“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.
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.
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.
To celebrate the release of Prince in a Pastry Shop by Marek Bienczyk, illustrated Joanna Concejo, and translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff, we are proud to share an excerpt from the book: a set of three spreads in which the two characters, Not-So-Little-Prince and Prickly Pair, dreamily discuss the nature of happiness as they eat confections.
“There's the rub: happiness passes us by quite unnoticed. You expect genuine happiness, that it's like, ‘Oh, it'll be here tomorrow, in a week, eventually.’ And it never occurs to you that you're living it here and now. Eating this napoleon with me, and now this truffle ... But I would recommend the donut, it’s the best.”
Click the images below to see the spreads in large format.
In a beautifully illustrated story for adults, one that is playful, slightly naughty, and charmingly philosophical, two characters — the Not-So-Little-Prince and Prickly Pear — consider the nature of happiness, all the while feasting on confections in a bakery.
Much more than a tale of sweet indulgence, Prince in a Pastry Shop touches on a fundamental question: what does it mean to be happy? Is happiness to be found in the smallest, most visceral of experiences like eating a sugar-dusted donut? Can we truly experience happiness while there is suffering in the world? Is there a great cosmic balance that demands for every happy moment there also be a moment of sorrow? Can we be happy knowing that it’s a fleeting condition? Can we really know and understand happiness while we’re experiencing it?
“Happiness is nothing but trouble,” says the Not-So-Little-Prince. For Prickly Pear, happiness simply tastes like a cupcake or profiterole.
The words of writer Marek Bieńczyk, winner of Poland’s prestigious Nike prize, pair with artist Joanna Concejo’s illustrations to create a wonderland where sitting at a café table morphs into a dreamscape with animals, a borderland between waking and dreaming.
With a very light touch, Prince in a Pastry Shop asks one of the most profound questions of our existence: is it enough to appreciate each moment of sweetness—and at what cost?—or must we be active in an unforgiving world to find contentment?
FORTHCOMING BOOKS FROM 2022 NOBEL LAUREATE ANNIE ERNAUX
FORTHCOMING LITERARY FICTION AND MEMOIR
In a beautifully illustrated story for adults, one that is playful, slightly naughty, and charmingly philosophical, two characters — the Not-So-Little-Prince and Prickly Pear — consider the nature of happiness, all the while feasting on confections in a bakery.
Much more than a tale of sweet indulgence, Prince in a Pastry Shop touches on a fundamental question important to us all, from pre-schooler to pensioner: what does it mean to be happy? “Happiness is nothing but trouble,” says the Not-So-Little-Prince. For Prickly Pear, happiness simply tastes like a cupcake or profiterole.
The words of writer Marek Bieńczyk, winner of Poland’s prestigious Nike prize, pair with artist Joanna Concejo’s illustrations to create a wonderland where sitting at a café table morphs into a dreamscape with animals, a borderland between waking and dreaming.
With a very light touch, Prince in a Pastry Shop asks one of the most profound questions of our existence: is it enough to appreciate each moment of sweetness—and at what cost?—or must we be active in an unforgiving world to find contentment?
A dazzling memoir of chronic illness that explores the fraught intersection between pain, language, and gender, by a debut author.
In A Matter of Appearance, Wells traces her journey as she tries to understand and define the chronic pain she has lived with all her life. She draws on the critical works of Freud, Sontag, and others to explore the intersection between gender, pain, and language, and she traces a direct line from the “hysteria patients” at the Salpêtrière Hospital in nineteenth-century Paris to the contemporary New Age healers in Los Angeles, her stomping ground. At the crux of Wells’ literary project is the dilemma of how to diagnose an experience that is both private and public, subjective and quantifiable, and how to express all this in words.
“Gorgeously written and brilliantly argued, A Matter of Appearance uses chronic illness as a lever to investigate the life of a body. It’s complex, inconclusive, and incredibly clear-eyed. Moving fluidly between histories of psychoanalysis, desire, ambition, pathology, Wells reminds us of the liminal state we all live in between sickness and health.”
—Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia and Summer of Hate
"[Tova Reich’s] verbal blade is amazingly, ingeniously, startlingly, all-consumingly, all-encompassingly, deservedly, and brilliantly savage.” —Cynthia Ozick
In this extraordinary collection of short fiction, Tova Reich dives deep into the world of Orthodox Jewry — a world that her stories embrace with respect and affection while also poking at the faultlines in its unshakeable traditions.
The eight stories collected in this volume are all populated by seekers—of holiness, illumination, liberation, meaning, love. Their journeys unfold in the U.S., Israel, Poland, China, often in the very heart of the Jewish world, and are rendered with an insider’s authority. The narrative voice bringing all this to life has been described as fearlessly satiric and subversive, with a moral but not moralizing edge, equally alive to the sacred and the profane, comically absurd to the point of tragedy.
Going Remote is a joint production of The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.
A searingly honest graphic memoir dispatch from a community college professor who cares deeply for his students and family while also combating personal health issues from the frontlines of public education during the pandemic.
With Peter Glanting’s powerful illustrations, author Adam Bessie, an English professor and graphic essayist, uses the unique historical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst to explore the existing inequalities and student struggles that plague the public education system. This graphic memoir chronicles the reverberations from the onset of the pandemic in 2020 when students and educators left their physical classrooms for remote learning. As a professor at a community college, Bessie shows how despite these challenges, teachers work tirelessly to create a more equitable educational system by responding to mental health issues and student needs.
From the Black Lives Matter protests to fielding distressed emails from students to considering the future of his own career, Going Remote also tells the personal story of Bessie’s cancer diagnosis and treatment during the pandemic. A fusion of memoir, meditation, and scholarship, Going Remote is a powerful account of a crisis moment in educational history demonstrating both personal and societal changes.
A breathtaking short novel about the complicated feelings of hate and pity in familial love, by an acknowledged Latin American master.
A brilliant and dark tour de force, Jewish Son presents the delicate archeology of the stubbornness of a boy who demands his parents’ attention. It is a brutal confession of the lies necessary to win a space of approval in a troubled family, a treatise on the excesses of love and the paradoxical lack of affection that is never enough, an accomplished narration of childhood from the point of view of the adult gaze, and a rewriting of Kafka’s Letter to His Father. As his father’s imminent death becomes an ever more concrete reality with surgeries, caregivers, sedatives and his mother grows obsessed with visits to the rabbi and amasses saint cards and Buddhist prayers, the narrator evokes the remnants of the rejection that pervaded his childhood. Without yielding to the idealization of youth or to the delight in pain before physical decay and death, Guebel dissects, beautifully although with discomfort, his very early conversion to the dream of literature as an act of reparation.
San Francisco is on the verge of collapse in this gritty, grimy noir set in a future that gets closer every second.
Former San Francisco Literary Laureate Peter Plate who taught himself to write fiction during eight years squatting in abandoned buildings, delivers a fast-paced dystopian and speculative novel — the latest in a hardboiled writing career that spans the era of out-of-control gentrification in the Bay Area.
Nelson Algren's classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein Algren would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in this collection are literary triumphs that don't fade away.
As rock and roll novelist Tom Carson writes in his introduction, "The Neon Wilderness is the pivotal book of Nelson Algren's career — the one which bid a subdued but determined farewell to everything that had earlier made him no more than just another good writer, and inaugurated the idiosyncratic, bedevilled, cantankerously poetic sensibility that would see him ranked among the few literary originals of his times."
