepted Greg’s challenge: Six weeks to put together a collection of interview transcripts into a coherent book-length treatise on how communities around the US are fighting the ethnic cleansing of our nation.

I deployed my 20+ years of experience as a journalist covering anti-immigrant racism, from the post-9/11 attacks on Muslims and South Asians to the Sensenbrenner bill and the rise of Barack Obama and the first Trump Administration.

I worked feverishly, adding some new interviews to the trove I had already gathered over the past year, transcribing and editing them, contacting my interview subjects for permissions, organizing and reorganizing the order of the conversations, and writing a 4,000-word introduction to frame the collection.

Around this time, my daughter N began getting college decisions, bringing more emotional whiplash. She also came out as transgender—something I’d suspected for years—but now, in the thick of the virulently anti-trans world we inhabit, this revelation, coming on the verge of her leaving home to live in another city, added a new layer of fear for her life and well-being.

Today, as the fastest book I’ve ever put together is publishing, my on-going grief at Sameera’s death is compounded by N’s impending departure for college. A project bookended by two great upheavals in my life is also garnering far more attention than my earlier books—in large part because of the timeliness of the issue it covers. I am taking deep breaths.

—Sonali Kolhatkar
September 2026

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SONALI KOLHATKAR is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the racial justice editor at YES! Magazine and the host of YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali, a weekly television and radio program that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates around the United States. Sonali is a senior correspondent of the Economy For All Project at the Independent Media Institute and the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice. She has won numerous awards, including Best TV Anchor and Best National Political Commentary from the LA Press Club, and has been nominated for Best Radio Anchor four years in a row.

On the publication date of Silencio by Clyo Mendoza, a poetic, lyrically haunting novel of women surviving femicide and destruction in Mexico, we’re proud to share a letter to the reader by translator Christina MacSweeney. In the letter, which you can read in full below, MacSweeney explores, among other things, the complexity and challenges of translating a prose-poetry novel written in multiple languages: Mexican Spanish, as well as the Indigenous languages Zapotec, Isthmus Zapotec, and Tacuate.

Where to being in addressing the levels of complexity that have been involved in translating the prose-poem-reportage of Clyo Mendoza’s Silencio?

As translation involves a movement between languages, that would seem a good place to start. The original text of Silencio includes Mexican Spanish and three Indigenous languages: Zapotec, Isthmus Zapotec, and Tacuate. These last three are in danger of extinction in Mexico yet, as Yásnaya Elena A. Gil points out in her essay “Blood, Language and Surname: Indigenous Women and Nation States,” they are also used by the State as criteria for officially belonging to an Indigenous group. Such policies exclude people who for one reason or another have not had the chance to learn their mother tongue and they have, paradoxically “led to an ever-faster loss of Indigenous languages.”* In a personal communication, Clyo Mendoza told me that her aim in including these languages was not that of “saving” them—a possibly grandiloquent gesture—but had to do with the pleasure it would give their speakers, both in Mexico and the diaspora in the United States, to see them written down. However, the movement between languages is never a simple process of substitution and in Silencio, the narrator frequently mentions “the language of steel and grass” that “imitated the flowing of water, the voices of trees,” and has now been outlawed by the Church. How could a language of pure sound be transformed into one of pure words and then again to another language of words in a very different setting? And then there is the language spoken by the “child drunkards” that nobody understands, but people who hear it feel they are “witnessing the birth of a new language, of language itself.” While translating the sections of Silencio written in Indigenous languages, I read them aloud to get a feel for, if not their sound, at least the rhythm of the words. It might perhaps have been simpler to eliminate these Indigenous languages and retain the Spanish with an English translation, but that would have both added to that “ever-faster loss” of the languages and denied speakers of them the pleasure of seeing those words written down in a different context.

Having considered language, it seems logical to move on to the issue of voices in the translation of the novel. In terms of the human characters, Águeda’s voice moves between lyricism and a prosaic description of her plight; her mother’s is surreal, seems to follow the flow of the water that carries her to the sea; the voices of the immigrants—Laura, Edna, and María—are more journalistic, a simple recounting of their stories. But in addition to the humans, other members of the animal kingdom are given voice in the text: a she-dog, a dog, a horse, and a bird; even stones speak. Each has their own world view, their own particular way of expressing it through language. The Horse, for example, sees itself as an organic part of the greater whole that is the world, and so cannot understand the human notion of love for an individual. Its voice is confident, composed, aware of the limitations of language. And although the trees and the water do not actually speak, their sounds provide the background music of the work. Listening to this polyphonic symphony of human and nonhuman music requires a carefully tuned ear; reproducing it in another language has been a challenge I hope I have risen to.

