The end of Roe is coming - how will you prepare?

September 25

by Seven Stories Press and Robin Marty

(Photo credit: Robin Marty, 2016)

With the recent passing of icon and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the end of Roe v. Wade is almost guaranteed. Prior to Ginsburg’s death, the constitutional right to an abortion already rested completely within the hands of Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointed by President George W. Bush. If the Senate pushes through a nominee before Inauguration Day, Roe can be overturned even without Roberts’ vote. A Democratic win and nominee could potentially hold status quo, but only if Roberts decides to uphold precedent – and his actions on other cases don’t bode well in that regard.

Even now, with abortion technically legal, we’ve seen an increase in pregnant people using the tools they know best to try to access abortions. Requests for money, medical advice, even abortion pills themselves are proliferating on social media channels like Facebook and Reddit even today. When Roe is gone and approximately two dozen states make providing an abortion illegal, that number will balloon.

In order to ensure that people are able to access abortion both today and in the future, Seven Stories Press is releasing an early excerpt from The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, the second edition of Robin Marty’s 2019 publication. In this excerpt, Marty provides a list of best practices for using social media to obtain abortion information while trying to maintain privacy from friends and family, legal observers, and anti-abortion activists. The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America will be on the shelves in March, 2021.

Seeking Abortion Help On Social Media - Tips

Maybe you have decided that you simply cannot access an abortion without help online? You aren’t alone. Since 2019, a proliferation of online social media outlets sprung up with the express goal of helping strangers on the internet find information, support, and most often the money to get care. On Facebook these groups are often referred to by names like the Janes, or Abortion Support, and they are also quite active on Reddit in channels like /r/abortion.

If you choose to go to a Reddit page there are a number of ways you can protect yourself and still get the information or assistance you want, without giving away your identity.

1. Do a thorough search. If you are looking for information about clinics, supports, laws, experiences, try to search for similar posts first rather than create something new.

2. Make a throw away account. Use a completely new name and email, and nothing that is associated with your identity or current location or other details)

3. Make your post as vague as possible. Try not to give any details you don’t need to give. Mention a state or region rather than a city. Avoid your age or race. Never mention an employer or even an industry. Every bit of information you release could make it possible for someone to figure out who you are and puts your privacy (and your safety) at risk.

4. Ignore anyone who isn’t helping. You don’t need to read troll comments or respond to people in your messages if you don’t want to. If they aren’t helping, just report, trash and ignore.

5. Delete it when you are done. People forget that Reddit (and a lot of the internet itself) is forever. If you got what you needed – or you didn’t but a lot of time has passed – delete your post and walk away.

Trying to get information – or especially financial or logistical assistance – on Facebook is a much more complicated endeavor. If you need support in obtaining an abortion, first of all know that you can contact any local abortion fund in your area and they will provide you with all of the information you would need, as well as help you find any financial support required – all while keeping your identity completely private.

However, if you do have a reason that you prefer to seek abortion information and support through Facebook, here are some tips that you should keep in mind while using Facebook abortion groups for assistance:

1. Consider setting up a new account. A new ID on Facebook, just like a throw away account for Reddit, is the easiest way to protect your privacy. Do not use any real world identifying details – including photos – if you do this.

2. Lock down your privacy settings. If you are using your real account in order to join groups and post messages, Make sure that all of your privacy settings are locked down. Click on “Settings” in the right hand drop down menu, then on “Privacy” in the left column on the next page. Change your settings to make sure that only your friends can see your friends list, so no one potentially contacts your friends or family to tell them about your activities. Then go to Manage Profile and make sure your email, phone number, and any other info is only available to friends. Make your photos private so they cannot be used by others. Remove your workplace if necessary in order to protect yourself in case someone tries to contact your employer. Make sure all posts on your page are set to “friends” rather than “public.” And finally, go double check and see what your page looks like to someone you haven’t friended. You can do that by clicking on the three dots beneath your cover photo and hitting “view as.”

3. If asking for money, consider a passthrough account or a throwaway account. Many people are using Facebook groups to try to crowdsource expenses ranging from emergency contraception to the procedure itself. If you are going to attempt to crowdsource for funding (something that in a just world wouldn’t need to happen at all), consider reaching out to someone you trust to act as the go between to protect your own privacy. If you do it yourself, look for an online banking app that you haven’t used before and set up a new account (think Cashapp or Venmo rather than your usual Paypal account). If you do use an already existing account, remember that for many people their Paypal is often their email, too, which opens you up to possible abuse or unwanted interaction. Meanwhile, if you use your Venmo account, make sure you turn the transactions to private so your contacts don’t see what the money is being used for.