A beautiful and heartrending short novel that unfolds through the unanswered letters of a young girl to her absent parents, relaying lively tales of cruel pranks and jovial reconciliations, pain and tenderness, despair and hope of real-life young children who grow up alone.
“In [Kinderland] Liliana Corobca has painstakingly examined…locations and territories that resemble Lord of the Flies… and has written a novel that is complicated and harsh, but also moving and full of candor.” —Observator Cultural
A stunning debut collection of fiction and creative nonfiction — irreverent and unglorified; loving and tender; uncomfortable and inconvenient — by a Ukrainian writer currently fighting for his country in Kyiv.
Includes the celebrated title story "The Ukraine," which was published in the New Yorker in 2022.
The Ukraine is a collection of 26 pieces that deliberately blur the line between nonfiction and fiction, conjuring the essence of a beloved country through its tastes, smells, and sounds, its small towns and big cities, its people and their compassion and indifference, simplicities and complications.
Ivana Bodrožić’s latest award-winning novel tells a story of being locked in: socially, domestically and intimately, told through three different perspectives, all deeply marked and wounded by the patriarchy in their own way.
Here the Croatian poet and writer depicts a wrenching love between a transgender man and a woman as well as a demanding love between a mother and a daughter in a narrative about breaking through and liberation of the mind, family, and society. This is a story of hidden gay and trans relationships, the effects of a near-fatal accident, and an oppressed childhood, where Ivana Bodrožić tackles the issues addressed in her previous works—issues of otherness, identity and gender, pain and guilt, injustice and violence.
These three stories run parallel and intertwine. Three voices deepen and give perspective to one another’s truth, pain, and struggle to survive.
FORTHCOMING POLITICAL NON-FICTION
Twenty-first century social movements come to life through speeches, essays, and other documents of activism, protest, and social change.
Gathering more than 100 texts from social movements that have shaped the 21st century, this powerful book includes contributions from Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, and others.
Inspired by the original Voices of a People’s History of the United States, the book features speeches, essays, poems, and calls to action from Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Indigenous struggles, immigrant rights activists, the environmental movement, disability justice organizers, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.
Groundbreaking solutions to the climate crisis from scientists, engineers, civic leaders, entrepreneurs and activists, offering hope to all readers concerned about our planet's future.
This book offers practical actions that reflect technological and economic advances, and features an introduction by former United States senator Russ Feingold.
Solving the Climate Crisis is a hopeful and critical resource that makes a convincing and detailed case that there is a path forward to save our environment. Illustrating the power of committed individuals and the necessity for collaborative government and private-sector climate action, the book focuses on three essential areas for action:
The technological dimension: move to 100% clean renewable energy as fast as we possibly can through innovations like clean-steel, “green” cement, and carbon-reuse companies;
The ecological dimension: enhance and protect natural ecosystems, forests, and agricultural lands to safely store greenhouse gases and restore soils, transforming how we grow, process, and consume food;
The social dimension: update and create new laws, policies and economic measures to recenter human values and reduce environmental and social injustice.
Cuban art critic and curator Iván de la Nuez explores the effects of the policies that have tried to constrain or liberate Cuba in recent decades in these sparkling essays of cultural criticism.
Essays on Cuba and the Cuban diaspora, on racism and Big Data, Guantánamo and Reggaeton, soccer and baseball, Obama and the Rolling Stones, Europe and Donald Trump—de la Nuez approaches his criticism with singularity of purpose. In Cubanthropy he does not set out to explain Cuba to the world, but rather to put the world into a Cuban context.
A graphic novel featuring uplifting stories of combatting—and beating—calls for their eviction in Detroit, showing how everyday people are fighting to stay in their homes, organizing with their communities, and winning.
We Live Here! is a graphic novel biography of the members of the local activist group Detroit Eviction Defense combatting—and beating—calls for their eviction. By illustrating the stories of families struggling against evictions, the book gives a voice to those who have remained in Detroit, showing the larger complexities at work in a beleaguered city. These are everyday people fighting back, organizing with others, going into the streets, and winning their homes back.
A reevaluation of life the man who saved the Mexican Revolution, published on the 100th anniversary of his death.
A wild ride and revealing portrait of the controversial Pancho Villa, one of Mexico’s most beloved (or loathed) heroes, that finally establishes the importance of his role in the triumph of the Mexican revolution by renowned writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II.
Pancho Villa is a rollicking, sometimes hilariously comical, sometimes extremely violent, and always very personal portrait of the controversial Mexican historical figure Pancho Villa. Beloved crime writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II (a.k.a. PIT)—the prolific historian, biographer of Che Guevara and the founder of Mexican “neopolicial” fiction—brings his tremendous storytelling skills to an account of one of the Mexico’s greatest legendary characters.
With his vibrant narrative style, Taibo describes the adventures of Pancho Villa with incredible stories, the stuff of history and tragedy, backed up by tremendous research. Throughout, Taibo unveils secrets about the life of one of Mexico's most courageous and charismatic leaders. Includes period photographs that indelibly capture the rocky transition from the wild and agrarian past towards modern statehood.
There have always been people who said NO to what they considered unjust and unfair. They Said No is an historical fiction series for younger readers of protestors, activists, poets, revolutionaries and other brave changemakers from around the world that emphasizes the importance of standing up for what you know is right.
You Are Everything takes readers on a journey that begins before the existence of space and time and ends in the present day. Illustrated by Iranian-American artist Shilla Shakoori, the story is a cosmically inclusive embrace of our interconnectedness.
With each turn of the page your transformation unfolds from a being that just is to one that becomes the world around us. And if you can take a moment off from all the doing that you do, author Arabian suggests, and let yourself simply be, you may realize that you are not just one person — you are also everything in the universe.
Readers who love Rumi and stories from Persian mystics or anyone interested in mindfulness and a greater awareness of being in the world will love You Are Everything.
A story of quiet contemplation and steely resolve by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, illustrated for readers of all ages.
On the banks of a river near his grandparents’ farm, a boy is about to catch a big fish. At the same moment that he loses his prey, the boy has a moment of growing awareness of the interconnectedness of all things. He is compelled to try again to catch the fish even though he is sure it’s gone. And even though his chance has passed and he is company only to silence, he has staked a claim there by the river’s edge.
From a childhood memory detailed in his book Small Memories, José Saramago spins a tale of quiet depth and wisdom – here translated by Margaret Jull Costa, and beautifully illustrated by Yolanda Mosquera.
What can abolition mean for a child? How can it help them dream a different future for their community?
In Abolition is Love, Amelie learns about collective care, mutual aid, and abolitionist ideas as they help their parents get ready for the annual Prisoners’ Justice Day. Amelie explores big concepts like love, justice, and care, and learns how we can build a different world together through the small choices we make every day. They learn to resolve a conflict with their cousin who plays differently than they do, they help their Papa plan a more accessible park for all, and collectively they create a beautiful banner. Amelie is also excited to hold their own candle at the rally, and they look forward to this big kid moment–to join the ranks of activists calling for justice and abolition. The book explores possibilities for hope, and offers ideas for caring for each other and building communities rooted in social justice and safety for all people. Parents and teachers can engage young readers with the expansive illustrations and prompts that suggest new ways of being in the world together.
A clever and quirky puzzle book from the legendary graphic designer is a blast for kids and caregivers.
