Bøger udgivet af Seven Stories Press

Highlighting the year's most significant independent journalism--including reports on toxic chemicals, climate disinformation, and union victories--Project Censored's State of the Free Press 2025 illuminates issues and raises voices that the establishment press have throttled. State of the Free Press 2025 shows how independent journalism can promote civic engagement and reconnect people who have otherwise lost interest in sensational "news" that distracts and polarizes us. Balancing critical analysis with optimistic vision, the book's diverse contributors champion press freedom and critical media literacy to hold the powerful accountable and promote a more just and inclusive society. State of the Free Press 2025 is a joint production of The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.

"Prophet. Entertainer. Courtier. Criminal. Revolutionary. Critic. Scholar. Nobody. Context Collapse is the secret history of the poet--from Bronze Age Greece and Renaissance Italy to the cafâes of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, from the creative writing departments of the American Midwest to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Cheekily introducing academic discourse, media studies, cybersemiotics, literary sociology, and heterodox economics into his blank verse study of poetry, Ruby traces the always delicate dance between poets, their publishers, and their audiences, and shows how, time and time again, the social, technological, and aesthetic experiments that appear in poetic language have prefigured radical changes to the ways of life of millions of people. It is precisely to poets to whom we ought to turn to catch a glimpse, as Shelley once put it, of the "gigantic shadows futurity casts on the present.""--

An old New York Catskills hotel is converted into a Reeducation center for star #MeToo offenders in a story full of cunning and craft, double meanings and doppelgangers. A finalist for the Jewish National Book Award strikes again with another brilliant satire--a treat for readers of Philip Roth, Dara Horn, Nathan Englander, and others. Somewhere in the Catskills there's a camp, it's called Camp Jeff. The place is named for Jeffrey Epstein, not that Jeffrey Epstein, this is the good Jeffrey Epstein, a benefactor who wants his name on the building, though the bad one's not entirely irrelevant to this story. Tova Reich's newest novel, on the heels of her award-winning Mother India is a raucous and biting tale of a reeducation camp for alleged sex offenders. Reich's verbal blade is sharp and she slashes with it, but not without the sensitivity that such incisiveness requires. Camp Jeff is a work in Reich's signature satirical mode, an unhindered indictment of both #MeToo and therapeutic culture, and at the same time is also a deeply considered work of psychological portraiture and an examination of love, faith, and affection in American culture.

A gorgeously illustrated picture book for adults—with two gatefold pages inside—by Nobelist Olga Tokarczuk and illustrator Joanna Concejo, creators of The Lost SoulA devastating putdown of our self-obsessed, superficial social media culture.Mr. Distinctive has a memorable, attractive face. He only has to walk down the street, and everyone turns to smile at him. Once he starred in a TV commercial and was praised and congratulated for having a face that sold the product well. Mr. Distinctive is very pleased with himself and loves to take selfies with his cellphone. He posts countless images of himself that are shared all over the internet.One day Mr. Distinctive looks in the mirror and sees that his features have begun to fade, his face has changed into a blur. With every new photo he posts, his distinctiveness dwindles. Determined to regain his flawlessly beautiful face and the adoration it brought him, Mr. Distinctive seeks out an extreme solution. But are the lengths he goes in order to restore his sense of being unique and exceptional worth it?In their new story, the creators of The Lost Soul—Nobel prize in literature winner Olga Tokarczuk and illustrator Joanna Concejo—show us a world of obsession with personal appearance and self-promotion, where happiness is an imperative, and the cult of youth rules.

"Ana is eleven when the Soviet soldiers send her from Bucovina, Romania, to Kazakhstan. She is just one of many forced to leave behind her home and make the three week long journey via train. The trip is a harsh, humiliating one, but in spite of the cold and the closeness of death, life persists in the boxcar in the form of storytelling, riddles, and ritual. Years later, Ana recalls her childhood for her great granddaughter, who is considering moving her to a nursing home. Her story, told with unflinching candor, is a chronicle of a life lived during a time of great political and national change, a story of an existence defined and curtailed by lines drawn on a map. The narration is interspersed with songs that transform into poems, and prayers spoken in the past that become prayers in the present. What links the narration is not so much a plot as it is the reader's astonishment. How could Ana survive such a series of experiences, and do so with her mind and heart intact? A history of cruelty and trauma lies behind the banal markers of contemporary life. These realizations combine in the central theme of the book, one which the narrator describes as, "stories bring you youth.""--