4. Move it to a more secure forum. Facebook is a VERY easy place for authorities to access information. If you suspect that your conversation could get you into legal trouble, take it to a secure place like a phonecall or text on Signal. And absolutely be completely sure you trust the person on the other end.

5. Delete and leave. Just like Reddit, do your post, get what help you need, and then delete your post and go. If it was on a fake new account, deactivate it. If it was on your real account, leave the group afterward. The less of a trail you leave the better.

6. Sadly, be prepared for some abuse. Not content with putting themselves in front of patients trying to access abortion in clinics, anti-abortion protesters and abortion opponents have decided to also infiltrate online groups in an effort to coerce people out of abortions there, too. This is one of the reasons it is so important to try to lock down all of your privacy settings before posting. If someone begins harassing you online, either on your posts of through your direct messages, try to report them and ignore them. You don’t owe anyone your reasons or your attention.

Behold, our Holiday Gift Guide for all of your Holiday Gifting needs.

Explore this year's holiday gift guide with everything you need for those hard-to-please loved ones... and it's all 30% off (40% off for newsletter subscribers. Not a subscriber yet? Sign up here)!

The perfect excuse to grab yourself a little present too :)

GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ADULTS

GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR KIDS

GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR TEENS

November 21

Introducing Triangle Square Book Clubs!

Triangle Square Book Clubs: Radical books for radical kids

Triangle Square Book Clubs are monthly kids’ book subscriptions focused on highlighting social justice kids' books and kids' books from around the world.

Whether picture books or chapter books, or people’s history books for tweens, all of the books included in these subscription options promote a radical kindness towards others, and emphasize the importance of standing up for what’s right.

Triangle Square Book Club subscribers receive one (1) book per month over the course of the subscription period, which is typically six or seven months, depending which of the book clubs are selected by the subscriber. The payment method is only charged one time, and the subscription never auto-renews.

To give a Triangle Square Book Club subscription as a gift, simply input the recipient's mailing address on the shipping page during checkout. If you have any questions, send us an email and we'd be happy to help.

THE KID ACTIVIST BOOK CLUB

Books for future changemakers

For readers ages 4-8

Six picture books that emphasize the power of community and promote a radical kindness towards others: Abolition is Love, 10,000 Dresses, T ogether, Grandpa Stops a War, The Wedding Portrait, and Oh! The Things We’re For.

SUBSCRIBE TO KID ACTIVIST BOOK CLUB

THE GLOBAL KID LIT BOOK CLUB

Picture books from around the world

For readers ages 4-8

Six picture books from all over the globe, from countries such as Indonesia, Portugal, Iran, Brazil, and Palestine: The Lizard, The Duel, The Donkey’s Gone!, T he Story of Hurry, My Night in the Planetarium, and The Best Tailor in Pinbaue.

SUBSCRIBE TO GLOBAL KID LIT BOOK CLUB

THE YOUNG COMRADE BOOK CLUB

Books for a better tomorrow

For readers ages 8-12

Six picture books and chapter books that encourage kids to be true to themselves and stand up for what’s right: Sing It!, Stories for Kids Who Want to Save the World, M is for Movement, Trevor, Human Rights, and Atty at Law.

SUBSCRIBE TO YOUNG COMRADE BOOK CLUB

THE WORLD TRAVELER BOOK CLUB

Kids’ books from around the world

For readers ages 8-12

Seven picture books and chapter books from all over the globe, including Portugal, Iceland, Chile, Denmark, and more: An Unexpected Light, Adam and Thomas, The Silence of Water, The Story of the Blue Planet, A Rabbits Rebellion, Zenobia, and Julia and the Triple C.

SUBSCRIBE TO WORLD TRAVELER BOOK CLUB

THE RADICAL HISTORY BOOK CLUB

Thought-provoking books for tweens and teens

For readers ages 10+

The stuff you won’t learn in school — stories of activists, workers, and other changemakers fighting for a better world: A Young People’s History of the United States, A Different Mirror for Young People, Freedom Summer for Young People, 1493 for Young People, Jane Jacobs, Escape ‘56, and Breaking the Chains.

SUBSCRIBE TO RADICAL HISTORY BOOK CLUB

November 13

Excerpt: Camp Jeff by Tova Reich

Out now, Tova Reich’s new novel is a raucous and biting tale of a Catskills reeducation camp for wealthy sex pests, helmed by a wealthy benefactor named Jeffrey Epstein (not that one), who just wants to clear his name.