With every page of colorful, original illustration, MistakEs invites young readers to spot what’s not right. Whose feet are sticking out of the blanket at the end of the bed? Which turtle isn’t like the rest? One clock doesn’t work—can you find it? These are just some of the funny, off-kilter puzzles and challenges artist Seymour Chwast presents for your amusement and instruction. Kids—and parents and siblings and teachers and librarians—will love spending time finding the mistakes. Includes an answer key in the back.
The first YA biography of Jane Jacobs, the visionary activist, urbanist, and thinker who transformed the way we inhabit and develop our cities.
Jane Jacobs was born more than a hundred years ago, yet the ideas she popularized—about cities, about people, about making a better world—remain hugely relevant today. Now, in Jane Jacobs: Champion of Cities, Champion of People, we have the first biography for young people of the visionary activist, urbanist, and thinker.
Here is a story of standing up for what you know is right, with real-world takeaways for young activists. Jane Jacobs: Champion of Cities, Champion of People emphasizes how today’s teens can take inspiration from Jane’s own activism “playbook,” promoting change by focusing on local issues and community organizing.
Centering Black voices and slave narratives, this illustrated young adult history offers a thoroughly researched account with first-hand testimonies of how slaves themselves were a driving force behind their own emancipation.
This compelling look at history is an educational eye-opener for history buffs of all ages, and offers clarity on one of the most turbulent periods of US history. This new paperback edition features a new introduction by historian Robin D. G. Kelley.
Boldly weird, cool, and confident, this YA novel of LGBTQ+ teen artists, activists, and telepathic visionaries offers hope against climate and community destruction. From the National Book Award–longlisted author of Out of Salem.
James Goldman, self-described neurotic goth gay transsexual stoner, is a senior in high school, and fully over it. He mostly ignores his classes at Cow Pie High, instead focusing on fundraising for the near-bankrupt local LGBTQ+ youth support group, Compton House, and attending punk shows with his friend-crush Ian and best friend Opal. But when James falls in love with Orsino, a homeschooled trans boy with telepathic powers and visions of the future, he wonders if the scope of what he believes possible is too small. Orsino, meanwhile, hopes that in James he has finally found someone who will be able to share the apocalyptic visions he has had to keep to himself, and better understand the powers they hold.
An entertaining and accessible introduction to the radical philosopher of freedom of thought and religion is the only biography of Spinoza for young adults.
Abbie Hoffman — national provocateur, political activist, founding member of the Yippies, defendant in the trial of the Chicago Seven, and author of Steal This Book, Revolution for the Hell of It, and Fuck the System — died on April 12, 1989. He was 52.
To celebrate his memory, we are proud to share the late Paul Krassner's foreword to the book Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman, written by Abbie's brother, Jack Hoffman, and Seven Stories Press publisher Dan Simon. Krassner's foreword, written a few weeks before his death in July 2019, perfectly conveys the contradiction of Abbie Hoffman — his unbridled silliness combined with a fiery political activism and passion for justice, creating a figure that simultaneously antagonized, amused, and terrified the highly conservative leaders of the era.
Dan Simon wrote of this contradiction, so pivotal to the living memory of Abbie Hoffman, in October 2020, soon after seeing the film The Trial of the ChicagoSeven:
Maybe the most important idea in Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman, the biography of Abbie that I wrote with his brother Jack, appears in the very first paragraph of chapter 1. It’s the idea that a sense of futility was the source of Abbie’s remarkable energy and optimism, and that in the end his deep optimism held the same tragic seed as our despair. What prompted Jack and me to go there was the derailed life of his brilliant aunt Rose, a diagnosed schizophrenic who spent most of her adult life institutionalized. So in that opening paragraph it wasn’t our despair but his aunt Rose’s. No matter.
After I watched [The Trail of the Chicago Seven], I found myself thinking about Abbie and his aunt Rose, and the relationship between despair and optimism. Despair and optimism may share the same seed, and this may lead in the direction of optimism, a kind of optimism that doesn’t hide its kinship with despair, or maybe, to name it more accurately, a kind of faith in people. After Abbie died, we published the book that he and I had worked on together. He had envisioned it to be like the “Best of” albums that the musical artists of his era made—Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, the Dead—and gave it the title The Best of Abbie Hoffman—his three ’60s and early ’70s books in one volume. We had buttons made: “Abbie Lives.” I still have a few. And he does.
FOREWORD
by Paul Krassner
I think it was 1967.
“What is this, we’re huddled together like in a fuckin’ ghetto, afraid to watch a fuckin’ parade,” Abbie Hoffman was saying.
We’d decided to confront the Armed Forces Day Parade coming down Fifth Avenue. There were a lot of us.
But then a police captain approached someone in our group and said, “I’m gonna have to give you a summons for holding a meeting without a permit.”
“We’re merely having a conversation, Officer. And why are you singling me out?”
“You seem to be leading the meeting,” the captain replied.
Although I was there as a reporter covering this action for the Realist, at that moment I crossed the line that separated observer from participant: “Excuse me, Officer, we’re both leading the meeting. You’d better give me a summons too.”
Right away, Abbie looked around and spoke up: “Who else is leading this meeting?”
Hands went up.
“I am.”
More hands.
“I am.”
“I am.”
“I am.”
It turned out that about fifty people were leading the meeting.
“Okay, I’m not gonna give you a summons, but the next time you hold a meeting—”
“You mean,” I interjected, “the next time we don’t hold a meeting—”
“—you better have a permit.”
“I’m sorry, Officer, we can’t continue this meeting any longer without a permit.”
The Armed Forces Day Parade began making its way down Fifth Avenue. The marines marched by and we chanted, “Get a girl, not a gun.”
The navy marched by and we sang “Yellow Submarine.”
Green Berets marched by and we shouted, “Thou shalt not kill!”
The Red Cross marched by and we applauded.
A missile rolled by and we called out, “Shame!”
Military cadets rode by on horseback and we advised, “Drop out now!”
The Department of Sanitation swept past and we cheered.
Then this horde of pacifists and hippies left the area and entered Central Park, followed by what seemed like a whole division of police. We romped past the statue of Alice and her friends playing around a giant mushroom; some lingered to present flowers to the Mad Hatter. The cops ordered them off the statue, surrounding Alice as if they were guarding a fortress.
When it was all over, I left with Abbie. Our paths had crossed at various meetings and events, but we’d never really hung around together. Now, over soup, he was telling me about the time he had taken one of my “Fuck Communism” posters to a symposium on communism, and how influenced he was by the Realist, the satirical magazine I had founded.
I asked, “Do you think it’s an ego trip for me to be concerned about whether the readers of the Realist think I’m on an ego trip?”
He laughed and said, “You only ask a question like that because you’re Jewish.”
“But I don’t think of myself as Jewish. I’m an atheist. I mean, Christ was Jewish.”
“When I was at Brandeis,” Abbie said thoughtfully, “I asked this professor, ‘How come in one part of the Bible Jesus says to God, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” But in another part of the Bible, Jesus says to God, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”?’ And the professor says, ‘You gotta remember, the Bible was written by a lot of different guys.’”
Abbie tempered his fearlessness with a gift for humor that was sharp and spontaneous.
On a particularly tense night on the Lower East Side, we were standing on a street corner when a patrol car with four police in it cruised by. Abbie called out, “Hey, fellas, you goin’ out on a double date?” These were some of the same cops from the Ninth Precinct that he liked to beat at pool at what I call the “laughing pool table” because of how Abbie made the cops laugh.
Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman does a meticulous job of capturing the marvel that was Abbie Hoffman as I knew him. It’s an indispensable book about an indispensable hero of the sixties’ near-revolution in America that Abbie helped lead with such incredible imagination. Dan caught the tale end of the movement as a red-diaper baby growing up in Boston: his mom taught with Howard Zinn at BU, and his dad once joined a mission to deliver medical equipment to Bach Mai Hospital after it was bombed during the Vietnam War. With Abbie as one of his heroes, Dan worked with the Attica Brothers Legal Defense while in high school. Later, he edited and published The Best of Abbie Hoffman, Abbie’s last book. Jack of course was Abbie’s little brother and sidekick through the years, more a businessman than an activist, but he loved his older brother and lived in his shadow.
Back on that first day of our long friendship, I told Abbie, “You’re the first one who’s really made me laugh since Lenny Bruce died.” Lenny Bruce had been in many ways my closest friend, and I had written his autobiography with him.
“Really?” Abbie replied, genuinely impressed. “Lenny Bruce was my god.”
— DESERT HOT SPRINGS, CA, JULY 2019
PAUL KRASSNER (1932–2019) was co-founder with Abbie of the Yippies and one of Abbie’s longest standing friends and collaborators. The founder and longtime editor of the Realist and the author of many books, including The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race, One Hand Jerking, and Impolite Interviews, he lived with his partner, Nancy Cain, in the desert in Southern California. Paul Krassner died on Sunday, July 21, 2019, in Desert Hot Springs, California.
With the forthcoming publication of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century, a new collection edited by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, we are proud to share a series of excerpts from the book, which will be published individually each week on the Seven Stories blog until the book's release.
This week's excerpt adapts Nick Estes' is speech from the first annual Native Liberation Conference, held on Saturday, August 13, 2016 at the Larry Casuse Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The stated goal of this conference, organized by The Red Nation, is to "orient, update, and educate the collective membership of The Red Nation and general public on local, regional, and international movements for Indigenous liberation."
A new companion to the classic collection edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century brings together more than 100 activist texts on social and economic justice that have shaped the last 22 years. The editors, Arnove and Pessin, offer a curated collection of voices of hope and resistance from Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the struggle for Indigenous liberation, activist groups for immigrant rights, environmentalist movements, disability justice organizing, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor.
Included in this new book are writings by Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Rev. William Barber, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Dream Defenders, Sins Invalid, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, Julian Brave NoiseCat, H. Melt, and others. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.
Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, is a cofounder of The Red Nation, an organization “dedicated to the liberation of Native peoples from capitalism and colonialism.” Here is part of his speech at the first annual Native Liberation Conference at the Larry Casuse Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Nick Estes, “Native Liberation: The Way Forward”
(August 13, 2016)
The Red Nation formed in November 2014 out of a collective desire to create a platform for revolutionary Native organizing and to fight back against this settler colonial system that seeks our annihilation. That very summer, two Navajo men, our relatives Allison “Cowboy” Gorman and Kee “Rabbit” Thompson, were brutally murdered by three non-Native men. The story is familiar to most of us. Our relatives—our aunties, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and even ourselves—are cast as outsiders, exiles in our own homelands in places we call border towns, the white-dominated settlements that ring Indian reservations where persistent patterns of police brutality, rampant discrimination, and violence against Natives define everyday life. The men who murdered Cowboy and Rabbit later admitted to committing similar violent acts against fifty others in a one-year period. They told investigators they were looking for a “good time,” and Native people were their playthings, just like the white boys in Farmington who attacked and murdered Navajo men “for fun” in what they call “Indian rolling,” or like how rich, racist white men like Dan Snyder, the owner of the infamous Washington football team, use Natives as playthings for entertainment and mascots that celebrate the scalping and mutilating of Native bodies.
Natives become entertainment objects for sport and killing because in this society we are unreal and not fully human. Cowboy and Rabbit’s killers spent more than an hour mutilating their bodies to the point they were unrecognizable. It was so bad authorities could not identify them and neither Cowboy nor Rabbit carried personal ID. All-too-common among Albuquerque’s unsheltered community, the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) confiscated and destroyed the men’s IDs—which included drivers’ licenses and CIB cards—to prevent them from buying alcohol or receiving basic human rights, such as access to housing, food, medical care, and employment. Even before they were killed, the APD and this settler society had marked and sentenced Cowboy and Rabbit to a certain kind of death, a social death, where they were excluded, like most Natives, from the realm of the living and relegated to a place where they were considered killable and disposable.
When we founded The Red Nation, this was our primary concern, to address the common experience of Natives: four of every five Natives lives off-reservation in border towns, which include places like Gallup, Farmington, Winslow, Albuquerque, Denver, Rapid City, and Phoenix, to name just a few. Why is this significant? Typically, Natives living off-reservation are considered unauthentic or somehow less Native. They are derisively referred to as “Urban Indians.” The truth is that reservations were created as open-air concentration camps, to contain and limit our movements across land that was rightfully ours.
Our ancestors did not choose reservation life; it was forced upon them. Natives who “went off the reservation” were the revolutionaries and rebels who refused confinement. In those days, those who willfully crossed the reservation borders were considered renegades, outlaws, or hostiles. They were usually hunted down, summarily shot, hanged, or imprisoned by law enforcement or by vigilantes. In other words, Natives off the reservation have always been deemed criminal, deviant, and in the way. Today, the recent police killings of Loreal Tsingine, Allen Locke, Sarah Lee Circle Bear, Jacquelyn Salyers, and many more are evidence that the criminalization and extermination of Native life is fundamental to settler society. And border towns literally thrive on Native death.
This is our common experience and our common struggle. This is why we formed The Red Nation.
In fact, police killings of Natives have increased in just the last year and some predict that number will double by the end of 2016, unless we take action now. Native women make up 30 percent of all the police killings of women just this year, even though Natives make up barely 1 percent of the national population. On top of this, Natives are killed by police at the highest rate. Some attempt to parse out these horrible statistics to suggest that Natives have it worse than other groups, as if being murdered by the police is a competition. The truth is that Natives, Blacks, and Latinxs have historically been the targets of the racist police state, the colonial system that enslaved Blacks for their labor, killed Indians for their land, and created a cheap, exploitable labor pool from Indigenous-descended people, now called Latinxs. And because of this reality . . . the Red Nation stands with all victims of police brutality. We recognize that undoing the system that oppresses everyone requires multinational unity and class solidarity among the racialized poor, colonized, and working-class peoples.
To understand why the Native struggle is essential, then, we must first begin with why Natives are targeted for elimination: to gain access to territory. Despite popular belief, Natives are not targeted and killed for our culture, spirituality, religion, or civilization. We are eliminated so that corporations and the settler state can gain access to our territory and resources. That requires the liquidation of our societies, the forced removal of our people from the land, the creation of a blood quantum system that dilutes our identity and decreases our population, the confinement to reservations or prisons, the breaking up of our land base and collective identities, and the hyper-policing of our people.
Elimination also requires that Natives in border towns like Albuquerque are seen as nuisances and are commonly referred to as “drunk Indians” or “transients.” Both stereotypes are criminalized, although by definition neither is illegal. Police and settlers often tell us to “Go back to the reservation!” or “You’re not from the community!” In those moments, Natives become a criminal element, as if we’re the ones who don’t belong. It’s what Native bodies off-reservation represent that makes us a threat. Native bodies off-reservation represent the unfinished business of settler colonialism; we’re physical reminders that this is not settler land—this is stolen Native land. Despite their best efforts to kill us off, confine us to sub-marginal plots of land, breed us white, or to beat or educate the Indian out of us, we remain. We remain because we resist.