"Regardless of where we were born, how much we have, what we believe or think, or our age or the color of our skin, we all deserve to live with satisfaction, justice and freedom. There are so many different kinds of human rights-civil rights, rights for workers, children and LGBTQ+ people, the rights to go to school and to a clean environment, the right to think freely and practice the religion of your choice. Human Rights is an oversized and vibrant visual book full of timelines and definitions and mini-bios that explains all there is to know about our human rights and the laws and doctrines that protect them"--

"Love and death cohabit in The Use of Photography as in no other major work by Annie Ernaux. First published in France in 2005, the book recounts a passionate love affair between Ernaux and the journalist and author Marc Marie, after the two met in January 2003. Ernaux had been receiving intensive chemo for breast cancer during the prior three months, and had lost all her hair from the treatments. At the end of January she had surgery, followed by radiation therapy. The affair took place in different locations and Ernaux describes how, shortly after it began, she found herself entranced each morning by the sight of clothes strewn about, chairs out of place and the remains of their last meal of the evening still on the table-and how painful it felt to put things back in order afterward. She went and got her camera, and began to take photographs of the scenes of disarray. When she told Marc Marie what she had done, he said he had felt the same desire"--

"An Irish-American family comes to life in this first novel by actor and independent filmmaker Ed Burns. The book opens at a wake, as our twelve-year-old narrator, an aspiring writer, takes in the death of his beloved grandfather, Pop, a larger-than-life figure to him. The overflowing crowd includes sandhogs in their muddy work boots, old Irish biddies in black dresses and cops in uniform, along with the family in mourning. There's an open casket, the first time he's seen a dead person. Later, at the bar across the street, he tells a story to the assembled crowd about the day his dad proposed to his mom, and how he almost got beat up by her brothers for it, and then how Pop made him propose twice. His mom calls him "Kneenie," and with her husband and older son Tommy lost to her, he's the best thing she's got. He sees her struggling, but doesn't know how to help-since like his brother and father before him he knows he'll also abandon her soon enough. Stories cascade between the prior generation's colorful origins in the Bronx and the softer world of the Long Island town of Gibson, where the family lives now. There are scenes in the Rockaways, at Belmont Race Track, and in Montauk. Out of individual struggles a collective warmth emerges, a certain kind of American story, raucous and joyous"--

"The Fidel Castro Reader begins with Fidel's famous courtroom defense ("History will Absolve Me"), includes his speech on learning of Che Guevara's death in Bolivia, his analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Fidel Castro demonstrates here his intellectual genius and his lifelong commitment to the Cuban revolution as well as his observations about events elsewhere in the world"--

A fascinating deep dive into Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre and legacy, illuminating his unique perspective on environmental stewardship and our shared connections as humans, Earthlings, and stardust.Vonnegut’s major apocalyptic trio—Cat’s Cradle, Slapstick, and Galápagos—prompt broad global, national, and species-level thinking about environmental issues through dramatic and fantastic scenarios. This book tells the story of the origins and legacy of what Kurt Vonnegut understood as “planetary citizenship” and explores key roots, influences, literary techniques, and artistic expressions of his interest in environmental activism through his writing.Vonnegut saw writing itself as an act of good citizenship, as a way of “poisoning” the minds of young people “with humanity . . . to encourage them to make a better world.” Often that literary activism meant addressing real social and environmental problems—polluted water, soil, and air; the plasticization of cultures and lives; racial and economic injustice; isolating and dehumanizing technologies; and lives and landscapes desolated by war. Vonnegut’s remedies took many forms, from the redemptive power of the arts to artificial extended families to vital communities and engaged democracies. Reminding us of our shared connections as humans, as Earthlings, as stardust, Lucky Mud helps fans, scholars, and book lovers of all kinds experience how Vonnegut’s writings offer whole Earth, interstellar, and species-level perspectives and purposely challenge readers to think, create, and love.

"A literary, unabashedly wicked, revealing montage of Gary Indiana's life-from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to the Haight-Ashbury in the post-summer-of-love era, to the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, a stint living in Havana, Cuba, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Here is his fierce writing style, his merciless eye trained on himself this time, a mixture of humor, philosophy and gut-wrenching realism that defies easy categorization"--

"On September 13, 2022, a young Iranian student, Mahsa Amini, was arrested by the morality police in Tehran. Her only crime was that she wasn't properly wearing the headscarf required for women by the Islamic Republic. At the police station, she was beaten so badly she had to be taken to the hospital, where she fell into a deep coma. She died three days later. A wave of protests soon spread through the whole country, and crowds adopted the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom"-words that have been chanted around the world during solidarity rallies. In order to tell the story of this major revolution happening in her homeland, Marjane Satrapi has gathered together an array of journalists, activists, academics, artists, and writers from around the world to create this powerful collection of full-color, graphic-novel-style essays and perspectives that bear witness. Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrates that this is not an unexpected movement, but a major uprising in a long history of women who have wanted to affirm their rights. It will continue"--