When Manhattan's preeminent writer manqué, Gershon Gordon, receives a thick envelope containing his acceptance to someplace called Camp Jeffrey Epstein, he’s incredulous. True, his already stagnant career has recently ground to a full stop due to accusations of sexual impropriety, but the disgraced financier is dead, and besides, Gordon hasn’t even applied. Despite his reservations, during a freakish winter heatwave Gordon soon finds himself at a former Borscht Belt hotel in the Catskills, seated among the chosen ten — nine men and one woman — selected as members of the inaugural class of Camp Jeff. He hopes he might at least get a book out of the bizarre program, a luxe experimental therapeutic regimen designed to rehabilitate its campers, all of whom have been laid low by the #MeToo movement.

Written in Reich’s signature satirical mode, Camp Jeff revels in its brazen indictment of contemporary masculinity, elite arrogance, and therapy culture. Her whip-smart dialogue and unsparing pen reveal rather than merely mock: here is a deeply considered work of psychological portraiture and a profound examination of contemporary American culture.

CAMP JEFF BY TOVA REICH

CHAPTER ONE

They called it Camp Jeff, short for Jeffrey Epstein, named in honor of the benefactor who had endowed the famous center in the Catskills for the reeducation of #MeToo offenders caught in the hashtag. At first there was serious resistance to the project, not so much to the idea, which, in general, was deemed salutary, redemptive, but rather to calling it by the donor’s name, thrumming as it did with so much negative resonance. That, however, was the only condition on which this visionary Jeffrey Epstein— the good Jeffrey Epstein—would not budge. He had made his fortune in potions and creams drawn from original recipes passed down through the matrilineal line, into which he had poured every drop of his male energy. With such a background, when it came to women, strong and powerful was his personal preference—he wanted only to be knocked out with awe. Maybe a day would come when the name would become permanently soiled and unusable—like the name Adolf Hitler, for example— but in the meantime, statistically speaking, it was likely that there was more than one man still at large called Jeffrey Epstein. Why should he let himself be robbed of his good name, why should he collude in its defilement due to one rotten carrier? No, he would put the name—his name!—right out there to grab the attention span of the public. It would flash like a beacon cautioning all comers that they, too, could end up like the bad Jeffrey Epstein, swinging from a noose in a jail cell, a suicide or murder victim, take your pick, but at the same time, it would also send the message that not every Jeffrey Epstein has to be a pervert and a deviant. The good Jeffrey Epstein would cleanse the name, he would purify it as with one of his Hungarian bubby’s magic Magyar lotions that kept you forever unblemished. The renewal of the name would be reflected in the renewal, the rehabilitation, of the sinners. He envisioned a network of camps stretching well beyond New York State, beyond the borders of the USA, internationally: Jeffrey Epstein Worldwide—yes, JEW, unfortunately. Because, though nobody dared to utter this out loud as part of the conversation, a disproportionate number of the hashtagged were, as it happened, Jews, like the recipients of the Nobel Prize.

The camps would be situated in the rural outskirts of the great coastal cities bookending the American heartland, and it was anticipated that they would be populated largely by representatives of the fallen leading lights endemic to the particular shining metropolis in the latitude. In the flagship New York Camp Jeff, for example, you already had your respectable concentration of literary and media types, your intellectuals, your finance guys; in the prospective Boston offshoot, you could count on servicing your academics and scientists; in San Francisco, your tech boys; in Los Angeles, titans in The Industry, and so on. But as it turned out, thanks to the mordant humor of the gods, Camp Jeffrey Epstein, the branch in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, remained alone of its kind, one and unique, and consequently, with nothing to rival it, the most prestigious and sought after. The elite of the fallen, in particular its proud intelligentsia—that is, those who were not out-and-out rapists and pimps and traffickers, and who had not actually landed in jail and indeed had not even been fined but instead simply had been publicly shamed while muttering abjectly sorry-sorry-sorry, then instantly removed from whatever lofty position they had occupied, and from polite society in general, as if pincered like a louse between the tips of long steel tweezers, extracted and shunned—every one of these outcasts singled out for reprogramming wanted desperately to get into Camp Jeffrey Epstein New York. Even if it meant enduring the insult of reeducation, especially the demeaning group sessions and other moronic communal requirements, nothing but lowbrow brainwashing, bottom line, refereed by pathetically inferior nobodies no less, it remained their top choice. Competition for acceptance to Camp Jeff, the New York branch, was brutal.