We remain as evidence that this is still, and will always be, Native land. We represent a challenge to the legitimacy of the colonial project of border towns and cities because we refuse to quit being Indians when we leave the reservation. We refuse to obey colonial borders. We refuse to disappear and to be quiet.
The Red Nation represents the unification of Natives outside of the institutions of power—taking the struggle back where it belongs: in the hands of the people. Our ancestors did not establish corporate foundations and boards. They fought for their dignity, lands, and lives. They expect the same from us. Corporate and colonial state institutions still dominate our present condition and, as a result, they structure and contain the free will and humanity of Native people. We have to transcend these power structures that, by design and intention, ultimately limit and strangle our lives. To achieve this new humanity, we have to refuse the false promise of capitalistic development—which is commonly disguised as tribal economic self-determination—and state-sponsored colonial reconciliation—which is commonly disguised as community healing and individual self-fulfillment. You cannot heal from a system that continues to violate and kill the land and our relatives unless you dismantle that system. Although seductive, these “solutions” do nothing more than carry on, and carry out, the same power structure that Native people have been resisting for the last five centuries: colonialism and capitalism. The healing of our wounds can only happen if we annihilate profit-making and colonial enterprises.
Instead of nonprofits, we need anti-profits organizing independent of corporate influence and state co-optation, and embedded in the true power of every society: the common people. The poor. The oppressed. The marginalized. In the Lakota language, we call our common people ikce wicasa. In Native societies, our common people are those who face the highest rates of violence and discrimination: our youth, our women, our LGTBQ, and our poor relatives. In other words, the broad swath of Native societies today. This is the common experience of Native people.
The current landscape of struggle pits organizations and groups of people against each other, vying for control over resources made scarce by austerity measures and corporate monopolies. Our struggle is not for funding streams or profit-making off the misery of the powerless. We see how organizations and movements mimic corporate and bourgeois competition over brands, logos, name recognition, clientele, and power. We refuse to participate in this corporate model that dominates community organizing. Instead, we organize according to a principle of unity to unite Native peoples and all oppressed peoples in a common struggle beyond national borders and racial and gender identities. That’s what separates revolutionary organizing and Native liberation struggles from entities that pit marginalized populations against each other, to compete for funding and resources, without attacking the true source of our collective misery: colonialism and capitalism.
We share an enemy that we must unite against. This is the organizing philosophy of The Red Nation.
Capitalism is the enemy of all life. Climate change, because it envelops the entire planet, makes all life precarious. Poor, oppressed, and Indigenous peoples, however, bear the brunt of rising seas, record droughts, and abnormal weather patterns. As Native people, our kinship with human and nonhuman relatives is fundamental to our being. As I speak, an alliance of Lakota and non-Lakota are laying their bodies on the line to halt a crude oil pipeline from crossing the major fresh water source for millions on the Great Plains, the Missouri River. Our relatives and allies are enacting the sacred duty of the Lakota belief of Wotakuye, or kinship. Kinship, in this way, is unconditional because it is revolutionary love. It is the love for our human and nonhuman relatives and the love for the land that will always trump profit. But the land can no longer sustain us if capitalism continues to stalk the earth in search of new markets, bodies, and resources. For life to live on this planet, capitalism must die. For us Lakotas, it is the owe wasicu, the way of the fat-taker capitalist, that must die for our people to live.
The Great Spirits have declared: capitalism is organized crime and must be destroyed. It is our obligation to act accordingly.
As Native people, we possess an essential tradition to sustain us—a tradition of resistance. From this tradition of resistance arises The Red Nation. In Lakota, we call ourselves and all Native peoples, Oyate Luta, the Red Nation. We are red because we come from the red earth. We are a nation because we have our own laws, language, territory, and customs that have persisted since time immemorial. We claim the land and the land claims us. . . .
Four of five Natives do not live on reservation lands, but that doesn’t mean that they have relinquished their treaty rights or their sovereign political identities as Native peoples. It means that we exercise our rights to live where and how we want in our own homelands because that is the ultimate definition of self-determination and sovereignty, collective independence, and autonomy. It is important to remember that no people in the history of this world were ever granted their freedom by begging for it from their oppressors. They had to fight for it. They had to win it. Freedom is actualized not given. . . .
It is time to name the systems that kill us—capitalism and colonialism—and call for their destruction so that our people may live. We will not apologize for this, relatives. It is the only right thing left to do. The Red Nation is a movement for life, not death. And for us to live, capitalism and colonialism must die.
Join us in this movement for life!
In the spirit of Popé and in the spirit of Crazy Horse!
Hecetu Welo!
NICK ESTES is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico. In 2014, he co-founded The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization. For 2017-2018, Estes was the American Democracy Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.
Estes is the author of the book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019) and he co-edited Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (University of Minnesota, 2019), which draws together more than thirty contributors, including leaders, scholars, and activists of the Standing Rock movement.
Estes' journalism and writing is also featured in the Intercept, Jacobin, Indian Country Today, The Funambulist Magazine, and High Country News.
To celebrate his birthday, take 30% off all books written by or about Nelson Algren!
One of the most neglected American writers and also one of the best loved, NELSON ALGREN wrote once that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.” His writings always lived up to that definition.
He was born on March 28, 1909, in Detroit and lived mostly in Chicago. His first short fiction was published in Story magazine in 1933. In 1935 he published his first novel, Somebody in Boots. In early 1942, Algren put the finishing touches on a second novel and joined the war as an enlisted man. By 1945, he still had not made the grade of Private first class, but the novel Never Come Morning was widely praised and eventually sold over a million copies. In 1947 came The Neon Wilderness, his famous short story collection which would permanently establish his place in American letters.
The Man with the Golden Arm, generally considered Algren’s most important novel, appeared in 1949 and became the first winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in March 1950. Then came Chicago: City on the Make (1951), a prose poem, and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), a rewrite of Somebody in Boots.
Algren also published two travel books, Who Lost an American? and Notes from a Sea Voyage. The Last Carousel, a collection of short fiction and nonfiction, appeared in 1973. He died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His last novel, The Devil’s Stocking, based on the life of Hurricane Carter, and Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, a 1952 essay on the art of writing, were published posthumously in 1983 and 1996 respectively. In 2009 came Entrapment and Other Writings, a major collection of previously unpublished writings that included two early short story masterpieces, “Forgive Them, Lord,” and “The Lightless Room,” and the long unfinished novel fragment referenced in the book’s title. In 2019, Blackstone Audio released the complete library of Algren’s books as audiobooks. And in 2020 Olive Films released Nelson Algren Live, a performance film of Algren’s life and work starring Willem Dafoe and Barry Gifford, among others, produced by the Seven Stories Institute.
Foreword by Colin Asher
Introduction by James R. Giles
A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems.
The literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm “Algren’s defense of the individual,” while Carl Sandburg wrote of its “strange midnight dignity.” A literary tour de force, here is a novel unlike any other, one in which drug addiction, poverty, and human failure somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope.
Seven Stories Press separately publishes the critical edition of The Man with the Golden Arm, the first critical edition of an Algren work, featuring an extra 100+ pages of insightful essays by Russell Banks, Bettina Drew, James R. Giles, Carlo Rotella, William Savage, Lee Stringer, Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, and others.