Another issue that arose almost immediately in my translation was related to the genre of the text. Although much of what we read is based on factual situations, Silencio delivers this in a wonderful mélange of prose poetry, literary prose, and reportage; the surreal imagery of the mother’s contributions is in sharp contrast to the excerpts from a military manual. It could be said that the genre of a book is unrelated to its translation; an issue for the marketing team, critics, and booksellers. Nevertheless, I must be aware of the often nuanced changes in register in Clyo Mendoza’s work and adapt my writing to them.

In my readings of Silencio in Spanish, I was drawn into Clyo Mendoza’s imagery, its sensuality, its musicality and rhythms. Water is a constant presence and the sea almost becomes a character in the mother’s journey to decomposition. The narrator tells us that when Águeda is released from captivity, she goes to bathe in the spring and, “unknown to her, the water carried her perspiration to the open sea covering her mother’s body.” There is a movement between solid and liquid states throughout the text, such as when the mother says, “I’m the muscle of the sea.” Once again, listening to the musicality of a text feeds into the reproduction of its imagery.

It would be impossible to write this note without mentioning the horrific violence described in Silencio. However, the violence meted out on women, including rape and femicide, is always present but never sensationalized in Clyo Mendoza’s writing, which, I feel, makes its impact stronger. The portrayal of violent characters like the father is nuanced; he initially appears to be the stereotypical Mexican, misogynist male narco, exploiting the inhabitants of the small town to harvest his crop, fathering illegitimate children, murdering his wife, locking up his daughter, the list goes on . . . But then we learn that he himself has been exploited and brutalized by people farther up the drug-trafficking hierarchy; he too is a victim.

One final point to address is the formatting of the English text. It is not uncommon in Spanish for dialogue to be represented in italics, and certain other elements of Silencio are also italicized in the original; my feeling was that this degree of italicization could be confusing for English readers. Working with my excellent editor, Elisa Taber, we devised a scheme in which spoken speech (in contrast to internal dialogue) was largely placed inside speech marks and separated by line breaks. Other than that, we respected the formatting of the Spanish text.

So, readers, treat Silencio as you would poetry; read and reread it. If you can speak one of the Indigenous languages, read the text aloud for yourself and for others. Teach others how to speak these languages. Help to keep them alive.

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CHRISTINA MACSWEENEY has an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. Her work has been recognized in a number of important awards. Her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize and also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award (2017). Her most recent translations include fiction and nonfiction works by Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Karla Suárez, and Jazmina Barrera, whose autobiographical text, Linea Nigra, was a double finalist in the NBCC awards (translation and autobiography). She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published translations, articles, and interviews on a variety of platforms. Her translations of Clyo Mendoza's novels Fury (2024) and Silencio (2026) are published by Seven Stories Press.

CLYO MENDOZA (Oaxaca, México, 1993) is a poet and novelist. She is the author of the poetry collection Anamnesis (2016), and the novels Silencio (2026), which was awarded the Premio Internacional de Poesía Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz, and Fury (2024), which was awarded the Premio Javier Morote by the Confederación Española de Gremios y Asociaciones de Libreros and the Amazon Premio Primera Novela. She has contributed to numerous poetry anthologies, including Poetas parricidas (Cuadrivio, 2014), Los reyes Subterráneos: Veinte poetas jóvenes de México (La Bella Varsovia, 2015), and Liberoamericanas: 80 poetas contemporáneas (Liberoamérica, 2018). Mendoza is the recipient of scholarships from the Mexican Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes and the Fundación Antonio Gala, in Córdoba, Spain. She has also collaborated on various transdisciplinary projects and experiments with painting, photography, and sound collage.

After hearing a bunch of complaints, I watched and listened to the entirety of Ted Rall’s podcast interview with Sonali in support of her new book, Breaking Ice, which releases Tuesday, September 15. Since both Sonali and Ted have been Seven Stories authors, I wanted to see for myself what had happened. Throughout the podcast, Ted and his co-host said over and over that they agreed with Sonali’s points, one after the other. There was not a single thing they disagreed with. But they seemed to agree reluctantly, which was strange, as if they were agreeing with her specific points—her critique of ICE, her championing of the responses of communities, in Minneapolis and Los Angeles and other places, that had successfully resisted ICE by finding solidarity among neighbors and fighting back—but at the same time disagreed with some larger argument which was never stated. 

Ted repeatedly said he wanted to support Sonali’s book release and identified with her as a fellow writer and author. But something was amiss. Ted and his co-host only alluded to it through two questions they kept returning to, one the question of whether Sonali agreed that governments had the right to establish borders, and the other whether immigrants ever threatened Americans’ jobs. 

Once upon a time, it was Black and Brown people who were accused of stealing jobs from white Americans. These are dog-whistle questions. And Sonali parried them well: Yes, she said, of course governments have the right to establish borders, but that doesn’t give them the right to demonize or dehumanize people who live outside them. And no, immigrants are not threatening Americans’ jobs, but they are making sure we have nurses and doctors where there is an acute shortage, and doing low-wage jobs that Americans don’t want. She also said these were fake issues created by those who benefit from wealth inequities, billionaires, and those who support the system that benefits them, so we don’t address the real issues. 