It was located in the swath of the Catskills that in its heyday had been known as the Borscht Belt, in the once-gilded old Lokshin Hotel and Country Club that the good Jeffrey Epstein, patron and philanthropist, a man who prided himself on being endowed with normal domesticated sexual appetites unlike his namesake, had rescued from collapse and abandonment, and set about renovating and refurbishing to meet the highest standards suitable to a rehabilitation center. The fabled attraction of the old hotel, now on the way to a full remodeling, top of the line, was what had been called in the old days the Murray Lokshin Casino and Lounge, honoring the establishment’s visionary founder, where once, in those golden years, the best talent, singers, dancers, and especially comedians, brilliant rising jokers, had been showcased. The former Murray Lokshin Casino and Lounge, now known as the Jeffrey Epstein Social Hall, had been totally reconfigured, thanks to the generosity of the good Jeffrey Epstein, provided with all of the prescribed larger and smaller public and private spaces for the performance of serious therapeutic group dynamics as well as individual self-examination, reflection, healing. Yet in a gracious, truly a nostalgic, nod to the golden days of Jewish immigrant striving and hopefulness, the honorable Jeffrey Epstein had also arranged for a section of the Murray Lokshin Casino and Lounge to be carved out for a cutting-edge theater space called the Zuzi Epstein Playhouse, a tribute to his lost daughter, named for her formidable great-grandmother—the girl who had exited too soon, exercising her right to choose. Upon its stage, inmates, or “campers” as they were called, from the world of entertainment could get up, and as one of them, that wise guy Gershon Gordon, the world-famous literary powerhouse and public intellectual, put it, expose themselves.

Indeed, a good number of the campers were true celebrities whose sojourn at Camp Jeffrey Epstein New York was one of the primary features that made it such a desirable destination for those hashtag degenerates self-channeled to the reeducation track. The acclaimed comedian Arnie Glick, for example, a camper there, was known to venture up onto the Zuzi Epstein Playhouse stage as often as would be tolerated to unload himself of some Glick-shtick to keep in shape for his desperately fantasized comeback. The finale, which every insider breathlessly anticipated, occurred when his co-inmate Gordon would roll up in his wheelchair to the foot of the stage, dressed in his trademark blacks—black sports jacket, black turtleneck, black jeans, the entire ensemble topped by a black velvet yarmulke setting off his signature white bouffant, his hair having gone prematurely, or, better, precociously, white—as the master (who would have found Gordon’s particular head covering most disagreeable) once nailed an ambitious, albeit fictional, Bostonian, also a self-styled writer and intellectual. Thus decked out, Gershon Gordon would boom out, “Shut up already, Arnie Prick,” the entire audience of inmates chanting along in jubilant chorus.

“Oh, Arnie Sick, Arnie Very, Very Sick,” Glick would wail so desolately, so penitently, a living testament to the success of the indoctrination by the mental-health storm troopers to which he had been subjected as an element of the Camp Jeff deprogramming, and he’d go limp and deflate into a puddle right there on the floor of the stage, as if resigning himself to be wiped up and flushed into the sewers, dragged off ignominiously from the wings by a cane hooked into his collar as in the legendary Lokshin days. It was a smashing routine, classic, Gordon and Glick, Vladimir and Estragon. What were they waiting for? With full faith they awaited the day when the nightmare that had ensnared them in the hashtag would come to its inevitable end like every other fad, like every other perverse fanatical craze that had gripped society over the millennia, and real life would resume. On that day they would make their reentry into the newly enlightened world as if emerging from a leper colony, climbing out of a pit crawling with scorpions and snakes, they would go forth together, born again, welcomed and hailed as honored survivors.

At Camp Jeffrey Epstein New York, Gershon Gordon, so gifted, so charming and erudite, trapped by the legend of his own precocity and ambition into a career as eternal prodigy and potential, was acknowledged intellectual royalty; gratefully, Arnie Glick accepted the supporting role of Gordon’s personal fool. The duo were joined by the news anchor Bob Bloom and the talk show host, Bob Blatt, the Two Bobs, fallen media giants dragged out of the tube, their names and faces instantly recognizable in every household across the fruited plains, far surpassing in primetime fame whatever nod had ever been allotted to Gordon or Glick. Together, the four of them made up what Arnie Glick, scarred forever by his high school years, from which he still extracted most of his material, called the Popular Group, the coolest clique on the premises having the most fun right in your face, everyone longed to crash their party. They were the Gang of Four, as the more evolved Gordon dubbed them, the Four Amigos, the leading nutcases in the cuckoo’s nest. Brandishing the power of their quartet, they took sad satisfaction during this dark intermission in their once radiant trajectory on earth in sabotaging the staff of inferiors—the mental-health mafia, therapists of every school, all of them women by birth or choice, including the administrators and the nurses of course, sculpted and toned for those emergencies when fitness and force would be required. All four of them, Gordon and Glick, Bloom and Blatt, were enviably good talkers, that was their trade, it was how they had once earned their living, seduced their benefactors, supported their habits, but here at Camp Jeff, they all deferred to Gershon Gordon, by unspoken consensus Gershon Gordon was their voice. This was because, as Arnie Glick explained, Gershon Gordon got into Camp Jeffrey Epstein due primarily, though not exclusively, to sins he had committed with the so-called harassments that came out of his unzipped Jewish mouth, whereas they, the Two Bobs and Arnie himself, had sinned without foreplay, with the clipped Jewish weapon that suddenly, startlingly, they yanked out of their pants.