Introduction by Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Wright Afterword by Daniel Simon Contribution by H.E.F. Donahue
Never Come Morning is unique among the novels of Algren. The author's only romance, the novel concerns Bruno Bicek, a would-be boxer from Chicago's Northwest side, and Steffi, the woman who shares his dream while living his nightmare. "It is an unusual and brilliant book," said The New York Times. "A bold scribbling upon the wall for comfortable Americans to ponder and digest." This new edition features an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and an interview with Nelson Algren by H.E.F. Donohue.
Foreword by Colin Asher
Introduction by Tom Carson
Afterword by Studs Terkel
Nelson Algren's classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein Algren would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in this collection are literary triumphs that don't fade away.
Among the stories included here are "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," about a Chicago youth being cornered for a murder, and "The Face on the Barroom Floor," in which a legless man pummels another man nearly to death—the seeds that would grow into the novel Never Come Morning.
Also collected are the World War II stories that found their final expression in the novel The Man with the Golden Arm, as well as “So Help Me,” Algren’s first published work, and "The Captain Has Bad Dreams," in which Algren first introduced the character of the blameless captain who feels such a heavy burden of guilt and wonders why the criminal offenders he sees seem to feel no guilt at all. And then there is "Design for Departure," in which a young woman drifting into hooking and addiction sees her own dreaminess outlast her hopes.
As rock and roll novelist Tom Carson writes in his introduction, "The Neon Wilderness is the pivotal book of Nelson Algren's career — the one which bid a subdued but determined farewell to everything that had earlier made him no more than just another good writer, and inaugurated the idiosyncratic, bedevilled, cantankerously poetic sensibility that would see him ranked among the few literary originals of his times."
Edited by Brooke Horvath and Dan Simon
Nelson Algren sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful voice rose from behind the billboards and down tin-can alleys, from among the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the punch-drunk boxers and skid-row drunkies and kids who knew they'd never reach the age of twenty-one: all of them admirable in Algren’s eyes for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places.
In Entrapment and Other Writings—containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays—Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure.
The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren's lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren's beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren's intensity but his diverse range of interests are revealed and celebrated.
Foreword by Herbert Mitgang
The Devil's Stocking is the story of Ruby Calhoun, a boxer accused of murder in a shadowy world of low-purse fighters, cops, con artists, and bar girls. Chronicling a battle for truth and human dignity which gives way to a larger story of life and death decisions, literary grandmaster Nelson Algren's last novel is a fitting capstone to a long and brilliant career.
Afterword by Dan Simon
Notes by Dan Simon and C. S. O’Brien
Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: "Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder." It is also about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: "Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards … [where there] are still … defeats in which everything is lost [and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope."
In Nonconformity, Nelson Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy's heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren says here.
Nelson Algren’s two books of travel writing describe his journeys through the seamier side of the international social and political landscape of the mid-1960s.
Algren at Sea brings both books together in one volume on the centenary of Algren’s birth.
Aboard the freighter Malaysia Mail in Notes From a Sea Diary, Algren offers a gritty account of his time among his down-and-out fellow sailors and the underground port life of Kowloon, Bombay, Pusan—yet an account softened by his discussion of Hemingway, Hemingway’s attitude toward the world of literature (and the world of literature’s attitude toward Hemingway), and the role of a writer in modern America.
Who Lost an American? takes us on a whirlwind spin from the world of the New York literary scene to Dublin, Crete, Paris, Seville, and more, with Algren commenting on everything from Simone de Beauvoir to bullfights to Playboy key clubs to the death of Brendan Behan—and, as always, Chicago, Algren’s eternal touchstone of American brutality.
Foreword by David Mamet
They met in 1949 when Art was a reporter for Life. Shay followed Algren around with a camera, gathering pictures for a photo-essay piece he was pitching to the magazine. Life didn't pick up the article, but Shay and Algren became fast friends. Algren gave Shay's camera entrance into the back-alley world of Division Street, and Shay captured Algren's poetry on film. They were masters chronicling the same patch of ground with different tools. Chicago's Nelson Algren is the compilation of hundreds of photos—many recently discovered and published here for the first time—of Nelson Algren over the course of a decade and a deeply moving homage to the writer and his city. Read Algren and you'll see Shay's pictures; look at Shay's photos and you'll hear Nelson's words.
With the forthcoming publication of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century, a new collection edited by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, we are proud to share a series of excerpts from the book, which will be published individually each week on the Seven Stories blog until the book's release.
This week's excerpt adapts Jesse Hagopian's speech that he delivered to the #TeachTruth rally in Seattle, Washington, on June 12, 2021, a National Day of Action during which teachers in more than forty cities demonstrated in opposition to a slew of new state laws aimed at banning teachers from educating about institutional racism, gender inequality, and other forms of oppression. In the piece, Hagopian reiterates his commitment to teaching accurate history, regardless of the laws passed intending to curb his students' rights to learn.
A new companion to the classic collection edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century brings together more than 100 activist texts on social and economic justice that have shaped the last 22 years. The editors, Arnove and Pessin, offer a curated collection of voices of hope and resistance from Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the struggle for Indigenous liberation, activist groups for immigrant rights, environmentalist movements, disability justice organizing, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor.
Included in this new book are writings by Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Rev. William Barber, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Dream Defenders, Sins Invalid, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, Julian Brave NoiseCat, H. Melt, and others. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.
On June 12, 2021, teachers in more than forty cities joined a National Day of Action to #TeachTruth in opposition to a slew of new state laws seeking to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory and about institutional racism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression. Educator Jesse Hagopian, who works with the Zinn Education Project and Black Lives Matter at School, delivered this speech at the #TeachTruth rally in Seattle, Washington.
Jesse Hagopian, “I’m Not Alone in Pledging to #TeachTruth”
(June 12, 2021)
Racists are scared these days, y’all.
You can tell a scared racist because when they can’t win a debate, they just try to make it illegal for you to say—or teach—anything that challenges them. I’m proud to stand with all of you today in the #TeachTruth movement.
I want to begin by acknowledging that we are on homeland of the Duwamish people—land that was colonized by the United States. We live in a city named after a Duwamish Chief and yet the Duwamish people still don’t have federal recognition . . . And, now, wait a minute . . . If I was in Tennessee, would it even be legal for me to acknowledge that I was on Native American land that was colonized? That’s really how far things have gone these days.
These laws banning the teaching of structural racism, sexism, and oppression are impacting every classroom—because even in states where there isn’t yet a bill, this legislation is emboldening people to attack teachers who want to teach the truth. And everyone should know that our neighbors to the east, the state of Idaho, recently passed a bill that declares, “Social justice ideology poses a grave threat to America and to the American way of life.” What? They are literally arguing that it’s social justice that poses a threat, not racism and sexism.
But you can’t understand our country without understanding racism and its intersections with sexism and heterosexism. Consider these facts:
- The average white family has ten times [more] wealth than the average Black family.
- A Black woman is three times more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes than a white woman.
- Black students are over three times more likely to be suspended from school than white students.
- Anti-Asian hate crimes have surged over 169 percent so far this year.
- At least forty-four transgender and gender non-conforming people were violently killed in 2020, with Black transgender women accounting for two-thirds of total recorded deaths since 2013.
Despite these glaring examples, in Iowa, they recently passed a bill which bans teaching that “the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist.”