"In Breaking the Curse, Alex DiFrancesco takes their own crushing experiences of assault, addiction, and transphobic violence as the starting point for a journey to self-reclamation. Reeling in the aftermath of a rape that played out as painfully in public as in private, DiFrancesco begins to pursue spirituality in earnest, searching for an ancestral connection to magic as a form of protection and pathway to transformation. Propelled by a knowledge of the spiritual role of the transgender person in society, Alex winds through Cleveland and Brooklyn and Philly-from rehab and pagan AA meetings and friends' spare mattresses to tarot readers and books about Italian witchcraft to daily ritual, prayer, altar-making, and folk tradition. In so doing, they begin to not only piece together a way to heal but also call into existence a life that finally feels worth living. Breaking the Curse weaves spells, blasphemous novenas, and personal memories to imagine a new memoir form. Speaking about trauma does not always take its power away, DiFrancesco reminds us, but one can write their truth so that the hurt no longer fills the whole horizon"--

With impressive literary power, the acclaimed historical novelist and critic Robert Graves tells the story of the tragic and eventful life of Marie Powell, who, at the age of sixteen, was pushed into marrying the man who was England's greatest epic poet--and knew it--John Milton. "A thumping good read." --E.M. Forster At the age of sixteen, Mary Powell marries poet John Milton. Their marriage, which plays out during the English Civil War, is not one of love, but rather a practical arrangement that proves to be a devastating mismatch of temperaments and convictions. Her Royalist sympathies and his ardent parliamentarianism, her independence, and his austere way of life, 1640s England is a hotbed of clashing ideologies and so too is this marriage. The story, which unfolds in Marie's sensitive and searching journals, is a scathing portrait of one of England's most famous poets, a story of literary ambition and masculine egoism, and, like all of Graves' historical novels, a monumental achievement of closely watched history. One the one hand, this is a tender story of the romance Marie Powell found outside the walls of her tyrannical husband's house. On the other it is also a brilliant account of one of the most breathtaking epochs in English history, when that kingdom was ravaged by a bloody civil war and the tides of fortune swayed from one to the other side of the opposing camps--the King against his parliament, tyranny against freedom--culminating in the dramatic execution of Charles I, and the establishment of a republic.

The incredible tale of a little game that shook the international gaming world--now with new material including a behind-the-scenes look at the sale to Microsoft.For this second edition, the story has been enriched with more Minecraft than ever--a new section describes Minecraft's sale to Microsoft, Notch's less than heartwarming last day in the office, and Mojang's final days of independence. His whole life, all Markus Persson wanted to do was create his own games. Create his own games and get rich. Then in 2009 a strange little project of his quickly grew into a worldwide phenomenon and, in just a few short years, turned its maker into an international icon. Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything is a Cinderella story for the Internet age--improbable success, fast money, and the power of digital technology to shake up a rock-solid industry. It's a story about being lost and finding your way, of breaking the rules and swimming against the current. It's about how the indie gaming scene rattled the foundations of corporate empires. But, above all, this is the story of how a creative genius chased down a crazy dream: the evolution of a shy amateur programmer into a video game god.

In 1987, the death of Ben Linder, the first American killed by President Reagan's "freedom fighters" -- the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras -- ignited a firestorm of protest and debate. In this landmark first biography of Linder, investigative journalist Joan Kruckewitt tells his story. In the summer of 1983, a 23-year-old American named Ben Linder arrived in Managua with a unicycle and a newly earned degree in engineering. In 1986, Linder moved from Managua to El Cuá, a village in the Nicaraguan war zone, where he helped form a team to build a hydroplant to bring electricity to the town. He was ambushed and killed by the Contras the following year while surveying a stream for a possible hydroplant. In 1993, Kruckewitt traveled to the Nicaraguan mountains to investigate Linder's death. In July 1995. she finally located and interviewed one of the men who killed Ben Linder, a story that became the basis for a New Yorker feature on Linder's death. Linder's story is a portrait of one idealist who died for his beliefs, as well as a picture of a failed foreign policy, vividly exposing the true dimensions of a war that forever marked the lives of both Nicaraguans and Americans.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Title of 2011 In Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, readers follow a man who wishes not to be followed, a man who, after a series of personal and professional disasters, finds himself lying on a rain-soaked road in the desolate, treeless Faroe Islands, population only a few thousand, a wad of bills in his pocket and no memory of how he had come to be there. From there, Brage Award-winning author and playwright Johan Harstad's debut novel--previously published to great success in eleven countries with its first English-language appearance in June 2011--tells the story of Mattias, a thirty-something gardener living in Stavanger, Norway, whose idol is Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon: the man who was willing to stand in Neil Armstrong's shadow in order to work, diligently and humbly, for the success of the Apollo 11 mission. Through Harstad's "delectably light but nonetheless impactful prose . . . [t]he novel's finest moments wrap you up in communion with Mattias, as if you are spending a quiet afternoon with an old friend, chatting but mostly thinking" (Three Percent). Surrounded by a vivid and memorable cast of characters--aspiring pop musicians, Caribbean-obsessed psychologists, death-haunted photographers, girls who dream of anonymous men falling in love with them on bus trips, and even Buzz Aldrin himself--"Harstad combines formal play and linguistic ferocity with a searing emotional directness" (Dedi Felman, Words Without Borders) to bring Mattias to the realization that he cannot always blend into the background.

"Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life. Over the course of twelve sessions, Cara recounts her tempestuous love affairs, her alternately biting and loving relationships with her neighbor Lulu and her sister Angela, her struggles with debt, gentrification and loss, and, eventually, what really happened between her and her estranged son, Fernando. As Cara confronts her darkest secrets and regrets, we see a woman buffeted by life but still full of fight."--Provided by publisjer.

In City of Widows, Haifa Zangana tells the story of her country, from the early twentieth century through the US-UK invasion and the current occupation. She brings to light a sense of Iraq as a society mainly of secularists who have been denied, through years of sanctions, war, and occupation, a systemwithin which to build the country according to their own values. She points to the long history of political activism and social participation of Iraqi women, and the fact that, before the recent invasion, they had been among the most liberated of their gender in the Middle East. Finally, she writes aboutBaghdad today as a city populated by bereaved women and children who have lost their loved ones and their land, but who are still emboldened by the native right to resist and liberate themselves to create an independent Iraq.

The first young adult book about the great writer and social justice activist plunges us into the heart of Victor Hugo's fierce fight against the death penalty. A new addition to the "They Said No" series.The guillotine. When Victor Hugo was a child in early 1800s France, it was common to walk down the street and see a petty thief or vagrant beheaded at the guillotine. It was a brutal punishment and also a public spectacle. Hugo was sickened and haunted by these public executions. For him, no man has the right or the power to end the life of another, whatever the crime committed.Hugo was a poet and novelist, author of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame among many others. But equally important to him was his work that protected life, like his book The Last Day of a Condemned Man, which allowed readers to understand what it might feel like to contemplate one's impending death. He also led a fight to save an assassin named Tapner: he had "declared war on the guillotine."Many activists have taken up the fight to end the death penalty. And much progress has been made around the world. Yet many countries--China, Iran, Egypt, the United States and many others--despite calls from those around the world who continue to say no, still allow the death penalty as a form of state-sanctioned punishment.

"Founded by Odile Hellier in 1982, The Village Voice Bookshop in Paris was a hub for anglophone literary life and a meeting place for French, American and English literati for over three decades. Hellier's collective memoir brings to life authors, publishers, and friends of the bookshop, and it narrates some of the most important reflections and debates of 20th century literary history. She has mined decades of archival footage to present anecdotes and insight from the spontaneous exchanges of literary and cultural icons like Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Jim Harrison, Barry Gifford, Raymond Carver, Adrienne Rich, David Sedaris, Amy Tan, Edmund White, Art Speigelman, Stephen Spender, and so many other shining lights. Village Voices is a life-long curatorial project by a bookseller trying to preserve the history of her much-loved bookstore. Her historical archive is an enduring conversation across time"--

A follow up to the book Roy's World, which inspired the documentary directed by Rob Christopher narrated by Lili Taylor, Matt Dillon and Willem Dafoe, this novel is a tribute to his mother Kitty and the gritty Chicago landscape of his youth.This book is about the “ghost years, that time in your life you don’t know won’t never come again,” as Mrs. Cunningham tells Roy and her son, Tommy. Barry Gifford has been writing the story of America in acclaimed novel after acclaimed novel for the last half-century. Almost all of Ghost Years takes place in the 1950s, and Giffort takes on a difficult time in his personal life as he examines the lives of women in that period—the suppression, the lack of opportunities, the dependency on men.