November 06

Required Reading: Seven Days of Free eBooks from Seven Stories Press

Over the next seven days, we’re offering free digital copies of some of our more relevant — perhaps even inspiring — works of radical literature. Download a copy, share it with your friends, then read it together.

"Political power," says Howard Zinn, "is controlled by the corporate elite, and the arts are the locale for a kind of guerilla warfare in the sense that guerillas look for apertures and opportunities where they can have an effect."

In Artists in Times of War, Zinn looks at the possibilities to create such apertures through art, film, activism, publishing, and through our everyday lives. In this collection of four essays—three of which are previously unpublished—the author of A People's History of the United States writes about why "to criticize the government is the highest act of patriotism."

This classic manual on repression by revolutionary activist Victor Serge offers fascinating anecdotes about the tactics of police provocateurs and an analysis of the documents of the Tsarist secret police in the aftermath of the Russian revolution.

As we approach the 100th anniversary of Victor Serge’s (1926) classic exposé of political repression, the specter of fear as a tool of political repression is chillingly familiar to us in world increasingly threatened by totalitarianism. Serge’s exposé of the surveillance methods used by the Czarist police reads like a spy thriller. An irrepressible rebel, Serge wrote this manual for political activists, describing the structures of state repression and how to dodge them—including how to avoid being followed, what to do if arrested, and tips on securing correspondence. He also explains how such repression is ultimately ineffective.

“Repression can really only live off fear. But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism…? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak; they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.” —Victor Serge

In early 2004, photographs came to light revealing extensive prisoner abuses, instances of torture, and other war crimes at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib detention center, committed by U.S. military and other government personnel. At the time, the Human Rights Watch confirmed that “the only exceptional aspect of the abuse at Abu Ghraib may have been that it was photographed." It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America's most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison.

In Abolition Democracy, Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI's "most wanted list." She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.

Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing Bush-era disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Born in San Salvador in 1935, Roque Dalton dedicated his life to armed struggle while writing fierce, tender poems about his country and its people. In Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases / Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle, Dalton offers a road map for a liberated El Salvador, writing through the lens of five poetic personas, each with their own imagined history and distinct voice. This collection shows a country caught in the crosshairs of American imperialism, where the few rule the many and the many fight to survive—and yet there is love and humor and self-mockery to be found here on every page, in every verse, as well as an abiding faith in humanity. “I believe the world is beautiful,” Dalton writes, “and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.”

A guide to direct action for those disillusioned with the posturing of liberal “activism.”

The left is losing, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here is the radical’s guide to activist work—the manual we need at this crucial moment to organize for universal human rights, a habitable earth, and a more egalitarian society.

In Volume 1: Building Movements and Fighting to Win, McBay describes the need for resistance movements, and paints a portrait of what a thriving resistance movement might look like today.

Powerful ideas of protest and freedom of expression from the world-renowned Egyptian political prisoner and activist.

Featuring a foreword by Naomi Klein.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, rising to international prominence during the revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa’s written voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade. Collected here for the first time in English are a selection of his essays, social media posts and interviews from 2011 until the present. He has spent the majority of those years in prison, where many of these pieces were written. Together, they present not only a unique account from the frontline of a decade of global upheaval, but a catalogue of ideas about other futures those upheavals could yet reveal. From theories on technology and history to profound reflections on the meaning of prison, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a book about the importance of ideas, whatever their cost.

"If we are to be treated like animals with no agency, so be it. But we shall bypass cattle and livestock, ignore pets and domesticates. We shall look to the lizards, starfish and earthworms— those beings that can regenerate after any injury, no matter how grave. We shall accept that regenerated organs may not be identical to what was lost. They could appear to be mutilated, but look closer and you will see the beauty in monstrosity, for only the monstrous can hold both the history of dreams and hopes, and the reality of defeat and pain together. The monstrous need not forget their old injuries in order to lose their fear of acquiring new ones."