According to Merriam-Webster, “fundamental” means: serving as an original or generating source. The original source of our country was the genocide against Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people. So you literally can’t teach about the founding of this country or its long history without talking about systemic racism.
In Missouri they proposed a bill that would ban teaching the 1619 project—which frames US history in terms of the enslavement of African people who were brought to North American colonies in 1619. And it bans the Zinn Education Project. And it bans the Black Lives Matter at School curriculum.
But I want to tell you all here today that the fact is they wouldn’t be passing these laws to ban the teaching of structural racism and oppression if they weren’t scared of something.
So, what are they scared of?
They are scared of the fact that activists built the broadest protest in US history over the spring and summer in the wake of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which shook this country and exposed the structural nature of anti-Blackness to many.
They are scared of the fact that [the] BLM at School movement tripled in size this school year.
They are sacred of solidarity. The bill in Arkansas actually suggests banning the teaching of solidarity!
And they are certainly scared of students who can think critically.
The summer uprising was led by youth. The media likes to talk about learning loss from summer break or from remote schooling, but the truth is the students have learned—and taught—the nation so much about the nature of structural racism. These youth who can think for themselves and challenge injustice really scare racists.
But informed Black people have always scared racists.
This isn’t the first time that frightened racists have tried to ban education. The first law of this kind was a slave code enacted in 1740 in reaction to the Stono Slave Rebellion 1739 in South Carolina and it made writing illegal for enslaved African people.
But from the time it was illegal to be literate until today, Black people have always led a struggle for racial justice and education.
Enslaved Black people snuck off plantations to teach each other how to read and write, even though it was illegal—they called it “stealing a meeting.” The punishment could be maiming or even death if you were caught reading or writing, but Black people did it anyway.
During the Reconstruction era, Black educators built the public school system across the south because they knew there was no full emancipation without education.
During the Civil Rights Movement, Freedom Schools were organized, especially during the “Freedom Summer” campaign of 1964. During Freedom Summer, more than three thousand Black students attended a Freedom School—and the final exam was going and registering to vote or organizing others into the movement—not bubbling in answers on standardized tests.
Then there was the proliferation of the Afrocentric schools around the country in the 1970s and the Black Panther Party’s Liberation Schools—like the Oakland Community School that was run by Ericka Huggins.
Today we have the Black Lives Matter at School and other movements for racial justice in education.
It’s important to look at this history to help us understand the way forward. But I want to be clear about something. While today’s racists may not be so bold as to ban the reading of the word—as they did for my ancestors—they do want to ban the reading of the world.
But I am telling you all that I am going to teach my students about how to read the world —because it desperately needs changing. And I refuse to be intimidated from teaching about the people throughout history who have helped make these needed changes. I am going to teach my students about the ideas and practice of people like Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, and Claudia Jones, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Ella Baker, and Barbara Smith, and Angela Davis. Because a world where kids learn about these freedom fighters and put their ideas in action will be a world with less oppression and more empathy, more dignity, more equity, more democracy.
I’m pledging to you all today that I will refuse to lie to kids—no matter what the laws tells me to do. And I’m so glad I’m not alone.
TRUTH IS THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR
THE U.S. INVASION OF IRAQ, 20 YEARS LATER
Truth — as Howard Zinn demonstrates in his classic text Terrorism and War — is the first casualty of war, and one can see evidence of this from the beginnings of the American empire, through our military operations around the world today. By March 2003, less than two years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. war machine of military propaganda reached a fever pitch with “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq. Now, 20 years later, we can see the truth of the matter: that we should have never invaded Iraq in the first place, and that doing so led to millions of unnecessary deaths, incalculable trauma for survivors and their families, and widespread environmental and socioeconomic destruction.
On the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, we are offering 30% off our "Iraq War, 20 Years Later Reading List," a timely selection of titles on U.S. imperialism, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and the so-called War on Terror.
From Mona Damluji, author of Together with illustrations by Innosanto Nagara, a poem for her children, an attempt to explain the Iraq War as a family with roots in Iraq and Lebanon:
How do I speak with my children about war? I have no idea. And yet I struggle to find the words to begin. Twenty years ago today the United States invaded Iraq. I offer this poem as a way to begin.
I want you to know that you came from a people and a place that was beautiful. I want you to know that your ancestors loved and laughed and danced and played and worked and cared in this place surrounded by their own beauty. That they called this place home.
I want you to know that they weren’t perfect, your ancestors, because no one is. But they lived in dignity.
I want you to know that what took it away, what made this place unsafe, was greed. The greed of people from another place who already had more than they need. Those people who had it all, and still wanted more. They made war. They made horrible, ugly, impossible war.
The war took away buildings. Took away homes. It took away families. Made it unsafe to breathe. Unsafe to drink. Unsafe to stay. Made so many leave.
And the thing about war is that it does not end when the generals say so. War keeps burning. It burns in the hearts, in the minds, in the pockets, in the limbs. It keeps burning in all those who witnessed, all those displaced, and all those who remember. It burns in our questions. It burns in our pain.
The war is a fire that set ablaze to the street my grandparents called home. It turned off the lights. It made day into night. And so they left, like all those who left before.
That fire burns inside of me. The fire that made it unsafe to stay, that keeps me from returning one day.
And it’s inside of you too. I want you to know it. I want you to feel it. Because if you don’t see it, it might still grow.
However far away we are now, however many miles, however many years, I want you to know you are still of the place that your ancestors know. The one that they called home.
TRUTH IS THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR
THE U.S. INVASION OF IRAQ, 20 YEARS LATER
Truth — as Howard Zinn demonstrates in his classic text Terrorism and War — is the first casualty of war, and one can see evidence of this from the beginnings of the American empire, through our military operations around the world today. By March 2003, less than two years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. war machine of military propaganda reached a fever pitch with “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq. Now, 20 years later, we can see the truth of the matter: that we should have never invaded Iraq in the first place, and that doing so led to millions of unnecessary deaths, incalculable trauma for survivors and their families, and widespread environmental and socioeconomic destruction.
On the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, we are offering 30% off our Iraq War, 20 Years Later Reading List, a timely selection of titles on U.S. imperialism, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and the so-called War on Terror.
With the forthcoming publication of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century, a new collection edited by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, we are proud to share a series of excerpts from the book, which will be published individually each week on the Seven Stories blog until the book's release.
In this excerpt, adapted from a speech addressed to the 15,000 marchers at the 2020 Brooklyn March for Black Trans Lives, Okra Project Founder Ianne Fields Stewart explores what it would mean to truly eradicate transphobia, to "bring that violence into the light and crush it beneath our feet."
A new companion to the classic collection edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century brings together more than 100 activist texts on social and economic justice that have shaped the last 22 years. The editors, Arnove and Pessin, offer a curated collection of voices of hope and resistance from Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the struggle for Indigenous liberation, activist groups for immigrant rights, environmentalist movements, disability justice organizing, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor.
Included in this new book are writings by Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Rev. William Barber, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Dream Defenders, Sins Invalid, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, Julian Brave NoiseCat, H. Melt, and others. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.
Ianne Fields Stewart is a Black transfeminine actor, storyteller, and activist and is the founder of The Okra Project, which works to address food insecurity in Black transgender communities. Stewart gave the following speech before a crowd of fifteen thousand people at the 2020 Brooklyn March for Black Trans Lives, the largest such gathering to date.