"Two sisters, Leokadia and Helena, nearing the end of their lives, live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. With summer in the air, they share memories of their youth, together with their fellow residents. Theirs are no ordinary stories but those of Auschwitz and its aftermath. Helena, at the age of twelve, was a darling of the notorious doctor Josef Mengele, the real-life Nazi officer and physician who was known as the "angel of death" for the experiments he conducted on prisoners, including twins and siblings."--

Nobel Prize winner José Saramago tells a quiet and poetic story, an excerpt from his book Small Memories, of a lasting childhood experience of simple, soulful joy. The narrator's memories of a lost childhood paradise focus on two glorious days when he helped his uncle take some piglets to the market in Santarém. They traverse dusty roads, sleep in a barn and awake to a miraculous moonglow, and hear the animals in their “infinite conversations.” The journey, the night, the wind, the light. . . . This poetic story is an unforgettable adventure narrated by José Saramago and presented alongside Armando Fonseca’s fanciful and evocative illustrations.A very special gift for readers of all ages.

"This collection is classic Nader-exhorting us to make our world and nation a better place, even when faced with unchecked political and corporate power, and perverse market and regulatory incentives. He starts with the declaration that the national Democratic Party bureaucrats are either inept or bewildered. With its record-setting campaign fundraising, he bemoans how the Party can't seem to figure out how to go on the offensive against the overtly lying, cruel, corrupt, law-breaking, Wall Street over Main Street, Trumpian Republican Party. In another essay he praises Canada, explaining that the majority of citizens love their health care system-Medicare-for-all, free choice of doctor and hospital, everybody in, nobody out and far less expensive with better outcomes overall. Highlighting heroes like Pete Seeger, Wendell Berry, the journalist Helen Thomas, Nader also celebrates citizens like the lesser-known charismatic George S. Hawkins, general manager of the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority who brought immense energy, vision, and ambitious, overdue plans to the forefront for American's public drinking water. Meanwhile, he doesn't shy away from enemies-for example Nader slams the evils of Big Pharma's strength and hold over Congress and infinite greed. Nader also brings American history to the present day with creative twists. "We need to remember Ben Franklin, our frugal forebear, who coined the phrase 'a penny saved is a penny earned, '" he writes. "Today he would say 'a trillion BTUs saved is a trillion BTUs earned.'" Ranging from hernia repair to auto safety reports and warnings about lethal super-bugs and global pandemics from 2013, Nader's essays and newspaper columns will inform and activate his legions of fans"--

"Simpatâia is set in the Venezuela of Nicolas Maduro amid a mass exodus of the intellectual class who have been leaving their pets behind. Ulises Kan, the protagonist and a movie buff, receives a text message from his wife, Paulina, saying she is leaving the country (and him). Ulises is not heartbroken but liberated by Paulina's departure. Two other events end up disrupting his life even further: the return of Nadine, an unrequited love from the past, and the death of his father-in-law, General Martâin Ayala. Thanks to Ayala's will, Ulises discovers that he has been entrusted with a mission - to transform Los Argonautas, the great family home, into a shelter for abandoned dogs. If he manages to do it in time, he will inherit the luxurious apartment that he had shared with Paulina. This novel centers on themes of family and orphanhood in order to address the abuse of power by a patrilineage of political figures in Latin America, from Simâon Bolâivar to Hugo Châavez. The untranslatable title, Simpatâia, which means both sympathy and charm, ironically references the qualities these political figures share. In a morally bankrupt society, where all human ties seem to have dissolved, Ulises is like a stray dog picking up scraps of sympathy. Can you really know who you love? What is, in essence, a family? Are abandoned dogs proof of the existence or non-existence of God? Ulises unknowingly embodies these questions, as a pilgrim of affection in a post-love era"--

In this signature yearly report, Human Rights Watch will document and address human rights abuses in more than 100 countries, plus a keynote essay by executive director Tirana Hassan.

"In a desert dotted with war-torn towns, Lâazaro and Juan are two soldiers from opposing camps who abandon the war and, while fleeing, become lovers and discover a dark truth. Vicente Barrera, a salesman who swept into the lives of women who both hated and revered him, spends his last days tied up like a mad dog. A morgue worker, Salvador, gets lost in the desert and mistakes the cactus for the person he loves. Over the echoes of the stories of these broken men--and of their mothers, lovers and companions--Mendoza explores her characters' passions in a way that simmers on the page, and then explodes with pain, fear and desire in a landscape that imprisons them ... Clyo Mendoza has written a novel of extraordinary beauty where language embarks on a hallucinatory trip through eroticism, the transitions of conscience, and the possibility of multiple beings inhabiting a single body. In this journey through madness, incest, sexual abuse, infidelity, and silence, Fury offers a moving questioning of the complexity of love and suffering. The desert is where these characters' destinies become intertwined, where their wounds are inherited and bled dry"--

"American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation--the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth--and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It's endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. ... [In this book,] ... McQuade shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it with practical solutions to strengthen the public, media, and truth-based politics"