The complete writings of radical leftist and political revolutionary, Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder of the Red Army Faction (RAF), aka. The Baader-Mienhof Gang.

No other figure embodies revolutionary politics and radical chic quite like Ulrike Meinhof, who formed, with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, the RAF, notorious for its bombings and kidnappings of the wealthy in the 1970s. But in the years leading up to her leap into the fray, Meinhof was known throughout Europe as a respected journalist, who informed and entertained her loyal readers with monthly magazine columns.

November 04

Election 2024 Survival Guide: A Reading List

November 01

Monica Cure on translating “Too Great a Sky” by Liliana Corobca

Too Great A Sky, a new novel from Liliana Corobca and her award-winning translator Monica Cure, tells the story of the deportation of Romanians from Bucovina. The protagonist, Ana, is eleven years old 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 story-telling, riddles, and ritual. Years later, Ana recalls her childhood for her great grand-daughter, 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.

In her introductory letter, which you can read below, Monica Cure shares some insight into the process of translating the text, particularly the challenges in rendering into English a narrative interspersed with moments of prayer, folksong, and other lyrical, sometimes ecstatic, often allegorical, frequently idiomatic, sequences of verse.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
BY MONICA CURE

Translating Too Great a Sky, the third novel by Liliana Corobca that I’ve translated, was especially challenging. If while working on The Censor’s Notebook I was exceedingly aware of the possibility that a translator could also be a censor, while translating Too Great a Sky I felt the additional burden of accuracy in bearing witness, especially given the ongoing war in Ukraine. Though it is a fictional story, many of the events and details closely follow the facts of the Soviet deportation of Romanians from what was then part of Romanian Bucovina, now Ukrainian Bukovyna, during World War II. In her academic work, with Dumitru Covalciuc, Corobca edited a volume of over eighty oral histories of survivors entitled The Romanian Golgotha: Testimonies of Bucovinians Deported to Siberia (Golgota românească. Mărturiile bucovinenilor deportați în Siberia, Vestala, 2015). These oral histories and others inform many of the incidents narrated by Ana Blajinschi in the novel.

Bearing witness is difficult and often complicated, a reality that is heightened in this novel. At first, I had no intention of getting overly involved in the “facts” of the story. My engagement started simply enough — I wanted to render the Romanian spellings of foreign words into their most common spellings in English. Almost all place names in the novel are real. I felt that leaving the Russian and Kazakh ones in the Romanian spelling would seem inconsistent with the character Ana having learned Russian and Kazakh as she does in the novel. Finding the Russian and Kazakh names is easy enough for rivers such as the Irtysh and Ob. But then I couldn’t find which steppe the “Anarhai” steppe could be. Liliana sent me the spelling in Cyrillic and luckily a blog post on the writing of Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov came up allowing me to match it to the Anarkhay steppe, which would have been obvious had I been more familiar with that part of the world. Then came Central Asian foods and customs. Without having intended to, I found myself looking up every unfamiliar word, place, and name. In the process of doing so, I noticed several discrepancies that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Fortunately, Liliana and I have a collaborative working relationship as well as a friendship. We cross-checked Central Asian details with information that could be found online. We found the names of dishes that more closely resembled their descriptions in the novel. We changed the name of the Kyrgyz teacher, again thanks to Chingiz Aitmatov. We made it clearer that people from that part of the steppe happened not to have a ready supply of apples rather than never having heard of them, a detail that had come from the testimony of a deportee to Siberia rather than Kazakhstan.

I could have chalked up any errors to Ana Blajinschi not understanding certain words at the time of her deportation when she was eleven, or to her forgetting or confusing things in her old age while explaining them to her great-granddaughter in the novel’s present tense. But I realized I wanted Ana’s account to be as accurate as possible so long as Liliana felt the same way that I did and agreed with the changes. Ana as a character is somewhat otherworldly at the same time as she is very human — I wanted errors to be anyone’s but hers, even as I recognized no memory or testimony is perfect.

I also knew that Ana’s story, while based on real events, is fiction and that this is a source of power in the book. The emotions come from the way the story is told, how it draws the reader close. Though I was tempted to consult a Kazakh language specialist, I limited myself to imposing only once on the writer Maria Rybakova, who was living in Kazakhstan at the time, to help me find an appropriate word in Kazakh that could sound like an insult in English, since the word had to be changed from the Romanian version regardless. I’m grateful for her assistance in polling thirty people for options. Moreover, though I researched every unfamiliar word, I thought including notes would detract from the story (a decision supported by the editors at Seven Stories). Often, I added a couple words of description to Romanian words I left untranslated, such as cojoc and sarmale, to help readers without distracting them from the story. These changes were easier to make because Ana often explains things to her great-grand-daughter rather than simply narrating them.