IANNE FIELDS STEWART, "TODAY IS THE LAST DAY OF TRANS OPPRESSION" (June 14, 2020)
Good afternoon. My name is Ianne Fields Stewart. I use they/them/she/her pronouns.
Today I call upon each and every one of you to make a commitment. Today I urge you to commit, that today is the very last day that transphobia will claim the lives, loves, and joys of Black trans people!
For too long, Black trans people have fought for our humanity, and for too long, cis people have been acting like they don’t know what the fuck we talking about.
So today is the last day that a Black trans woman fears for her life, when she names and claims herself, in front of a man, whose hatred of himself is stronger than his love for her.
Today is the last day that a Black trans man fears occupying physical space because he can’t find his binder or is without it, and he fears that, because he fears being misgendered, because he fears brutality. It is the last day.
Today is the last day that Black nonbinary people feel forced to fake themselves into a binary that doesn’t exist.
Today is the last day that cis people use trans people as an encyclopedia when Google is right there.
Today is the last day. And today, I demand that you commit that there will be no more hashtags. There will be no more elevated rates of incarceration, housing insecurity and unemployment for Black trans people.
Today I demand that the state be held accountable for our murders.
Today I demand that the state be held accountable for continuously ignoring us, abusing us, while profiting off of us in the shadows.
Today we bring that violence into the light and crush it beneath our feet.
To summarize I have one simple thing to say: transphobia ends today. And it doesn’t end because your nonprofit made a grant off of it. It doesn’t end because you put a trans flag on a credit card. It doesn’t even end because you said to your white family that trans lives matter. It doesn’t end because you fuck us and still misgender us to your friends. Transphobia ends today because if you ain’t with us, you are learning today what it means to be against us.
IANNE FIELDS STEWART is a black, queer, and transfeminine New York-based storyteller working at the intersection of theatre and activism. Their work and she are dedicated to interrupting the exclusivity of luxury by making things like entertainment, nourishment, and self care accessible to the most marginalized in their community. In a world that is constantly traumatizing Black bodies she believes that Black queer and trans people should have the space and time to center collective emotional, physical, and sensual pleasure.
To celebrate the paperback release of our bilingual edition of No More / C’est Tout by Marguerite Duras, we are proud to share an excerpt from the book: a short portion from the beginning of Duras’ final text, paired with introductory notes by translator Richard Howard and French publisher Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
It was Chateaubriand who initiated a literature explicitly from the other side, posthumous writing, d’outre-tombe. There are subsequent French instances — Drieu La Rochelle’s Récit secret, Gide’s mortuary pillow-book Ainsi soit-il, some late Jouhandeau, quite a lot of Montherlant, perhaps Céline’s last three volumes — the mere instancing of these ominous names suggests the ethical risk of such an enterprise. Who makes book here — isn’t there always someone else, someone not entirely to be trusted who will have to collect the disjecta verba, to straighten things out —in Duras’s case her last young lover, appearing so mysteriously as a gruesome interlocutor, the angel of death masked as the last coital gasp, drowning out all foregoing competition during these inter-comatose manifestations of that special literary fanaticism which asserts not merely that this is happening (after all, Duras has written a hundred works, novels, stories, plays, films; expression is her trade) but that this is happening to me!
No attempt will be made to please, to beguile the (loathed?) reader. Nor to identify anything so trivial as circumstance. We are in the abstract — and perhaps fraudulently dated — halls of Dis where only glints of consciousness, when they come, will suffice: angry, dismissive, these are the intermittences not of the heart, as in Proust, but of the spleen. Baudelaire indeed is the plausible prototype, though what scorn M.D. would have for all his formal scruples, his attention to the classi cism of ruin. Here is nothing but what the French call hargne (surliness, resentment, bad temper . . .), tense and often mocking observations of the still-articulate soul, betrayed by the still-longing body. This is one of the fiercest little books in our culture, the converse of the Stoic manual of proper dying. Give it the last inch on your bedside table to remind you (like the slave whose function it is to slap the victorious Roman general before he sets out on his Triumphal March) of the degradations of mortality: greedy, illicit, profound. Odi et amo.
—Richard Howard
Spring 1998
New York City
FOREWORD
It was toward the end of August 1995 that Yann Andréa brought me the beginnings of C’est Tout: a few typed sheets which went from November 20, 1994 to August 1, 1995. We published them right away, and Marguerite Duras was able to see the book. Everyone knew at the time that she was mortally ill. Then a few days after her death on March 3, 1996, Yann gave me the pages which end on February 29. In the notes she herself wrote or in those retranscribed by Yann, the striking thing, for anyone who knew Marguerite Duras toward the end of her life, is that immediately recognizable voice, her outrageous and powerful way of forcing the language to obey her thought, a way which has here become lapidary, on account of the urgency of the message and the fear of silence. She spoke exactly as she wrote, or the other way around. It is for what they say, and also for her will to speak to the very end, that I find these pages — poorly typed on an old machine, not even an electric typewriter — so overwhelming. And also because the whole of her work is to be found in them, in fragments and flashes and echoes, as always reworked and revisited, this ultimate time, truly the last.
—Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens
Spring 1998
Paris, France
November 21, afternoon, rue Saint-Benoît.
Y.A. [Yann Andréa]: What would you say for yourself?
M.D.: Duras.
Y.A.: What would you say for me?
M.D.: Unintelligible.
Later, the same afternoon.
Sometimes I am empty for a very long time.
I have no identity.
At first it is frightening. And then it
turns to an impulse of happiness. And then it stops.
Happiness: I mean dead, somewhat.
Somewhat missing from the place where I am speaking.
Later still.
It is a question of time. I shall
write a book.
I want to, but it’s not certain I am
writing this book.
It is aleatory.
November 22, afternoon, rue Saint-Benoît.
Y.A.: Are you afraid of death?
M.D.: I don’t know. I don’t know how to
answer. I don’t know anything anymore
since I’ve reached the sea.
Y.A.: And with me?
M.D.: Before and now it is love between us, between you and me.
Death and love. It will be whatever you want, whatever you are.
Y.A.: Your definition of yourself?
M.D.: I don’t know, just as right now
I don’t know what to write.
Y.A.: Which of your books do you prefer to all the rest?
M.D.: The Sea Wall, childhood.
Y.A.: And you’ll go to paradise?
M.D.: No. That makes me laugh.
Y.A.: Why?
M.D.: I don’t know. I don’t believe in
such a thing.
Y.A.: And after death, what’s left?
M.D.: Nothing. Except the living who smile, who remember.
Y.A.: Who will remember you?
M.D.: Young readers. Students.
Y.A.: What is on your mind?
M.D.: Writing. A tragic occupation, at least in relation to the
course of life.
I am in that without effort.
Later, the same afternoon.
Y.A.: Do you have a title for the next book?
M.D.: Yes. The vanishing act.
November 23 in Paris, 3 in the afternoon.
I want to talk about someone.
About a man of twenty-five
at the most. He is a beautiful man who wants
to die before being marked by
death.
You loved him.
More than that.
The beauty of his hands,
Yes, that’s right.
His hands which move forward with
the hill—distinct now, bright,
as luminous as a child’s
grace.
I kiss you.
I wait for you the way I wait for
someone who will destroy this failed
grace, gentle and still warm.
Given to you, wholly, with my whole
body, this grace.
Later the same afternoon.
I wanted to tell you
that I loved you.
To shout it.
No more.
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