Again, there was no disagreement, but the agreement in front of the camera had a strange flavor to it. Then they thanked Sonali for coming on the show and she left. I learned a lot from her appearance. She was highly articulate, highly informed, and addressed every point the co-hosts raised. 

After she left, the show’s producer, someone named “Robbie,” came on camera. He attacked Sonali, called her a heifer, accused her of lying, attacked her over and over in bigoted and plainly racist terms, and said she should be deported.

Racists often like to say they aren’t racist. No surprise there. The main thing he was hating on Sonali for was her insistence that immigrants are not stealing American jobs. This really incensed him. And he went so far as to praise Trump for “doing the right thing in the wrong way,” with reference to ICE’s aims being “right” even if their tactics were “wrong.” Ted and his co-host laughed at Robbie, not at Sonali, but they did so good-humoredly, as you would a child who was a good kid even if a hothead. 

What was most shocking to me was Ted’s passivity. But also, the blatant hatred towards Sonali, who is a charismatic woman of color, well spoken, articulate, and highly informed, as if these were her crimes. The crudeness and violence of the far right was everywhere in the room, but unnamed—until “Robbie’s” appearance, which was sudden and revelatory. 

Watching, you could not escape thinking this: Our society is not divided today between red and blue or even workers and owners, or Left and Right. It is divided between the beneficiaries and victims of racialized economic warfare. I think this was the message. Robbie identified Sonali as his class enemy. Ted and Jamarl acted like this battle didn’t concern them, as if Robbie were a harmless, ignorant child. Historical analogies abound. What scared me most was the way reactionary and racist ideology had seeped into the arguments of the co-hosts without them even realizing it.

I’d be glad for an apology to be issued by Ted and Jamarl for how Sonali was treated on their show after she signed out. 

—Dan Simon, founder and publisher, Seven Stories Press
 

Provincetown Seafood Cookbook is finally back in stock! To celebrate, we’re excited to share Anthony Bourdain’s introduction to the cult classic cookbook, which coincidentally had a pretty sizable appearance in the new Bourdain biopic Tony, directed by Matthew Johnson. (This is also, coincidentally, why the book immediately fell out of stock as soon as the movie came out in theaters. Thank you everyone for your support!)

Once you’re done reading Anthony Bourdain’s introduction, excerpted below in full, as well as on our Substack, scroll down for a few of our favorite recipes from the cookbook, which Bourdain calls “one of the most influential of my life.”

Provincetown’s best-known and most-admired chef, Howard Mitcham, combines delectable recipes, delightful folklore, and darling illustrations to serve up a cult classic of seafood cookbooks.

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INTRODUCTION BY ANTHONY BOURDAIN

I was never pals with Howard Mitcham. Howard Mitcham never knew my name. If he knew me by sight, it was because I was always hanging around Spiritus Pizza during the bar rush, waiting for my girlfriend (of whom he was quite fond) to get off work. He’d come in after a few drinks at the Foc’sle or the Old Colony or wherever he was doing his drinking in those days. His face would be flushed and he’d be a little unsteady on his feet, and you could hear him over the crowd, but this was normal. Even then, he was a legend.

I knew Howard through his book. This book. Which was presented to me by a friend pretty much the first day I began working as a cook. In the Flagship restaurant, where I’d only recently started what would turn out to be a long, checkered career in the industry, Howard’s word was law: baseline technique, first principles when dealing with fish. His haddock amandine was famous up and down the Cape—people would drive down from Boston to eat it at Pepe’s (or later, his own eponymous restaurant). We lifted his recipe shamelessly intact.

More important than his recipes, however, and more enduring, was his prose—his attitude toward the humble quahaug, haddock, mackerel, Wellfleet oysters, striped bass, bluefish—the Portuguese fishing families of P’Town and the Cape. He was not a snob—at a time when most cookbooks sounded as if they’d been written by someone in a smoking jacket, while stroking a pet ocelot.

He put his recipes in context. Told you where they came from, what inspired them, convinced you that he loved them and that you should love them too. He was way, way ahead of his time in his embrace of so-called trash fish. And he understood always that the best place to enjoy seafood was on the beach, among friends, in a pretense-free zone, preferably accompanied by many drinks, or at the beloved Cookie’s Tap, whose squid stew he appropriated after much experimentation. That’s a recipe I still cook today—one that I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of over the years.

Like another great food writer, A. J. Leibling, Mitcham understood there is no difference between the joys of a great meal at a three-star Michelin and at a humble fishermen’s bar—as long as it’s made with love and with pride.

His love for Provincetown shines through every page of this book. It’s a true classic, one of the most influential of my life.

I may never have really known Howard Mitcham, but I miss knowing he was out there.

—Anthony Bourdain, 2018

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RECIPES FROM PROVINCETOWN SEAFOOD COOKBOOK

(click to enlarge)