The songs included in the novel were based on songs actually composed by deportees and sung by survivors. Corobca found them in the journal The Land of the Beeches (Ţara Fagilor) dedicated to the history and culture of Romanians in that area. She altered them slightly when writing them into the narrative and I was somewhat more liberal in my translation. For most of the songs I prioritized a folksy tone and rhyme, or at least half-rhymes. The only song fragments for which I adamantly created a regular meter were the songs the deportees danced to when they got off the train.

Liliana also read a range of religious books in preparation for writing the novel since several of the main characters, especially Ana Blajinschi, are marked by their Christian faith. In some ways this aspect was less of a challenge for me since my grandfather had been a Romanian Baptist pastor who had been imprisoned for his faith in the early years of the communist regime and so the language of Christian faith was already very familiar to me. In several of the prayers I preserved what may seem to be awkward syntax since it accurately depicts the rhythm of extemporaneous spoken prayer, with the common interjection of the word “Lord.” Specifically Orthodox aspects, which show up in the novel in layered ways, were less familiar to me. A troiță is a large wooden or stone cross set up at crossroads or to mark an event, but Troiță de Sus is also the (fictional) name of the village in Moldova where Ana settles, and de sus can be translated either simply as “upper” in geographic usage or as “from above” in a metaphorical sense. Part Three was entitled “Troiță de Sus” in Romanian and we decided that the most important meaning to keep was “roadside crosses,” especially since Ana had just shared the memory of the invisible crosses she saw along the train tracks.

Throughout the novel, Orthodox and folk practices and beliefs are often intertwined, as they continue to be in reality, especially in rural areas. Liliana collected many of the folk beliefs present in the novel during fieldwork in her own village in Moldova, especially those mentioned in the book during the burial ritual performed with words on the train. Ana’s last names also hold both religious and spiritual connotations. Her maiden name is Zeiţă, which means “goddess,” while her married name, Blajinschi, and its affectionate diminutives (Blajinica, Blajina, and Blajâna), has at its root the word blajin. The word means a combination of gentle, peaceful, kind, and forgiving, which calls to mind Christian virtues. The gentle mother in the train and Anton, Ana’s husband, are described using this word as well. But blajin can also refer to fairy-like creatures from Romanian folklore, also called Rohmani, as Ana notes. The syncretism of Orthodox and pre-Christian beliefs is especially present in the day in which the dead are honored, which I translate here as the “Feast of the Peaceful,” but a literal alternate translation could be the “Easter of the Blajins.”

Too Great a Sky is comprised of countless liminal spaces: between heaven and earth, both literally and metaphorically; different peoples; different languages, including words in Russian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uyghur, Polish, and Karakalpak; and different eras. Passages about various sewing machines and fabrics, and the process of manually preparing hemp, make sense in the context of Ana’s desire to bridge the gap between past and present. In telling her story to her great-granddaughter, Ana is both witness and translator. The further apart the spaces are, the more challenging the translation is, but also the more rewarding.

—Monica Cure
Bucharest, April 2024

MONICA CURE is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright grant award winner. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she’s the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her first published full-length translation, her 2022 translation of The Censor's Notebook, was awarded with the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.

October 25

Gary Indiana (1950 - 2024)

Gary Indiana, photographed by Hedi El Kholti

REMEMBERING GARY INDIANA
(1950 - 2024)

It is with great sorrow that we share the news that novelist, essayist, critic and literary icon Gary Indiana has died at age 74. Below, you will find a video from our last event with him, the launch of our recent reissue of I Can Give You Anything But Love, in which Gary reads from the book and shares some stories about his so-called anti-memoir. Watching it now, after his passing, we’re struck by the grace with which Gary oscillates between his biting wit and sardonic sense of humor, and a real tenderness that emerges when you least expect it. He was, as always, determined to not let anyone get too comfortable in their assumptions about him, about literature, about writing as a whole. We will miss him dearly.

Below that video, we've also included some links to some beautiful tributes from our friends at Frieze, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and more.

GARY INDIANA was a novelist and critic who chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From Horse Crazy (1989, reissued in 2018 by Seven Stories Press), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), "a desolate frieze of New York's aging bohemians" (n+1), Indiana's novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire. With 1997's Resentment: A Comedy, Indiana began his true crime trilogy, following up with Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999) and Depraved Indifference (2002). Together, the three novels show the most vicious crimes in our nation's history to be only American pathologies personified. In 2015, he published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love (reissued in paperback by Seven Stories Press in 2024) and later the novel Gone Tomorrow (reissued in 2018 by Seven Stories Press). A renowned writer with a historic tenure as the art critic at the Village Voice, Gary Indiana is also the author of the essay collections Vile Days (2018) and Fire Season (Seven Stories Press, 2022), among others. Called one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today" by the London Review of Books, "the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society" by Jamaica Kincaid, and "one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche" by the Guardian, Gary Indiana was a writer who was both inimitable and impossible to pin down. Gary Indiana passed away on October 24, 2024 after a long battle with cancer.

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* We love all of our children equally, of course. These are just some books we're really digging at the moment.

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A Kid from Marlboro Road by Edward Burns A Kid from Marlboro Road is a coming of age novel that is plainspoken and holy for its love of fragile family bonds and the places where the form, set in and around New York City and Long Island.

Fury by Clyo Mendoza Fury, a novel of ghosts that evokes the legendary classic of modern Mexican literature, Pedro Páramo, without actually imitating it. Steeped in indigenous Mexican culture, a stunning debut novel by the young Mexican poet Clyo Mendoza.

Global Justice: Three Essays on Liberation and Socialism by Ernesto Che Guevara Global Justice is the perfect, short Che book (80 pages) to get your younger cousin who just started sharing Luigi Mangione memes.

“This is just fucking sonnets, Cat”—Imogen Binnie, author of Nevada

The Duel by Inês Viegas Oliveira Circuses and marching bands instead of anger and fighting? I'm in. And the illustrations? Not surprisingly the NY Times called them "dazzling."

Fury by Clyo Mendoza A hallucinatory fever dream of love and violence that will leave you wanting more from this young, very talented Mexican poet and novelist. Wow.

REMEMBERING PETER WESTBROOK

(April 16, 1952 – November 29, 2024)

The title of his book, Harnessing Anger, says it all. To paraphrase: We’re not perfect, we’re human, and we may have enormous reservoirs of anger in us. So harnessing anger can be the great weapon that we turn into a force for good.

Pete himself could be a two-edged sword: quick to respond, alert, always in the moment, ready to pounce or pull back, gentle and hard. And his art, in life as in fencing, was to redirect the different emotions he was capable of into positive action.

We lost a true humanitarian, a consummate sportsman and a towering figure in fencing when Peter Westbrook died last week.

—Dan Simon

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Triangle Square Book Clubs: Radical books for radical kids

Triangle Square Book Clubs are monthly kids’ book subscriptions focused on highlighting social justice kids' books and kids' books from around the world.

Whether picture books or chapter books, or people’s history books for tweens, all of the books included in these subscription options promote a radical kindness towards others, and emphasize the importance of standing up for what’s right.

To give a Triangle Square Book Club subscription as a gift, simply input the recipient's mailing address on the shipping page during checkout. If you have any questions, send us an email and we'd be happy to help.

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CAMP JEFF BY TOVA REICH

CHAPTER ONE

Over the next seven days, we’re offering free digital copies of some of our more relevant — perhaps even inspiring — works of radical literature. Download a copy, share it with your friends, then read it together.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE BY MONICA CURE

—Monica Cure Bucharest, April 2024

Gary Indiana, photographed by Hedi El Kholti

REMEMBERING GARY INDIANA (1950 - 2024)

Below that video, we've also included some links to some beautiful tributes from our friends at Frieze, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and more.

A Kid from Marlboro Road by Edward Burns
A Kid from Marlboro Road is a coming of age novel that is plainspoken and holy for its love of fragile family bonds and the places where the form, set in and around New York City and Long Island.

Fury by Clyo Mendoza
Fury, a novel of ghosts that evokes the legendary classic of modern Mexican literature, Pedro Páramo, without actually imitating it. Steeped in indigenous Mexican culture, a stunning debut novel by the young Mexican poet Clyo Mendoza.

Global Justice: Three Essays on Liberation and Socialism by Ernesto Che Guevara
Global Justice is the perfect, short Che book (80 pages) to get your younger cousin who just started sharing Luigi Mangione memes.

The Duel by Inês Viegas Oliveira
Circuses and marching bands instead of anger and fighting? I'm in. And the illustrations? Not surprisingly the NY Times called them "dazzling."

Fury by Clyo Mendoza
A hallucinatory fever dream of love and violence that will leave you wanting more from this young, very talented Mexican poet and novelist. Wow.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
BY MONICA CURE

—Monica Cure
Bucharest, April 2024

REMEMBERING GARY INDIANA
(1950 - 2024)